“Well, let me know if you need any help.” She gave me the once-over and I must have passed, because she swooped down on someone else, getting them up in the chair and bringing out the makeup brushes. On impulse, I put the lipstick in my pocket. In the mirror, a look flitted across my face, alert and predatory. In my head, Peter said, In a society that worships individuality and elevates consumer commodities to the highest form of personal expression, appropriating the means to make such an expression possible can only be a virtue, dear Andy.

And Em, Have it! Forty fucking quid? Serves them right.

A ripple ran through me, a quickening, and I tore my eyes from the mirror and strode off. Just before I got to the automatic doors, I slowed down and flipped over the price tag on a black leather wallet, a display of unhurried innocence. Once outside, I took off feeling both foolish and alive. The rain ran down my neck. My heels clicked merrily along the pavement as I dodged the tourists and shoppers, nipping across the road in front of a big red bus so that the driver blared his horn.

It made me aware of how dormant I was most of the time. How my life—my job, my screens—made it easy to be occupied every waking moment, hurrying, distracted, and equally, on some level almost entirely asleep, comforted by dreams of effortless transformation.

But I was not Cinderella. Instead, there was another story Peter and I had often found in the books of our childhood. It came in different disguises. It was the one about the traveler who arrives at an island, or a castle, or a secret door into the side of a mountain. There, welcomed, the traveler stays, perhaps against their instincts. Often they eat or drink—strange fruit, or wine from a goblet. There is always something they should be doing, an important task for them to fulfill, but they forget it, they are waylaid, and if they ever remember, their companions, if there are any, distract them with promises, or songs, or riddles to ponder.

Often the traveler sleeps, sometimes they dream, always they are nagged by the sense that there is something they are forgetting, something they must do. Their true love is waiting, or their aged parents. There is a sick child they must bring herbs to, a kingdom for them to inherit. But they do nothing; they are paralyzed. And when they wake, if they ever get away, once back in the world they find that centuries have passed, that they are too late, too late for everything, and that all that they loved, everything that truly mattered, is lost forever.

To sleep on? Or to wake? This was the question facing me. To sleep, or to wake and face the reckoning, to find out what had been lost.

CHAPTER 16

NO WONDER ALICE