“Well, Beth gave her fairies to you, right, Jennifer? But I don’t know who gave them to Natalie or who she gave them to after Molly, or who gave Jonathan his.”
“Maybe we should find out,” said Michael.
“No! We’re not letting another day go by without at least trying to rescue Tyler and Molly.”
“Ali’s right,” said Crista. “We can’t let them be fairy slaves.”
“Okay, let’s get your hair up in the bun just in case,” said Ali. “Then we’ll go over to Mrs. Hopper’s and get Molly and Tyler back.”
Ali, Crista, Jennifer, and Michael squatted behind the dumpster in back of Mrs. Hopper’s hair salon.
“What now?” whispered Jennifer.
Michael was having the hardest time hiding. He was so big he practically had to curl into a ball. He jumped up, peered into the dumpster, and then curled up again. “All clear, no fairies,” he whispered.
“There’s no point in sitting out here,” said Ali. “I say we just go in there and follow the plan. Michael is going to take some fairies hostage. I’m going to demand Molly and Tyler back. Jennifer and Crista, you stand there looking menacing, like you’re ready to stomp on them or something. And if that doesn’t work, we go for plan B. You know what to do if that happens, right, Michael?” She hoped that by telling him what to do, she technically wasn’t telling him what the directions said.
Michael nodded.
“Okay. They may have magic, but they have rules they have to follow. They need kids to multiply themselves. I bet they can’t really do anything to us unless we break the rules, which we haven’t. I checked everything, and there’s nothing that says we can’t take our friends back.”
“Are you sure?” asked Crista.
“I’m sure,” said Ali. “There were even directions on how to resize someone. Why would they tell us how to do something that was against the rules?”
Michael and Jennifer exchanged a glance while Crista rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“I’ll go first,” Ali snapped. She stood up and headed for the door, but Michael jumped in front of her and got there first.
He barreled through the door. “Where are you, you little devils?”
Ali pushed in behind him. The hair salon appeared completely empty. “Come on, fake Mrs. Hopper. We know you’re all here.” Please don’t dump hair on me again. Please don’t dump hair on me again.
Fairy heads popped out from behind the chair backs. Eye upon bulging eye watched them. Tiny voices whispered, too quietly for Ali to understand.
Mrs. Hopper stepped out of a closet to Ali’s right, calmly surveying the four of them. What had she been doing in there? She didn’t seem at all unnerved.
A fairy dressed in wrapping paper appeared on Mrs. Hopper’s shoulder. “You must find your own hair,” said the tiny man.
“We’re not here for the hair,” said Ali. “We’re here for our friends Molly and Tyler. We know you turned them into fairy slaves, and we want you to give them back to us.”
Ali didn’t have to look to know that the fairies were dropping down from their places on the chairs. They were crowding around the humans.
The door clanged.
Ali looked back. Crista was gone. Jennifer stood with her back to the door, ready to run. So much for being menacing. But Ali wasn’t going to back down.
“Where are they?” she demanded.
“Give them back,” said Michael. His voice was so quiet, it was almost a whisper. Apparently he’d used up all his courage bursting in front of her. He looked like he was about to run too. Well, let him. She just needed him to do one little thing first. The fairies that crowded silently around their feet weren’t going to help, and there was no way she’d be able to pick out which ones were Tyler and Molly. She’d just have to hope her plan worked.
“Now!” she yelled.
Michael bent down and scooped up the fairies nearest to him. He got six of them in one swoop, and they writhed and squirmed in his hand.
“Agh! What’s that stink?”
“Cigarettes. Gak!”
“Unholy beast!” All of the fairies in Michael’s hand began to cough dramatically. They flailed their arms as if they were drowning.
“Give us Molly and Tyler,” said Ali. “Or we’re taking your friends.”
“Ali!” a voice squeaked. Ali looked down and saw two fairies jumping and waving their arms. Two fairies with hair on their heads!
“Molly, is that you?”
A fairy poked Molly in the back, and she stumbled forward.
“Yes, it’s me. We’re all right, but they’re making us coat sea-shells with mousse. They’re getting ready for some kind of—mfff.” A fairy wearing bright red paper clapped a hand over Molly’s mouth. Tiny Tyler tried to land a punch on the first fairy, but another fairy restrained him.
