by Chris Colfer
There were plates of mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese, oven-roasted chicken with carrots and peas, and freshly baked rolls. Their kitchen table looked like the cover of a cookbook.
Just when they thought they couldn’t possibly eat any more, their grandmother pulled a huge birthday cake out of the oven. The twins were amazed; they hadn’t even realized she had been baking one. She sang “Happy Birthday,” and the twins blew out the candles.
“Now, open your presents!” Grandma said. “I’ve been collecting for you all year!”
They opened their boxes and were flooded with knickknacks from all the countries their grandmother had been to.
Alex was given copies of her favorite books in other languages: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in French, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in German, and Little Women in Dutch. Conner got a pile of candies and tacky T-shirts that said things like “My crazy Grandma traveled to India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
They both received several figurines of famous structures, like the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Taj Mahal.
“It’s crazy to think that places like this actually exist in the world,” Alex said, holding an Eiffel Tower in her hand.
“You would be amazed to know what’s out there just waiting to be discovered,” their grandma said with a smile and a twinkle in her eye.
A day with very low expectations had turned into one of the best birthdays they’d ever had.
As the night grew later, the visit with their grandmother began to come to a bittersweet end. Since their dad had died, they never saw their grandmother for more than a day at a time, and there were always a few months between each visit. She was always so busy with her travels.
“When do you leave?” Alex asked her grandmother.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “As soon as I take you to school.”
The twins’ postures sank a bit.
“What’s the matter?” asked their grandmother, sensing their spirits sink.
“We just wish you could stay longer, Grandma. That’s all,” Conner said.
“We really miss you when you’re gone,” Alex added. “Things are so gloomy here without Dad, but you make everything seem like it’s going to be okay.”
Their grandmother’s constant smile faded slightly, and her gaze drifted off toward the window. She stared blankly into the night sky and took a deep breath.
“Oh, kiddos, if I could spend every day with you, I would,” Grandma said longingly, perhaps more disheartened than she intended to show. “But sometimes life hands us certain responsibilities—not because we want them, but because we were meant to have them—and it’s our duty to see to them. All I can ever think about is how much I miss you two and your dad when I’m away.”
It was hard for Alex and Conner to understand. Did she not want to travel as much as she did?
Their grandmother looked back at them; her eyes were bright with a new idea.
“I almost forgot. I have one more gift for you!” Grandma said, and jumped up and skipped into the next room.
She returned carrying a large, old book with a dark emerald cover titled The Land of Stories in gold writing. Alex and Conner knew what the book was as soon as they saw it. If their childhood could be symbolized by an object, it was this book.
“It’s your old storybook!” Alex proclaimed. “I haven’t seen that in years!”
Their grandmother nodded. “It’s very old and has been with our family for a long time,” Grandma told them. “I take it with me everywhere I go and read it to the children in other countries. But now I want you two to have it.”
The twins were shocked by the gesture.
“What?” Conner asked. “We can’t take your book, Grandma. That’s The Land of Stories. It’s your book. It’s always been so important to you.”
Their grandmother opened the book and flipped through the pages. The entire room filled with its musty-paper aroma.
“That’s very true,” said Grandma. “This book and I have spent a lot of time together over the years, but the best times were when I read it to you. So I’d like to pass it down to you now. I don’t need it anymore; I have all the stories memorized anyway.”
She handed it to them. Alex hesitated but finally accepted the book from her grandmother. It didn’t feel right to take it. It was like receiving an heirloom from a relative who was still alive.
“Whenever you’re feeling down, on the days you miss your dad the most or when you just wish I were here, all you have to do is open it up and we’ll all be together in spirit, reading along,” Grandma told them. “Now, it’s getting late, and you have school tomorrow. Let’s get ready for bed.”
They did as she asked. Even though they were too old for it, their grandmother insisted on tucking them into their beds like old times.
Alex took The Land of Stories with her to bed that night. She gently flipped through the old pages, being careful not to tear them.
Seeing all the colorful illustrations of the places and characters again made her feel like she was reading an old scrapbook of sorts. She loved spending time reading about fairy-tale characters more than anything. They had always felt so real and accessible to her. They were the best friends she had ever had.
“I wish we got to choose which world we lived in,” Alex said, running her fingers over the illustrations. They were so inviting.
In her hands was a world unlike the one she lived in. It was a world unaltered by political corruption or technology, a world where good things came to good people, and a world she wanted to be a part of with all her being.
Alex imagined what it would be like to be a character in her own fairy tale: the forests she’d run through, the castles she’d live in, and the creatures she’d befriend.
Eventually, Alex’s eyelids began to feel heavy. She closed The Land of Stories, placed it on her nightstand, clicked off her lamp, and began to drift off to sleep. She was just about to fade into unconsciousness when she heard a funny noise.
A low humming sound filled her room.
“What in the world?” Alex said to herself, and opened her eyes to see what it was. She saw nothing. “That’s strange,” she said.
She closed her eyes once more and began to drift back to sleep. The humming noise began to buzz through the room again.
