Sleeping Beauty Dreams Big Page 3

  As the word rolled off her tongue every object in the room seemed to rustle, moving around a little nervously. Weird!

  Rose rubbed her eyes. And when she looked again, nothing was moving. “Maybe it was just my imagination,” she murmured. Except the pen was definitely moving again on its own. She went over to the desk to see what it had written: Never speak the principal’s name.

  “You mean, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’?” she asked it. In response, the rustling in the room happened again, even more nervous-sounding this time. So it hadn’t been her imagination after all!

  “Sorry, but why not?” she asked the pen. But it had gone still now and lay on the desk unmoving, just like any normal pen.

  She let out a perplexed huff. “Okay, be that way, you silly pen,” she told it.

  With that, she left the desk and went over to look out the room’s only door. She appeared to be in some kind of warehouse with shelves and shelves of storage. She looked down at her slipperless feet, then over at the pen.

  “Where am I, anyway?” she asked it. Nothing. She’d been hoping it might write the answer to her question.

  Hearing a boinging noise, she swung around to see that a half-dozen balls the size of oranges had leaped from a box on a shelf. After hitting the floor and bouncing upward, they began juggling themselves in midair! Not only that, now some school supplies — an eraser, a pair of scissors, a bottle of glue, and about a dozen paperclips — hopped from another box to begin fighting a comical battle on the floor. She watched the scissors warily as they occasionally sprang into the air, but they didn’t seem to mean her any harm, despite their sharpness.

  Just then, something drifted down from the room’s ceiling to land butterfly-soft on her nose. Startled, Rose slapped it away, then saw that it was only a slip of paper. Before she could bend down to read the words on it, the scissors zipped over and snipped it into a dozen pieces.

  “Thanks a lot!” she scolded. She kneeled to rearrange the pieces, but all she could read were three words: Tower Task: Candles. She remembered Ms. Jabberwocky saying something about a task she’d have to do on Wednesdays, sixth period.

  “Candles. What kind of task is that?” she asked aloud. But no one answered, and the pen remained still. She reached for the rest of the tiny pieces of paper nearby, when suddenly, the glue decided to squirt itself at the paperclips. Blurp! A big glob of glue sprayed out and the rest of the paper pieces got sloppy wet. Standing, she crammed the three dry pieces of paper with the words she’d read into the pocket of her pj’s.

  Choo! Choo! In a corner of the room a toy train started chugging along a track. In fact, all around her, more objects had begun to move under their own power. When a snow globe lifted from a shelf and headed her way, she quickly backed against a wall to avoid getting bonked. However it seemed to somehow know she was there. It circled carefully around her and gradually came to rest in the outstretched hand of a stone statue standing across the room.

  Rose gaped in astonishment. “This is one bizarro room!” she blurted. She decided to leave. But in the doorway, she paused, glancing down at the pj’s she wore.

  “Hope I don’t run into anyone,” she murmured to herself. Then she stepped out the door. Determined to figure out where she was exactly, she wandered up and down the aisles she’d glimpsed earlier. This place reminded her of the maze in the grand garden back home. Only instead of high green hedges, this maze was made of shelves. Shelves that stretched so far into the distance she could see no end to them. There were rows upon rows of them and little rooms filled with who knew what. Tons of books, for one thing, but other stuff, too. Then it flashed on her. This must be the Grimmstone Library!

  Everyone in Grimmlandia had heard of it. For it held the legendary Books of Grimm, written by the two Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. They’d built this Academy not just for all the students who attended GA, but also to protect their amazing collection of books, as well as enchanted artifacts from various tales and nursery rhymes.

  Flap! Flap! Looking up, Rose saw snow-white geese. They were flapping their wings and zooming back and forth high overhead, expertly navigating among chandeliers lit with dozens of candles that hung from the ceiling. A net bag dangled from each goose’s bright orange beak. Some of the bags held books. Others held objects, such as harmonicas, jars of buttons, balls of yarn, and fashionable hats.

