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 traitor, and it definitely wasn’t Ian. Judging from his cologne and British accent, it was a prince.”
But was that the right thing? In the eyes of Fairyland Management, it was reporting the “delinquent” who’d violated Rule #22. For Jess, it was giving a heads-up to the stranger who saved me from the quicksand and, for me, it was warning a friend that he was in danger of being wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
I was about to point out my conundrum when the door to the bathroom creaked open, and someone left. I froze. Jess quit talking and waited. Whoever had been there could have heard everything, including that I knew the traitor was not Ian—that he was, in fact, a Prince Charming and that I was about to warn him.
Jess and I simultaneously said, “Crap!”
Despite our panic about the eavesdropper, it seemed we were in the clear. Over the following days, it was business as usual in the front office. No one came forward with information to claim a promotion. There were no more sightings of saboteurs “egressing” from the hole in the fence. For the most part, the memo seemed to have been read by the interns, tossed into recycling, and largely forgotten. Everything was back to normal.
Or, at least, it would have been were it not for two unscheduled real royal VIP visits that sent the Queen into a tizzy.
The first was a Saudi sheik who’d decided on the spur of the moment to visit the park with his three wives and nine kids. They took up the entire penthouse floor of the Fairyland Kingdom Resort, and it was my assignment to reserve facials, manicures, and pedicures at the Fairyland spa for the wives while leading the nine kids around the park in sweltering heat.
Their visit was followed by a certain young British duke and his new wife—whose identities I was sworn never to reveal, though I have to say that when he kissed my hand and complimented me on my “superb bottled-water distribution,” I practically fainted.
Because of all this VIP activity, Jess and I didn’t get down to hunting for my prince until the following Saturday night, when a group of guys jumped in the Frog Prince’s Pond after throwing around the Frisbees on Fiddler’s Green.
We were walking Tinker Bell—an automatic pass to be anywhere—and so we just happened to be in the Haunted Forest and just happened to stop by the pond and inspect a bunch of shirts flung all over the place. We found several tees but nothing in black flannel aside from a black button-down oxford cloth that didn’t quite fit the bill, though it was close.
“Did you bring the swatch?” Jess whispered.
“No way. I’m not taking that thing out of its hiding place until I know for sure it’s the right shirt.”
Jess said, “That’s an oxymoron.”
“You’re an oxy-moron.”
Turned out, the black oxford-cloth shirt belonged to Marcus.
“Hi, Marcus!” Jess shoved the shirt into my hands.
I mouthed, Thanks a lot.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked, toweling water off his six-pack abs. Even in the dim light, I could make out the purple and red bruises from the falls off his horse.
He jutted his chin toward his shirt. “I think that’s mine.”
“Here,” I said, handing it to him. “You dropped this.”
“Oh, wow, thanks.”
Jess gave me a nudge.
“You two going to the party tonight?” he asked, running a hand through his wet blond hair.
“Can’t,” I said. “I promised to play a game with Karl.” And I could not ditch Karl, whose self-esteem from the Febrezed-puke wolf head was already rock bottom.
Also, the Queen was vehemently opposed to my partying, as she’d made known that very morning when she’d said, “I trust you won’t succumb to the temptation of adolescent festivities that periodically arise here, Zoe. Do try to remember that the primary duty of a lady-in-waiting is to be at my beck and call, not rousting about with some hideous testosterone-laden Neanderthals.”
And because I was still on probation from the flower-picking incident, I’d said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She’d continued to study me warily. “Just so you know, I am not above testing the veracity of your assurance.”
Meaning, she would wake me with a bogus errand. “Go ahead. You won’t find me having fun.”
“I certainly hope not!”
So that’s why I had to stay in the dorm. Ugh.
Marcus said, “That’s too bad. Word is it’s gonna be sweet.”
“I thought I might go,” Jess said shyly, which was news to me. “Though if it’s only for princes and princesses . . .”
“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.