by Joan Holub
“What do you think, Schmetterling?” she heard Mr. Thumb ask. “A misplaced magic basket or a magical charm?”
“My money’s on magical charm,” the butterfly replied. “And it seems to have chosen Red Riding Hood.”
Because of the perfect acoustics, Red heard their voices as if they were standing next to her instead of hovering way behind her above the stage. She stopped in her tracks and stared at the basket in wonder, hardly noticing when the two teachers buzzed off, chatting about the auditions.
“Wow,” she breathed. Could they be right? Was this basket really a magical charm? Her magical charm?
A thrill of excitement ran through her, chasing away her embarrassment over her flubbed audition. Like everyone at the Academy, she’d been hoping her whole life that a magic charm would someday claim her. But if this basket was hers, she couldn’t help wondering why it had picked her moment of defeat to appear. Was it trying to make her feel better?
Whatever! It was an honor for a charm to choose you. Students waited years before it happened to them. Of her three BFFs, only Cinderella had received her magical charm so far — a pair of sparkly glass slippers.
Red pulled open the auditorium doors. She could hardly wait to get a look inside the basket. Would it hold jewels? Or maybe an enchanted antidote that would cure her of stage fright? A don’t-be-scared diamond tiara? A magic have-a-wonderful-audition wand?
Or maybe it would contain an important message that had come through time from the Grimm brothers themselves!
The minute she stepped outside the doors into the fourth-floor hallway, Red set the basket down on the polished marble floor. Her heart thumped with excitement as she lifted the basket’s lid. She looked inside. And discovered … a piece of vellum paper folded in half.
Growing more excited, she pulled the paper out and unfolded it. There were words written on it:
A tisket, a tasket. _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____.
A fill-in-the-blank sentence with missing words? It was kind of a letdown compared to jewels or a message from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, thought Red. And she already knew how the rest of the nursery rhyme went: “A tisket, a tasket. A green and yellow basket.” So what? She stuck the note back in the basket and huffed a breath that blew her bangs upward for a second.
“So, if you are a magic charm, what kind of magic do you do exactly?” she asked the basket. It gently bumped her knee and then did a little twirl on one of its bottom corners, but didn’t reply. Of course, she didn’t know of any magic charms that could talk.
Just then, Red heard boys’ voices. Prince Awesome and Prince Foulsmell walked by and peered at her curiously. She sent them a weak smile. She probably did look weird kneeling in the hall talking to a basket.
After they passed, she dropped her Academy Handbook into the basket and closed the lid. Then she looped her arm through the wooden handles, stood, and hurried on. Time for lunch. She was starving!
She was halfway down the hall before she realized she was heading the opposite direction she’d intended to go. Oh! Why did she have to be cursed with such a terrible sense of direction? She was always losing her way in the halls at school! Reversing her steps, she made for the grand staircase on the girls’ side of the Academy.
As she walked, Red kept sneaking peeks at the basket on her arm. It did feel somehow right dangling there. Could it really be her very own charm? Charms had magical powers that only the people they belonged to could unlock. If this basket truly was her charm, though, only time would tell what powers it had.
Once she made it to the first floor, she dashed to her trunker, which was like a locker. There, she pulled out the ornate key she wore on a chain around her neck. She poked it into the keyhole just below the little heart-shaped portrait of her painted on the trunker door. “Five, six, pick up sticks,” she said.
Snick! Creak! In response to the rhyming code she’d chanted, the fancy leather trunk in front of her opened on its own. Like all the other trunks lining the walls in the hallway, it stood upended tallwise instead of flat on its bottom in the normal way of trunks. It was as tall as Red was and about eighteen inches wide. Its lid had opened outward like a door to reveal a coat hook and three shelves inside. Red set her GA Handbook on one of them.
She tried to put the basket inside, too, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. To her surprise, it leaped from her arms to the floor. Then it scooted down the corridor toward the Great Hall!
“Wait! Hold up, you wacky basket!” she yelled.
