Only, it couldn’t have been Ian, because the guy who’d rescued me from the quicksand had been a prince using his princely voice and wearing the princely cologne that Wardrobe kept guarded under lock and key. And Ian was the Puss ’n Boots.
Not that I could tell Her Majesty this—unless I wanted to lose my job and doom Jess to a summer of “Oh! What big eyes you have, Grandma!” But I would have to find some way to get the message across before it was too late and Ian was sent back to Texas with a Do Not Return stamp on his forehead.
“With all due respect, ma’am, Ian doesn’t seem like the law-breaking type. I think you might be mistaken.”
“Of course you do.” She reclined slightly, her eyes reduced to sinister slits. “Be careful, Zoe. The heart is a clever trickster that delights in playing the brain for a fool.”
Ten
“You know you’ve got to find that prince,” Jess said, turning off the shower. “You have to warn him that the Queen’s out for his head.”
This had already occurred to me, too. I switched off the water in my stall and grabbed a towel. “I know, but how? I can’t exactly play Prince Charming going from door to door in the Royal Tower with a swatch of black flannel I found on a thornbush looking for some guy with the matching shirt.”
“Yeah, but the princes don’t spend all their free time in their rooms. I’ve seen them swimming in the Little Mermaid’s Falls after the park closes or playing pickup basketball over at Jack’s Beanstalk. Parties? Wardrobe? The cafeteria? There’s got to be some place where they take off their shirts.”
I quit toweling to replay what she’d just said. The cafeteria? “Is that where RJ hangs out?”
A long, painful sigh echoed in the other stall. “I don’t know where RJ hangs out. He says he spends his nights reading in his room and getting ready for Columbia in the fall, but I’m sure that’s just an excuse. Do you think he has a girlfriend?”
The ever-impossible question. “How would I know?”
“Because you’re good at sensing stuff like that. He claims he doesn’t.”
“Then he probably doesn’t.” I collected my shampoo and conditioner and plunked them into my plastic carrier, thinking that guys were never honest about relationships unless they were up against a wall.
“I hope you’re right, because I can’t tell what he wants. He acts as if he likes me. We meet up for coffee every morning and go for runs and sit really close, but . . .”
“You just want him to make a move.”
“Exactly. I’ve got to take action, or this summer’s going to go by without so much as a kiss.” Jess wrung out her hair. “Maybe I should ask him if he has any inside information on the Queen and Ian. She’s so psycho, you know that once she convinces herself Ian’s the traitor there’ll be no turning back.”
Jess had a point. This was a woman who lectured on the evils of sugar while snarfing down two bars of dark chocolate a week. Talk about the Queen of De-nial. “So you think I should say something to her beyond what I’ve said about him being innocent?”
“Kind of. I mean, I don’t want you to get in trouble, but you have to do the right thing, Zoe, and that’s admitting you were in the Forbidden Zone and you talked to this so-called traitor, and it definitely wasn’t Ian. Judging from his cologne and British accent, it was a prince.”
But was that the right thing? In the eyes of Fairyland Management, it was reporting the “delinquent” who’d violated Rule #22. For Jess, it was giving a heads-up to the stranger who saved me from the quicksand and, for me, it was warning a friend that he was in danger of being wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
I was about to point out my conundrum when the door to the bathroom creaked open, and someone left. I froze. Jess quit talking and waited. Whoever had been there could have heard everything, including that I knew the traitor was not Ian—that he was, in fact, a Prince Charming and that I was about to warn him.
Jess and I simultaneously said, “Crap!”
Despite our panic about the eavesdropper, it seemed we were in the clear. Over the following days, it was business as usual in the front office. No one came forward with information to claim a promotion. There were no more sightings of saboteurs “egressing” from the hole in the fence. For the most part, the memo seemed to have been read by the interns, tossed into recycling, and largely forgotten. Everything was back to normal.
