BLUE By Krishan Coupland She found them at the bottom of the garden, where they were playing in the nooks and crannies of the dried-up fountain, the stone of which now bristled with moss. For a long time she watched from the other side of the roses, breath held, hands gripping the trellis to keep herself from moving, from making the slightest sound. The creatures were hand-high, pastel-skinned. Human. Human-shaped anyway, but so small and so delicate that they were hardly there at all. The wings that swelled from their backs were transparent and filmy like the wings of dragonflies. They were chasing one another, hopping from the upper bowls of the fountain to the lower and back again, or diving into piles of moss to hide. Their little voices filled the air, fey and bell-like, tinkling. They moved so fast that Lottie could barely keep track. Later than day Aaron came around to see her, just as he did every Sunday. Lottie thought that she might take him to see the pixies. That was what she’d decided they must be. Pixies. They looked just like a picture she remembered seeing in a book one time. She would have to make Aaron swear on his mother’s life not to tell anyone, of course, because his very first reaction would be to want to tell _everyone_. He might even want to catch one of them in a jar. That was the kind of thing boys did: caught butterflies and pulled the wings off them, or burned ants with magnifying glasses. Boys were cruel. Perhaps it was best not to tell, she decided. And so when Aaron came around they went up to her room and she put on a record and they sat and listened, and Aaron smoked a joint out of the window (she took two puffs, the second of which was really more of a pretend puff than anything) and then laid her down on the bed. “We have to be quiet,” she said. “Mum’s downstairs.” She could hear her mother in the kitchen, clanking together pots and pans. It was a big house, but an old one, and sound carried through the walls. “Hush,” said Aaron. She stared past him towards the ceiling. Her mother was making broccoli soup — she could hear the food processor whirring. Every time it started she would think of her mother, instead of Aaron, instead of what Aaron was doing. What Aaron was doing was thrusting his fingers in between her legs. It had grossed her out when he’d first tentatively tried it, and even now it made her spine go rigid. His silver ring scraped the inside of her thighs. Whenever Aaron did this to her she always tried to think of something else. This time she thought of her mother making broccoli soup. Then she thought of the pixies. Did they have tiny boyfriends who came around and thrust tiny fingers between their tiny legs? Somehow, to Lottie, it seemed rather unlikely. After a time Aaron put his penis inside her. She groaned into his neck. They’d been doing it for almost a month now, but it still hurt a little. It felt like being stabbed down there, but also warm and snug at the same time. She couldn’t decide if it was good pain or bad pain. She was almost certain it was good. She looked past Aaron, through his messy brown hair to the ceiling of her room. There were stars stuck there. The stars had been there since she moved in. The girl who used to live in the room must have stuck them up years ago, but they still glowed when the light was off. Aaron finished inside her with a trembling groan that rose so high in pitch it became a whimper. Sometimes it sounded as though it hurt him too, but he enjoyed it so much that Lottie thought that couldn’t possibly be the case. She kissed him on the cheek. His skin tasted salty, and the soft, barely-there hairs of his stubble tickled her nose. Later she went back out to the garden. She took a coffee cup of broccoli soup, which was thick and smelled like a forest. There were no hand-high creatures by the fountain. No movement at all except for a few circling midges. She left the soup nestled amongst leaves, warm as a face. She wondered where the little things went at night. Perhaps they wrapped themselves in moss against the cold. Perhaps they turned into puffballs, or globes of light. Aaron stayed for dinner. He ate two bowls of soup and helped with the washing up, and then they all sat on the sofa together and he put his arm around her. She wished he wouldn’t, because Mum was right there on the other side of her, but she didn’t seem to notice, and after a while Lottie relaxed and it was nice. They watched the news, and then a little programme about how kettles were made, and then it was time for Aaron to go home. * She woke up in the middle of the night. She