CJ's Treasure Chase

by Jessica Brody

  She shut her eyes tight. She couldn’t watch. If this ended badly, she didn’t want to see it.

  She felt a blast of something hit her in the chest, like a gust of warm wind, and her whole body started to tingle.

  Then she heard a loud, booming voice. It sounded a lot like Peony’s voice, but for some reason it seemed to be coming from far above her head. “Oh, dear. That was not supposed to happen.”

  CJ glanced up and saw a staggeringly huge pair of orange go-go boots stomping toward them, the ground shaking with each step. And that was when CJ also noticed the rest of their surroundings. The shelves and cabinets that only a second before had been normal-sized were now ginormous.

  “Gulping guppies!” CJ exclaimed with a sudden realization. “She shrunk us!”

  So, this isn’t good.

  CJ couldn’t believe it. That useless pixie had shrunk them!

  She looked at Freddie, letting out a loud gasp when she noticed that Freddie was no longer holding the map. Panicked, she looked all around them, thinking maybe it had simply slipped from Freddie’s hand, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  “What did you do?” CJ roared.

  Freddie, who looked just as stunned by their sudden change in size, took a step back, stammering. “I-I-I didn’t do anything! It was the fairy! She must have made a mistake!”

  CJ struggled to keep her temper in check, but it was too late. She simply couldn’t keep herself reined in. Just as she’d seen her dad do so many times, she exploded. “I told you never to trust a fairy!”

  Freddie looked conflicted. “I don’t think she did it on purpose.”

  “Oh, wake up, Freddie, and smell the pixie dust. Of course she did it on purpose. She hornswoggled us like a pro. She tricked us. She probably shrunk us so she could run off with the map and find the treasure herself. She’s been playing us since we walked in that door. And now it’s all over. We’ll never get the map back. We’ll never find the treasure. I’ll never get my ship!”

  CJ felt hot, angry tears spring to her eyes. She blinked hard to keep them at bay.

  Don’t cry. Do not cry.

  She’d taught herself to hold back tears when she was just a little girl. Her father hated crying children. He hated children in general, actually. Most of the time he just barely seemed to tolerate CJ.

  She’d learned at a young age that the best way to keep yourself from crying was to yell instead. The frustration had to come out somehow, and the people in her family always seemed to respond better to yelling.

  She opened her mouth to scream something else at Freddie, but before she could get another word out, the floor started to tremble violently beneath their feet again. Clouds of dust and debris sprung up from the ground, like rain falling in reverse. She glanced up and saw that Peony was walking around, her giant orange boots shaking the earth with each step.

  CJ leapt back to avoid being squished to death. “Oh my my my my my,” Peony lamented, her voice sounding like thunderclaps. “Where did they go? Did I make them disappear? This is bad. Very, very bad.”

  “Doubloons!” CJ swore. “What do we do now?”

  Freddie bit her lip in concentration. “Um…um…”

  “Think!” CJ commanded her.

  “I am thinking!” Freddie shot back. “Oh! Ally from Auradon Prep told me a story once about her mother.”

  CJ stared at her in utter disbelief. “You want to talk about lame AK family stories at a time like this?”

  Freddie ignored her. “She said that one time when her mother, Alice, was in Wonderland, she accidentally got shrunk from drinking a potion.”

  “We didn’t drink a potion,” CJ pointed out.

  “Just listen!” Freddie snapped. CJ could tell the stress of the situation was getting to her friend. While CJ had always had a short fuse, Freddie was usually calm. “The point is she found something in her pocket—a piece of mushroom—that made her big again.”

  CJ shot her a blank stare. “So?”

  “So!” Freddie said, as though it were obvious. “Check your pockets! Maybe all AK clothes come with some kind of anti-shrinking mushrooms.”

  They both checked their pockets.

  Nothing.

  Why was CJ not surprised?

  She watched panic spread over Freddie’s face as Freddie tried to think of another plan. She must have come up short, because a second later, Freddie cupped her hands over her mouth and started yelling into the sky. “Help! Down here! We’re down here! You shrunk us!”

