by Shannon Hale
Lizzie shrugged. “I didn’t hear you speaking up with alternate questions, Catworm.”
Maddie laughed. “It’s catchy, right?”
Kitty did not appear to think it was catchy.
“Oh, Bookworm,” Maddie said, presumably addressing the Narrator, though the Narrator had expressly expressed that Narrators must never be directly addressed.
Without warning, Giles Grimm vanished, and where he’d been standing a pile of books clattered to the floor.
“Oh, no, he disappeared!” Lizzie said. “Just when I had a better question about whether or not to behead Kitty.”
Kitty sniffed the books. “He didn’t disappear. Disappearing things have a smell like the echo of a lemon. I think those books might actually be him.”
“Oooh,” Lizzie breathed out. Things changing into other things suddenly and without warning was a refreshing change of pace and slightly Wonderlandian. That giddy, popcorn-belly feeling returned.
Wonderland is coming to me.…
A small nag caught in her thoughts. In Wonderland, Giles might have shrunk, or enlarged, or folded up on himself, but when things changed back home, they were still what they were. Not a person into a pile of books. That was magic, certainly, but was it the right kind? The wonderlandiful kind?
“Should I put the Grimmy books in my hat and take him with us?” Maddie asked.
“I wouldn’t,” Kitty said. “What if he turns back?”
“While stuck inside my hat?” Maddie said. “Good point.”
“I didn’t mean to make a good point,” Kitty whined. “Making good points is not what I do!”
“Leave the book-man be,” said Lizzie. “We’ll tell Headmaster Grimm about him when he gets back.”
“If he gets back,” Maddie said, and then coughed. “Sorry. Frog in my throat. Ribbit.”
Maddie stuck out her tongue, revealing a small blue frog perched upon it. The frog leaped off and hopped away. Maddie’s eyes went wide.
Lizzie smiled. Wonderland found me.
CEDAR WOOD WAS FEELING LIKE A HOLLOWED-out log. Though she’d fled Raven’s room the moment the session ended, her unhappy encounter with Poppy seemed to chase after her. Quick steps down the corridor rattled her knee and elbow joints with a jangle of metal and wood, but she didn’t slow down till she reached the safety of her dorm room.
Cedar opened her paint box. Black paint smeared on her index finger and seemed to tingle, as if beckoning her to lose herself in her art. Cedar knew the sensation was as false as everything else she felt. If I were you, Faybelle had said, I’d do anything to finally be real. Perhaps Cedar was not a person at all but just a piece of wood who imagined she was a person.
She squeezed her creaky eyelids shut, trying to close off thoughts about wood and people and what she was or wasn’t. Bits of sadness—imagined or not—were already worming into her heartwood. Maybe she could paint them away.
Today she set aside the traditional canvas and instead placed a wide wooden plank on her easel. She started to paint a scene of a garden early in the morning, when the colors were still hushed and full of grays, more shadow than not, shapes not yet fully revealed.
The paint couldn’t completely hide the wood plank, its rough grain, lines, swirls, and knotholes as much a part of the picture as what she painted over them. It took some time before Cedar realized she was painting her own experience, bringing a kind of life to the dead wood but never changing what it was, never hiding it completely.
And that’s what she loved about art. It spoke the unspeakable, revealed truth before the mind had a chance to think it.
It’s not a real garden, Cedar thought, standing back to look at her painting, but perhaps still worthwhile?
From her pouch of art tools, she took out a knife to sharpen a quill she liked to use for making thin lines. The knife slipped and cut into her finger. That wasn’t unusual. Cedar wasn’t particularly careful.
But then a thin line of red welled up along the cut. At first, she thought it was paint, but it grew. A red bead, fat as a honeybee, bled out and dropped from her finger, splashing onto the purple carpet. Cedar felt—truly felt—a sensation she had never experienced before: a slicing, hot, sharp fierceness, a hugeness as big as life trapped in the tip of her finger. She whispered the word: “Pain.”
Cedar Wood’s finger was bleeding.
She shouted toward Cerise Hood’s side of their dorm room, “Look! Look, my finger is bleeding!”
