. .”
“No, no. You should definitely come,” he said. “In fact, I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
Jess brightened. “Really?”
“Yeah. It’ll be cool.”
“All right,” said Jess. “Meet you there.”
“Awesome.”
While we were walking Tinker Bell back to her boudoir, I said, “You do realize he has the IQ of Play-Doh.”
Jess shrugged. “That’s okay. I like Play-Doh. It’s soft and squishy and has so many useful purposes.”
I wondered if one was getting RJ to finally make a move.
Eleven
That night I met the outlaw prince again.
On purpose.
Or by accident.
I still wasn’t sure.
I was playing The Settlers of Catan with Karl in the rec room like a good little lackey when my iPhone started playing “Every Breath You Take.”
It was 10:59, one minute earlier than I’d expected. I pumped my fist. “Called it!”
Karl, who’d bet on midnight, fished out five bucks from his pocket. “No fair. You work for her.” He slammed the fiver on the table.
I took it off his hands. “There’s gotta be some perks,” I said, secreting my win into the front of my bra. “Excuse me, will you?” And I took the phone out to the hall.
Thanks to the miracle of FaceTime, the Queen’s pale visage filled all four-by-two inches of the screen. Her makeup had been removed, exposing her true features, which were extraordinarily corpselike, and her hair was gone, tucked into what appeared to be a white turban.
But that wasn’t what I found shocking. It was her eyeballs.
They were rolling wildly in their sockets.
“Ma’am. Are you okay?”
“I most certainly am not! There is a mote in my eye, Zoe, and I need you here posthaste to remove it.”
“Just blink,” I said.
“What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been blinking so much, my eyelids have biceps. Now stop with the dillydallying and hurry. I can’t sleep until this cursed offender has been extricated from my ocular perimeter!”
The Queen’s verbiage was the perfect example of what my English teacher called using fifty words when one will do.
With apologies to Karl, I went upstairs to the Queen’s office, where a door led to her private quarters in a separate turret. Using my master key, I opened the gold lock and stepped into a marble hallway lined with exquisite, thick Persian carpets and beige walls covered in framed photo after framed photo of . . . her.
“Hurry, Zoe!” she beckoned from a far room. “I’m in agony!”
“Yes, ma’am.” I would have liked to have lingered over what might possibly have been a shot of her with Justin Bieber, but clearly time was of the essence as I scurried past a pair of ornate French doors to her chilly air-conditioned bedroom.
Against one wall was a humongous four-poster bed, and in the center of that, lost among piles of white bedding and white pillows, was a rail-thin figure tossing and turning as if she were on fire.
“Help! I am blinded!”
I rushed to her side and adjusted her bedside lamp but found nothing except for one seriously bloodshot eye. Still, figuring she’d never be satisfied until I removed something, I ran a finger over her lower lashes and faked success.
“All done. See?” I held up my bare finger.
She squinted. “No, I don’t. And it still hurts.”
“Because you’ve irritated it. Now lie back and close your eyes,” I said, fluffing up a pillow. “And let your natural tears do their job. That’s what my mother used to say.”
The Queen lay back as I tucked her in. “What else did your mother used to say?”
“That if you can’t sleep, try to see how many words you can make from a bigger word.”
“Like incarceration?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of petunia or lavender. You know, something pleasant.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed with the floral options but gamely rattled off pet, pen, pie, pit, tip, tan, tap, nit, nip. “It’s no use. I can’t sleep. It’s the stress, what with the traitor and those dwarfs giving me such trouble.”
Earlier today it had been discovered that Grumpy had fallen in love with Bo Peep and was now as cheerful as one of her lambs while Sleepy had become mildly addicted to energy drinks and seemed bent on singing “Hi, ho!” at warp-speed.
Seriously, everything down at Snow’s was all wrong.
“I need my sleeping potion,” the Queen declared. “Call Chef and have him concoct a batch. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
It was almost midnight. I wasn’t sure if that was fair to Chef, who was usually in the kitchen by 4:00 a.m.
“Do it!” she croaked.
Chef was on her phone’s speed dial,