“Don’t tell them your lies,” I said back. “I know who you are.”
“Of course you know who I am,” the woman said. “I’m your neighbor.”
My next few breaths came especially hard. I lowered my stick and squinted at her as though this would 118/431
somehow change what she’d just said. “You’re . . . you’re what?”
“I’m Widow Hazel. I live right next to you.” There was a murmur of consensus among the crowd and all of their gazes turned to me.
I pointed accusingly at her basket. “Well, if you’re really Widow Hazel, why did you try to give me one of those?”
She took out an apple and held it in her hand. “This?”
“Yes.”
“Because I thought you might want to eat something besides burned porridge.”
The crowd all laughed, and one of the men came and took me by the arm. “Here then, Snow White, why don’t I walk you back to your cottage and you can rest until the dwarfs get home.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in Widow Hazel’s direction. “I . . . I thought you were the queen.”
I know she heard me because the women standing around her all said things like, “Well, of course, who hasn’t mistaken Hazel for the queen? I do it frequently myself.”
“It’s all of them jewels you wear, Hazel. I keep telling you that if you wear your tiara around, things like this are bound to happen.”
Then there was a lot of laughing.
119/431
I went home red faced, and not because I’d just run down the street.
When I got back to the cottage, I sat in the dining room for a long time calling Chrissy’s name.
Nothing.
And nothing again.
It could be days before she found enough shoes to match all her outfits.
Stupid mall. She was a fairy, for crying out loud. She flew places. What did it matter what shoes she wore?
And why in the world did she keep sending me into these medieval fairy tales, anyway? Did she not realize that no modern girl in her right mind would choose to live in a place where no one took showers?
Finally, after calling Chrissy’s name over and over again like it was a mantra, I went to the kitchen and dumped out the old porridge. I was not about to eat it again tonight and it was impossible to repair bad food. I had to start from scratch. Let me say right now that it’s harder to cook with a cauldron and a fire than you might think.
As I cut up vegetables I thought about my situation. I was stuck here and I just had to make the best of it, but I didn’t have to try and bluff my way through things and look like an idiot. It was time to tell the dwarfs the truth.
120/431
• • •
The truth, it turned out, would have sounded much more convincing if I’d been able to come up with some proof. When I told them who I was that night at dinner, the dwarfs sat around the table looking at me like I was not only stupid but insane as well. And this after I’d come up with an unburned dinner for them.
“No, really,” I said, “I’m from the future. I just got here yesterday. That’s why I don’t know how to do very much or who anyone is.”
Percival rubbed his chin with one hand. “Er, and what was your excuse for not knowing anything before yesterday?”
“I suppose before yesterday, Snow White had servants at the castle do everything for her so she didn’t have to know how to cook or sew or remember people’s names .
. .” It suddenly occurred to me that both Snow White and Cinderella had been actual people, and I wondered where they were while I was being them.
Edwin looked at me suspiciously from underneath his bushy eyebrows. “So you’re saying you’ve been bewitched?”
“Be- fairy- ed, technically. I mean, this was obviously a mistake.” And then because they all still stared at me 121/431
blankly, I added, “She’s only a fair godmother, not a good one.”
The dwarfs bent their heads together, talking with each other in murmured voices. The ones that had been sitting on my side of the table moved around to the other side to be included in the discussion. I sat there watching and wondering what conclusion they’d come to. They spoke in such hushed voices that I only caught snatches of their conversations.
Someone said, “She can’t be bewitched. Bewitched people never know they are; that’s part of the bewitchment.”
“She’s sick then.”
“What sort of sickness makes you think you’ve seen fairies?”
More murmuring. Then Reginald’s head popped up from the group and he looked over at me with a forced smile. “While you were lost in the forest you didn’t perchance eat any of those mushrooms we warned you about, did you?”
I folded my arms. “No, I didn’t eat any hallucinogenic mushrooms.”
More murmuring from the dwarfs. “Maybe she’s telling the truth. She just used a six-syllable word.” 122/431
“Of course I’m telling the truth,” I called over to them.
“You can tell because there are no snakes falling out of my mouth.”
Perhaps it wasn’t the best thing to say. The dwarfs lowered their voices and murmured faster. I heard the words “doctor” and “medicine” thrown around.
Finally they stopped discussing my condition and Reginald stepped over to me. He took my hand, pulled me from the table, and walked with me toward the stairs.
“We all think that a rest would do you good. Let’s go to your room and you can lie down.” I went with him—what else was there to do? The rest of the dwarfs followed us up the stairs, eyeing me carefully like I might make a break for it. I protested all the way up. “I don’t need to rest. I’m telling you the truth.
I’m from the future. Look, I’ll prove it to you. I’m taking geometry in school. Just ask me, I can find the perimeter of a triangle—or the area. Well, actually I’m not that good at the area and sometimes I mess up on the perimeter too—but I can do the angles for you. Could Snow White do that?”
He led me to my room like I was a little girl and this was all just some bedtime story I’d concocted. “And why do people in the future need to know how to find the area of a triangle? Is that a big problem in your day? Un-identified triangles?”
123/431
“Well . . . um . . . I don’t know. It’s just something they teach at school.”
“Sounds like a lovely place. You go ahead and rest now.”
He shut the door and then I heard scraping noises on the outside of the wood. I tried the door handle and confirmed my suspicions. It didn’t budge. I pounded on the door to get their attention. “Hey! You can’t lock me in here!”
“It won’t be for long,” someone yelled. “Just until we can find some leeches.”
“Leeches!” I called back. Suddenly I remembered something from my history class. One little fact that had managed to stay lodged in my brain long after most of the teacher’s lectures had rolled away. And that was that medieval doctors’ favorite treatment was bleeding patients. It went without saying that this sort of medicine killed more people than it helped.
“Aye, Edgar—er, Doc—will have that bad blood out of you in no time and you’ll be back to your normal self.” I heard the sound of footsteps going down the hallway and then down the stairs.
My first thought was one of disbelief. I was being held prisoner by a bunch of dwarfs. Then my next thought was one of fear. Leeches. That so totally sucked.
124/431
I heard the front door shut and ran to the window in the room. The shutters were already open and the window didn’t have glass. I leaned out and watched all seven dwarfs heading outside. They walked a few feet and then Edwin turned, looked back, and saw me. “We’ll be back in a bit,” he called to me. “Don’t do anything stupid while we’re gone.”