Chapter VII: Finding You Can Change
The grand theatre was by far the glittering crown jewel of the town. Adorned from floor to ceiling in towering marble pillars and elaborate, vibrant stained glass windows depicting storybook images of princesses and mythical creatures from lands far away, it was clear the building was designed with exactly the same kind of love and passion Luan held so dearly for the performing arts.
The serene, crystalline embellishments were such a stark contrast to the exasperated groans and shouts that could be heard from the stage that Luan almost laughed.
"Leo! Put a little effort into your delivery! Lord Capulet has just received the news that his daughter has died, for proscenium's sake!" Madame Bernardo, the play director, pulled at her dark brown hair in frustration as she paced across the glossy wooden stage. She stopped to glare down at Luan's sister, Lola, who was currently adjusting the strap of her tan mail-carrier's bag with an utterly disgusted look upon her face.
"And you! Act with feeling, Lola. Your character needs motivation! A real messenger would travel through miles of nothing but wind, rain, and hurricanes to get this letter to Romeo. Your interpretation makes it look like he wouldn't even care enough to walk three steps!"
"I don't care!" Lola retorted. "I didn't even want to be the stupid messenger anyway! I wanted to be the star! I only get three minutes of time onstage, and besides that, the color of this bag totally clashes with my complexion!"
Madame Bernardo massaged her forehead. "I'll get back to you. Keep working on your lines." As she walked down the steps on the end of the stage, she muttered in a low voice, "Don't get me wrong, I totally love teaching the art of theatre to my eager young scholars, but sometimes, I really don't get paid enough for this."
She lightly tapped Luan on the shoulder, who had been up until this point leaning with her back against the railing of the staircase and gazing up at the red stained-glass dragon soaring across the overhead window.
"Luan!" she chirped, her face showing no remaining traces of the mental breakdown she'd had only a heartbeat earlier. "My main event, my magnum opus, my perfectly splendid little starlet! What's new with you? Have you been practicing?"
"Yes," Luan lied. In actuality, she'd been neglecting her theatre duties a little as she'd tried to deal with the seven hundred other things on her mind. Yesterday, she'd been so dazed and distracted by the memory of nearly kissing Benny that she doubted she would've been able to study a single word of Romeo and Juliet even if she'd tried. And today, she had an entirely different problem to tend to: going back to the Stone Castle, this time with her entire family in tow, and having to figure out how to manage a bunch of complicated emotions she still didn't understand while also making sure her siblings didn't set the place on fire. And while trying to stop Leni from referring to Benny as her 'boyfriend' in front of their parents. Seriously, Luan had already had to shut her up twice.
Could you blame her for being a little rusty on her lines?
"Well, let me hear it, then." Madame Bernardo gestured for her to get up onto the stage and then walked over to sit in the very front row of the audience seats. As always, she gave Luan her full attention, her green eyes practically drilling into the girl's skull. Usually, Luan didn't mind this–she saw it as an unmistakable fact that she was, in fact, the director's favorite pupil. But today, the last thing she wanted was for anyone to study her too closely. One little slip-up on her part and everyone would know how insecure she was feeling.
Luan struggled through her lines from the balcony scene, floundered through her delivery of the dramatic monologue she was supposed to read before her character poisoned herself, and couldn't even seem to tell her stage lefts from her stage rights. For the first time in all of her life, Luan was absolutely awful onstage.
There was no fooling Madame Bernardo now, she thought bitterly.
"Curtain calls and cast parties!" the director cried, her face betraying her total shock. "What happened?" She crossed her arms. "There's no way you practiced before delivering a performance like that!"
Luan wilted, her face feeling blazing hot. She hated letting people down, especially those who confided in her this much.
"You're in the lead role," Madame Bernardo reminded her, her eyebrows creased into a disappointed slope. "Everyone else is depending on you, so I can't have you making any more halfhearted efforts like this." She slowly climbed up the steps again, standing very close to Luan in order to whisper, "Is something going on at home? You seem distressed."
Luan shook her head. As her theatre teacher's scrutinizing gaze looked her over once, twice, and then a third time, she couldn't help but feel as though Madame Bernardo's trained eyes could expose all of her secrets bare and cold.
"Gadzooks!" her teacher shouted suddenly, causing Luan to flinch and step back. "Which is also the name of my one-woman showww! I think I know what's up. You're in love, aren't you?"
No! Luan felt a whole new layer of blush creep onto her cheeks. Wait, maybe.