wasn’t thirsty, but she knew it would be ages before she could sleep again, and so she went downstairs for a glass of milk. The floors were cold, but she didn’t mind. It was a clean kind of cold that made the skin on the soles of her feet feel more polished with each step. After a while of standing in the cold kitchen she always felt as though her feet were made of marble. From the kitchen, standing in the glow of the fridge, she looked out at the garden. There were lights. Bobbing lights, pastel colours. So tiny that you wouldn’t really notice them unless you know what you were looking for. She watched them while she drank her milk and then fetched slippers from under the stairs. It was a mild night. The grass was heavy with dew already, and the trees shushed lightly in the wind. The pixies were sitting around on the lip of the fountain. She could see them quite clearly despite the dark, because each of them glowed with a different-coloured light. One red, one blue, one green, one yellow. Lottie scrunched herself as small as she could, then stepped around the rose bushes. “Hello,” she said. “My name’s Lottie. I brought the soup.” They looked at her, and she thought they looked like a class of schoolchildren when the teacher walks in. She smiled so that they wouldn’t be afraid. She wasn’t used to being scary and she didn’t like it at all. She wished that she were small. She wished that she were no bigger than a doll. “You’re a big one, aren’t you?” said the green one. “I’m normal-sized,” said Lottie. “We’re normal-sized,” said the blue one. “We liked the soup.” “It was my mum that made it. I can bring some more.” They all laughed at that, for some reason. Lottie laughed too, not wishing to offend them. The red one hopped up into the air and flew up close to hover in the air in front of her. Her body was wonderful, the skin patterned like the surface of a leaf, the features so small that no human hand could possibly have sculpted something like them. Eyes the size of poppy seeds. A nose dinkier than a hamster’s. “You smell funny,” said Red. “Like flowers, but not like flowers.” “Sorry,” said Lottie. “I did have a bath.” They all giggled again, and she was pleased that she had amused them. The next morning Lottie thought that it might have been a dream. Her feet were dirty and there was a grass stain on her pyjamas, but that didn’t prove a thing; she’d read all about sleepwalkers in a book in the school library. She sat up and chewed her lip. It had been a nice dream. A strange dream. She went downstairs and her mother said that Aaron had called. “He asked if you wanted to come out at the weekend,” she said. “Bowling, I think. He’s such a nice young man.” As soon as she could, Lottie went out into the garden. The pixies were there. Blue fluttered up onto her shoulder. Up close she was so delicate — little limbs the thickness of pipe cleaners, little head like a walnut, but complex and perfect and pretty. Her dress was made of stitched flower petals, the thread as fine as spider-silk. Lottie felt happy. “Back so soon?” said Blue. “I just wanted to check,” said Lottie. Green appeared at the fountain and hopped into the air and flew in front of Lottie’s face. “You’ll come and play again?” “Tonight,” said Lottie. “I promise. I’ll sneak out like I did before.” “Will you bring more soup?” said Green. “Not soup,” said Blue. Red and Yellow and Green were all lingering by the fountain. They waved shyly, giggling, hiding smiles behind hands. Lottie waved back. “Bring something more fun,” said Blue. Lottie’s mother didn’t keep much liquor in the house, because she thought the smell of it crept. But there was a three-quarters-full bottle of whisky under the stairs, Lottie knew, and she poured a little of that into an old perfume bottle that she’d washed out in the bathroom sink. The pixies wouldn’t want too much, she thought. They were only small, and it was strong enough to make her eyes water. Aaron called again later. When he heard her voice on the line he called her babe and asked her if she missed him. Lottie winced. She wished he wouldn’t do that, because her mother sometimes picked up the phone at the same time as her, and if Aaron wasn’t careful then one day she would hear. Lottie was certain that if her mother heard a boy calling her “babe” she would know that she’d had sex. Aaron invited her to his house the next day. She said okay. She said she could come after dinner, and that she’d tell her mother she was going to the cinema with him. She thought about telling the pixies about Aaron, but she didn’t. She didn’t sleep that night either — but lay awake and alert and sensitive to every little sound until three AM in the morning, when she put on her slippers and crept downstairs. The pixies flew up the garden to meet her, saying her name in their little ringing voices. She felt a swoop of excitement at the sight of them, and again when a couple landed on the bare skin of her arm, their little feet pressing in. They were awfully heavy for such small things. They sat around the fountain. Lottie found that when she sat on the ground the rose bushes were tall enough to block her view of the house. That made her feel a lot safer. She took out the perfume bottle and the pixies all took turns to smell it. Red dipped her hand in through the neck and drew out a shining, heavy droplet. “Careful,” said Lottie. “It’ll be strong for you.” Later, she lay down on the ground and let the pixies walk over her stomach. She pulled her pyjama top up so that their feet would be bare against her skin. Blue lay down by her belly button, her full warm weight pressing into Lottie’s abdomen. Lottie had never had a living thing lie on her before, and it was a strange sensation. It was a nice sensation. “You’re so big,” said Blue. “I love how big you are. I feel like you go on forever and ever.” Red and Green walked up the centre of her chest. She hiked her pyjama top higher and looked up at the sky. Stars and branches. Her stomach was tingling. Small hands found her nipple and the sensation was so ticklish and pleasant that she laughed, and this sent the pixies scattering into the air. “I’m sorry,” said Lottie. “It feels good. That felt good.” Their wings made no sound. They glowed above her, and their glow wiped away the stars. She eased her hips off the ground and pulled her pyjamas down to her knees. Blue descended, and landed between her legs where Lottie couldn’t see. She lay as still as she possibly could, although she could feel the nerves in her legs and belly and groin straining at the surface of her skin. She could feel the weight of the pixies on her chest, on her belly. Warm. She shut her eyes and held her breath. When Blue did eventually touch her she shuddered convulsively from the top of her head all the way down to her toes. Little hands on delicate parts of her. Strong little hands. The ground was cold and the pixies were warm and she was warm and the night was cold. Even the pressure of her clothes against her skin was almost too much. Lottie had never touched herself before. Lottie was a good girl, and she knew that good girls didn’t do that kind of thing. She bit her lip. Words quivered on the edge of speech, but emerged soundless. She wriggled — she couldn’t seem to keep still — but only slightly, only the most tiny, most delicate wriggles that she could manage. She felt as if she was being opened up like a box full of presents. She felt as if she really did go on forever. * The next time she saw Aaron was at the weekend. They didn’t go bowling. They went to Aaron’s house and had sex on his parents’ bed. The bed was next to a large, mirror-fronted cabinet and Lottie watched herself lying there as Aaron thrust and grunted on top of her. She looked squashed. She looked like she was being pressed into the bed. She had a vision of herself ironed out flat as though she’d been run over by a steamroller — Aaron apologising as he peeled her off the mattress. It was funny, but before she could laugh he pulled sharply out of her. She looked at him, surprised, just in time for him to finish across her chest and neck. Afterwards she asked if he would go down on her. She said it that way because that was the only way she’d ever heard it said before. That’s what some of the other girls at school called it. She’d heard them talking about it in the corridors and in the bathrooms. _He said he’d go down on me. I let him go down on me._ She wondered what the pixies called it. “I don’t do that kind of stuff,” said Aaron. “Don’t want to get herpes. Do you want me to get herpes?” Lottie said that no, she did not. “Right. Good. Well then.” She wondered if there were boy pixies, but the idea was one that she couldn’t really imagine. Blue and Red and Green and Yellow were all so light, so feminine in the way they were constructed. Boys wouldn’t be so small. Boys wouldn’t be able to fly. It seemed right that they were all girls. Lottie wondered if she would like Aaron if he was a pixie. He would be a funny-looking pixie. She wondered if she liked him now. And if she didn’t like him, did she like the pixies? Could a person like more than one other person? Aaron, lying beside her, one arm sprawled across