LIZZIE HEARTS SLID A THIN BOOK TITLED Wonderland! A Libretto of Whimsy back onto the library shelf. She hadn’t enjoyed it. Not at all. It hadn’t been a proper book, nor even an improper one. “A bound thing with words” was the fairest description she felt she could give it. And yet, it had Wonderland in the title, so she had finished reading those inadequate words nonetheless.
Though to be fair, unless a book about Wonderland managed to transport her back home again, she would always feel that the tome had failed her.
“Off with your head!” she shouted, and the words echoed back at her. The library was empty, most of the students still home for the chapter break. Only she and Kitty Cheshire had remained at Ever After High, having no home to return to.
No home… She felt a twinge near her heart. After the Evil Queen poisoned the wild magic of Wonderland, Headmaster Grimm ordered all the doors, portals, and wells to Lizzie’s homeland sealed against the infection. Only a few Wonderlandians had escaped, like Madeline Hatter and her father, who now had the Tea Shoppe in Book End. That was where Maddie lived when she wasn’t at school. But like Kitty Cheshire, Lizzie was never not at school. There was nowhere else for her to go.
Her finger traced the spines of the books on the shelf looking for another title that had something—anything—to do with Wonderland. Wonderstruck… Wonder Princess… Wonder Red Now and Other Palindromes… She grabbed an enormous volume titled Wonderful Wizards, Volume Two: Lands N–Z, exposing a severed head sitting on the shelf behind it. Lizzie startled and dropped the book onto her foot.
“Could you keep it down?” said the head of Kitty Cheshire. “I’m trying to be headless here.”
“Ugh,” Lizzie said, stomping her foot. “Save the pranks for someone else.”
Kitty’s head moved out, appearing to float off the shelf and at Lizzie, her eyes wide. Lizzie just rolled her own eyes.
“And put your body back on! Aren’t you embarrassed to be walking around like that?”
The rest of Kitty Cheshire brightened into visibility. “It’s not really walking if you don’t have legs or feet.”
“Oh, even if I can’t see them, I know what those sneaky feet are doing under there,” Lizzie said.
“Under where?” asked Kitty.
“Underwear?”
“Where?”
“In your dresser back at your dorm room, I should hope,” said Lizzie.
Kitty giggled, and Lizzie couldn’t help laughing a little, too. It was nice that at least one person in Ever After understood her.
“I believe I finished the last Wonderland book in this inadequate library,” Lizzie said. “I am therefore bored. Croquet?”
At the mention of the sport, Lizzie’s pet hedgehog, Shuffle, popped her head out of Lizzie’s handbag.
“Roink?” she grunted.
“In a minute, poppet,” Lizzie said, patting the wee spiky head.
“Croquet again?” Kitty said. “Meh.”
“Don’t say ‘meh,’” Lizzie said. “It’s unbecoming.”
“Myeh,” Kitty tried out instead.
“Better, but now I don’t know what you mean.” Lizzie picked up her handbag and walking scepter and began muttering under her breath. “Myeh… nonsense, and not the right kind of nonsense, not the kind of nonsense that makes good, solid sense. Come along, then, Kitty.”
“I think I’ll just stay here for a while. In the library,” Kitty said from atop a bookcase. “Curl up with a good book.”
Lizzie turned back. “Really?”
“Rlyeh,” Kitty said, pieces of her fading away until only her mouth remained. “And also fhtagn,” the mouth said, and then vanished completely.
“Well, I never!” Lizzie shouted at the air. She had no idea what a “fhtagn” was, but it sounded rude. She waited a moment in case Kitty changed her mind and reappeared with a croquet mallet. She didn’t.
“Fine,” Lizzie said, stomping out of the library. “I will have fun by myself!”
Lizzie marched out the doors of the library, scepter held high. She kept right on marching, as if leading an army to battle, all the way out of the school and toward the croquet field.
She passed a little man raking leaves, one of Ever After High’s gardeners. Kitty had told her that all the groundskeepers were part of Old Tom Thumb’s family and were usually too small to notice. Though little, this man was far larger than a thumb. Besides, it was Kitty’s nature to be misleading. Lizzie suspected he had considerably more leprechaun than Thumb in his family tree. Besides, the name stitched on his coveralls read GREEN.
He eyed her as she marched onto the croquet lawn.
“Croquet!” Lizzie announced to the grass.
Green startled, dropping his rake.
“Um… what ye say?” he asked in a high, squeaky voice.
“I said croquet!” Lizzie answered.
Green did not seem consoled by this clarification. His eyes darted around as if afraid others were about to run up and yell things at the grass, too. Hesitantly, he raised a hand and gestured toward the small garden shed. That was where the mallets and hoops were stored, so she pointed that out to him.
