"This is Wonder-smacking awesome!" Maddie shouted.
Wonderland coming to find me.
Lizzie smiled so hard she felt like Kitty. Her adopted world was becoming what she, Lizzie Hearts, needed it to be! Perhaps soon all parts of Ever After would smell and feel and sound as perfectly extraordinary and Wondery as the Grove. Perhaps now she would not have to spend all her energy just trying to hide her homesickness.
But first, she would need to teach the new world some manners, blinking windows and such. Her mother would certainly expect this. There would be much Ruling and Ordering and Shaping Things Up.
Maddie c.o.c.ked her head to one side. "This is a slice of strange pie. Why don"t we hear any screaming or whining or what"s-going-on-ing? Chair herds and window blinks are just the kind of world-spin that leaves the Ever Afterlings... well, troubled."
"Perhaps they"ve finally come away from their senses," said Lizzie.
"Maybe," Maddie said. "Hey, Narrator, what are Raven and Apple doing?"
Maddie waited, eyebrows raised, mistakenly expecting the Narrator to break the rules and interact with her.
"Hmm, when the Narrator is being this secretsy and rule-ish, that means there"s something Big and Important happening that the Narrator is trying very hard not to reveal," said Maddie.
It does not!
"So we should probably go check on Raven and Apple," said Maddie. "Tell them what"s up."
"Do we know what"s up?" Kitty asked.
"Well, we should act like it, even if we don"t," Lizzie proclaimed. "Own the up!"
This was a quote from one of her mother"s cards: Whether up or down, inside or out, it is yours.
Own the down. Own the up.
The girls made their way past another group of chairs chatting in an incomprehensible furniture language.
"What do you suppose they even have to talk about?" Lizzie asked. "It"s not like the life of furniture is particularly interesting."
"Maybe they"re discussing ways to make life more interesting," Kitty whispered.
The thought made Lizzie shiver.
She shook the shivers away. She would simply order the chairs to behave! If Wonderland was indeed coming to Ever After, Lizzie had no time to waste. She must be as queenly as her mother would be.
The door to the dorms didn"t look alive like a chair or blinky like a window, but when the three girls walked through, it made a disconcerting gulping noise.
"Ew," Kitty said. "I feel like we"ve just been swallowed."
"Halloo, friends," Maddie shouted, entering Raven and Apple"s room. "Oh, n.o.body"s here."
"n.o.body"s anywhere, it seems," Kitty purred.
The school was unusually empty today, and they hadn"t seen anyone since leaving the library. Anyone human, anyway.
"Our story appears to be a series of Looking Gla.s.s adventures without the gla.s.s," Kitty said.
A little noise uncurled from deep within the room, like the whimpering of a pat of b.u.t.ter cornered by a piece of toast. Lizzie did not hear it, Kitty chose to ignore it, and Maddie uncharacteristically a.s.sumed Apple and Raven"s room wouldn"t contain anything like talking b.u.t.ter or aggressively warm toast.
"Wait!" Maddie said, questioning her a.s.sumptions after hearing what the Narrator had said. "There is someone in here."
"We should get out of this school and find one of the teachers," said Lizzie.
"Frighteningly sensible, Lizzie," Kitty said.
Lizzie frowned. "You"re right. What is the matter with me?"
"h.e.l.lo?" Maddie called out.
A tuft of dark hair popped up from behind a writing desk, followed by two brown eyes. "Maddie?" said a mouth, conceivably somewhere below the eyes.
"Cedar!" Maddie called, running to the girl and pulling her out and into a big hug. "You"re all meaty! How did that happen? And you"re shivering. Are you cold? No? Oh, scared, right. You came looking for Apple and Raven, too, didn"t you? But they"ve disappeared, just like Giles Grimm!"
"Not disappeared, just like Giles Grimm," Kitty said, sniffing the room.
"They... they-" Cedar started, when a black bird perched on the writing desk squawked.
"Crow!" Lizzie shouted, pointing at the bird as if accusing it of something.
"Raven," Cedar whispered, and then pointed at a plump red apple on the floor. "And Apple."
"Oooh!" Lizzie said with a little laugh. "Delicious!"
Cedar"s eyes widened in further shock.
"Not literally, I mean," Lizzie muttered. "Who eats raw ravens anymore? And that apple, especially knowing it"s an Apple-apple, is bound to be much too sweet. And full of organs. Note to everyone-don"t eat that apple. It"s probably gross."
The toilet flushed from inside the bathroom. The door opened, and a squat little crocodile about the height of Maddie walked out on its stubby hind legs. It carried a newspaper under one arm.
"Mornin", ladies," it said, dropping to all fours. "Feelin" a bit peckish, what."
"Peckish?" Lizzie asked, always willing to have a conversation with a crocodile. "Like, birdy?"
"Like "ungry." The crocodile was marching toward the Apple-apple.
The Raven-raven began dive-bombing the crocodile.
"Oy," the crocodile shouted, swinging its head around. "Jus" tryin" a get breakfast, soddin" bird!"
Maddie picked up the Apple-apple and put it safely in her hat. "C"mon, Raven," she said, running for the door. "Let"s leave Mr. Hungry Teeth on his own."
