“Hey! You’re okay!” Tinkerbell ran up and gave me a hug.
“Hey,” I hugged her back. “You, too.”
“Yeah, well, I almost wasn’t,” she shook her head. “I’m on the third floor, you know, and when the fire started, I was completely passed out! If I hadn’t heard the chirping alarms, well, then I probably wouldn’t have made it out.”
I felt sick.
I felt totally and completely sick at the idea that my friend could have gotten hurt.
“I’m glad you were okay,” I told her.
“Thanks. You too. Ya’ll doing okay?” She looked at Stacy and Wolf, who both nodded, but then Tinkerbell seemed to notice the absence of Belle.
She looked at me and raised an eyebrow, but I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to betray my roommate’s weird secret. I mean, I didn’t really understand why studying out of her room was supposed to be some sort of weird secret. Weren’t we allowed to study wherever we wanted to?
“Where’s Beauty?” She finally asked.
“Uh,” I said. I wasn’t ready to lie to Tinkerbell. Luckily, I didn’t have to.
“She had other plans, I guess,” Snow White strolled over and put her hands on her hips. How did she manage to look so perfect even in the middle of the night? It simply wasn’t fair. She definitely was using some sort of appearance enhancement products because no one just naturally looked that good.
No one.
“I guess,” I said.
“Guess she’s too good for the lot of you,” Snow White said. “Chasing after flowers and dreaming big.”
“Go away, Snow,” Stacy climbed into her hammock and closed her eyes. “It’s past your bedtime.”
“I’ll tell you when it’s past my bedtime!” Snow said.
Okay, so apparently, her insults needed some work.
“Pretty crazy, huh?” Tinkerbell said, and I could tell it was taking all of her courage to talk to Snow. I knew that Tinkerbell wasn’t the type of person who could get out of her comfort zone easily, so I was proud of her that she was trying. “A fire on our floor!”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Did you see anything?” Tink asked. “I mean, it started right by your bedroom, right?”
Snow White’s naturally pale skin seemed to turn a deep, crimson huge. Peculiar. She didn’t say anything at first. Her face just got more and more red. Finally, she screamed at Tinkerbell.
“Leave! Me! Alone!” She said. Then she stormed off across the room, flung open the door to the gymnasium, and took off down the hall. We all turned and looked at Tinkerbell, whose eyes were wide and filled with tears.
“Hey,” I said. “Just ignore her.”
“Yeah, she’s crazy,” Stacy said.
“And mean,” Wolf added.
“Maybe she is,” Tinkerbell said, shaking her head. “But I should have known better than to talk to her. I mean, I’m just a fairy.”
Her wings came out of her back just then, spreading big and wide and beautiful. They were lovely to look at, and I’d never seen anything quite like them. I was tempted to reach out and touch them, but I was able to hold myself back, thankfully.
I didn’t want to be rude to my friend, especially when she was hurting, but I made a mental note to ask her how a fairy’s wings worked. Were they something she could use all of the time? Could they only come out when she felt strong emotions? What exactly could she used her wings for?
“You’re more than that,” I said. “And you’re special.”
“And you’re our friend,” Wolf added.
“Yeah, don’t let her words get to you, kid,” Stacy said.
“Okay,” Tinkerbell said. “I’ll try.”
“You said the fire started near her room,” I pointed out. “What did you mean?”
“Well, I’m a few doors down from her, but yeah, the fire seemed to begin right around her bedroom, actually.”
“Did she cause it?” Wolf asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Tink shrugged. “Nobody really knows.”
I thought about it for a minute, but Tink was right. Nobody would ever really know, probably, exactly what had happened, but I thought that Snow White’s reaction was more than a little strange. There had been no reason for her to just randomly storm off.
None at all.
The other girls didn’t seem to think much about her outburst, but as I watched the other students in the room begin to calm down and prepare to go back to sleep, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something she wasn’t telling us.
Did she know what had caused the fire?
Did she know where Belle was?
Chapter 8
The next day, Belle still wasn’t there.
She didn’t come back the next day, either.
Or the next one.
We all moved back into the girl’s dormitory, but she still didn’t return from wherever she had gone that night.
A week went by, but no one seemed very concerned.
No one seemed to care that she was gone, except for me. At least, that’s how it felt. Each night, after my classes, I climbed into my hammock, and I looked over at the other side of the room. Belle’s empty hammock stayed there.
And there was nothing.
I kept finding myself drawn to her side of the room. I really shouldn’t even have considered touching her things. That was wrong, and mean, and more than a little creepy, but after ten days had gone by, I couldn’t help myself. Stacy and Wolf were out having dinner, but I had stayed in the suite.
It wasn’t that I planned to touch Belle’s stuff, but, well, it had been more than a week.
And I still hadn’t heard from her.
