Chapter 9.

That said, in all the years of their creation and exploration of Greenland, the single most significant, most lasting contribution Fanny made was a rather ordinary secondary character of relatively little import to the major storylines of the siblings' adventures by the name of Kit Marlowe, a vaguely vulpine being of whom the words person or beast would be equally accurate, only slightly anthropomorphized, and loosely inspired by the real-life Christopher Marlowe, not only in name but in certain occasionally alluded-to clandestine intelligence work for the Crown. In manner and voice Fanny ascribed to this Kit a certain resemblance to Pantalaimon from His Dark Materials, to Mogget from the Abhorsen books, and to the black cat from Coraline.

The funny thing was that Kit Marlowe did not seem to be so much an invention of Fanny's imagination as an independent individual who had happened to walk into her mind one day and, finding the environs of Greenland satisfactorily hospitable, decided to put down roots there. When she related Kit's words and actions--which for such a relatively minor player in their sagas was not terribly often--she did not have to consciously think them up. It was closer to the feeling of remembering something mentioned in passing, or translating from a foreign tongue; the words were not quite hers.

As Rory and later Mackenzie and finally Fanny herself consigned Greenland to a shared treasure chest of childhood memories, naturally they thought about the characters of the world they had created less and less. Still, and though she rarely shared it with the others, from time to time Kit Marlowe would pop into Fanny's head with a wry remark, an illustrative anecdote, a seemingly innocent suggestion.

Chapter 8.

If you were to compare the four Green siblings to the Pevensies of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, I would seriously question your judgment regarding the aptness of analogies. It seems unfair on some level, then, that I'm about to make just such a comparison with utter impunity, but the problem of the asymmetry of the relationship between narrator and reader is not one to be solved within these pages--if indeed it can be said to be a problem at all.

At any rate, the extent of the analogy is that of the four of them, Fanny might be said to have been the Lucy of the group: the one most prepared to accept the improbable or impossible, the one most unshakable in her convictions, the one most likely to go poking around in spare rooms and wardrobes and such. When they were younger, Rory and Fanny and later Mackenzie as well (and still later Fanny and Mackenzie, and finally Fanny by herself) would pretend their house was a castle, their cul-de-sac a kingdom inhabited by fantastic creatures of every description, and they themselves intrepid adventurers, knights and sorcerers and jesters and explorers whose privilege and duty it was to uncover all the mysteries their realm had to reveal. And while all of them contributed to these quests and idylls and epic sagas, with even Vivian popping in from the fog of her inexplicable preoccupation with mundane reality from time to time to suggest a new thread in the tapestry, it was Fanny who could see their world (the name of which, Greenland, was by far its least inventive feature) most clearly. Rory could conjure endless details of its landscapes and the beings that populated them, a full map of which adorned one wall of his room (incidentally showcasing the evolution of his drawing style from kindergarten through middle school); Mackenzie would devise dizzyingly Byzantine yet thoroughly consistent codes of chivalry and magic by which the universe operated (experience which came in handy later as she began to foray into organizational policy and the minutia of parliamentary procedure); but Fanny was simply there. Even long after her siblings had outgrown the world they had created.

Chapter 7.

Sorry, that should be imaginary friends. The thing about imaginary friends is that sooner or later, we leave almost all of them behind. Though the thing applies equally to real ones.

In fact, one of the ways in which Fanny Green was unusual--one of the reasons she needn't have feared that indistiction alone distinguished her among her siblings--was that, as a rule, she did not easily lose friends once found. As we have seen, she did not have overly many friends to begin with; but this should not be misunderstood to render her maintenance and preservation of these friendships through the years any less of a triumph over the erosion of time, the inevitable inertia of distance.

And more unusual still: just as she did not, through the years, leave behind Leah and the others, the group that was not the Diogenes Club, that was not even a group, neither did she leave behind her imaginary friends.

Chapter 7.

The thing about friends is that sooner or later, we leave almost all of them behind.