Her own thoughts confused her. That couldn't possibly be right.
"Aha!" Madame Bernardo snapped her fingers in front of Luan's traitorous face. "I knew it! Drama teachers are never wrong!"
Luan swatted her director's hand away. She'd had just about enough of all of these confusing, fluttering feelings. "For the last time, I do not have a crush on Benny!"
Madame Bernardo merely smirked. "I never mentioned any names."
That was true. Luan had never said anything about Benny to her teacher before.
Dang it. Foiled again.
Luan pulled the hood of her cloak over the back of her head, trying to hide her expression the way she always did when her face dared to reveal anything that wasn't a smile. She was done with all these stupid, annoying emotions and she wanted nothing more than to go back to the time when she was only a mere traveling performer living from show to show. Back when things were simple.
But all she could think about was that quick, yet lingering moment the day before when, by the faint light of a mysterious, glowing flower, she'd let herself get distracted by Benny's charms yet again. Swept away by her crazy feelings, she'd somehow, in some way, found herself leaning in to kiss him.
What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking at all?
And why, despite it all, could she have sworn that in those few stolen seconds, she'd felt her heart pounding faster, louder than it ever had before?
And… wow. Had her blush just gotten even deeper?
There was no question about it. The boy was driving her insane.
Luan hated every second of it. But for some reason, she also kind of liked it.
Throughout all these thoughts, and throughout whatever kind of expressions Luan's face was currently making (for the love of her, she had no idea), Madame Bernardo never once looked away from her pupil's eyes.
Or, her pupil's pupils, Luan supposed, if you wanted to take the punny route.
"Luan," Madame Bernardo said gently. "Love's not a bad thing to feel. Trust me."
She offered her hand to Luan, and Luan took it, feeling the places in her teacher's palm that had gone soft with age and experience. She noticed all of the inkstains and papercuts dotting the woman's fingers, and the places where the green polish that coated her fingernails had begun to peel.
Madame Bernardo took advantage of her student's compliance to spin her around in a twirl, the way boys had often done to Leni whenever they danced with her at those masquerade balls.
Luan, being both caught off guard and the sort of person who was much more comfortable with her feet on a tightrope or the pedals of a unicycle than on a dancefloor, promptly stumbled, losing her footing.
Luckily, Madame Bernardo was there to catch her by the cloth of her yellow sleeve before she did any more damage to that silly little head of hers.
"If anything," Madame Bernardo said, playfully twirling the end of Luan's sleeve around her index finger. "I'd say it's the mark of a true leading lady. A promising young bird, finally finding her wings and soaring free!" She let go of Luan and started to run around in a circle, flapping her arms in what Luan guessed was supposed to be an imitation of a bird.
"I don't want to spread my wings," Luan protested, feeling slightly embarrassed as she saw that several of the other cast members had stopped their rehearsing to stare at their director's antics.
"Oh, at least tell me you'll give it a chance, darling!" Madame Bernardo paused mid-flight to give Luan a wink. "You never know what might happen!"
Luan pulled on her ponytail. She wasn't quite convinced she wanted to know. She'd seen her older sisters' lives get completely shaken up by their own crushes. Storm after storm of squealing, giggling, crying and all that jazz. Even Luna turned into an absolute wreck around her girlfriend, Sam, and they'd only been dating for three months!
That just wasn't Luan's scene. Sure, maybe she could admit, if only to herself, that Benny was sort of cute, albeit in a very peculiar, fluffy way, but Luan didn't exactly have experience with anything like this. She'd never even kissed anyone before! What if she was bad at it?
Or worse, what if she was bad at love itself? If she were writing a play, the comic relief character archetype wouldn't exactly be her first choice for the romantic lead. That wouldn't even make the list of her top ten!
Plus, there was the whole matter of Benny's mysterious curse, as if Luan needed anything to complicate matters even further. She knew just as well as he that he was running out of time, and her mind, being much better suited to puns than to complex spells, was completely clueless.
Still, there had to be something she could do. Maybe she'd stop by the library again later and pester the librarian until he finally let her check out the secret closed-off room in the basement. Or maybe Lisa's annoyingly brilliant brain would be able to decipher the weird squiggles in the books they'd checked out yesterday that Luan's brain couldn't comprehend.
But could it happen fast enough?
Madame Bernardo studied Luan's face again, and for a brief moment Luan worried that maybe her deepest thoughts had been floating above her head in a fluffy cloud, the way they did in those comic strips in the Sunday papers.
