Andy raised his hand. “I’ll confess. I didn’t think she could do it.”
“I know, right?” RJ chimed in. “When I was laying it on her, I kept thinking this is crazy. It’s too much. How’s this girl expected to turn down fifty grand and a chance to save the environment?”
“The spike-nosed hornbeam turtle.” The Queen erupted into a full-throated laugh, even pinching her nose to stop. “I mean, honestly, RJ. Where did you come up with that?”
RJ threw up his hands. “Beats me. Discovery Channel? I dunno.”
I had no idea what was going on. Had my firing and RJ’s bribe been lies? Or was this more of their cruelty?
“Wait,” I said. “Is Fairyland building another theme park or not?”
The Queen dabbed her eyes with a doily. “Oh, there was a PUD:1,001 once upon a time. But that project was jettisoned years ago for environmental reasons. Since then we’ve been using those files for the Final Exam, which you passed with flying colors when you decided against giving RJ the progress report. Brava!”
I glanced from RJ to the Queen to Andy, who was busily helping himself to coffee and breakfast laid out on the side table. “In other words sending me to get the PUD:1,001 report had been a setup.”
The Queen said, “We prefer to think of it as a test.”
“A test?” None of this was rational. “What for?”
“To win the Dream and Do, silly.” Andy shook his head. “Seriously, Zoe, are you just caffeine-deprived? You took the test. You passed. And now you’ll win the Dream and Do. In other words you are now twenty-five thousand dollars richer.”
They were messing with my mind. “I couldn’t have won the grant. I did so many things wrong.” There had to be a mistake. My litany of grievances was huge. “I picked flowers and crossed into the Forbidden Zone.”
“Twice, I might add.” The Queen nudged RJ. “You remember the quicksand? Oh, dear lord, I was on the verge of sending the trolls out there myself if Ian hadn’t happened along.”
RJ nodded. “That was dicey. I was a little worried, too.”
“Don’t forget her confrontation with Jake the Hansel,” Andy added. “I thought Jake was about to lose it for a minute there, and I must admit that staying in costume was a particularly delightful touch.”
“That reminds me.” The Queen grabbed her cell, the one she’d loaned me, and rapidly texted like a teenager. “I need to put something extra in Jake’s final stipend check. He did a superb job.”
“He’s going to be very disappointed when he finds out he didn’t win the grant,” RJ said.
The Queen lifted a shoulder nonchalantly. “He’ll live. Now come here, Zoe, I want to give you a hug.”
I went stiff as her bony arms awkwardly wrapped around me. “Do you know why I picked you to be my assistant, Zoe? Because, as a young girl, I’d also lost my mother, and I knew when I read your essay about Storytown that you not only had the potential to meet my highest expectations, but that without a maternal figure you were desperately in need of nurturing female guidance.”
Now I was the one laughing, since nurturing was not the word I would have associated with a woman who sent me into the dark woods at midnight to fetch a sleeping potion she hadn’t needed. “Thank you, ma’am. . . .”
“Helen,” she clarified, clasping me tighter. “Helen Reynolds McNeil.”
HRM. It said so right outside her door, though I’d assumed the initials had stood for Her Royal Majesty.
“Ma’am,” I said, unable to break the habit. “I mean Helen. What about Marcus?”
She twirled me around so we were face-to-face. “Listen, don’t you worry about Marcus. He was a disaster from the get-go and sent home in the interests of his own safety. That boy was destined to break his back, but, if you’re still unsure, you should know that I received an email that he’s surfing and doing fine.”
“And Dash? And Valerie? Were they in on the joke, too?”
After all, Dash had snagged Jake the Hansel’s report from the Box of Whine. Had he been trying to earn my trust by stealing Jake’s letter? Or maybe I’d been wrong about that, too.
At the mention of Dash and Valerie, the Queen allowed a glimpse of her chilly former self. “No.” Her tone was clipped. “I’ve made it a policy not to discuss the performance of current cast members, but perhaps it will help if I explain something.”
