How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come Tr - By Sarah Strohmeyer Page 0,74

thousand dollars richer.”

They were messing with my mind. “I couldn’t have won the grant. I did so many things wrong.” There had to be a mistake. My litany of grievances was huge. “I picked flowers and crossed into the Forbidden Zone.”

“Twice, I might add.” The Queen nudged RJ. “You remember the quicksand? Oh, dear lord, I was on the verge of sending the trolls out there myself if Ian hadn’t happened along.”

RJ nodded. “That was dicey. I was a little worried, too.”

“Don’t forget her confrontation with Jake the Hansel,” Andy added. “I thought Jake was about to lose it for a minute there, and I must admit that staying in costume was a particularly delightful touch.”

“That reminds me.” The Queen grabbed her cell, the one she’d loaned me, and rapidly texted like a teenager. “I need to put something extra in Jake’s final stipend check. He did a superb job.”

“He’s going to be very disappointed when he finds out he didn’t win the grant,” RJ said.

The Queen lifted a shoulder nonchalantly. “He’ll live. Now come here, Zoe, I want to give you a hug.”

I went stiff as her bony arms awkwardly wrapped around me. “Do you know why I picked you to be my assistant, Zoe? Because, as a young girl, I’d also lost my mother, and I knew when I read your essay about Storytown that you not only had the potential to meet my highest expectations, but that without a maternal figure you were desperately in need of nurturing female guidance.”

Now I was the one laughing, since nurturing was not the word I would have associated with a woman who sent me into the dark woods at midnight to fetch a sleeping potion she hadn’t needed. “Thank you, ma’am. . . .”

“Helen,” she clarified, clasping me tighter. “Helen Reynolds McNeil.”

HRM. It said so right outside her door, though I’d assumed the initials had stood for Her Royal Majesty.

“Ma’am,” I said, unable to break the habit. “I mean Helen. What about Marcus?”

She twirled me around so we were face-to-face. “Listen, don’t you worry about Marcus. He was a disaster from the get-go and sent home in the interests of his own safety. That boy was destined to break his back, but, if you’re still unsure, you should know that I received an email that he’s surfing and doing fine.”

“And Dash? And Valerie? Were they in on the joke, too?”

After all, Dash had snagged Jake the Hansel’s report from the Box of Whine. Had he been trying to earn my trust by stealing Jake’s letter? Or maybe I’d been wrong about that, too.

At the mention of Dash and Valerie, the Queen allowed a glimpse of her chilly former self. “No.” Her tone was clipped. “I’ve made it a policy not to discuss the performance of current cast members, but perhaps it will help if I explain something.”

She sat me down and perched herself on the desk. “This internship serves a dual purpose. Providing rising high school seniors with experience acting in the park is one, but it is not the primary reason Fairyland runs the program. The internship is the best way for us to identify young talent who will go on to become loyal and dedicated team players as Fairyland executives, either here or in the parent company in Düsseldorf.”

Andy and RJ nodded in agreement. “Helen’s right,” RJ said. “Almost all the executives at Fairyland are former interns. That’s why we take the Game and, especially, the Final Exam very seriously.”

The Queen said, “As a result we enjoy working here because—aside from a fantastic benefits package, including an impressive retirement savings plan—we know that we’re more than employees. We consider ourselves members of the Fairyland family, with all the support and encouragement commonly found in such societal groups.

I’m afraid that in the case of some interns . . .”

Meaning Dash and Valerie.

“. . . the competitive spirit eclipsed that bonhomie, and they allowed their personal ambitions to surpass their moral underpinnings for a truly Machiavellian dynamic of the ends justifying the means.”

She might have been slightly nicer, but with that SAT vocabulary she was still the Queen.

“I think I get it,” I said. “Undercutting isn’t really showing that Wow! spirit.”

The Queen rewarded me with a pat. “You showed that Wow! spirit by putting yourself last, Zoe, and your cousin Jess and Fairyland first. You could have turned over the progress report to RJ—heck, I would have been tempted to myself, after his bleeding-heart speech—but you didn’t, because you consider