Ali kneeled down and held out a hand. “Now just let them walk onto my hand, and we’ll leave. We came to take them back, not to hurt anyone.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to hurt anyone,” said Michael, shaking the fairies.
“Fiend!”
“Monster!” The six fairies in Michael’s hand wailed. Hot tears dripped from their giant eyes onto Michael’s palm.
“Oh, come on,” said Michael. “I just gave you a little shake.”
“No one is letting anyone go,” said a loud, imperious fairy voice. She stood on the back of one of the salon chairs, and she was wearing a dress made of green wrapping paper and holding a hairpin. “I am Bunniumpton, Grand Miss Coiffure, monarch of the Kingdome of Fairies, and I—”
“You’re no fairy!” Ali cried. “You’re just a Divvy-imp!”
“What?” Bunny exclaimed. “I am—”
“You’re not,” said Ali. “I saw it in the directions. It said that to resize a reduced child you had to take one full-sized human—”
“Ali, don’t tell us!” Jennifer cried.
“—and one can of hairspray, and the magic of ten un-enslaved Divvy-imps! And then they tried to say I should just forget it but I’m not going to!” Ali had no idea what was so bad about being an imp instead of a fairy, but they never would have said they were fairies if it didn’t mean something.
“Once we freed ourselves from children, we cast off our old titles!” Bunny cried. “We demand to be treated as equal sprites! We will call ourselves fairies if we so choose. And we will not be giving any slave children back—children who broke the rules and are only receiving their just deserts.” Bunny waved her hairpin, and fairies closed in around Molly and Tyler. One of them gave Ali’s hand a good kick.
“Hey!” Ali pulled her hand back. She glanced at Michael.
Michael gulped and nodded.
“Then we’ll just have to do what we can right here,” Ali said, standing up again.
Michael reached down with his other hand and scooped up four more fairies.
At the same time, Ali pulled a can of hairspray out of her jacket pocket. That was when she realized what was missing from her plan. They hadn’t decided who would be the “full-sized” human. It couldn’t be Michael—he was in charge of holding the fairies. Jennifer shook her head vigorously and shrank against the door, eyes wide. Ali couldn’t spray Jennifer when she was so scared. She couldn’t spray anyone she cared about because she had no idea what was going to happen. I hope Mrs. Hopper counts, she thought, and she leaped toward Mrs. Hopper and sprayed.
“Mmmf! MMM!” Mrs. Hopper fell back against the closet door.
Ali advanced on her, pushing as hard as she could on the trigger, letting the whole can go in Mrs. Hopper’s face.
“You do it,” Michael said, shaking the fairies in his fists. “You change them back.”
“You can’t force a fairy’s magic,” said one.
The hairspray can sputtered out.
“Do it,” said Michael, still shaking the fairies.
“Stink!”
“We’ll never . . . gak . . . help you!”
“Monster!” The
fairies wailed and wailed.
Mrs. Hopper grabbed the bottle out of Ali’s hand and tossed it toward the front of the shop. She was about a foot taller than Ali, and her blue eyes were strangely empty as she advanced. The hairspray covering her face, head, and chest didn’t seem to impede her breathing. The sticky film just sat there, obscuring her blank features as she reached for Ali.
“It’s not working! Let’s go!” Jennifer yelled. “Aaah! Get off me! Get off me!” Jennifer stumbled toward Michael and Ali. Her dress ruffled with the movement of the fairies as they crawled up her stomach and began crawling out of her neckline. “Ali, help! Michael! Get them off me!” Her sentence ended in a squeak.
Please don’t let that squeak mean . . . Ali turned her head just enough to see that Jennifer was gone—or at least not big enough for her to see. “Run!” she cried, racing for the door, but Mrs. Hopper’s large arm squeezed her neck. The arm was rubbery and twisted around Ali. It wasn’t like a real human arm at all.
A great commotion arose from the Kingdome. The fairies screamed and jumped about. Mrs. Hopper let go of Ali. Ali turned and saw Tyler, now as large as he had ever been, holding Mrs. Hopper around the waist.
