If the Shoe Fits (Whatever After #2)
Page 3
If we don’t stop exploring soon, we are definitely going to get caught.
“Now what? We’ve tried all of them!” Jonah huffs after we’ve visited every room — thrice.
“Maybe the magic mirror isn’t at the palace,” I say. “Maybe it’s at Cinderella’s house. Snow White lived in the palace before she had to run away. So maybe the portal is where the main character originally lives, before she gets to live happily ever after.”
“But we don’t even know where Cinderella lives!”
“We can follow her home,” I say. “She knows where she lives.”
“Do you think she’s still here?” Jonah asks.
“Wait, what time is it?” I glance down at my watch. Oh, no! I’m not wearing my watch! I took it off last night before bed. Not that my watch would tell me what time it is here. But it would tell me what time it is at home so we could get home before my parents wake up. And now I have no idea what time it is in Smithville!
ARGH.
Jonah follows me sneakily down the hallway back into the ballroom, and I spot a huge round clock hanging on the far wall.
It’s 11:55.
I scan the room for Cinderella and spot her dancing with the prince.
Now the clock says 11:56. Hmm. Does Cinderella not realize what time it is?
“It’s getting late,” Jonah says. “We should tell her to go. Doesn’t she turn into a pumpkin at twelve?”
“Her coach turns into a pumpkin, not her.” I grab hold of his sleeve. “But no, don’t do anything! We don’t want to mess anything up.”
We wait. We watch. 11:58. 11:59.
My heart thumps. What if our just being here messed things up? What if we don’t have to do anything but be here and the story changes anyway? What if she changes back into her rags right here and everyone gasps and freaks out and the prince doesn’t want to marry her after all?
Twelve!
Ding Dong! Ding Dong! Ding Dong!
Cinderella looks up at the clock. Her face pales when she sees the time. She looks at the prince, says good-bye, and then — sprints!
Like really fast!
She makes a mad dash right out of there.
She doesn’t look back, she just goes, goes, GOES!
Zoom! Rhymes with Floom!
“We have to follow her,” I order Jonah, and sprint right behind her. “If we lose her, we won’t know where she lives!”
“At least we didn’t mess up the story,” Jonah calls out.
We follow her outside. She’s running down the steps of the palace, and the prince is chasing after her. She’s in the front, Jonah and I are to her left, and the prince is behind us. We’re a triangle on the move.
On the bottom step, her glass slipper falls off, just like it’s supposed to. Yes! We didn’t mess anything up!
She glances back for a second, but sees the prince behind her and doesn’t stop moving.
She just goes, goes, GOES!
“Wait! Wait! WAIT!” the prince yells.
I look behind and see that he’s stopped. He bends down and picks up the slipper.
Jonah and I, however, keep on running.
Cinderella jumps into her coach and shouts, “Go, go, GO!”
The footmen and horses go, go, GO!
“Oh, no!” Jonah exclaims. “How are we going to keep up on foot?”
“Run,” I order. “Fast, fast, FAST!”
We chase the coach down the block. I’m huffing and puffing, and I really need to do more exercise because I am not in very good shape and —
I see a spark up ahead. Like someone is lighting a match.
The coach begins to glimmer. The horses are shaking. Something is happening.
Kabam!
The coach is shrinking! The horses are shrinking! The footmen are shrinking!
Poof!
Cinderella is sitting on her butt in the middle of the street next to a squashed pumpkin.
The horses are mice. The footmen are lizards. The coachman is a rat.
The whole transformation only took about two seconds. I wish I had my dad’s video camera so I could put it on YouTube.
Jonah is standing beside me with his jaw wide open. “Did anyone else see that? Someone else must have seen that!”
I look around the empty moonlit street. We’re the only witnesses.
