The Very Little Princess

by Marion Dane Bauer

  Mr. Simmons sent her to the principal, Ms. Whittenbottom. And at the exact same point in Rose’s story, Ms. Whittenbottom sent her back to her classroom. Which was, of course, the next best thing to being sent home.

  Dawn and Melanie, the girls who sat in front of Rose, had lots of practice rolling their eyes that day. They did it when Rose first came into the classroom. They did it when she was explaining herself to Mr. Simmons. They did it when she was sent to the principal and when she came back.

  They looked at one another across the desks each time and lifted their gaze to the ceiling. It was as if something odd about Rose were written there. Then they looked back at one another in that meaningful way again.

  Their look said … well, you know exactly what it said. I don’t need to explain.

  Rose told herself she didn’t care. She just set about creating a second throne room for the princess. Inside her desk she set her math and spelling books on one side. She stacked social studies and language arts on the other. She threw out all the old papers that filled the space between them and blew the crumbs off a fat pink eraser. It made a fine throne.

  She even found a small notebook with some blank pages and several broken crayons. (Most of Rose’s crayons were broken.) Then she slipped Regina from her pocket, holding a finger to her lips to warn her to be still, and put her on the throne. She propped the desktop open a bit with another eraser to let in some light so the princess could draw.

  With all that finished, Rose turned her attention to Mr. Simmons. He was at the chalkboard talking about adjectives. Rose pretended to be extremely interested in adjectives.

  Strangely, the day whizzed by. Having a tiny princess in her desk made every moment more interesting. Or if lessons about adjectives weren’t exactly interesting, they passed more quickly than usual.

  Rose kept slipping her hand into her desk to make sure Regina was really there. Had she dreamed her? No! There she was!

  This was what she had needed all her life, a tiny, walking, talking doll made out of china. She just hadn’t known it before now.

  Each time Rose reached for Regina, the doll touched her. She tapped a fingernail or ran a china finger across Rose’s wrist. The touch was hard—hard as china—and cold—cold as china, too—but every single time it made Rose glow.

  When the school bell rang, Rose tucked Regina into her pocket again and hurried home. When she got there, though, she didn’t go in. She waved to her mother, who was watering her plants at the living room window, and headed for the woods behind the house.

  There they walked and talked. At least Rose walked. The princess rode and gave directions.

  “Let’s climb that tree.” (One bottom limb of an old oak tree dipped almost to the ground, so Rose simply walked up it. If the princess was impressed, she didn’t say so.)

  “Are you brave enough to cross that fierce river?” (It was a bubbling creek, and Rose was.)

  “Look! Flowers! I told you I needed flowers.” (Shy snowdrops, but they wilted almost as soon as Rose picked them.)

  Rose made it back to the house just barely in time for dinner. What a day it had been! Wasn’t it amazing how fine the world could be when it was shared?

  “Did something good happen today?” her dad asked, studying her beaming face.

  Rose smiled and nodded, but she didn’t try to explain. What could she say? Regina sat on the edge of her plate and was silent, too.

  When Rose went upstairs to her room and shut the door, however, the argument began.

  “You aren’t going to sleep again tonight, are you?” Regina asked.

  Something about the question made Rose cross. “Of course I’m going to sleep,” she said. “I sleep every night. Just like I eat every day. And I breathe, too. And I’m going to go on breathing. Every single minute.” She plopped the princess down on her bed, a little harder than she needed to.

  “What’s wrong with you humans?” Regina shouted in her shrill voice. “Don’t you know better than—”

  Rose looked up to see Sam standing in her doorway. He’d been late for dinner and held a plate in one hand, heaped with mashed potatoes and chicken and peas. “What’s going on, pip-squeak?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Rose replied. She snatched Regina up and whipped her behind her back.

  “It sounds like a regular ruckus.” Sam licked mashed potatoes off a chicken leg and took a big bite. His gaze traveled the room.

