When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  A quiet descended on the apartment, cloaked in the heavy potpourri smell that surrounded them. Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay both seemed at a loss as to how to proceed from there.

  “Um,” Kylie said, raising her hand halfway. “I can vouch for all of that. Rose didn’t drink any alcohol. But actually, I did.”

  Rose turned, raising her eyebrows. “What?”

  Kylie shrugged. “Well, you just told them I didn’t, and I know that you didn’t know that I did, but still it wasn’t true, so I didn’t want you to be saying something that wasn’t true even if you didn’t know it wasn’t true, and I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

  Aunt Suzette smiled tenderly. “Yes, you are,” she said and sipped her tea. “Do your parents know you drink, or are we complicit now in your delinquent behavior?”

  “Oh, I don’t drink,” Kylie replied. “I had half a cup of that punch and it was seriously nasty, like I almost retched all over Chloe’s birthday cake. And I know what you’re thinking, why have more than a sip if it’s that disgusting, right? But the guy who gave me the cup rows crew at Harvard and he is ridiculously cute and so, y’know, I didn’t want to be impolite.”

  “Impolite?” Aunt Fay said drily.

  Mischief danced in Kylie’s eyes. “If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have wanted to be impolite either.”

  Aunt Fay astonished Rose by laughing. She held up Rose’s shirt and looked at it again.

  “I’ll work on this, but it’s probably doomed. I doubt even I can get this stain out,” she said. “You two go up to bed. At breakfast, you can tell us more about this party.”

  Rose kissed her aunts good night, the two women fussed over Kylie to make sure she had enough pillows and blankets, and then the girls started for the stairs.

  Aunt Fay called to Rose, who paused on the bottom step and turned.

  “You weren’t ‘polite’ to any boys tonight, I trust?”

  Rose smiled, wondering if they could hear the way her heart jumped and sped up at the question.

  “Auntie, I promised,” she replied.

  Aunt Fay glanced at Aunt Suzette and then back at Rose. “That’s right, you did.”

  Guilt burned through her like quick poison, and it made her angry. Why should she feel guilty? Why should she have to lie? And yet they were so crazy on this subject that she knew honesty would not have the same result as the truth she and Kylie had told about the rest of the party. It would be ugly and awkward and, with Kylie there, horribly embarrassing. Still, she didn’t want to lie.

  “I promise you I was very impolite to the boys at the party,” she said, hoping the joke would float, hoping it would suffice.

  Her aunts both smiled, amused and visibly relieved.

  Rose nudged Kylie and they fled up the stairs. A fresh wave of guilt surged up inside of her, but Rose pushed it away, and when they had at last retreated to her bedroom and she closed the door behind her, she managed to shut it down, separating herself from it entirely.

  The two girls looked at each other and sighed, and then laughed. Kylie dropped the armload of pillows and blankets on the floor and then let herself fall into them. She turned onto her back and looked up at Rose.

  “That was frickin’ nuts!”

  “Told you they were weird,” Rose whispered.

  “Not them! Are you kidding me? I’m talking about the weirdo lady on the T.”

  Rose perched on the edge of her bed. “So you do believe she was following us?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we got that far ahead of her. No way did we lose her. She totally could have caught up, so she probably wasn’t actually our stalker or anything. But she was just so freaky!”

  They talked a little longer about it, but soon the conversation returned to the party and to Kylie’s honesty with her aunts.

  “I can’t believe you told them that,” Rose said.

  “Well, I didn’t know if they could smell it on me or something, so I didn’t want them to figure out that I’d had alcohol and then think you were lying. You didn’t know. That wouldn’t have been fair or cool.”

  Rose studied her, this pretty, wild girl sprawled in a pile of bedding on the floor, and felt suddenly very fortunate.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said.

  Kylie grinned. “So are you.”

  “How?” Rose said, her smile slipping. “I mean, all I do is babble about crazy stuff and get you chased by subway stalkers.”