But Cerise wasn’t there. Cedar examined her fingertip again. It felt softer than normal. She patted herself, her hands bumping against the brass pegs at her joints. She traced the knot of wood that marked her left thigh like an oval birthmark. Still there. And yet, when she lifted her finger to her mouth to suck on it, she tasted blood—salty and metallic and warm. Not just imagined the taste. Really tasted it. Like the difference between looking at a photo of a beach and actually putting bare feet in the sand.
Cedar giggled and performed a short dance that was a burst of joy, a wobble of uncertainty, and a flinch of fear all at the same time. Was something marvelous happening? Or something scary?
The bubble and rush of emotions made it impossible to stay still. Cedar ran out the door and down the hall.
“Help? I think?” Cedar called out. “Or maybe hooray? I’m not sure, but one of the two!”
No one answered.
She knocked on Maddie’s door, finding it open but no one inside. No one except Maddie’s pet dormouse, Earl Grey, who was standing on Maddie’s tea table squeaking and strutting about. As Cedar drew closer, she could see he was wearing a dashing black silk shirt and trousers and holding up a tiny skull in one hand.
“Squeak squeak, squ-squeak squeak squeak?” he squeaked.
It appeared that Earl Grey was practicing a dramatic scene from Hamlet.
“Earl Grey?” Cedar said.
Earl Grey startled, dropped the skull, and leaned nonchalantly against a teacup as if he’d been just hanging out and not rehearsing his one-mouse show at all.
“Do you know where Maddie is?” Cedar asked.
Earl Grey shrugged, put back on his top hat, and leaped onto Cedar’s shoulder, eager to go with her to track Maddie down.
Across the hall, Gus and Helga’s door was ajar. Cedar couldn’t see them inside, but two heaps of breadcrumbs sat in the middle of their rug.
“Hello?” said Cedar.
Another new sensation crawled over her—a ticklish, cold, worrying sort of thing, like thousands of icy fingernails skipping down her limbs. Chills. Cedar had imagined chills before, but her imagination had failed to create the combination of pleasure and discomfort, the shudder and exhale.
Beneath her, the floor rolled as if the castle had started to gallop and then changed its mind. Cedar shook her head. Perhaps she was sick. Could she have contracted some rare wood disease that was causing her magic-enlarged imagination to overreact?
Out the window, Cedar spotted several small shapes dropping from the roof. Above the Crumbs’ room was Ashlynn’s balcony, and Cedar knew songbirds often congregated there. Had the songbirds been hurt and fallen? Cedar raced to the window but spotted no injured songbirds in the courtyard below, only a flock of dodoes, those odd-looking flightless birds, lurching around as if bewildered.
“I know how you feel,” Cedar said.
“Squeak,” said Earl Grey.
Cedar ran to Raven and Apple’s room. Raven had magical abilities, and whatever was happening just had to be magic.
As she raced up the stairs, again the castle seemed to burp, the stairs swaying under her feet. The warm stab in her fingertip traveled down her arm and into her chest, where it flared to a pain that was as sweet as it was agonizing. The pain left behind a strange and wondrous thumping as if something were moving inside her chest. Moving, like the waves of the ocean. The beating of a drum. The buzzing of a dragonfly’s wings. The rolling meters of a song. The everything of the world caught and moving inside her chest.
&
nbsp; Cedar ran harder, as if she could somehow catch up to whatever wondrousness was happening to her and seize it, hold on to it, and make it hers forever.
And Cedar ran even harder, as though she could somehow flee the frightening changes altering her body.
As she leaped onto the next floor, she heard several small, heavy things fall off her and bounce down the stairs. She didn’t turn to see what she’d left behind, her body in agony to be running so hard and yet burning with exquisite joy. She burst through Raven’s door.
“Raven!” she shouted. “Something’s—”
But she didn’t have to tell Raven that strangeness had erupted at Ever After High.
Apple was standing before a mirror, a gasp of horror escaping her throat. Raven’s hands were covering her mouth.
