The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell (4 page)

“Can you imagine a childhood without knowing all those characters and places?” Alex continued. “We’re so fortunate that Dad and Grandma made such a point of reading them to us when we were little.”

“Very lucky…” Conner nodded, although he wasn’t exactly sure what he was agreeing with.

Every day after school, the Bailey twins would walk home together. They lived in a charming neighborhood that was surrounded by more charming neighborhoods that were surrounded by another series of charming neighborhoods. It was a sea of suburbia, where each house was similar to the next but uniquely different at the same time.

To pass the time as they walked, Alex would tell her brother everything on her mind: all her current thoughts and concerns, a summary of everything she had learned that day, and what she planned to do as soon as they got home. As much as this daily routine annoyed Conner, he knew he was the only person in the world Alex had to talk to, so he tried his best to listen. But listening had never been Conner’s forte.

“How am I ever going to decide which story to write about? It’s too difficult to choose!” Alex said, clapping her hands with excitement. “Which one are you going to write your paper on?”

“Um…” Conner said, whipping his head up from
looking at the ground. He had to mentally rewind the conversation to remember what the question was.

“ ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ ” he said, choosing the first fairy tale that came to mind.

“You can’t choose that one,” Alex said, shaking her head. “That’s the most obvious one! You have to select something more challenging to impress Mrs. Peters. You should pick something with a message hidden deeper inside it, one that isn’t so on-the-surface.”

Conner sighed. It was always easier to just go along with Alex instead of arguing with her, but sometimes it was unavoidable.

“Fine, I’ll pick ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” he decided.

“Interesting selection,” Alex said, intrigued. “What do
you
suppose the moral of that story is?”

“Don’t piss off your neighbors, I guess,” Conner said.

Alex grunted disapprovingly.

“Be serious, Conner! That is
not
the moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” she reprimanded.

“Sure it is,” Conner explained. “If the king and queen had just invited that crazy enchantress to their daughter’s party in the first place, none of that stuff ever would have happened.”

“They couldn’t have stopped it from happening,” said Alex. “That enchantress was evil and probably would have cursed the baby princess anyway. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is about trying to prevent the unpreventable. Her parents tried protecting her and had all the spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed. She was so sheltered, she didn’t even
know what the danger was, and she still pricked her finger on the first spindle she ever saw.”

Conner thought about this possibility and shook his head. He liked his version much better.

“I disagree,” Conner told her. “I’ve seen how upset you get when people don’t invite you places, and you usually look like you would curse a baby, too.”

Alex gave Conner a dirty look Mrs. Peters would have been proud of.

“While there’s no such thing as a wrong
interpretation
, I have to say
that
is definitely a misread,” Alex said.

“I’m just saying to be careful who you ignore,” Conner clarified. “I always thought Sleeping Beauty’s parents had it coming.”

“Oh?” Alex questioned him. “And I suppose you thought Hansel and Gretel had it coming, too?”

“Yes,” Conner said, feeling clever. “And so did the witch!”

“How so?” Alex asked.

“Because,” Conner explained with a smirk on his face, “if you’re going to live in a house made of candy, don’t move next door to a couple of obese kids. A lot of these fairy-tale characters are missing common sense.”

Alex let out another disapproving grunt. Conner figured he could get at least fifty more out of her before they got home.

“The witch didn’t live next door! She lived deep in the forest! They had to leave a trail of bread crumbs behind so they could find their way back, remember. And the whole
point of the house was to lure the kids in. They were starving!” Alex reminded him. “At least have all the facts straight before you criticize.”

“If they were
starving
, what were they doing wasting bread crumbs?” Conner asked. “Sounds like a couple of troublemakers to me.”

Alex grunted again.

“And in your deranged mind, what do you think the lesson of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ is?” Alex challenged him.

“Easy,” Conner said. “Lock your doors! Robbers come in all shapes and sizes. Even curly-haired little girls can’t be trusted.”

Alex grunted again and crossed her arms. She tried her best not to giggle; she didn’t want to validate her brother’s opinion.

“ ‘Goldilocks’ is about consequences! Mrs. Peters said so herself,” Alex said. Although Alex would never admit it, sometimes arguing with her brother was amusing. “What do you suppose ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is about?” she asked.

Conner contemplated a moment and slyly grinned. “Bad beans can cause more than indigestion,” he answered, laughing hysterically to himself.

Alex pursed her lips to hide a smile.

“What do you think the lesson of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is?” she asked him. “Do you think she should have just
mailed
her grandmother the gift basket?”

“Now you’re thinking!” he said. “Although, I’ve always
felt sorry for Little Red Riding Hood. It’s obvious her parents didn’t like her very much.”

“Why do you say that?” Alex asked, wondering how he could have possibly construed that from the story.

“Who sends their young daughter into a dark and wolf-occupied forest carrying freshly baked food and wearing a bright jacket?” Conner asked. “They were practically asking for a wolf to eat her! She must have annoyed the heck out of them!”

Alex held back laughter with all her might but, to Conner’s delight, she let a quiet chuckle slip.

“I know you secretly agree with me,” Conner said, bumping her shoulder with his.

“Conner, it’s people like you who ruin fairy tales for the rest of the world,” Alex said, forcing the smile on her face to fade. “People make jokes about them, and suddenly the whole message is… is…
lost
—
”

Alex suddenly stopped walking. All the color in her face slowly drained away. Something across the street had caught her eye, something very disappointing.

“What’s the matter?” Conner asked, turning back to her.