But all the director said was: "Goodness gracious! You're more shaken-up about this than I thought, aren't you? Okay, take five–no, ten, and then we'll run through your lines again. After all, lovesick or not, the theatre waits for no one!" And with that, Madame Bernardo skipped away, merrily singing, "There's no business like show business!"
Luan, now left alone under the stained-glass dragon, merely glanced down at her script. If only she had one of those for her actual life–a three-act structure she could use to figure out how to solve all of the problems she had.
But no gifted playwrights were around to help her. Madame Bernardo was right. This was her role to play, and she was cast (rather stupidly in her opinion) as the unwitting leading lady.
…
"Remind me again why you feel the need to bring both your baseball bat and your hockey stick?" Luan crossed her arms as she looked down at her younger sister. "I'm no animal behavior specialist, but I doubt any wolves would dare to attack a family as big as ours."
"Shows how much you know, big sis!" Lynn Jr protested in between grunts as she tried to cram a dozen assorted sports balls into her tiny duffel bag. "I mean, when is there not a need for a good hockey stick?"
Other than for literal slapstick humor, Luan couldn't even think of one good use. But she wasn't in the mood to care right now. She just wanted her family to hurry up and get out the door so she could put all her worries to rest.
"Lana! Lola!" Luan yelled as the sisters raced in circles around the room, apparently playing some modified version of tag where the objective was to murder the other player instead of just touching them. "Quit fooling around and get dressed!"
In their defense, they were at least half-dressed. Lola had on lacy pink pajama bottoms and a regular shirt, where Lana had on the reverse: she was dressed in normal leggings but was still wearing the top to her 'I Heart Dirt' PJ's.
Still, that was much more than she could say for Luna. Apparently, ten o'clock in the morning was still much too early for her. "Never thought I'd ever hear you say the words, 'quit fooling around,' brah," Luna said through a yawn, still rubbing the sleep out of her tired night-owl eyes.
"I'm serious!" Luan protested, pulling one of Luna's purple tunics out of the communal dresser and beaning her in the face with it. "At this rate, it'll be midnight by the time we finally get out of here!"
Lori, who still looked as though she was down a few cups of coffee and holding both a screaming Lily and one of Lisa's overflowing beakers of god-knows-what, emerged from the closet and gave her comedienne sister a wry smile. "Nice to finally not be the only one trying to get us out the door."
"Um, I'm standing right here," Lincoln complained. The fact that he was already dressed, washed-up, and ready to go earned him a 'best sibling of the day' trophy in Luan's book. He seemed to be in the middle of wrangling Lisa away from a book that was thicker than their father's Lynnsagna.
"Come on! Just one more page, elder brother!" Lisa protested. She'd been trying to decipher the magic spellbooks they'd found yesterday in the library for hours, without even so much as a bathroom break. The claims she made about doing it purely for 'scientific discovery' seemed plausible given the enraptured look upon her face as she flicked through the endless pages, but deep down, Luan knew the little inventor was just trying to help in whatever way she knew. Which was not only adorable, but also pretty useful. Luan crossed her fingers that Lisa's efforts would result in a much-needed breakthrough very soon.
"You can read more when we get there, Lis," Luan pointed out. "The Stone Castle's very… quiet." Sometimes a little too quiet for Luan's noise-accustomed brain. But if anyone could fix that sort of a problem, Luan would bet three weeks' allowance on her own family.
"Are you sure it's not covered in gold?" Lola asked, now thankfully wearing a skirt instead of her pajama pants. "Or gemstones? Or even glitter?"
All night long, Lola had kept Luan busy with her excitement and endless yammering about the kinds of glamorous riches that fairytale castles were supposed to have. Despite all of Luan's constant complaints that this was not, in fact, a fairytale.
Luan facepalmed. "It's called the Stone Castle, Lols. What do you think it's covered in? Take a wild guess."
"Not even a few diamonds?" Lola crossed her arms and pouted.
"Not even one, judging by what I've seen. Sorry to crush your dreams there, toots," Luan gave Lola a pat on the head before directing Leni to the closet after she'd just gotten lost for the eighth time.
"And everyone has a buddy, right?" Rita asked. "I don't want anyone getting left behind!"
"Also, stranger danger!" Lynn Sr warned.
"This isn't a stranger!" Luan cried.
"Yeah!" Leni chimed in, poking her head out of the closet's doorway. "This is Luan's boyfrie-"
"Platonic friend!" Luan shouted over her, giving Leni a withering glare. The last thing she needed right now was ten meddling Loud siblings gushing over the fact that she might have a crush.