Apple turned as Cedar entered. The light from the window fell on Apple’s face, revealing a deep red coloring her round cheeks and moving outward to paint her whole face. Sticking out of the top of her head was a finger-sized piece of wood. Even as Cedar stared, a lime-green leaf sprouted from the stick and unfurled itself to face the sunlight. It was a stem.
Raven pointed at Cedar in shock and opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.
Cedar hugged her arms around her chest. She felt warmth, softness, aliveness. The brass pegs at her elbows and wrists were gone. She touched her knees—gone there, too. Those were what had dropped away on the stairs.
She dared to turn to a mirror. Her hair looked as it always had—warm brown, wavy, and heavy as frayed rope. Her dress was the same lavender and coral one she’d put on that morning. But if not for those details, she might have assumed she was looking at a stranger. Her dark brown limbs and face were smooth, no wood grain, no chipped spots where she’d bumped into something (like bandersnatch teeth). She blinked, and her eyes were wet. Two tears freed themselves from her lashes and rolled down her cheeks, leaving behind a cold, ticklish path.
She inhaled sharply for the first time, and she felt her chest—her lungs?—fill up, pressing against that constant winged, wave-ish, drumlike beating of a… a… a heart.
Her heart.
Her real heart beating in her chest.
She pressed her hands against the beating, crying faster with wonder and alarm and joy, so filled with the music of her aliveness she feared she might explode.
“Raven, what’s happening?” Cedar whispered.
But the only response was a single, frightened squawk.
LIZZIE, KITTY, AND MADDIE WALKED OUT of the library, sounds wafting over their heads like invisible birds. Suss-suss. Hiss-hoo. Waaaahhh. Lizzie wondered if she was hearing the books whisper to each other. Or if the air itself had come alive.
The cushioned chairs in the hall just outside the library door were huddled together as though in conversation. When the girls neared, they scattered, their short wooden forelegs making clumping noises like little hooves.
Lizzie felt so good she longed for a ripping game of croquet. She pretended her scepter was a flamingo mallet, lined it up, and swung at an imaginary hedgehog.
“Things are obviously changing,” Lizzie said.
“See?” Kitty said. “It was a pointless question.”
The rug beneath Lizzie’s feet rippled. Remembering her mother’s advice to avoid rugs, Lizzie stepped off, just as a tasseled end flicked to where her feet had been.
Outside the window, a stone gargoyle carved into the school’s facade flapped its wings. And then the window Lizzie was looking through blinked. Startled, she took a step back.
“Well, I never!” said Lizzie. It seemed bad-mannered to blink when someone was actively looking through you.
“This is Wonder-smacking awesome!” Maddie shouted.
Wonderland coming to find me.
Lizzie smiled so hard she felt like Kitty. Her adopted world was becoming what she, Lizzie Hearts, needed it to be! Perhaps soon all parts of Ever After would smell and feel and sound as perfectly extraordinary and Wondery as the Grove. Perhaps now she would not have to spend all her energy just trying to hide her homesickness.
But first, she would need to teach the new world some manners, blinking windows and such. Her mother would certainly expect this. There would be much Ruling and Ordering and Shaping Things Up.
Maddie cocked her head to one side. “This is a slice of strange pie. Why don’t we hear any screaming or whining or what’s-going-on-ing? Chair herds and window blinks are just the kind of world-spin that leaves the Ever Afterlings… well, troubled.”
“Perhaps they’ve finally come away from their senses,” said Lizzie.
“Maybe,” Maddie said. “Hey, Narrator, what are Raven and Apple doing?”
Maddie waited, eyebrows raised, mistakenly expecting the Narrator to break the rules and interact with her.
“Hmm, when the Narrator is being this secretsy and rule-ish, that means there’s something Big and Important happening that the Narrator is trying very hard not to reveal,” said Maddie.
It does not!
“So we should probably go check on Raven and Apple,” said Maddie. “Tell them what’s up.”
“Do we know what’s up?” Kitty asked.
“Well, we should act like it, even if we don’t,” Lizzie proclaimed. “Own the up!”
This was a quote from one of her mother’s cards:
Whether up or down, inside or out, it is yours.
Own the down. Own the up.
The girls made their way past another group of chairs chatting in an incomprehensible furniture language.
