Welcome to Bordertown Read Free Page B

Boston all this time, probably hooked on drugs, or worse, and too ashamed to let the family know. (It was at this point that Mom left the room and refused to discuss it any further.) As for me, I’ve got a theory of my own, although I know better than to say it out loud. As soon as I saw the postcard, I knew: Trish had really made it to Bordertown.
    It was, after all, where she’d said she was going in the note she’d left behind for Mom and Dad—although she might as well have said she was going to Mars or Oz for all that anyone believed it.
I
believed it. I was only six years old, but she’d taken me into her confidence. “There’s a place called the Borderlands,” she’d told me, “where magic is actually real, Jimmy, and elves live alongside mortal men, and everything is
beautiful
. They don’t have cars and televisions, or factories and shopping malls. And no one thinks it’s weird to love old books there and to want more out of life than
this
.”
    I was sitting on the bed in her little attic room, watching glumly as she filled her knapsack with clothes and books and chocolate bars. She finished her packing, buckled up the straps, and came over to sit on the bed beside me.
    “I still love you, Jimbo,” she tried to reassure me. “And Mom and Dad and the uncles and everybody.”
    “What about Rosco?” I asked her miserably. “He’s only a puppy. He won’t understand.”
    Trish put an arm around my shoulders. “I need you to look after Rosco now, Jimmy. And Mom and Dad. Will you do that? Promise?”
    I nodded slowly … and it seems to me now that my childhood ended with that solemn vow. I keep my promises. Unlike Trish.
    “Don’t worry, cuddlebunny,” she said. “I’ll write. And I’ll be home for Christmas.”
    She didn’t write. She didn’t come home. For thirteen years, my sister has been just a smiling photograph sitting on the mantel—while my parents stopped smiling at much of anything at all. The family went on. That’s all. We went on—ignoring the empty, aching space where my smart, funny, beautiful sister used to be. The dog grew older. The folks grew older. I kept my word andlooked after everybody: the quiet son, the reliable son, the child who would never up and leave. The son who’s never done anything unpredictable his entire life. Until now.
    I’m going to Bordertown.
    I’m going to find Trish, and then I’m going to bring her home.
    *   *   *
     
    Bordertown, thirteen years earlier by the World’s time, thirteen days by Border time …
    Trish stuck the postcard between the pages of
The Book of Three
, the only paperback she’d brought from home, in her knapsack along with two changes of underwear, some warm socks, her pen with the purple ink, plus
The Golden Book of Fairy Tales
and
A Treasury of Verse.
She kept them with her at all times, because nothing was really safe at the squat. Stuff disappeared. She’d been there only two weeks, but already she knew that much about life in Bordertown.
    Trish bit back tears. If this had been her first week of college, the way she’d planned, then she’d have a roommate—probably some snotty preppy kid, sure, but they’d be in a dorm with lots of other girls who studied hard and wanted to talk about poetry and history as they walked across campus carrying their books past redbrick buildings covered in ivy.
    And instead here she was, begging a girl (whose real name couldn’t possibly be Thelma Louise Mankiller!) to hurry up and let her use the only sink with running water in the squat they all shared in an abandoned building. She knew she’d been lucky to find it. She’d thought it was a sign: It was called Carterhaugh, which was the name of the place in the old ballad where young Janet encountered the enchanted knight Tam Lin and rescued him from the Queen of Elfland to be her own true love. No guys were allowed in this Carterhaugh, though, and that wasfine with her. A boyfriend was not part of her dreams. College