  “She can’t hear you,” CJ said miserably, plopping down onto her backside. “We’re the size of ants.”

  She couldn’t believe what was happening. She should never have listened to Freddie. She should never have invited Freddie to come along in the first place. She should have heeded her father’s advice from the very beginning. Sidekicks were a waste of time. They only got you in trouble. They only screwed things up.

  Did Mr. Smee ever actually help her father? No. He just bumbled around, making a mess of things.

  CJ hung her head in defeat. It was time for her to admit it to herself: the treasure hunt was over. They were going to stay bugs forever—or at least until someone stepped on them, which probably wouldn’t take long.

  But then CJ noticed something beneath her.

  She remembered that when she had walked in there, the floor of the salon had been wood—cracked wood that looked like it was ages old. This floor was different. It was kind of an off-white color. Almost yellow. And it wasn’t made of wood.

  She reached down and rubbed her fingertip over the surface.

  It was kind of scratchy and rough, almost like it was made out of…

  Old paper?

  CJ shot up and starting walking in a slow circle, taking in the black ink drawings and letters beneath her feet that stretched out to the horizon.

  “The map!” she exclaimed. They were standing on top of it.

  CJ glanced around, trying to orient herself amid the landscape. It was difficult, because everything was now enormous. One dot on the trail was bigger than she was. But after a moment, she realized they were right on top of Briar’s Hollow, where the trail had ended.

  But as she stared down at the massive dots, she noticed something strange. The dots didn’t stop in Briar’s Hollow, as she had once thought. They kept going. A new trail was stretched out in front of her. But these dots were different. They weren’t gigantic like the others. They were normal-sized. Well, normal-sized to her, and she was miniature.

  Curiously, she followed the dots with her eyes, and she let out a shriek when she saw something a few steps away.

  There was more of the map.

  There was a new section she definitely hadn’t noticed before. She could see a forest leading to an area called South Riding, and another castle positioned on the east shore, which was called Towering Heights.

  Has this been here the whole time, CJ thought, and we just couldn’t see it?

  Then she had a sudden realization and whispered, “The smudge of dirt!”

  She remembered when Freddie had grabbed the map from her earlier. CJ had believed Freddie had gotten it dirty.

  But it wasn’t dirt at all.

  It was this.

  It was another part of the map.

  CJ thought about the second half of the clue that had appeared alongside the dotted trail leading to Briar’s Hollow.

  When magic shrinks the big to small,

  You’ll see the final clue of all.

  You’ll see the final clue of all.

  It had been there since they’d gone to the Enchanted Lake. They just hadn’t been able to see it before because they were too big!

  Excitedly, she knelt down and traced her finger across the newly revealed area and the tiny dotted treasure trail that stretched across it. But she stopped abruptly when her eyes fell upon the northernmost tip—upon a small island that seemed to rise from the ink-black sea like a drowned ship resurfacing.

  Her heart pounded. Her
breath hitched. Her entire body went numb.

  “Freddie!” CJ turned to see her friend struggling to push against a giant wooden pole that was as thick as a tree trunk. She peered up to see that it was the handle of a broom.

  “One second,” Freddie said with a grunt, “I’ve almost got it.” She backed up a few paces and ran, hurling herself against the wooden stick. It didn’t budge. But Freddie was thrown back from the impact. “Ow!” she cried, holding her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” CJ asked.

  “Trying to knock over this broom to get the fairy’s attention.”

  “Come look at this!”

  Rubbing her wounded arm, Freddie made her way to CJ and let out a shriek of her own when she saw what CJ had discovered.

  “What is that?” Freddie asked, her eyes wide.

  “It’s the last section of the map! It’s been here the whole time.”

  “You mean,” Freddie began, seemingly putting the pieces together, “Peony was supposed to shrink us instead of the map?”

  CJ nodded. “Apparently so.”

