Days of Daydreams Past

I suppose my mother noticed I was down, because she said, ‘I’m sorry I got angry with you yesterday. If Eftae does have a cold, we can just take him back to the springs. I shouldn’t have snapped.’ I told her it was fine. Part of me wanted to tell her about my lost chance, but I didn’t want to make her feel guilty that we didn’t have more money. I just forced a smile and got on with it.

After I hung out the washing (we seemed to create a lot of it) I didn’t go back inside. I didn’t want to be given another chore to do. Instead I stole away up to one of my favourite spots – an old tree that grew beside the low stone wall that separated us from the road. Some of the branches hung over the road and I liked just lying there, mainly because none of the little ones could reach me.

I knew I had to resign myself to the plain fur I’d been born with, that had been good enough for me my whole life up til now, but it would just take time. I tried to remember all the good things I still had. It was just coming towards the end of summer so that meant there was picking windfall in the orchards and the leaves changing colour and going back to school to look forward to. It was also close to harvest time which was always hard work but also fun, because everybody had to help out and work together.

I was snapped out of my reverie by a cheery voice – ‘Kentan!’ I looked down at the lane and saw somebody I never expected to see again; Crystal. I scrambled down from the tree and stood before her. She looked so out-of-place standing in the shade of our tree, in front of our weather-beaten, humble cottage. This was for some reason comforting. I realised how silly a fancy island kacheek would look in my worn and patched clothes, doing the dishes, running errands, sitting in the village school. Perhaps in the city it was practical, but it wasn’t for me.

Crystal was on her way back to Neopia Central. I told her about how I’d never be able to afford the item the fountain faerie had asked for and she sympathised. ‘The circlet was forty thousand and even that took me months to save for,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pity though. What did she ask you for again?’

‘Just a rare book.’

She paused a second. ‘If only you could write your own!’ she said, laughing. At the time, I laughed too, but the idea burrowed down into my brain as we talked. She couldn’t stay long as she needed to make her way back home and as I watched her retreating figure, I kept thinking about what she said. The fountain faerie had asked for an unabridged dictionary. How hard could it be to put together a dictionary? I’d just list all the words I knew in alphabetical order and say what they meant. It would be a very rare book, because there’d be only one in existence!

I knew there was a good chance it wouldn’t work, but I had to give it a try, just in case. I wouldn’t even need to turn something complicated, but if she could make me striped or spotted or oh…anything!

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Finding words became my secret hobby over the following months. At lunchtime at school I would stay in, copying words out of the set of children’s encyclopaedias that usually sat unused on the windowsill. Whenever I heard anybody use a long word my fingers itched for a pencil so I could add it to my ragged notebook of words. I constantly went around with bits of my paper trailing from my hand with words like “luminescent” and “auspicious” written on them. I stowed an ever-growing pile of notebooks under my pillow so that it got quite uncomfortable to sleep. Still, words were more important than sleeping.

I began the actual task of compiling my words during the winter vacation. For the festival of Giving I had received a new big stack of notebooks and the next day I took one and my ordinary school pencil up the tree outside the cottage. Usually the tree only became my hiding spot from spring onwards, but it was the only place I knew I would be able to write in peace.

I lay on my stomach with my new notebook in front of me and my collection of words that began with 'A'. Alright. First one - abacus. I made a particular effort to keep my handwriting under control and not smudge the paper. Abacus. Alright. Now I had to put in some sort of definition. I hadn't thought of that part. It was best to keep it simple, I figured, since I had an awful lot of words to write down. I just wrote; 'counting device'. Phew. One down and only about a million more to go.

I wrote quickly and got better at keeping track of where I was on my lists, but it was a dull job. I had been outside for hours but I hadn't even finished my A words and I was so bored of just mindlessly copying letters. I was glad when the sun began to set and I had to go inside.

That night in bed, as I tried to find a comfortable spot with all the notebooks and scraps of paper hidden under my pillow and mattress, I thought about how much work this project was. I sat up and lifted my pillow. By the light of the moon I could see all my sheets of notes; each one had pages black with my cramped handwriting. My heart sank. It was going to take months. It was going to consume all of my free time. It mightn't even work. I was going to look so stupid, coming up to the fountain faerie with my homemade dictionary. No matter how many words I had, I'd probably still leave plenty out. I had hardly started but I really wanted to give up.

I crawled back to bed and lay there in the dark, tossing and turning restlessly until I fell into an uneasy sleep.

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I slept badly and woke up more tired than when I had gone to bed. I heard the sound of my parents and siblings getting up and eating breakfast, but I remained in bed, even when my little brother Eftae came in to bother me. When I didn't respond he left and a little while later my mother entered.

'Kentan, are you alright? Are you ill?' she asked, looking concerned.

'No.' I sat up a little bit.

'Are you sure? You don't look well,' she said, kneeling down at my bedside and reaching a paw up to feel my forehead. 'You don't have a temperature...what's that under your pillow?'

'What? Nothing!' I said, sitting up and trying to push my pillow down so none of my paper scraps showed.

She stood up and crossed her arms. 'I can see there's something there Kenny,' she said. 'What are you hiding?'

I looked up at her guiltily, wondering if I should divulge my secret. She had a stony look on her face and I realised she would wait there until I told her everything. With a sigh, I lifted up my pillow. 'It's just words...' I said. '...I'm trying to make a dictionary.' I explained the whole story to her, lifting my mattress and taking out the piles of notebooks in which I had gathered my lists of words. When I was done, I looked up at her.

Unexpectedly, she laughed. 'I have to say, I was wondering why you asked for all those notebooks for the festival of giving!' she said. She smiled at me and sat beside me on the bed. I was holding the notebook which I had started as my 'official' dictionary and she took it from me, flipping through my 'A-words'.

