How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come Tr - By Sarah Strohmeyer Page 0,24
the first bounce. “Do you know him well, Zoe?” she asked.
“Kind of. He hangs out with another furry, Karl the Wolf.”
She studied him a little longer. “Interesting.”
“Why?”
She crooked her skeletal finger. “Heaven forfend such intelligence be leaked to the masses, but last week I ordered Security to install a secret camera by the hole in the fence where we suspect our traitor has been egressing. Unfortunately there was a minor malfunction in the power supply, and the images from last night are blurred.”
That was why she was throwing such a fit this morning. Her hidden camera had failed. “I’m sorry, but I’m confused.” I tossed a handful of Smarties to a group of Girl Scouts. “Why don’t you just repair the fence?”
“Oh, no, dear girl. We want to apprehend this violator. Carpe Sceleratum! Fortunately the camera has been fixed, and our success is assured. In the interim, from what I could discern by analyzing the albeit murky still shots, our devious delinquent was dark-haired and slim, much like one Ian Davidson when he is not in costume.”
Only, it couldn’t have been Ian, because the guy who’d rescued me from the quicksand had been a prince using his princely voice and wearing the princely cologne that Wardrobe kept guarded under lock and key. And Ian was the Puss ’n Boots.
Not that I could tell Her Majesty this—unless I wanted to lose my job and doom Jess to a summer of “Oh! What big eyes you have, Grandma!” But I would have to find some way to get the message across before it was too late and Ian was sent back to Texas with a Do Not Return stamp on his forehead.
“With all due respect, ma’am, Ian doesn’t seem like the law-breaking type. I think you might be mistaken.”
“Of course you do.” She reclined slightly, her eyes reduced to sinister slits. “Be careful, Zoe. The heart is a clever trickster that delights in playing the brain for a fool.”
Ten
“You know you’ve got to find that prince,” Jess said, turning off the shower. “You have to warn him that the Queen’s out for his head.”
This had already occurred to me, too. I switched off the water in my stall and grabbed a towel. “I know, but how? I can’t exactly play Prince Charming going from door to door in the Royal Tower with a swatch of black flannel I found on a thornbush looking for some guy with the matching shirt.”
“Yeah, but the princes don’t spend all their free time in their rooms. I’ve seen them swimming in the Little Mermaid’s Falls after the park closes or playing pickup basketball over at Jack’s Beanstalk. Parties? Wardrobe? The cafeteria? There’s got to be some place where they take off their shirts.”
I quit toweling to replay what she’d just said. The cafeteria? “Is that where RJ hangs out?”
A long, painful sigh echoed in the other stall. “I don’t know where RJ hangs out. He says he spends his nights reading in his room and getting ready for Columbia in the fall, but I’m sure that’s just an excuse. Do you think he has a girlfriend?”
The ever-impossible question. “How would I know?”
“Because you’re good at sensing stuff like that. He claims he doesn’t.”
“Then he probably doesn’t.” I collected my shampoo and conditioner and plunked them into my plastic carrier, thinking that guys were never honest about relationships unless they were up against a wall.
“I hope you’re right, because I can’t tell what he wants. He acts as if he likes me. We meet up for coffee every morning and go for runs and sit really close, but . . .”
“You just want him to make a move.”
“Exactly. I’ve got to take action, or this summer’s going to go by without so much as a kiss.” Jess wrung out her hair. “Maybe I should ask him if he has any inside information on the Queen and Ian. She’s so psycho, you know that once she convinces herself Ian’s the traitor there’ll be no turning back.”
Jess had a point. This was a woman who lectured on the evils of sugar while snarfing down two bars of dark chocolate a week. Talk about the Queen of De-nial. “So you think I should say something to her beyond what I’ve said about him being innocent?”
“Kind of. I mean, I don’t want you to get in trouble, but you have to do the right thing, Zoe, and that’s admitting you were in the Forbidden Zone and you talked to this so-called