  “And let me sleep in your weird-smelling apartment with the creepy mobiles hanging in the windows,” Kylie teased.

  Rose buried her face in her hands. “Gahhh! I know!”

  She dropped her hands and glanced over at the window, where the spirit-wards her aunts had made dangled from gleaming thread like fishing line. She laughed to herself.

  “Sorry about the stink,” Rose whispered. “It’s Aunt Suzette’s potpourri.”

  Kylie smiled. “I love it. Entering the secret lair of aging French hippies.”

  Laughing, Rose picked up her pillow and hurled it at her, prompting thirty seconds’ worth of giggling pillow fight that ended with the two of them flopped on Rose’s bed, red-faced and chuckling. They settled into a contented silence, just staring at the ceiling, each alone with her thoughts.

  Rose broke the silence.

  “This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen her.”

  Kylie rolled her head to the side, staring at her. “The woman on the T?”

  Rose took a shuddery breath. “Yeah. The other day I was shopping with my aunts on Newbury Street and I saw her standing across the street just staring at me. Cars were going by, people walking around her, but she was definitely staring at me.”

  And I started to go to her, Rose thought. But she didn’t say it. How to explain the weird compulsion she’d had to walk over to the woman? She had nearly walked right into traffic, could’ve been killed, and she had no explanation for that. It had been almost like she was in a trance or something. She was just glad that she hadn’t felt any such temptation when she had seen the woman tonight. All she had wanted was to get away from her.

  “Did your aunts see her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Kylie sat up, leaning against the headboard, and studied her. “So you think this lady really is stalking you?”

  Embarrassed, Rose looked away. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s a coincidence. Or it wasn’t the same person. It’s crazy, right?”

  Kylie shrugged. “What the hell do I know? I’m sixteen, not some shrink.”

  They laughed again, but not with the same open abandon they’d felt only moments before. When the laugh subsided, Rose only looked at her, waiting for more. After a few seconds Kylie drew her legs up beneath her, propping her chin on her knees. Her eyes held a kind concern that verged on sorrow.

  “All right, you want my two cents? I think maybe all of this is more than anyone should be expecting you to handle on your own. Recovering from a coma, and probably worse, the memory loss, you should totally be in counseling. You’re starting your life over from scratch. That’s, like, the most stressful thing I can possibly imagine. And yes, I know I always speak in superlatives, but I’m serious. It’s huge. And you’re going through it alone.”

  Rose frowned. “Well, not alone.”

  “You mean your aunts? They seem okay, but come on, Rose. You’re freaking out and they’re not really taking it seriously. You need someone who will. I can’t believe the hospital didn’t hook you up with a therapist or whatever.”

  “They did,” Rose admitted. “I went a few times, but then I just figured if they couldn’t help me get my memory back, what was the point?”

  Kylie stared at her. “Oh my God. Coping? Coping is totally the point.”

  “I’m coping.”

  “You’re having nightmares you think have secret messages in them, birds freak you out, and you think mental patients on the T are stalking you. Okay, granted, she definitely gave me the creeps, but I think
she was just a nut. Plus, seriously, the Sleeping Beauty connection is there. Coma Girl equals Sleeping Beauty. In your dreams you’re, like, putting yourself into the story, or your version of it.”

  “I barely remember the story,” Rose said.

  “Trust me. It’s gotta be there in the back of your mind somewhere,” Kylie said. She seemed as though she would go on, but then her eyes lit up and she hopped up from the bed, crossing the room to Rose’s desk.

  Slipping into the desk chair, she tapped the space bar on the keyboard and Rose’s laptop screen flickered to brilliant life. She went online and typed “Sleeping Beauty” into Google. The first hit was about the Disney film version, but Kylie chose the second, the Wikipedia entry for the fairy tale.

  “Sit,” she said, getting up from the chair and gesturing for Rose to take her place. “Read.”

