When Amy went downstairs to pour some cereal and eat, Davey wasn’t up yet. That wasn’t too unusual. When Mom and Dad got up and made coffee, he still wasn’t up. That was a little more so. Then Carson came downstairs, and it was past nine, and Davey still hadn’t shown up.
“Is Davey up yet?” Mom asked Carson.
“I don’t know,” Carson said, sleepily pulling a frozen waffle out of the freezer.
“What about go wake him up, if he’s still asleep,” Dad said.
Carson said, “Lemme get this in the toaster first.”
“I’ll do it,” Amy volunteered, and went upstairs. Carson might be mean about waking Davey up, dragging him out of bed or throwing water on him or something. Waking up when you were still sleepy wasn’t going to be any fun anyway, but Amy could probably make it less bad.
She knocked gently on his door and said, just a little louder than normal, “Hey, Davey, Dad says it’s time to get up.”
No answer. She opened the door a crack, stuck her head in, and repeated the message louder. Still nothing. In fact...
She went over to Davey’s bed. He wasn’t in it.
“Davey, where are you?” she called out. She crossed the hall to the bathroom — it was empty. She checked her room and Carson’s room. And their closets. Then she went back to Davey’s room and checked the closet there, too.
Probably he’d been in the bathroom while she was checking his room, and he’d gone downstairs before she checked the bathroom...?
She went downstairs. “Um, hey... did Davey come downstairs while I was up there looking for him?”
Mom and Dad glanced at each other. “No,” Dad said with a hard expression. “You couldn’t find him?”
“He wasn’t in his bedroom, or in the bathroom, or anywhere else I looked for him.”
“Carson, come with me — we’re going to check the yard and treehouse. Amanda, what about you and Amy search the rest of the house?” Dad said. He and Carson moved toward the back door.
Mom and Amy searched the downstairs and the basement thoroughly, calling out “Davey! Where are you?” now and then, and then searched the upstairs again, and the attic.
“The outside doors were locked and bolted,” Dad said. “He couldn’t have left the house unless he took a key with him to lock the door afterward. Did he take his key? Or are any of the other keys missing?”
“I’ll check,” Carson said and moved to the kitchen drawer where they kept an extra key.
Amy said, “I’ll look and see if he took his key,” and went upstairs. As she went she heard Mom say “None of the windows were open, and most of them were latched from the inside.”
Amy checked Davey’s dresser and found his house key and wallet. Then she checked her own room and Carson’s. Her key was on her dresser. Carson’s wasn’t, but when she talked to him, he said he would check on it, and later told her it was where he normally kept it.
After that, they all sat down and compared notes. When they were pretty sure they’d searched everywhere in the house and yard, Mom and Dad started calling the neighbors to ask if they’d seen him (even though it seemed he couldn’t have left the house).
Twenty minutes later they called the police.
Zindla liked having a little girl around, even if she was older than she looked, and used to be a boy. Seeing her cousins and other children who lived in the neighborhood, she’d sometimes regretted being an only child, and now she felt like she almost knew what it was like to have a little sister. Devi was so enthusiastic and curious about everything; having her around was like seeing everything for the first time. Sometimes it did get a little tiresome, answering her basic questions about things even a child her age native to Zindla’s world would know, but on the other hand, she was an endless fount of information about her own world, which probably made up for it.
Now, though, more than a week after her arrival, it seemed like Devi’s enthusiasm was starting to flag. Zindla thought she was getting homesick. This supposition was confirmed one night when they laid down to sleep. Devi settled down well enough at first, but Zindla still hadn’t fallen asleep when she heard Devi sob quietly.
“Devi? Are you all right?”
“Sure,” Devi said.
“You can tell me what you’re crying about,” Zindla said. “I won’t tell anybody.”
“I miss Mom and Dad, and my sister, and even my brother. I know I’m supposed to have an adventure first, but I really want to go home.”
“Shhh, it will be all right. One of the wizards who’s coming to see the cabinet will figure out how it works and you can go home. Meanwhile, do you want me to be your sister?”
Devi sniffled. “That would be nice.”
Zindla thought of something. “Do you want to be my little sister or my little brother?”
“...Could I be your brother? I know I’m a girl right now, but...”
“Sure, that’s fine. We can get some hair ornaments for you to wear, and I’ll make you a red gown. I don’t know if Father and Mother will like it, but I’ll talk to them.”
Devi laughed. “Back home it’s girls who wear stuff in their hair. And blue is a boy color. Only girls wear pale red like the robe your Dad was wearing today.” He paused. “Back home we have a special word for pale red, but I guess your language doesn’t.”
“I think dyers and painters have special words for a bunch of different shades of colors, but I’m not sure... Do you want to wear stuff that boys here wear, or stuff that boys from your world wear?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess the portal turned me into a girl so I’d learn what it’s like to be a girl, so maybe I’m supposed to wear girl clothes while I’m here?”
“Do you think the portal is alive? I’ve never heard of a talisman that could think for itself. Except — well, I hate to think Tirishkun bound a dead person’s soul into the cabinet... that’s been illegal since before the Republic was founded.”
“I don’t know. I’ve read several stories about kids who go through portals into other worlds, but none of them ever changed like this. Mostly they just learned to speak the other world’s language all at once.”
“Well, think about it and decide what you want to do. Let’s get some sleep for now, and talk about it some more tomorrow, all right?”