“What do you suppose they even have to talk about?” Lizzie asked. “It’s not like the life of furniture is particularly interesting.”
“Maybe they’re discussing ways to make life more interesting,” Kitty whispered.
The thought made Lizzie shiver.
She shook the shivers away. She would simply order the chairs to behave! If Wonderland was indeed coming to Ever After, Lizzie had no time to waste. She must be as queenly as her mother would be.
The door to the dorms didn’t look alive like a chair or blinky like a window, but when the three girls walked through, it made a disconcerting gulping noise.
“Ew,” Kitty said. “I feel like we’ve just been swallowed.”
“Halloo, friends,” Maddie shouted, entering Raven and Apple’s room. “Oh, nobody’s here.”
“Nobody’s anywhere, it seems,” Kitty purred.
The school was unusually empty today, and they hadn’t seen anyone since leaving the library. Anyone human, anyway.
“Our story appears to be a series of Looking Glass adventures without the glass,” Kitty said.
A little noise uncurled from deep within the room, like the whimpering of a pat of butter cornered by a piece of toast. Lizzie did not hear it, Kitty chose to ignore it, and Maddie uncharacteristically assumed Apple and Raven’s room wouldn’t contain anything like talking butter or aggressively warm toast.
“Wait!” Maddie said, questioning her assumptions after hearing what the Narrator had said. “There is someone in here.”
“We should get out of this school and find one of the teachers,” said Lizzie.
“Frighteningly sensible, Lizzie,” Kitty said.
Lizzie frowned. “You’re right. What is the matter with me?”
“Hello?” Maddie called out.
A tuft of dark hair popped up from behind a writing desk, followed by two brown eyes. “Maddie?” said a mouth, conceivably somewhere below the eyes.
“Cedar!” Maddie called, running to the girl and pulling her out and into a big hug. “You’re all meaty! How did that happen? And you’re shivering. Are you cold? No? Oh, scared, right. You came looking for Apple and Raven, too, didn’t you? But they’ve disappeared, just like Giles Grimm!”
“Not disappeared, just like Giles Grimm,” Kitty said, sniffing the room.
“They… they—” Cedar started, when a black bird perched on the writing desk squawked.
“Crow!
” Lizzie shouted, pointing at the bird as if accusing it of something.
“Raven,” Cedar whispered, and then pointed at a plump red apple on the floor. “And Apple.”
“Oooh!” Lizzie said with a little laugh. “Delicious!”
Cedar’s eyes widened in further shock.
“Not literally, I mean,” Lizzie muttered. “Who eats raw ravens anymore? And that apple, especially knowing it’s an Apple-apple, is bound to be much too sweet. And full of organs. Note to everyone—don’t eat that apple. It’s probably gross.”
The toilet flushed from inside the bathroom. The door opened, and a squat little crocodile about the height of Maddie walked out on its stubby hind legs. It carried a newspaper under one arm.
“Mornin’, ladies,” it said, dropping to all fours. “Feelin’ a bit peckish, what.”
“Peckish?” Lizzie asked, always willing to have a conversation with a crocodile. “Like, birdy?”
“Like ’ungry.” The crocodile was marching toward the Apple-apple.
The Raven-raven began dive-bombing the crocodile.
“Oy,” the crocodile shouted, swinging its head around. “Jus’ tryin’ a get breakfast, soddin’ bird!”
Maddie picked up the Apple-apple and put it safely in her hat. “C’mon, Raven,” she said, running for the door. “Let’s leave Mr. Hungry Teeth on his own.”
“Aaaaaah,” the crocodile bellowed, running at the lot of them. Lizzie stared at the teeth. They were fascinating. So many of them. She could do a lot with teeth like that. The teeth kept getting closer until suddenly the raven pecked her on the forehead.
“How dare you!” Lizzie shouted, and only then realized she might be on the crocodile’s menu. She took quick steps out the door, Cedar slamming it shut behind her.
“Where did that crocodile even come from?” Cedar asked, panting.
“Probably from the toilet,” Maddie said. “There’s loads of them in the sewers, you know.”
