What I Wore to Save the World by Maryrose Wood Page A

zipper pouch of my backpack, where I usually stashed my SGS (SGS was Sarah-and-Morgan-speak for Secret Girl Stuff, meaning tampons and panti-liners and supplies of that nature, though math tests that had failing grades scrawled on them in red ink sometimes got crumpled up and shoved in there too).
    I promised my mom that I’d be careful and not get kidnapped by perverts, my dad that I’d take plenty of pictures and not get arrested by a “constable” and Tammy that I’d buy her crappy souvenirs from every overpriced gift shop in the United Kingdom.
    And then, with multiple hugs all around and my mom doing a final frisk to triple-check that my passport and plane tickets were safely stashed on my person, I climbed in the van and took my seat. Taking the van was my idea—I figured there was no need for either of my parents to miss a whole day’s work just to drive me all the way to the airport when the Marriott was only two miles away from our house. I already had enough guilt that I wasn’t telling them the whole truth about where I was going.
    â€œI want to handle this trip myself,” I argued, when Mom made a boo-boo face about my van plan. “That’s what a true Oxonian would do.” I’d been waiting for a chance to use that word ever since I’d read it in the Oxford brochure. Privately, I imagined the Oxonians as a small, nerdy race of aliens from the planet Oxon. Their incompetent rulers would be called the Oxymorons. Anyway, just saying it did the trick. Dad puffed out his chest, Mom got a tear of pride in her eye, and they let me go.
    â€œMy goodness,” Mom whispered in my ear, during her final-final-final-positively-this-is-the-last-one goodbye hug. “You’ve grown up so much since last summer, I can’t get over it.”
    She doesn’t know the half of it, I thought. Last summer I’d been a cranky-to-the-point-of-emo-girl whose world revolved around a twisted axis named Raphael. Now I was a legendary half-goddess who’d been summoned to a far-off land, “by name,” Colin had written—but by whom? And to do what?
    Like a dork, I waved through the van window until I couldn’t see my family anymore. Then I took a deep breath and settled into my seat. I’d brought my MP3 player for the ride but I didn’t feel like turning it on. There was too much to think about: Finnbar blowing bubbles in my parents’ bathtub, Colin’s e-mail, even the phreaky Mr. Phineas—all signs pointed to some kind of magical disaster brewing.
    I could handle it, right? I’d done it before. The half-goddess Morganne, at your service. Magical Disasters R Us.
    But something was bothering me, and the van was halfway to the airport before I figured out what it was:
    Whatever faery mischief was percolating this time, it sounded like my utterly non-magical, one hundred percent-skeptical human Colin had already come face-to-face with it.
    Not in a dream, or while under an enchantment that would make him forget everything he’d seen by morning—but for real.
    That had never happened before.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    the whole seven-hour flight to london, in between naps, gross airplane meals and multiple screenings of Be Kind Rewind, I kept thinking about Colin, and magic, and—wait for it—photosynthesis.
    I mean, come on: The fact that a blade of grass, or a tree, or a weed growing in the sidewalk could have the ability to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and keep an entire planet alive had to be the greatest feat of magic ever.
    Photosynthesis was something Colin had absolutely no trouble believing in, but faeries? Leprechauns? Not a chance. He thought all that “faery claptrap” was leftover junk from the “old Ireland,” the backward, superstitious country of his grandparents’ day.
    Colin believed in the future. He believed in an Ireland whose high-tech factories manufactured laptop computers, and where