A Spindle Splintered Read online

  I manage a single wheezy, “Holy shit,” before my vision goes black.

  * * *

  I WAKE UP in bed. Not mine; mine is a twin mattress with faded Disney sheets that I grew out of years ago but don’t see the point in replacing. This bed is an absurd, canopied affair of white silk and soft down. It’s the sort of bed that only exists in period romances and fairy tales, because actual medieval beds were a lot smellier and lumpier; the sort of bed where a princess might sleep comfortably for a hundred years.

  I part the canopy with one finger and find a room that matches the bed: dark stone and rich rugs, tapestries and carved-oak chests. I blink into the cheery morning light for several seconds, half expecting a songbird to alight on the windowsill and break into an upbeat chorus, before sinking calmly back against the pillows.

  This is the point in your standard fantasy adventure where the heroine would give herself a good hard pinch to determine whether or not she’s dreaming. But I can hear the labored thump of my heart in my ears, feel the slightly hungover scratchiness of my eyeballs: I’m not sleeping. I’m not hallucinating. Unless the afterlife is even more profoundly wacky than most major religions have so far posited, I’m not dead. Which means—

  I can’t seem to finish the thought. It sends a giddy, hysterical thrill up my spine and a nameless rush of something behind my ribcage.

  My phone hums in my jean pocket. I fish it out to find roughly eight hundred texts from Charm. Most of them are variations of wtf wtf WTF where are you interspersed with threats upon my person (if this is some kind of sick joke I swear to jesus I will kill you before the grm does) and pleas for a response (hey your parents are calling me now and idk what to say so if you’re alive NOW’S THE TIME BITCH).

  I start to type back an apology then pause, wondering about data rates between Ohio and wherever the hell I am and how exactly I have cell signal, before that wild hysteria bubbles over. I write sorry babe. got spider-verse-ed into a fairy tale.

  As I hit send, I feel that unfamiliar rushing in my chest again, and it turns out it has a name, after all. Oh, hell. You’d think twenty-one years under a life sentence would be enough to squash all the hope out of me, but here I am, lying in a bed that doesn’t belong to me, filled with the desperate, foolish hope that maybe my story is about to change.

  The phone buzzes in my palm: is this a joke to you

  Followed by: i thought you were dead/abducted!!! what the HELL zin???

  I’m tapping out a longer explanation when that impossible girl with the impossible hair sweeps aside the canopy and carols, “Oh, you’re awake! Thank goodness!”

  I squint at her—this slender golden princess limned in dawn light, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining—and slowly raise my phone, take her picture, and send it to Charm with the caption not joking.

  “Are you well?” the princess asks earnestly. “Should I call for a healer?”

  I ignore her, choosing instead to watch Charm’s little typing bubble appear and disappear several times. It’s worth mentioning at this juncture that Charm is profoundly, disastrously gay, and suffers from a diagnosable hero complex. Willowy princess-types with slender wrists and visible collarbones are essentially her kryptonite.

  The bubble reappears. who is thjat

  *that

  I grin up at the princess, who now has two tiny lines marring her perfect brow. “What’s your name?” I ask.

  She tilts her chin very slightly upward. “I am Princess Primrose of Perceforest. And who are you?” I detect a hint of haughtiness in that you, as if she barely restrained herself from adding peasant after it.

  “Zinnia Gray of, uh, Ohio.” My eyes return to my phone. Princess Mothereffing Primrose, apparently, I type. dude, where did you get that spinning wheel??

  pam’s corner closet & more. Pam’s is the nearest flea market to our old high school and an extremely unlikely place to purchase an accursed or enchanted object. It’s mostly just used vacuums and Beanie Babies perched on moldy piles of National Geographics.

  “Lady Zinnia.” The princess’s voice is less musical when she’s annoyed. “If I could but beg your attention for a moment. I would very much like to know how you came to be in the tower with me last night.”

  I slide the phone into my hoodie pocket and scooch upright in bed, legs crossed. “Is there coffee in this universe? No? Okay, just sit down.” From Primrose’s expression, I suspect she’s not accustomed to being invited to sit on her own bed by sickly, short-haired interdimensional travelers in unwashed jeans. “Please,” I add.

