Sleeping Beauty Dreams Big Page 12

  “She’s right,” Rose whispered to the silver sliver in her fingers. “Thanks for trying to help, but you’re just too … needle-teeny. I mean, you’re too —” But before she could tell the needle that she’d actually meant to say it was too teeny to help much, the needle flashed brightly.

  Zzzpht! It sprang longer, and longer. And longer still. Until it became a … sword! A real, amazing one. Though it had a flat sharp blade it was surprisingly lightweight and easy for Rose to hold. Almost like it had been made for her.

  Sounding nervous for the first time now, the thirteenth fairy cried out a name. “Wandini!”

  At this, the wand the fairy held grew as long as a sword, too. Hers must’ve also been lightweight, for the small fairy had no trouble wielding it. Zzzpht! Zzzpht!

  A battle began. Rose and the fairy whacked and clanged, circling the room, each trying to win. Clang! Clink! Clang! Clink! It was sword against wand. It was good against evil!

  The fairy gave a mighty swing of her magic wand, knocking Rose toward the spindle. For a little fairy no bigger than a melon, she packed a wallop.

  Thinking fast, Rose spun around and swung her sword like a bat, whacking her opponent with the flat of her blade … and sending her flying out the tower’s window. Whoosh!

  The fairy’s wand stayed behind. Instantly, it shrank to a small size and dropped to the floor. Clink!

  Rose whirled to gaze at the mirror, fearing the worst. The fairy bottle teetered at the very top of the Wall now, dangling from the rope. Another tug and it would disappear over the Wall into the Nothingterror.

  “No!” Rushing over, she swung her blade at the mirror, whacking it, too. Crack! It shattered into a zillion pieces. And, somehow, that released all twelve fairies trapped there. They came spilling out of the mirror in a rainbow of colors. The pink, yellow, and purple fairies were among them and flitted over to Rose, thanking her.

  But she saw them as if through a dreamlike fog. “S-something’s wrong,” she murmured dizzily. She lifted her hand and looked at it. There was a drop of blood on her finger. Oh no! She’d pricked it on the spindle as she fought Fairy Thirteen!

  “Ow!” she said. It would be her last word before the curse took effect. With it, she fell to the floor, asleep. And she wasn’t the only one.

  At the very same moment, everyone at the Academy, most of whom had just risen to begin their mornings, suddenly fell back asleep as the curse affected them, too. She saw them in her dreams.

  Over in Pearl Tower, Snow, dressed in a blue nightgown, dropped to her knees on the blue polka-dotted rug in her dorm room and fell into slumber when the curse kicked in. Cinda, wearing a pink robe and carrying a pink towel, was on her way to the shower. The towel tumbled from her fingers as she sleepily slid to the floor, her cheek pillowed on one arm. And back in Emerald Tower, Pea had overslept, and simply turned over to continue dozing.

  Rapunzel had gone to sit on the steps just outside her dungeon room to drink a cup of tea. Now her cup clinked to the stone step, cracking as she slumped against the stone wall next to her. As for Red, she had risen early and was baking something. It looked like a cake. And she had whipped up frosting in Rose’s favorite color. Lavender. Mmm. She hoped the cake didn’t burn, for Red was now seated at the counter in the center of Pearl Tower Dorm, her head on her folded arms, asleep.

  Ms. Wicked had just risen and was staring at herself in a mirror (of course!). She was taking spiky black rollers out of her beautiful hair, and her face was covered with white, gooey face cream. Without her makeup and fancy clothes, she didn’t look so beautiful now. However, unlike the others at Grimm Academy, she looked wide-awake. And she was smiling, as if she knew what was going on around her. Thinking that E.V.I.L. had won.

  In a cozy room lined with bookshelves, Mr. Hump-Dumpty was snoozing away in a chair in what had to be his living quarters. And he was wearing pj’s with little egg-shaped smiley faces on them. Which was totally out of character! Out in the stables, a boy had fallen asleep. So had all the horses. One by one, most everyone at the Academy fell asleep.

  And less than two hours later … they all woke up again! All except Rose.

