Authors: Janette Rallison
He’s supposed to be wonderful so I can live happily ever after. That part of my wish wasn’t granted.” She rolled her eyes like I was the one being unreasonable. “You only asked for a handsome prince. He is. I suppose charming is implied in the wish—trust me, he’ll be very charming at the ball.” My mouth dropped open and a little squeak of disbelief popped out. “But besides that he’s an arrogant tyrant? How am I supposed to live happily ever after with someone like that?”
“I already told you I couldn’t grant vague statements like happily ever after. I grant specifics. Happy is entirely up to you and always has been.” Her wings fluttered in agitation. “Besides, since when did you become so concerned with personality? You never worried about Hunter’s personality, did you?” She picked up a shopping bag and pushed it, somehow, back into her purse. “You know, just out of curiosity, I checked in with him before my shopping trip. Do you know what he was doing? Talking with Jane over the phone about the benefits and drawbacks of testing out of freshman English.
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There’s a thrill ride for you. Most people can make those kinds of decisions without talking it over extensively with their girlfriends.”
Okay, granted, sometimes Hunter cared way too much about school, but he’d always worn such an endearingly earnest expression while he’d gone on about that sort of thing that I’d never minded. “This isn’t about Hunter—,” I said.
She held up one hand to stop me. “I know. It’s about getting back at Hunter. I totally understand how dating works between humans. You want a boyfriend who’s handsome
and
popular. Well, Prince Edmond is the epi-tome of that. You’ll be the envy of the kingdom. That’s what you really wished for, wasn’t it, to be envied?” It sounded so superficial when she said it that way that it took me aback. I had to stop and think about it for a moment. “It’s not that I have to be envied by an entire kingdom . . .”
Chrissy wedged her last bag back into her purse. “Oh, that’s right. You just want to be envied by Jane and Hunter. I can arrange that then. I can bring them here.
They could be poor peasants in your stepmother’s manor.” She pulled the wand from somewhere beneath all the shopping bags and looked ready to wave it in my direction.
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“No, wait, I don’t want that.” Even though I hadn’t forgiven them, I wouldn’t wish the type of life I’d just been living on either of them.
Chrissy put the wand down at her side. “Well, what do you want then? You called me here away from my shopping trip and I haven’t even made it to the shoe section yet.”
I tried to think of how to form my next wish. For almost a month I’d just wanted to leave, but now with Chrissy standing in front of me, tapping one foot while she waited for me to speak, I didn’t want to waste a wish on just going home. I should wish for something new, something spectacular, for a situation where I could be truly happy.
“Well . . .” I didn’t know how to phrase my wish or even how to articulate what I wanted, what I longed for.
Ironically, it struck me that Jane would know the right way to say it. Jane could write a thousand-word essay on how she felt at any given time. But Jane didn’t need wishes. Jane had Hunter.
Chrissy checked her watch. “I can come back later when you’ve had time to think about it—”
“No,” I said, because if she left now who knew how many days I’d be stuck here, and after my scene inside, the WSM would undoubtedly throw me in a dungeon or something. “I just . . . um . . . I want to feel beautiful and 97/431
loved, and although I like the idea of having a prince, he has to be more than just handsome and rich. He has to be nice, and kind . . .” I paused, trying to think of the next quality I wanted to add to the list.
That’s when I learned a very important lesson about dealing with fairies. Don’t pause when you’re wishing for things.
Chrissy slipped her sunglasses back over her face.
“One Snow White coming up!”
Bright lights like hundreds of fireflies spun around me, and then I found myself in a completely different forest.
The trees grew together so close and tall that I couldn’t see the sky. Only slivers of light penetrated the canopy here and there, testifying that it was still day. What time of day, I wasn’t sure.
“I didn’t mean that I wanted to be Snow White!” I called out.
Only the sound of birds and tree branches rustling answered back.
“Chrissy?” I called. “Chrissy?” It had suddenly become very clear to me why she was only a
fair
godmother.