Or, at least, it would have been were it not for two unscheduled real royal VIP visits that sent the Queen into a tizzy.
The first was a Saudi sheik who’d decided on the spur of the moment to visit the park with his three wives and nine kids. They took up the entire penthouse floor of the Fairyland Kingdom Resort, and it was my assignment to reserve facials, manicures, and pedicures at the Fairyland spa for the wives while leading the nine kids around the park in sweltering heat.
Their visit was followed by a certain young British duke and his new wife—whose identities I was sworn never to reveal, though I have to say that when he kissed my hand and complimented me on my “superb bottled-water distribution,” I practically fainted.
Because of all this VIP activity, Jess and I didn’t get down to hunting for my prince until the following Saturday night, when a group of guys jumped in the Frog Prince’s Pond after throwing around the Frisbees on Fiddler’s Green.
We were walking Tinker Bell—an automatic pass to be anywhere—and so we just happened to be in the Haunted Forest and just happened to stop by the pond and inspect a bunch of shirts flung all over the place. We found several tees but nothing in black flannel aside from a black button-down oxford cloth that didn’t quite fit the bill, though it was close.
“Did you bring the swatch?” Jess whispered.
“No way. I’m not taking that thing out of its hiding place until I know for sure it’s the right shirt.”
Jess said, “That’s an oxymoron.”
“You’re an oxy-moron.”
Turned out, the black oxford-cloth shirt belonged to Marcus.
“Hi, Marcus!” Jess shoved the shirt into my hands.
I mouthed, Thanks a lot.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked, toweling water off his six-pack abs. Even in the dim light, I could make out the purple and red bruises from the falls off his horse.
He jutted his chin toward his shirt. “I think that’s mine.”
“Here,” I said, handing it to him. “You dropped this.”
“Oh, wow, thanks.”
Jess gave me a nudge.
“You two going to the party tonight?” he asked, running a hand through his wet blond hair.
“Can’t,” I said. “I promised to play a game with Karl.” And I could not ditch Karl, whose self-esteem from the Febrezed-puke wolf head was already rock bottom.
Also, the Queen was vehemently opposed to my partying, as she’d made known that very morning when she’d said, “I trust you won’t succumb to the temptation of adolescent festivities that periodically arise here, Zoe. Do try to remember that the primary duty of a lady-in-waiting is to be at my beck and call, not rousting about with some hideous testosterone-laden Neanderthals.”
And because I was still on probation from the flower-picking incident, I’d said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She’d continued to study me warily. “Just so you know, I am not above testing the veracity of your assurance.”
Meaning, she would wake me with a bogus errand. “Go ahead. You won’t find me having fun.”
“I certainly hope not!”
So that’s why I had to stay in the dorm. Ugh.
Marcus said, “That’s too bad. Word is it’s gonna be sweet.”
“I thought I might go,” Jess said shyly, which was news to me. “Though if it’s only for princes and princesses . . .”
“No, no. You should definitely come,” he said. “In fact, I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
Jess brightened. “Really?”
“Yeah. It’ll be cool.”
“All righ
t,” said Jess. “Meet you there.”
“Awesome.”
While we were walking Tinker Bell back to her boudoir, I said, “You do realize he has the IQ of Play-Doh.”
Jess shrugged. “That’s okay. I like Play-Doh. It’s soft and squishy and has so many useful purposes.”
I wondered if one was getting RJ to finally make a move.
Eleven
That night I met the outlaw prince again.
On purpose.
Or by accident.
I still wasn’t sure.
I was playing The Settlers of Catan with Karl in the rec room like a good little lackey when my iPhone started playing “Every Breath You Take.”
It was 10:59, one minute earlier than I’d expected. I pumped my fist. “Called it!”
Karl, who’d bet on midnight, fished out five bucks from his pocket. “No fair. You work for her.” He slammed the fiver on the table.