  He’d missed dinner the last couple of nights because of baseball practice, so Rose hadn’t yet had a chance to show him the doll. This hardly seemed the time for introductions, though.

  Sam leaned against the doorjamb, filling the doorway. He was tall and big-shouldered and … Well, everything about him was the giant economy size. He had a bush of tangled curls, very much like Rose’s.

  His dark eyes searched her face. Clearly he was waiting for a better answer than “nothing.”

  Rose tried again. “I was just … ah … I was practicing for the school play. I’m going to be a mouse, you know. One that gets its tail caught in a trap?” And she made her voice high and thin. “What’s wrong with you humans?” she squeaked. “Don’t you know better—”

  Sam laughed. Rose liked to make her brother laugh. His laugh was deep and as generously sized as he was.

  He took another bite of the chicken but didn’t take his eyes off her face. “What’s that behind your back?” he asked.

  “Behind my back?” Rose repeated. Even she could hear how guilty she sounded. Her voice squeaked again on the word back.

  Sam said nothing. He just put the chicken leg down, wiped his fingers on his pants, and held out his hand. Rose barely hesitated before she gave up. She could often fool her father, sometimes her mother, but never Sam.

  “It’s just this old doll,” she said. She held Princess Regina out without letting go of her. She hoped the silly thing would stay quiet a bit longer. “I found her in the attic. And I was playing with her, talking for her, you know? The way little kids do.” She leaned heavily on little kids because she wanted Sam to see how unimportant it all was. Something for little kids, not for a big boy like him.

  Princess Regina, for her part, seemed to have entered into the game. She lay rigidly in Rose’s hand as if she’d gone to sleep again. Rose was pretty sure the doll was faking. At least she hoped she was.

  But instead of glancing at her hand and then away again, Sam leaned close. His eyebrows rose until they practically vanished into his dark curls. “You’ve found Princess Regina!” he said.

  Rose started to nod, but she stopped cold. Princess Regina? Sam had called the doll Princess Regina! She hadn’t told him the doll’s name. She hadn’t told anyone.

  “How do you know she’s Princess Regina?” Rose demanded.

  “The same way you know, I’m sure,” he replied. “She told me.”

  Rose was going to set the record straight. The doll hadn’t given herself the name. Rose had come up with it herself!

  But before she could, the princess sat up in Rose’s hand. She looked at Sam and cried, “Why, Sammy! Just look at you. You’ve gotten to be enormous!”

  Chapter 6

  “Prickly as a Porcupine”

  The three of them sat together in the middle of the floor, talking. Rose told Sam everything while Princess Regina kept interrupting.

  Rose told Sam how she’d found the doll in the bottom of the trunk.

  Princess Regina said, “I don’t know what took you so long. You humans are so slow. I must have been in that stuffy trunk forever.”

  Rose told about the way her mother’s hand and hers had knocked into one another, sending the doll over the banister.

  Princess Regina cried, “You dropped me? You mean you actually dropped me? What a klutz! You’re lucky I wasn’t broken.”

  (Rose wondered why she was the lucky one. After all, it was Regina who didn’t get broken.)

  Rose told Sam about taking the doll to school for show-and-tell and about how she decided
not to show her after all.

  Princess Regina said, “What a shame. I’m sure the children would have been impressed.”

  Then Rose explained how Regina came alive in her hand as she ran out of the classroom.

  Princess Regina added, “And she was crying. Would you believe it? I thought I was going to drown in her stupid tears.”

  Now Rose got to the part about naming the doll. While she was telling that, a thought struck her. “The name I gave her—Princess Regina—it came from you!”

  “No.” Sam grinned. “It came from her.” He nodded toward the doll, who was perched on the toe of his sneaker. “She told me her name was Princess Regina a long time ago.”

  Rose shook her head, trying to clear the jumble of her thoughts. “But,” she pointed out to Sam, “you used to call me that!”

  Sam shrugged. “What can I say? I’m not good at making things up the way you are. I named you after the only other princess I knew.”