Pushing the trunker door shut, she turned the key in its lock and chanted the second half of her trunker combination all in a rush. “Seveneightlaythemstraight!” Snick! As the trunker locked itself, Red dashed down the hall after the basket.
She was in Pink Castle now, the side of Grimm Academy where the girls lived and had most of their classes. The walls she was passing were hung with tapestries showing lush and lovely scenes of feasts and pageantry. And every so often she passed a tall stone support column with figures of flowers, birds, and gargoyles carved on its top.
She caught up to the basket just as it went whirling into the Great Hall. “Gotcha!” she exclaimed, grabbing it with both hands.
Then she straightened and glanced around. Heads had turned toward her, faces staring in surprise at her dramatic entrance. Instead of getting all flustered at the attention as she had in her audition, Red simply looped the basket’s handles over one arm and curtseyed grandly. Just as if she was an actor onstage, doing a curtain call after a fabulous performance in a play. Numerous students clapped and whistled, enjoying her ability to laugh at herself.
If only she could be this relaxed onstage! But the only time she seemed able to perform before a crowd was when she wasn’t on a stage!
The majestic Great Hall — where meals were served and fancy balls were held — was at the center of Grimm Academy. Two stories high, the Hall straddled Once Upon River and connected the Academy’s two magnificent castles, which stood one on either side of the river.
To the west of the river was Gray Castle, which was made of blue-gray stone. It was where Wolfgang and the other academy boys lived and had most of their classes. Pink Castle — the girls’ side — stood east of the river. All the students’ dorm rooms were located in the three turreted towers that topped each castle.
Like Red, everyone here was a character from literature. Some, like her BFF Snow White, were princesses (or princes). But others, including Red herself and her other two BFFs, were not. And though the four of them were named in the Books of Grimm, not everyone at GA was. Some came from other fairy-tale books or from nursery rhymes. Regardless, everyone in Grimmlandia had been brought here for safekeeping by the Grimm brothers.
Only recently had Red and her friends begun to realize what they needed to be kept safe from. Something really truly evil! An E.V.I.L. Society!
As Red headed for the lunch line, a girl with long candle-flame yellow hair called to her. She was seated at one of the two linen-draped tables that ran the entire length of the enormous two-story-high Hall. “Red! Over here! We got your lunch for you!”
It was Cinda. She, Rapunzel, and Snow were all sitting together. They’d saved Red a spot, too. And uh-oh. From the worried looks on the three Grimm girls’ faces, she could guess that the news of her embarrassing fainting spell had already gotten around the Hall.
“Oh, hobwoggle,” she mumbled under her breath. Because she really didn’t want to talk about it.
Going over to the table, Red sat down in the empty space on the bench next to Cinda. Snow and Rapunzel were sitting across from them.
“Look at my new basket,” Red began, trying to head off questions about what had happened at the audition. But her friends barely glanced at it. They were more concerned about her, and got right to the point.
“We heard you fainted,” Cinda said, her blue eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” asked Snow as she re-pinned the bow that had slipped from her short ebony hair.
>
Red nodded. “Mm-hmm. Fine. So what’s for lunch?” Peering at the others’ plates she saw they were about halfway through eating.
Rapunzel slid one of the Hall’s fancy silver lunch trays toward her. The delicate gold-rimmed white plate on it contained a serving of fig newt, a sour-eye scone, a mound of walldwarf salad, and a gingerbread house small enough to fit in the palm of Red’s hand. All were specialties of Mistress Hagscorch, the Academy’s Head Cook. Luckily, her food tasted way better than it sounded.
Red slipped the basket off her arm and set it under the bench so she could eat. “Thanks, you guys,” she said, genuinely touched. “I wasn’t looking forward to standing in the lunch line.” She dug into her fig newt. Mmm — delicious!
Lunch was kind of hard to enjoy with three pairs of eyes staring at her, waiting for an explanation. Still, Red didn’t want to admit her stage fright, even to her friends. Instead she decided to pin the blame on something else.
“I think maybe I fainted because I didn’t eat enough breakfast this morning.” She grinned, trying to lighten everyone’s mood. “Or maybe I was allergic to Mistress Hagscorch’s knick-knack paddy-whack pancakes.”
