Off the Page Read online

  Meet Oliver, a prince literally taken from the pages of a fairy tale and transported into the real world. Meet Delilah, the girl who wished Oliver into being. It's a miracle that seems perfect at first - but there are complications. To exist in Delilah's world, Oliver must take the place of a regular boy. Enter Edgar, who agrees to play Oliver's role in the pages of Delilah’s favourite book. But just when it seems that the plan will work, everything gets turned upside down.

  In this multilayered universe, the line between what is on the page and what is possible is blurred, but all must be resolved for the characters to live happily ever after.

  Off the Page is a tender and appealing romantic novel filled with humour, adventure and magical relationships.

  ALSO BY JODI PICOULT AND SAMANTHA VAN LEER

  Between the Lines

  NOVELS BY JODI PICOULT

  Leaving Time

  The Storyteller

  Lone Wolf

  Sing You Home

  House Rules

  Handle with Care

  Change of Heart

  Nineteen Minutes

  The Tenth Circle

  Vanishing Acts

  My Sister’s Keeper

  Second Glance

  Perfect Match

  Salem Falls

  Plain Truth

  Keeping Faith

  The Pact

  Mercy

  Picture Perfect

  Harvesting the Heart

  Songs of the Humpback Whale

  First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2015

  First published in the United States in 2015 by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House

  Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © Text, Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer 2015

  Copyright © Cover art, Su Blackwell 2015; photograph by Christine Blackburne

  Copyright © Full-colour illustrations, Yvonne Gilbert 2015

  Copyright © Black-and-white illustrations, Scott M. Fischer 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74343 998 2

  eISBN 978 1 92526 743 3

  Cover design by Alison Impey

  Cover adaptation by Julia Eim

  Cover photo by Christine Blackburne

  Text design by Stephanie Moss

  TO KYLE AND JAKE:

  Mom says I’m her favorite. You’re okay.

  Love, Sammy

  TO KYLE AND JAKE:

  Sammy’s lying. You’re ALL my favorites.

  Love, Mom

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  DELILAH

  OLIVER

  EDGAR

  OLIVER

  DELILAH

  EDGAR

  OLIVER

  EDGAR

  PART TWO

  DELILAH

  OLIVER

  EDGAR

  OLIVER

  DELILAH

  EDGAR

  OLIVER

  DELILAH

  EDGAR

  OLIVER

  DELILAH

  EDGAR

  DELILAH

  OLIVER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PART ONE

  Just because you’ve picked up this book, you know, doesn’t mean it belongs to you.

  Quite a lot went on before you even arrived. There was a spark of an idea one day, which ignited into a fire of imagination. Each lick of flame burned a line of text, spreading from chapter to chapter.

  And where were you? Probably in some other book, not even aware that this was happening someplace in the universe.

  From this blaze came smoke, and from that smoke came silhouettes, marching across the pages, each with a voice to be heard. As they spoke, their edges grew sharper and more defined. Their features rose to the surface. And soon they were characters in their own right.

  They picked up the lines that had been laid across the page and carried them on their shoulders, wrapped them around their waists, tugged and twisted, and became the story.

  And still you weren’t here.

  Then one day you reached onto a shelf, and out of all the books in the world, you chose this one.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if you’re not important. For the moment you opened this tale, your mind awakened the characters. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it really fall? If a character sits in a book and no one reads it, is he truly alive? As your eyes moved across the pages, as you heard the story in your head, the characters moved for you, spoke for you, felt for you.

  So you see, it’s quite difficult to know who owns a story. Is it the writer, who crafted it? The characters, who carry the plot forward? Or you, the reader, who breathes life into them?

  Or perhaps none of the three can exist without the other.

  Perhaps without this magical combination, a story would be nothing more than words on a page.

  DELILAH

  I’ve been waiting my whole life for Oliver, so you’d think another fifteen minutes wouldn’t matter. But it’s fifteen minutes that Oliver is alone on a bus, unmonitored, for the first time, with the most ruthless, malicious, soul-sucking creatures on earth: high school students.

  Going to high school is a little like being told you have to get up each morning and run headlong at sixty miles an hour into the same brick wall. Every day, you’re forced to watch Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest play out: evolutionary advantages, like perfect white teeth and gravity-defying boobs, or a football team jacket keep you from falling prey to the demons that grow to three times their size when they feed on the fear of a hapless freshman and bully him to a pulp. After years of public school, I’ve gotten pretty good at being invisible. That way, you’re less likely to become a target.

  But Oliver knows none of this. He has always been the center of attention. He’s even more undeveloped socially than the boy who enrolled last year after nine years of being homeschooled in a yurt. Which is why I’m actually breaking a sweat, imagining everything Oliver could be doing wrong.