The teachers in our few shared classes didn’t seem to think much of her absence. Apparently, because Belle was a witchmaster student, she got a lot of leeway in whether or not she attended classes. We were both in Art in Magic together, as well as Spell Books. Anytime there was a new assignment given out, the teacher would look at me and simply say, “Make sure you give Belle the assignment.”
And I promised that I would, but I mean, where was she?
It had gone on for so long that it felt ridiculous and more than a little crazy.
It was time to do something.
If my time in the foster care system had taught me anything, it was that standing up for yourself was your own decision. Nobody else was going to do it for you. Nobody else was going to protect you. Kids were cutthroat and a lot of parents didn’t care. They couldn’t care. Someone like me, an orphan, would get pushed around from house to house until graduation. Then I’d be shoved off to fend for myself because that was just the way the world worked.
Well, that wasn’t going to be the way the world worked for Belle.
I wasn’t going to leave her to fend for herself.
As soon as the door to the suite closed, I counted to one hundred. I waited until I was certain that Stacy and Wolf wouldn’t be coming back for a forgotten item. Then I closed the door to my bedroom and looked at Belle’s side of the room.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we have?”
I walked over and surveyed the area. Really, I probably should have gone through her things sooner, but I kept half-expecting her to walk through the door and catch me in the act. And I still didn’t really think I had that many friends at the academy. I didn’t want to go burning bridges I didn’t have the time or energy to burn.
“Pink,” I said. “So much pink.”
It was a lot for one woman, but that was Belle. Her side of the room was very minimalistic, as was mine. Unlike my side, however, her things were all various shades of pink.
And they were all covered in roses.
She had paintings of roses and drawings of roses and pictures of roses on the wall. I walked over and looked at them a little more closely. She had a bit of an obsession, if I did say so myself. Maybe we should have called her Flower instead of Beauty.
I went to her li
ttle shelf on the wall, where she had several books. Nothing really stood out, though. She had a couple of storybooks and she had a little notebook, but there wasn’t really anything strange. There was nothing that could tell me, “Hey! This here! This is where she went!”
I picked up the notebook, though, and flipped through it. The first part of the notebook contained various drawings of roses and flowers. There were blue roses and pink roses and roses in different shapes and sizes. There were a few snapshots she had taken: pictures she’d attached to the pages. They were pretty, and lovely, and I wanted to see more of those, so I kept turning the pages.
Before I came to Enchanted Academy, I’d never really paid much attention to plants.
Why would I?
In my world, plants were just something you used to make your garden look nicer or a way to make your house more marketable before you listed it for sale. Plants were plants. They weren’t cool and they weren’t interesting.
But that had been before.
Now, with my magical classes, I was beginning to learn that plants could be used for more than just looking at.
Plants themselves could be magical.
And it seemed like my roommate had a strange attachment to roses.
I put her notebook back and moved to the little trunk that was shoved against the wall. Opening it, I found all of the usual stuff: teddy bears, clothes, shoes. There were a couple of books in there, along with some hats and other random items. Materials she’d need for different classes had been carefully packed in the trunk, and at the bottom, beneath everything else, I found something I hadn’t seen before.
A hat box.
It was small and round, but that’s definitely what it was.
I pulled it out and opened the top. Inside the box, there was no hat. I was a little surprised, but whatever. There wasn’t a hat, but there was a tiny little notebook, and I reached for it and pulled it out.
“Kind of ridiculous to keep this in a hat box,” I mumbled, but then I opened the notebook, and to my utter horror, it started to burn. It didn’t catch on fire, no. Instead, it got hot.
Really hot.
It got hotter and hotter and I dropped it on the floor, which was probably rude of me, but I didn’t want to burn myself, and damn.
I looked at the book again and it was growing.
It was expanding.
It was...changing.
The notebook was no longer a little tiny miniature. Now it was a full-fledged book with notes and articles shoved inside, as well as more drawings.
What on Earth was it?
I waited until the book stopped changing, and then I reached for it again. It was still a little warm to the touch, but not so hot that I’d burn myself, and I opened it.
“The Rose of Emblem,” the front page said. “A study.”
What was the Rose of Emblem?
I’d never heard of that.
I wasn’t a magical kid, though. I hadn’t grown up in a magical household and I’d never really been around magic users at all until this week. The Rose of Emblem could be anything.
Did it have something to do with Beauty’s disappearance?
I turned the page and began to read. There was an article there that had been torn from a book. It was all about this rose, which was enchanted. It was supposedly enchanted by a very powerful sorcerer and would give the user something incredible: their greatest wish.
It seemed ridiculous to me.
A magical item that could grant wishes?
Yeah.
That was a fairytale story if I’d ever heard one.
No one really believed in that stuff, and besides, why would a magical item like that be something work searching for?
What could Belle possibly want that she didn’t already have?
From what I could tell, she had a loving father who adored her. She had grown up in a cool little village. She had won a scholarship to the academy, just like I had. She was a witchmaster student, which meant that her grades were incredible and that she was really good at magic.
Like, really good.
So why had she been reading about this rose?