“Allergic?” echoed Snow. Her emerald green eyes rounded with worry. “Oh, dear. I wonder what ingredient could have —”
Oops, bad move mentioning allergies, Red decided. Snow was allergic to various things, but especially to fruit. She could talk about the dangers of allergies all day.
“Or it might have been because I didn’t get much sleep last night,” Red added quickly. Which was true. Her roommate, Gretel, had had a nightmare just before dawn. She’d screamed, waking Red and mumbling something about Mistress Hagscorch’s oven. Afterward, Red had been unable to get back to sleep.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were auditioning for the play today?” Rapunzel asked. Her heavily-kohled dark eyes studied Red impatiently. She was dressed all in black, as usual. Even her hair was black and was so long it brushed the floor at times.
“Yeah, if we’d known, we could’ve helped you more on that scene you were practicing,” said Cinda.
“Sorry, I just didn’t — that is, I was just — too stressed out about it,” Red admitted.
“Why?” asked Snow.
To buy some time while she considered how to answer, Red shoved a spoonful of walldwarf salad into her mouth. Then she gestured toward her lips, wordlessly indicating, “Sorry, can’t talk now!” As she chewed, she lifted her eyes to the arched windows that lined the Hall and gazed through them to the sparkling blue river waters far below. Most of the windows were propped open so birds could fly in and out of the Hall, crossing in from one side and flying back out the other.
“No reason I guess,” she said finally, after swallowing the bite of salad. She didn’t want to admit the truth. That some small part of her had feared failure and that she’d hoped her friends wouldn’t find out about it if it happened. They knew she lived to act! And now they knew she’d been a flop at her tryout.
As if sensing she needed a change of subject, Red’s new basket suddenly started banging around under the table.
“What in Grimmlandia?” exclaimed Rapunzel. She pushed aside the tablecloth and peeked under it, then looked over at Red. “Is that thing magic?”
Nodding, Red pulled the basket out by its handles and showed it off. “Mr. Thumb thinks it could be my charm,” she said proudly.
Her friends gasped.
“Really? Wow!” said Rapunzel.
“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything about this till now!” said Snow at the same time.
“I tried to when I first sat down,” Red protested. “Only you weren’t paying any atten —”
“Do you know what it can do yet?” Cinda interrupted in excitement. When her glass slippers were on her feet, Cinda, who was usually a terrible dancer, could sway and twirl around a ballroom beautifully.
“Not yet,” Red replied. “But I can’t wait to find out!”
Then she told them how the basket had appeared in the auditorium. “I thought it must belong to someone else, but it attached itself to my arm when I tried to leave without it.”
“You’re so lucky,” Snow exclaimed, her eyes alight with pleasure.
Rapunzel nodded, smiling. “I’m really, really happy for you.”
“Me, too,” said Cinda, giving her a hug. “Is there anything inside it?” Cinda’s glass slippers had tiny words written inside them that read: These glass slippers will convey, the magical power to lead the way.
Red showed her friends the fill-in-the-blank letter. “The nursery rhyme goes: A tisket, a tasket. A green and yellow basket.”
“Yeah, but that’s only five words, and there are six blanks here,” Rapunzel noted, pointing to the blanks. She cocked her head and a few strands of her hair glittered under the overhead lights. Like Red, she’d added streaks to her black hair, but Rapunzel’s were a dazzling blue instead of a glittery red.
Red shrugged. “Whoever wrote the note must have miscounted the rhyme’s missing words.”
“Or maybe it’s supposed to be ‘A tisket, a tasket. A brown and white wicker basket’ or something like that,” said Cinda.
“It seems like the note’s message should be more special, though,” said Snow. “Like it should mean something, or be some kind of clue.”
As they continued eating lunch, the four Grimm girls took turns guessing what the missing words might be. It seemed pretty hopeless.