Alex sat up and looked around her room and finally found what was making the noise. It was coming from inside The Land of Stories on her nightstand and, to her amazement, the pages were unmistakably glowing.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LAND OF STORIES
Alex had been acting strange all week. Conner had noticed right away, because she wasn’t as talkative and upbeat as she usually was. Instead, she was very quiet and looked like she was in a deep state of confusion.
When they ate breakfast, she barely acknowledged it when her brother said, “Good morning.” During school, she stopped raising her hand as much. After school, she barely said a word to Conner while they walked home. And as soon as they got home, Alex would run up the stairs and lock herself in her bedroom for the rest of the day.
“Are you feeling okay?” Conner eventually asked her. “You seem different.”
“Yes, I’m just tired,” Alex said.
Conner knew she must be tired, because she didn’t seem to sleep anymore. Every time he had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water or use the bathroom that week, the lights in his sister’s bedroom were still on, and he could hear her rustling about inside, working on something.
He didn’t have to be a genius to know that his sister was dealing with more than just insomnia. He had seen enough health videos at school to know that girls his sister’s age were expected to start going through mood swings and changes, but Alex had become another person entirely. Something very serious was bothering her, and she was keeping it to herself.
“Can I borrow some of your pencils?” a wide-eyed and wide-awake Alex asked him late one night.
It was like a peacock asking to borrow some feathers. He wasn’t certain how to handle the request. Surely she wasn’t still doing homework at this hour?
“Don’t you have, like, hundreds?” Conner asked her.
“Yes… but I’ve lost them all,” she said.
He shared the few that he had with her. Alex took them and quickly disappeared into her room again; she didn’t even seem to mind that they were chewed on or were missing the erasers.
The next night, Conner kept waking up to a peculiar humming sound coming from Alex’s room. It was quiet but had a strong vibration that he could feel as much as he could hear.
“Alex?” Conner said, knocking on his sister’s door. “What is that sound? I’m trying to sleep, and it’s driving me crazy!”
“It’s just a bee. I shooed him out the window!” a frantic Alex responded from behind the door.
“A bee?” a puzzled Conner asked.
“Yes, a very big bee. It’s mating season, you know, so they’re quite aggressive this time of year,” Alex called out.
“Err… all right…” Conner said, and went to bed.
But these happenings were nothing compared to the events during the next day at school.
“Can anyone tell me the names of the rivers that ran through ancient Mesopotamia?” Mrs. Peters asked the class during a history lesson. As usual, she had no volunteers.
“Anyone?” Mrs. Peters asked. Everyone was looking at Alex and expecting her hand to shoot into the air any second, but Alex was just staring at the floor. She wasn’t paying any attention to anything.
“The Tigris and Euphrates,” Mrs. Peters informed the class. “Can anyone tell me what the area between these two rivers is believed to be?” She asked the question in Alex’s direction, but it was no use: Alex was lost in her own thoughts.
“Miss Bailey, perhaps you know the answer?” Mrs. Peters pleaded.
“To what?” asked Alex, snapping out of her trance.
“The question,” Mrs. Peters said.
“Oh…” Alex said. “No, I don’t.” She rested her head on her hand and continued staring at the floor.
Mrs. Peters and the rest of the class didn’t understand what was happening. Alex always knew the answers. How was the class going to function without her?
“The cradle of civilization…” Mrs. Peters told the class, answering the question. “Many believe that mankind started there—Miss Bailey!”
Alex sat up quickly in her seat. The most shocking thing that had ever happened in the classroom had occurred: Alex Bailey had dozed off in the middle of class!
“I—I—I am so sorry, Mrs. Peters!” Alex pleaded. “I don’t know what came over me! I haven’t been sleeping very well lately!”
Mrs. Peters was staring at her as if she had just witnessed a gruesome rural animal give birth. “That’s… that’s all right,” the teacher said. “Do you need to see the nurse?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m just a little sleepy,” Alex said. “I promise that’ll never happen again!”
Conner had been watching the whole thing like it was a train wreck. All he could do was shake his head. What had happened to Alex? Where was his real sister? She was turning into him!
The strange humming sound Conner had heard the night before suddenly filled the classroom. Alex sat straight up in her seat, anxious; her eyes grew larger than they had ever been before. A few of the other students looked around, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.
“Can anyone tell me the technologies Mesopotamia brought into the Bronze Age?” Mrs. Peters asked, oblivious to the humming. “Anyone?” she asked again.
Alex’s hand shot straight into the air.
“Yes, Miss Bailey?” Mrs. Peters happily called on her.
“May I use the restroom?” Alex peeped.
Mrs. Peters sighed with disappointment. “Yes, you may,” she replied.
Before she had finished granting Alex permission to leave the classroom, Alex had already jumped out of her seat, grabbed her school bag, and headed out the door.
Conner watched his sister leave. His eyes were bulging with suspicion. Why had she taken her backpack with her to the bathroom?
He had to know what was going on. He was going to confront his sister here and now at school, where she had no place to run and no bedroom to lock herself into.