  “And then I gave the name back to her!” Rose said, amazed at the circle of events.

  “I told you,” Princess Regina said. “You didn’t give me anything. Don’t you think I know my own name?” And she went on like that.

  (You and I know, of course, that when Regina first woke she had forgotten her name entirely. So Rose actually did give it to her, even if the name had belonged to her before. But you can bet the princess would never admit that.)

  Rose shook her head and smiled at Sam over the fuming doll. He grinned back.

  Rose loved her brother so much that sometimes just looking at him made her heart ache.

  “How did you know about the doll?” she asked finally. “Did you find her in the attic, too?”

  Sam touched Princess Regina’s spun-gold hair. “Mom gave her to me,” he said, “when I was a little kid. Younger than you. I’m sure she’d been hoping to have a daughter to give her to. But she’d been waiting a long time. I guess she decided I’d have to do.”

  Rose ducked her head. She loved thinking about her mother hoping for her, waiting for her. She wasn’t sure she had lived up to all that waiting and hoping, though … or ever would.

  Then she thought about the fact that Hazel had given Princess Regina to Sam when he was younger than she was now. And yet she had never brought the doll out for her. Even when Rose had found Regina in the attic, her mother had clearly not wanted her to have her.

  Rose shook those thoughts away. To Sam she said, “So Princess Regina came awake for you, too?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at first. When Mom gave her to me, she was just a doll. And I wasn’t much interested in dolls, you know?”

  Rose grinned. The very thought of her big brother playing with a tiny china doll was funny.

  “I played with her a little bit,” he said. “I used to give her rides in my race cars when they were going very slowly … no crashes. Then I put her on a shelf in my room so nothing bad would happen to her. I knew she was important to Mom. I didn’t pay much attention to her after that until …” But he didn’t say until when.

  Rose stared up into Sam’s face. “What happened?” she asked.

  Sam lifted his great shoulders and let them fall again. “I’m not sure. One afternoon I had a fight with my buddy Brian. A pretty bad one. Fists and a bloody nose. Brian’s nose, not mine.”

  He stopped as if he wasn’t going to say more, but when neither Rose nor Regina spoke, he started again. “I came home to hole up in my room, and I took the doll off the shelf. I don’t know why, exactly. I was feeling awful, and I just needed something to mess with. I guess I was kind of blubbering. Then—I never knew what happened—there she was, talking to me, walking all over me, telling me what to do and how to do it. I was …”

  He stopped, looked hard at Regina, and let out a low laugh. “Surprised isn’t a big enough word for what I was. I never understood how it happened. All I knew was that I was there, alone in my room feeling pretty bad, and suddenly I had this big secret. The little doll Mom had trusted to me could move. She could talk, too! Yell, actually.”

  Rose could see the moment exactly. Hadn’t it happened to her in almost the same way? She loved that! She and her big brother shared a secret, the best secret ever!

  “I couldn’t tell anybody,” Sam said. “I sure couldn’t go back to school and tell my buddies that I had a little dolly at home that walked and talked.” He ran his fingers through his curls and shook his head. “I almost told Mom, but then … Well, what could I say? ‘This little doll you gave me, she’s a princess, you know’…? I didn’t think even Mom would …”

  Again, he stopped.

  A late-to-bed robin chirruped outside the window. The robin fell silent, too.

  Rose nodded. It was so comforting to know that Sam had felt the same way.

  “So,” Sam continued, “the next day I made up with Brian. Then I invited him to come home with me after school. I wanted to let him see for himself.”

  “And did he see?” Rose asked.

  Sam shook his head. “When we got back here … there she was. She was sitting on the bed where I’d left her. And she was … nothing. She was just a doll again. You know? It didn’t matter how hard I shook her. Or what I said. She wouldn’t say a word.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Brian and I had another fight. He told me I was full of it, talking to a stupid doll. I punched him again.”

