The Radiant Road Read Free

Áine Quinn, Fifth Class , said the first page. Áine Quinn was Clare’s mother’s name before she was married. Áine was pronounced “Ahn-ya.” Fifth was crossed out in a different ink color, and Sixth written above it. Commonplace Book , it said below that.
    This was my mother’s. It felt warm in her hand.
    She questioned her father, without telling him the reason, and learned that class meant “grade” in Ireland (“In Scotland we call it ‘form.’” Okay, Dad, whatever). She also learned that commonplace book didn’t mean “ordinary book” or “you-could-find-it-anywhere book.”
    â€œIt’s where you write down things you’ve read that you want to remember,” he said, “or draw or paste pictures you want to save, like that. Thinking of starting one?”
    Clare shrugged.
    â€œAh well, you needn’t tell me, you stubborn child,” he said cheerfully, and left it at that.
    Clare kept that notebook always with her. When she saw a fairy-making, she wrote it down. When she read a scrap of poetry or prose she loved (which was almost as good as a fairy-making, to her), she wrote that down as well.
    And sometimes Clare turned the notebook upside down, and in the back, in her tiniest handwriting, she wrote poems of her own.
    Hiding her poems upside down in the back made her feel as if they weren’t really there. Anyway they aren’t real poems , she told herself. They’re notes for poems I might write some day.
    Although she was almost too embarrassed to reread them, and would never have told anyone about them, ever—still, privately, and never aloud—she called those tiny scraps of poetry “my makings.”

    During the year before this story begins, Clare and her father lived in Texas. It was as if they had come around the world to the exact opposite of Ireland: a hot sun blaring from squint-bright sky, ground flat and dry with patches of prickly grass. Her father would say, “It has its own great beauty here, and the winters are kind,” but Clare thought he secretly missed wet and green.
    In Texas, no one knew about Clare and her fairy-makings, or knew to laugh at her. But by now she was so Strange-haunted and solitary that no one talked to her at all, except to say, after a long stare, “You talk funny,” and walk away.
    Clare knew it was true, about how she talked. She sounded neither Irish, like her mother, nor Scottish, like her father. But she didn’t sound American, either. Clare didn’t sound right for anywhere in the world, but especially not for Midland, Texas.
    On the first day of school in Midland, the teacher had asked them each to stand up and say what made them special. Clare made a small list on a page of her notebook as she waited her turn.
    1. Dead mam.
    2. I used to play with fairies in my dreams, ha-ha.
    3. And all the fairy-makings.
    God. She started to crumple the paper, but stopped. That second line felt like . . . something.
    She chewed for a moment on her chewed-up pen.
    Before my mother died , she wrote,
    I used to play with fairies in my dreams.
    She paused.
    And fairy-makings wound through every day drifted through our days
    Like curious boats, whose pilots were unseen.
    But now—
    â€œClare Macleod?” called the teacher.
    Clare’s pen skidded, startled.
    â€œDo you have something to share with us, Clare?”
    Hastily, Clare crumpled the paper into a hard, damp ball and shoved it in her pocket, her face on fire. She didn’t answer.
    My strangeness is all I have , she vowed at that moment—meaning all I have left of Ireland, of childhood, of home, though she never said it to herself that way. I have to keep it to myself, so no one knows, or they’ll try to take it away from me. They’ll try to make me like everyone else.
    So Clare kept her strangeness to herself. She kept herself safe; and she kept herself tightly