her stomach, had fallen asleep. She could hear it in the regular rhythm of his breathing. She wasn’t sleepy herself, but she wouldn’t be able to extricate herself without waking him, so she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, imagining what it would be like to have wings. * Lottie asked Blue if there were boy pixies. Blue seemed like the smartest out of all of them, and she never laughed at Lottie even when she said something that made the others giggle and hide their smiles behind tiny hands. “Boys smell bad,” said Blue. She perched on Lottie’s shoulder and they watched the others play in the air above the fountain. Pixie games were complex and quick and full of rules that changed so fast it was impossible to keep track. “Boys are big and gross.” “So there aren’t any?” said Lottie, wanting to make absolutely sure. Blue shook her delicate head. “We’re all there is,” she said. The others came to Lottie as the sun fell. She watched their little bodies pulse with breath, exhausted from the game. Yellow and Red perched on her knees and asked what she had brought them. “That house is full of things,” said Red. “We’ve looked in through the windows. You should bring us lots and lots of stuff.” “I can’t take any more liquor,” said Lottie. “Mum will find out.” “Something else then,” said Red. “What would you like?” “You don’t have to bring anything,” said Blue, and at the same moment, Red said, “She’d like _you._” There was a flurry of giggling at that. Put together their voices sounded like wind through a throng of glass chimes. Their weight on her knees was delicious. Lottie peeked around the corner of the roses, but the back door of the house was shut and the garden was empty. One light on in the kitchen and one in the hall. “I’ve never done this before,” she said. She watched, fascinated, as they shed their dresses. The thin shifts were fashioned from flower petals, and without the little bodies to inhabit them they looked fit to blow away in the breeze. The pixies hung them from the moss at the base of the fountain. Naked, they looked as delicate as model ships. “I don’t want to hurt you.” “You could never hurt us,” said Blue. “We’re tougher than we look,” said Red. With the tip of her littlest finger she brushed their bodies and watched them shiver. Between their legs a fine dark-blonde down. They spread themselves and they were tiny beyond belief. Tiny as the pupil of Lottie’s eye. She touched them. She licked the tip of her littlest finger like she was turning a page and touched them where they told her to touch them. As she did, her whole body tingled. “Is that okay?” she said. “I’m not being too hard?” Blue hushed her, and perched her hands on the tip of Lottie’s thumb, her wings twitching as though she were about to take flight. The others were already fluttering. She felt them alight on her shoulders, saw them at the edges of her vision, naked and bright. She didn’t look. She looked only at Blue. * Aaron was two years above her at school, which meant that he was allowed to ride his scooter in. There were only a couple of boys who had scooters and they always hung around outside the gates after school ended, revving their little engines and punching each other on the arm. Lottie had never spoken to them before until one day when she was waiting for her mother to come and pick her up. Aaron had sat down on the wall beside her. “You’re always here,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the house across the road, and his face was bright red. “You’re always waiting here. I’ve seen you.” Lottie nodded. That was true. “Yes,” she said. And then, since it seemed only polite to carry on the conversation. “I’m waiting for my mother to come and pick me up.” “Huh,” said Aaron. They sat together on the wall until Lottie’s mother arrived. It was the first time that she’d really spoken to a boy, if that counted as speaking. It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be. Boys were scary. Boys always ran about the school breaking things and throwing things and howling madly. Lottie had come to think of them as a kind of wild, dog-like animal that only ever roamed in packs. Aaron was nice though. He came and sat with her every day for a week, and sometimes he let her have a fruit pastille. At the end of the week he asked her if she’d like to be his girlfriend. Lottie didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be anyone’s girlfriend, but the way he’d asked was so plaintively hopeful that she couldn’t really say no, so she said yes. “Yes? As in, yes you will?” said Aaron. He’d returned to his group