by Joan Holub
“Oh, too bad,” said Snow. “I was really hoping for j —”
“Jewels plus gold equals treasure,” her friends said right along with her. Then they all cracked up laughing.
All eyes went to the crystal ball as Red took it from the basket and placed it on top of the mapestry. The ball was still transparent and stayed that way. No pink mist swirling inside. No enchantress peering out of it.
A small silence fell among the girls and Red wondered if, like her, the others were a little puzzled. Because even though the mapestry had seemed to lead them to the crystal ball, Grandmother Enchantress now wanted them to turn it over to Wolfgang.
“Let’s do a game called ‘should we give Wolfgang the ball, or not,’” Red suggested. “Sort of like the ‘loves me, loves me not’ flower petal game.”
“Give,” said Red, going first. Then she gave the feathery-light ball a gentle bump with her hand. It rolled across the mapestry to Snow, who said, “Not give,” before bumping it to Cinda, who said, “Give,” before bumping it to Rapunzel, who said, “Not give.”
They kept up the back-and-forth bumping game as Cinda emptied the basket between turns. She took out the lantern, as well as the flowers Red and Wolfgang had picked earlier that afternoon. The flowers were a bit crushed and badly in need of water by now. Skipping a few of her bumping turns, Snow got up to set the flowers in a half-filled water glass on Red’s desk where she arranged them prettily.
Gazing at the flowers, Red caught the ball Cinda bumped back to her, stopping it on “give.” Suddenly, she blurted, “I think I’ll go talk to Wolfgang by myself.” Then she grinned. “Assuming I don’t get lost on the way to the library, that is!” The others laughed along with her. And they murmured in understanding when she added, “I’m guessing he’d clam up if we were all there. But I’ll tell you everything he says. I promise.”
As Snow came to sit with them again, Cinda spoke up. “Remember when we were all getting gowns for Prince Awesome’s ball and we went into the G section in the library to the room where all the Grimm brothers stuff is?”
Red, Snow, and Rapunzel nodded. The Grimm brothers room was the most magical room in the whole library. Things inside it moved under their own power. Decks of cards shuffled themselves in midair and dealt themselves out. Paperweights floated off desks and glided around the room, and books slid out from the shelves and came to rest wherever they pleased.
“I thought I saw a nose sticking through the coat of arms on the wall. Remember?” Cinda went on as Rapunzel picked up the shiny yellow braid she’d made and wound it into a knot at the back of Cinda’s neck. “And later I thought I saw an eyeball?”
The other girls traded looks. “You decided you were just imagining things,” said Snow.
“Yeah, because it was only your first day at the Academy,” Rapunzel reminded her. “Everything was strange and new to you then. Especially magic!”
“Right, but now I’m not so sure it was my imagination,” said Cinda.
“Hey! You don’t think Grandmother Enchantress was watching us, do you?” asked Red as she began rolling up the mapestry. “Like she did from her portrait in the cottage?”
“No,” Cinda said firmly. “The eyes I saw were brown and hers are gray. And the nose was way bigger than hers. But remember how she said that someone outside of Grimmlandia must be pulling the E.V.I.L. Society’s strings?”
“Uh-huh, so?” said Rapunzel. She’d unwound the knot and was trying another style, piling the braid on top of Cinda’s head now.
“The enchantress also said that the protective spells that keep Grimmlandia safe from the outside world are weakening.” Cinda lowered her voice to a near whisper, then went on. “So maybe they’re already weak enough for someone from the outside to peek in!”
Red felt goose bumps rise on her arms. Lowering her voice to the same level as Cinda’s, she said, “Someone from the Dark Nothingterror, you mean?”
“Exactly,” said Cinda.
Rapunzel dropped Cinda’s braid. “Whoa! If what you saw was real, I wonder what it means? Grandmother Enchantress was definitely right about magic being spirited out. We all saw Peter Peter Pumpkineater’s pumpkin turn into a carriage, roll into Neverwood Forest, then disappear off the edge of the mapestry. But is someone or something from the Dark Nothingterror trying to get into the Academy?”
