Author's Note: A short one this time—just to tell you that you guys rock my polka-dotted socks, and I'd like to thank you yet again for leaving all your lovely reviews, giving me more ideas then I know what to do with, and also unwittingly providing the data for my upcoming science project for answering the peanut butter survey...in short, I love you all. I was gonna give you some of Dalton's crayons, but he was still being really possessive—

DALTON: (sticks out his tongue)

...So I stole some of them while he was sleeping...

DALTON: WHAT?

(innocently) Cerulean, anyone?

Chinese Lantern

Chapter Two—

"Don't You Forget About Me"

The first day of summer vacation dawned bright and sunny and without a single cloud, the air cool and breezy, the sky as pure and crystalline as icing-sugar. It was the day of departure for the annual end-of-the-year sophomore field trip, and it was the kind of day that made forty six-year-olds act sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds act six. Although, truth be told, field trips almost always seem to have that effect on people, no matter what the weather is like.

Maybe it was Ram who explained it best, when he was sitting in the back of the bus along with Maddox, Ginnie, and Max—all best friends since grade school—barely five minutes out of Boston and already systematically shredding his Spanish III book and tossing the ripped pages out the window and into the paths of unsuspecting motorists.

"It's the first day of summer vacation," he rhapsodized. "We're free for three months—we can kiss our sophomore year goodbye. School's out. We survived finals. Now we're headed to New York City for a week, practically unsupervised if we play it right--We should all celebrate."

"Right, Ram, I understand all that," Max allowed. "But, um...what does that have to do with the Grease soundtrack, exactly?"

But of course, Ram couldn't hear him by then, as he had already put on his headphones, the volume cranked all the way up, singing along at the top of his lungs.

"Why, this car is automatic—"

(A slap on Max's head in time with the music.)

"It's systematic—"

(Slap.)

"It's hyyyyyyyyyyydromatic—"

(Slap.)

"WHY IT'S GREASED LIGHTNIN'!"

(Slap-slap-slap-slap-slap!)

Max buried his face in his hands. "What did I ever do to deserve this?"

"Maybe you killed a Bollywood star in a past life?" Maddox suggested from the seat behind him.

"But I thought Bollywood stars had the universal significance of gnats."

"Try telling that to our Ramchandra's mother," Maddox said, barely managing to hold back a laugh, if only for Max's sake.

"With a four-speed on the floor, they'll be waitin' at the door—you know that it was shit, we'll be gettin' lots of tit, with Greased Lightnin'!"

As Max sighed, looking close to tears, Ginnie, occupying the seat next to him, seized the opportunity at hand.

"Maxie?" she asked tentatively. "Anything I can do?"

"Can you go back in time to 1978 and make sure the production of Grease is stopped?"

"Um."

"Then no, Ginnie. I really don't think there is."

Ginnie colored prettily, as she always did when he called her by name, and rested her head gently on his shoulder. "I brought your lexicon for you," she said quietly. "It's in my backpack. And your Hesperides...your Historie of the Spartan Wars...so you can work on the bus if you like...and those juice boxes you like?" she continued, as Ram launched into a full-scale rendition of "You're The One That I Want" on Max's head. "The Cran-Grape? I brought some of those too..."

"Look, Ginnie, unless you can get him to stop using me as a human drum...there really isn't much—"

"I'll work on it," Ginnie said resolutely, and began in earnest to convince Ram that she had a more resonant head.

Ginnie Skarbonkiewicz had hair the color of milk and clover honey and the fragrant crushed petals of a sweet briar rose; the gods of youth and graceless beauty had given her bee-stung lips, coltish legs, and absolutely no common sense whatsoever--she was, as Ram was given to saying, not the sharpest crayon in the Crayola box of life. She was also an absolute hopeless romantic, and had, at this point, two great loves in her life: Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, and Max Backderf, whom she had been following around relentlessly since the fourth grade.