of scooter friends to exchange triumphant howls before coming to sit with her again and kissing her on the mouth. It was the first time that a boy had kissed her, and Lottie didn’t know what to do with her lips. She moved them around as if she was speaking, and that seemed to be okay. He let go of her before her mother turned up, and that was that — from that point in they had been joined together by a rite that Lottie never felt as though she quite understood. Aaron called every other day, and sat with her after school, and — when they were alone together in her bedroom — told her to touch his penis. She did so, tentatively at first, finding it squashy and hard at the same time, like a stale mushroom. The first time he had put it inside her the pain had been so bad that she thought for certain she would die from it. * Lottie woke to the sound of rain against her window. It was the kind of heavy summer rain that came in waves, as if the storm clouds were pushing as hard as they could, then pulling back exhausted to rest before raining down some more. She lay in bed for a minute or two, listening to the drops hammer against the glass. Then she thought of the pixies. On her way downstairs Lottie didn’t even pause to put on her dressing gown. Her slippers were in the shoe tidy and it would have taken a moment to find them, so she didn’t bother, but instead flung open the back door and ran barefoot out into the garden. In a second her pyjamas were soaked through and clinging, her feet numb. Mud squelched up between her toes, and the smell of rain after a month of sunshine filled her nostrils. “Blue?” she called as she reached the bottom of the garden. “Red? Yellow? Green?” They were sheltering under one of the bowls of the fountain, their little dresses sodden and their wings drooping. In the rain light they barely glowed at all. “You must be freezing,” said Lottie. “It’s only rain,” said Green. “It’ll go. The rain always goes.” “You’ll get a cold!” “What’s a cold?” “Why don’t you come inside? Let me take you inside. It’s safe, I promise.” The pixies exchanged looks, shrugs. Lottie wondered if they’d ever been into a human house before. Perhaps they snuck in at night and went exploring. Perhaps they stole things and then brought them back later on. They must have tasted liquor before, she reasoned, otherwise they wouldn’t have known to ask for it. Looking around the rose bush, Lottie could see that her mother was in the kitchen. She pointed out her window to the pixies and told them to fly up to it and wait for her on the windowsill, then ran back up the garden. Her pyjamas were so wet that they kept slipping down, and her hair was stuck unpleasantly to her scalp. Really she should have got an umbrella before she came outside, but she’d been too worried. “What on earth are you doing out in the garden in _this_?” said Mum when Lottie came in the kitchen. “Oh, Darling, look! You’re dripping.” There was fussing. Towels. A mumbled excuse about how she’d been doing sums on the grass yesterday and worried that she’d left her homework book out there. By the time Lottie was at last released and allowed to run upstairs to her room the pixies were already waiting for her on the windowsill. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, sorry.” She let them in and they fluttered through the gap, little droplets spraying from the tips of their wings. Red landed on her bed and promptly fell over. Blue peered at papers on her desk while Yellow and Green fluttered around the walls examining posters and pictures. Lottie stood in the middle, trying to watch them all at once. They were beautiful and quick when they were excited, flitting around like birds. Sometimes they were too quick to follow. “I like this,” said Yellow. “I can imagine you now. When you’re not there. I can picture you in my head.” “This smells of boy,” said Red, inhaling a handful of the comforter from her bed. “Doesn’t this smell of boy?” “That’s Aaron,” said Lottie. The pixies all giggled. “Show us,” they chorused. “We want to see him. Show us, show us.” “I... don’t have any pictures,” said Lottie. “Is he your boyfriend?” said Blue. Lottie felt something come unstuck in her chest. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m his girlfriend. No, I _am_ his girlfriend. I think he’s my boyfriend.” Blue looked at her from the desk. Lottie wanted very much to pick her up and hold her close to her face so that she could look at her properly. She’d never picked one of them up without asking before, so she did it very slowly and very gently. Blue fit perfectly into the snug circle of her finger and thumb, and it was nice to feel her breathing there as she lifted her off the desk. Her dress was soft. Her skin was soft. “Is that okay?” said Lottie. She didn’t know, really, what it was that she was asking. The pixies all watched her with their tiny eyes. Blue’s wings fluttered once or twice, like she was trying to escape, but she wasn’t. She was looking at Lottie very, very thoughtfully. “Will you show us?” she said. “We want to see him. Will you bring him to us?” * The next time Aaron came over she packed a picnic and told him that her mother knew he’d been smoking in the house. “She can smell it,” said Lottie. “We should go down to the bottom of the garden. She never goes there.” Aaron followed her easily enough, and she set out a blanket by the fountain. She didn’t often see him outside. The sun was bright and it made his skin look pale and washed out like a photograph that had lost its colour. His stubble was like mown wheat, the roots poking up all over his chin. It scratched when he kissed her, and scratched more when he buried his face in the crook of her neck. “Aaron,” she said. “Aaron. Listen... Aaron.” “What is it, Babe?” “There’s some friends I want you to meet,” she said. She found, to her surprise, that she was on the verge of fainting with nervousness. The sun — which was hot against her face and back — was too hot, the grass too green, Aaron and his breath and his scratchy beard too close, the garden too still and too thrumming with life. She pushed and he released her and she stood swaying by the roses. “Blue,” she called. “He’s here. Red, Yellow, Green. I brought him to see you.” For a long time nothing happened, except that Aaron looked at her with an expression of patient amusement, as though waiting for the game which she was playing to run its course. She noticed that he was hard beneath his jeans. She thought of him putting his thing inside of her, and the thought was so tiresome that her own distaste surprised her. He moved for her. “Come here,” he said. And he kissed her again and his beard scratched her again and she pushed him away again. The fountain was empty and the only things that hummed in the air of the garden were midges and bees. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Wait a second,” she said. “They’re probably just shy.” “Who’s shy?” said Aaron. “There’s nobody here to see us.” “Wait. Please wait a second. I promise, they’re here.” He looked, now, truly uncomfortable. He shuffled his shoulders and tried to touch her again, but she stepped back, almost into the roses. He huffed in frustration. “What is this? What’s up? Huh?” There were no pixies. The fountain was dry and the roses were wilting in the heat. They were enclosed by green, she and Aaron. She wanted very much to sit down. She did. She beckoned Aaron to as well and, after sniffing and spitting into the flowerbed, he did. He leaned back and looked at the sky. His erection was like a little tent, poking up from the crotch of his jeans. “They’ll be here soon,” said Lottie faintly, although she didn’t really believe herself. Now that Aaron was here with her, now that it was broad daylight and the garden was empty and hot and buzzing only with the sound of rustling leaves and flying bees it seemed ridiculous to expect such impossible creatures to simply appear out of nowhere. She must surely have imagined them. Or else the whole thing had been a dream. It had seemed so real at the time though... Aaron lit a joint and lay back in the grass. After a few puffs he offered it to Lottie, but she waved it away. “What’s all this messing around, anyway?” he said. He sat up. “Are you sure your mum can’t see us?” “Quite sure,” said Lottie. Nothing in the fountain. Nothing hovering in the air above. Nothing clinging to the rose trellis. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And yet the weight of the little things was fixed in her mind. The warm weight, the heavy weight. How puzzling it all was. Aaron finished smoking and buried the filter in the grass. Lottie lay down next to him, very cautiously, and looked up at the sky. It felt right that at any moment she might see a faint red glow flicker across her field of vision. But she did not. And then Aaron was leaning in to kiss her, and she was letting him, and his stubble was scratching her face and her neck and it was so quiet in the garden that she could hear the wet, sloppy noises their lips made as they moved against one another. Aaron rolled on top of her. He was heavy, but his weight wasn’t luminous like the weight of the pixies. His weight was just