The Very Little Princess: Zoey's Story (3 page)

You are also aware of a lot of freckles.

A nose, too. A pert, turned-up one. It’s the kind adults refer to as “cute as a button.” But when viewed from below by a very tiny creature, such a nose is not at all appealing. It is gaping and moist and even a bit hairy. (We humans tend to think the outsides of bodies are much prettier than the insides. This doll thought that, too.)

The other thing you would have noticed would be an explosion of coppery curls surrounding the freckles and the turned-up nose.

What would you do? What would you say?
What a sweet little girl? How nice of her to wake me? I certainly hope she’ll be my friend?

That might, indeed, be what you would say if you were an exceptionally kind doll … and exceptionally quick to gather your wits.

But if you were startled and bewildered and uncomfortably wet, you might be less than kind. And this doll was all those things. So she said instead, “Who’s that big, ugly girl?”

After she said that, the doll heard footsteps pound across the room. Then she heard a door slam.

She paid no attention to the running and the slamming. She was too busy picking herself up and smoothing her gauzy pink dress. When her skirt was arranged to her satisfaction, she looked around.

That was better. She knew where she was now.

She was in her own bedroom. She could remember the bedroom. She especially remembered the dressing table. And she remembered the oval mirror. She sat down on the bench and gazed into the mirror.

She fluffed her golden hair. She touched her alabaster cheek.

(If you don’t know that word—
alabaster—
it means smooth and white. At least that’s what it means when it refers to cheeks.)

Then she said to the very pretty image smiling back at her, “I’ve almost forgotten. Who
are
you?”

The image didn’t answer.

The doll touched the mirror with a delicate china finger.

The image reached out with an equally delicate finger to touch her.

The doll studied her golden hair, her blue
eyes, her alabaster cheeks. “You’re utterly perfect!” she said. “Surely you must be a princess!”

Her image agreed by saying exactly the same thing to her.

The doll reached up and formed a circle
with her hands above her golden hair. Yes, a crown was definitely called for.

“Of course,” she said. And she nodded emphatically. Her image nodded, too. “A princess for sure.”

Then she turned to look from her small dollhouse room to the larger one beyond. “I wonder,” she said, “where my big, ugly servant ran off to.”

As for the princess’s “servant,” shall we check on her now? The last time we heard about Zoey, she was slamming out of the bedroom.

Now she sat at the bottom of the stairs. The shock of the doll’s sneeze had carried her that far. But once she’d reached the bottom step, she’d stopped, unable to go farther.

Too much had happened today. Too much was still happening.

Her mother and the grandmother she hadn’t even known she had were still arguing in the kitchen. She could hear their voices, but by trying hard she could just manage to block out the words. Except for her name. From time to time one of them said “Zoey.” She couldn’t block that out.

Ordinarily Zoey might have listened in. In her situation you probably would, too. You would want to know what was wrong and what your mother and your grandmother were saying about you. But Zoey had too much on her mind to think about grown-ups’ arguments.

She had the doll on her mind.

What she couldn’t decide was whether to be thrilled or horribly hurt. A doll had actually sneezed. In her hand!

It had called her ugly.

No one had ever called her ugly before. She wasn’t beautiful. Zoey knew that. Not in the way movie stars are beautiful. She had too many freckles. Her nose turned up too sharply. Her curls were too bushy and too red.

But her mother had freckles and bushy curls (though not red ones), and her mother wasn’t ugly. So how could
she
be?

Anyway, just because a doll talked, did that mean you had to believe everything she said?

After a few moments, that very sensible question brought Zoey back to what mattered. She had found a doll. In her mother’s old bedroom. The doll had sat up in her hand. She had sneezed!

Who cared what she said?

Zoey had been waiting her entire life for exactly such a thing to happen. And now, at last, it had.

And what had she done? She had run away!

All children who play with dolls like to pretend they walk and talk, of course. They feed them pretend meals. They take them to the doctor for shots.

But Zoey wasn’t like other children. Not quite. She had never
pretended
her dolls walked and talked. Her entire life she had simply
known
they did. The problem was that, until now, she had never been able to catch one of them at it … the moving bit, that is.