  Rose obeyed, discovering the history of La belle au bois dormant and its author, Charles Perrault. The original fairy tale told the story of the christening of a princess and the ugly fallout that occurs when a wicked fairy was not included on the guest list. Those fairies who were invited became the princess’s godmothers and gifted her with wit and beauty, grace and song, but the wicked fairy cursed her, declaring that she would one day prick her finger on a spindle and die.

  “Wait,” Rose said, looking up from the screen. “The good fairies couldn’t break the curse, but they could change it? How does that make sense?”

  “How do I know?” Kylie said. “It’s a freakin’ fairy tale.”

  Rose shook her head. It really did not make sense to her, but in Perrault’s story, one of the good fairies twisted the original curse so Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t die, just fall asleep for a hundred years, until she received a kiss from the son of a prince.

  “That is just so random,” Rose said.

  Kylie laughed. “Nah. Most fairy tales have princes and princesses kissing somewhere.”

  Rose read on, remembering enough that she was not surprised to learn that despite the king banning spindles from the kingdom, the princess eventually pricked her finger on one and the spell kicked in. She rolled her eyes at the discovery that the good fairies came back and put the entire kingdom to sleep with her, making them share in her curse.

  “Where’s the logic?” she muttered.

  But joke as she might, she could not avoid making the same conclusions that Kylie had. Her aunts had made a cameo in her dreams as fairies in the woods. There were a lot of things in her dreams that she could not connect to the story, but some parts of it did resonate. The thing about all the people in the kingdom falling asleep had been in there. The sleeping curse on the princess was an obvious parallel, but instead of pricking her finger, in her dreams the threat seemed to be sex itself. Instead of a kiss waking her up, sex would be the end of her.

  And no wonder, with Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay so frantic about her getting anywhere near a guy.

  Rose glanced up at Kylie again. “You really think this could all be in my head?”

  “Honestly, yeah. How could it not be? It makes sense. Who knows what’s stirring around behind whatever walls have been put up in your brain?”

  Rose stared at the screen, smiling as she clicked back to the search window and then selected the link to the Disney Sleeping Beauty. The images did not look familiar at all, but the bright colors made her smile.

  “Does that help?” Kylie asked.

  “It shouldn’t,” Rose said, standing up and spinning once before landing on her bed. She looked at Kylie. “I mean, really I’m trading one brand of crazy for another. But it does make me feel a little better.”

  Her cell phone beeped. With a grin, she pulled it out of her pocket and saw she had a text from Jared.

  Good night, beautiful. Sleep tight.

  “And that makes you feel much better,” Kylie said.

  Rose nodded eagerly. “It certainly does.”

  She couldn’t wait for Monday, when she could see Jared again. As for her aunts’ paranoia about guys and sex, well, Rose was sixteen years old—definitely old enough to make up her own mind about such things.

  And what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  Rose enters the room with her head bowed, eyes downcast in what she hopes will be perceived as appropriately demure and deferential behavior. In truth, she does not look up because she does not want her future husband to see the hatred in her eyes. She has never met him before, only glimpsed him twice, in the castle courtyard, when he came to parley with her father for her hand.

  She smells of jasmine and lilac and vanilla and cinnamon, a potent perfume intended to make her seem more beautiful and angelic, to take the wild edge off of a girl used to wandering the Feywood with sprets and fairies. The scent makes her want to vomit, though as tight as she is laced into her dress, she doubts she could manage even that.

  The windows are open in the vast meeting room in the castle. They look down upon the courtyard, where the enemy prince’s men await, armed and defiant. Horses snort and stamp their feet, betraying a yearning for action—for battle—that so many must share. The people of the village do not want to die. They fear the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes. But the idea of surrender—and the serving girls tell Rose there is no doubt in the village that the marriage her father has planned for her is tantamount to surrender—troubles them all.

  But no one is as sickened by it as Rose herself.

  Except perhaps her father.