  Primrose perches at the foot of the bed, her posture painfully upright.

  “How about we start with you. What exactly were you doing in that tower room?” I’m seventy-five, maybe eighty percent sure I already know.

  She draws a measured breath, and for the first time I catch a gleam of something raw beneath the porcelain-doll perfection of her face. “I—don’t know. It was my first-and-twentieth birthday yesterday.” Of course it was. “And I went to sleep very late. My dreams were strange, unsettled, full of a green light that called my name … And then I woke in a room I’d never seen before! Far from my bed, reaching for that strange object.”

  “You mean the spinning wheel?”

  Her pale face grows two shades paler, and the raw thing in her eyes swims closer to the surface: a desperate, lonely terror. “I thought it must be,” she breathes. “I’d never seen one ’til last evening.”

  “Because, I assume, your father ordered them all destroyed?” Standard Perrault stuff, repeated by the Grimms a hundred years later and canonized by Disney in the ’50s.

  Primrose stares at me for a long second, then nods. “Mother says he spent months riding the countryside, holding bonfires in every village. He was trying to save me.” I can hear the weariness in her voice, the exhaustion of being unsavable. Dad used to spend hours on the phone with specialists and experimental labs and miserly insurance companies, mortgaging the house in his search for a cure that doesn’t exist, trying so hard to save me that he nearly lost me. He stopped only when I begged.

  “Hold on a second.” I slide my phone back out and start to text Dad, wimp out, and write Charm instead. can you tell mom & dad I’m not dead pls?

  already done, she writes back, because she is, and I cannot stress this enough, the best.

  “Okay, continue.”

  The princess appears to brace herself for a grand speech. “I am cursed, you see. Twelve fairies were invited to my christening feast. But a thirteenth fairy arrived, uninvited!” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a person speak with so many implied exclamation points. It’s exhausting. “A most wicked creature who placed a curse upon me—”

  “To prick your finger on your twenty-first birthday and fall down dead? That sound right?”

  Primrose deflates slightly. “An enchanted sleep.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “You think it lucky to be cursed to sleep for a century—”

  “Yeah, I do.” It comes out harsher than I mean it to. I swallow hard. “I’m sorry. Look. I’m—cursed, too. Last night was my twenty-first birthday. I was in my own world, minding my own business. I pricked my finger on a spindle as a joke, and all of a sudden I was here. In an honest-to-Jesus castle with an honest-to-Jesus princess. And historically inaccurate furnishings.”

  The lines have reappeared between Primrose’s brows. “Was it a wicked fairy that cursed you, as well?”

  I consider trying to explain that my world doesn’t have curses or fairies. That my fate was determined by lax environmental regulations and soulless energy executives and plain old bad luck. “Sure, yeah,” I say instead. “Except I’m going to die, not sleep, and there’s nothing anybody can do to save me.” But hope flutters in my chest again. I’m in a land of magic and miracles now, not ribosomes and proteins. Who knows what is or isn’t possible?

  “I’m sorry,” says the princess, and I can tell she means it. Most people don’t know what to do when I tell t
hem I’m dying. They flinch or look away or step back, as if bad luck is contagious, or they go all maudlin and grip your hands and tell you how brave you are. Primrose just looks at me, steady and sorry, like she knows exactly how much it sucks, and neither pities nor admires me for it.

  I feel snot gathering in my throat and cough it away. “It’s not a big deal, it’s fine,” I lie. I can tell that she knows it’s a lie, because she’s spent roughly twenty-one years telling herself the same one, but she doesn’t call me on it.

  “Well. Thank you, however you came to be here. I’ve never met anyone else…” Cursed, I think, but she says, “Like me.” She gives me a furtive, hungry look that causes me to suspect the life of a cursed princess is several degrees lonelier than the life of a dying girl.

