“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 them 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.