  None of the geese paid any attention to her as she walked the aisles between the shelves, gazing around in wonder. The library’s wares appeared to be arranged in alphabetical order. She passed jars of mustard and stacks of mud pies sitting alongside books by M authors in Section M. In Section L, she passed bags of lollipops, boxes of lost things, and stacks of love letters tied together with ribbons of long lace.

  From the corner of one eye, she spied a ladder leaning against the shelf of letters. She scrambled up it to stand atop the eight-foot-tall shelves. As usual, she didn’t consider the danger of doing such a thing until after she’d done it. Oops. Good thing her parents weren’t here to see her now.

  The top of the shelving unit turned out to be a great vantage point for gazing across the sea of other shelves that made up this enormous library. She walked along the top of the shelf she’d climbed, hoping she was going in the right direction to eventually reach the library’s entrance. She needed to get back to the dorm and get ready for classes!

  Swoosh! A dark shadow fell over her. She looked up to see something huge flying overhead.

  Flap! Flap! It was another goose. Only this one was as big as a horse. A woman wearing a frilly white cap, a crisp white apron, and spectacles was riding on its back.

  After nearly toppling off the shelf in surprise, Rose quickly dropped to a crouch to regain her balance. “Hello? Which way is the exit?” she called up to the woman. But she didn’t hear, and the goose flapped on past.

  “Oh, dust bunnies,” Rose grumped under her breath.

  “What are you doing up there?” asked a voice from below.

  Whirling around, she looked down to see two boys standing below in the aisle. The three of them all gaped at one another for a few seconds without speaking. She wasn’t sure who looked more surprised. Them or her.

  One was the same brown-haired jousting boy she’d nearly knocked down yesterday, she realized. The one who’d returned her helmet. Running into him again seemed a coincidence, to be sure.

  Suddenly remembering she was in her pj’s, Rose felt her cheeks redden. Horribly embarrassed, she blurted out the first random thing that popped into her mind. “Are girls allowed on the jousting team?”

  “Huh?” Both boys gave her confused looks.

  “Because I want to try out. Think about it. Talk later!” They probably thought she was completely loopy, she decided as she leaped across a three-foot gap onto the top of the next shelf over. And maybe they were right!

  She leaped across the next gap and onto another shelf top, and onto the next, and the next. She knew she was taking chances since she could fall to the floor and break a leg (or worse) if one of her leaps missed. But she couldn’t seem to stop with the daredevil act.

  Her fairytale curse was always in the back of her mind, spurring her on to take chances like this before she turned twelve and had to behave. Despite the sheltered life she’d lived at the family palace, her overprotective parents hadn’t been able to keep an eye on her every minute of every day. So whenever she’d been out from under their watchful eyes she’d gone wild, doing crazy things that made her heart pound with excitement.

  Once, she’d jumped from the top of a crenellated wall into the moat down below. She’d jumped fences with Starlight. And she’d climbed the tallest trees in the forest behind the palace to swing from vine to vine.

  Just then, she came to a break in the shelves that was far too wide to leap, and she skidded to a halt. Her arms windmilled as she teetered forward at the edge of the shelftop on which she still stood. Luckily, she found her balance again and didn’t go crashing down to her doom. Farther
ahead, she saw what could be the exit.

  As she was contemplating how to get there, two girls appeared in the aisle below her. One was wearing a tiara with blue-green stones and the other a red cape. They were friends of that girl she’d nearly trampled, Cinda.

  “Hey! Up here!” she called softly down to them.

  The two girls looked up, and Red Cape immediately asked the same question the boys had. “What are you doing up there?”

  “Shh! Long story,” Rose said quietly. She looked around, but didn’t see anyone else besides the two girls. By now, she’d left those boys far behind.

  Dropping to her hands and knees atop the shelf, she asked, “Which way is out?”

  Both girls pointed in a direction diagonally across the huge room. Her heart sank. She wasn’t near the exit after all. It would take way too much shelf-hopping to make it to where they pointed. She eyed the girls again. “Any ideas on how I can get down?”