I took it off his hands. “There’s gotta be some perks,” I said, secreting my win into the front of my bra. “Excuse me, will you?” And I took the phone out to the hall.
Thanks to the miracle of FaceTime, the Queen’s pale visage filled all four-by-two inches of the screen. Her makeup had been removed, exposing her true features, which were extraordinarily corpselike, and her hair was gone, tucked into what appeared to be a white turban.
But that wasn’t what I found shocking. It was her eyeballs.
They were rolling wildly in their sockets.
“Ma’am. Are you okay?”
“I most certainly am not! There is a mote in my eye, Zoe, and I need you here posthaste to remove it.”
“Just blink,” I said.
“What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been blinking so much, my eyelids have biceps. Now stop with the dillydallying and hurry. I can’t sleep until this cursed offender has been extricated from my ocular perimeter!”
The Queen’s verbiage was the perfect example of what my English teacher called using fifty words when one will do.
With apologies to Karl, I went upstairs to the Queen’s office, where a door led to her private quarters in a separate turret. Using my master key, I opened the gold lock and stepped into a marble hallway lined with exquisite, thick Persian carpets and beige walls covered in framed photo after framed photo of . . . her.
“Hurry, Zoe!” she beckoned from a far room. “I’m in agony!”
“Yes, ma’am.” I would have liked to have lingered over what might possibly have been a shot of her with Justin Bieber, but clearly time was of the essence as I scurried past a pair of ornate French doors to her chilly air-conditioned bedroom.
Against one wall was a humongous four-poster bed, and in the center of that, lost among piles of white bedding and white pillows, was a rail-thin figure tossing and turning as if she were on fire.
“Help! I am blinded!”
I rushed to her side and adjusted her bedside lamp but found nothing except for one seriously bloodshot eye. Still, figuring she’d never be satisfied until I removed something, I ran a finger over her lower lashes and faked success.
“All done. See?” I held up my bare finger.
She squinted. “No, I don’t. And it still hurts.”
“Because you’ve irritated it. Now lie back and close your eyes,” I said, fluffing up a pillow. “And let your natural tears do their job. That’s what my mother used to say.”
The Queen lay back as I tucked her in. “What else did your mother used to say?”
“That if you can’t sleep, try to see how many words you can make from a bigger word.”
“Like incarceration?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of petunia or lavender. You know, something pleasant.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed with the floral options but gamely rattled off pet, pen, pie, pit, tip, tan, tap, nit, nip. “It’s no use. I can’t sleep. It’s the stress, what with the traitor and those dwarfs giving me such trouble.”
Earlier today it had been discovered that Grumpy had fallen in love with Bo Peep and was now as cheerful as one of her lambs while Sleepy had become mildly addicted to energy drinks and seemed bent on singing “Hi, ho!” at warp-speed.
Seriously, everything down at Snow’s was all wrong.
“I need my sleeping potion,” the Queen declared. “Call Chef and have him concoct a batch. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
It was almost midnight. I wasn’t sure if that was fair to Chef, who was usually in the kitchen by 4:00 a.m.
“Do it!” she croaked.
Chef was on her phone’s speed dial, and our conversation took all of a minute, concluding with several choice swears on Chef’s part plus, “I’ll leave it on my doorstep. Don’t wake me again.” Click.
I hated doing that. “I’ll be right back. I just have to go over to his house and get the stuff.”
“He lives far in the Haunted Forest, way behind Hansel and Gretel’s Candy Cottage.”
There were several employee cottages there that weren’t attractions. “No problem. Back in a jiffy,” I said, tiptoeing out.
“You can’t miss it,” she called. “It’s the one closest to the Forbidden Zone.”
I stopped and smiled to myself, deciding the Queen must have passed me off for an idiot. This emergency was indeed a test, though not to see whether I’d gone to the party.
It was a test to see if I could catch a spy.
Ian was on his way to the party when I ran into him on the fairy path. “Hey, I’ll go with you,” he said, adding, “unless, um, you’re going to meet someone.”
