sit and have her hair braided by her mother’s fingers and go to bed in her mother’s arms. Those days
seemed lost, worlds away.
Then there was Lucian. He made her laugh. He made her smile. He made her do a lot of other things
that were fun. Every other face from her existence paled in comparison to his. Her emotions calmed at
the mere thought of him.
She grinned at Nick. “I really liked working with you too, Nick. Maybe in a few weeks we can get
together and hang out. Grab lunch or something.”
Her friend smiled sadly. “That would be cool. I can introduce you to my new girlfriend and maybe
you can bring your bazillionaire.”
She laughed. “Maybe.” Would her life ever be ordinary with a man like Lucian in it?
They hugged and said good-bye. She felt marginally guilty for leaving the cart of food for the others
to put away, but she was done. Another job, another chapter in the life of Evelyn Scout Keats.
Chapter 14
“Hearts can never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.”
~The Wizard of Oz
There is something so contrived about winter. It’s long, and bits of warmth are stolen from
fabrications of man. Evelyn always favored the warmer months, and on days like this she savored
every replenishing kiss of sunlight as it heated through her clothes and hugged her in a way her skin
desperately needed.
For once, her feet simply trotted over ground with no direction as to where she should go next.
Sharp, white blades of sky blurred the tops of buildings as she wandered aimlessly through the streets
of Folsom. It was barely noon and she had hours to spare before her lesson, before Lucian finished
work, before . . . anything.
Her body sunk into a bench, its metal planks forcing her posture into a pose she had no energy to
hold. This dogged existence of climbing from one ladder to the next was wearing out her limits. She
ached to crawl out of her skin and be someone else for a day.
People steadily passed in cars and on foot. She watched in a clouded form of wonderment. Where
were they going? What did they do? Was there a purpose to their day? It all appeared convoluted and
arbitrary at the same time.
Feeling like she’d run a marathon a lifetime long, she welcomed this jumbled form of inertia.
Maybe Lucian was right. Maybe she was burning herself out, trying to cram too much in. Outlasting
all else was her desire to be on par with others. She was twenty-three years behind in the game, and
her struggle to catch up was beating her down like an iron fist.
It wasn’t fair. None of it was. Her life was a peephole, a tiny snippet of skewed reality that flipped
upside down in the blink of an eye. Lowering her lashes, she eased her head back, drawing warmth
from the rays that warmed her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her mind traipsed over sporadic
clips of her past, visiting some longer than others for no reason in particular, clinging to certain
specific memories.
“Wait. He’s a big coward!” Evelyn recalled her outrage at having borne the entire length of L.
Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “It’s all fake.” She shifted from her seat on the carpet of the library. Her back ached from lounging against the jagged bookcase display.
Parker folded the paperback over his thumb and frowned. “Well, it’s fiction, Scout.”
“Then why didn’t they make him real?”
“Because that’s not the way the story’s written.”
Her disappointment was a cramp in her heart. “He’s just a man.”
“It’s symbolic.”
Her lips twisted derisively. “Symbolic of what? How disappointing all their hard work to reach Oz
is?”
“No. It’s a metaphor. All the pomp and fanfare, it’s all just glitz to disguise normal men. He’s just an ordinary man.”
“Exactly.”
Parker crossed his legs, tucking the book beneath his knee. The fabric was torn there much like she imagined the legs of the wilted scarecrow. Cynically, she said, “None of them even knew. The little dog figured it out.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to know. Maybe they wanted to hope there was something more out there,
a man so powerful he had the ability to change their fate,” Parker argued.
“Maybe this book doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a fairy tale. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
But she wanted it to, desperately. She wanted to join the band traveling along the yellow brick road and be taken away to a better place. “Fairy tales are supposed to be happy.”
“Maybe that’s what makes this such a popular story, that it isn’t wrapped up in unattainable
perfection. It’s flawed because there is no real magic, but the magic of an ordinary man willing to tell the people they’re more than ordinary travelers. Do you want me to keep reading?”
“Why bother? They went all that way for some measly trinkets. I don’t get why they’re so happy.”
“Because they were seeking validation,” Parker said as if she were missing the whole point. Maybe