Chapter 6.

Like the time Leah wanted to draw something on the Graffiti Bridge.

"That's the worst idea you've ever had," said Fanny as they blocked the sidewalk walking to Leah's bus stop. The Green house was actually in the opposite direction, but Fanny had her bike and was just going to hang out till Leah's bus came. It wasn't an especially dangerous neighborhood--it didn't have that reputation--but better safety in numbers than sorry and all that, which of course went unsaid. "Including when you wanted to shave your head and go as Professor X for Halloween."

"Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise, thank you very much, and that was an awesome idea. Stupid parents, talking me out of it. And friends. And estate of Gene Roddenberry."

"Terrible. But tagging the Bridge? That leaves shaving your head miles behind."

"It's not tagging! It's a legitimate form of artwork."

"Pretty sure 'legitimate' means you can't get arrested for it."

"In the most pedantic, literalistic sense of the word. Anyway, a million people must have painted there over the years. How many have you ever heard of getting arrested?"

"You know what, you're right! I mean, sure, other people have tagged the Bridge a million times before, but wouldn't it be something to be the first two ever arrested for it? We'll go down in history!"

"You say that sarcastically, but part of you knows that'd be totally badass. Besides, it's not like there are cops patrolling the park at night, on the lookout for guerrilla artists on the prowl."

"Wow, you've really talked this up for yourself." They had reached the stop. Fanny leaned her bike against the side of the shelter.

"C'mon. This Saturday night. You say you're coming over to my place, I'll say I'm going over to yours."

"That is the most played-out, sitcom-esque scheme in the book."

"Which is exactly why it'll work!" Leah's tone was so earnest Fanny couldn't help but laugh out loud.

"That is actually the opposite of making sense."

"You're not saying noooo...."

"I'm not going to have any time anyway. I just picked up 'A Study in Scarlet' and I was planning on reading it this weekend." Here Fanny knew she had played her trump card, and it was with some amusement that she watched the struggle going on in Leah's head. She had been trying to get other people at school interested in Sherlock Holmes for forever, and aside from the crowd that had already seen the movies or watched the TV shows she'd had next to no luck. Now one of her closest friends, someone she talked to nearly every day, was about to embark on the very novel that had introduced the consulting detective and his iatric companion.

"Well...."

"Unless you think defacing public property is more urgent?"

"Improving, not defacing. And you can always read Holmes later."

"I'm sure we'll have plenty of free time in jail."

"We're not going to jail! Look, I just want to draw something. If you're so worried, we can use sidewalk chalk instead of paint. No way there's a law against that."

"Pffft. If we're going to do this, we might as well do it right. Do you even know where you can get spray paint?"

Leah grinned.

"So you're in."

"With greatest reluctance."

"Sweet. Don't worry about the paint, I'll figure it out." The bus was pulling up. "And tell your parents about Saturday night, all right?"

"You know, this could be fun. I think I'll paint 'I, LEAH LEVY-NG, AM A HALF-CRAZED DELINQUENT VANDAL' in giant blue letters on one of the supports."

"Just for that, I'm not getting any blue paint."

"Blast! Foiled again!"

"Crime never pays, villain!" They were both still laughing as the bus pulled away and Fanny pushed off on her bike.

Chapter 5.

Most of the other kids had their own groups. Most of the other kids were on teams--sports teams, academic teams, dance teams, music clubs, language clubs, whatever you could want. Most of them had their own cliques, crowds who sat together at lunch, hung out after school, formed tight little knots when there were two or three of them together in a class. Most of the other kids had friends.

Not that Fanny didn't have friends. She didn't have very many of them, it's true, but the ones she did have she was, as a rule, fiercely loyal to. They were outcasts, Fanny and her friends, or at least outsiders. They weren't even a group like most of the other groups; they weren't always together, and when they were there were maybe five of them, but this number could fluctuate from one to seven or eight. They were quiet kids and shy kids and too-loud kids and just-plain-weird kids. At one point Leah, who had recently become a great fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and their myriad attendant adaptations, came up with the idea of calling themselves the Diogenes Club; but the name never really caught on, and in any case they weren't the sort of group to call themselves anything in particular, or even to consider themselves a group.