Lynn Sr gave Luan an uncomfortably suspicious look, but said nothing.
Luan felt a cold hand wrap around her wrist and almost yelped, before she realized that it was only Lucy, having just materialized out of the dark closet.
"I still think you should leave this evil magic alone," Lucy whispered, her voice like a warning breeze before a tornado. "I don't want anything happening to you."
While Luan found her stoic sister's concern surprisingly sweet, it also made her worry. If Lucy, the girl who knew practically everything about dark magic and evil spirits, thought this was a bad idea, she was probably right.
Luan couldn't help but think of the stone statues in Benny's castle, or more appropriately, the things that weren't statues, but his parents and friends, petrified in stone. Could the same thing happen to her family? Considering Luan had no dang clue about how curses worked, she couldn't exactly slide that possibility off the table.
But I've gone in and out multiple times and I've been perfectly fine, Luan reminded herself. There was probably, most likely, almost certainly nothing to worry about.
"It's going to be fine," Luan told Lucy, hoping her smile looked reassuring and hid how panicked she really felt. "Nothing bad is going to happen. Besides, you should know by now that I never leave anything alone!"
Lucy frowned. "That's what I'm afraid of."
…
"Knock-knock?"
Benny didn't think he could ever get tired of hearing those words.
"Who's there?" was his reply, the usual continuation of their little routine.
"Did you forget my name again?" The quick, light sound of his beloved comedienne's giggle transferred easily through the thick wooden door. "You really ought to have your brain Luanalyzed, mister."
"I volunteer to do the honors!" exclaimed a voice Benny didn't recognize.
"I didn't mean literally, Lisa," Luan's voice hissed.
"As if I could ever forget your name." Benny pulled open the door. "Hello, Luan."
Luan's cute, smiling face, as Benny had predicted, wasn't the only one gaping up at him. But what he hadn't been predicting was that there would, in fact, be twelve others (and yes, he counted, twelve!), just as she had said.
It was a surreal experience. So many of them looked like Luan. Not exactly like her, of course, but he kept catching hints of her eyes, her nose, or the way she liked to fidget with her hands as he looked at one of her siblings and then at another. No doubt they were all related.
None of them held her smile, however, except Leni. Many of the older ones' expressions seemed uneasy or nervous, while the younger siblings looked full-on terrified. A pair of trembling twins hid behind Luan's legs, their wide blue eyes the only visible parts of their faces. A tiny, brown-haired girl, her nose buried in a book, looked as though she was trying to appear disinterested, but the subtle glint of fear behind those thick-rimmed glasses revealed she was anything but. He even thought he saw Luan's smile twitch a bit as a spooky-looking girl gripped her hand so tightly that her fingertips were beginning to lose traces of their color.
"And… all of Luan's siblings. Whoa, you actually weren't kidding about how many you had." As he looked across the sea of wary faces, he felt a sudden urge to hug them all, just to see if that would make them smile and feel better. But, it dawned on him that something like that would probably have the opposite effect of what he intended. It would more than likely just scare them even more.
Luan crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Do I look like the kind of person who would joke around about things like that?"
"...Yes." In his defense, it had seemed pretty far-fetched at the time.
"I never joke around when it comes to my family," Luan said loyally. "Unless, you know, if I'm playing a joke on them. Which happens more than you think."
A few irritated nods from some of the elder siblings confirmed this statement.
"Come in," Benny said as he pulled at a few of the loose tufts of fur on the back of his neck. If he was being completely honest, he felt very much like a bad actor being put on display in front of a clearly-disapproving crowd. The sooner the spotlight was on anything other than him, the better.
"It's okay," Luan said in a tone more gentle than he ever could've expected from her. She gave the spooky girl's hand a soft squeeze before nudging her forward a pace or two.
Slowly, deliberately, carefully, the Loud family made their way inside.
As they did, one of the girls held up a hockey stick menacingly, as though she was just a second away from whacking him into oblivion.
Benny shuddered. It would do him some good to stay away from that sister.
"Okay," Luan repeated as she shouldered the door closed. "I think we all know that introductions are probably going to take a loooong time–" She paused to dramatically roll her eyes. "-But they're necessary and stuff, so if that's okay, I'll just dive right in."
She took a deep breath. "These are my parents, Rita and Lynn Loud Sr."