“That is where the mallets and hoops are stored!” she shouted.
Green nodded and started to rake again, still staring at her as if she was the odd one instead of the only person around who was helpfully shouting “Croquet!”
In Wonderland, a clutch of card soldiers would have set up the croquet court, but in Ever After, Lizzie had to do it herself. She placed the hoops in properly awkward locations, skirting the grove of invisible trees that had sprouted on the lawn. No way to cut them down until someone found an invisible ax, which was, she had been told, impossible. Ha! Nothing is impossible.
Even returning home again? she dared to ask herself. But the thought prompted sniffles in her nose and wetness in her eyes—Probably just allergies—so she ignored it.
Lizzie dug the hazard troughs, politely invited all the grass-dwelling insects to take their business elsewhere, and even managed a fairly good swamp wicket by dumping buckets of water into a hollow.
Proud of her work, she plopped Shuffle onto the grass. The Wonderland-bred hedgehog promptly curled up into a nearly indestructible ball, and Lizzie whacked her with a flamingo mallet. The hedgehog sailed through the first hoop, rebounded on a second, and settled just on the edge of one of the hazard troughs.
“Good enough,” Lizzie said, hands on her hips. “Your turn.”
She waited for the sound of a mallet striking one of the inferior Ever After croquet balls, but it never came. She whirled, a mouth full of insults about insufferably slow players, only then remembering she didn’t actually have anyone to play with.
Green was still eyeing her nervously. He was standing beside a huge pile of leaves and holding a long stick with a tiny flame on the end, like a thin, fully grown birthday candle. He dipped the flaming stick onto the leaves, catching them on fire.
“Oh, for Queen’s sake!” Lizzie said.
She grabbed the still half-full bucket and sped toward the gardener.
Green made a terrified squawk and ran away, looking over his shoulder with wide eyes as if afraid she would chase him.
But Lizzie made straight for the burning leaves. She tossed the water from the bucket, extinguishing the fire.
“By the vorpal sword, what is the matter with you?” she yelled.
Green whimpered and kept running.
Lizzie huffed, stalking back to the garden shed, picking up all the hoops as she went. She tossed them unceremoniously into the garden shed. A moment later she huffed impatiently and returned to put it all away properly.
Everything has a place and should be put in it. That will be your job, since people, things, and in-betweens tend to forget their place.
It was one of several special messages her mother had written for her on a pack of playing cards. The cards were full of advice and not-advice, instructions and out-structions, as well as the occasional verbal sneeze. She pulled the deck out of her pocket, her thumb running over the word Lizzie her mother had inscribed on the case.
Everything has a place.… Except Lizzie Hearts, perhaps. She could put the croquet hoops back in the shed but not herself back in Wonderland.
“Roink?” Shuffle noised, snuffling at Lizzie’s boot.
“What’s that, Shuffle?” Lizzie whispered. “You need a place to call your own? Come on, let’s go play cards.”
During the chapter break at Ever After High, one could circle the school grounds and not run into a single person. Lizzie rarely used the benches along the paths. Benches seemed to invite sharing a seat with others. Lizzie was not a fan.
But there was one particular bench in a particular place that Lizzie could usually depend on keeping to herself. Only today, that very bench was occupied.
“I arrived just after you,” said Mrs. Her Majesty the White Queen.
Lizzie supposed she meant “before you,” but time played with the White Queen’s mind like a kitten with a ball of yarn.
The tall, pale teacher patted the unoccupied portion of the bench beside her. Lizzie sat. One did not ignore an invitation from the White Queen.
The bench topped a hillock overlooking the wishing well that used to lead to Wonderland. Now it was just a regular, nontraveling well with unkempt, wild plants tangling around its base. Lizzie tsked her tongue. Something so precious should not be in disrepair. Still, the plants themselves lightened her heart. They were Wonderland plants! The only ones in Ever After. She’d transplanted some in pots to put in her dorm room, but those always withered and wilted. The Wonderland plants only seemed to thrive near the well.
“My palace would normally only be a year away,” the White Queen said, gesturing at the neglected well. “But the halfwise backtime in which I prefer to walk doesn’t slide that direction here. Not in Ever After.”
Lizzie nodded. Back home, all one had to do to understand the White Queen was to imagine oneself living backward. Thursday after Friday, August after September, breakfast after lunch. But in Ever After, things worked differently. Sometimes the White Queen ate breakfast in the morning like everyone else. It was confusing to everyone, including the queen.
“Less than a year for you, though,” the White Queen said, smiling at Lizzie.
Lizzie’s heart had jumped. Did she mean in less than a year she’d be going home?
“Before you’re signed into the book of destiny, that is,” said the White Queen. “It is your Legacy Year.”
