I glared at her.
“No? Well, let me be the first then. Get some patience—it will help you out in life.” Yeah, I could put that on the list right behind my milking skills, which were also woefully undeveloped.
“Who goes shopping for three weeks?” I asked. “Exactly what kind of sale is that?”
Chrissy slipped her sunglasses onto the top of her head and gave me a condescending look. “Time isn’t the same here as it is in your world. You obviously don’t read fantasy books or you’d already know that sort of thing.”
“How much time has elapsed back home?” I asked.
“Well, ideally with these wishes you could live here for years and only seconds would have passed back in your world. Then when you wanted to, you’d come home 92/431
physically unchanged.” She examined her nails instead of looking at me.
“But . . . ,” I prompted.
“Well, that was one of those areas that I didn’t do so well on in school. I never could get time to stop spinning, just to slow down. For every week that passes here, an hour passes back in your world. That’s not really so bad. Your parents are still downstairs at your house watching TV. They won’t miss you until tomorrow morning, and the way you sleep in and then hole up in your room, well, that should give you months here. Then you can decide whether—”
“I don’t want to stay here for months,” I said. “All I’ve done here is work like a dog. No, I take that back. Dogs don’t have to clean out the toilets. I’ve worked like . . .
like . . .”
“Cinderella?” she asked.
“Yes, but with no ball in sight and a prince who is an arrogant jerk.”
She shrugged. “The ball is in about eight months. It wouldn’t be the full Cinderella experience if you only worked a few days and then got to go to the ball. Anyone can do that. It takes no long-term suffering at all.” I held out my rough and calloused hands toward her.
“And who said I wanted to be long-suffering? I don’t remember wishing for that.”
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“If the prince is going to rescue you from your dreary life,” she continued, “it has to be dreary in the first place, doesn’t it?”
Her logic made me sputter. She actually thought she’d done me a favor by turning me into some sort of serf.
“My life was plenty dreary as it was, and besides, I didn’t wish to be Cinderella in the first place. You never let me finish telling you what I wanted.” Her eyebrows arched up. “Well, excuse me for having other things to do with my time besides listen to your love-life woes— I told you I needed to go shopping.” She tossed her hair off her shoulder and pulled first one, then two more shopping bags from her purse. At last she pulled out the scroll and opened it. “You said, and this is a quote, ‘I just wish my life could be like a fairy tale with a handsome prince waiting for me at the ball, and that somehow when I met him, everything would work out happily ever after.’ ”
She pulled on the end of the scroll and it spun shut.
“You asked for a fairy tale. One of us here is an expert on fairy tales, and the only tale with a handsome prince waiting at the ball is Cinderella, which I duly granted.” Another toss of her hair. “If you had a different fairy tale in mind—well, I’m sorry you’re so ill read that you got mixed up and wished for the wrong one.” 94/431
“But I didn’t actually think that . . .” I stopped. It wouldn’t do any good to point out I hadn’t meant those words as a wish at all. I’d just been speaking in generalities. Apparently fairies didn’t do generalities. I tried to make my case in another way. “What about the prince?
He’s supposed to be wonderful so I can live happily ever after. That part of my wish wasn’t granted.” She rolled her eyes like I was the one being unreasonable. “You only asked for a handsome prince. He is. I suppose charming is implied in the wish—trust me, he’ll be very charming at the ball.” My mouth dropped open and a little squeak of disbelief popped out. “But besides that he’s an arrogant tyrant? How am I supposed to live happily ever after with someone like that?”
“I already told you I couldn’t grant vague statements like happily ever after. I grant specifics. Happy is entirely up to you and always has been.” Her wings fluttered in agitation. “Besides, since when did you become so concerned with personality? You never worried about Hunter’s personality, did you?” She picked up a shopping bag and pushed it, somehow, back into her purse. “You know, just out of curiosity, I checked in with him before my shopping trip. Do you know what he was doing? Talking with Jane over the phone about the benefits and drawbacks of testing out of freshman English.
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There’s a thrill ride for you. Most people can make those kinds of decisions without talking it over extensively with their girlfriends.”
Okay, granted, sometimes Hunter cared way too much about school, but he’d always worn such an endearingly earnest expression while he’d gone on about that sort of thing that I’d never minded. “This isn’t about Hunter—,” I said.
She held up one hand to stop me. “I know. It’s about getting back at Hunter. I totally understand how dating works between humans. You want a boyfriend who’s handsome and popular. Well, Prince Edmond is the epi-tome of that. You’ll be the envy of the kingdom. That’s what you really wished for, wasn’t it, to be envied?” It sounded so superficial when she said it that way that it took me aback. I had to stop and think about it for a moment. “It’s not that I have to be envied by an entire kingdom . . .”
Chrissy wedged her last bag back into her purse. “Oh, that’s right. You just want to be envied by Jane and Hunter. I can arrange that then. I can bring them here.
They could be poor peasants in your stepmother’s manor.” She pulled the wand from somewhere beneath all the shopping bags and looked ready to wave it in my direction.
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“No, wait, I don’t want that.” Even though I hadn’t forgiven them, I wouldn’t wish the type of life I’d just been living on either of them.
Chrissy put the wand down at her side. “Well, what do you want then? You called me here away from my shopping trip and I haven’t even made it to the shoe section yet.”
I tried to think of how to form my next wish. For almost a month I’d just wanted to leave, but now with Chrissy standing in front of me, tapping one foot while she waited for me to speak, I didn’t want to waste a wish on just going home. I should wish for something new, something spectacular, for a situation where I could be truly happy.
“Well . . .” I didn’t know how to phrase my wish or even how to articulate what I wanted, what I longed for.
Ironically, it struck me that Jane would know the right way to say it. Jane could write a thousand-word essay on how she felt at any given time. But Jane didn’t need wishes. Jane had Hunter.
Chrissy checked her watch. “I can come back later when you’ve had time to think about it—”
“No,” I said, because if she left now who knew how many days I’d be stuck here, and after my scene inside, the WSM would undoubtedly throw me in a dungeon or something. “I just . . . um . . . I want to feel beautiful and 97/431
loved, and although I like the idea of having a prince, he has to be more than just handsome and rich. He has to be nice, and kind . . .” I paused, trying to think of the next quality I wanted to add to the list.
That’s when I learned a very important lesson about dealing with fairies. Don’t pause when you’re wishing for things.
Chrissy slipped her sunglasses back over her face.
“One Snow White coming up!”
Chapter 6
Bright lights like hundreds of fireflies spun around me, and then I found myself in a completely different forest.