I called her name for a few more minutes, then wandered through the forest, frustrated and wondering if there was any way to get out of this. I did not like the idea of biting into a poisoned apple and lying unconscious until a prince showed up. How long would that take? Days? Years? I mean, yes, I sleep in but if I was lying around in the Middle Ages for years, my parents would notice I was missing.
Fairies really ought to give you some directions before they plop you down into the middle of a forest and take 99/431
off to go shoe shopping. The only thing Chrissy had given me was new clothes. I now wore a simple crimson dress.
As I wondered which way to go, a little man with a long gray beard and a brown cap on his head burst through the trees.
His eyes zoomed in on me, anxiety etched into the wrinkles on his face. “Snow White,” he said, “are you all right?”
“Yes.”
He knew who I was, which meant I must have come into the fairy tale after Snow White had found the seven dwarfs’ house. I had no idea which of the dwarfs this was, and come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I could recall all of their names. There was, um . . . Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Boring—no wait, Boring wasn’t actually a dwarf. I was getting the dwarfs confused with my schoolteachers.
“Are you hurt?” The dwarf asked, still worried. “Why are you out in the forest?”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to lie, but I couldn’t very well tell him that I’d mistakenly been sent here from the twenty-first century.
“I, um, was out walking,” I said. Which was true, if not vague.
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“What?” he said indignantly. “You went wandering about when you know full well Queen Neferia is out to kill you?”
“I . . . guess.”
He broke into a language I didn’t understand but figured was dwarf cursing. He crossed over to me, took my hand, and none too gently towed me along beside him as he pushed his way back through the trees. “Have you not a lick of sense anywhere in your body? Did the good Lord spend so much time crafting your pretty head that he forgot to put anything inside? Do you not listen to anything we ever say?”
For someone so small he had a tight grip and moved incredibly fast. I tried not to stumble on rocks and tree roots as he pulled me along. “Let me guess—you’re Grumpy?”
He let out a
humph
. “And you would be too, if you’d just spent the last hour searching the forest for your wayward charge.” He walked even faster. “We tell you to stay inside, we tell you not to talk to strangers. But oh no, you must be out singing to the animals as if the birds didn’t do a fine enough job of it. And this after Queen Neferia has already tried to kill you thrice.”
“Thrice?” I repeated.
“Three times,” he said as though I didn’t know what
thrice
meant. Which I didn’t, but still—in the movie 101/431
there was only the time with the woodcutter and the poisoned apple.
“We already explained to you that the old lady peddler was Queen Neferia in disguise,” he said slowly. “She tried to kill you with the poisoned comb and with the belt. Which is why you are not to go shopping anymore, no matter how pretty the wares, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Now that he mentioned it, I vaguely remembered that in the Grimm version of Snow White, the queen had come twice before her trip with the apple and nearly killed Snow White with other deadly items.
And when you looked at it that way, Snow White had to be pretty idiotic to keep falling for the same trick.
I took a few steps in silence and realized what this meant. In this wish, apparently I was stupid. Or at least the dwarfs thought I was. I was going to have to set them straight about that right off.
We came to a clearing in the woods where not only one house stood but an entire village, complete with a church, a mill, stables, and a well.
“Go into the house,” the dwarf told me. “I’ll ring the church bell to let the others know you’re safe.” He let go of my arm and headed toward the church. I stood there staring at a row of cottages and wondering which one was the dwarfs’ home.
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He turned back to check on me and when he noticed I hadn’t moved, he said, “Well?”
“Which one is our house?” Okay, so this wasn’t the best way to impress him with my intelligence, but what else could I do? He rolled his eyes, let out a sigh, and took me by the hand again.
“This way,” he said and led me toward a large cottage in the middle of the street.
Oh. I should have guessed it was the biggest one since it had seven men living in it.
He might have said more, but just then two more dwarfs appeared out of different cottages as though going on a door-to-door search. One wore a gray cap, the other a black one, but both had long gray beards and wore the same baggy brown clothes that the first dwarf had on. They hadn’t seen us yet, so the dwarf beside me waved at them. “I found her! She’s fine.” The one in the black cap let out a relieved sigh. “I’ll go ring the church bell to let the others know.” He turned and trotted off toward the church. The one in the gray cap walked toward me, smiling.