"Aaaaaah," the crocodile bellowed, running at the lot of them. Lizzie stared at the teeth. They were fascinating. So many of them. She could do a lot with teeth like that. The teeth kept getting closer until suddenly the raven pecked her on the forehead.
"How dare you!" Lizzie shouted, and only then realized she might be on the crocodile"s menu. She took quick steps out the door, Cedar slamming it shut behind her.
"Where did that crocodile even come from?" Cedar asked, panting.
"Probably from the toilet," Maddie said. "There"s loads of them in the sewers, you know."
"That"s alligators," Kitty said.
"Oh, right," said Maddie. "Alligators. I don"t know about that crocodile, then."
A deep ba.s.s rumbling shook the floor, as if the world were beginning to turn in exactly the opposite direction as the building it supported. More changes? Lizzie rubbed her hands together.
Cedar jumped away from the closed door. "Is that creature getting through?"
"Be reasonable. Crocodiles don"t have the thumbs necessary to open doors," said Lizzie.
"It could be eating its way through," Kitty said.
Cedar eyed the door nervously.
"Something is happening out on the terrace, though," Lizzie said. "A crowd is gathering. A queen can tell these things."
"You"re not a queen yet," Cedar whispered.
"If I say I am, I am!" Lizzie shouted as she marched downstairs. "It is a queen"s prerogative to determine reality."
"What"s a prerogative?" Maddie asked.
Lizzie ignored Maddie"s question, partly because she wasn"t actually sure what a prerogative was. But most of her was riddled and ant-dance-y with the worry that she might be lying to herself and the others about being ready to be a queen.
A queen worrying about others is like a baker worried he"s making too many m.u.f.fins.
As if there could be such a thing as Too Many m.u.f.fins. Ha! WORRY NOT!
AND EAT MORE m.u.f.fINS!.
But I can"t help worrying, Mother, Lizzie wanted to say. She had yet to read a card that explained how her mother lived worry-free.
Lizzie clenched her teeth and marched toward the crowd-feeling on the terrace. And the parts of her that weren"t wormy with worry or puzzled with prerogative began to pulse with excitement.
Wonderland found me!
The sunshine seemed especially bright, warming her gold crown against her forehead. On the terrace, a podium faced rows of chairs as if set up for an event like Legacy Day. Or a coronation. Her coronation?
Lizzie lifted her nose, tightened her lips, pressed one hand against the worry in her belly, pressed the other hand against the eager beats of her heart, and smiled.
"These chairs weren"t here when we came back from the field trip," Cedar said.
"Maybe the people setting this up were the crowd we heard," Maddie said. "The faculty must be back! Yay!"
At Maddie"s shout, all the chairs turned and looked at them.
"Uh-oh," said Kitty.
"The chairs set themselves up," Cedar whispered. "What I want to know is, what was the podium telling them to do?"
An incomprehensible noise, somewhere between a shout, the crackle of a fire, and a bone breaking, issued from the podium.
The chairs nodded. And then they began to charge.
Lizzie"s stomach dropped. This was not her coronation. This was some kind of uprising.
"Run!" Lizzie yelled.
And they did.
"They"re not very fast," Kitty said, running backward.
"What are you talking about?" Lizzie shouted, casting a glance over her shoulder. "They"re gaining on us!"
Kitty shrugged, disappeared, and then reappeared, running a few feet in front of the group. "We"re not very fast either."
"I can"t... keep... this up," Cedar gasped. "Not really... used to... breathing... like this... or at all...."
Maddie held her hand.
The girls zoomed through corridor after corridor, past flighty curtains, over grumbly carpets, around mischievous benches. But the charging chairs stayed on their heels, the podium thump-hopping in front, shrieking microphone feedback that sounded like a battle cry.
"Maybe the chairs... are mad... that we"ve been sitting on them... all these years," Maddie said between huffs and puffs.
"This... is... not... wonderlandiful," Lizzie said.
Ahead, nearly blocking the hall, was what appeared to be a garden shed.
"Hutling!" Maddie yelled.
On hearing its name, the small cottage stood up on two chicken legs and turned to them "face"-first. There was a door. Mouth. Whatever. Only a couple of weeks ago, this offspring of Baba Yaga"s magic hut had hatched from its egg, but already it"d grown so much that when it was standing, the doork.n.o.b was too high for Maddie to reach. And the stampede of seats had caught up.
With a tremendous clacking and whacking, armchairs, easy chairs, folding chairs, and stools galloped closer. The hutling made a distressed clucking sound. It took a few steps forward, bringing the four girls underneath its shadow, like baby chicks under their mother.
"Is it going to squish us?" Cedar asked.
"The hutling is my buddy! We play hide-and-seek all the time," Maddie whispered, "Don"t tell, but I trick the hut every time by hiding inside it." Maddie snickered.
The crowd of chairs had stopped before the hutling, confused, turning back and forth.
"Can"t they see us?" Cedar whispered. "We"re right in front of them."
"Of course they can"t," Lizzie said, sure she was right. Or pretending to be sure. She wasn"t entirely sure of the difference at this point.
The hutling started to walk away.