  At this point, he’s probably ten minutes into a story about the first dragon he ever encountered—and while he might think it’s a great icebreaker, the rest of the bus will either peg him as the new druggie in town, who puts ’shrooms in his breakfast omelet, or as one of those kids who run around speaking Elvish, wearing homemade cloaks, with foam swords tucked into their belts. Either way, that kind of first impression is one that sticks for the rest of your life.

  Believe me, I know.

  I’ve spent my entire school career as that girl. The one who wrote VD Rocks! on all her second-grade valentines and who literally walked into a wall once while reading a book. The one who recently reaffirmed her subterranean spo
t on the social-status totem pole by accidentally punching out the most popular girl in school during swim practice.

  Oliver and I make a fabulous couple.

  Speaking of which . . . I kind of still can’t believe we are one. It’s one thing to have a boyfriend, but to have someone who looks like he just stepped out of a romantic comedy—well, it doesn’t happen to people like me. Girls spend their lives dreaming of that perfect guy but always wind up settling when they realize he doesn’t exist. I found mine—but he was trapped inside a fairy tale. Since that’s the only world he’s ever lived in, acclimating to this one has been a bit of a challenge. How he came to be real—and mine—is a long story . . . but it’s been the biggest adventure of my life.

  So far, anyway.

  “Delilah!” I hear, and I turn around to see my best friend, Jules, barreling toward me. We hug like magnets. We haven’t seen each other all summer—she was exiled to her aunt’s house in the Midwest, and I was totally preoccupied with Oliver’s arrival. Her Mohawk has grown out into an Egyptian bob, which she’s dyed midnight blue, and she’s wearing her usual thick black eyeliner, combat boots, and a T-shirt with the name of her favorite band du jour: Khaleesi and the Dragons. “So where is he?” she asks, looking around.

  “Not here yet,” I tell her. “What if he called the bus his trusty steed again?”

  Jules laughs. “Delilah, you’ve been practicing with him the whole summer. I think he can handle a fifteen-minute bus ride without you.” Suddenly she grimaces. “Oh crap, don’t tell me you guys are going to be Gorilla-glued together, like BrAngelo,” Jules says, jerking her head toward Brianna and Angelo, the school’s power couple, who seem to have an uncanny ability to be making out on my locker at the exact moment I need to get inside. “I think it’s great that you have a hot new boyfriend, but you better not ditch me.”

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “I’m going to need your help. Being around Oliver is like when you’re babysitting a toddler and you realize the entire house is a potential danger zone.”

  “Perfect timing,” murmurs Jules as Oliver’s bus pulls up to the front of the school.

  You know how there are some moments in your life when time just slows down? When you remember every minute detail: how the wind feels against your face, how the freshly cut grass smells, how snippets of conversation become a dull background buzz, and how in that instant, there’s only the beat of your heart and the breath that you draw and the person whose eyes lock with yours?

  Oliver is the last one to step off the bus. His black hair is ruffled by the breeze. He’s wearing the white shirt and jeans I picked out for him, and an unzipped hoodie. A leather satchel is strung across his chest, and his green eyes search the crowd.

  When he sees me, a huge smile breaks across his face.

  He walks toward me as if there aren’t three hundred people staring at him—the new kid—as if it doesn’t matter in the least that the popular girls are tossing their hair and batting their lashes like they’re at a photo shoot, or that the jocks are all sizing him up as competition. He walks as if the only thing he can see is me.

  Oliver wraps his arms around me and swings me in a circle, like I weigh nothing at all. He sets me down, then gently holds my face in his hands, looking at me as if he has found treasure. “Hello,” he says, and he kisses me.

  I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, their mouths gaping.

  Not gonna lie: I could get used to this.

  I met Oliver inside a book. Last year, I got obsessed with a kids’ fairy tale that I found in the stacks of the school library—in particular, with the prince who was illustrated throughout the pages. Now, lots of readers crush on fictional characters, but mine turned out to be not so fictional. Oliver wanted out of his book, where every day was the same, and into a life that didn’t have such a rigid plotline.

  We had a bunch of failed attempts—including one involving a magic easel that reproduced him in the real world but flat as a pancake, and a brief period of time where I got sucked into the book and found myself swimming with mermaids and fending off a deranged princess who fancied herself in love with Oliver. Our last-ditch attempt to get him written out of the story included a covert trip to Cape Cod to find the author of the book, Jessamyn Jacobs, who had written the story for her son, Edgar, after his dad died. As it turned out, Edgar was a dead ringer for Oliver, and just the replacement we needed in the book for Oliver. For the past three months, Edgar’s been living in the fairy tale, and Oliver’s been living on Cape Cod, impersonating him—American accent, teenage moods, twenty-first-century clothing, and all. After weeks of persuasion, Oliver finally convinced Jessamyn to move here, to New Hampshire, so he could be with me.