She sat me down and perched herself on the desk. “This internship serves a dual purpose. Providing rising high school seniors with experience acting in the park is one, but it is not the primary reason Fairyland runs the program. The internship is the best way for us to identify young talent who will go on to become loyal and dedicated team players as Fairyland executives, either here or in the parent company in Düsseldorf.”
Andy and RJ nodded in agreement. “Helen’s right,” RJ said. “Almost all the executives at Fairyland are former interns. That’s why we take the Game and, especially, the Final Exam very seriously.”
The Queen said, “As a result we enjoy working here because—aside from a fantastic benefits package, including an impressive retirement savings plan—we know that we’re more than employees. We consider ourselves members of the Fairyland family, with all the support and encouragement commonly found in such societal groups.
I’m afraid that in the case of some interns . . .”
Meaning Dash and Valerie.
“. . . the competitive spirit eclipsed that bonhomie, and they allowed their personal ambitions to surpass their moral underpinnings for a truly Machiavellian dynamic of the ends justifying the means.”
She might have been slightly nicer, but with that SAT vocabulary she was still the Queen.
“I think I get it,” I said. “Undercutting isn’t really showing that Wow! spirit.”
The Queen rewarded me with a pat. “You showed that Wow! spirit by putting yourself last, Zoe, and your cousin Jess and Fairyland first. You could have turned over the progress report to RJ—heck, I would have been tempted to myself, after his bleeding-heart speech—but you didn’t, because you consider yourself a member of our family, and you know what we say in Fairyland?”
“The slipper always fits?”
“Exactly.” She held out her hand. “Now where is that progress report?”
I was reaching into my bag to get it when a noisy scuffle erupted in the hall. The door slid open, and Michelle—Sage’s mother/manager—burst in, her red corkscrew curls flying in every direction. “You lost my son! He didn’t come home last night, and he’s still missing!”
I slapped my cheek, alarmed. Sage hadn’t returned, and that would be the end to all this bon vivant, bonhomie, bon-whatever stuff. The one thing I wasn’t supposed to do—take Sage to Storytown—and I’d bombed that, big-time.
“Forget it, Mickey,” the Queen said with a wave. “Zoe knows.”
Michelle blinked. “Oh, shoot. I’m too late.” She placed her hands on her hips. “Boy, that was fun. I hope you’ll let me do it again.”
The Queen handed her a cup of coffee. “You have to be the bitchiest stage mother ever.”
“Coming from you, that is high praise.” Michelle or Mickey or whoever gave me a wink.
“Even you and Sage were part of the exam?” I asked. “How did that happen?”
Michelle placed her cup in its saucer. “When we were negotiating the spokesperson deal this spring, Helen told us about the Game and the Final Exam, and Sage insisted on playing a part. We had to rearrange his schedule to squeeze this in, but he was adamant.”
I thought about this. “He was adamant about being part of my Final Exam?”
The Queen bit into a cheese Danish, wiped her mouth, and said, “Not your Final Exam, my dear. Ian’s.”
I watched the monitor on which the Queen, back in character, and Andy and Michelle stood on the stage outside the Princess Palace waiting for the trolls to haul Sage and Ian from Storytown.
Enough of the initial shock had worn off, so that I had calmed down and was
beginning to enjoy myself, though you might say I was waiting for the other glass slipper to drop. I was sure the Queen would say I’d really been fired and that the Game and the Final Exam had all been pranks.
What bothered me were the princesses. They’d been weighed nearly every day to make sure they had stayed the same sizes. When I’d mentioned the sexism of that to the Queen, she’d brushed it off with some statement about corporate policy being set in stone. Personally that didn’t seem very “family-friendly” to me. Then again it was my understanding that the Mouse did the same with its princesses, so perhaps this was standard for fairy-tale theme parks. Didn’t make it right, though.
“How do you think Ian’s going to react when he finds out Sage intentionally kissed you just to get him mad?” RJ asked. “Should I have my fists up in case he takes a swing at the nearest male?”
I gave him a look. “Ian’s not like that. And you people did provoke him, admit it.”
RJ went back to the monitor. “Yeah, well, he was supposed to lash out at Sage, not Dash. That turned out to be an added bonus.”
