Home :: The Stacks
Jill shoved the Narnia clothes into her book bag. The riding crop she had some difficulty fitting in, but she eventually managed it. As she stepped outside, she was once again an ordinary British school girl - not a hint of person she had been in Narnia was visible. It was difficult to slip back into the Experiment House and pretend she hadn't been anywhere extraordinary. As much as she might not look any different, she knew she was not the same Jill Pole anymore.
"Did you hear about the Headmistress?" One girl asked another as Jill passed them in the hallway.
"Yes, I heard the police are going to start an inquiry. Regina says she was acting like a lunatic. Kept going on about a lion and escaped criminals..."
Jill smothered a laugh.
"Pole!"
It was West, another of their victims. Jill did not know her very well; but she was certain that it was not common for West to smile.
"Did you hear? They say at least a dozen people beat them with swords and whips." Here Jill had to smile herself. A half dozen! The tale was already being embroidered upon.
"Made them run off. They are all in the gym licking their wounds and howling about it not being fair," West finished with a satisfied nod.
"I'd heard," Jill said mildly. "Do you think the beating will do any good?"
West shrugged. "They aren't bothering anyone now, are they?"
Jill laughed.
West studied her for a moment. She noticed something different about Jill, but could not identify what it really was. "You weren't wearing those clothes earlier," the other girl noted.
"I got grass stains all over my other clothes," Jill explained. As much as she would have liked to be honest with West, it would earn her strange looks if she said she had left her other clothes behind in Narnia.
"Well, I had best be off. See you around, Pole."
As West walked off, it occurred to Jill that their conversation was one of the longest one she'd had with any of her schoolmates - other than Eustace, of course. Most people avoided her like the Black Death out of fear of attracting unfortunate attention.
Eustace came around the corner humming a Narnian song they had learned from Puddleglum. When he saw her, he stopped.
"Isn't it amazing?" He said in a low voice. "Things are already better here."
"Yes," Jill said. "I actually saw West smiling a moment ago."
"When Aslan said 'set things right', he meant just that."
"Where is your sword?" Jill asked low. Eustace would never be able to fit that in a bag and they could get in a lot of trouble if he was found with it.
"I hid that in the shrubbery under leaves. I'll come back for it after school," Eustace sighed. "Somehow, though, I like the idea of something Narnian being on school grounds. Still, I dare not leave a sword around here," his eyes sparkled mischievously. "I'd be too tempted to use it again!"
It made a strange sense to Jill. "Why not leave some of your clothes here? If you bury them and someone digs them up, they'd just think it was an old costume."
"I'll have to think about it," Eustace said. "In the meantime I want to write down everything while it's still fresh in my mind. I think my cousins would like to read it, it would cheer them and I think they'd like to know Caspian finally got to see our world as he'd wished."
"I'll help you," Jill volunteered. "There were parts you weren't there for, after all."
With that, they both took off for the library.