“Are you all right?” Tyler asked.
“Where’s Molly?” Ali gasped. The spell worked, she thought. I did it!
“She’s still small,” Tyler said. “I don’t know where she is.” Mrs. Hopper squirmed in his grip. She reached out a hand toward Ali, but Ali stepped back, out of reach. The fairies were disappearing into cracks and crannies. The only ones left in view were the few Michael was holding.
“Let us go, you monster.”
“You got what you wanted.”
“Oh, the stink!”
“Should I let them go?” he asked. “Ow!” He opened his hands and the fairies jumped down. Before Ali could say anything, they had all disappeared. “Where’s Jennifer?” Michael rubbed his sweaty hands on his pants.
“She’s gone!” Ali cried. “They made her small.” She put a hand on her head and looked around. “They weren’t supposed to make her small.”
“They weren’t supposed to make any of us small,” said Tyler, squeezing Mrs. Hopper tighter.
A fairy appeared on Mrs. Hopper’s shoulder. She was still carrying the hairpin as if it were a royal scepter.“The spell needed a full-sized human,” said Bunny. “A slave for a slave, that’s how it works.”
“The directions never said that!” Ali cried. “Plus, I sprayed Mrs. Hopper, not Jennifer.”
“Mrs. Hopper is a fairy,” said Bunny.
Imp, thought Ali. She glared at the Grand Miss.
“Furthermore, you and your friends have all broken the rules,” said Bunny.
“No, I haven’t! What rules? I read your directions and followed them.” Fairies were streaming out of their crannies, flowing back into the salon. Some began climbing up Tyler’s pants. This was not good.
“You haven’t read them all yet,” said Bunny.
“You can’t hold me to something I haven’t read! That’s not fair!”
“You agreed.”
“I didn’t agree to this!”
“You agreed to follow the rules.”
“Ah, get off me!” Tyler cried. He let go of the fake Mrs. Hopper, who lunged at Ali and grabbed her around the waist and neck. She reeked of hairspray, and she grinned maniacally at Ali as Ali tried to squirm free. Tyler swatted the fairies, but they kept climbing up and up until they were on his head, and he disappeared.
Fairies crawled up Ali’s legs, and then over her stomach, and then her chest, and this time she couldn’t get away. “Michael, run!” she cried. But she wasn’t going to give up. She shook her body as hard as she could and grabbed Mrs. Hopper’s rubber arm.
Some fairies flew off her, but most held on. Mrs. Hopper’s arm was surprisingly strong. Ali struggled, and then the pressure on her neck was gone. She shook herself. Where were the fairies? Why are you thinking about this? Run! She raced toward the door, but nothing looked the way it had. The door was nowhere and . . . what was that long, delicious-looking string?
Eleven
Ali stopped dead in her tracks. That giant string was . . . No . . . it couldn’t be. It was a hair, and if the hair was large, then she must be small. She looked down at herself. She was still wearing her clothes. If she had shrunk, then so had they. She felt the top of her head and breathed a giant sigh of relief. Her bun was still there. At least being shrunk didn’t mean she had to be bald like them. But everything looked weird, magnified. My eyes, she thought. They were as big as a fairy’s! She turned, looking for the other fairies, and there they were. They were heading for her, a whole group of them. Was that Mrs. Hopper’s foot? It was giant! It was a mountain of bare, scaly, fungus-infested, way-too-realistic fake-old-lady toes.
“Michael! Michael! Michael!” she yelled at the top of her tiny lungs.
“Ali!”
Ali turned toward the voice. It had come from the group of fairies that was now surrounding her.
“Ali!”
There she was—Jennifer—in the grip of two other fairies. She stood out because of her bun. Even with her eyes bulging out of her head and her giant tears dripping on the linoleum, she still managed to look gorgeous. Behind her, in the grip of more fairies, were Molly and Tyler.
“Thanks for trying,” Tyler called. “It felt good to be big again!”
Someone scooped Ali up. The hand drenched her in sweat, and it stank. “Michael! Michael!” She was stuck to the pale, rough-yet-spongy skin.