I now knew that RJ really didn’t like the guy, and I couldn’t blame him. Apparently Dash had been filing regular mini reports in the Box of Whine ratting on each of us, including RJ for hooking up with Jess (a violation of Fairyland Rule #103). But Dash hadn’t acted alone.
Much to my shock, Valerie had been scheming with him, too.
That’s how Dash learned I’d been in the Forbidden Zone and that I knew Marcus wasn’t the real spy. It had been Valerie who’d been in the bathroom eavesdropping on my discussion with Jess. And she ran right back to tell her boyfriend, so they could trash our reputations with the Queen.
I watched monitor #22. “So Ian and I will be the only ones who know?”
“Yup. Otherwise, even with all the confidentiality agreements you interns sign, it would get out, and the Game would be ruined.” RJ swiveled to inspect monitor #19, the one in the Haunted Forest, where a group of figures were gradually coming from the shadows. “You and Ian will keep it a secret, because you’ll have an incentive.”
Incentive?
Was that Adele? I moved closer to the screen. “What’s she doing with Ian and Sage?”
The trolls were bringing the three scofflaws to the Queen, who greeted them with her royal disapproval. Michelle looked like she was throwing a hysterical fit, ranting and raving about the outrage of it all. Andy pretended to act anxious, wringing his hands and pacing. Now they were being led to the office, Ian with his head down and Adele trying really hard not to smile
RJ pumped his fist. “Adele’s awesome, isn’t she? It was her idea to play a temperamental princess who runs off to hide out in Storytown. And being away from the park gave her a chance to work in the off-site studio recording new songs and dances for the parade. That’s her major at Barnard, you know, music.”
I didn’t, of course. Up until two seconds ago, I’d thought she was a farm girl from Wisconsin. “So you and Adele . . .”
“Won the Dream and Do last year, just like you and Ian are going to win it this year. And then, come next summer, you two will return to the park as RAs to train a whole new set of interns.”
The door slid open, and the group stumbled in. Ian took one look at me hanging out with RJ and with a booming Texan shout exclaimed, “I knew it!”
Ian would later claim that, from the get-go, he’d suspected something was up. As proof, he noted that the Queen did not flip out when he confessed that he’d been the one in the Forbidden Zone so Marcus wouldn’t be unfairly sent home to California, an act of selflessness that Her Majesty considered the ultimate example of Wow!™ spirit.
“Obviously it was some sort of test,” he said. “I have a sixth sense about these things. Legit.”
My response to him was, “Oh, yeah? Then if you were so convinced this was a game, then why did you go to Storytown after saying good-bye to me last night to convince Sage that he should sign the contract to be a spokesman so I’d get my job back?”
“CYA, Zoe. Pure Cover Your Ass.”
I had my doubts. Anyway, by returning to Storytown and begging Sage to ask his mother to reconsider canceling the deal, Ian had passed the Final Exam and won the boys’ Dream & Do. So, as they say in Fairyland, All’s Well That Ends Well and It Always Ends Well.
The most difficult part, actually, was that Ian and I couldn’t tell anyone about the Game, not even Jess, which was ridiculous since Jess and I shared everything. Worse, she kept saying how bad she felt that I’d been treated so unfairly and how she was going to do something to set things right.
She even went to the Queen to plead my case, and the Queen had snapped that Jess had overstepped her position and that whatever happened to me was none of her business. Then she ordered Jess to work a double shift as punishment for her insolence.
Broke my heart.
For seven whole days until the Dream & Do ceremony, I had to go around pretending that the only reason I’d been allowed to stay until the end of the internship was because the Queen didn’t want to cover a sixty-dollar bus ticket to send me back to Bridgewater.
Every morning I walked Tinker Bell and dressed in my dove-gray gown and brought my boss her tray of newspapers and tiny food as if nothing had changed. At night Ian and I would sneak off to swim at the old gristmill and make out on the beach under the stars. When we weren’t kissing—and we did a lot of kissing—we would lie back on the sand and plan the next summer. Everything was perfect, except for one major glitch that I needed to fix ASAP.