She loved them both equally but as Bender was fictional and Max a living, breathing prodigy, he always seemed to win out in the end, although he never seemed to be particularly happy about it. Of course, Max also had the added bonus of being a valid genius—and while Ginnie would always attest for Bender's skills as a philosopher ("screws just fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place," et cetera), he would never be able to beat Max in a fair game. Because Max had been reading English at two years of age, French when he was four and Latin, Arabic, and Greek by the time he started the first grade. He was a boy wonder, a child who exuded brilliance like a hundred-watt bulb—"my own little Doogie Howser," his mother was given to coo, at which point he usually attempted suicide by jumping out the first-floor window. He had started at Helen Keller School of Arts and Sciences when he was nine, and Ram, Ginnie, and Maddox, knowing nothing about the primary works of Hesiod or the fall of the Roman empire, befriended him immediately because of his preternatural kickball skills, and the fact that his full name was "Maximum Volume Backderf"—which cemented once and for all the fact that Ginnie couldn't have done much better chasing after Judd Nelson, although a fictional character might have paid her more attention in the long run.

By the time the teachers got around to taking roll, they were almost out of Massachusetts and anyone left behind would probably be in pretty bad shape. They also had to work around the fact that every single person on the bus had their headphones on, and so much noise was being made that even Ram had almost been drowned out. By the time roll had been taken, it was impossible to hear a word that anyone was saying, and the trip leaders had wisely decided to occupy the students with a written assignment—Goals For The Field Trip.

"I didn't know we were supposed to have goals for a field trip," Max muttered, but was of course completely drowned out.

Ram and Ginnie occupied themselves bowling tangerines down the center aisle of the bus ("who's it going to hurt? The orange?" Ram asked incredulously when one of the younger teachers suggested mildly that he stop, and the teacher, a little bit in love with Ram—because he really did look like some Bollywood Hindu god, with his blue-black hair and dark eyes and skin like milk chocolate, so that you couldn't help being a little bit in love with him, even if you happened to hate him—just yelped something about trying not to hit anyone and scurried back to the front). Orange bowling seemed to take a remarkable amount of time, involving complex scoring procedures and the like, and by the time they were both happily singing along with their CD players—the RENT soundtrack for Ram, and "Ginnie's Eighties Mix VIII" for Ginnie—Max and Maddox were already working on their written goals, but mostly passing notes to each other across the seat-back.

"What's the time? Well, it's gotta be close to midni-i-ight...my body's talkin' to me—it says, time for dange-e-er!..."

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS, MISS MADDOX BROWN? Max scrawled in his impenetrable shorthand.

"WO-ON'T YOU, come see about me...I'll be alone, dancin', you know it baby..."

i'd like to buy the world a coke, Maddox wrote back.

NO, SERIOUSLY—WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO PUT?

"It says I wanna commit a crime! Wanna be! the! cause! of a fight! Wanna put on a tight skirt...and flirt...with a strange-e-er..."

you mean, what are you going to put?

EXACTLY.

"Love's strange—so real in the dark...think of the tender things...that we were working on..."

well, if i were you, i'd say: i'm going to once again infuriate every adult in my social stratosphere (which is all adults) by acting bizarre and trivial and once more stifling the work of genius that everyone is sure is inside me somewhere.

"We don't need any moooo-oneeeyyy...I always get in for free! You-can-get-in-too...if you get in with meee-a-heee...LET'S GO! O-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, tonight! I have to go! A-na-na-na-hoooo, tonight!..."

"DON'T! YOU! Forget about me! Don't, don't, don't, don't..."

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, A WORK OF GENIUS INSIDE OF ME? Max wrote. LIKE A TAPEWORM, OR SOMETHING?

yes, max. exactly like a tapeworm.

HOW DO YOU GET A TAPEWORM OUT?

i think you're supposed to not eat anything for a while, and then hold a dish of warm milk in front of you...and lure it out...somehow...

AND THEN I JUST GRAB IT BY THE NECK AND GO, 'HELLO, INSPIRATION'? MY GOD, MADDIE, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THIS BEFORE?

At risk of becoming yet another Backderf-groupie, Maddox stifled a laugh and reluctantly went back to working on her assignment. She wrote her on-paper name, Caroline Maddox Brown, on the slip they had given her, and before she could let herself compose anything that might have been expected—I want to go to the Metropolitan Museum; I want to see a Broadway show—she began to write down the only thing that she could ever think of, beginning with that much-bitten line:

I want to have an adventure.
I want to do something never done before—to raise anchor on a pirate ship of cutthroat marauders who write poetry with steel; to shoot with the perfect arc of a bow, and let fly poison-tipped arrows. I want to shout from every hilltop, to go into battle, to sing my heart and soul and lungs out across the trampled-bracken undersnow fields and barren mountains of a strange new land. I want to save a life. I want to be something. I want to change something. And most of all: to do something that no one could ever have imagined.