“Oh well,” Cinderella says to herself. She looks nothing like the Cinderella of two minutes ago. No wonder her own family didn’t recognize her. Her hair hangs around her shoulders, and she’s no longer wearing any platinum eye shadow or red lipstick or any makeup at all. Her dress is plain brown. Her jewelry is gone, too. She stands up and brushes her dress off. She takes off her right glass slipper and starts walking barefoot.
“What do we do now?” Jonah asks.
Isn’t it obvious? “We follow her home.”
We follow her for the next thirty minutes, all the way to her house. It’s a good thing there’s a full moon because this town doesn’t have any streetlights.
We keep a safe distance. We only whisper. We duck into the shadows whenever Cinderella turns around. We’re really good at this sneaky thing. I bet we could be spies when we grow up. We’d be the cool brother-and-sister team that gets to go to exotic places like New York or Japan to steal nuclear power secrets. They’ll make a movie about us! It’ll be called —
“WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE FOLLOWING ME?”
Oops.
Cinderella is glaring at us from her porch, her hands on her hips.
“We’re not following you,” I squeak.
“Um, yes you are. You followed me all the way from the palace.”
“No, we —” I stop in mid-sentence. We are following her. I’m not sure what to say.
“We need to use your house,” Jonah says.
“There’s a public bathroom three blocks over,” Cinderella says.
“No, so we can go home,” I say.
“What? Who are you?”
“I’m Abby, and this is my brother, Jonah.”
“Don’t you have your own house?” she asks.
“We do, but we need to use yours to get back to it.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t let you in. My stepmother is really strict, and if I don’t listen to her, I get into trouble.”
“Your stepmother is still at the ball,” I say. “We’ll be in and out before she gets home.”
“Yeah,” Jonah pipes up, “but even if you did get into trouble, it won’t be for long ’cause you’re going to marry the prince!”
Her eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
Uh-oh. “Jonah, no!”
Jonah turns to me, cheeks reddening. “What? Was I not supposed to tell her?”
Cinderella steps down from the porch. “Why would you say I was going to marry the prince?”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Jonah says to me. “Why shouldn’t she know her future?” He grins at Cinderella. “You were at the ball, right? You danced with the prince and he thinks you’re the prettiest girl around. You’re going to get married.”
“But — but I don’t understand!” she sputters. “How would he find me? He’ll never recognize me! Even my own stepmother and stepsisters didn’t recognize me!”
I sigh. Since the cat is out of the bag, I guess there’s no reason to keep it all a secret. “You dropped your shoe, right? He picked it up. Tomorrow he’s going to make an announcement that he’s going to marry the person who fits the shoe. He sends his assistant to make every girl in the kingdom try it on. It only fits you.”
A slow smile spreads across Cinderella’s face. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I say. “You’re going to be a princess — and then you’ll get married and be his queen. Well, at first you’ll just be a princess, but eventually you’ll get to be queen once his dad … you know.” No need to be morbid. “Anyway, my point is that even if your stepmother is ticked off at you for a few days, it won’t matter in the long run.”
“It was lucky,” I say. It probably would have been luckier if the prince had caught up with her, but who am I to judge?
One day I’ll be a judge. But not yet.
“It’s also lucky that it only fits you,” Jonah says.
“They’re perfectly molded to my feet.” She lifts the remaining shoe so that it’s eye level. “See?”
And there it is. Right in front of me. The infamous glass slipper. “Can I hold it?” I ask breathlessly.
“Sure,” she says, and passes it to me.
Whoa. It’s heavier than I thought. And it’s really made of glass. Completely see-through. It feels like I’m holding one of my parents’ for-company-only wineglasses. But it’s a shoe. A really high-heeled shoe. I’m not sure how she even walked in them. And they’re tiny, too. For an adult. Or an almost-adult, anyway — I’m guessing she’s about sixteen. The weird thing about the shoe? There are toe marks where the toes go. This shoe was perfectly molded to fit Cinderella’s foot. I guess that makes sense for the story — if they were just a size five, then other girls with size-five feet could fit in them, too.
