-Chapter 2: Doubt-


"Does my hair look all right in the back?"

Lucy Pevensie pretended to think about this. "Maybe if you were trying to impress a goat, or a snail, or a corkscrew-maker, or a grapevine..."

Susan sighed. "A few too many curls?" The half of Susan's makeup-coated face that Lucy could see in the little mirror beside the school bunk-bed was scowling, and Su started yanking her brush through the top left side of her lovely, brown, over-curly hair.

"Why don't you just braid your hair with ribbons and flowers, like you did in Narnia?" Lucy suggested. "That always looked so pretty."

"One, it's Autumn, and all the good flowers are dead; two, this isn't Narnia; and three, braids are unfashionable in the real world."

"Narnia was real too!" Lucy argued, stepping a foot to the left so that Susan could clearly see her in the corner of the mirror, glaring so hard that it hurt.

Susan stuck a pin, the nice one, with the blue pearls, in her hair. "There, how's that?" she asked.

"You look just like an advertisement for shampoo, or lipstick, or clam chowder," said Lucy flatly. Only prettier, she added in her head. Su always was the pretty one in the family. "and Narnia was real."

"Or it might have been simply some strange, shared, astral projection brought on by the trauma of the Blitz and being in a new house," Susan countered, while dabbing a tissue against the corner of her mouth, where the too-red lipstick had smeared.

"Astra-what?"

"Astral projection. A sort of out-of-body experience, where your mind goes somewhere while you don't. Sort of like lucid dreaming."

"Who told you that?" Lucy inquired curiously. Just so she'd know who to avoid.

"Bertram Torchley. A boy I met at the train station- he was going to Peter and Edmund's school."

"So is that the reason you're all dressed up? Did he ask you on a date?" Lucy asked mischievously.

"Oh- no!" Susan blushed fiercely beneath her heavy make-up. "No- um- just his step-aunt's sixth wedding."

"Sixth?"

"I hear she's not the easiest person to get on with."

"Not even the second day of boarding school, and already you're being invited to strange boy's step-aunt's sixth weddings," Lucy teased.

"Oh, shush. And he's not strange at all- he's ever such a nice boy- do you know, he knows everything there is to know about lucid projections, and trances and metaphysics and cosmology, and esotericism, and hypnagogia and parapsychology, and praedormitium, and oneirogogic images and phantasmata? He's so smart, sophisticated, blond-"

"I thought you hated blonds," Lucy interjected, by way of reminder.

"You obviously have never met someone as classically intriguing, as well-bred, as ingenious, or as polished as him, or you wouldn't say that."

"I hate him already, and I just got here," said Edmund, strolling into the open dormitory with a periwinkle-blue yo-yo dangling off his finger.

"Edmund!" yelped Lucy.

"What in the world are you even doing here?" Susan demanded.

"This world, you mean?" Edmund joked. He was wearing his blue school sweater, and his black hair was even more disheveled than usual, due to the blustery weather they'd been having lately. "Yeah, um- you know how it is- first time at boarding school, some kid plays a prank on me, and tells me we reached our school, and switches the tags on my luggage, and locks me out of the train car, so I get stuck at this girls' school until they can re-route the train in three weeks- three weeks, can you imagine?- and the worst part is, I don't even get vacation- I have to study whatever you girls are studying! No wait, the worst part is, I have to share a room with the cranky old janitor. No wait again, the very worst part is, I get stuck with some strange girl's luggage! At least she has good taste in yo-yos..."

"Edmund, you can't muck about with a stranger's luggage!" Susan chided crossly.

"Why not? She's probably messing with mine- and having a jolly smashing time too, since I actually pack interesting things, like my electric torch. Too bad I lost it in Narnia..."

"Oh, grow up Ed!" Su sighed.

"Sheesh, fine; but it seems a shame to let a perfectly good yo-yo go to waste for three, whole, weeks..." Edmund said, jerking his hand up an inch and letting the yo-yo curl into the palm of his hand. "So who was the kid you two were just chatting about?"

"Some supposed know-it-all called Bert Torchley who says Narnia was a dream," Lucy rattled off, at the same moment Susan snapped:

"None of your business!"

"What? A dream?" Ed repeated, joining Lucy in her glaring. "Seriously? You can't tell me you believe that rot- hold it, you mean you told him about Narnia? Su, have you gone blinking nutters?"

"I didn't tell him specifically, I told him theoretically, in the sense of: what if some logically-thinking individual stumbled into another world that couldn't possibly exist, or thought they did? Purely theoretical," Susan stated evenly. "Furthermore, his name's Bertram, not Bert, and he theorized astral projection, not dreaming, since he happens to believe the universe is a thing of order and purpose and control, not chaos and chance."

"He sounds like a regular Nazi," Edmund commented wryly, twanging the yo-yo string so that it vibrated.

"Oh, shut up!" Susan hissed, slamming her hairbrush against the stained ceramic of the bed-table, and storming out of the dormitory. Her slightly-too-short skirt crackled against the doorframe as she left. Lucy guessed Susan had used too much starch on her dress. Either that, or she'd just generated an awful lot of static electricity from all that hair-brushing.

"What bee's in her bonnet?" Ed asked foggily.

Lucy shrugged, and then dashed off after her big sister. "Susan, what's wrong?" she asked, while gasping for breath, since she'd had to chase her all the way downstairs, to the ground floor. "I mean, you don't really care a fig for this Bertry-whatever-his-name-is, do you? I mean, you're in love with King Caspian, right?

Susan halted stiffly, and her shoulder-blades clenched together beneath her peaches-and-cream party dress, which wasn't quite zipped up all the way in back. "Whatever gave you that notion?" she asked calmly.

Too calmly.

"Oh, let me see, I don't know, your snogging him like that right before we left Narnia might've had something to do with it."

"It was not 'snogging'," Susan corrected primly, "it was a simple goodbye kiss. If it even happened," she added quickly.

"It happened," Lucy assured her firmly.

"Professor Kirke's house was a very strange place, and we were traumatized, and none of us had gotten much sleep," Susan pointed out in an annoyingly sensible tone. "And the train-ride to our schools was also stressful. Peter had gotten into a fight. Nerves were high-strung."

"It happened," Lucy repeated adamantly. How could Susan just brush away being a queen of Narnia? And everything they'd done there? All the adventures?

"Lu, you might as well hear it now before you get old enough for it to bother you," Susan lectured stiffly, "in the real world, boys such as Caspian simply don't exist."

Oh. So that was how Susan could forget. Remembering was too hard.

Because Susan could never go back.