“You fell into an accursed sleep,” Primrose answers seriously. I guess that’s fairy tale–speak for a hypoxic coma brought on by advanced amyloidosis. “And I…” Primrose blushes and I find myself mesmerized by the blotchy fuchsia of her cheeks; I hadn’t thought it was possible for her to look anything less than perfect.

“And she kissed you. You!” Charm shakes her head in mock disgust. “Which was enough to trigger the narrative resonance between universes, I guess. Apparently fairy tales are flexible about gender roles.”

A cursed girl sleeping in a tower; an heir to a throne bending to kiss her. And if the heir was a princess instead of a prince, and if it’s more like awkward sexual tension between them than true love, well, stories are told all sorts of ways, aren’t they?

I run my thumb along the splinter in my hand, the slender last hope which had done exactly nothing to save me. “And the others? What happened to them?”

Charm makes a mystical woo-woo gesture with her fingers. “They took their exits on the cosmic highway between worlds, man.” I kick her and she relents. “We all got sucked together into this whirling darkness—the void between universes, I guess—and the other princesses each chose a story to step into. The cryogenic space lady and the Viking lady went home, I think, but the short-haired girl with the sword went elsewhere. She struck me as the adventurous type.” I picture her crashing headlong into some other unsuspecting sleeping beauty, a headstrong protagonist out to wreak merry havoc, and feel a weird lurch of something in my stomach. Regret, maybe, or envy.

Primrose finishes the story. “Charmaine took you to this world, and I followed. We landed in the tower of an abandoned castle”—the guard tower of the state penitentiary, I assume—“and Charmaine summoned assistance”—called an ambulance?—“because you wouldn’t wake up. I thought for a time that you might be…” Dead.

“Yeah, me too,” I tell her. “I will be soon, statistically.” I try to say it with a shrug in my voice, the way I used to, but I can’t quite pull it off. There’s still a hot spark of hope caught in my chest, scorching my throat.

Charm frowns at me. Tilts her head. “Didn’t they tell you?” she asks, and the hope catches fire. I can’t speak, can’t breathe, can hardly think around the bonfire of my own desire, twenty-one years of suppressed hunger for more: more life, more time, more everything. For the first time in my life I let myself believe I might, somehow, be cured.

Right up until Charm says, “I mean, it’s not like you’re cured or anything, but—” and the fire goes out like an ember beneath a boot. I don’t hear the rest of Charm’s sentence because I’m busy wishing I could rewind the world and linger in the radiant ignorance of two seconds ago, when I thought my story had finally changed. It’s a good thing I already used up my tears for the year.