Lizzie frowned. The White Queen was talking about signing the Storybook of Legends. Lizzie’s destiny was to claim the Card Castle throne as the next Queen of Hearts of Wonderland. But now… She looked at the overgrown well, wild plants scattered around it, untended. She was exiled from Wonderland—how could she possibly fulfill her destiny? Everyone knew that if you didn’t sign the Storybook of Legends and relive your parent’s story, you and your story would go poof. Would Lizzie vanish, too, if she couldn’t get home? If she had no home? No kingdom to rule? It didn’t seem fair.
“It will all work out, sweetheart,” the White Queen said, patting Lizzie on the knee. It was an unexpected kindness, unexpectedly clear-spoken.
The queen stood. “Stay here for a while. Build something.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said, and watched the White Queen glide away.
Shuffle nosed out of Lizzie’s handbag. “Sorry, little one,” Lizzie said, taking her hedgehog out of the bag and placing her carefully on the bench. “I’ll build something for you. Your own place.”
Lizzie shuffled a fresh deck of playing cards and shook her head at the mess of foliage surrounding the Wonderland well. In her mother’s Card Kingdom, every plant was nurtured, every flower painted. Surely someone’s head would come off for allowing a well to be so neglected, its plants so overgrown and rebellious.
Lizzie placed two cards, leaning against each other, on the seat of the bench. Then another, and another. In no time, she was placing the last of her cards on the top of a surprisingly accurate re-creation of the Ever After High girls’ dorms.
“That’s your room there,” Lizzie said, pointing to one of the rooms on an upper floor of the construction. “It’s the same one I stay in. You know, in the real building.”
Shuffle sniffed at the cards and then skittered into the card building, which had no trouble supporting her weight. Lizzie was fairy, fairy good at building things with cards. Shuffle climbed up the card stairs, and settled into the room Lizzie had said was hers.
“It isn’t really to scale,” Lizzie said apologetically. It was a tone of voice she reserved only for Shuffle and a few plants she thought deserved respect. “At least, not hedgehog-scale.”
“Roink,” said Shuffle, looking nervously at the card walls closing her in.
“Too cramped? And lonely, I suspect, in that big house, so far from your real home, so few friends who understand your wee little roinks and adorable little sniffles…”
Shuffle scampered down and onto Lizzie’s lap. She plucked a corner card from the building, and it collapsed.
As she gathered the cards together, she was struck with an unsettling memory of a time in Wonderland when lightning had struck the Card barracks and it burned to the ground. Those soldiers had been so despondent when waiting for the barracks to be rebuilt, with no place to call home.
What had brought that to mind? She sniffed and smelled real smoke.
That fool of a gardener had lit the piles of leaves on fire again and was just standing nearby, watching them burn.
Lizzie ran down the hill to the Wonderland Well, weaving her cards together as someone might use reeds to make a basket. By the time she reached the well, she had a serviceable card-bucket. She dumped the bucket into the well, filling it to the brim with water.
Lizzie flew past Green and flung the contents of her emergency card-bucket at the fire. The water scattered beautifully and the flames guttered out with a hiss.
“Stop it!” Lizzie shouted at the gardener. “Are you insane?”
She had opted to use the word insane, because this fire-starting Ever Afterling didn’t deserve the honor of being called mad.
“Nae, ye stop it,” Green said, even as he backed away from her, his hands gripping each other. “I’s trying to burnna leafs. It’s me job to burnna pile o’ leafs.”
“Is it your job to murder innocent little hedgehogs, too?”
“Hedgie-hoggies?” he asked, his nose wrinkled, head tilted.
Lizzie sighed loudly and dug into the wet, slightly singed leaves, finally exposing a gray-spined, pink-nosed hedgehog blinking at the light.
“A hedgie-hoggie!” said the gardener.
“Honest to nonsense,” said Lizzie, “I almost think everyone in Ever After has to actually see a hedgehog to know it was there. I almost assume you weren’t capable of sensing that this pile of leaves was home to an entire family.”
And she brushed aside more clumpy, smoking leaves, revealing seven little hedgehogs, a bit ashy and a lot frightened.
“Roink?” said Shuffle, nuzzling them one by one.
“Nae, nae, mum!” said Green, more frightened than ever. “I… I did nae know they was there! Honest to… uh, nonsense.”
“What is your name?” Lizzie asked. “I need to report this malfeasance to someone!”
“Green, mum,” he said, pointing to his name tag. “Green Thumb. But dinnae be malfeasing. I fae an sure love hedgie-hoggies all. I’d nae be hurtin em!”
Lizzie snorted. “If it was an honest mistake, then why are you trembly and wombly and sniffly, hm?”
“If’n you d’nae mind me saying, mum, you’re scary!”