  “But how do you know it’s the last section of the map?”

  CJ grinned, letting the delicious sense of victory wash over her. It was just as sweet as she’d always imagined. “Because of that.” She pointed to the top of the new section, and Freddie’s eyes tracked her finger.

  The dotted trail extended off the east coast of Auradon, crossed a small sea labeled HOOK’S BAY, curved around a large landmass called Never Land, and stopped just to the north, at a small island that resembled a skull rising from the water.

  The words written below the island were familiar to CJ, because she’d heard them in many stories of her father’s adventures.

  And now, marked with two slanted lines crossing in the middle, those words were leading her to the beginning of her own adventure.

  SKULL ROCK.

  Holy mackerel.

  Things are getting good.

  “One…two…three!” CJ and Freddie slammed against the broomstick with all their might.

  The broom gave way. Freddie held CJ back as it wobbled and then finally tipped over.

  “Oh, my!” screamed Peony, who had been pacing the floor, trying to figure out how to make Freddie and CJ reappear.

  Peony glanced at the broom on the ground.

  “C’mon!” Freddie called. She leapt onto the broomstick and began jumping up and down. CJ reluctantly joined her, even though she felt ridiculous.

  But she was too close to lose it all now. She had unlocked the map, followed the clues, and found the location of the buried treasure. She was so close to buying her pirate ship and setting off on her first big adventure she could taste it.

  Of course her treasure would be on Skull Rock. It made so much sense. It was almost poetic. Her father had always said that Skull Rock was one of the few places in Never Land that a pirate could call home.

  And that was where she was heading.

  She jumped up and down on the broomstick—which might as well have been a log, as thick as it seemed—and flailed her arms in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Down here, you stupid pixie! We’re down here!”

  CJ saw the fairy squint and bend down to get a closer look.

  “Well, turn my raven to stone, look at that!” She dropped to her knees, causing a trembling in the ground that nearly knocked both CJ and Freddie off the broom. “Oh, my, silly me, I must have shrunk them instead of the paper.”

  “About time she figured it out,” CJ muttered.

  The fairy cocked her wand back and gave it a flick. Giant sparks of white light rained down on them, and then…presto!

  CJ and Freddie were normal-sized again.

  Oh, thank badness, CJ thought.

  “There,” Peony said, stashing her wand back in her pocket. “Much better. Sorry about the mix-up.”

  CJ lunged for the map, which was still on the floor, and hastily rolled it up. As she did, she noticed that the new section—the part leading her to Skull Rock—looked like a smudge of dirt again.

  Whoever had hidden the treasure and enchanted the map had obviously wanted to make sure that no one could find the final location unless they were incredibly small.

  Like pixie dust small.

  CJ stuffed the map into her pocket and threw her backpack on. “Well, thanks for shrinking us. And, you know, unshrinking us. We’d best be going now.”

  She grabbed Freddie by her kimono sleeves and pulled her back into the salon, just in time to hear the older fairy with the glasses scream in horror at her reflection: “My hair! It’s black as a raven!”

  Freddie looked at CJ, who shrugged innocently and hurried out of the shop.

  “Wait!” Peony called after them. “What about your makeover?”

  But CJ was already closing the door behind them with a jingle.

  Once they were safe on the street, CJ immediately tied her hair back into its usual billowing ponytail. “Ah, much better.”

  “Oh, no!” Freddie cried out, pointing up the road.

  CJ turned around. “What?”

  “Our bus is gone!”

  But CJ was completely unfazed. “We don’t need a bus to get where we’re going,” she told Freddie. “We need a boat. Skull Rock is an island, remember?”

  “A boat?” Freddie repeated skeptically. “But how are we going to get a boat?”

  CJ was two steps ahead of her. She’d already asked herself that very question and come up with a solution. “Easy. We’ll just find a ship captain and take him hostage.”

  Freddie shook her head. “For the last time, we’re not taking anyone hostage.”

  CJ crossed her arms. “Do you have a better idea?”

