Wood Sprites

“He has depth-perception issues or something.” Iggy illustrated by tapping his palm against his forehead. “He makes this noise when he runs into things head-first. When he does it he makes this sound kind of like ‘baa’ crossed with ‘moo.’ I think they may have given him some goat programming.”

“Baaamoo?” Jillian attempted as Louise started her feint toward the girls’ bathroom to explain why she was walking away unannounced.

“No, not like that.” Iggy made a very cute “booonnnk” noise.

“Louise! Jillian!” Zahara came bursting through the door and spotted them in the hallway. “I’m so excited I could barely sleep. I didn’t tell you, but I want to be a pirate!”

“Shiver me timbers!” Iggy cried. “Are ye three sheets to the wind?”

“Arrr, ye scurvy dog!” Zahara cried back. “Are ye blind in both eyes? I be a corsair out of Barbados and the greatest pirate queen that ever sailed the seven seas!”

Jillian’s eyes widened and she glanced to Louise for help, completely destroying any chance that Louise could slip away. “There’s — there’s no pirate queen in Peter Pan.”

Zahara laughed. “I know, but there should be. Maybe we can rewrite parts of it.”

Jillian’s eyes went a little wider. “They won’t let us rewrite it. Not after what happened in second grade.”

“No, not you two.” Zahara grinned, her nose wrinkling with delight. “All of us.”

* * *

The morning set the pattern for the day. As hard as Louise tried, she couldn’t find a single chance to slip away unnoticed. At recess they played jump rope with Zahara. Even at lunch, where they normally sat alone, they ended up with Iggy, Zahara, and a handful of boys from Iggy’s class, all talking in pirate. By then, it was obvious to Louise that they would have to wait until the play meeting was over and forgotten before staging the raid on the art-room printer.

Jillian was not taking the delay well. She was doing a good job covering it, but inwardly she was obviously seething. “Why can’t they leave us alone?” she muttered darkly as they were herded from the lunchroom back to the fifth-grade floor.

“We’ll just do it later. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is the one day Miss Gray comes in early.”

“Then Wednesday. Or even next week. We need to find a spell that will help save the babies first.”

Jillian glared at her as Louise coded open their joint locker.

“What?” Louise whispered as Elle stopped beside them to get things out of her locker.

“I want to learn everything, not just what we need for them.” Jillian used vague terms so Elle wouldn’t understand what they were talking about.

Elle snorted, guessing wrong that they were discussing their next class. “The way you butcher French, you’ll be lucky to know enough to pass the tests.”

She yanked out her tablet and flounced away.

Louise bumped Jillian, who was about to shout something after Elle. “We’re about to yank the rug out from under her in public.” Zahara wasn’t the only girl speaking in pirate at lunch. If all the boys and at least two other girls besides the twins voted for Peter Pan, they were going to win. “Let her score points. Besides, we’re the ones screwing around in class pretending not to understand. It’s karma if people don’t know how fluent we are.”

Jillian muttered some very rude French that wasn’t in any textbook.

“We’re going to have to learn more Elvish.” Louise tried distracting her. “Dufae uses a lot of words we don’t know. We can use an online translator to get the basic gist, but we can’t trust it to be accurate. Everything we’ve read said that magic is as exacting as chemistry. We need to be sure we’re translating things right or it’s going to end like the flour experiment did — and we’re running out of places to safely blow up.”

Jillian harrumphed at the knowledge that they weren’t as fluent in Elvish as they were in French. “We planned that explosion.”

Louise made sure no one was nearby before whispering, “We planned an explosion, but not that one. If we screw up a magic spell, God knows what might happen.”

“There’s a reason we’re not more fluent,” Jillian said vaguely as Giselle opened up her locker on the other side of theirs. “Nicadae.”

Someone in Pittsburgh had mistranslated the phrase to “hello” without realizing that the elves were actually saying “Nice day” in butchered English. All in all, the official dictionaries were a joke, consisting of only a few thousand words of Low Elvish and pidgin commonly used in day-to-day transactions in Pittsburgh. “Nicadae” and its like were viral; all the dictionaries had the same mistake. If there was a more accurate dictionary, it had been hidden by a scientist with mad ninja skills. “We’ve never tried the University of Pittsburgh.”

“That’s because it’s only on Earth one day of the month, and that was Friday.” Jillian slammed shut their locker, and the twins headed down the hallway since their French class was about to start.