“Get away! Get away!” Was that really Michael’s voice? It sounded strange, so large and deep. Ali squeezed herself up through the sweaty fist, using the stickiness to keep her grip. She poked her head through the hole at the very top. Her vision was clouded with the sweat that had dripped onto her bulging eyes, but the view was unmistakable: It was Crista! She was holding the giant door open with one hand and spraying the fairies with the other. On the can Crista was holding were the words EXTRA-STRENGTH INSECT REPELLENT.
The fairies raced around on the ground in front of Crista, frantic to escape the bug spray.
“Get the others!” Ali shouted, but Michael raced past Crista and out the door. His hand shook and his feet pounded, and every organ in Ali’s body banged against her tiny bones. Her skull rattled, and she was almost ready to throw up whatever was left of her breakfast cereal when the motion finally stopped. Ali was flung one last time into the wedge between thumb and pointer finger, and she rose up with the hand to sit in front of a giant mouth. Instinctively, she shrank back. Michael’s teeth were now crooked yellow mountains, and his breath was a smoky, rancid wind.
“Ali? Are you all right?”
She closed her eyes and put her hand over her nose and mouth.
“Ali, come on. Talk to me! Are you okay?”
She would have to remove her hand sometime. “I’m fine,” she choked.
“Oh man, this got totally messed up.” A bead of sweat dripped from Michael’s upper lip, narrowly missing his fist.
Another giant face came into Ali’s view. The face panted. “Oh, Ali, is that you?”
“Crista!” Ali held on to Michael’s thumb with one arm and waved the other. “You saved us!”
“I wish I’d made it back sooner,” said Crista.
“Bug spray,” said Ali. “It was genius!”
“I don’t think it really hurt them,” said Crista.
“I hope it did!” Ali fumed. “I hope it killed every last one of them!” She paused. “I mean, except for Tyler and Molly and Jennifer.” She leaned against the sweaty thumb. “I just made everything worse.”
No one said anything.
“It worked for a minute, though. If we could only have gotten Tyler out of the Kingdome . . .” Ali put her head down. Her eyes were now so large that they rested on Michael’s fist, leaving her forehead hanging in the air. Who cared if Michael stank? She deserved it. She’d put her best friend in danger and gotten Jennifer chang
ed into a fairy. Jennifer had turned out to not even be so bad, coming along when none of the other people with wishes had wanted to help. Now how were either of them supposed to help anyone? They couldn’t make anyone big again without making someone else small. The directions had neglected to mention that little issue.
She had wanted to find a way to save Molly and Tyler without breaking any rules, but of course it hadn’t worked. How could she have been so stupid? If only she could have gotten her wish, she would have had the brains not to go running into the salon half-cocked.
“I’m so stupid,” Ali moaned. “So so so stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” said Crista. “You’re brave. You got everyone together to save people you weren’t even really friends with.”
“Stupid,” Ali said, banging her giant eyes against Michael’s fist. “Stupid stupid stupid.”
“It’s going to be all right. We’ll think of a way out of this,” Crista said.
Silence.
“Right, Michael?”
Michael sighed, unfortunately with his mouth open. “Sure we will.”
“You’re worried about your wish, aren’t you?” Crista asked, her voice rising. Oh no. Her rants were bad enough when Ali’s ears were normal sized. She covered them, but she could still hear. “After what just happened, all you can think about is, ‘How is she going to grow all those fairies for me now? How can I become some big sports star?’ Never mind that Ali’s a fairy now, thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me?” Michael’s fist widened, loosening his grip on Ali.
Ali grabbed on with both arms.
“Thanks to me?” Michael ranted. “I helped, didn’t I? I risked everything to save those idiots who couldn’t follow some stupid rules!” He waved his hand in the air.
“Stop!” Ali screamed, slipping farther and farther into his fist.
Michael slapped her from one hand into the other, plunging her into the overwhelming stench of stale cigarettes. Her head was completely covered, and Michael squeezed her as he continued defending himself. “Those other kids didn’t come even though they got their wishes. I came! Now they think I broke the rules! They’re going to be coming for me now.”
Evil Fairies Love Hair Page 6