  Freddie thought for a moment. “My dad always told me stories about the Bayou d’Orleans. They have lots of boats there, so why don’t we just steal one?”

  A wicked grin spread across CJ’s face. She was glad to see that Freddie was back to her usual evil self. CJ clapped Freddie on the back. “Good thinking! So how do we get to the bayou?”

  But Freddie didn’t respond, and a moment later CJ noticed that Freddie’s face had gone deathly pale. And her eyes were so wide they looked like full moons.

  “Okay, don’t panic,” Freddie said in an anxious tone. “Don’t panic.”

  CJ was confused. “Why would I panic?”

  “I was talking to myself!” Freddie snapped. Then she hastily grabbed CJ by the arm and pulled her behind an idling delivery truck parked on the street.

  “What’s going on?” CJ asked.

  “Look out there,” Freddie muttered between clenched teeth.

  CJ peered out from behind the truck, her eyes scanning the street until she found the source of Freddie’s sudden anxiety.

  On the sidewalk, making her way straight toward them, was the pink-clad, high-heeled, headbanded, prissy princess Audrey.

  We gotta split.

  And fast.

  “We need to get out of here,” Freddie said, “and without her seeing us.”

  “So what if she sees us?” CJ asked, peeking from behind the truck. “What’s the big deal?”

  What did CJ care if one of the AKs spotted them? Let them try to catch her and send her back to the isle. She had the last piece of the map. She was golden.

  Pun intended.

  “What’s the big deal?” Freddie repeated, clearly losing her patience. “The big deal is she could tell on us. She could report us to Headmistress Fairy Godmother. She could have us expelled from Auradon Prep.”

  “You expelled,” CJ corrected spitefully. “She could have you expelled. Remember, I’m not a student there. I could care less what Audrey or any other lame AK thinks.”

  “Me too. Trust me. But I don’t want to get the boot when we’re this close to your pirate’s booty.”

  CJ smiled. “Now there’s the wicked VK that I know and hate. So we need to figure out how to get to the bayou and—”

  But CJ’s words were cut short when t
he truck they were hiding behind rumbled to life and they heard someone—presumably the driver—say, “See you next week!”

  Freddie’s eyes widened in panic. Their cover—it was leaving. In just a few seconds they would be exposed, standing in the middle of the street with nothing to block them from Audrey’s view.

  Freddie and CJ both spun around to look at the truck. It was the first time either of them had taken notice of what was written on the side of it. They read the words at the same time, then turned toward each other to share a look of disbelief.

  DELICACIES D’ORLEANS

  ALL THE BEST FOOD FROM THE BAYOU!

  “C’mon!” CJ said, grabbing Freddie by the hand. They ran to the back of the truck. CJ struggled to unlatch the loading door while Freddie kept glancing over her shoulder at the place where they’d last seen Audrey.

  When CJ finally managed to swing the door open, she hopped inside and called for Freddie. “Get in!” she commanded.

  But Freddie was turned away from her, and she seemed to be frozen to her spot. CJ followed her gaze and understood what was happening. Audrey had stopped in the middle of the street and was staring in their direction, her head cocked to the side and her eyes squinting at them, like she was trying to figure out why they looked so familiar.

  They were still in their AK costumes, which were undoubtedly throwing her off.

  “Freddie!” CJ whispered. “Get in the truck!”

  But Freddie didn’t move.

  Audrey took a curious step forward, looking suspicious. “Freddie?” she asked. “Is that you?”

  Freddie visibly flinched.

  The truck lurched as the driver threw it into gear, readying to pull away. “Freddie!” CJ said a little louder. “The truck is leaving!”

  And just as she said it, she felt the vibration under her feet. She looked down to see the cobblestone street moving as the truck slowly pulled away from the curb.

  “Freddie!” CJ yelled, no longer caring who heard.

  Audrey heard. Her gaze traveled to the back of the truck, where CJ was still standing with the loading door wide open.