Furthermore (Furthermore, #1)

by Tahereh Mafi

Being afraid meant it was okay to forget your manners. If you’re afraid, you never have to be nice. Do you understand?

Mother could not unbecome herself, so Alice was resigned to loving and disliking her just as she was, for as long as she could bear it.

One great magical talent. And they would perform this magical talent—a Surrender, it was called—in exchange for the ultimate task. It was tradition.

Nothing was so much worse than ugly.

For as long as a single lie never left her lips, she could never be fooled by one. It was the only way she could be sure she’d find Father one day. To never be led astray.

Her Surrender was a ticket to something new—a task that would set her life in motion. Every child in Ferenwood grew up aching to be tasked—awaiting adventure and the thrill of a challenge.

Father won the title for his dexterity of mind and for his ability to retain and re-create images at will; his task was to travel the land and work with the Town Elders to become the first true cartographer of Ferenwood.

“Unfold your heart. Sharpen your ears. And never say no to the world when it asks you to dance.”

There were a great many talents on display that day, and hers, as it turned out, was the strength to keep from bursting into tears in front of everyone.

“That is what I do. That is my gift. I feel it, Oliver. I feel it in my heart. It’s what I’m meant to do.”

“Alice,” he said again. “Bringing your father home is my task.”

“Yes, yes. But—don’t you see? Knowing means nothing when there’s doing to be done. It’s the getting to your father that I can’t do.”

Love had made her fearless, and wasn’t it strange? It was so much easier to fight for another than it was to fight for oneself.)

“People are so preoccupied with making sense despite it being the most uninteresting thing to manufacture.”

“Making magic,” he said, “is far more interesting than making sense.”

“The laws work the same in Furthermore: Living off the land gives us our color; it’s the magic we consume that makes us bright.

Currently, your father possesses no full-color of any kind, which makes him incompatible with the real world. If he tried to go home as he is now, the physical demands of a full-color existence would crush him. It’s a security measure that makes it impossible for him to escape.”

Clever reader: I’m sure by now you’ve guessed it, haven’t you?

I know I’ve not kept it much of a secret—and maybe I should’ve done—but I’m glad you’ve guessed it, because I’d like to finally be able to say this honest thing: Despite her protests to the contrary, Alice’s gift was never to be a dancer. Her true magical ability was to be a living paintbrush.

Alice could change the colors of anything without lifting an eyelid. She could turn a person blue and a thing green and a place yellow and even though she should...

Alice—no-color Alice—could change the color of anything and everything but her own colorless self.

“Darling Alice,” he said, reaching for her. “Why must you look like the rest of us? Why do you have to be the one to change? Change the way we see. Don’t change the way you are.”

And because she was a girl made of more heart than hurt, she forgave him on the condition that he, too, forgive her.

This must be a prison village.

Strange, you must think, that Father hadn’t recognized Alice himself. You are wise to wonder so. And when Alice first told me how it all happened, I thought it strange, too.

This new Alice was confident and bold; she was articulate and passionate; she had become the kind of person who’d lived through hardship and survived with grace. Father hardly recognized her.

But Alice was also beginning to learn that life was never lived in absolutes.

Alice would always be different—but to be different was to be extraordinary, and to be extraordinary was an adventure.

Oliver, good sport that he was, tapped open his magical box with its little door, and they three clambered in, one after the other, and soon, very soon, they were right back where they started, back home in Ferenwood.

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. A black card just means you get another try the following year. Did you never unlock it?”

rimmed and puffy, and nodded. “He went to find color for you. He thought—he thought it would make you happy. But when he never came back, I blamed you for it.”