by Joan Holub
“Move back!” yelled Ms. Wicked. Switching directions, she raced to the girl’s side. But already the flames that had been leaping from the ball were dying away.
“Did you spill something on it?” Ms. Wicked demanded to know. She gestured a hand with long red-polished fingernails toward a china cup the girl held.
“Only a little tea,” Polly said, sounding a bit defensive.
Frowning, Ms. Wicked pointed to a large mirror she’d hung on the wall at the front of the classroom. “Mirror, mirror, what’s my rule?” she called out to it.
In response, words magically drew themselves in red lipstick upon the surface of the mirror. The whole class dutifully read them aloud:
“Bring food to class never.
Nor any drink whatsoever.”
As Ms. Wicked went back to scolding a very pink-faced Polly, the sand in the hourglass ran out. Immediately, the hourglass rose into the air and flipped itself over to start again, ready for the next period.
Ms. Wicked abruptly ended her lecture. “Clear any remaining visions in your crystal balls, wipe down fingerprints, and leave the balls on your desks,” she called out to the class. “Sixth period will be using them, too.”
Quickly doing as instructed, Red then grabbed her basket, twirled her cape over her shoulders, and zoomed off before the teacher could remember she’d been coming over to speak with her. “Nice work. With your crystal ball prediction, I mean,” Red told Wolfgang as she followed him to the door. “One of those balls would’ve come in handy before my audition. It might’ve predicted my flubbing and fainting, so I could’ve stopped it from happening.”
“Yeah. But what if, knowing what was coming, you’d avoided the audition altogether?” he asked as they left the classroom. “Then I would’ve lost my chance to play the hero!” His gray eyes sparkled with humor.
Red blinked. Hey, he was … cute! Why hadn’t she ever noticed before?
Out in the hall, he dropped back a step to walk beside her. “So getting back to the future, want to get together later? After dinner, I mean? We could go over your lines. Prepare you for your second audition.”
When she hesitated, Wolfgang pulled the spoon from his pocket. Holding it close to his face, he pretended to speak to it. “Oh great and powerful spoon, what will Burgundy say? Yea or nay?”
“My name’s Red,” she reminded him for the grimmillionth time, though she couldn’t help laughing at his antics. Because this standoffish guy was actually funny! Wolfgang might occasionally be annoying, but he also intrigued her. She kind of would like to hang out with him, she decided. But then she remembered she’d already made plans.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m working on a … a project with my friends tonight.”
Wolfgang paused and looked back toward Ms. Wicked’s door. Then he stopped walking and pulled Red over to stand to one side of the hall. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Oh, well, tomorrow we’re all going to um … pick wildflowers.” The lie was a lame one, but she couldn’t tell him about the mapestry. The girls had agreed to keep it and their hunt for treasure a secret. Just like they’d agreed not to talk to anyone else at school about E.V.I.L.
“Where and when?” Wolfgang asked, interrupting her thoughts. His tone was light, but Red sensed something concealed beneath it. Was it hurt? He wouldn’t be asking so many questions unless he’d seen through her lie. He must be thinking she was trying to ditch him!
“Where and when what? Oh, the flower picking you mean? I’m not sure,” she hedged. Since it seemed that he was going to keep pressing her for a time they could practice together, Red finally blurted out the truth. “Okay, if you must know, I’m not going to audition on Monday. Or ever.”
“What?” He looked shocked, which embarrassed her for some reason.
She didn’t need his disapproval. She could make her own decisions. “I’m not auditioning, okay? Give it up. Take a hint, why don’t you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh, I never give up, Carmine. But I can take a hint. See you.” Then he turned and went back down the hall — to go talk to Ms. Wicked about spoon predictions, no doubt.
Red hurried off in the other direction, worrying that she’d hurt his feelings, which made her feel horrible. So horrible that she hadn’t remembered to remind him again that her name was Red. She spun around and called after him, “Wait! I didn’t mean —” But her words were drowned out when some girls close by began to shriek with laughter.
She looked down to see that the basket on her arm was flapping its lid as if trying to soothe Wolfgang’s feelings, too.