“Mrs. Peters?” Conner called out.
“Yes, Mr. Bailey?” Mrs. Peters asked.
“Can I see the nurse?” he asked.
“What for?” she asked.
He hadn’t thought this far into his plan. “Um… my elbow hurts,” Conner said.
Mrs. Peters stared at him blankly. She may have believed him more if he had told her he was a dinosaur. “Your elbow hurts?” she asked.
“Yes, really bad. I banged it on my desk, and now it’s just killing me,” Conner said, clutching his perfectly fine elbow.
Mrs. Peters squinted and rolled her eyes, two of her trademark indications of annoyance in one expression. “Fine,” the teacher said. “But I’m going to have to write you a pass—”
Conner was out the door before she could finish her sentence.
Meanwhile, Alex burst into the girls’ restroom. She quickly looked underneath all the stalls to make sure she was alone. She zipped open her school bag, pulled out The Land of Stories, and set it on top of a sink; it was glowing and humming more than ever.
“Please turn off! Please turn off!” Alex said to the book. “I’m at school! I can’t get caught with you here!”
The sound and shine slowly faded, and The Land of Stories returned to being just a normal book. Alex sighed with relief but panicked once more when someone else suddenly charged inside the restroom. It was her brother.
“Bees don’t have mating seasons, Alex,” Conner said with a tightened brow and his hands on his hips. “I looked it up. They come from colonies just like ants, even the big ones. They don’t have schedules.”
“Conner, what are you doing in here? You can’t be in the girls’ bathroom!” Alex shouted.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on!” Conner demanded. “You’ve been lying to me all week. I know something’s up; I have ‘twin-tuition.’ ”
“ ‘Twin-tuition’?” Alex asked sarcastically.
“I made it up,” Conner said. “It means I know when something’s bothering you, even if you tell me nothing is. At first I thought you were just having girl issues—”
“Oh, Conner, please!” Alex interjected.
“Then, after all the strange buzzing noises and late nights, I figured Mom must have gotten you a cell phone and didn’t want me to know about it. But then I remembered you have no friends, so who would be calling and texting you?”
Alex grunted. Now he was being accusative and rude.
“But I know you well enough to know that it would take something much worse to make you act this way,” Conner said. “You’re quiet, you don’t know any of Mrs. Peters’s answers, and you’re falling asleep in class! You’re acting like me! So just tell me, what’s your problem?”
Alex didn’t say a word; she just stared at her feet. She was so ashamed at how she had been acting, but she knew no one would believe her if she told them why she had been that way, except maybe her brother.
Conner looked around the girls’ bathroom. “Gosh, it’s so nice in here. The boys’ bathroom looks like the bottom of a hazardous waste barrel…. Wait, why do you have Grandma’s book with you?”
“I don’t know what’s going on!” Alex burst into the loud and awkward tears one cries when exhausted and overly stressed.
Conner took a step back for his own protection. He had never seen his sister so hysterical.
“At first I thought I was hallucinating!” Alex said. “I thought maybe I was having a reaction to something Grandma made us for dinner. That was the first night it happened! But then it kept happening, so I knew it wasn’t a reaction!”
“Alex,
what are you talking about?” Conner asked.
“The Land of Stories book!” Alex yelled. “It glows! It hums! Every day it gets louder and brighter! I’ve lost so much sleep trying to figure out how and why it does it! It breaks all the laws of science!”
“Ah…” Conner said with raised eyebrows. “Alex, I think we should go see the nurse—”
“You must think I’m insane!” Alex told him. “Anyone would come to that conclusion unless they saw it themselves. But I promise I’m telling the truth!”
“I don’t think you’re insane,” Conner lied, starting to think his sister was definitely going insane.
“It happens once or twice a day,” Alex said. “I was afraid Mom would find it, so I brought it to school; the last thing she needs to worry about is a possessed book lying around her house.”
Conner didn’t know what to say. He briefly imagined the future trips he and his mother would take to see his sister in the local asylum and the wisecracks he would make about the cool white jacket she got to wear.
Clearly, his sister had lost her mind, but after all they’d been through, he couldn’t blame her. He kept thinking about how his dad would have handled this situation. What story would he have used to comfort Alex?
“Alex,” Conner said with understanding eyes. “We’ve been through a lot in the last year. It’s perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed and—”
The humming started again. They looked back at The Land of Stories on the sink; to Alex’s relief and Conner’s horror, it was glowing.
Conner jumped back against the wall as if he were in the presence of an explosive.
“The Land of Stories book!” Conner yelled. “It glows! It hums!”
“I told you!” Alex said.
Conner’s mouth was opened so wide, it was almost touching his chest. “Is it radioactive?” he asked.
“I doubt it,” Alex told him. She reached for the book.
“Don’t touch it, Alex!” Conner shouted.
“Relax, Conner,” Alex reassured him. “I’ve been dealing with it all week.”
Using one finger, she flicked the book open, and the entire restroom was illuminated. All the illustrations and writing had disappeared, and the pages seemed to be made out of pure light.