Bong! The girls were so creeped out that they all jumped at the sound piping in through a grate in the wall. But it was only the Hickory Dickory Dock clock bonging the six thirty dinner hour.
“Saved by the bong,” quipped Red. “Because none of us has an answer for that one!” She set the crystal ball back in her basket and shut its lid.
Rapunzel took charge of the mapestry. “My turn to guard it.” After shoving it into the bag Snow gave her, she hopped to her feet. “Let’s go eat.”
“Yeah,” said Cinda as she and the others stood, too. “One cookie just did not do it for me. I could really go for some of Mistress Hagscorch’s newt’s eye potpie.”
“Mmm. Sounds good,” said Snow rubbing her stomach.
“I’ll catch you later,” said Red as her three friends made to leave. “Cookie jar’s empty. I want to whip up a new batch of cookies before I go downstairs. I’ve been neglecting my duties as Snackmaker.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Snow teased. “If you bake while you’re hungry, you might wind up eating all the dough.”
Red laughed. “I’ll try to control myself.”
After mixing it up, however, she couldn’t help taste-testing a couple of mouthfuls. Her double-chocolate chocolate-chip cookie dough — her very own special recipe — was so good it was simply grimmpossible to resist!
Gretel came in while she was dropping the last spoonfuls of dough into a Dutch oven, which was really just a big cast iron cooking pot. She placed it among the coals in the huge common room fireplace and then covered the pot with a tight-fitting lid.
“Mmm,” said Gretel, eyeing the cookies that already sat cooling on a fresh towel atop the table. “Those smell dee-licious.”
“Have one,” said Red, nodding toward them. “But first please tell me you’ve had something to eat today besides cookies for breakfast and lunch.”
Gretel’s brown eyes twinkled as she reached for a cookie. “Believe it or not, I just had dinner.”
“In the Great Hall?” Red asked in surprise.
Gretel nodded as she broke off a piece of warm cookie. “Uh-huh. My starving stomach dragged me there. I was terrified. But I kept thinking about what you said yesterday. That a person can’t live on cookies. And how I shouldn’t let fear keep me from eating healthy. And besides,” she said with a grin, “we were totally out of cookies since I ate the last of them for lunch.”
Red laughed. “Yeah. I noticed!” She thought it best not to let Gretel in on the secret of her own private stash.
Gretel giggled, then took a big bite of her cookie. “Mmm,” she said around a mouthful, closing her eyes in bliss. “Anyway, since I was sooo hungry,” she went on between cookie bites, “I got desperate. I decided it was up to me to face Mistress Scaryscorch — I mean, Hagscorch — in the Great Hall again.”
“Yeah?” Red asked.
Gretel nodded. “My legs were like limp noodles when I entered the Hall. But I got in line with my tray anyway. I nearly lost it though, when Mistress Hagscorch handed me a plate of her special swamp stew. Because guess what she said?”
“You need fattening up!” the two girls said at the same time. Then they erupted in giggles.
“I wanted to drop my tray and run!” said Gretel. “But I was mad, too. Mad that I let her get to me like that. So I looked her in the eye and I said, ‘Do I look like a stick figure to you or something? Because if I do, you probably need glasses.’”
At that, Red laughed so hard she almost fell over. “Oh, grimmtastic! I wish I could’ve seen the look on her face when you said that.”
“Her mouth did kind of fall open,” Grete
l said. “But it didn’t stop her from saying the very same thing to the next student in line.”
Red handed her another cookie. “Here’s a reward. To celebrate your courage,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Gretel. Then she took a few more cookies and wrapped them in a napkin. “For my brother. And for Jack and Jill,” she explained. Gretel and her brother, Hansel, were best friends with the twins.
“Jack somehow managed to hit himself in the head with the magic pail this morning,” she went on. “He apparently broke his crown.”
“Why was he wearing a crown when he’s not a prince?” asked Red.