“Stop that, you wacky basket!” Red scolded. Unwilling to leave things so unsettled and hoping to explain herself more, she went back to the door of Ms. Wicked’s classroom. However, she stopped short just outside, when she heard voices.
“… seems pretty attached to her,” Red heard Wolfgang saying doubtfully.
“You’ll find a way. That basket is exactly what the Society needs! And you’ll get hold of it for us, if you know what’s good for you,” Ms. Wicked replied.
Red gasped, backing away from the door in horror. Wolfgang must be part of E.V.I.L., after all — and he was planning to steal her magic basket!
Just let him try, she thought. Dashing off, she made her way to Calligraphy class, hugging her basket protectively under one arm.
After school Red took the twisty staircase up to Pearl Tower, one of the three towers — or turrets — at the top of Pink Castle. The other two turrets had jewel names, too, Ruby Tower and Emerald Tower. Over on the other end of the Academy at Gray Castle the boys’ turrets were named Onyx, Topaz, and Zircon.
The winding stairs dead-ended on the sixth floor at a pair of doors. The emerald green one led to Emerald Tower and the pearly white one to Pearl Tower, of course. All the turrets had two floors and were connected by stone walkways. Getting around the Academy was so confusing that it had taken her all the way to the end of first grade to stop getting lost on her way up here.
Red opened the white door and stepped outside onto the stone walkway that ran between the towers. Ahead, the pointy roof of Pearl Tower gleamed a pale frosty white against a cloudless blue sky.
Hearing splashing water, Red peeked over the edge of the walkway to admire the new mermaid statue below. Cinda’s roommate Mermily had recently added it atop the fountain on the fifth-floor patio. The statue was curved in the shape of an S and spurted water in streams that looped over each other and glistened in the sunlight before tumbling back into the lower rings of the fountain.
Down at the far end of the walkway, Red opened another pearly white door and entered the Pearl Tower dorm. She crossed the common area in the center of the tower, where the girls could hang out by a huge fireplace, sit in comfy, overstuffed chairs, or play games at a table.
Ringed around the common area, all along the inside of the tower wall, were numerous small alcove bedrooms. Red headed for the one she shared with Gretel. Cinda and Snow both roomed here in this dorm, too, with other alcove-mates. But because she had a fear of heights, Rapunzel preferred the dungeon. She avoided the towers as much as possible, seldom climbing above the third floor.
The minute Red pushed back the curtain to enter her alcove, she immediately spotted the crumbs on the floor. They led straight to a pair of legs dangling over the edge of the very high canopy bed on the opposite side of the room from Red’s.
“Oh, hi!” Red said, surprised. She hadn’t expected Gretel to be in. The other three Grimm girls were coming here for their meeting soon. If Gretel stuck around, they’d have to find somewhere more private. Although Gretel was about as likely to be a member of E.V.I.L. as a smiley-face sticker was, Red couldn’t very well tell her about the mapestry, the treasure, and the E.V.I.L. Society since she and her friends had sworn to keep those things secret.
At the sound of Red’s voice, Gretel sat up. She’d woven her brown hair into a thick braid that hung forward over one shoulder and almost reached her waist. There was an o
pen book in her lap titled Trails and Hikes Around Grimmlandia. Gretel was totally into hiking. And into something else, too: snacking and being messy about it.
Red felt the tiny crumbs crunching under her ankle boots as she crossed the room. She set her basket on the desk that was tucked under her loft bed across from Gretel’s.
Looking up from her book, Gretel’s quick brown eyes immediately went to the basket. “Where’d you get that?”
“It just appeared during Drama,” Red told her “And it seems to want to be mine.”
“Ooh! You got a charm!” Gretel began bouncing on her bed.
“Not so fast,” said Red. “I think it’s my charm, but I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.”
Gretel scrambled down the ladder at the end of her bed and came to examine the basket. Remembering that You Know What was hidden inside it, Red worried she might try to open it. Sure enough, Gretel did try. However, the basket held both sides of its hinged lid tightly shut, not letting her see the mapestry inside!
“It doesn’t open,” said Gretel, sounding disappointed.
