Wood Sprites(9)

Luckily the teacher was letting them use their tablets instead of forcing them to use actual pencils and paper. It meant that for the first time all morning they could work on saving their siblings. According to Cryobank, there were four embryos still in storage. While the sex of the embryos weren’t given, Jillian decided that it would be best if they were three girls and one boy. Louise had considered the matter and had to agree. More than one boy and they would gang up together and be totally, annoying boys. Case in point, the whole reason they weren’t using pencil and papers was because Kelsey and Gage stabbed each other repeatedly during their last freehand drawing lessons.

Louise grinned as she hit pay dirt on the April Gieselman in Queens. “Look, look,” she whispered, tilting her screen. “Her records show that she was born in Pittsburgh! She’s the one!”

Their datapads suddenly enlarged their drawing window. Louise controlled the urge to glance up to double-check that their teacher had actually moved into viewing range. If their teacher realized that they were using her tablet to track her movements through the classroom, she would probably hover over them, and they would have to actually pay attention to the assignments. Lousie’s sketch was just a rushed collection of yellow pen swipes to place hold the sunflowers. Louise winced, picked a red that roughly matched the velvet and added in the draped fabric in the same quick lines.

“Is that all you have done?” Miss Gray said above her head.

“I had more.” Louise made a show of pausing and considering her drawing. “I didn’t like how it was going, so I erased it. It seemed too—too real.”

“Too real?”

“Well, if we wanted the picture to look real, wouldn’t we just take a photograph of the flowers?” Out the corner of her eye, Louise could see Jillian frantically drawing on her blank tablet. Louise held up her picture to keep Miss Gray’s attention; she at least had something to show and had already started into a reasonable excuse. “Art is translating what we feel into a visual medium. Obviously, the flowers can’t look like a photograph or otherwise I wouldn’t be putting my emotions into the picture. To me sunflowers are like…like…”

“Flowing sunlight,” Jillian prompted in a whisper.

“Flowing sunlight.” Louise babbled on to give Jillian more time. “Like the sun dripped down onto the flower and will flow away again. It’s all bright and sunny and temporary. At any moment, poof, it will be gone. What I had before just seemed too permanent. It didn’t have all of that ‘life is fleeting’ kind feeling.”

Miss Gray was getting that slightly panicky look she had often with the twins—like she realized she was in over her head. Jillian’s theory was because it was Miss Gray’s first year of teaching and hadn’t firmly latched onto the idea that she was an adult. Louise leaned more toward the notion that Miss Gray was smart enough to know that they were pulling something over on her, but not smart enough to figure out what or how.

“I see. Well. Then. Jillian, what do you have?”

Jillian held up her sketch. She’d gone to extreme cartoon to cover her lack of details. The sunflowers had eyes, huge sharp mouths and holding wriggling students in their leaves. One student was crying “help me” as she was being dropped head first into a gaping mouth. “These are carnivorous sunflowers from Elfhome. Like strangle vines and black willow trees, they’re distant cousins to Venus flytraps and the waterwheel plant. Those are both snap trap plants as opposed to flypaper traps or pitfall traps that you have in butterworts and pitcher plant. Did you know that the Black Willow trees on Elfhome can walk close to two miles per hour and can swallow a man whole?”

Miss Gray gave a tiny whimper and her eyes went wider.

Louise ducked her head and pressed her lips tight together to keep from laughing.

Jillian frowned at her datapad as if she was totally unaware of the effect she was having on Miss Gray. “Luckily all Elfhome plants need some magic to thrive, and magic doesn’t exist on Earth, so these are most likely harmless.”

Miss Gray whimpered again.

Elle Pondwater unintentionally rescued them by waving her hand and calling “Miss Gray, I’ve finished!” Elle and her friends were on the other side of the room; all dressed in their Girl Scout uniforms. The distance illustrated that the twins were currently failing at socializing with their peers. “Can I put my picture up on the wall display?”

“That would be good, Elle.” Miss Gray fled their table while Elle uploaded her drawing onto the wall display. “Oh, Elle that is wonderful!”