Poison and Mirrors

by Holly Hook

I leaned down and pressed my fingers to her throat. She had a rushed pulse. Behind me, Sara caught her breath. "She passed out," I said. "Moanna! Do you hear me?"

  "What's going on in there?" Eric asked. He'd dare to come into the bathroom.

  "Sara," I said. "Go tell the office."

  "I..." Sara started.

  "Now!" I yelled. "Don't stand there!"

  Sara ran off. I pressed my fingers further into Moanna's skin. There was still a fast pulse, but it felt weak. It was fading. Something had happened. Her breaths came shallow and sweat beaded on her forehead as if she'd come down with the worst fever.

  I shook her shoulders, but Moanna didn't respond. My comb stayed in her hair. She'd passed out so fast she didn't have to time to remove it.

  I eyed the mirrors to make sure the man in black hadn't appeared in them. They were clear. This made little sense. I shook Moanna again and the bathroom door opened. Eric stood there, mouth falling open.

  "She's out," I said. "We should put her legs up, or something."

  "What happened?" Eric asked.

  "I don't know," I said. I checked her pulse again. It was tough to find. Moanna wasn't recovering. She was getting worse.

  She might even be dying.

  I slapped her across the face. I might as well be hitting a corpse. Someone in the office might know rescue breathing or whatever it was. Why was Sara taking so long?

  The door burst open again and Mrs. Hendry ran into the bathroom. She pushed past Eric and didn't even yell at him for being here. Sara stood behind her, expressionless.

  "I don't know what happened," I said. "She screamed, and I ran in here and found her on the floor."

  Mrs. Hendry pushed me out of the way and I didn't care about her friendship with the man in black. I backed into Sara and Eric. We pressed into the bathroom wall as there wasn't much room in here. Mrs. Hendry went to work checking Moanna's tank top as if it might be too tight. Then she checked the belt around her skirt and loosened it.

  "What are you doing?" I asked. "You're wasting time!"

  But Mrs. Hendry worked with a scary calm. She faced me as Moanna's breathing got more labored. Didn't the principal see she could die? "Let me look at her," she said, holding up a finger like she was trying to reprimand me. "There could be something that caused her lose consciousness."

  Did the principal want Moanna to die on the floor? Sara had to grab the worst person for the job other than Mr. Rain and the man in black himself. She should have grabbed a secretary. Hell, even the janitor. There were plenty of non-creepy people around.

  So I shoved around Mrs. Hendry and leaned down to Moanna again. I lifted her head, and the comb fell from her hair. It shattered into hundreds of glittering pieces.

  Moanna's eyelids fluttered.

  And then she opened her eyes and took a deep breath.

  "Moanna!" I yelled. I was so relieved I had to fight back tears.

  "Why are you holding my head up?" she asked, groggy. "Why am I on the floor?"

  "You passed out," I said. "Get up. If you can. Go slow so you don't do it again." My heart raced and the horror of the whole thing caught up with me. My legs tensed and my stomach heaved as if I had just found her. Now that she was okay, I could let my feelings rise to the surface.

  Sara and Eric still stood there. Mrs. Hendry got up and leaned against the sink without a word.

  I hated her.

  I thought of her taking her sweet time lecturing me and I wanted to punch her.

  Moanna groaned and stood, leaning on me for support. "You okay?" I asked. "What happened in here?"

  "I was combing my hair," she said. "That's all I remember."

  "You screamed. Twice."

  I eyed the shattered glass on the floor, the marbled colors shining in the florescent light. My comb. The one Stephanie had bought for me when I was eight—or the one I thought she'd bought for me.

  Did it have something to do with all of this?

  Sara messed with it right before handing it to Moanna.

  "How are you feeling?" I asked. I sent a glare at Mrs. Hendry. Maybe the man in black wanted kids to drop dead, and he'd ordered his minions not to do anything if something like this happened. I doubted anyone had called the ambulance.

  My comb might have cursed Moanna.