  Primrose clears her throat. “And thank you for saving me from my curse. At least for now.” She looks toward her bedroom door, eyes flashing eerie green. “I still feel it calling to me. I haven’t slept all night for fear I will wake in that tower room, reaching toward that wheel. Perhaps if I destroy it—my father would surely burn it if he knew—”

  “No!” Panic makes my voice overloud. “I mean, please don’t. I’m pretty sure that thing is my only ticket out of here. It must be a portal or something, a match to the one back home.” A sly little voice whispers are you sure you want to go home? I elect to ignore it.

  Primrose looks doubtful. “But what if it sends you into an enchanted sleep, as it would me?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know the rules, man.” I run my fingers through the greasy tangle of my hair. “I’m just saying don’t set it on fire yet. Give me a second to think.”

  Primrose opens her mouth to respond, but a light tap comes at the door. A voice calls, “Your Majesty. Your father requests your presence in the throne room.”

  I watch the pale bob of her throat as the princess swallows. “Of course. A moment, only.” She spins back to me. “I have to go. Stay hidden until my return.” It’s an order, casually issued, as if she can’t imagine anyone disobeying her.

  I bow my head as she sweeps from the room.

  I scroll through the ten or fifteen messages I’ve missed from Charm (are you okay tho? are there pharmacies in fairyland??) and type back: I only have 35% battery so I’m turning this off in case of emergencies. xoxo

  ummmm this IS an emergency. why are you not freaking out. why are you not trying to come back.

  I start to type because but can’t decide what comes next. Because I don’t want to, at least not yet. Because I’ve fallen out of my own story and into one that might have a happy ending. Because this is my last chance to have a real adventure, to escape, to do more than play out the clock.

  In the end I just write i’ll come back. cross my heart, before turning my phone off. Then I wallow my way out of Primrose’s ridiculous bed, steal a gown from her wardrobe, and slip out the door after her.

  3

  WHEN I WAS eleven, I used my Make-a-Wish Foundation wish to spend a night in the Disney castle and get the full princess experience. It was a total letdown. I think I waited too long: eleven is old enough to see the cracks in the plaster, to sense the pity behind the megawatt smiles of the staff. It was like trying to play with my Barbies a year after I’d outgrown them, perfectly remembering how it used to feel but unable to feel it again.

  Primrose’s castle is about a thousand times better. The stone is smooth and cool beneath my tennis shoes and the torch brackets smell of oil and char. My dress isn’t polyester and plastic; it hangs heavy on my shoulders, literal pounds of burgundy velvet and gold thread. I try to walk like Primrose, a glide so delicate it suggests my feet touch the earth only by happenstance.

  I pass a pair of women who I think might be actual chambermaids and they pause to stare, mouths slightly open. Maybe it’s my haircut or my shoes, or the fact that I couldn’t figure out the laces and strings in the back of the dress and left it gaping open like one of those terrible paper hospital gowns. Whatever. Surely they’re used to inbred nobility with eccentric habits of dress.

  I wave cheerily at them and they fall into belated curtsies. “Which way to the throne room?”

  One of the maids points wordlessly down the hall. I attempt a regal nod in return, which causes one of them to giggle and the other to elbow her.

  The throne room looks exactly like you might expect a throne room to look: a long hall with vaulted ceilings and high windows. There are honest-to-God knights stationed along the walls, surrounding a small crowd of people who look like lost extras from the set of A Knight’s Tale, all puffed sleeves and sweeping trains. A ruby-red carpet splits the room, leading to a man and woman sitting on golden chairs.

  Primrose looks nothing like her parents. I guess when twelve fairies bless you with hotness, you lose some of the family quirks. The Queen has ordinary brown hair, a too-long nose, and an expression of permanent weariness; the King is roundish and baldish and alcoholic-looking. Standing beside them, Primrose looks like one of those Renaissance angels descended among mortals, softly glowing. I touch my own chin—the tiny, too-sharp chin I got straight from Mom—and almost like it for the first time in my life.

  Primrose’s eyes flick up at my movement. They widen very slightly. I give her a cheery shrug.

