Episode 130: Tester of Toys (Marj)

Marj kept reaching her hands up to her face, to rub her eyes, and then remembering she wasn’t supposed to be as tired as she felt, and then lowering them before (she hoped) Shea noticed.

Hungry, too. They were back at the palace, finally, after a lot of work picking out clothes and toys for a little girl about Marj’s age. She tried to pick out the best best ones.

Shea set the bags down along the kitchen wall, and Marj set hers down next to them. “Okay,” she said. She was looking in some kind of white metal thing that let out cold air when she opened the door. “What do you like to eat?”

“Not eels,” Marj said. She shut her mouth.

“Are you sure?” Shea said, like she thought that was funny. Marj hoped it didn’t mean Shea was going to make her eat eels now just to make a point. Shea seemed nice, but that didn’t always mean anything.

“I can eat them if you need me to,” Marj said quickly.

Shea shook her head and pulled out a fancy white plate with a gold ribbon around the edge.

On the plate, there were little cream and brown colored cubes of something.

Over the cubes, there was this…it was like air, but it was stretchy and made a funny noise when Shea pulled it off the cubes. It stuck to itself. Shea crumpled it into a little ball and set it on the table.

What was it? It was stretchy, soft air.

Marj wanted it.

“I need you to eat something else,” Shea said. “Make sure it tastes okay. Can you eat this?” She passed one of the cubes to Marj.

She bit into it. It tasted like salt and nuts, and the brown parts were crunchy and sweet in a way that melted on her tongue. She grinned at Shea, she couldn’t help it. “These are delicious!” she said, with a little jump. “I love these, they taste like nuts and something else, I don’t what. They taste so good.”

She volunteered to be food eater if they needed one.

“Chocolate,” Shea told her.

“It’s good,” Marj said again. “I’ll eat that anytime.”

Shea smiled and walked toward the white cold doorway for something else. While she was gone, Marj grabbed the stretchy air and tucked it into the waistband of her skirt. It crinkled a lot, but Shea didn’t seem to notice.

“You are welcome to them,” Shea said, about the cubes. “Anything you want to eat in this fridge is okay. There is one that we just save for special parties, but we’ll make sure there are labels on those things.”

Which meant she couldn’t eat anything, because she couldn’t read.

Shea poured two cups of something yellow-clear and passed one to Marj to drink from. It tasted sweet, maybe a little too sweet, and left her a little thirsty.

“Grape juice,” Shea told her.

When Marj finished the food, obviously her supper for the day, she looked at Shea. They still hadn’t actually talked about what her job was.

“Okay,” she said. “And what things do I clean?”

Shea looked up at the ceiling. “Well,” she said, almost like she was making it up. Marj knew that look anywhere, it was the same thing she did when she was lying. “You have to make your bed every morning. And you have to put your toys away, and you have to put your dishes in the sink. You also have to wipe up any mud you track in. And when there are storms, you have to help pick up things. There are lots of storms. That’s my job, too.”

Picker upper of things. Marj could do that.

That man from before walked in, the one who didn’t like Uncle Artair. He wrapped his arms around Shea and kissed her neck.

Marj had seen that a lot of times. Daddy always did it with the new mommies. Some of them. Not the last one, she didn’t like him much at all.

“And,” the man said. He seemed to think he owned Shea, the way he had his hands on her like that. Maybe he did own her. “You have to take care of your horses.”

“Brushing,” Shea added. “Cleaning the hooves, cleaning the stall. It’s a ton of work.” Shea smiled at the man, and she put her hands on him too and turned and kissed him.

Maybe she owned him.

Marj couldn’t figure it out. It was weird.

“Okay,” she said.

She shouldn’t have taken the stretchy air. If she got caught, she was going to be in a lot of trouble.

“I promise,” she said dutifully, “to do all those things, and eat all the chocolate you tell me to too. And grape juice.”

“You’ll have to learn how to ride your horse too,” the man told her.

Her horse?

She really shouldn’t have taken the stretchy air.

Shea looked around the table, and then under the table, and Marj just knew she was looking for that stretchy air. Marj was about to get in trouble, over just curiosity.

Stealing, she reminded herself. It wasn’t just curiosity, it was stealing.

Shea went over to a cabinet – did she have something there for hitting people with? – and came over with a long skinny box made out of hard paper. No, it was soft wood.

Paper wood.

Something.

She wanted that stuff too.

And then, Shea opened the box and inside the box there was a whole rolling pin made out of stretchy air!

Marj watched Shea pull some of the stretchy air off the rolling pin to cover the plate of cubes, and then she closed the paper wood box and put it back in the cabinet.

Marj waited to be yelled at, but nothing happened. Shea must be saving that part for later.

“Everything went well?” Shea asked the man.

“He wanted an obnoxious amount on top of room and board,” the man told her. “I managed to talk him down.”

They both sat at the table, and Shea got out some bread and a knife and some kind of stuff she put on the knife and then put on the bread, and she gave Marj some stuff-covered bread, and then gave some to herself and the man too.

This stuff was sweet and salty hard to swallow. Too bad Marj had already finished that grape juice.