She surveyed her paper with furrowed brow, and, at the very bottom, penciled in one last PS—

and failing that, I wouldn't mind going to see Wicked on Broadway.

From the seat next to her, as if on cue, Ram began to sing at the top of his lungs:

"SO! If you care to fiiiiind me, look to the western sky—as someone told me lately, everyone deserves a chance to flyyyy! And if I'm flying solo! At least I'm flying freeEEeeEeee..."

At lunchtime, they stopped at a deli somewhere in the outskirts of Brooklyn, the last stop before they reached their final destination. While Ginnie, Max and Ram sat outside at one of the rickety tables on the sidewalk, soaking up the sun as Ginnie tried to convince both of them that the inside of her Snapple cap had "YOU ARE THE ONE TRUE LOVE OF MAX BACKDERF" printed on the inside (Max objected mainly because there were too many syllables), Maddox went into the antiques shop next door, and began to take a look around.

Maddox stood straight up as she walked in, shivering in the sudden cold of the air conditioning. Ducking through the aisles of antique doilies and hot water bottles, she exhibited a kind of sunburned grace in her tennis shoes and peppermint wafer-pink sundress, Ram's "DETROIT: ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE" sweatshirt looped around her shoulders to protect from the cold. Maddox was translucent skinned, skinny-legged and tall for a girl. She hadn't blossomed into womanhood as Ginnie had, but had been dragged up anyhow, and with her narrow hips and shoulders, fine dark hair that refused to do anything but fall stick-straight to her chin, constant summer sunburn and blush that went all the way to the tips of her ears, she resembled nothing so much as a lost girl from Never land. And, for someone who refused to consider growing up, maybe this wasn't all that bad.

Maybe that was why she loved old photographs so much: all of them were moments trapped in time—a single moment, snapflash, and frozen forever in youth, in a space or a feeling that could never be repeated again.

It took her a long time to find the box of photos that was always at the back of every antique store. It was a small place, but packed to the rafters—with commemorative sugar-spoons, old singles on vinyl and shellac (Chubby Checker, Cab Calloway, and the ever immemorial Twisted Sister), comic books (The Green Lantern, The Flash), old button-up blouses and wedding-gowns, snowy lace baby pillows, tarnished sliver baby combs—and it took her a long time before she finally found what she was looking for, wedged between a Complete Tide-Table Listing and an old Singer sewing machine the size of a Buick.

She knelt down in front of an old cardboard box, sorting through the old ripped glossies and sepia portraits of debutantes of a hundred years ago. There were pale-haired beauties with upturned noses and parted mouths, glossy curls bound into heavy coifs that hung down the backs of their necks, garlanded and by corsages of roses, scent almost emanating from the page.

They were all different, of course—some of men in overcoats and business hats, posing for a formal portrait, some of matronly women drowning in lace, some family portraits of eight or nine children all sitting around a man and a woman, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.

The last photograph in the box was the only one without poses or lighting or far-off glances at middle distance—it was spontaneous, and Maddox was so glad to see it after a shoebox full of blushing prides and pompous businessmen that she almost laughed. It was an ancient newspaper clipping, yellowed with age and so fragile-looking that she held it by her fingertips. Twenty young faces from a hundred years ago: smiling, proud or startled by the flashbulb of the camera—blurred, seconds away from movement, invulnerable in their youth...all dead now...

"Whaddaya think, Maddie, are they me?" Ram asked loudly behind her, startling her so much that she jumped, nearly ripping the picture clean in two.

She turned around to see him with a pair of faded red suspenders clasped onto his jeans, a fantastic look of pride on his face. "Well?"

"They're marvelous, dahling."

"Y'think I could be on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with them?"

Maddox grinned. "Definitely."

He raised an eyebrow quizzically. "Carson?"

"No. Jai."

"Dammit."

"Take a minute, Ram, and think about how many straight guys would actually admit to saying that..."