  In her dreams, Rose could see them rising, one by one, each wondering what had just happened. Students and teachers were walking around a bit dazed because they’d just woken and didn’t know where the time had gone.

  Still, Rose slept on. But why? She didn’t understand it. She’d changed things so this wouldn’t happen to her, or so she’d thought. After all, everyone else at the Academy had awakened.

  “Where’s Rose?” Snow asked Pea at breakfast. But no one knew. As the hours passed, their worry grew. Her friends began searching for her.

  Then Pea got an idea as she was talking with the other girls at dinner. “Mother Hubbard has a dog!” she blurted. They would get the dog to help track her down, they decided. Once they’d convinced Mother Hubbard, her dog led them to the library, to the fairy tale book. And at last, they arrived in the tower.

  “Rose!” “There she is!” “It’s her!” Pea, Rapunzel, Cinda, and a small crowd of other GA students gathered around her where she lay on the stone floor.

  “Why didn’t she awaken when the rest of us did?” Rose heard Cinda ask. But her voice seemed faraway and dreamlike for Rose still saw this all in a dream.

  Then something touched her face. It was Mother Hubbard’s dog, Prince. He’d licked her cheek. She stirred, her eyelashes fluttering. And just like that, she woke up. Pushing onto one elbow, she gazed around at all the faces in the room.

  “She’s awake!” Pea cried in delight.

  “It was the dog that woke her, ” said Rapunzel.

  Rose sat up and the dog immediately jumped into her lap. She laughed as she hugged him to her. “Yeah. His name is Prince. I guess all that was needed to break my sleep was a kiss on the cheek from a totally adorable, corkscrew-tail prince of a dog,” she said. Everyone laughed.

  “Sleeping Beauty has been found and she’s awake at last. Spread the word,” someone toward the back of the room called out. Some students obediently peeled off from the crowd to race down the winding stairs.

  “How long was I asleep?” Rose asked. Then she yawned, which made Pea yawn, which made everyone laugh again.

  “All day,” said Snow, who’d joined the group in the tower along with Red.

  “The rest of us only slept about an hour and forty minutes,” Red added. “No telling how long you’d have slept if not for that pooch.”

  When Mother Hubbard called her dog away, Rose glanced around the room for the fairies, but they were nowhere to be found. Had she only dreamed them? The thirteenth fairy’s wand was missing, as was the cracked mirror.

  But then Rose’s gaze found her needle. It lay only a foot away on the stone floor and was still sword-size. So she hadn’t dreamed everything!

  “Needle-Teeny?” she said, speaking to it softly. She’d guessed that was its name, and she must’ve been right. For upon her words, it shrank to needle size again. Zzzpht!

  As she tucked it inside its little box and stowed that in her pocket, she explained to her friends how she’d used it to stitch a change into the Sleeping Beauty tale. “Turns out this needle can stitch just about anything. Including glass and paper,” she told them. “So in my fairy tale in the library, I X-ed out the word ‘years’ and stitched in the word ‘minutes.’ The curse of one hundred years became one hundred minutes. An hour and forty minutes, like Red said you all slept. Only, I still needed Prince’s kiss to end the curse.”

  “Well, I’m glad you finally woke, because otherwise you would have totally missed your birthday!” Red exclaimed in a happy voice.

  “Yeah! Now that your curse is broken, let’s party!” said Pea. Cheers for this idea sounded from the crowd and they began to make their way out of the tower single file.

  Rose had just started to push to her feet, when suddenly, a hand slipped into hers. A boy’s hand, helping her up. It was Knightly. Not that she needed hel
p. Still, it was nice of him. She smiled her thanks.

  As they all left the turret room and started through the library, they passed Ms. Wicked. She looked startled for a moment, then shot Rose a fierce look. She was obviously annoyed, knowing she and E.V.I.L. had been bested, but not understanding how. Rose just grinned and sent her a happy little wave.

  She and her new friends all gathered for the cake that Red had made outside in a fabulous garden that magically grew flowers in ready-made bouquets. “I saw this cake in my dream. It’s beautiful!” raved Rose. Turned out that it hadn’t been in the oven when Red fell asleep after all, but had only been sitting on a cooling rack before being frosted.