Luan's mother looked simply curious, though her father looked like he was thinking about punching Benny if he dared to try anything at all (which he definitely wouldn't, especially not with him around).
"And these are all of my siblings." Luan grinned and pointed a finger at each of the faces as she said their name. "Of course, you already know Leni. And this is Lori, Luna, Lynn Jr, Lincoln, Lucy, Lana, Lola, Lisa-" Then, she gave the baby of the family, a sweet-looking creature with a tuft of white-blonde hair, a deft pat on the head. "And this little thing is Lily, my biggest fan."
"I thought I was your biggest fan," Benny said in mock protest. He held out a finger for the little one to grasp, putting on his brightest smile. "She doesn't bite, does she?"
He cringed as Lily promptly started to cry.
So much for him being good with kids.
Luan flinched a little, too. "Dang it. Lily, shhh!" Luan said as her worried mother began to gently rock the infant. After none of that did anything, Luan threw her hands in the air.
"Oh, for crying out loud! I didn't want to have to do this to you, little sis, but you give me no other choice!" She made a series of increasingly funny faces involving crossing her eyes, crinkling up her nose, and sticking out her tongue.
Lily's sobs were replaced with giggles in the blink of an eye.
"Knocks 'em dead every time," Luan said while pulling on a stray lock of her hair. "Sorry, she can get a little fussy sometimes."
"It's fine," Benny said, though deep down somewhere inside him, seeing this little baby cry at the mere sight of him made him feel like the worst kind of monster in the world.
Nice try. I know you better than that, the intelligent, sympathetic look in Luan's eyes seemed to say.
A few of the siblings had started to stray away from the door, cautiously exploring their new and strange surroundings. Benny hung back, not quite sure what to do or say to them, as Luan, her oldest sister, and their parents rushed around the castle, trying to direct the family towards interesting things and away from sharp objects.
Luan's voice was busy as she dashed from sister to sister. "Leni, check out these drapes! Lynn, I bet you'll love the ballroom! Oh no, Lisa, we don't trust you around knives, remember? Yes, I know that's just a butter knife, but still! Put that down!"
After several minutes of running around and shouting at one sibling after another, Luan returned, looking both satisfied and completely exhausted. The yellow band in her ponytail had started to come undone, revealing that her hair went wild with static when it wasn't tightly tamed. "That's enough big-sistering for the day," she said as she slumped against the wall and closed her eyes.
The sound of suspiciously squelchy footsteps made her eyes pop wide open again. "Uh, hold that thought." She stepped away from the wall, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "Lana! You better not have tracked mud through the castle! This isn't your personal pigsty, you know!"
After that, she immediately collapsed against the wall again, her hand to her forehead in that classic dramatic-actor fashion. "Okay, now I'm really done," she declared.
She slid her body down the wall and onto the floor, hugging her knees tight. He sat beside her in a cross-legged position, listening to the room start to fill with conversation and chaos.
Luan was, as always, such a sight. She seemed to thrive off of the noise, become more energized by it somehow, but at the same time, she also looked slightly overwhelmed by it. Her response to the mayhem reminded Benny of the way he thought of fire (and also, at times, of Luan herself). Beautiful and interesting, but also kind of scary.
He sat with her for a short while, just listening to her family's crazed cacophony. Every now and then, one of her siblings would run past, excited about something or another, and he'd try, rather unsuccessfully, to match a name to their face. But there were just so many of them, and to make things even more complicated, every single one of them had a name beginning with 'L.' (Why, by all the zapping joybuzzers, had Luan's parents thought that was a good idea? It's like they wanted to make his head spin!)
Eventually, he gave up on trying to catalog Luan's stampede of siblings and instead focused on Luan, the one and only thing around him that was perfectly and entirely familiar. She kept her eyes on whatever action was currently going on in the castle lobby, studying her surroundings in that clever way that Luan studied everything. But this time, he also noticed a streak of pride and protectiveness in her expressions that he'd never seen on her before. From that extra-big smile she held when one of her littlest siblings padded by to that 'don't-you-dare' death glare she made at those who dared to try a little mischief, it was clear Luan's siblings brought out a whole new spectrum of emotions in her. And Benny watched them all with newfound interest, because Luan was nothing if not constantly the most interesting thing in the room.
And was he just imagining things again, or was Luan's warning glare just a little sharper anytime someone got too close to the petrified statues of his mother and father?
Actually, probably not. Because soon enough, nearly everyone had received her subtle messages and made a visibly-obvious effort to avoid that corner of the room.