And while Ram went around asking innocent Brooklyners which member of the Fab 5 his brand new old red suspenders would look good on, Max sifted through an ancient Britannica, and Ginnie cooed over the black silk kimono she had found, a dragon embroidered on the back in golden thread as bright as the day it was woven, Maddox went to pay for the photograph: a scrap of the world, hers for the low, low price of fifteen cents.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in that special school-sanctioned activity of Sightseeing, in which something that might have been normally enjoyable was a miserable activity to say the least (although Max promised to orchestrate a prison-break the next day, in which the four of them would escape the group and only return on the day of departure). So, on their first afternoon in the city, they had school-sanctioned Museum Visits while expressing school-sanctioned Opinions, then a school-sanctions Walk through the Park, and then, for dinner, a school-sanctioned trip to Chinatown, where they had a school-sanctioned dinner of dumplings and custard and steaming black tea.

It all got very tiring after a while.

They had their first non-school-sanctioned moments since noon just as the sun was setting, and they were set loose to browse in a shop next door to the restaurant. And Maddox (who for reasons that don't really have to be explained needed five minutes of solitude and a bag of Circus Peanuts, in that order) took this opportunity to slip up a narrow flight of stairs, and into a place where she could be alone for a few moments.

She fingered the clipping in her pocket as she pelted up the broken steps, first onto the second floor, then the third, the fourth, and finally the fifth, which was empty and utterly dark, the shutters drawn, closed against the last rays of the setting sun.

She moved to open them, but they were jammed; one milky filament of light reached the inside, cutting through the darkness and shedding no warmth.

Maddox took her hand out of her pocket, bringing it to the path of the last day's sun to watch it play against her skin. And she was surprised when instead of skimming her palm, it looped around her fingertip, taking hold. It went all down the flickering muscle of her hand, splintering across her forearm, up along her shoulder, and then, and then, and then...

Even as the fire took hold, there was no warmth.

And not much later than that, no light to be seen; so sound or scent, no touch. She was in a place now where none of that mattered.

The time has come...

[TBC...]

(dabs at her eyes with Jack's bandanna) First-shout-outs…

JACK: Hey! Dat's mine!

(blows her nose with a loud honking noise) Oh, d'you want it back?

JACK: Uh…you keep dat one.

YAY! (tackles)

JACK: AUGH!

Sapphy: Oh god! CHOICES! Nay! Shun the word!

DALTON: I—

SHUN!

DALTON: (pause)

And this, from the guy who firsthand witnessed my existential crisis when faced with choosing between a cherry or a coke slushy? (wink) Guys...they just never seem to learn...

Lute: Oh, our Spotty-boy is so very much up to something. I mean, the guy's gotta keep up the waifish physique somehow, right?

SPOT: ...I resent dat.

(clings) SPOTTY! JUST SAY NO!

Matchin' Laces: (high-fives) Creamy all the way! (does the creamy peanut butter dance, even though that hasn't actually been invented. Oh well. There should be one)

And, of course...yay for constant crushingness...yeah, you know I'm like that too. (winks) All I care about is laaaahhhhhve!

JACK: CHEESE IT! SHE'S MUSICALISING!

Ershey: Hey, don't feel bad for not knowing what vices are...when I first saw Newsies, I had to look up "conflagration" in the dictionary. Not my proudest moment, by far...(grins) Vices are, I guess, either bad habits, or things you have weaknesses for...for instance, for me, "newsies fanfic" would fit under BOTH those categories... Teepot: Haha! I love your vices...just about perfectly explains my feelings towards world politics...

I actually haven't seen "The Neverending Story" in a long while also...I just refound my old grade-school copy and reread it...honestly, the movie was pretty bad. (Although you just have to admire how a neverending story needs a sequel...)

m-e lee12: Yay! (flying rugby tackles) GUYS! Thr press has spoken! They like it!

DALTON: (excited) Who? New York Times, Boston Globe?

BETTER!

DALTON: Who then?

(grins) ...m-e lee...

DALTON: (sighs)

HEY! The girl knows what she's talkin' about!

Klover: high-fives Yay for tall girls! (grin) Hmm...twelfth in line you say? pause You wouldn't be...morally AVERSE to a few mob-related hits, would you? Might liven things up a little...

Soaker: I guess everyone's got their vices when it comes to junk food, huh? Me, I'm a 7-11, Hostess Twinkies and blue-raspberry slurpees kinda gal myself...they way I see it, if you ingest that many chemicals, you have to develop bionic powers at SOME point.

Moonlights Sundance: I love your background. I was at a bookstore a few days ago and for some reason found myself flipping through a Pirate!Romance, and it was so bad that I vowed to make the pirate parts of fic just about as opposite to it as they could be...and let's just say that you've helped a whole lot on that front...