“No, I mean crown as in the top of his head,” Gretel explained. “He fractured his skull. Had to go to the infirmary and have his forehead wrapped in vinegar and brown paper. Again. He’s the most accident-prone person I know. Ms. Jabberwocky had to call for the doctor and call for the nurse. They even had to call for the lady with the alligator purse.”
“The alligator purse lady! Wow, Jack’s injury must’ve been a difficult case,” Red sympathized.
“Yeah, and Jill returned the pail to the library and they aren’t allowed to check it out for a whole week.”
As Red took the last batch of cookies from the Dutch oven, she glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Seven thirty already. Gotta run!” she said. “I haven’t eaten dinner yet, and I’m supposed to be at the library by eight!”
After Gretel waved her off and headed for their room, Red left the cookies to cool on the table. An impulse seized her as she grabbed her basket. She looked back at the cookies again. Should she? Wolfgang didn’t really deserve any of her precious cookies after what he’d done. Still …
Moving to the table she quickly piled some of the cooled cookies on top of a large red-and-white-checkered cloth napkin. Then she pulled out her magic snack-reshaping wand from her cooking tool drawer and used it to tap the top cookie on the pile.
“Your shapes instead
Shall be a wolf head!”
In an instant, each cookie on the checkered cloth magically transformed itself into the shape of a cute wolf head. Then, without giving herself a chance to change her mind, Red tied the napkin cookie bundle securely and set it inside her basket beside the enchantress’s crystal ball. Slipping the basket over one arm, she wound her way downstairs to the Great Hall to grab a fig newtburger before her meeting with Wolfgang.
Luckily, Red didn’t get lost looking for the library this time. After searching along several hallways and climbing up and down many flights of stairs in search of the Grimmstone Library’s special doorknob — the only one without the GA (for Grimm Academy) logo on it — she finally found the plain brass knob. It was in Gray Castle, the boys’ side of the Academy, in the middle of the fourth floor. Strangely, it was positioned very low, about a foot off the floor.
She got on her knees and then lightly tapped the knob just as the Hickory Dickory Dock clock bonged eight. “Honk!” The knob morphed into the shape of a beaked goose’s head the moment she touched it. “What do you get if you cross the ocean with a kangaroo?” it demanded to know. Students always had to answer a riddle before the gooseknob would let them into the library.
A kangaroo with fins? Red thought at first. But that didn’t quite make sense. Hmm. The word cross in the riddle could have more than one meaning. For example, even though kangaroos were good leapers, no way could a kangaroo actually cross the ocean in a single bound. It would have to swim. So if you did cross with one, you’d get …
“Uh. Wet?” Red guessed in answer to the riddle.
Without another word, the gooseknob morphed back into a plain brass knob again. Which was the way you knew you’d guessed correctly. Quickly, a rectangle drew itself on the wall around the knob, becoming the library door.
This time the door was smaller than Red had ever seen it, only about three feet high and two feet wide. But as always it was decorated with low-relief carvings of nursery rhyme characters like Little Bo-Peep (running after her sheep), Jack and Jill (tumbling down a hill), and Little Boy Blue (napping under a haystack).
After turning the knob, Red crawled inside. Another strange thing about the library was that it could make itself any size it figured it needed to be on any given day. Usually it was as vast as Neverwood Forest, its ceiling as high as the treetops, with white geese flying overhead carrying books and artifacts hither and thither in nets that hung from their orange beaks.
And usually there were rows and rows of shelves stretching farther than the eye could see, and dozens of side rooms housing special collections. Like the Grimm brothers room where Cinda thought she’d seen someone peeking at her through a coat of arms.
But tonight the Grimmstone Library was even smaller than Red’s dorm room! Instead of the usual enormous chandeliers, only one hung overhead, its dangly crystals touching all four walls.
A short stack of books, none more than a few inches square, and a jar holding several goose-feather quill pens sat on a ledge, which was labeled with a large ornate letter P. P for what? she wondered. Puny? Usually the labels in Grimmstone Library indicated what was to be found in that section of the library. And everything in here was pitifully puny for sure.
