Once Upon A Fairytale

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  ‘People in relationships need time together,’ she continued, ‘or their love shrivels up like a dead rose!’ Her step-mom was kind of dramatic. ‘You understand,’ she said.

  But Sarah didn’t. If time together equalled love, she thought, then how could her dad love her?

  ‘What about our relationship then?’ Sarah whispered at her feet. ‘What about me and Dad?’

  But her step-mom pretended not to hear her. Nathan said he’d read somewhere that using too much hairspray can seal over your ear canals, so that could have been it.

  For a while, Sarah tried to steal time with her dad. She’d sneak a sugary drink before bed and try to force her body clock onto Mars time. But when she waited up, creeping into the hallway and trying to make herself hungry for dinner just when he was about to get home at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., her step-mom would always catch her, bursting into the kitchen in a black silky nightgown like a bat.

  ‘This is no time of night for twelve-years-olds,’ she’d hiss, dragging Sarah back to her bedroom before her dad came home. ‘And thank you for ruining my beauty sleep.’

  One night, when Sarah sneaked out of her room at 12.36 a.m., she almost ran right into her. Her step-mom had been standing in front of the hallway mirror trying to smooth out her wrinkles. She was always in front of a mirror. One time Sarah caught her muttering to it, something about the ravages of time. Dramatic, remember?

  ‘Back into bed!’ her step-mom hissed, and Sarah was thrown into her room once again.

  It was hopeless.

  Then Sarah and Nathan had an idea. Maybe she could force her dad back into her time zone. She started mucking around in class, sometimes not even turning up, and purposely failing tests. If her dad found out then he might have to come home early and sit with her at night so he’d know she was doing her homework. Or he might have to start driving her to school in the mornings so he’d know she went to class on time.

  ‘Maybe he’ll quit his job and homeschool you!’ Nathan said. ‘Space robots 101 for every period. I’m in!’

  But instead, her step-mom intercepted the letters sent home from school. She rounded on her one dreary afternoon.

  ‘Sarah, don’t you know about the school’s three-strike policy?’

  Sarah gave her a blank look.

  ‘One, two, three –’ her step-mom tapped her long red fingernails on the kitchen bench to the numbers – ‘and you’re out.’

  ‘Out?’ Sarah slid her school bag onto the floor.

  ‘Expelled!’ Her step-mom held up a letter with the school’s logo and Mr Jackson’s signature and shook it. ‘And you’re on two.’

  ‘Oh’ was all Sarah managed.

  Her step-mom swept over to her and placed a hand softly on her shoulder. ‘Oh, Sarah.’ Fake sympathy spread across her make-up-caked face. ‘We can keep two strikes from your father for his sake. He’s too busy to worry him with this. But if you play up any more, well –’ she shook her silky mane of black hair – ‘there’ll have to be some big changes.’

  That didn’t sound good but for a moment Sarah couldn’t think what her step-mom meant – until her eyes slid to the kitchen fridge. There, pinned to the door with a Saturn V spaceship magnet, was a brochure for St Mary’s Boarding School in Scotland. And Sarah’s guts dropped.

  ‘She’s an ice queen!’ she told Nathan as they parried back and forth in fencing the next day.

  ‘She’s the wicked witch,’ he agreed with a flourish of his sword.

  ‘She’s going to put me in some Scottish dungeon!’

  ‘If only these were real swords.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah yelled, dealing him a blow, which he skilfully dodged. ‘OFF WITH HER HEAD!’

  Then, just when Sarah was beginning to think she’d never be in sync with her dad, she turned thirteen. On her birthday, Sarah’s dad sat on the end of her bed after school, wearing a goofy, excited grin.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘now that you’re a teenager I think you’re old enough to come in and see me at work.’

  ‘What?!’ Sarah leapt off the bed and her pillow went flying.

  Her dad laughed. ‘Just tonight. We can have lunch. If you don’t mind having a cheese sandwich at four a.m.’

  ‘So, I get to be on Mars time with you?’ Sarah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘I get to go to NASA?’

  ‘As long as you don’t fall asleep in class and get us both in trouble.’ He winked.

  Sarah’s insides froze solid and she could almost hear her step-mom’s nails tapping.

