And Tamburlaine.
Mostly Tamburlaine.
When he was eight, they’d crowned him Thomas, King of the Jungle Gym, and put a tiara made out of a jump rope on his head. The Rule he read to them upon the occasion of his coronation was: The Kingdom of School is like Sherwood Forest and in Sherwood Forest it is better to be a bandit than an unjust substitute-king like Mr. Wolcott, who stole the throne from Mrs. McDermott when she went on Crusade and rules wickedly while she languishes in the Maternity Ward. Prince Wolcott takes everything good and makes it horrid or boring! We must sneak and pounce and win every scrap of wonderful poetry or tidy geometry proofs or volcanoes made of baking soda and vinegar!
How they cheered! How they pretended to struggle through Peter Rabbit when Bad Prince Wolcott was looking on, and how they gloried in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the woods behind the school! The Big Kids smoked cigarettes behind the gym—Thomas’s kids called each other Mustardseed and Cobweb and snuck glances at The Faerie Queene, which Tamburlaine had smuggled to them from her house. She revealed it the way an older girl might open her satchel to show a stolen bottle of gin out of her father’s cabinet. Sighs of longing sang up among the children at the sight of its gilt cover. Tamburlaine let them all touch it, one by one, cradling the book like a kitten they could all play with, if only they were very careful not to spook the poor thing.
Thomas had once tried to call her Tammy. It was the only time since that first day with Max that Thomas thought he might be in for a punch in the chin.
“Tam, then,” he tried again.
A strange and shadowed look came over her face. She shook her head harshly.
“Not Tam, either. And certainly not Tammy. My name is not Tammy. It’s Tamburlaine. Use the whole thing or don’t use it at all. Shortening things just makes them less interesting.”
But until the day of the baseball, which ought to be called fateful, not because it was fated to happen, for it was not, but because it caused a number of things to fall into fate’s filing system that otherwise would have remained stuck under a cup of old coffee, Tamburlaine never said a word to Thomas that did not concern their Teachers, Oberon, or Mr. Spenser.
Thomas always played outfield, because that was the best place to be if you didn’t really want to play at all. He stood far, far left field while the rest of his class went up at bat and pitched and stole third. He liked to see how long he could look at the sun, or how many fairy Kings he could list in his head, or practice his Stances. This last he went through in the field-grass like calisthenics: A Bold Stance, a Fighting Stance, a Heroic Stance, a Pleading Stance, a Humble Stance
, a Dueling Stance, a Fearful Stance, a Lover’s Stance, every one he had read about and a few he had made up on his own. Tamburlaine also preferred outfield, experimenting with how far “out” she could field until Mr. Granberry hollered at her. Quit inching, Miss Wheel! None of you could hit that far if you were batting bluebirds! And you, too, Rood! Stop flailing around out there like a showgirl! And they would wink at each other and take a couple of sullen steps infield before starting up their private games of avoiding sports again.
It was Spring that day, one of the very first warm days, when the sun seems to be trying on Summer for size, turning this way and that, blushing and hemming and hawing and opening its top button, just to be daring. The grass shone with dew and damp. The trees all round had just let a few green buds out to survey the situation before any real leaves risked their necks. It was fine, and Thomas felt fine, his bones remembering heat and life and the fun of moving, all those things they had found too depressing to think about while the snow was throwing its weight around and feeling big in the chest.
Now, though the class had a perfectly good baseball to beat about during physical education, Thomas was carrying his own in his pocket. He often did. He didn’t know why. He just liked having it near him, knowing it was there. He felt better with its sure weight resting in his coat or his pants’ pocket. He liked to run his fingers over the thick red stitching in class, or walking home, or before he fell asleep at night. He would count the stitches over and over, for no particular reason at all, one through one hundred and thirty-six, and by the time he got to one hundred and thirty-six, he always felt quite calm and pleased with himself.
If Thomas had ever done his counting with the school ball, the one just now being cocked back in Max Barrie’s hand, ready to fly over home base, he would have noticed that it had only one hundred and eight stitches. But he had not, and so he did not. Such little, unimportant things are so easy to miss, you know.