I turned the page of the notebook again.
And again.
And again.
Soon I’d read almost the entire thing. There was story after story about the rose and all of the wishes it had essentially granted. Each person only got one wish, but there was a warning attached to the tale.
You had to be careful when you made your wish, because if you weren’t, the rose could misinterpret what you wanted.
It could give you something else.
It would still grant your wish, yeah, but it would do so in a way that you hated. It could grant your wish, but in a way that made you come apart at the very seams. The rose wasn’t evil at all. It was just an enchanted object, after all. It wasn’t good or bad. It was neutral.
But it sounded like it was safe to say it was chaotic neutral, if that was a thing.
“Oh Belle,” I whispered, turning the page once more. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
Chapter 9
“Still sleeping alone, huh?” Tinkerbell looked at Belle’s side of the room.
“For two weeks now,” I said. “It’s almost like I have a single room.”
“Funny,” Tinkerbell walked over to Belle’s stuff and started touching the pictures on the wall. Normally, I’d be quick to tell her not to touch someone else’s things, but the reality was that it didn’t really matter.
“I went to the counselor today,” I said.
“School counselor?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. It had been a pointless meeting, but I felt like someone had to do something. I’d want people to look for me if I went missing. Shouldn’t I be doing the same thing for her?
“I wanted to tell her I was worried.”
“About Belle?”
“Yep.”
“How’d that go?”
“About as well as you’d expect, I guess.” I kicked at the floor.
“So, not well at all, is that right?”
“Pretty much.”
“I don’t know why you bothered to try,” Tink said. She looked away from the rose pictures long enough to shrug in my general direction. I didn’t even realize you could do that, but somehow, Tinkerbell managed it.
“I had to try,” I said.
“She hasn’t been kidnapped,” Tinkerbell said. “Maybe she went home.”
“How do we know she hasn’t been kidnapped?” I asked.
“Nobody gets kidnapped from Enchanted Academy.”
“You seem pretty certain.”
“It’s essentially guaranteed.”
“But-”
“Look,” Tinkerbell turned and leaned against the wall. She crossed her legs at the ankles and her arms over her chest. She looked like a bad girl, all of a sudden, and she seemed very different from the sweet, shy little fairy I’d gotten to know over the past couple of weeks. “She left, Jessica. She left and she might not come back. There’s really not anything you can do about that.”
“I can keep looking.”
“Why?” She held up her hands, like she couldn’t believe how ridiculous I was being.
“Because she wouldn’t just leave, Tinkerbell. She wouldn’t just go.”
“How do you know? How are you so certain? You hardly even knew her.”
But I felt like I’d gotten to know her.
I felt like, despite the fact that she’d been gone for two weeks, I’d gotten to know her better than I could have possibly gotten to know her if she’d never left.
I’d been reading her journals and her notebooks every night after class, and I knew a lot about Belle.
I knew she loved to read.
I knew she wanted to be a writer one day.
I knew she wanted to teach writing spells to kids.
I knew she’d come from a magical background, but that her dad ha
d always struggled to provide for her.
I knew she had big dreams.
I knew she was an over-achiever.
And I knew that no matter what, she never would have walked away from Enchanted Academy on her own.
Not ever.
“There’s no way,” I said. “She didn’t leave on her own.”
Tinkerbell frowned, but finally sighed.
“Okay, let’s just say for a second that you’re right,” she said.
“Okay, I’m right.”
“Whatever,” she rolled her eyes. “Where do you think she would have gone?”
“She was doing research,” I said. I pointed to her trunk. “She’s got notebooks in there that detail everything she was learning about.”
I had found more journals and notes about the Rose of Emblem. It seemed like this was something she’d been working on for a really long time. Years, maybe.
“On what?”
“Have you heard of the Rose of Emblem?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Everyone has. It’s an old myth.”
“What’s the story?” I asked Tinkerbell, curious to hear what she’d grown up hearing. If it was an old legend, then maybe Tinkerbell would know something that I didn’t know. Maybe she’d have an idea of what had happened to Beauty. The thing about stories was that sometimes, the most mundane detail could be the key to finding out what the secret was.
Sometimes something that seemed small could be...
Well, unbelievable.
“Once upon a time,” she started.
“You can skip that part.”
“Nope, you’re getting the full experience. Sit.”
She motioned to the floor and I grabbed one of our sitting cushions and plopped myself down on it. Okay, so maybe I was about to get a lesson in magic from someone who really “got” it. I was still very new to the world of magic and mayhem. I still had a lot to learn, but I wanted to figure things out. I wanted to do a good job. I wanted, perhaps more than anything, to find my friend and prove that I wasn’t totally and completely worthless.
My classes were hard.
They were harder than I’d ever thought possible.
And despite studying every night, I found that there were a lot of basic magical skills that I didn’t have. It was part of being human, I guessed. There were other human students at Enchanted Academy, but they all had some sort of power or ability.
The Beauty Page 6