At home in the apartment she shared with her mother, Zoey had three dolls—a baby doll, a Barbie, and a rag doll. She often lined this unlikely trio up on her bed. She’d position them carefully. The baby doll with a thumb in her mouth perhaps. Barbie standing with her head tilted just so. The rag doll with her legs crossed.

Then Zoey would say cheerfully, “I’m going to be gone all day, you know. I won’t be back
until dark. So have fun!” Or something like that so they would be fooled. And then she would march out, shut the bedroom door, and keep on walking, very loudly.

After a moment, though, she would tiptoe back and stand just on the other side of the door. And she would wait. She would wait as long as she could bear to, holding herself back and back and back. And when she couldn’t wait another second, she’d throw the door open and spring into the room.

What she expected, every time, was to catch her dolls in different positions.

Maybe she would find the baby doll lying on her back, kicking her bare feet. Barbie would probably be sitting instead of standing, as Zoey had left her. Her head, instead of being tilted, would be perfectly straight. The rag doll might be doing back bends.

Always, though, they were too smart for her. Every single time she found them exactly as she’d left them. She could never figure out how they did it. How could they spring back into position so fast? But she’d never doubted what she knew … that they moved about the instant she left the room and that they managed to get back to the way they’d been just before she came in.

Being the kind of girl who believed such things, Zoey was probably less surprised to come across a sneezing, talking doll than you or I might be. Doing so just confirmed what she had always known.

She wasn’t without feelings, though. And those feelings reminded her that she didn’t like being called ugly.

“Well,” she said at last. She smacked her hands against her knees and stood. “I guess I’ve
got two choices. I can go see what Witch Hazel is brewing for lunch, or I can go back upstairs and give that rude doll a good talking-to.”

And though she had named two choices and though she was, indeed, very hungry, she knew without question that only one choice was possible.

Zoey turned and climbed the stairs.

A Name for a Princess

The doll, in the meantime, was still sitting in front of the tiny mirror in her pink and white bedroom admiring herself. She was also sorting through names. What was she called before?

Adeline. Danielle. Lillian. Primrose.

Even as she sorted, though, she couldn’t take her eyes off of the doll in the mirror.

Wasn’t she gorgeous? Her china face was so lovely. Her hair so … golden!

Kaytlin. Vanessa. Wilhelmina.

What name would be right for a princess? And not just any princess, but one as perfect as she.

(I told you she was still admiring herself.)

She cocked her head. The mirror doll, of course, cocked her head, too.

She knew she’d had a name before she’d gone to sleep. Everyone has a name, after all. But she couldn’t seem to remember what it was.

The problem was that waking always made her feel so muzzy! That’s one of the few things she was certain of, besides that she was beautiful and a princess—waking
always
made her feel muzzy.

She tried to remember the before time, before she’d gone to sleep. But all she could call up was a succession of giant girls, one after another. Had they all been her servants? If she had always been a princess—and it was hard to imagine being anything else—then they must have been.

And speaking of servants, where had hers run off to, anyway? The doll turned from the mirror to check the larger room.

As if on cue, the big, ugly girl came through the door.

“Well,” said the princess. She rose to face the girl, tiny fists bunched on her tiny hips. “Where have
you
been? Don’t you know I need you?” And then, though she had spoken as firmly as a three-and-one-quarter-inch doll can, she found herself suddenly uncertain. What would the girl do? She remembered vaguely that these giant creatures could be unpredictable.

What she didn’t know was that she had just spoken the magic words,
I need you
. (Zoey’s mother said those words from time to time,
I need you
. And when she said them, it meant everything was fine. It meant that she wanted Zoey close.)

But the doll didn’t know that. She didn’t even know that Zoey was Zoey. That is, she didn’t yet know her name. She did understand the smile that spread across Zoey’s face, however. And she could see that, though the giant girl had come in clearly set for a fight, the fight had drained out of her in an instant.

“You need me?” the girl said. And she pressed both hands against her chest as though
to make sure she was the
me
under discussion.

“Certainly,” the doll said, “you’re my …”

She stopped herself. She had almost said
owner
, but she didn’t like that word. She had never liked it.

So she started over and said instead, “You’re my servant, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” the girl asked. And as if she had already answered her own question, she settled obediently onto the floor in front of the dollhouse. She peered in at the doll, her face bright with questions.