Max threw his pitch, the best pitch he would ever throw in his life. It was, in fact, the best pitch anyone would throw on any field until the end of time and outdoor sports. His form turned suddenly, wonderfully, completely perfect, his follow-through as graceful as a ballerina, the speed of the ball shattering records that had not yet been set. A certain portly gentleman taking the field in Boston at just that moment shuddered from head to toe, for some tiny part of him knew that he had just been bested by a twelve-year-old boy in Chicago who hadn’t done so well on his last math quiz.
The ball left Max’s grip like a shout, hurtling toward an alarmed Franco Moretti, who had no idea what was happening to him. He shut his eyes in a panic and swung wild, hoping only to avoid taking that perfect throw between the eyes. Max sagged—he didn’t know where that pitch had come from, how it had found him, or what he’d done to make friends with it.
Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.
Franco’s pinwheeling swing connected with the fantastically satisfying sound that happens when a piece of wood and a piece of leather conspire to make a lump of cork fly. The ball soared high, higher, into the startled sun, invisible for a moment, and then plummeting down, down, down toward Tamburlaine, who raised her glove hesitantly and rather hopelessly. Arm outstretched, she stepped backward, stumbled backward, careened backward, trying to get underneath Max’s juggernaut.
Just then, the baseball in Thomas’s pocket tumbled out onto the grass as though it had had quite enough of being left out of the game for which it had been made. It rolled toward Tamburlaine with a deliberate gait, if a ball can be said to have a gait. The new, wet grass striped its white leather with green as it trundled on, as determined as a dog in sight of its mistress. The baseball came to rest just behind her, very self-satisfied indeed. Tamburlaine stepped backward once more as Franco’s home run finished its daredevil act—and her heel landed crunchingly on Thomas’s ball. She fell over her suddenly tangled, cartwheeling legs, hitting the earth heavily, awkwardly, and with a hideous thick snap.
“Tamburlaine!” Thomas screamed, and ran for her, his legs moving before her silly long name had even gotten all the way out of his mouth.
The infielders had seen her fall, though all they wanted to know was whether she’d fallen with the ball in hand or not. Thomas fell to his knees beside her. Tamburlaine’s wide brown eyes shone with fear. She breathed hard, staring up at him in what was plainly, obviously, a Pleading Stance.
Mr. Granberry was already striding across the field toward them. “Rood! She okay? She need the nurse? Tammy, honey, walk it off, there’s a girl.”
“Tom,” she whispered, “Tom. I’m fine. Say I’m fine. Tell him I’m fine. Don’t look. Just tell him I’m fine.”
But he did look. He couldn’t help it. Once a body tells you not to look, you just have to.
Tamburlaine’s leg was broken. It was broken almost in half. But there was no blood, no bone peeking through, no horrible mash of ruined girl. There wasn’t even a leg, not really. Under her skin there was sap, running freely, like awful water. There was bark, sheared and torn up. There was a straight, long branch, with only one or two knots and a little green moss on it, cracked nearly in two.
Under her skin, Tamburlaine was nothing but wood.
“You are not fine!” Thomas hissed. “What is that? What’s wrong with you? What? What?” Thomas’s head refused to speak to what it saw. That, that makes no sense and it can not come in, his head insisted. It’ll track bunkum all over the carpet. But his heart began to beat very fast, and with a terrible bright joy.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Tamburlaine had never snarled at him before. Her gentle mouth was twisted up into a grimace. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.”
The girl who had once given him back his Golden Galosh put her hands over her wounded shin. Amber sap oozed between her fingers. She tugged on the ragged wooden ends of her bones until they matched up again, like puzzle pieces. She drew up the frayed edge of her skin like a blanket in the wintertime and tucked it in under her kneecap. She did it as fast as slapping a mosquito, but when her fingers came away her leg was utterly whole once more, with only a new little thin line, like all the many others Thomas had noticed on her body the first time he saw her, across her knee.
She fixed him with a stare like iron chains. “I am fine. See? I am. I’m just fragile. That’s all. Come on, Thomas. You’re my friend. Friends keep secrets for each other. I’ve kept yours. So you owe me. Holler at Mr. Granberry so he goes back to the dugout. Don’t let him see. Please, Thomas. Please don’t let him see me.”