  Rose let out the breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding. “Was that the last time?” she asked. “Not you and Brian. Princess Regina. Did she ever …?”

  “Never,” he said. “That was the last time. And after that … not long after that, I guess, I gave her back to Mom. I told her the doll was nice and all, but I didn’t want her. Mom was kind of sad, I could tell, but she took her back. And I never saw her again.”

  “Until now,” Rose said.

  “Until now,” he agreed. “I even got to thinking I’d dreamed the whole thing. It was so strange. And it lasted such a short time.” He paused to study Regina, then turned his gaze to Rose. “It’s really important that nobody knows about this. No other kids, no adults, either. Bad things will happen if people find out … bad things for her.” He pointed to the tiny doll.

  What kind of bad things? Rose wondered, but she knew. The world wasn’t ready for china dolls that could walk and talk. Certainly the world wasn’t ready for a three-and-one-quarter-inch princess!

  “What do you think makes her go to sleep again,” Rose asked, “after she’s been awake?”

  “I think she likes messing with us,” Sam answered without missing a beat. “I think she’s prickly as a porcupine and likes messing with us.”

  Rose laughed. That perfectly described what she’d already seen of Regina.

  Apparently Princess Regina wasn’t equally pleased with the description, though. She pushed herself off the toe of Sam’s sneaker and stomped her feet in the carpet. And then, probably because feet that are only a quarter of an inch long make no sound at all when stomped in carpet, she tipped her head back and howled, “I am not prickly!”

  Though, of course, you and I know better.

  Now, I’ve never been a three-and-one-quarter-inch doll myself, but I’d guess being prickly would be easy if you were that small. Think about it. You would be so tiny that people could pick you up and put you down wherever they chose … whenever they chose, too.

  Even worse, if they weren’t paying close attention, they might not see you at all.

  And perhaps that was why Regina needed to be prickly. Folks would be forced to pay attention.

  So she stomped her foot in the soft carpet and howled, “I am not prickly!” And then she added, as though it explained everything—and perhaps it did—“I am a princess!”

  Chapter 7

  Into the Green and Blooming Summer

  And a princess she remained. But being a princess didn’t keep her from having a good time. In fact, Regina couldn’t remember ever having as much fun as she had with her new servant, as odd
ly unreliable as Rose was.

  Rose could come up with the most amazing adventures.

  One night, as Regina lay on the pillow next to Rose, bored with this silly sleeping business, she was amazed to see the girl suddenly sit up. Rose studied the fat-faced moon peering through her window. Then she got out of bed, tucked Regina into the elastic of her pajamas, and crawled out her second-floor bedroom window.

  Regina closed her eyes as Rose swung from the sill. “Remember,” she cried, “I break!”

  But Rose just caught hold of the trellis leaning against the wall and climbed down to the moon-washed grass. Once there, she held the princess high in the air and danced and danced.

  When she tried to climb the trellis to go back to her room, though, it broke under her weight. She had to go around to the front porch and ring the bell to get back in.

  Rose’s dad came to the door looking bed-rumpled and bewildered and even a bit cross. (Her dad was rarely cross.) Still, Rose giggled, and Regina couldn’t help but join in … very quietly.

  Rose came up with adventures during the day, too. After school or on weekends, they explored the woods behind Rose’s house again and again.

  They climbed back into the attic to search for more treasure. (The closest they found to treasure was an old teddy bear, leaking sawdust. Regina was glad when Rose put him back into the trunk. He was awfully big. What if he decided to come awake … and bite?)

  They checked out the town, too.

  They stopped at the empty school playground. Rose would sit on a swing, wind it up, then let it spin until even Regina was dizzy.

  They peered through the windows of the grocery store and the drugstore and Kathi’s Kut and Kurl.

  But better than anything else were their visits to the hardware store. It wasn’t the bins of screws and the cans of paint that drew them. It wasn’t even the balls and scooters and dolls that never woke. It was the dollhouse sitting all by itself on a shelf in the back of the store.