Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy Read Online Free Page A

to think about how the boy knew her name. He’d said it twice, and she hadn’t told him it. Not once. She tried not to think of anything. She could not help the boy because she didn’t believe in him.
    There, she’d thought it.
    She didn’t believe in wizards or boys with no names. These things could not be classified. These things could not be pigeonholed. These things made her feel terrible. She plunged her hands into her coat pockets to keep them warm. She walked through the gallery of broken stone angels, across the celebrated sea monster mosaic, upstairs and downstairs.
    In her left pocket there was a map of the museum, and in her right pocket there was her puffer. There was also a small hole. She stuck her finger through the hole because for some reason, lately, that made her feel a little calmer.
    If her mother had been alive, Ophelia would have told her about the hole. But she was not. Ophelia looked at her watch. Her mother had been gone exactly three months, seven days, and fourteen hours.
    If Ophelia had shown her pocket to her mother, who was not practical at all, she would have sighed.
    “Surely we have a needle and thread somewhere here,” her mother would have said, and taken Ophelia from room to room in their house, looking in drawers and boxes. She might havefound some twine or even some glue. She might have used her stapler; she’d done that once with the hem of Ophelia’s school uniform. The stapler lived on her writing desk, right beside the vampire-teeth paperweight.
    Ophelia stuck her finger through the hole. She felt it tear a little more. She was nothing like her mother, she thought. Her mother had believed in almost everything. Her mother had believed in vampires with satin cloaks and shape-shifters that slid through keyholes. She believed in the ghosts of children who terrorized schools and strange creatures who sucked the thoughts from their victims’ brains. She loved crumbling castles and dark towers and secret doors.
    Her mother wrote about these things. She wrote about these things all morning in her study. Her stories were sent away in bundles of paper tied up with string and returned as the books that lined the sitting room. Dark books. Thick books. Books with her name, Susan Worthington, emblazoned on the front in blood-red letters that glimmered in the dark.
    Ophelia walked down the long gallery that contained the paintings of bored-looking girls in party dresses. She squeezed through the crowd in the
Gallery of Time
. She didn’t bother at all to look for the little window in the clock that the boy had asked after.
    She went through the pavilion of wolves and the exhibition of elephants. She stamped through the arcade of mirrors, the room filled with telephones, the gallery of teaspoons.
    No, she was nothing at all like her mother. She didn’t believe in boys who came from
elsewhere
. She simply refused.

2
    In which Ophelia, while refusing to save the world, does something very brave indeed
    Miss Kaminski was tall and elegant in a crisp white pant-suit. She stood in the doorway to the sword workroom and smiled a dazzling smile. Mr. Whittard, looking up from his station, magnifying glass and lamp in his white-gloved hands, turned red at the sight of her.
    “I have been thinking,” said Miss Kaminski. “Perhaps Miss Alice and Miss Cordelia would like a special tour of the museum.”
    “Ophelia,” whispered Ophelia.
    Miss Kaminski looked at Ophelia as though she had heard something but was not sure what it might be. She looked at her as though she were looking at something small and insignificant. Ophelia saw her gaze at Alice, who was sitting in the corner of the room, in an old throne, twirling her long blond hair and looking very bored.
    “Miss Alice looks like a girl who would be interested in jewels,” said Miss Kaminski.
    Alice, reclining on frayed cushions, looked very uninterested. She held up a section of her hair and examined its end, and stared straight through