  One, two, three – and you’re out.

  So you get it now. You get why I’m trying not to fall asleep. You get why Mr Jackson keeps staring at me, just waiting for a chance to give me a third strike.

  Nathan’s whispering is so loud now it’s practically yelling but nothing can stop this sleep taking over. I’m slipping away. But we’re almost at the end! The end of the story. The end of class – and the end of my life as I know it.

  At 11 p.m. Sarah woke up to her alarm, sleepily packed her school stuff, and her dad drove them down the highway towards his work. He rapped along to a song called ‘Intergalactic’ by the Beastie Boys while Sarah chewed gum and stared out of the window at the stars. They looked extra bright tonight.

  The moon came out from behind a hill and Sarah’s dad threw some binoculars in her lap. She hung out of the window, hair flapping in the night air, as her dad named all the moon’s craters for her and Sarah felt like time had stopped. Not in the bad way, like it does in the five minutes of class before the bell, but in a good way. She never wanted it to start again.

  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was all screens and model space robots. Her dad introduced her to G-force and Spaceman and the other spacecraft engineers. They seemed so close, like a family, teasing each other and joking around in their matching uniforms.

  ‘So this is the famous Sarah!’ said a woman with bubblegum-pink hair. She shook Sarah’s hand excitably. ‘I’m Electro. Your dad’s told me all about you.’

  ‘He has?’ Sarah was surprised. She hadn’t realised her dad might think about her during work, let alone talk about her. She assumed he forgot about her when they weren’t together. But now that she thought about it, it’s not like she ever forgot about him.

  ‘Yeah!’ Electro continued. ‘He says you’re super smart! Maybe you’ll come and work for us one day.’

  Sarah smiled and turned about as red as the planet she could see on the screens.

  Sarah hung around the control room all morning, staring in wonder as her dad manoeuvred the rover across the craggy, rock-strewn surface of Mars.

  ‘We’re aiming for Olympus Mons,’ he said, pointing at an enormous mountain on the screen in front of them.

  Sarah sat in his lap and tapped in some coordinates that directed the rover.

  Lunch was at 4 a.m. Sarah stifled her first yawn as the team sat around a large table, chatting in small groups. Staring around the breakroom she saw a corkboard with photos pinned to it. She saw her own face staring back at her. It was the one her dad took on her first day of school. There was one of her step-mom too but Sarah’s was bigger. Sarah grinned to herself as she chewed.

  Halfway through her sandwich, the spacecraft engineers starting talking about time.

  G-force turned to Sarah. ‘Did you know,’ she said with a cheeky smile, ‘that time moves faster at your feet than at your face?’

  ‘Really?’ Sarah replied.

  ‘Gravity makes time move faster the closer it is to the earth’s core. So, your toenails are older than your hair by about –’ G-force looked up, like he was doing calculations in his head – ‘ninety billionths of a second every hundred years.’ Then he burst out laughing.

  Spaceman spoke up. ‘My favourite time fact is that when we look at the stars, we’re looking back in time. See,’ he told Sarah, waving a doughnut in the air as he talked, ‘when we look at objects that are large distances away from us, the light that is hitting us now will have started from
the object a long time ago. So, in effect, we’re looking back in time.’

  Sarah tried to get her head around this. She knew there was more to time than a number on a clock – there had to be more to it if it could make someone hate you like her step-mom did – but she’d never thought it might be this … bendy.

  ‘Time is an illusion,’ Electro chimed in, spraying some choc chip cookie across the table. ‘Albert Einstein said so. Right, Space Monkey?’

  It took Sarah a second to realise Electro was talking to her dad, not her.

  ‘Hear hear,’ her dad said.

  Space Monkey! Sarah thought. He’d given her his nickname. Like she was one of them. Part of his NASA family.

  ‘See, Sarah,’ Electro continued, ‘the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.’

  ‘Wait.’ Sarah paused. ‘It … time … doesn’t exist?’ she asked, starting to giggle and wishing Nathan was hearing this.

  ‘Oh, it exists.’ Electro downed her glass of milk, burped and winked. ‘Just not the way you think it does.’