I laughed at his lame attempt at subtlety. “Like Dash?”
He shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and kept a brisk pace. “You like him, don’t you?”
“He’s nice enough. I don’t really even know him.”
“To know him is to love him. That’s the princesses’ take, anyway.” Ian kicked a stray stone off the path that, due to the old-fashioned gas lamps, glittered even in the dark.
“Well, obviously he’s kind to animals, even cannibalistic chickens, so that raises his hotness right there,” I teased.
Ian groaned. “No, you’re not going to get me to go that far.”
“As if you would.”
“Really? You wouldn’t believe the lengths I’ve gone to . . .” He quickly changed the subject. “So you must have the scoop. What’s up with that whacked memo the Queen sent out the other day? A traitor? She has to be kidding.”
“Or nuts.”
“Or nuts,” he agreed.
We headed side by side into the Haunted Forest. It was darker there, even with the gas lamps, and more private, for which I was thankful, seeing as how I had to bring up a subject that was probably going to ruin his night. “Look, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” I took a breath. “Oddly enough, you’re her prime suspect.”
He stopped and turned to me, stunned. “Get out.”
“To make a long story short, she had a camera set up by the hole in the fence to the Forbidden Zone. The images she got back were blurry because of a glitch, but they managed to capture a guy who was slim and dark—”
“And tall and sexy?” He kept his expression dead straight. “Because if he’s so hot he broke the camera, then I was definitely the dude.” He held up his hands. “Guilty as charged.”
Gullible me, I actually wondered if he was serious until his whole face broke into one big grin. “Yeah, I have no idea what she’s talking about. I didn’t even know there was a hole in the fence. Or that there was a fence. And where’s this so-called camera?”
“Wherever it is, you shouldn’t go near it, because she got it repaired and now it’s working.”
“All the more reason, don’t you think? That way she can compare and see for herself that it wasn’t me.” He started heading even deeper into the Haunted Forest, and when we passed Hansel and Gretel’s Candy Cottage, its white picket fence glowing strangely, I grew nervous that he just might try something f
oolish.
“You don’t know her, Ian. It’ll only confirm her suspicions if you show up on one of those shots.”
He let out another laugh like I was overreacting. “Chillax, Zoe. She might be kind of crazy, but she does manage a huge theme park and has for years. There’s gotta be some grounding to her.”
If only he’d been in her apartment a half hour ago. Help! I am blinded!
“The party is that way,” I said, when we got to the Witches’ Crossing intersection. We could make out the green glow of the Frog Prince’s Castle in the distance and even this far away hear the faint boom, boom, boom of a pounding bass beat.
“You wanna take a shortcut?” He reached out for my hand as easily as if we’d been friends forever. “We can get there without having to do that unnecessary half-mile loop.”
He led me off the sparkling fairy path and through the forest in violation of several rules. My heart fluttered slightly as often happens whenever I’m on the verge of doing something I shouldn’t, especially since I knew the Queen was desperately waiting for her potion.
“Um, I really should be heading the other way,” I said.
“Worried that the trolls will catch you stepping off the path? Don’t be. They’re in bed getting their beauty sleep.”
“No, it’s not that, it . . .”
“Low branch!” He pushed aside a tree limb, and we emerged from the forest into the castle’s backyard. Princes and princesses and furries in civilian clothes were dancing in the warm night under the light of tiki torches. Some people were sitting on the fake lily pads dangling their legs in the green-lit water and tossing around a Frisbee. Over in the corner on an oversize red toadstool were Jess and Marcus—making out!
I hoped RJ wasn’t there to see this. Or maybe that was the whole idea.
“Looks pretty decent.” Ian was still holding my hand. “Wanna go in?”
I wiggled my hand free. “I can’t. I have to do an errand for the Queen.”
“Now? It’s gotta be close to midnight.”
How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True Page 7