  Oliver and I walk down the hall, where girls bunch together, jockeying into position to take a Snapchat selfie; bros try to jam a shipping container’s worth of sports gear into a locker the size of a carry-on suitcase; cheerleaders gaze at themselves in their locker mirrors, putting on lip gloss in slow motion, as if they’re starring in their own Sephora commercial. Suddenly two nerds zoom down the hallway, clutching stacks of books to their chests, careening off bystanders like human pinballs. Oliver nearly gets mowed down in the process. “Is there a fire?” he asks.

  “No, we only have fifteen minutes till class starts. To a nerd, that means you’re already a half hour late.” I glance down the hallway. “They run everywhere. All the time.”

  I can feel everyone’s eyes on my back as Oliver and I pass. As we move through the crowds, I purposely bump into him every so often. I do this so I can make sure he’s really here. You have to understand—I’m just not a lucky person. I never win a raffle; every penny I come across is tails-up; my last fortune cookie said Good luck with that. This is literally a dream come true.

  Suddenly I realize that Oliver is doing the queen’s wave as we head down the science wing. I grab his hand and pull it down. “These are not your subjects,” I whisper, but when he threads his fingers through mine, I completely forget to be frustrated.

  Before I realize what he’s doing, he’s pulling me around a corner, into the narrow hallway that leads to the photography lab. In a delicate choreography, he spins me so that my back is against the wall and his hands are bracketing me. His hair is falling across his eyes as he leans forward, lifts my chin, and kisses me.

  “What was that for?” I ask, dizzy.

  He grins. “Just because I can.”

  I can’t help smiling back. Three months ago, I never imagined that I could even reach out and touch Oliver’s hand, much less sneak away during school for a secret kiss.

  The terrible thing about falling in love is that real life always gets in the way. I sigh, taking his hand. “As much as I’d like to stay here, we have to get you to class.”

  “So,” Oliver says. “What’s my first task?”

  “Well,” I reply, taking the printed schedule out of his hand. EDGAR JACOBS, it reads, startling me. It’s hard for me to remember that Oliver is masquerading as someone else; how difficult must it be for him? “Your first class is chemistry.”

  “Alchemy?”

  “Um, not quite. More like potions.”

  Oliver looks impressed. “Wow. Everyone here hopes to be a wizard?”

  “Only the ones with a death wish,” I murmur. I stop in front of a bank of lockers, matching the number to the one on his schedule. “This is yours.”

  He tugs on the lock, frowning at the numerical puzzle of the combination. Then suddenly he brightens and, out of nowhere, pulls out a dagger and hacks it against the metal.

  “Oh my God!” I shout, grabbing the knife and stuffing it into my backpack before anyone else can see. “Do you want to get arrested?”

  “I’m really not that tired,” Oliver says.

  I sigh. “No knives. Ever. Understand?”

  His eyes flicker with remorse. “There’s just so much here that’s . . . different,” he says.

  “I know,” I empathize. “That’s why you’ve go
t me.” I take off the numeric lock, using the code on the back of Oliver’s schedule, and replace it with a padlock whose combination is five letters. “Watch,” I say, using my thumb to roll the wheels until they spell E-D-A-H-E. “Everyone deserves a happy ending.”

  “I think I can remember that.” He grins and backs me against the lockers. “You know what else I remember?”

  His eyes are as green as a summer field, and as easy to get lost in.

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” Oliver says. “You were wearing that shirt.”

  When he looks at me like that, I can’t even remember my name, much less what I’m wearing today. “I was?”

  “And I remember the first time I did this,” he adds, and he leans in and kisses me.

  Suddenly I hear a voice over my shoulder. “Um,” a boy says. “You guys are kind of draped across my locker?”

  Oh God. I’ve become BrAngelo.

  Immediately I shove Oliver away and tuck my hair behind my ears. “Sorry,” I mutter. “Won’t happen again.” I clear my throat. “I’m Delilah, by the way.”

  The kid jerks the metal door open and looks at me. “Chris,” he says.

  Oliver extends his hand. “I’m Oli—”

  “Edgar,” I interrupt. “His name is Edgar.”

  “Yes. Right,” Oliver says. “That is my name.”

  “I feel like I haven’t seen you before,” I say to Chris.

  “I’m new. Just moved here from Detroit.”

  “I just moved here too,” Oliver replies.

  “Oh yeah? Where from?”

  “The kingdom of—”

  “Cape Cod,” I blurt out.

  Chris snorts. “She doesn’t let you talk much, man. Where are you guys headed?”

  “Edgar’s got chemistry with Mr. Zhang,” I say.

  “Cool, me too. I’ll see you there?” Chris shuts his locker and, with a wave, walks down the hall.

  Oliver watches him. “How come he’s allowed to wave?”

  I roll my eyes. It’s 8:15 a.m. and I’m already exhausted. “I’ll explain later,” I say.