  Pea, Cinda, Rapunzel, Red, and Snow wished Rose a happy birthday and lavished her with simple, sweet gifts of hair ribbons and decorations for her room that they’d made for her. As news spread of her awakening, more and more students came to wish her well. But not everyone did. Some still looked wary.

  It was because most of her tale remained changed, as in wrong, Rose realized. And she didn’t think there was enough stitching to ever make it completely right again. She’d try, but no matter what she did, there might always be those who would believe her to be evil. So what, though?

  In her heart, she knew the truth. And her real friends knew it, too. That she wasn’t evil and never had been. With their support, she would stay strong and confident and persevere. Because that’s what heroic knights did.

  As the party wound down, Rose noticed colored lights hovering at the edge of the garden. Drifting away from the party, she wandered toward them, only to discover that they weren’t lights at all. They were fairies! Twelve of them. They flitted around her, sparkling and winking as they thanked her for saving them from the mirror.

  “We were at your christening,” the fairies told her. Then they began to introduce themselves and tell her the gifts they’d given her when she was born. They floated gently around her head, darting quickly now and then so she had to turn her head this way and that to see which one was speaking.

  After the first nine fairies had spoken in turn, the tenth fairy piped up. The pink one. “I’m Blush,” it said. “I gave you the gift of beauty.”

  “I’m Violet,” said the eleventh, purple fairy. “I gave you curiosity.”

  “I’m Sunny,” said the chicken-yellow twelfth fairy. “I meant to give you the gift of bravery. Then she smiled. “However, I think you found that gift yourself.”

  “Sunny gave you a more necessary gift at your christening, though, don’t you agree?” Blush asked Rose. “She changed Pruney’s curse.”

  “Pruney?” echoed Rose.

  Darting closer, Violet interrupted. “Pruney is the thirteenth fairy’s name, didn’t you know? Her original curse was that you would prick your finger and die.”

  “Luckily, I hadn’t yet given you a gift when she burst in uninvited,” Sunny said, taking up the story. “I couldn’t reverse her curse after she made it, but I was able to soften it. So that you’d sleep for one hundred years. I only wish I’d thought of using ‘minutes’ instead, like you did.”

  “No! It’s okay. I mean, you saved me. All of you. Thank you, oh, thank you, for your gifts!” Rose told them. Hearing someone call her name from the garden, she started to wish the fairies good-bye.

  “Wait! There’s something we’ve been trying to tell you all this time, but you kept shutting us down,” Blush rushed to say.

  Sunny nodded. “Pruney is helping the E.V.I.L. Society.”

  “You knocked her over the Wall with your magic needle charm, and we captured her wand after you fell asleep,” added Violet. “But she never likes to leave a job unfinished, so you should be careful about relaxing your guard too much.”

  “We must go,” Sunny told her, a hint of sadness creeping into her voice at the thought. “Now that we’ve fulfilled our mission, we can only appear to you again during times of trouble. But be assured that we will always watch over you.”

  As the twelve fairies flitted out of the garden, they called back to her, “Farewell for now. Be safe!”

  The next day was Saturday, the day of the Grimmstone Library Games. However, before all the students could head to the library for the fun to begin, an announcement was piped through loudspeakers into every corner of Grimm Academy.

  “This morning’s event in the library has been canceled by Principal Wicked’s order,” chorused the School Board helmet-heads. “That is all.”

  “What? Why?” said Rose. She and Pea stood in their dorm room and looked at each other in disappointment.

  “I’ll tell you why,” huffed Pea. “Because that lady is just plain mean. Not to mention evil.”

  Within minutes, all the girls began to gather on the walkways between the dorms, feeling rather glum. But soon Cinda suggested that they hold at least some of the events in the dorm towers on their own, instead of in the library. A scavenger hunt began and spirits rose. Ms. Wicked couldn’t keep them down!

  As Rose was searching for a shoe buckle — one of the items on the scavenger hunt list — she came upon Red sitting on a bench reading her handbook. “I’m looking for a new play,” Red explained. “The last one the GA drama department performed was called Red Robin Hood. It was a success, but now we need something new. Something with a big cast, so more students can have parts in it and get some experience at acting.”