heavy, and it pressed her down into the grass. He pulled up her dress and pulled down her knickers in order to put himself inside her. It was all so quick. For a minute or two Lottie lay there in the sunshine while he heaved and grunted on top of her. A blade of grass tickled the back of her neck, and her bottom was cold and naked against the ground. He reached a peak quickly and she felt warmth and wetness between her legs. Then he rolled off her and lay panting on the ground, his penis still sticking out of his trousers and twitching lightly. It looked so funny — this pink, wrinkly thing in amongst all the green — that Lottie couldn’t help but laugh. She put a hand over her mouth to stifle it, so that the sound came out sort of like a cough and sort of like a whimper. “You okay, Babe?” said Aaron faintly. She gave the trellis and the fountain and the sky above — which was a still and perfect blue — one last desperate scan. Nothing. She nodded. “I’m okay,” she said. “I was just having a kind of funny little moment.” * Aaron fell asleep right there in the garden with his arms wrapped tight around her — one around her chest and one around her stomach, like a little boy clutching a teddy bear. Lottie wasn’t the least bit sleepy, but she didn’t want to wake him up, and so she lay as still as she possibly could, trying not to even breathe too much. It was warm and nice in the garden, and the grass filled her nose with a pleasant earthy scent. Most of the girls at school would think that this was the nicest thing in the world, Lottie thought, so she really ought to be grateful and make the most of it. The pixies came through the grass. She saw the tips of their wings first, but she didn’t see them until they were close enough to part the forest of green stalks. It must have been like trekking through the jungle for them, little as they were. Lottie smiled. The pixies smiled back. “I said that I would show you,” she said. “But then you didn’t come.” Red giggled. “Of course we couldn’t come. If we’d come he would have seen us, and then where would we be?” “Isn’t he allowed? He’s from school. He’s only a few years older than me.” “It’s not about being old or young, Silly,” said Yellow, but then she didn’t go on to say what it _was_ about, which just made Lottie wonder even more. “His name is Aaron,” she said. “He’s got his own scooter. Do you like him? I think I like him.” The pixies picked their way through the grass, ranging up and down their entwined bodies. Lottie felt the odd sensation of tiny eyes roaming parts of her that she herself could not see, and squirmed a little, but not enough to wake Aaron up. Occasionally one of the pixies would flutter up into the air and land on the other side of their bodies, or down by their feet. The way they observed her felt faintly like a ritual, but it was an odd one if it was. Then again everything about the pixies was strange. Lottie didn’t mind that in the slightest. “He looked so funny,” said Blue, landing as she spoke on Lottie’s cheek. Lottie thought that Blue was being very daring, landing right in front of Aaron’s face like that. He would only have to open his eyes to see her — but Blue didn’t seem to care. She sat down, perching her little bottom on Lottie’s cheekbone. “I mean, when he was on top of you, huffing and puffing away. That’s when he looked funny. Now he looks nice. Kind of peaceful.” “You were watching?” said Lottie, trying not to move her jaw too much. “We were up in the tress, hiding,” said Green. “We’re really good at hiding.” “Do you love him?” said Blue. “Um,” said Lottie. There was silence in the clearing again, and for a moment it was just like being alone. Aaron was asleep and the pixies were all just about out of sight. Blue was a little blur at the corner of her vision — one wingtip only just visible, the sunlight filtering through it from above. “Um,” said Lottie. “He loves you,” said Blue. “He definitely does. He loves you a lot and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s never loved anything before. He doesn’t want to admit it. We’re clever we are. We can tell, sometimes, with things like that. He wants to keep you forever.” “That’s nice,” said Lottie. And Aaron stirred behind her, easing his body against hers, and then she was alone, the pixies nowhere to be seen. * She rolled over so that she was facing him. They never fell asleep like that because Aaron couldn’t sleep with her breathing all over his face. Aaron was still half-asleep, his face slack and his mouth a little open. She noticed, perhaps for the first time, that he had the tiniest little scar up on the side of his head, just where the hair began. “Aaron,” she poked him gently. “Aaron, wake up.” He snorted. Shook himself. “Wha?” “I need to know if you love me,” she said. Aaron pulled back as though she had sneezed on him, his face scrunched. “If I _love_ you?” “That’s right,” said Lottie. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I think I might love you or might not, but I’d like to know for sure first whether you love me.” “Well, I don’t know.” Aaron sat up, blinking, looking dazed. “I don’t know, do I? How am I supposed to know a thing like that?” “I think you just sort of... guess,” said Lottie. She sat up too. There was a gap between the two of them — only a few exercise books wide, but it was there, and the air in the gap was turning solid like the crust of a cheese that had been left outside its wrapper. “You’re my girlfriend,” said Aaron. “Yes,” said Lottie. “Yes, I am.” “Well then obviously I love you.” “Oh,” said Lottie. It made sense when he put it like that. “Okay then.” There was silence. Aaron laughed, once, shortly, and then lay down again. Lottie lay down too, and looked at the sky. Everything was just like before, but somehow slightly soured. The sun felt a little too bright now, the blue of the sky somewhat nauseating. Nothing was still. Branches rusted in a breeze, and birds sang and the earth beneath her body seemed to hum oddly, like a bell that had been struck several minutes ago. “It’s just,” said Lottie, “that there are some other people who I know for sure that I love, and I was wondering if that was okay.” There was a long silence from Aaron. Lottie didn’t dare turn to look. She scanned the branches of the tree above her and the rose trellis, and tried to guess where the pixies were hiding. “Who?” said Aaron. There was something rather painful in his voice, like a cough had got stuck halfway down his throat. Lottie bit her lip. Then she told him everything. * Once she’d finished telling him he sat there for quite a while, looking blank. Several times he opened his mouth and looked like he was about to say something, but he didn’t seem able to work out what that was each time, and so he just shut his mouth instead and went on sitting there, a frown creasing his forehead. “Are you okay?” said Lottie. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said.” Aaron shook his head. Then he stood up and made a motion like he was brushing something off his jeans He started walking away, then came back and knelt down next to Lottie in the grass. “So... you’re saying you don’t want me anymore. That’s it isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?” Lottie stared at him, and wondered if she should repeat all the stuff about the pixies and how strange it was to love such little things. About the fountain. About their wings and their delicate little dresses. She didn’t in the end. She just shrugged and said, “I’m sorry,” once more, and that seemed to be enough. She hunched up and hugged her knees until he left. Once he was well and truly gone she lay back on the grass. Her stomach was churning. It hadn’t been at all like she had expected and she felt rather as though she was being a very stupid girl. She did like Aaron, kind of. Certainly he was the only boy who had ever really paid any attention to her. And he was nice. He said nice things about her sometimes, and he kissed her and put his fingers in her. Those were things that boys did to girls they liked. But she liked the pixies too, and the way she liked the pixies was so different from the way she liked Aaron that they almost didn’t seem like similar things at all. She lay there for ages and waited for the pixies to come back. They didn’t. The sky got dark and the grass started getting cold, but Lottie didn’t move. Maybe they had never been real. But if the pixies didn’t exist, then maybe she shouldn’t have broken up with Aaron. Maybe she was going mad. She wished that she could speak to Blue about it. It was just then, almost as if she’d been called by Lottie’s thinking of her, that Blue clambered over the lip of the fountain and fluttered the little distance between that and Lottie’s belly. Almost at once, the rolling there calmed itself. Blue perched and twitched her wings. “Where are the others?” said Lottie. “Coming soon,” said Blue. “They thought I might want some time alone with you first.” Lottie giggled, and the movement made Blue fall over, and that made Lottie giggle more. She lay there in the garden for a long time, until it was dark and her mother shouted from the house for her to come in and wash her hands for supper.