'You really did all these words just yesterday?' she said.

I nodded.

'And how long have you been collecting words?'

'Since the end of the summer.'

'If only you took this much interest in your school work!' she said. 'Still, I never thought my daydreaming Kenny could focus so much on one thing.'

'Well collecting words was the easy part... I don't know if I want to copy them all in the proper order. It's going to take forever.'

'What about if you had some help?' she said. 'Eftae and Erren and Keino, they could help. It'd be good to give them something to do over the vacation.'

'It might not even work though.'

'Well you'll never know unless you try. Are you really going to let this amazing opportunity run away?'

I looked up at her and thought hard for a moment, then shook my head. No. If I didn't try, I would always look back with regret. I would give this everything I had.

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We started work that day - me, Eftae, Erren and Keino sitting around the kitchen table. I gave them each a letter and they began to arrange them alphabetically while I finished out the A's. I worked with a new energy, knowing I didn't have to do this alone. Every now and again I would pause at my writing and look up to see three little heads bowed, working silently to help me. I had expected that they would be reluctant to join in but in fact they were almost as excited as me imagining what colour I would be.

We worked industriously for the whole of the winter vacation, two full weeks of copying words upon words upon words for our dictionary. As we got into a rhythm of work we were able to sing and talk as we wrote. My writing slackened and sometimes we mixed up the order of words so things were never quite alphabetically perfect. Sometimes we joked around and wrote silly things for the definitions - after all, words got new meaning over time, so why couldn't we speed up that process a little bit? So in this dictionary, the definition for 'baize' was 'a blue maize that grows only in Shenkuu', and 'balderdash' was a verb - 'to make bald, using a boulder'. Sometimes we would think of new words, congratulating each other if one sounded particularly plausible. 'I've got one!' somebody would say, Eftae perhaps. 'Miroid! Anything that's reflective like a mirror, but not a mirror.'

Towards the end, as we trudged our way through 'U' and 'V', even my parents joined in on the writing so that when we finally, finally, had about fifteen notebooks filled from A-Z, it was a mix of six different handwritings.

I tied string around the fifteen notebooks to keep them safely together and put it on the table. We all stood back to admire the product of two weeks of work. Though the pages were sometimes ink stained and some of the words got smudged, though the definitions were not always helpful, I was very, very proud for some reason. Even if the Fountain Faerie laughed in my face, I was glad we had done it, and done it together. It had been fun and cosy spending all those hours around the kitchen table with the stove burning merrily beside us.

'When will you go to Faerie City?' Erren asked.

I opened my mouth to reply but my mother cut across - 'Not until the snow melts,' she said firmly, and that was that. We gathered the notebooks and put them safely out of the way on a high shelf in the kitchen and began the long wait.

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The vacation was over and so it was back to real life - bickering and going to school and doing the chores at home. Eftae was sick again and so I had even more to do than usual around the house. It was time to start planting new crops but the price of grain had risen and my parents were anxious about money. The terrible weather didn't help either - it snowed long and hard into the month of Awakening and it was Illusen Day before the sun finally began to appear. My mother said I could finally make the trip to Faerie City.

'You'll need to bring Eftae to the Healing Springs,' my mother said the night before I was due to leave. 'I think I can trust you not to daydream now, can't I?'

I nodded. It was funny, I hadn't thought about it til now, but doing the dictionary had helped me a lot - something about concentrating on one big project and working so hard on a goal had really changed my daydreaming habits.

Still, my imagination came in useful the next day as Eftae and I started out to Faerie City. He was in a rotten mood, sniffling and coughing because of his cold. I tried to cheer him up by telling him historical stories about Jeran (I may have fudged some of the facts - I don't think Jeran breathed fire) and these carried us all the way to Faerieland.

I watched to see that Eftae got into the Healing Springs okay, then made my way over to the Rainbow Fountain. I had my schoolbag with the 'dictionary' inside and began to feel very nervous walking up the grassy knoll to the pavilion where the fountain faerie resided.

'Excuse me?' I said hesitantly just outside the door.

She looked up. 'Kentan, isn't it? It's been a while! I didn't think I'd be seeing you again,' she said.

'Well... It's kind of a long story,' I said. 'You see... You asked for an unabridged dictionary. And I got you a dictionary. And it's not abridged.'

She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to continue.

'It's just... well...' I took off my backpack and unzipped it, reaching in and pulling out the notebooks. They looked very tatty all of a sudden.

She took it from me and looked at it, leafing through it and flipping open a few pages. Finally she looked up at me with a small smile. 'I suppose it is one of a kind,' she said.

My mouth dropped open. 'So you'll do it?' I said.

'I'm afraid it's not that simple. It's to do with the magic... There wouldn't be enough for a full pet, but maybe if you had a petpet I could give that a new colour?' she said.

'Really?' I said, eyes wide. Then I paused. 'There's just one problem - I don't have a petpet.'

'Well, I can take the book now and you can come back any time with a petpet for me to change.'

'Really? Are you sure?! Alright, I will! Thank you, thank you very much!'

I was thrilled. A big part of me had completely expected her to turn me down and laugh in my face, throwing the notebooks my family had worked so hard on into the water. Now she had offered me a compromise - my very own petpet! I would need to save up some money to buy a petpet, but there were plenty that were relatively cheap. I felt like I was back in the position of having a hard but wonderful choice to make. I began to daydream, imagining myself with all sorts of exotic and beautiful petpets - I would walk through the village with a beautiful faerie something-or-other fluttering on my shoulder and everybody would stop and ask to hold it and pet it and think I was the luckiest kacheek in Meridell.

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