  “How about A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” suggested Rose. “It’s by a writer named William Shakespeare.” She began to describe the plot and how there were bunches of fairies in it. “I even know some actual fairies who might be able to give the actors some tips,” Rose told Red.

  “Grimmawesome idea!” Red enthused. She sat up straighter as her interest keened.

  Eagerly, she spoke to her handbook, requesting to view the play. When it appeared, she began to read, seeming to forget that Rose was there. But when Rose started to leave, Red looked up and said, “Think you could help us make the sets? And maybe do some acting if we put this play on? That needle of yours will come in really handy for stitching scenery backdrops. And for sword-fighting scenes. I mean, if you’re staying on at GA?” Red asked hopefully.

  Would she stay? She didn’t have to, Rose realized. Not anymore. Despite the fairies’ parting warnings, she didn’t really think the curse remained a huge danger to herself or anyone else. So her parents would probably let her return home.

  Before she could reply, she heard a familiar rhythmic thumping sound. Looking from the tower walkway down to the ground below, she saw her unicorn galloping toward the Academy.

  “Starlight!” she cried out, overjoyed to see him. Bidding Red a hasty farewell, Rose raced downstairs, outside, and across the Academy’s lawn. When she met her unicorn, she wrapped both arms around his snowy-white neck, hugging him. He tossed his head and nuzzled her, happy to see her, too.

  “Where? How?” she began. But then she noticed a card attached to his horn with a ribbon. After untying the ribbon, she opened the card. It was from her parents. Sending Starlight to GA was her birthday present from them. And they apparently weren’t far behind the unicorn, because the card said they were coming to visit her in their coach today. They’d only just heard what had happened yesterday and wanted to see for themselves that she was safe.

  Rose leaped onto Starlight’s back. “Come on, boy! Let’s go meet them.” She planned to tell them she wanted to remain at the Academy, a decision she’d made on the spot right then and there. She’d tell Red and Pea, and her other new friends when she returned. And on Monday, she’d switch to Drama class instead of Comportment, so she and her needle could help Red with the new play.

  Not only that, she would ask her parents’ permission to officially begin knight training at the Academy. There was trouble brewing here. E.V.I.L. trouble. And she was determined to stay and fight. For in her heart she’d sworn to protect Grimm Academy and all of Grimmlandia. And she was going to uphold that promise!

  “One day, when I’m a real knight, we
’ll ride to the Wall,” she told her unicorn as they cantered across the lawn. “We’ll see what’s on the other side. And fight it until E.V.I.L. loses its power.” And maybe someday, the curse upon Grimmlandia, for that’s what the Society was in her opinion, would be destroyed once and for all.

  Spying the coach ahead, she urged Starlight into a gallop. Together, they fairly flew across the fields to greet her parents, who loved her and cared about her. It was a magical moment. The wind was in her hair. She could smell the trees and flowers. The sky was sunny and blue. And the Academy lay behind her, awaiting her return.

  When she had first arrived at GA, she never imagined she’d make such good friends, foil her fairy tale curse, have a chance to become a knight, and even meet a maybe-crush who wanted to be a writer. Not to mention save herself from a life of boredom and a Hundred Year Nap!

  It was all like a dream come true!

  Goldilocks is so eager to make friends at Grimm Academy, she’s even tempted to accept an invitation to join E.V.I.L. — it’s just nice to be included! But she doesn’t want to be a villain. Can Goldie get inside the secret society and do some good?

  Joan Holub has authored and/or illustrated more than 130 children’s books. She lives in Raleigh, NC, and can be found at www.joanholub.com.

  Suzanne Williams is the author of more than 40 books for children, including the award-winning picture book Library Lil (illustrated by Steven Kellogg). She lives outside Seattle, WA, and is online at www.suzanne-williams.com.

  Together, Joan and Suzanne have written the Goddess Girls, Heroes in Training, and Grimmtastic Girls series. Though they live in different states and hardly ever get to see each other, they spend lots of time together in Grimmlandia.

  Cinderella Stays Late

  Red Riding Hood Gets Lost

  Snow White Lucks Out