There was no sign of Mother Goose, the librarian, and certainly no geese flying by overhead. No sign of Wolfgang, either. If he had been here, he would’ve been easy to find!
After setting her basket in a corner (which was only two feet away since the area was so small), Red grabbed one of the tiny books off the ledge. There were no chairs, so she settled onto the floor of the mini-library to wait.
Good thing her friends hadn’t come. No way all of them could’ve squished together in this small space. On the other hand, maybe the library would’ve expanded to hold them all? Even though this was her sixth year at the Academy, she still wasn’t quite sure how the library’s magic worked.
She opened the book she’d taken from the ledge. To her surprise it turned out to be an illustrated rhyme about Polly, the snippy, tea-drinking girl from her Drama and Scrying classes. Checking the spines of the other books she saw that all were books with P titles, like this Polly one.
In fact, this must be the entire P-section, she realized suddenly. Only everything had been shrunk to dollhouse size. Or P for Pint-size. Or small as a Pea.
Red squinted at the tiny print in the book she held and softly read it aloud:
“Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
And let’s drink tea.
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
They’re all gone away.”
Well, that certainly explains why Polly liked tea so much, Red decided. She couldn’t help it. It was part of her nursery rhyme! But who was Sukey? And why did she have to take the kettle — which was basically the same as a teapot — off the heat? Couldn’t Polly do that as well? It didn’t seem like too much effort was needed to mind a kettle.
She’d just begun to wonder who “they” were — the ones who had drunk the tea and then abruptly gone away (without even a thank-you, it seemed) — when the door behind her flew open with such a whoosh that the candles in the single chandelier flickered and almost went out.
“Ow!” yelled Red. “My foot!”
“Sorry,” said Wolfgang as he tried to fit himself into the cramped space. “Why is everything so small?”
“You mean petite, don’t you?” she asked, rubbing the toes he’d accidentally stomped through her ankle boots.
He shot her a confused look, which turned to a P for Pained one as he bumped his head on the low ceiling. “Ow!” Rubbing his head where he’d bumped it, he sank down beside her to sit cross-legged on the floor. There was so little space in the tiny library that their knees bumped.
“Sorry,” they said at the same time. Red drew her knees up to her chin under her skirt, then wrapped her arms around them.
Wolfgang chuckled, looking around. “I wanted someplace private to talk. Guess we got it, huh?”
“Which probably explains the P,” said Red, pointing at the big P on the ledge. “P for Private! That’s why the library is so small tonight!”
“Huh?”
“The entire library is just the P section right now,” Red informed him. “Books with P titles. A box of peas. And another box of Ps,” she said, showing him a little box with P letters inside it. They were all different sizes and fonts.
“Well, pardon me, but this is P for Pathetic,” Wolfgang pronounced. “We can’t talk in this pint-size place.”
Suddenly, an idea sparked in her head. “Hey, maybe we could P for Push the walls outward to make it more P for Pleasant in here?”
“Worth a try,” said Wolfgang. They each set one shoulder against the wall opposite one another and pushed with all their might. The walls began to move farther apart, creating more room! But the pace of movement was pretty poky.
When Wolfgang’s hand slipped from the wall and accidentally touched her basket in the corner, Red snatched it up and hugged it under one arm. They both stopped pushing for a few seconds, eyeing each other uncertainly. Then Wolfgang started to push again and she did, too.
“I get it,” said Wolfgang. “You don’t trust me because of what happened in the forest.”
Red frowned at him. “What did you expect? First you steal my basket. Then you trick me into telling you stuff I’d promised my friends I’d keep secret.”
Instead of responding to what she’d just said, he glanced at the basket. “I suppose you found what was inside it?”
She nodded. “The mapestry.”
Wolfgang frowned. “So that’s where that went. I should have guessed. But wasn’t there anything else inside?” he asked anxiously.
Red arched an eyebrow. “Maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t. Before we talk about that, you need to tell me the truth about why you were out in the forest. While you’re at it, an apology might be nice, too.”
“Or maybe just a ’pology since we’re in the Ps?” suggested Wolfgang.