These were her friends, such as they were. She didn't have a best friend, found the idea of "BFFs" strange, even silly. The person she hung out with the most would have to have been Leah--Leah, who was super into Sherlock Holmes, who had previously been super into Harry Potter and Star Trek and Dragonriders of Pern, whose tendency to get excited about something and delve utterly into it Fanny often found herself carried along with.

Here's how their friendship worked. If one of them had a brilliant idea to do something stupid or dangerous, the other would try to talk her out of it. But if she couldn't talk her out of it, she'd be there right alongside because you shouldn't let your friend do something brilliant and stupid and dangerous like that alone.

Chapter 4.

Having been obliged to share a bedroom for most of her childhood and adolescence, Fanny was of a disposition to appreciate quiet and solitude to the point of considerable introversion, but a hop, skip, and a jump from misanthropy. It wasn't that she actually hated people; just that, given her choice of company, she preferred her own to that of others.

"It isn't fair," she would patiently begin to explain to her parents.

"What isn't?" they would say.

"Viv gets her own room because she's the oldest. Rory gets his own room because he's a boy. I've always had to share."

"You had a room to yourself before Mackenzie was born. She's had to share with you her entire life."

"I was a baby then, I couldn't appreciate it," she'd reply, the patience beginning to leak out of her like helium from a poorly tied party balloon. "And besides, when I move out she'll have our room to herself for two whole years. And she'll be old enough to enjoy it," she would add hastily.

"Tell you what. When Vivian goes off to school, you can move your stuff into her room. That way, everyone gets to have their own space."

"And where's Viv's stuff that she doesn't take to school going to stay? Who's she going to live with when she comes home for break?" she'd ask.

"..." they'd reply, exchanging a glance.

"Exactly. It isn't fair."

"Well, sometimes life isn't fair." And, though this argument seemed hardly compelling, and indeed perverse in its abject capitulation to the forces of injustice in the world, that would generally be the end of the conversation.

Chapter 3.

You would think that the surname Green were a common enough one to forestall the inference of a familial relationship between individuals united therein, but somehow every last one of Fanny's teachers who had had either of her older siblings (and in one particularly galling instance her precalc teacher, who had only been hired at the school after both Vivian and Rory had graduated and by whom she therefore had some hope of being recognized on her own account, but who unfortunately turned out to be the new assistant coach of the math team of which Mackenzie was already the rising star) made the connection. Partly as a consequence of this, her favorite teachers, the ones who made a lasting impression, tended to be the ones none of her siblings had crossed paths with.

Chapter 2.

Some of her favorite books, some of the ones that made a lasting impression, were Matilda, Coraline, Calvin and Hobbes, His Dark Materials, and Persepolis. Sometimes she had the feel of being a character in a story herself; when she started reading David Copperfield for the first time--it would be half a dozen attempts over twice as many years before she actually finished it--this feeling was only compounded.

"Do you ever think none of this is real?" she asked one day.

"All the time," replied Vivian without looking up as she moved her king--jump, jump, jump--over Rory's last three pieces.

Chapter 1.

Vivian was the eldest of the children and the athlete, Rory the artist and the only boy, and Mackenzie the youngest and the scholar, which by process of elimination left Fanny. It wasn't that she was sedentary, or unimaginative, or uninterested in learning; but by the time comparisons had begun to be made between the four of them and adjectives had begun to settle in ruts of familiar description, the other three had identified themselves, or been identified, in a way she simply had not. Nevertheless, as she gradually became aware of such things--beginning, it may be said, at an earlier age than either Vivian or Rory--Fanny could not shake the nagging fear that the process of elimination was the only thing that identified her.