  She glances up as she walks slowly and prettily across the room, but her gaze immediately finds the king. She refuses to acknowledge any of the others gathered in that room. In her father’s eyes she sees a pain that mirrors her own but is even more profound. The dream he has nurtured all of his life, of a life of satisfying work and peaceful contentment for his people, had been in his grasp… and then it had been stripped away from him. Now it is within reach once more, but the cost is too much for him to bear. More than once he has changed his mind and decided to return to war. When the enemy demanded that his son, Luc, be officially introduced to Rose so that he could see her, so that he could speak to her, and decide if he wished to wed her—as if she might not be an acceptable bride—Rose’s father wanted to betray the flag of truce and kill his enemy’s son, to ride out with his warriors and fight the enemy armies to the death.

  But it would mean much more than his own death. So many innocents would die. Families. Children. And all he has dreamed of would end in bloodshed and tears.

  Rose will not allow him to sacrifice all of that in order to save her from this sham of a marriage. And so they are here, all of them, and she is to meet the enemy prince, this young man, Luc, and charm him. A great deal depends upon it, and upon her not allowing him to see the hatred in her eyes.

  “There you are, darling Rose,” her father says, holding her gaze as she walks to him and takes his hand. And then he turns to the man beside him. “Luc, le Comte de Roussillon, may I present my daughter, Rose.”

  Luc takes her hand from her father’s, just as he will on the day of their wedding, and she has no choice now. She must look at him. She turns her gaze from her father to the enemy prince—her future husband—and sees that he is a beautiful man, cold-eyed and exquisitely made.

  She hates him all the more for it.

  From somewhere nearby—perhaps outside in the courtyard or perhaps from the shadows beneath the tapestries on the walls—there comes insidious laughter. It seems familiar, and she shivers.

  “Mademoiselle,” her future husband says, bending to kiss her hand.

  Rose forces herself not to speak, for if she opens her mouth, she knows that she will scream.

  •

  From the moment Rose returned to school on Monday morning, things were different. People said hello to her by name in the hall. Not a lot of people; it wasn’t an avalanche of affection and acceptance. But the change in attitude toward her was significant enough for her to notice almost immediately. One or two of the girls who gav
e her a wave on the way to a class or in the lunch line were faces she recognized from Chloe’s party, but only one or two.

  They didn’t all use her name, however. Amiable greetings of “Hey, Coma Girl” met her arrival in the cafeteria and later in chemistry. Kylie smiled in approval. It was mostly the guys who seemed to have developed a fondness for the nickname, but all the venom had been sapped from it, and Rose embraced it even further. Some of the guys seemed intrigued by her now, and by the time Tuesday ended, she had counted half a dozen attempts to flirt with her. One guy even went out of his way to open doors for her whenever he saw her coming.

  “This is because you stuck up for yourself,” Kylie’s friend Dom told her at lunch on Tuesday.

  “Courtney tends to make people feel small,” Kylie added. “You turned the tables on her. It took guts, and there are a lot of people who wish they’d had the guts to do the same at one point or another.”

  Rose didn’t know how much of that was true and how much of it was just fascination with the girl who had a freak-out at Chloe’s birthday. Either way, she wasn’t about to complain about the sudden turn of fate and her new acceptance.

  Of course, there were exceptions. Other than Jared’s football buddies, it seemed like the school’s elite were now her enemies. She heard their quiet mocking and saw their sneers. When Courtney passed her in the corridor she pretended Rose was invisible, but that suited Rose perfectly. Unfortunately, Courtney rarely went anywhere without a troupe of worshippers, and those sycophants—her boyfriend Eric and the girls who always trailed along with her like baby ducks—seemed to think riding Rose was the best way to make their queen happy.

  The one time Courtney spoke to her in the early part of the week was right after homeroom on Tuesday morning. When the bell rang and everyone picked up their books and made for the door, Courtney cut her off, with a wary glance to make sure Mr. McIlveen wasn’t watching.

  “Nobody humiliates me,” the girl said in a low voice, blue eyes narrowed with hate.