  Before she can either banish me or die of embarrassment, the King taps his ringed knuckle against the arm of his throne. The court falls quiet. “It is my very great pleasure to announce that the curse laid upon our fair princess has failed! She is one-and-twenty years old, and yet untouched by that wicked promise!” His accent is vaguely English, the way medieval accents are in movies, and his voice booms exactly like a king’s should. When the clapping and hurrah-ing dies down, he continues, “And it is my even greater pleasure to announce my daughter’s betrothal!” I guess exclamation points are inheritable. “To none other than the good Prince Harold of Glennwald!”

  It’s only then that I notice the person standing on the other side of the thrones: a twenty-something man wearing a tunic and an expression of criminal smugness. He’s handsome, in that generic, Captain America–ish way that does absolutely nothing for me, and I can tell from the briefest glance at Primrose that I’m not alone. She’s smiling, but there’s a falseness to it that reminds me of those Disneyland actresses when I was eleven.

  That smile jars me, like a little shock of static or a missed step on the stairs. I know this story really, really well: after the curse is broken, Prince Charming marries the princess and they live happily ever after, the end. But this version has slid sideways somehow, like a listing ship. The curse isn’t quite broken, the prince isn’t quite charming, and that’s not a happily ever after I see swimming in the princess’s eyes.

  The King has been speechifying for some time about his hopes for their blessed union and Prince Harold’s many virtues. “—a true son to us, who has tirelessly striven to end the curse for years now, even tracking the fairy to her lair, though she fled before his might.” I squint at Harold, all jawline and puffed pride; surely even an off-brand discount-store Maleficent could take him if she wanted to. “That their marriage may be delayed no longer, Princess Primrose and her betrothed will speak their vows in three days hence!”

  There’s a final swell of applause as Primrose and Harold step before the thrones and clasp hands. Primrose’s hand looks limp and boneless in his, like a small, skinned animal.

  I lurk at the back of the crowd for a while after that, smiling and nodding and collecting odd looks, before a voice hisses, “What do you think you are doing?”

  I spin to face Primrose and sweep her my most absurd curtsy. “Why, Your Majesty, may I not celebrate your engagement?” Oh God, now I’m doing the fake British accent thing.

  She barely seems to hear me, her face still gritted in that plastic smile, her pupils wide and hunted. “Your hair, your shoes … you look deranged. If anyone sees you—my father’s court does not take kindly to the uncanny!”

  Her hand clamps around my bicep and
steers me into a side hall. “Return to my rooms and wait for me.” I cross my arms and give her my best make me glare. “Please,” she adds, looking at me with those enormous eyes of hers, “I beg of you.”

  I’m at least three-quarters straight, but her lashes are very long and very golden and I’m not made of stone. I nod. She closes her eyes as if summoning some inner strength before swishing back into the throne room with her smile shining like a shield.

  I get lost two or three times on the way back up, startling a pair of amorous knights in a broom closet and briefly alarming a cook. By the time I climb all nine hundred stairs I can hear my pulse a little too loudly in my own ears, feel my lungs pressing too hard against my ribs. I think of my morning handful of pills back in Ohio and the last round of X-rays that showed the chambers of my heart shrinking, my lungs congested. I hadn’t showed them to Charm.

  Primrose’s room is warm and sunshiny and quiet. I shrug out of the burgundy velvet gown and curl in her window in my socks and hoodie, staring out at the countryside like a girl in a Mucha ad, thinking about curses and fairies and stories gone sideways. Thinking that I should probably go find that magic spindle and prick my finger and peace out of this entire medieval hallucination.

  Instead, I wait. I watch the slow creep of shadows and the lazy dance of dust motes in the air. The sun is squatting fat and red on the horizon by the time Primrose returns.

  She’s still stunning, but I must be getting used to it, because I can see past the shine to the weary set of her mouth, the grim line of her spine. She sets a silver platter of heaped food on the seat beside me and collapses back onto her bed, vanishing behind the canopy with a dramatic sigh.

  I take three enormous bites of something that I recognize from the Great British Bake-Off as a hand-raised pie. “So.” I swallow. “Harold seems nice.”

  “Yes.” Her voice is muffled, as if she’s facedown in a pillow.