  After lunch Sarah was given a tour of the rest of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and her dad explained the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which was studying changes in earth’s water and ice sheets.

  At 7 a.m., while they were drinking a hot chocolate back in the break room and laughing at the way the steam fogged up his glasses, her dad’s watch started to beep. He reached to his wrist and turned the alarm off.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘That’s the time you wake up for school, Space Monkey.’

  Sarah was confused. ‘Why do you have an alarm for that?’

  Her dad showed a weary, sad smile. ‘You might not miss your dorky dad much, but it’s not easy being away from my daughter all the time,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel closer to you knowing what you’re doing.’

  And then it hit her. Sarah finally got it. The photo, the nickname, the alarm. She was in sync with her dad. She always had been. Time existed, just not in the way she thought it did! Like Electro said.

  ‘Speaking of which …’ Her dad smiled properly now and reached down to pull a small square present wrapped in midnight-blue paper from his bag.

  Sarah unwrapped it. ‘Woah!’

  It was a NASA watch, the same as her dad’s. The background was black with stars and on the end of the hour hand was a tiny red planet. Her dad buckled the strap around her wrist.

  ‘Now you’ll always know what I’m doing too,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you to school.’

  And that’s a beautiful lesson to learn, isn’t it? And they lived happily ever after. But, no. This is not a fairytale ending. Because it’s too late. Because it’s over. Mr Jackson is standing right over me now, waiting for me to drift off, and Nathan can’t do a thing about it. I can’t hold my eyes open any longer. I can’t hold my head up for a single second more. It sinks down to my wrist. I’m going to be sent to Scotland. Away from my dad. Away from Nathan …

  BEEP-BEEP BEEP-BEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEP-BEEP.

  The alarm on my NASA watch set to go off when Dad finishes work starts going crazy right next to my ear and I jolt up and gasp. And now I’m definitely not asleep but I’ve sucked my apple gum right into the back of my throat and I’m choking!

  I stand up, wrapping my wrist around my throat, coughing and spluttering, but Mr Jackson just thinks I’m messing around.

  ‘Sit DOWN!’ he booms, but I won’t because sitting down won’t help me breathe. ‘You are ONE strike away from expulsion, Miss Snow!’

  Nathan jumps up and yells, ‘She’s choking, sir!’

  And the other kids are starting to notice and a look of realisation comes over Mr Jackson’s face, quickly followed by panic.

  I can feel my face turning blue.

  ‘Right,’ he says unhelpfully to the classroom. ‘Right, well, someone go get the school nurse then. Quickly!’

  I’m on my knees now, trying to suck in the tiniest scrap of air but it’s no use. I roll on to my back, hoping the gum might slip down my throat with gravity but it’s lodged solid.

  ‘There’s no time!’ Nathan screams, and in half a second he’s on the floor with me, golden hair sweeping over my face, and I swear I can smell daisies and then …

  He’s kissing me!!

  No.

  He’s giving me mouth-to-mouth. And I’m so shocked to have his lips on my lips that I gasp again and the gum shoots straight down my oesophagus and is gone. I suck in a gulp of sweet air.

  ‘You saved me,’ I wheeze at Nathan, and his smile is like the Californian sunshine.

  He points to my new watch. ‘Cool time machine,’ he says.

  The school nurse calls my step-mom, who takes me home early. She’s wearing lipstick the colour of a perfect red apple.

  ‘Poor darling,’ she croons from the driver’s seat with well-disguised disappointment that I didn’t choke. ‘How awful. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I stick my head out of the window in the suburban streets and find that the moon is still out. I name the craters quietly to myself.

  Then, suddenly, I can’t hold it in.

  ‘I don’t want to be sent to Scotland!’ I yell.

  My step-mom’s painted eyebrows shoot up her forehead. ‘What? We’re not sending you to Scot–’

  I cut in, not believing a word. ‘Then what’s with the brochure?’ I spit. ‘The talk about boarding school?’

  She looks nervous and I think I’ve got her. ‘Well,’ she starts carefully, ‘we just … we were going to suggest to you that you might like to go there for your senior year. You know, to get to know your mum better. But only if you want to!’ She turns quickly and offers me the same tired and sad smile I saw on my dad this morning, a crack in the make-up-caked facade. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a mum to you. I try, but it doesn’t come easy to me.’