I hand it back. I really don’t want to drop it by accident.
“Why didn’t the glass slipper disappear like the rest of the stuff?” Jonah asks.
“My fairy godmother changed the dress and coach and horses from something else,” Cinderella explains. “But she gave me the shoes as a gift. The slippers are made just for me, you know.”
“High heels,” I say.
“What?”
I wave my hand. Never mind.
“Anyway, how do you know what’s going to happen to me?” Cinderella asks. “Are you some type of fairy?”
“No,” Jonah says. “But we’re in a fairy tale.”
She scrunches her nose. “Does that mean a fairy told you what happens to me?”
“Well … kind of,” I say. A fairy tale told us what happened. Close enough. “Can we come in? We don’t have much time. We need to get moving before your family gets home.”
“All right,” Cinderella says, and unlocks the door.
We step into a fancy foyer. Not as fancy as the palace, but still fancy. The tiles on the floor are checkerboard, black and white. There’s a big couch, a love seat, chairs, a fireplace, and a wood grandfather clock up against the wall.
There’s a lit chandelier above us, and a big rectangular mirror right by the entranceway.
“Let’s try it,” I say. “Cinderella, stand back. We definitely can’t take you home with us. That would mess up your life for sure.”
Jonah knocks. Once. Twice. Thrice! Nothing.
Boo. “How many other mirrors do you have in the house?”
“My stepmother has one in her room, and my stepsisters have two. That’s it. But why do you need to use a mirror to get home? Where do you live? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we,” I say. “But that’s the way the magic works. Why do we need a mirror to get home? Why did you have to leave the ball by midnight?”
“Magic is weird,” she says. “Let’s go.”
On the second floor, there are two rooms and another staircase.
“Where’s your room?” I ask Cinderella.
She points up. “The attic. Let’s start in my stepmother’s room.” She throws the door open and motions to the large mirror by her bed.
I knock. Once. Twice. Thrice!
Nothing.
“Argh!” I say.
There’s a noise outside. It’s a carriage.
“Look who it is,” Cinderella says with a smirk. “My stepmother and stepsisters returning from the ball. Wait until I tell them what you told me.”
My mouth goes dry. “No, no, no. You can’t say anything to them!”
“Why not? You said it’s going to happen! Were you not telling me the truth?”
“I was telling you the truth, but who knows what will happen if you say something? What if they try to stop it? What if they mess something up? You have to keep it a secret! Promise me you’ll keep it a secret!”
“Okay, okay,” she grumbles. “If you think I have to.”
“We have to hurry,” Jonah says. “We don’t want them to see us, right?”
“Let’s go. To the stepsisters’ room! One of those mirrors had better work.”
“Abby, what if they don’t? How will we get home?”
“I don’t know!”
Last chance. Here we go.
I can see in the moonlight that the room is all pink. Two pink beds, two pink carpets, two pink desks, two pink wardrobes, and two pink pillows — one embroidered with the name Kayla, the other with the name Beatrice.
But best of all: two full-sized pink-framed mirrors.
I have a good feeling about these mirrors, I really do.
Jonah runs straight to Kayla’s mirror. “Maybe they both work. We each get our own portal, how cool is that?”
“Do you really think I’d let you walk into a mirror by yourself?” I say. “What if you actually end up on Mars or something? Not happening. Let’s just choose one and go for it.”
Cinderella is looking out the window. “Hurry! They’re getting out of the coach! They won’t like this one bit! Last month they caught me napping in here and they locked me in their closet for two hours!”
I shiver. They sound awful. I take Jonah’s hand and knock. “One … two …”
And now for the final knock …
“Three!”
Nothing.
“Cinderella, are you awake?” cries a voice from downstairs. “Where are you? Make us some tea!”
Oh, no! They’re home!
And we’re still here.
I hear the clomp-clomp-clomping of their walking around downstairs.