“Sure,” Devi said. Zindla stroked her — his — hair, and put her arm around him. She wasn’t sure which of them fell asleep first.
Devi thought about what Zindla had said. It still felt kind of weird being a girl, but maybe she was supposed to get over that and learn more about what it was like? And maybe there was some lesson she was supposed to have learned the first time he was five, so he had to go back and be five again. That would fit with the stories about kids going to other worlds he’d read.
But what Zindla said made sense, too. The talismans they had here — the magic furniture and jewelry and stuff, and their trains and buses and cars and elevators — were just like the machines back home. They couldn’t think for themselves. Maybe the portal opened up into Devi’s bedroom not because he needed to have adventures in another world and learn a lesson from being a little girl, but because it was broken and doing things it wasn’t supposed to. Like when Mom’s computer kept freezing up and had to be rebooted a couple of times a day. If that was it, there was no particular need to act like a girl or learn girl stuff. And no use in trying to have an adventure. He should just try to get home.
So if he was going to be a boy, would he be a boy like back home or a boy like they had here? Maybe he could ask Zindla or Pasyala to make him some trousers, but he was pretty sure trousers were a lot harder to make than gowns, and he didn’t want to impose on his hosts. Mom and Dad said when you were a guest at somebody’s house, you took what they offered you and didn’t ask for something else. — But Zindla had offered to make him some clothes in boy colors... which apparently included pale red, here. Weird. But not the weirdest thing about this place by a long shot.
So, after thinking about it for a while, he told Zindla after breakfast and lessons that he wanted a pale red gown, and something in his hair. She nodded and said she’d start on it after she was done with her chores for the afternoon. Devi went downstairs with her to the shop and hung out by the cabinet until lunchtime.
There were fewer wizards coming to look at the cabinet now, and not all of them still wanted to talk to Devi after they’d read the FAQ that Devi and Syuna had written. But the ones who did had deeper questions to ask about Devi’s world, and he couldn’t always answer them. He thought some of them were skeptical about his claim to really be a boy, or at least to have been a boy before he came here. They asked him the same questions in different ways, like they were trying to trick him into contradicting himself. Syuna cut them off when they got like that.
“That’s enough questions for now,” she’d say. “The poor child is tired and needs her afternoon nap.” Devi was a little resentful of being called “poor child,” but he was glad sometimes to get away from the wizards' suspicious questioning.
The following week it was raining when they went to church, so they didn’t picnic afterward, but went to a restaurant. It served a different kind of food, blander than what Pasyala or Tyemba cooked at the apartment, but spicier than most of what Devi’s mom cooked back home, noodles with a selection of sauces you could pour over them. By then Zindla had finished Devi’s pale red gown — it was good enough, though not as neatly cut and sewn as the blue and purple ones Pasyala had made — and had bought a couple of hair sticks for him with her allowance. Devi felt better knowing the strangers at church and in the restaurant looked at him and saw a little boy. Maybe he looked a little girlish, but obviously he must be a boy or he wouldn’t be dressed like that, right?
Devi and Pasyala hardly ever left the shop except when they went to church, but Syuna or Tyemba sometimes went out during the day, and came back with new merchandise for the shop, or groceries; sometimes they took Zindla with them. From what Devi overheard, it seemed they were going to estate sales and moving sales and stuff. Devi asked Syuna a couple of times if he could go with her to one of these sales, just to get out and see something besides the shop, but Syuna said he should stick around and keep an eye on the cabinet, in case it opened up again.
The pangs of homesickness came and went. Some days it was really bad, and Devi had to find a quiet place to cry, so Zindla and the others wouldn’t know how sad he was. Most days it wasn’t so bad, but Devi was still about ready to give up on adventure and go home — if the portal would ever open. He remembered one of the wizards saying it would probably take a month or more.
He read through all of Zindla’s storybooks from when she was a child, sitting cross-legged in the furniture aisle of the shop. When a customer came along who wanted to look at furniture, he got up and went into the back office for a while; then he returned to his post.
Toward the end of the month leading up to the auction, at supper one night, Syuna said, “It is time to begin planning for Zindla’s fourteenth birthday.”
“When is it?” Devi asked.
“A little over a month from now,” Zindla said, “the nineteenth of Hankirta.”
“Oh. Well, early happy birthday, if I wind up going home before then.”
“Thank you,” Zindla said, looking bemused.
“As I was saying,” Syuna said, “we need to make plans. After worship tomorrow, I will speak to someone about scheduling your coming of age ceremony, and reserving a room for the party afterwards.”
Devi was curious, and wanted to ask what this coming of age ceremony entailed, but he got the impression Syuna wasn’t happy with him interrupting, so he stayed quiet and listened.
“You and I must have new robes for the ceremony,” she continued. “Mother, can you make them?”
“Of course,” Pasyala said. “What about Devi?”
“That is an interesting problem,” Syuna said. “Besides the fact that she may be going home before the ceremony, there is the question of whether she is a girl. Devi, we’ve indulged you in your whim of wearing a boy’s gown and hair-ornaments, but if you wish to take a sister’s part in the ceremony, you will have to dress as a girl.”
Devi thought about that for a moment. If he was really here to learn about being a girl, then participating in that ceremony would probably be part of it. Or even if he were just here to learn about other cultures and religions. “Sure,” he said. “That will be fine.”