  I feel an itch in my chest that I hope isn’t sympathy.

  ‘Well, what about the big changes?’ I ask. ‘You said if I kept playing up at school there would have to be big changes.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ And this time the ‘darling’ sounds genuine enough to make me wonder if maybe I was wrong about her. ‘I meant that perhaps your father should quit his job. His work schedule is –’ and there’s the slightest catch in her voice – ‘hard on all of us. I know I don’t always deal with it well myself either.’

  She smiles and reaches out for my hand and finds my wrist, my watch, wrapping black nails around it gently, and it feels like an apology.

  That itch in my chest. It is sympathy. For my step-mom. Ugh.

  But it feels good to talk. Because maybe she doesn’t hate me after all. Maybe we’ve just been out of sync. I think of the photo of my step-mom in the breakroom at Dad’s work and remind myself to tell her about it later. It sounds like she needs to hear it.

  ‘I don’t want him to quit,’ I’m surprised to hear myself say. Because he loves that job. And, I realise, he loves me – even when he’s not with me.

  Dad’s home when we get there and my step-mom pulls a 2 p.m. roast dinner out of the oven. She’d set the table for two but quickly adds another place. She smiles and tells me to eat slowly so I don’t choke. I look around the table and for the first time in forever it feels like we’re a family.

  During dessert at 3.15 p.m., Dad’s NASA watch alarm goes off.

  ‘School time’s up, Space Monkey,’ he says.

  ‘Actually, Space Monkey,’ I say, waving my chocolate ice cream cone in the air as I talk, ‘time is an illusion.’

  He starts laughing.

  And they lived happily ever after continued to live their imperfect lives.

  The Giant’s Child

  Vicky McFarland

  Very few human beings know the true story of what happed to Jack when he went up the beanstalk.

  After all, Jack was the only one to return alive and tell the tale. He told it the way he wanted it to be remembered. But there’s another versio
n, one he would rather you didn’t know about. Not because he thought he did anything wrong, or bad. He admitted to stealing from and killing innocent giants. What could be worse than that?

  No, Jack was embarrassed.

  To be honest, I don’t blame him.

  I would be embarrassed too, if I went through what he went through. And a little bit ashamed.

  I’m sure you know that Jack and his mother were very poor. They lived in a tiny cottage and barely had enough food to eat. All they had in the world was their cow, Daisy, which they had to sell.

  Who knows what was going through Jack’s mind when he traded Daisy in for magic beans? Perhaps he was hoping the beans would grow into a magic beanstalk that would take him to a land filled with riches. Or maybe he was conned by a very good salesman. Either way, through luck and magic, a giant beanstalk did grow from the beans. And it did lead to another world. Who’d have guessed?

  When Jack arrived at the top of the beanstalk, he knew he was in a place where the rules were different. For a start, there were flowers as tall as he was. Secondly, there was a castle as big as a mountain. I don’t know about you, but if I saw a castle the size of a mountain, I’d be sure I was in the Land of Giants, which just happened to be where Jack was. Jack knew this for two reasons:

  1. There was a big sign that said: Welcome to the Land of Giants.

  2. There was a humongous giant’s hand reaching down to grab him.

  Before he knew what was happening, Jack was lifted up, up and still further up, until he came face to eyeball with a real-life giantess.

  ‘He-wo!’ She grinned at him.

  Jack caught a glimpse of her huge teeth, which were as big as fridge doors. A couple were missing. Judging by the rancid smell of her breath, Jack guessed she never brushed them. He doubted anyone made a toothbrush large enough.

  ‘What ya do-win?’ she asked, then didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘You better be carefwul. My daddy eats lickle people like you.’

  Jack took this to be good news. If her daddy ate little people like him, that meant she did not, didn’t it? As Jack was processing this good news, the giantess dropped him into her pocket. It was deep and filled with soft white tissues the size of bed sheets, which was a good thing, because the giantess immediately skipped back to her castle, causing poor Jack to be jostled this way and that. It wasn’t long before he felt something slimy and cool trickle down his neck.