“I give up,” Cinda said finally. “There are a million words that could fit in those blanks.” But a second later her face lit up. “Hey! That basket would be a perfect place to keep a certain thing. A certain thing that needs to be kept safe, if you know what I mean?” In case Red hadn’t gotten the hint, Cinda pushed the edge of her cloak aside to reveal the tip of a tapestry that was rolled up underneath it.
But it wasn’t just any tapestry. It was the mapestry — a two-foot square magical cloth tapestry embroidered with a map of Grimmlandia. Cinda had literally stumbled over it when her glass slippers had led her to where it was hidden under a loose floor tile — right here in the Great Hall — at Prince Awesome’s ball last week.
After Red set the basket in her lap, Cinda looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then she slipped the mapestry into the basket.
“That’s a relief,” said Cinda. “I don’t think anyone’s guessed about that certain thing also known as ‘You Know What,’ since it was wrapped in vellum paper when I found it. But the fewer chances we take with it being discovered, the better.”
“Good point,” said Rapunzel. “It’s probably better that someone besides you keeps it for a while. If the E.V.I.L. Society knows about its existence and figures out you have it, they might try to steal it.”
E.V.I.L. was an acronym for Exceptional Villains In Literature. Red doubted whether the members of the group truly were exceptional, but they apparently liked to think of themselves that way.
The Grimm girls had stumbled on the existence of the society about the same time they discovered the mapestry. It seemed that E.V.I.L. had been quite active until Grimmlandia was founded. After that, the group had mysteriously died out. Just why it had recently begun to operate again, the girls had no idea.
Cinda nodded. “Yeah. Maybe we can trade off from now on. Take turns guarding it.”
Red lowered her voice. “Since I’ve got it now, let’s meet in my room after school today, okay? To plan our little, um, trip tomorrow morning to look for the —”
“Shh,” warned Rapunzel before Red could add the word treasure. The girls glanced around them, checking that none of the other students were listening in.
They hoped the mapestry might lead them to the long-lost Treasure of Grimmlandia. In fact, a few days ago, an embroidered X had appeared on the mapestry, atop what appeared to be a tiny embroidered cottage in the middle of a stitched representation of Neverwood Forest. And X marks the spot where treasure is found, right? However, none of them knew e
xactly what that treasure was, or if it really and truly even existed.
Snow frowned. “It’s weird not knowing who we can trust around here. I don’t like suspecting everyone.”
“Well, Malorette and Odette are E.V.I.L. members, for sure,” said Cinda. She peered down at the end of the table, where her two stepsisters sat.
Those three girls did not get along, Red knew. But that wasn’t Cinda’s fault. Her Steps were mean, and definitely evil! A week ago, Cinda had overheard them discussing the Society on the night of Prince Awesome’s ball.
“Why are they hanging around with Wolfgang all of a sudden?” Cinda asked suddenly.
“Huh?” Red leaned out from the table to see what Cinda was looking at. Sure enough, Wolfgang was at Malorette and Odette’s table! And those two girls were jabbering away to him like the three of them were best friends. Usually Cinda’s Steps only paid attention to princes who went to the Academy. Wolfgang was not a prince.
Had the girls invited him to sit with them? Red wondered. Why else would he hang out with Cinda’s awful stepsisters when there were plenty of other empty seats? Not that Red wanted him near her, of course. She could certainly use a break from all the nicknames he came up with.
When Wolfgang’s head started to turn in Red’s direction, she whipped around. Breaking off a chocolate tile from the little gingerbread house’s roof, she popped it into her mouth. Had he seen her staring? She hoped not.
Rapunzel raised an eyebrow. “I say we add Wolfgang to our E.V.I.L. Society suspect list.”
Really? thought Red. She could see why her friends might suspect him, since he was hobnobbing with the enemy. Wolfgang was annoying, yes. But evil? Red just couldn’t see it.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tum! Trumpets blared.
At the sound, everyone stopped talking and all eyes turned toward the balcony at the west end of the Hall, the end closest to Gray Castle.
There, on a wide, carved wooden shelf, sat the School Board — a row of five shiny iron knights’ helmets, each topped by a decorative feather. The visors on the helmets began to open and shut as if they were speaking. Which they were.