  “Too bad Rapunzel isn’t here. She could probably stretch her magic comb charm into a ladder,” said Red Cape. “There are real ladders in the L section, though.”

  Tiara girl glanced up at her. “I’m Snow,” she said.

  “Red,” added the other girl.

  When Rose looked confused, Red-Cape girl grinned, adding, “Those are our names.”

  “Oh.” Rose grinned back. “Sorry, I was thinking of the kind of snow that falls and the color red, so I didn’t —. Anyway, I’m Rose, like the flower. So can you help me?”

  “We’re closer to Section S for stairs than to L for ladders,” Snow told her. Pointing, she added, “S is that way. Only you’d have to jump three aisles to get there, and that’d be pretty dangerous. So maybe —”

  Before Snow could finish, Rose started leaping. The two Grimm girls dashed to follow, anxiously staring up at her antics the whole time.

  “This is crazy!” fretted Snow.

  “You could fall!” exclaimed Red, stating the obvious.

  Fortunately, Rose reached the S section safely. “Aha! Stairs.” Sure enough, a set of steps led from a shelf to the floor. She started to take them down. But then she spotted an enormous shoe farther down the shelf she was standing on. It was as tall as the shelf, and so long that several shelves across from it had been removed to make room for its toe. And it had little windows and a door!

  “What’s that?” she asked the two Grimm girls, who’d caught up and now stood below.

  “It belongs to the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” replied Snow. “She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”

  “So she moved from this too-small shoe house, which she stowed here in the library, into an even bigger shoe house instead,” said Red. “At least, that’s what I heard.”

  While they talked, Rose sat on the edge of the shelf, poised at the top of the shoe, which was tall and really more like a boot. Pushing off, she slid down its sloping top all the way to its toe. When she landed on the floor, she laughed. “Wow! It might not have been that great of a house, but it makes a cool slide!”

  Snow and Red stared at her, stunned looks on their faces. Rose grinned at them and wiggled her eyebrows. “Sorry. I know that was kind of risky. Couldn’t resist, though. It was fun!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re okay,” said Snow.

  Red nodded. “What were you doing up on those shelves, anyway? And, um, why are you in pj’s?”

  Rose sighed, shifting from one bare foot to the other. “I sleepwalk sometimes,” she finally admitted, shrugging. “It happened last night and I woke up here in the library. I didn’t know where I was, so I climbed the shelves to look for the exit.”

  “How awful!” Snow sympathized. “About the sleepwalking, I mean.”

  “Worst thing is that now I’ll have to walk through the halls in my pj’s,” said Rose. “Which will be majorly grimmbarrassing. How far is it from here to the dorms?”

  “Library’s on the first floor today,” Red told her.

  “So that’ll mean five sets of stairs up to get to the dorms,” added Snow. The two girls went on to explain how the library magically moved around the various floors of the Academy each day. And how sometimes it shrank itself as small as a closet, while at other times it made itself even bigger than it was now — bigger than the Academy itself! Yet it always managed to fit wherever it put itself.

  Cool! thought Rose.

  “I’d fetch you a gown, but I don’t think it would fit in my basket,” said Red. Rose had no idea what she meant by that. Was her basket magic or something? Before she could ask, Red snapped her fingers and looked over at Snow. “I know! We can get her a gown to wear from Section G.”

  “Perfect!” Snow told Rose, bouncing on her toes. “Then you won’t have to wander around in your pj’s! We’ll have to hurry up about it if we want to get to breakfast on time, though. Let’s go!”

  As the three girls headed off together, Red looked over her shoulder at Rose. “Hey, I just remembered something. The library doorknob always asks a riddle before it’ll let you in. So if you were asleep, how did you get in?”

  Rose shrugged. “No idea.” But then she vaguely recalled sleepily talking to a beaked doorknob. One without the customary GA logo on it. “Oh, wait. Um, I think I was asked a riddle. By some kind of chicken-headed knob.”

  “Gooseknob,” both Grimm girls corrected.