Lizzie nodded. A highly appropriate answer. Her mother would be pleased. She thought of the advice the Queen of Hearts had written on one of the cards.
It is better to be gloved than bearded, and better to be fearded than loved.
Lizzie was inclined to believe this Green Thumb. Anyone with enough sense to fear her could only be honest. She was frankly more surprised to find that Kitty hadn’t been misleading her about the Thumbs after all.
She crouched down to the group of bedraggled hedgehogs. They were Ever After hedgehogs, not Wonderland ones, so they didn’t seem to recognize her, since they didn’t bow or anything. She chose not to be offended.
“Hey, little guys. I’m Lizzie Hearts, and I’m going to find you a better place to live. Everyone deserves a little place of their own. Follow me.”
Lizzie, Shuffle, and all eight hedgehogs marched in an indignant line past the gardener. Lizzie started toward the bench, thinking to build them a card palace, but she caught a whiff of wild fluxberry blossoms and veered toward the old Wonderland wishing well. Even being near the well, wading knee-deep through the tangles of overgrown Wonderlandian plants, Lizzie Hearts just felt right. Better. Beamish and unbefuddled. Surely the hedgehogs would thrive here.
And indeed, the refugee hedgehogs immediately scurried into a fluxberry bush and nestled under its glossy green leaves. Above them, the ever-changing fluxberries glowed slightly like disco lights, fading from pink to purple to orange.
“Mayhap ye build a home here,” Green Thumb said behind her.
Lizzie looked at him with as good a grump-eye as she could manage.
“Are you implying that I need a home?” said Lizzie. “Are you trying to say that I’m obsessed with the hedgehogs’ home because I, too, am feeling homeless and am empathizing with their displacement as some sort of metaphor for my own? That would be highly inappropriate on your part!”
“No, no, for’n the hedge-hoggies, mum,” he said. “They’s seeming to cuzzle and nuddle the Wonder plants.”
A couple of the little creatures had emerged from the fluxberry bush and were nibbling tufts of nodgrass.
“But if’n ye’s keen on makin a garden here, I’d be on helping, too, should ye…”
“No!” Lizzie snapped, and then felt bad about it when the little man startled backward. “I mean,” she said more calmly, “it is a good idea, but I would like to do it alone.”
Green nodded. “For’n fer certain, mum. But feel ye free to use me tools, aye?”
“Off with your head,” she said, and then mumbled, “and by that, I mean thank you.”
The hedgehogs scuttled about the wild plants, eating, hiding, squeaking. Shuffle went from hedgehog to hedgehog, touching noses and sniffling politely. It was a good idea the gardener had helped her to have. A little Wonderland garden, properly tended, would be the perfect habitat for any hedgehog, be they Ever After or Wonderland.
She dusted herself off and started back to the school. She would need a book on caring for hedgehogs. She did perfectly well with Shuffle, but she, like most Wonderland hedgehogs, was fairly self-sufficient. Perhaps Shuffle’s companionship and the eating of Wonderland plants would even turn the ordinary hedgehogs into Wonder hoggies like Shuffle.
But turning a wild grove into an orderly one? Lizzie might need some tips on where to begin. She couldn’t very well talk to her mother about it, so it was back to the library for her, though she doubted such a helpish and unlikely book existed.
And yet, the moment she walked into the library, a book fell off the shelf and onto her shoe for the second time that day.
“Shoe!” Lizzie shouted at her foot. “Cease this book-baiting at once!”
She picked up the book: Hedgehog Husbandry and the Ordering of Wild Groves. Well. What a perfectly appropriate book for her quest.
Lizzie smiled. Suddenly she didn’t feel so lost, so forgotten. Suddenly she felt a little more like the Princess of Hearts and a lot more hopeful. Her destiny wasn’t impossible, because nothing was. Home was far away, but there were ways to bring it closer. Even if just a teeny-weeny-bleeny bit.
She really didn’t know what the gardener was going on about, accusing her of being lonely and needing the Wonderlandish home for herself. But quietly, secretly, the Princess of Hearts’s heart beat a little more hopefully at the thought of a Wonderland garden, even a small one for hedgehogs.
Lizzie heard a yawn. There was Kitty, curled up on the bookcase exactly where she had left her hours ago.
“Kitty, have you been napping there this whole day?” Lizzie asked.
Kitty examined her nails. “More or less. Hey, you want to get something to eat? The Castleteria kitchen might be open.”
“Yes!” Lizzie said, slamming the book shut and stuffing it into her bag. “We shall eat!”
“As you wish, Your Highness,” Kitty said with her customary grin.
Lizzie nodded, but she couldn’t help looking at her friend sideways. Kitty’s grin always made Lizzie wonder what Kitty was up to.
And wonder was a marvelous thing.