Red breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Sometimes it does.” Remembering what she’d told Ms. Wicked about it, she said, “Maybe it’s just feeling shy or something.” She hated keeping secrets from Gretel, but that was the way it had to be, at least for now.
“So have you discovered what it can do yet?”
As Red shook her head, Gretel pulled a cookie out of her skirt pocket and took a big bite. Red glanced down at the floor, where more crumbs fell as Gretel munched. Raising her eyebrows, she looked back up at her roommate. Then she pointed down at the crumbs on the floor.
“Oops! Sorry. But cookies are crumbly, what can I say?” said Gretel.
Red sighed inwardly. Gretel always managed to leave a trail of crumbs no matter what she was eating! Still, Red didn’t want to be mean about it. Then she looked more closely at the half-eaten cookie still in her roomie’s hand.
“Hey, is that one of the oatmeal cookies I baked yesterday?”
Gretel popped the last of the cookie into her mouth and dusted her hands. More crumbs drifted to the floor. “Yuh uhn thur vur nummy.” She finished chewing, then repeated, “I mean, yes and they’re very yummy!”
Both girls giggled.
On the first day of the term, all students at the Academy had been assigned a tower task — a small job they were responsible for doing. Cinda was Hearthkeeper. Snow was Tidy-upper. No one knew what Rapunzel’s job was because she kept mum about it. Gretel was Pathfinder, which meant she helped anyone in the dorm who wasn’t getting along to find a path toward friendship.
It was Red’s job as Snackmaker to keep the cookie jar full in Pearl Tower’s common room, which was fine with her. She loved baking! And unlike some other students, Red got along great with the Academy’s head cook, Mistress Hagscorch. Still, lately she’d noticed that cookies had been disappearing from the jar at such an alarmingly fast rate that she was having to bake twice as often as usual.
“How many have you had?” Red asked her roommate suspiciously.
Gretel thought for a minute. “Well, I ate three for breakfast, five for lunch, and just now I had two more for a snack.” She paused. “And I’ve got seven more saved for dinner tonight.”
Red stared at her. “Do you mean you’ve eaten nothing but cookies all day today?”
“Since school started last week, actually,” Gretel admitted sheepishly. “Oatmeal’s good for you, though, right?”
“Yeah, but … wait. Is this because of those nightmares you’ve been having?” Red guessed. “The ones that always start with you doing scullery duty for Mistress Hagscorch in the kitchen below the Great Hall?”
Gretel’s eyes went wide and she nodded vigorously, causing her thick brown braid to bounce up and down. “Uh-huh.”
“And then she sneaks up behind you while you’re starting to bake loaves of bread. And then she pushes you into the ov —” said Red.
“Stop! Don’t say it.” Shivering, Gretel wrapped her arms around herself. Then she said in a tiny voice, “I can’t go back to the Great Hall ever again. If I do, I’m toast! Literally. Pushed into the oven to bake with the bread. I just know it!”
“Calm down,” Red soothed, giving her a quick hug. “I know Mistress Hagscorch is always talking about fattening students up, but that’s only because she likes to see people enjoy her food. Not because —”
“— she plans to fatten us up for her dinner?” finished Gretel. “Are you sure? Because I’m not.”
“Don’t you miss hanging out with everyone during meals?” Red coaxed in a singsong voice. “You can’t live on cookies, you know. And you can’t let fear keep you from eating healthy food.” Or from both of us getting a good night’s sleep, she almost added. She didn’t, though. It wasn’t Gretel’s fault that she was having nightmares!
Gretel shrugged. “I know. But all that isn’t worth taking a chance of becoming Gretel Pie, thank you very much.”
Red could see how unhappy Gretel was. But how could she demand that Gretel face her fears when Red couldn’t face her own? After all, hadn’t she decided to let her stage fright keep her from her dream of acting in the school play?
Going over to the doorway, Red peeked out into the common room. No sign of her other friends yet. She ran her fingers over the alcove’s white velvet curtain, which was studded with shiny seed pearls. She really wanted to help Gretel, but …
“Hey, do you smell smoke?” Gretel asked suddenly.