  Rose nodded, her forehead wrinkling as she searched her memory for that fragment of her dream. At last she said, “Got it! The riddle went like this: ‘I am at the beginning of every end, at the end of every middle, and in the middle of every dream. What am I?’ ”

  “Hmm. That’s a tough one,” said Red, wrinkling her nose.

  Snow nodded. “So what was the answer?”

  Rose grinned and pointed to a sign in the section they were passing through. It read: Section E.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Snow. “The answer to the riddle is the letter e.”

  “PrEEEcisely,” said Rose. Which made them all giggle.

  When they reached the G section they came upon a tiny mirror, which was no bigger than a three-inch square. It hung in the middle of a large otherwise empty wall. As Rose watched, Red and Snow both gently tugged outward on the four corners of the mirror’s silver frame.

  The mirror began to stretch larger, until it was taller and wider than they were! And then it spoke to them:

  “What do you wish?

  You need only to ask,

  And I will complete for you

  Any fair task.”

  Red replied:

  “Mirror, Mirror, at aisle’s end,

  Please make a gown for our new friend.”

  Snow nudged Rose with an elbow. “Tell the mirror what you want it to look like,” she prompted.

  “Um, an everyday gown for class?” Rose requested vaguely.

  “What’s your favorite color?” Red asked.

  “Lavender,” said Rose.

  Flip-flap! As her words died away, a dozen bluebirds came flying toward the girls from across the library. Their beaks held bedsheet-size pieces of a beautiful lavender fabric that billowed out behind them like colorful sails. They carried scissors, pins, and thread as well. The birds swooped down beside Rose, wrapped the fabric around her, and got to work.

  In no time at all, she stood before the mirror clad in a finished gown. Ribbons were tied just so and tiny sparkly gems along her calf-length hem winked in the chandeliers’ light from overhead.

  “Wow!” Rose said softly. She’d had pretty dresses before, but never one whipped up in mere minutes by bluebirds. Snow had even gotten slippers for her from another aisle to match! She swayed from side to side, studying herself in the glass and enjoying how the skirt of her gown swished. “It’s beautiful.”

  At her words, the mirror must’ve decided its job was complete. It began to slowly shrink, then snapped back to its original small size.

  Red nodded toward Rose’s pj’s, where they lay on the floor. “Want me to send those to your dorm r
oom for you? Just put them in here.” She patted her cute wicker basket.

  As the birds had begun to work, Rose had barely noticed when her pj’s had disappeared from under the gown. Somehow, they’d wound up on the floor. When she plucked them up now, three tiny pieces of paper fell out of their pocket.

  “What’s that?” asked Snow, pointing to them.

  Rose kneeled and gathered up the pieces along with her pj’s, then stood again. “It’s my tower task assignment, I think. Long story, but the paper it was written on got cut up by some crazy scissors in the room where I woke up.”

  “You got a tower task already? What is it?” asked Snow, seeming unsurprised about the crazy scissors part. Magic like that must be far more commonplace in GA than in the rest of Grimmlandia, Rose figured.

  “Making candles? At least I think so,” said Rose.

  Red lifted her basket’s lid. After Rose set her pj’s inside it, the lid dropped shut. Then Red commanded, “A tisket a tasket, send these pj’s to Rose’s room, basket.”

  When Red opened the basket afterward it was empty. “Those pj’s should be in your alcove when you get back tonight.”

  “Thanks! I wondered if your basket might be magic,” Rose said, impressed. “Very cool.”

  Red just smiled, and nodded. “It followed me from Drama class one day, wanting to be mine. C’mon. We’d better get going.”

  As they headed off again, Snow asked Red, “Do you think Rose’s tower task might have something to do with the candlestick-maker in the ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’ nursery rhyme?”

  “Huh?” said Rose. What is she talking about? “I’m not really into making candles,” she protested. “Do you think maybe I could trade for a different task?”

  Snow looked doubtful.

  “We’re each given a specific task for a reason,” Red said encouragingly. “Somehow, candles will turn out right for you. You’ll see. Over in Pearl Tower, Cinda’s the Hearthkeeper, I’m the Snackmaker, and Snow is Tidy-upper.”