Nani: Gypsy royalty? Why didn't I think of that one? Well...in short... You rock. And isn't it true, what they say about peanut butter choice having a lot to do with your personality...

DALTON: ...who says that?

I do.

DALTON: Oh.

Strawberri Shake: You've got a crime racket? Do you know that I've been asking for one of those for EVERY birthday since I was twelve?

Mobsters, organized crime, thieving...y'know, all the lovely things that make life worth living? I gotta say, you know where it's at.

DALTON: But I thought bunnies and kittens and pink butterflies were what made life worth living?

Well...what about mobster butterflies?

DALTON: Oh. Okay!

Uninvisible: AHH! Yes! NUTELLA! Food of the gods, it is...along with, of course, Velveeta, and Jell-O and shrimp n' lime Top Ramen...ALL that nutritious stuff... Man, ya just gotta love it.

Checkmate: See, this is what I love about you guys... thank you! You just added an entire new dimension to the story (get it? Story? Dimension?) (Yes, I'm a loser). Love ya darlin'!

CiCi: I love how you included scars in your profile! Gotta love 'em. 'Causeevery scar tells a story. (points to her knee) This one I got commandeering a pirate ship outside Barbados...

DALTON: Didn't you get that one falling of your bike when you were seven?

Shut up, Charlie...

Chaos: Y'know I'm seeing a pattern here? All the royalty seem to be going for creamy peanut butter, and all the toughies for chunky...interesting...

DALTON:You're gonna use that as your science project next year, aren't you?

Yep...

Splashey: I know! No Jack Sparrow...man, that was a hard decision... But if you're already in trouble for infringing the copyright on ONE movie, you wanna stay out of the red zone, y'know? Although there'll be some damn sexy pirates in this one two...actually, I'm beginning to wonder why I made any other characters at all...

Ccat: YAY for unintentional rhymes! I'm a total dork about those...all the time, I end up making a rhyme!

DALTON: Can we please not start this again?

Start what, little hen?

DALTON: DAKKI! I MEAN IT!

...anybody wanna peanut?

DALTON: Oh, great...now you've got her quoting "The Princess Bride"...

Sparks-a-go-go: TWO characters! You rock! My socks! And other assorted footwear! Sparks, you rock my pink Converse!

DALTON: That doesn't rhyme.

...Do you want me to start rhyming again? ...Cause I could.

BrooklynGrl: nods I love the idea of a seer in this fic. Maybe a fortune teller? Madame Aurora? A crystal ball, perhaps?

DALTON: You've been drinking the cherry cough syrup again, haven't you?

(nodnod)

BabyXtreme: Oh, man, I heart your profile...grin It's soooo cool. And I always loved anything involving amazons. Oh, and Lilandra?—coolest. Name. Ever.

Rubix: Hey, I always had trouble sharing too...y'know, I was the kid who got all OCD about the Play-Doh and wouldn't let anyone mix the colors together...I guess we all have our weaknesses...

Buttons: Ahh! The Joy Luck Club! Love that book, own it, read it, re-read it, seen the movie...my favorite was always the chess prodigy...Waverly? That was great. And, yes...I just turned sixteen about a week ago. Of course, I'm still too immature to not cringe whenever I read the dumpling bit too...but then, what do you expect? winks

Coin: So I'm not the ONLY one who eats peanut butter straight? YESSS! We rule! 'Cause god knows, ya gotta be a tough cookie to eat peanut butter right off the spoon.winks

Almatari-of-arda: Yay for us dye-addicted people! I'm currently in a mermaidy-green phase (it was supposed to be blue, but this is what happens when blondes try to color their hair...) but I just bought a lovely packet of cherry-red Kool-Aid...I figure I'm just giving nature a little upgrade...

Brownie/Melody: C'mon, Charlie, they're crayons, she'll give 'em back. What do you say?

DALTON: B-but...the tips'll get all blunt...

Don't worry...by the time I'm done with him, he'll be a lean, mean, sharing machine...(winks)

Next Up: Chapter Two, In Which Dakki Gets To Include A Nifty Anime Quote and Our Plucky Heroine Is Left In A Pink World, Also Known As The Special Heaven Reserved For Medda Larkson (Not Really). (devilish grin)