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.”