  "I'll call a janitor to sweep up the glass," Mrs. Hendry said with that horrible calm. "I want all of you out of here. Come on. Go back to lunch and get that tray off the water fountain."

  "But a girl just passed out," Eric said. "You can't ignore something like that. She might need a doctor."

  But Mrs. Hendry was already walking towards the door. "Everything looks all right," she said. "The four of you. Get back to lunch."

  Chapter Seven

  After what happened at lunch, Sara and I refused to go to Mrs. Landry’s class.

  I had to convince her, of course. Eric headed off to his normal fourth period and Sara and I stood there at the corner of the Foods hall and the main hall, trying to figure out what to do.

  "We're going to fail," Sara said. "Stephanie might not pay much attention to us, but she notices when our grades aren't very good."

  "We might end up dead if we go to Foods," I said. Was Sara trying to lure me into a trap? Something screamed at me from the back of my mind, but I couldn't make out the words.

  Sara had fingered the comb before handing it to Moanna.

  She'd had it before Moanna even walked up to our table.

  Maybe she'd even meant to hand it back to me before Moanna came along to stake her claim on Eric. Then, when Moanna came in and started hitting on Eric, she'd turned her aggression on her.

  No. We couldn't go to Foods. I didn't want to believe the worst of Sara, but this was leaving me zero choice. Sara had Mrs. Laney on her side in there. I was outnumbered.

  "I'm not going," I said. "I'll...go find somewhere else to go for the rest of the day. I might come back for last period but I'm not going to Mr. Rain's class, either."

  Sara's face fell. "I don't want to go by myself."

  "You don't have to go at all. These teachers want us dead. Even the guy in the robe said that." Sara was trying to trap me with guilt. A part of me wanted to go to class with her, but another part, a growing and scared one, wanted away from her. And that part was winning more and more.

  I had a sense that there was something familiar about all of this.

  "I'll go," she said. "I think I'll be fine. It's not like these teachers are going to do anything in front of the class, anyway."

  I could almost see what she was thinking. Eric was in Mr. Rain's class. She just might want to go sit with him.

  I turned away and stalked off. "See you later." I wandered the halls as the warning bell got closer and saw the library.

  The apple. The forest.

  The little men that may or may not be a dream.

  It all sounded like a fairy tale.

  I scooted inside just as the bell rang and the last people ducked into class. The librarian, a gray-haired lady I didn't know, had her back turned to me and she was leaning over the copier, so I took the opportunity to hide in the shelves before she could turn around and find me. The school had strange rules about the library. You had to have a teacher pass to visit it and a signed note to check out any of the books. Apparently some idiots had taken off with some books years ago and the library had been operating on maximum security ever since. It was great.

  But I had two hours if I hid well enough and no classes came in.

  I moved to the back of the library and waited for someone to boot me out, but I'd gotten inside at the right time. There had to be a big volume of those fairy tales somewhere in here. I'd heard that a lot of them were a lot darker than the stuff you saw in Disney movies. As in, not appropriate for kids dark. I had always been curious to check them out, but never got around to it.

  Now was my chance.

  Since I couldn't visit the computers without alerting the scary library lady to my presence, I had to br
owse the shelves forever until I came to the old classics section. The school had that, luckily. Books like Dracula and H.G. Wells' stories that they'd bought from the local Barnes and Noble since they looked new. I searched around for a bit until I found the hardcover I wanted. Grimm's Fairy Tales. It was the only one on this shelf that looked old and worn, as if someone had taken the new copy for themselves and never returned it. I wondered if Mrs. Hendry or Mrs. Laney had read it over and over. This seemed to be what we were dealing with, after all.

  I pulled the old copy off the shelf. It smelled musty and the front cover was falling off. Yeah. Someone had taken the new copy or something. But it was good enough. I found the most distant part of the library, a corner with a bunch of old history books, sat down cross-legged, and started to read.