Luan clearly cared about him in some way or another, that much he could tell. Why else would she keep knocking on his door? But whether she cared about him in that way or in just a regular sort of way remained a mystery to him.
However, he couldn't avoid the fact that she had come painstakingly close to kissing him just yesterday. So very, very close…
…And then she'd stopped. Hesitated. Pulled away.
Why had she stopped?
It took Benny all of seven seconds to come up with the most plausible answer. It wasn't really that complicated.
Who could ever learn to love a beast?
That was impossible.
So Benny decided right then and there that whatever had happened between him and Luan yesterday had been a fluke. An accident designed to torment him with a storm of feelings he wasn't supposed to feel.
End of story. He was not going to question Luan about it because he was not genuinely curious about how she felt about him because there wasn't even anything to be curious about in the first place!
If he repeated that to himself over and over, he could almost believe it.
But no matter what he tried, it didn't do anything to stop those pesky thoughts about how close to him Luan was sitting, and how her bright amber eyes seemed to reflect his deepest fears. And how if he just scooted a little closer, he could maybe, potentially, kiss her.
Wait… how long had he been staring at her like that? Had she noticed?
He looked away, and as he did, he could've sworn her eyes were fixed on him.
Okay, yeah, she'd definitely noticed.
The silence between them that had felt weirdly comfortable moments before now felt incredibly awkward. Benny scoured his brain for words to fill the gap.
"So… ten siblings, hm?" he asked, figuring that would get her talking.
"Huh? Oh, yeah," Luan said, her eyes now surveying the pair of twins, who had just gotten into a screaming match in the middle of the room. Then she looked at him again and grinned. "If you think this is crazy, you should see us when we're backstage trying to get ready for a show. Things get intense behind the curtains."
She gave a small, light laugh, perhaps reminiscing about a funny memory. "Wouldn't trade it for the world, though."
"Sometimes, I wish I had siblings," he admitted. He'd always felt a little lonely as a child, growing up in a world of empty gray halls. Maybe a little brother or sister would've made them feel a bit brighter, happier.
At the very least, it would've taken some of the attention off of him. Sure, a full audience had been fine and dandy back when he had been eight and into performing Shakespearean monologues, but to have a castle-full of people staring at him, and only him, while he screwed up Ode to Joy during his piano lessons for the umpteenth time? Total torture.
"Aw, you're an only child?" Luan's gaze looked surprisingly pitiful. "Gosh, I could never imagine being alone like that all the time. Sure, these guys may drive me crazy, and I imagine I drive them even crazier, but at the end of the day–" her smile broadened. "-They're like the punchline to my jokes. They complete me."
"Lucky."
Luan looked as though she was just about to reply when a loud, "Stage dive!" echoed from a few rooms down.
Her eyes widened. "Uh-oh. Luna and high ledges are a very dangerous combination." She paused to dramatically facepalm. "I'd better go make sure she doesn't accidentally kill herself. Come on!" Luan tugged on Benny's arm, pulling him out of his comfort zone and back into the loud, thunderous fray of her family's wild antics.
As she raced across the room, she brushed past Leni, the only sibling Benny was fully confident he could address by name, on her way to the parlor door. Just as she was about to turn the doorknob, her sister tapped her on the shoulder, her twisted-up face indicating that she was quite uncomfortable.
"Uh, this castle has a bathroom, right?" Leni asked urgently.
"Oh, is that why you look so flushed?" Luan said, her eyes lighting up in that stubbornly cute way that they always did when her brain came up with the perfect pun. "It's upstairs," she directed. "Down the hall, second door on the right. Here's a hint: look for the one with the toilet in it."
Leni rushed off in a frenzy, seemingly missing her sister's rallying cry of, "I believe in you, sis! Go get 'em!"
Another room, another sibling, another burst of noise. The goth girl Benny had seen Luan comforting earlier poked her head out of the parlor's fireplace, her hair coated in a dusty layer of soot. "Hey, do you have any rhymes for 'curse?'" she asked.
"Stuck again? Well, you know I'm not a poet, but I'll give it a shot for you." Luan tilted her head as she thought. "Worse? Verse? Rehearse?"
"Works for me." It might've been Benny's imagination, but he thought he saw the spooky girl smile, just a little. Then again, he knew all too well that Luan just had that effect on people.
"Don't spend all day in the dark," Luan advised. "It's good to get a little sunshine."
"I don't do sunshine."