While she ate, Shea and the man talked. They talked a lot, about this place called gain well where the man picked things up and started a foundation for other things. Then they talked about this guy named Weston who sounded like he was a lot more interesting than either of them.

All of a sudden, the man looked at Marj. “There’s another kid in the area,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows. “He’s a boy but he’s taking lessons too.”

“And he’ll need to go to school,” Shea said. “You could help each other.”

Marj knew all about boys, with all the brothers she had.

But…

“A friend?” she asked. She sounded too hopeful, but she couldn’t help it. Basil and Annatto weren’t very nice to her and Orris had Olida. A friend was an opportunity, and she didn’t want to mess it up. “You have chalk, right?”

“We will have chalk tomorrow,” Shea promised her.

Shea stood up and started clearing things off the table, so Marj helped her and the man went over to the sink and washed all the dishes while Shea showed Marj where everything else in the kitchen went.

And then she led Marj back up those stairs, this time carrying all the bags from their shopping. She opened the door to the shamrock bedroom and set the bags against the wall, so Marj put her bags there too.

“Well, have a good night,” Shea said.

Shea must really trust her already, even though she’d stolen the stretchy air, to leave all these toys in here with Marj. “I will guard these toys,” Marj promised her.

“You’re not going to play with them?” Shea asked.

“No,” Marj said. “I promise. I’ll make sure they’re still in their bags.”

“But I need you to,” Shea insisted. “I need to know if you like them. Which ones are the best. All the games you can come up with, with them.

Ohhh.

Marj understood. Shea must be pregnant, or maybe the queen was, wherever she was, and they needed a tester of toys.

She could do that.

Toy tester. Food eater. Bed sleeper.

This was a much better job than she thought it would be.

“I might fall asleep,” she warned. It was late for her to be starting a new job, but she would do her best. The stretchy air would have to wait until she was done toy testing. “But I can try.”

“You have as many days or weeks or months as you want,” Shea told her. She walked over to the shamrock bed and turned down the corner of it so it would be easy for Marj to climb into. “You should sleep when you get tired. Do you want some help setting them up?”

“I can do it, thank you,” Marj promised her. “I’ll make sure they all work right.”

“Marj,” Shea said, in a warning voice.

This was better. Marj understood that kind of voice, it was much easier to figure out than the happy friendly voice thing Shea had been doing.

“What?” Marj asked. She was ready to get caught, ready to face the consequences of stealing the stretchy air.

“Your job,” Shea said in a firm, bossy voice, “is to have fun and be happy and learn. These are your toys, for you to do with what you want.”

Marj didn’t know how to look like she was being happy all the time. She would have to learn.

“My toys?” she asked. Maybe there was a way for her to send some home so Orris and Olida could have some too. She didn’t really want to give Basil any, because he didn’t like her, but Orris and Olida were nice. “What about my freckles?”

Shea smiled. “I think your freckles are beautiful.”

Marj felt tears in her eyes. No, she couldn’t cry. She fought against them.

She was just so tired. It had been a long weird day and she just wished someone would be normal to her so she’d know what to expect. Real, she wanted someone to be real. And they wouldn’t. They kept on trying to trap her. It was a good punishment, for having freckles.

“We convinced your uncle to sell you to us, so he can’t punish you anymore,” Shea insisted. “No one can.”

She would be back for Marj. Shea wouldn’t be able to stop her, if that was even really her plan. No one would.

“You’re okay, Marj,” Shea added. “Did you know your dad is my brother?”

Her dad’s brothers and sisters were in the Dells. That was why she trusted the people here to hate Marj.

Unless she knew something she didn’t tell Marj. Maybe that was why Marj was here, why Uncle Artair had told her to keep an eye out for anything interesting.

She’d thought he meant stuff to steal, not information, but now that she thought about it, she would want information, not stuff.

“He is?” she asked. She tried to sound…normal? Like she’d sounded a minute ago, like someone who wasn’t sneaking around for information to make her happy.

“He is,” Shea said. She looked sad. Little lines showed up on her forehead right above her eyebrows. “And he can’t protect you right now, but I can. Bentley can. We’re the king and queen of this kingdom.”

Queen and king, Marj corrected silently.

“But you’re not on my dad’s side,” she said.

She got it now. They didn’t hire her, they’d taken her, like she knew they would, and Marj was going to have to figure out how to keep herself safe from them and from her. She was just a tool, to everybody.

“No, I’m not,” Shea told her. “But maybe someday he’ll be on your side and you can see him again. You can see that we’re not bad, right?”

She nodded her head.

Nobody wasn’t bad. They all were up to something and Marj was so tired she was almost going to cry again but she needed to be strong. The only person she could trust, on either side, was herself. And maybe her horse, if they really were giving her one.

“Do you need anything?” Shea asked. “Have you used a shower before?”

Oh, there was more. Just an endless string of more.

She shook her head. “A what?” she asked.

So the queen who was secretly her aunt, who wasn’t the evil queen but wasn’t a good person either, who wanted things Marj couldn’t figure out yet, showed her what a faucet was, and how to use shampoo and soap that came out of a little bottle of hard air.

By the time Shea finally left, Marj was so tired she forgot all about the stretchy air. It had fallen on the bathroom floor and Shea didn’t even seem to care about it.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she would learn how everything worked.

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