  I'd heard right. The fairy tales were darker than most people thought. I skimmed the one with the frog prince and there wasn’t even a kiss involved. The frog prince was so annoying the princess threw him against the wall and that was what freed the guy. I felt bad for the princess in that story. She didn’t get much of a prize.

  The one with Rapunzel was even worse. The prince got his eyes gouged out by thorns when he had to jump from the tower to escape the witch. Even the stepsisters from Cinderella got their eyes pecked out by birds at the end of the story. I even read a story where a woman witnessed another girl being cut to pieces and eaten by a group of bandits way out in the woods.

  And these stories were meant for children. That was great.

  At last I found the story I wanted.

  Snow White.

  Like the others, it was darker than the Disney movie ever showed. A jealous queen consults her magic mirror and finds that Snow White is the most beautiful girl in the land, so she sends the girl into the forest to die. When she’s still a child. Some dwarves take her in and hide her but the jealous queen asks her mirror again and finds she’s still alive, so she makes several attempts on the girl’s life. The queen takes on several disguises and visits the girl. She first laces her so tight in new clothes that she passes out, but the dwarves are able to rescue her. And then she tries a poison comb which also makes the girl pass out, but the dwarves find her and pull the comb out of her hair just in time.

  I drop the book.

  Sara.

  My comb.

  Moanna passing out with it in her hair.

  Sara and her mirror.

  Sara had been standing there when Mr. Rain’s tie started to tighten around him. Just like those laces had tightened around the poor girl in the story. I’d seen seven little men in the den of Haven House last night.

  And I’d had a dream about a very, very red apple.

  I stood up, leaving the book on the floor, and peeked through the shelves to check that no one else had entered the library. There was a kid who was skipping and playing a first person shooter on one of the back computers, but other than that, it was empty. The kid was doing a great job of not getting noticed by the librarian, who still fiddled around in her office. He’d get discovered sooner or later.

  Sara was trying to kill me, just like in this story. Her aim had just been bad so far.

  She must be the evil queen or some version of her character.

  And the man in black had mentioned something about me being part of a story, too. After everything that had happened, I had to believe it. Everything in it had lined up so far.

  I had to read the rest. I skimmed the part where the queen sent a guy to cut out the girl's heart. That part was in the movie. Disney hadn’t left that out and I gave them credit for that.

  So I sat back down and turned the page.

  And found the poison apple scene. The apple was so well made that the queen was able to eat the white part, tricking Snow White into eating the skin which contained the poison. The dwarves were unable to save her and had to place her in a glass coffin. It took the prince to free her and dislodge the apple piece from her throat.

  But that wasn’t the end. There was more that wasn’t in the movie at all. Snow White and the prince got married and invited the jealous queen to the wedding. They made her dance to death in a pair of iron shoes. My feet hurt just thinking about that, but at least she got what she deserved.

  I imagined Sara dancing to death.

  I wanted to check out the book and read more of the stories, so see where the heck the cursed lettuce had come in, but then I remembered the stupid policy where you couldn’t without a teachers’ note. Some great way to get people to learn. I checked the time and realized I had another half hour, so I got more time to skim. It was five minutes before the start of last class when I found a story about a guy who fell in love with a witch’s daughter, and at one point found a garden of lettuce that turned him into a donkey and back. It wasn’t in Snow White, so I couldn’t figure out how the heck that had come in. Unless Sara was a witch who specialized in all fairy tales, period.

  Sara.

  She’d go home to those little kids.

  Those little kids. She’d close her door. Ask her mirror if she looked better than me. I felt my face and wondered what Sara had to be jealous of. My nose was a little misshapen and my eyebrows were a bit too high. Sara didn’t have that problem, but maybe her mirror had told her otherwise.

  She had to be working with the man in black. I wondered what story he was from. I didn’t have time to look. The bell rang.

  I hesitated, wondering if I could get a few more minutes with the book, then peeked through the bookshelves again. The kid playing his games was still there, not giving a crap about the bell. Footsteps and chatter floated in through the open doors. The librarian exited the room, probably to head to the bathroom. I eyed the detectors around the double doors, shoved the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales into my backpack, and ran for it.

