All to get into the Elflands, when as many kids ran away from it as ran away from the World. Or maybe that wasn’t why they did it. Maybe the human kids had come to Bordertown to be somebody or something else, and found out they couldn’t change enough to make it happen. They were still themselves, and their selves had never been good enough. Maybe they didn’t give a damn about getting across the Border, except to be able to say that they were different, and could do it.

My self had never been good enough; for me, for my mother, for my father, for the people around me who I wanted to be my friends. I’d come to Bordertown, too, with only that, and found it still wanting in this new place. I’d become a River addict, trying to erase the parts of me I couldn’t live with. Then I’d found Tick-Tick, who’d been a mirror, a shoulder, and a friend. She’d polished my self on her sleeve and handed it back, so that I could finally tell the real flaws from the tarnish. Without her, my road to the Border would have ended in the river or a box. I wanted to think I’d done a little of the same thing for her, but she’d started stronger, and angrier, and hadn’t sunk as low as I’d had before coming back up.

What would I have done, if someone had offered me a synthetic alternative to self-respect? I’d have taken it. I knew it because it was just what I had done, and I’d done it with less justification than any poor elf wannabe. They at least had a goal in mind when they took up with their dangerous drug.

Would it make them elves? It wouldn’t make them Tick-Tick, with her quirky mix of human and fey idiom, her steady confidence and stubborn principles, her strange notions of how to decorate an apartment. What about the prohibitions that Tick-Tick had tried to explain to Ms. Wu; if elves were born with them, what would happen to an elf who wasn’t born, but only grew?

But they weren’t becoming elves. They were becoming dead.

I finally acknowledged that I wasn’t going to fall asleep again, and got up. I needed to give Rico her answer; if I wrote a note, I could find somebody to take it by her place, or by Chrystoble Street Station. Depending on what I wrote, it might be safe to leave it at the copshop.