"Keep telling yourself that. We all know you enjoy a good beach day. It's no secret." Luan gave the girl a saucy wink before continuing on her way.
She tugged Benny into the ballroom, still on the hunt for her stage-diving sibling. The first thing Benny noticed as she pulled him through the doorway was that the room had some new decor. A dozen or so sports balls were scattered across the floor, on the windowsills, and on the staircase. There was even a ping-pong ball lodged in-between the spokes on the overhead chandelier.
Luan seemed to figure out the culprit right away. With a quick roll of her eyes, she said, "Lynn, explain yourself."
A girl with shaggy brown hair–the one whom Benny recognized with a shiver as the girl with the hockey stick–slid down the stairs' banister and tumbled onto the floor. As she regained her footing, she said, "You like my little touches? Yeah, I thought it was weird that this was called a 'ballroom,' when there was obviously a serious lack of balls in here. Good thing I brought my own, huh?"
If anything, that made Luan roll her eyes even harder. "Lynn, you should know better than to chuck your stuff around in a house that's not yours without permission. Seriously, I thought Mom raised you better than that." She looked up at Benny expectantly.
"As long as it's ball in good fun and you don't break a window, I don't really mind," he said.
"Great. Just what I need. Another Luan," the girl–Lynn–groaned in protest. But just as he and Luan left to continue their mini-quest, he thought he saw her pump her fist in the air before chucking another soccer ball across the room.
Yes! Benny felt like doing the same thing. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. And the approving glance Luan gave him made it all the more worth it.
They entered the library, where one sister, standing tall on a high desk, was shredding a complicated riff on her lute and bending her knees as though she was just about to jump off the ledge. Luan barely glanced at the towering walls of bookshelves before letting go of Benny's hand and marching across the room to have a word with the offender.
But a quiet whisper of, "Elder sibling?" made her appear to reconsider.
Benny watched as Luan followed the faint voice back over to the bookshelves, and then tilted her head up. He followed her gaze to where a trembling girl hung by her fingertips from a shelf that had to be at least eight feet from the ground.
"I…I believe I may have mis-miscalculated the culmination of this ledge, and now I fear I am unable to descend," the girl explained in a shaky voice.
"Oh, Lisa!" Luan cried, rushing over. "Lisa, Lisa, Lisa! How do you keep getting yourself into these kinds of situations? I keep telling you, 'Lisa, don't climb bookshelves if you don't think you're going to be able to get back down.'" She looked over at Benny. "Aren't I always saying that?"
Benny shrugged. He had no clue if Luan said that a lot or not.
Luan looked as though she was going to complain again when Lisa whimpered.
"Oh, for the love of comic relief," Luan grumbled. She held her arms out wide. "Okay, let go and I'll catch you."
"What if I collide with the floor instead?" Lisa worried. "Doesn't take a genius to know that will end in inevitable disaster."
"You're just going to have to trust me." Luan had an oddly sincere look in her eyes. "I'm not going to let you fall. You're safe with me."
Lisa let go of the bookshelf, letting out a shriek as she plummeted. But just as she'd so wholeheartedly promised, Luan caught her in her arms and held her tight. She carried her sister's weight without even breaking a sweat, as though she'd done it all her life.
"See? I'll always be here to cover for you. Get it?" Luan said with a chirp of laughter, lifting a hand to her sister's head to stroke her hair.
Something about this protective, sensitive side to her was intriguing to Benny. Luan hadn't been kidding when she'd said her siblings completed her. They brought out so many more parts of her personality, even more little things about her that Benny doubted he'd ever have been able to discover on his own.
She was so much more mystifying than he had thought. Wow.
He'd definitely fallen hard for her. Like a moth to a flame, or like Shakespeare to a summer's day. Through a million different ways and through a million different moments. And through a million different puns.
The girl was seriously something else.
"YEAH!" He heard the lute-playing girl shout in music-blinded ecstasy before taking a flying leap off the desk.
Benny had just enough of his thoughts and reflexes left to pull a pillow off a nearby chaise lounge and fling it at the floor beneath the desk so at the very least, the girl would have something that wasn't the floor to smush her face into.
Then he went right back to searching for Luan, his thoughts nothing but a crazy, poetic mess.
…
Rita didn't know what to feel.
Which truly surprised her, because usually she was the kind of person who had strong, perfectly-defined opinions on just about everything (and she wasn't shy about sharing them with whoever she thought wanted or needed to listen).