Alex was staring at a large house. It was a lovely home, painted blue with white trim, and had several windows. The front yard was landscaped to perfection; it had just the right amount of grass, patches of colorful flowers, and a large oak tree ideal for climbing.

If a house could smile, this house would be grinning from ear to ear.

“Look,” Alex said, and pointed to a For Sale sign next to the oak tree. A bright red stripe with the word
Sold
had recently been added to it.

“It sold,” Alex said, slowly shaking her head from side to side in disbelief. “It sold,” she repeated, not wanting it to be true.

The little color in Conner’s round face drained, too. The twins stared at the house for a moment in silence, each not knowing what to say to the other.

“We both knew it would happen
eventually
,” Conner said.

“Then why do I feel so surprised?” Alex asked softly. “I guess it had been for sale for so long, I figured it was just… you know…
waiting for us
.”

Conner saw tears begin to form in his sister’s eyes through the tears forming in his own.

“Come on, Alex,” Conner said and kept walking. “Let’s go home.”

She looked at the house for a second more and then followed him. This house was only one thing the Bailey family had recently lost….

A year ago, just a few days before their eleventh birthday, Alex and Conner’s father died in a car accident on his way home from work. Mr. Bailey had owned a bookstore a
few streets away named Bailey’s Books, but all it had taken was a few small streets for a big accident to happen.

The twins and their mother had been anxiously waiting for him at the dinner table when they got the phone call telling them their father wouldn’t be joining them that night, or any night after that. He had never been late to dinner before, so as soon as the telephone rang, they all had known something was wrong.

Alex and Conner could never forget the look on their mother’s face when she answered the phone—a look that told them, without saying a word, that their lives would never be the same. They had never seen their mother cry like she did that night.

Everything had happened so fast after that. It was hard for the twins to remember what order it all had happened in.

They remembered their mother making tons of phone calls and having to deal with a lot of paperwork. They remembered that their grandmother came to take care of them while their mother made all the funeral arrangements.

They remembered holding their mother’s hands as they walked down the church aisle at the funeral. They remembered the white flowers and candles and all the sad expressions on everyone’s faces as they passed. They remembered all the food people sent. They remembered how sorry people told them they were.

They didn’t remember their eleventh birthday, because no one did.

The twins remembered how strong Grandma and Mom had stayed for them in the following months. They remembered their mother explaining to them why they had to sell the bookstore. They remembered that, eventually, their mother couldn’t afford their beautiful blue house anymore, and they’d had to move into a rental house a little way down the street.

They remembered Grandma leaving them once they were settled into their new, smaller house. They remembered returning to school and how falsely normal everything appeared to be. But most of all, the twins remembered not understanding why any of it had to happen.

A full year had passed, and the twins still didn’t understand it. People had told them it would get easier with time, but how much time were they talking about? The loss seemed to grow deeper each day without their dad. They missed him so much sometimes that they expected their sadness to swell out of their bodies.

They missed his smile, they missed his laugh, and they missed his stories….

Whenever Alex had had a particularly bad day at school, the first thing she would do when she got home was jump on her bike and pedal to her dad’s store. She would run through the front doors, find her dad, and say, “Daddy, I need to talk to you.”

It didn’t matter if he was helping a customer or putting brand-new books on the shelves, Mr. Bailey would always stop what he was doing, take his daughter to the storage room in the back, and listen to what had happened.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he would ask with big, concerned eyes.

“I had a really bad day today, Daddy,” Alex said on one occasion.

“Are the other kids still teasing you?” he asked. “I can call the school and ask your teacher to have a talk with them.”

“That wouldn’t solve anything,” Alex said through sniffles. “By publicly persecuting me, they’re filling an insecure void caused by social and domestic neglect.”

Mr. Bailey scratched his head. “So, what you’re saying, sweetheart, is that they’re just
jealous
?” he asked her.

“Exactly,” Alex said. “I read a psychology book in the library today at lunch that explained it.”

Mr. Bailey let out a proud laugh. His daughter’s intelligence constantly amazed him. “I think you’re just too bright for your own good, Alex,” he said.

“Sometimes I wish I was like everyone else,” Alex confessed. “I’m tired of being lonely, Daddy. If being smart and being a good student means that I’ll never have friends, then I wish I was more like
Conner
.”

“Alex, have I ever told you the story about the Curvy Tree?” Mr. Bailey asked.

“No,” Alex answered.

Mr. Bailey’s eyes lit up. They always did when he was about to tell a story.

“Well,” he started, “one day when I was very young, I was walking around the woods and saw something very
peculiar. It was an evergreen tree, but it was different from any other evergreen tree I had ever seen. Instead of growing straight out of the ground, its trunk curved and wound in circles like a large vine.”

“How?” Alex asked, utterly entranced. “That isn’t possible. Evergreens don’t grow like that.”

“Perhaps someone forgot to tell that to the tree,” Mr. Bailey said. “Anyway, one day the loggers came and cut down every single tree in the area except for the Curvy Tree.”

“Why?” Alex asked.

“Because they figured it was unusable,” Mr. Bailey answered. “You could never make a table or a chair or a cabinet out of it. You see, the Curvy Tree may have felt different from the other trees, but its uniqueness is what saved it.”

“What ever happened to the Curvy Tree?” Alex asked.

“It’s still there today,” Mr. Bailey said with a smile. “It’s growing taller and taller and curvier and curvier every day.”

A tiny smile grew on Alex’s face. “I think I get what you’re trying to tell me, Daddy,” she said.