I tried to guess his name. “Happy?”
“Of course we are,” he said. “We were worried that the queen had taken you someplace.” He took hold of my other hand and the three of us went into our cottage.
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The dwarf in the brown cap took on the frustrated tone of a parent as he spoke to me. “You’re far too trusting, Snow White. You’d like to help every stranger and animal that comes your way—and that’s admirable—but there are things to fear in the forest: bears, and thieves, and your stepmother. So you mustn’t go walking there by yourself again, agreed?”
Instead of answering him I looked around at the cottage. A rough-hewn table and benches sat before me, nothing like the intricately carved furniture in the Cinderella manor. Large beams spread across a low ceiling. If I stood on tiptoes I’d probably bang my head.
Everything seemed narrow and cramped. How could I promise them to stay inside all the time? Stairs in the corner of the room must lead to the bedrooms. I wondered if I had my own room. Even as Cinderella I had my own room. Okay, it was a hovel off the kitchen with a straw mattress, but at least I didn’t have privacy issues.
“Agreed?” the dwarf prompted.
I couldn’t answer him for fear that lizards would drop out of my mouth. Instead I said, “Can we talk later? I’m a little hungry right now.”
“Yes,” the first dwarf said. “It’s past time for our supper. We’ll wash up while you see to the porridge.” 104/431
“Oh.” I’d forgotten that in this fairy tale, Snow White did all the cooking and cleaning for the dwarfs. Great.
Just great. More chores.
I walked out of the main room and into the kitchen.
Off in the distance, I heard the church bell ring. To me it sounded like a scolding parent.
Ring! Ring!
Our beautiful but idiotic charge has been found wandering around the forest for no apparent reason!
Ring!
In the kitchen I found a pot of split-pea soup already hanging in a kettle over the fire. I’d learned from my stint as Cinderella that the cook never took the soup off the fire. They didn’t have refrigerators to store it, so they just left it there cooking day after day and kept adding more beans and vegetables to it. Of course my WSM and stepsisters never ate the soup. It was just for the servants. The nobility ate meat, wheat bread, and all sorts of pies that, trust me, after three weeks of eating porridge and rye bread, smelled fabulous.
Apparently here at the dwarfs’ home we all ate like servants. A lump of bread dough sat rising on a board. I slid it into a dome-shaped oven that was built into the side of the hearth.
Then I picked vegetables from a basket on the floor, cut them up, and added them into the pot.
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the
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pot, nine days old
. I used to think that was just a nurs-ery rhyme, not a way of life.
From the kitchen, I heard them discussing me as they came into the main room from outside. “One of us will just have to stay at the cottage and keep an eye on her.
That’s all there is to it.”
“You know we can’t do that. The mine takes all of our time.”
“Let’s see if Widow Hazel wouldn’t take her in during the day, maybe teach her something useful—”
“No, remember when she learned how to knit? Now we’re stuck wearing these dreadful hats.”
“Not so loud! She’ll hear you.” In a lower voice, one of the dwarfs said, “H. A. T. S.” Apparently Snow White didn’t know how to knit
or
how to spell. I left the soup and stood by the doorway so I could hear them better.
“Besides,” another dwarf said, “we can’t pawn her off on our neighbor forever. We need to find her a proper husband.”
“You’ve tasted her soup. What kind of man would be willing to take her for a wife?” There was a long pause, then one of the dwarfs said,
“One who’s wealthy enough to have a cook. After all, Snow White’s a beauty and from a royal line. And you couldn’t find a more caring lass.” 106/431
A general murmuring of consensus floated around the room and some even threw out names in suggestion, until one of the dwarfs said, “None of those men would have her—not when her head’s as empty as her dowry.” Another murmuring of consensus rose from the room, which I resented. My head was not empty.
“Aye, we’re doomed. We’ll be eating burned bread for the rest of our lives.”
“And chasing after her every time she wanders off into the forest.”
“And worrying that the queen will try to poison her again.”