When Luan's friend had first opened the door, seemingly always keeping an ear out for the girl's incessant knocking, Rita's first instinct, just as any responsible mother's would be, had been to snatch the collar of her obviously-brain-dead daughter's yellow cloak and yank her out of harm's way. If a big, scary-looking creature with claws, horns, and teeth was within ten feet of your daughter, wouldn't you want to scoop her up in your arms and rush her halfway out to sea?
She'd been this close to doing that, but then, something had made her stop and reconsider.
It was the way Luan's smile brightened when she greeted him. The way she held her chin higher and how when she laughed, her giggles felt much more natural, less stilted. She seemed lighter and sunnier somehow, possessing the kind of radiant confidence she typically only saved for the stage.
If this bizarre and terrifying creature had this sort of effect on her daughter, then surely he deserved at least a chance. Luan might've been a silly, idealistic, head-in-the-clouds comedienne, but Rita knew she usually didn't trust so easily. She only truly came out of her shell around a few very special people.
As Rita watched Luan's interactions with this boy from a distance (but not that far of a distance, of course!), she became more and more pleasantly surprised. Despite all of the loud, unpredictable chaos her family brought with it, Benny seemed remarkably calm. When Luan cracked a terrible pun, he encouraged it instead of dismissing it with an eye-roll or a groan. Despite appearances, the boy was gentle and kind. He did everything he could to make Luan's days as bright and warm as they could be.
Her daughter's sense of humor was… questionable at best, but Rita could give her this: she really knew how to pick her friends.
During the entirety of the family's long walk back to the familiar inn, Rita continued to watch Luan from the back of the group (a position she often took so she could keep an eye on all of the little ones). She chatted delightedly with a few of her siblings, mostly the ones who had started to warm up a little to the Stone Castle and its odd inhabitant. If she strained her ears hard enough, she could make out the sound of Lola excitedly saying something about diamonds and gold.
Somewhere in that moment, in between the drifting pink clouds and the blazing afternoon sun, another thought struck Rita like lightning. The way Luan chirped and chattered reminded Rita of the way she used to gush about boys with her girlfriends back in those rose-tinted days of youth. Luan was just approaching that part of life: that silly, boy-crazy stage nearly every teenage girl went through.
Dealing with those kinds of things was nothing new to Rita. She'd seen her three eldest daughters grapple with all sorts of crazy relationship drama. As they'd laughed, cried, shouted and squealed, Rita had held their hands through it all.
But was she ready to possibly do it again a fourth time? (And then, eventually, a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth… the list just went on and on).
Furthermore, Rita had no doubt it was going to be especially hard for Luan. Not only was she completely out of touch with her emotions at times, she had a magic curse to break on top of everything else. Rita vowed to herself that she would do anything she could think of to make her daughter's storm a little easier to weather, but she understood that there was only so much she could do for her. Luan would have to figure a lot of things out all by herself.
But there was time, surely. The family had no plans to go anywhere for at least the next couple of weeks, and while Luan was kept on her toes by rehearsals and performances, there would be at least a few spaces in between for her to think, reflect, and learn how to handle things.
Luan was a smart girl, in her own peculiar way. She'd probably make it out just fine.
As the clever comedienne continued to smile and joke away to her heart's content, Rita attempted to give her husband a knowing look. However, Lynn Sr, being the adorably obtuse idiot Rita had fallen so fully and deeply for, completely missed it.
She'd tell him later, in private, when he could sob his typical streams of tears at the notion that another one of his daughters was growing up.
Honestly, Rita couldn't blame him. She found the thought terrifying and sad, too. How soon would it be before all of her children were grown-up and getting ready to leave them? Too soon.
But there was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was offer some encouragement (and at times, give a little space) and let her daughter change in the ways she needed to.
...
A/N: Well, welcome back to my very tiny little corner of the internet! I actually finished this chapter yesterday, but because the site was all finicky, I decided to wait until it got fixed. Maybe it's better if I post it on a Friday, anyway.
Once again, updates are going to be very slow, because college is very time-consuming. Worth it when I get that big fat degree one day, I hope!
I'm not giving up on this story, though-that I can assure you, 100%. It's honestly a lot of fun to write this, even though sometimes the ideas come at literally 3 A.M. and I just have to get up and write them down before my brain forgets them. This story has taken over such a big chunk of my headspace, it's unreal.
I hope you enjoyed reading my latest chapter and thanks for your support! I'm going to stop writing this now because I've proofread this chapter so many times that the idea of looking at it is making me vomit. Hopefully you don't feel the same way. :)