“I have to go,” Cinderella whispers urgently, and turns to leave the room. “You guys have to get out of here!”
“We will,” I say with more optimism than I feel. “There’s still another mirror.”
“Bye, Cinderella!” Jonah says.
“It was nice to meet you,” I add.
I grab Jonah’s hand. “This mirror is going to work. It has to. Ready? One … two …”
And now for another final knock …
“Three!”
Still nothing.
This is NOT good. Not good at all.
I hear more clomping. Clomp-clomp-clomp coming up the stairs.
The sisters are going to walk into their room any moment. We need to do something.
We need to hide.
I signal to Jonah for him to slide under the bed. It looks like I’m waving at him.
“Huh?” he says.
“Shh! And don’t say huh. Say excuse me.”
“Excuse me, what are you doing with your hand?”
Clomp-clomp-clomp.
“I’m trying to motion you to — Oh, forget it! Just slide under the bed!”
He nods and does it. Finally. I slide under Kayla’s bed. The bed skirt reaches the floor, so unless they look for us, they won’t catch us. Ouch! I just scraped the top of my arm.
What if they see us? What will we say? What will happen to us? Will they call the fairy tale police? Will we go to fairy tale jail?
The room is suddenly lit up.
“Cinderella, were you in our room?” someone asks in a high nasal voice. “Our door is open.”
“Yes,” Cinderella calls back. “I was, um, cleaning up.” I hear footsteps coming closer — not the clomp-clomp-clomp kind, but the dainty kind. Cinderella’s footsteps.
“Is that what you did all night?” the same person says.
“No. I was pretty busy,” Cinderella says. I hear a smile in her voice.
At least she’s not telling them the truth.
I hear the window opening and feel a flush of cool air. “So, tell me all about the ball,” Cinderella says, and I detect a little bi
t of an edge to her voice. “Did either of you get to talk with Prince Jordan this time?”
Hmm. That wasn’t very nice. She knows neither of them got to talk to the prince. She danced with him the whole time. Is Cinderella rubbing it in?
“Kayla got to talk to him,” the same person — must be Beatrice — says.
“Really?” Cinderella says. “I didn’t … I mean, that’s nice. So what happened?”
“The beautiful stranger showed up again and interrupted them,” Beatrice says.
“Really?” Cinderella says again.
“I heard she was a princess,” Kayla says.
“She wasn’t a princess,” Beatrice says. “We’d have heard about her if she was a princess. I bet she was an heiress. Those clothes were expensive.”
“The prince danced with her the rest of the night,” Kayla says. “Again. I was really hoping she wouldn’t show tonight.”
“Reeealllly? The prince danced with the beautiful stranger? And that’s why he stopped talking to you? How sad for you!”
I put two and two together and realize that the ordinary-looking girl we saw talking to the prince was Kayla. Also, is it just me, or is Cinderella being mean?
“Yes,” Kayla says, “it was pretty sad.” She sits down on her bed, and the mattress sags so that it’s an inch from my face.
Uh-oh.
If she bounces, she’s going to break my nose. DO NOT BOUNCE, KAYLA. DO NOT BOUNCE.
I hope she’s not a bed jumper. I think back to all the times Jonah and I have jumped on our beds. What if there were kids from other dimensions hiding under our bed skirts and I had no idea?
My nose tingles.
Do not sneeze. Abby, whatever you do, DO NOT SNEEZE.
“Prince Jordan was obsessed with the beautiful stranger,” Beatrice says. “He’s in love with her, surely. How could he not be? She’s gorgeous.”
Ah-ah-ah —
Don’t-don’t-don’t … I squeak a sneeze.
“Did you hear something?” Beatrice asks. “We better not have another mouse problem. Anyway, guess what happened at the end of the night?”
“I have no idea,” Cinderella says. “Did Prince Jordan ask Kayla to dance?”
I can practically see Cinderella batting her eyelashes all fake-innocently.