Red’s eyes rounded as she sniffed the air. Then she and Gretel ran to the window of their room and gazed outside.
Down below, Principal R was at his alchemy experiments again, trying to turn yet another object into gold. This time it was the statue of himself that stood in the center of Maze Island.
It looked to Red like his experiment was turning into a disaster. One of the maze’s hedges was ablaze. “Great grimmfire!” she whispered.
“Oh, no!” moaned Gretel. “Why doesn’t he just give it up?”
The fact that no one had ever succeeded at alchemy hadn’t yet stopped Principal R from trying. And he’d somehow convinced his dragon-lady office assistant, Ms. Jabberwocky, to help out with his doomed experiments.
As Red and Gretel watched, Ms. Jabberwocky beat out the hedge fire with her long green tail. At the same time, she tossed a small object into the air with a clawed hand. Tilting her head back, she opened her mouth and chomped the object when it dropped in.
It was probably a spicy jalapeño pepper, Red figured. That’s what she usually ate when she was helping with Stiltsky’s experiments.
Hearing a noise behind them, Red turned from the window to see the alcove’s curtain wiggling. “Knock, knock,” Cinda called from beyond it.
“Come in,” Red called back. Cinda and Snow slipped into the room to join Red and Gretel at the window. They all four stared down at the maze.
“Now!” hollered the principal. Ms. Jabberwocky let out a blast of orange breath-fire to heat the statue.
“Is Principal R really trying to turn his own statue into gold?” asked Cinda.
“Looks like it,” said Red.
“This is nuts!” said Gretel.
As usual, things went awry. There was an explosion. Then the wooden benches surrounding the statue caught fire. Flames and smoke rose up from the center of the maze, and alarms went off all over the school.
Jack and Jill, a pair of twins who attended the Academy, sprang to the rescue. Swinging their magic pail between them, they raced from the school up a small hill and down it again to Once Upon River.
Quickly, they hopped aboard one of the swan-shaped boats docked along the shore and zoomed over to Maze Island. After chanting a few magic words, they tossed their pail into the air. As it tumbled down into the river, it grew bigger and bigger until it was as large as the boat itself!
Dunk! The gigantic pail sunk, scooping up an enormous amount of water, then rose into the air over the center of
the island. It dumped its load. Splash! And just like that, the fire was out. Unfortunately, the principal and Ms. Jabberwocky also got sopping wet, which made the principal grimmighty angry!
“Yikes. Here we go again,” Snow said to the other girls in a half-amused, half-concerned voice.
Sure enough, Principal R began hopping up and down like a cricket and yelling at the statue he’d just set afire. Like it was the statue’s fault that it was partly melted now! He even climbed up on the pedestal to hammer the statue with his fists. That turned out to be a mistake. Suddenly, he slipped in water the pail had dumped. Waving his arms around and around, he spun a few times, wobbled, and then toppled right off the pedestal into the maze of hedges.
“Uh-oh,” said Cinda. “Hope he can find his way out.”
“Yeah,” said Red. “I never can. That maze is crazy hard unless you have help.”
By now, a bunch of other kids had come outside to watch the spectacle from shore. Some called out directions to help the principal escape the maze.
“I’m going down there!” Gretel announced.
As Gretel headed out of their room, Red noticed that she grabbed another cookie from the stash she was keeping at her desk. She obviously hadn’t taken to heart anything Red had said.
“Rapunzel bailed on us,” Cinda said once Gretel was gone. “She wants us to fill her in on our discussion at dinner.”
“Okay,” said Red. She didn’t ask why Rapunzel had bailed. They all knew her fear of heights had everything to do with it. Letting fear stop you from doing what you wanted to do was something Red totally understood better than ever after her botched audition!
Suddenly, a pleased look came over Snow’s face, and she snapped her fingers. “I just remembered something I wanted to check out. It has to do with the mapestry.” She turned toward Red. “Can I see your handbook?”
“Sure.” Red fetched it from her basket. Though the lid hadn’t opened for Gretel, it opened for her, no problem. Was that a clue that the basket really must be her charm?