On my second-to-last day at Fairyland, I summoned my nerve to take the Queen aside. “I have something to ask you,” I said, anxious not to appear disgraceful in any way. “It has to do with the Dream and Do—”
She stopped me. “I know what you’re going to say, Zoe. I had the feeling you might change your mind. That’s why we want you to be part of the Fairyland family.”
It will always be a highlight of my life when the two winners were announced and Jess, crying and laughing for joy, gave me a huge hug. “You did it, Zoe.”
“You did it,” I said, hugging her right back. “Now, quick, you’d better get up there before Valerie climbs over everyone and grabs your money.”
With one last smile of gratitude, Jess took her spot next to Ian, who gave me a thumbs-up, even though only a half hour before he’d told me that turning down the grant, while kind and sacrificial and all that, was just plain stupid.
“It’s not like you don’t need the money, too, you know,” he’d said when we’d managed to steal a minute alone. “What about your mom’s leftover medical bills and your college tuition?”
I knew what really had him worried: that because I hadn’t won the Dream & Do, I wouldn’t join him here next summer to corral a new herd of interns, and I thought that was really sweet.
“Got it covered,” I’d said, slipping my arms around his neck and pressing his nose to mine. “Since Jess doesn’t know how all this works, she doesn’t expect to come back. It’ll be you and me next June, Ian, so be good until then.”
He’d grinned. “But it’s so much more fun being bad.” And then he’d kissed me in a way that was absolutely wicked.
That’s what I was thinking about—kissing Ian and how great next summer would be—as the Queen presented the twenty-five-thousand-dollar checks and awards. Afterward she gave a speech praising Ian’s upbeat attitude, his excellence as Puss ’n Boots, his willingness to help “a certain prince” learn how to ride horses on his off-hours, his stellar performance as Prince Charming, and, finally, “going above and beyond” to insure that Sage Adams signed on as the Fairyland spokesman—which was a little white lie, since Sage had already signed, but whatever.
Turning to Jess, the Queen applauded the “indomitable Wow! spirit” Jess displayed in her gripping portrayal of Red Riding Hood and, later, as Cinderella, a role she embraced with “unprecedented enthusiasm,” working both the morning breakfasts and tuck-in services at the resort, alway
s cheerfully and willingly, never a complaint.
“Last,” the Queen said, zeroing in on me, “there is an unsung heroine here who gave of herself so willingly that she insisted I not publicly afford her credit. This girl requires no Dream and Do grant, because she is already a doer who, I am certain, is fully capable of making all her dreams come true.”
Well, maybe not all my dreams, I thought, smiling to Ian, who was smiling back. But most. Which was fine, since I’d learned that getting most of what you wish for in life is often just as good as getting it all.
Excerpt from Sarah Strohmeyer’s
SMART GIRLS GET WHAT THEY WANT
I’ve decided Halloween when you’re sixteen pretty much epitomizes the concept of adolescent purgatory.
On the one hand, the kid in you can’t believe the days of harassing neighbors for sugar loot have swiftly come to an end. And yet, the prospect of beating aside four-year-olds for the last Giant Pixy Stix on the block seems somehow wrong.
For years, Neerja, Bea, and I have managed to deal with this moral dilemma by getting together to watch The Blair Witch Project, which is good for a laugh because inevitably Bea, hopped up on a mega-mix bag of Tootsie Rolls and Starbursts, will yell, “Follow the river. Follow the river, you idiots. Seriously, just how stupid are you?”
I’d so miss that this year.
This year, because Halloween fell on a Saturday, the day before her brother’s birthday, Bea’s parents were taking her and George out to dinner at Legal Sea Foods. I’m sure this is exactly how Bea’s brother wants to celebrate the big two-oh, by listening to his father bicker with a waitress over the price of oysters instead of going with his friends to a Halloween party on campus. But, when you’re Harry Honeycutt’s kid, you tend not to disagree.
Neerja, meanwhile, was stuck babysitting The Things while her parents, attired in matching clown suits, attempted to cheer up/frighten to death Dr. Padwami’s elderly patients. After that, the whole Padwami clan was off to a party of doctors—which left me to celebrate Halloween alone, with Marmie.
How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True Page 19