  The detector beeped like a car alarm like I expected, but I got through quickly and checked around for the librarian. She was way down at the corner near the toilets, but like the dutiful woman she was, she whirled around to find the offender. But it was too late. The crowd had thickened around me. I figured the best way to avoid suspicion was to walk in her direction, so I did.

  It worked. She ran past me and barked, “Who stole a book? That’s school property and a fine!”

  I walked a bit faster. I was clear. No one ratted me out.

  Last period dragged out forever. The end of day announcements came on with their bus delays and football games going on tonight. Thankfully, Sara wasn’t in my last class, but neither was Eric.

  Did Eric play some part in all of this, too?

  He might be locked into this story with us. There had to be a prince, after all. But I still didn't understand where the man in black came in. There was no guy in a hooded robe in Snow White, but I was sure he was in this book...somewhere. Maybe he was the wizard who liked to cut girls into pieces and hide them in a room in his cottage.

  Either way, I was dealing with something powerful here.

  I couldn't concentrate in last class. The teacher went on about literary devices. I just wanted to get home and make sure those kids were safe when they got off the bus. Sara could go after them next. And Stephanie. And Eric. What was she planning to do with him? Maybe she just wanted him for herself and she wanted to hurt me or maybe she had something even worse in mind.

  I had to help them all. No one but me and him would believe the truth.

  The bell rang and I didn't even wait for Sara. I spotted her walking through the Art hall, back turned to me, but at least Eric wasn't with her. I ran to my bike, unlocked it, and pedaled home as fast as I could. My heart was racing by time I dumped it on the lawn of Haven House. Stephanie had some classic rock blaring out of the front entrance. She had the front door propped open, enjoying the cooler day. I ran inside.

  I found her at her office and she looked up at me, shocked, as I ran in.

  “Has Sara been acting weird to you?” I asked.

  Stephanie just kept giving me that look and she shook her head. “Not that
I’m aware,” she said. “Sara’s been acting normal to me.”

  I thought of Stephanie sitting there with those ugly little men. The dwarves. All seven of them. “You haven’t seen anything weird happening around here?”

  Stephanie’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. I was used to that look from teachers, but not from her. “What makes you think there’s something strange going on?”

  “The lettuce,” I supplied. “How it turned color like that. And Sara’s been hiding in her room a lot. Some kids at school got sick from eating the lettuce yesterday and I was wondering if she did something to it. I was out there and the lettuce was fine, but when I got back, it had changed color and Sara was out there the whole time.”

  “Are you saying Sara’s been casting spells or something?” Stephanie didn’t smile. For a moment, I wondered if she was being serious.

  Maybe she was. I could believe anything now.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged, trying to look casual. “She’s just been acting weird lately. Like she’s the queen of me or something.”

  I got a reaction then. Stephanie’s eyes got big for a second and her hand moved towards the phone, but then she stopped. “I’ll talk to her,” Stephanie said. “If you’re worried, you can simply avoid her for the time being.”

  How could I tell Stephanie that Sara might be trying to hurt me? Kill me? That she was only disguised as my best friend? I couldn’t. Stress lines creased Stephanie’s features and I saw the terror there, the worry that she might have another violent girl on her hands. If that happened, someone might shut down Haven House and these kids would be screwed. They’d have nowhere to go. We already had a bad reputation.

  “I will,” I said at last, and went up to my room.

  I locked my door behind me. At least Haven House had that.

  The front door opened down below, but I couldn’t see Sara as she came in. I could only see down into the garden. I remembered that I had left my bike on the lawn and I wondered if it would magically fall apart on the way to school tomorrow.

  I waited for Sara to come up the stairs, but the footsteps never came. Sara stayed downstairs for a long time, so long that I started to fear for Stephanie. At last, after twenty minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore and I cracked open my door to see if I could hear anything.