As Bethany slowly pulled herself out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by her chocolate-covered hands, she sighed. Why had she stayed so long? She was beyond late now. It’d just been incredibly relaxing to sit hidden behind the chocolate river, watching the Oompa-Loompas work and not being yelled at by Mr. Barberry or her mom.
Her head popped out of the book, and suddenly she worried a lot less about being late and a lot more about Owen, a brown-haired, ordinary-looking boy from her class, staring at her like his eyes were going to explode.
“Bethany?” Owen croaked, his voice almost too quiet to hear.
“Owen!” she said, cringing, and quickly pulled herself the rest of the way out of the book and kicked it closed.
“You . . . were in the book?” he said, glancing between her and the still-chocolatey book.
“Don’t be stupid,” Bethany told him, forcing a fake laugh. “You just didn’t see me. I was back here the whole time reading.”
Owen shook his head. “I had the book in my hand,” he said, pointing at it on the floor. “It started jumping around, and you came right out of it. I saw you!”
“That’s crazy,” Bethany said, picking the book up and showing it to him. “How could I have been inside a book? They’re made of paper!” She dropped the book to her side and snorted. “You’ve been reading too many books yourself.”
Owen started to say something, and then his gaze dropped to her side, and he began to make odd squeaking noises. Bethany glanced in the same direction and groaned as she saw her thumb sticking right into the book.
Okay, that really didn’t help her case. Ugh.
Owen’s squeaking noises got louder, and he began to back away from her in a hurry.
Bethany cringed at how loud he was getting and started to shush him, when she remembered something. Owen had seen her in the cafeteria, when she’d been pulling chocolate out of the book to eat at lunch, because some days were so bad that you just wanted candy. He was the one who’d sent her over the edge.
After her mother being upset that morning; after the long, horrible day of Mr. Barberry going on and on about fractions, then yelling at her; after being forced to sit in class when she could have been searching in Prydain or Oz or Wonderland instead, Owen almost catching her at lunch had been the last straw. That had just been it: She was done with school, her teachers, her mother, everything. She walked out of the cafeteria, resolving to spend the rest of the day in the fictional world, so over things that she couldn’t even wait to get somewhere safe before jumping right into the book. She might get detention, yes, but she’d gotten it before and her mother never found out, since she got home from work so late. As long as Bethany was home before her mom, she’d be fine.
Except she wasn’t home, and now Owen had seen her jumping out of a book. This had gone way too far.
“Owen,” Bethany said, grabbing him by the shirt and pushing him back into the children’s section. “You’re going to listen to what I say, quietly, or I’m going to throw you into the Chocolate Factory. Do you understand me?”
Owen nodded quickly, and she let go of him. Instantly, he made a jump toward the library’s exit.
Bethany gritted her teeth, grabbed his hand, and pulled him down into the pages of a book from a nearby pile on the floor without even looking at the title. First Bethany, then Owen passed right into the pages so fast that he probably didn’t even see how it happened.
And that’s how they found themselves in the middle of a burning London as huge green rays exploded into buildings all around them.
“GAH!” Owen shouted, then quickly shut up as a death ray sizzled through the air above his head.
Bethany shoved him into the burned shell of a building, then followed right behind. “Those are Martians,” she shouted over the roar of the invasion, pointing at the huge round spaceships crawling around the city on robotic tentacle legs, firing green rays at anything and everything. “We’re in The War of the Worlds. Now calm down and be quiet, or they’ll shoot you full of Martian lasers.” Something exploded right outside and Owen jumped, but Bethany just grabbed him by his shirt again. “If you stay quiet and don’t get seen, then we’ll be fine. They’re all going to get sick and die from getting colds or germs or something.”
“Martians?” Owen said, his voice almost too quiet to hear over the craziness outside. He glanced out, then jumped back in as another ray exploded a car right outside. “For real? Martians?”
Bethany paused, not exactly sure how to answer that. “It’s real here, in the book. It’s not like Martians really destroyed London. That probably would have made the news.”
Owen gave her a confused look, then stuck his head outside again. “But . . . where’s the army? Who’s fighting them?”
Bethany scrunched up her nose. “It’s been a while since I read it, but I think the army gets beaten pretty bad. They can’t really fight the Martians with just guns. But that’s not why we’re here!” She pulled Owen back inside again and stared him straight in the eye. “You can’t tell anyone about this, Owen. In fact, you can’t even tell me about it, because we’re never going to speak again after this. Mostly because you’ll be so good at keeping this a secret. Do you understand me?”
He just stared at her for a second, then shook his head and pushed her out of the way. “Shouldn’t we help them?” he shouted, pointing outside. “We can tell them how the Martians get sick, so they can protect themselves. Sneeze on the aliens or something!”
The boy really wasn’t getting the point. “No,” she told him. “The book’s already written. We can’t change it. You don’t seem to be grasping what’s happening.”
“But how is it written if it’s going on right now?” Owen shouted. “Look at it!”
She sighed, grabbed his hand, and jumped them both up and out of the book, this time not bothering to exit slowly, since she didn’t have time to be careful. They shot right out of The War of the Worlds, slamming into the nearby bookcase a bit harder than Bethany had meant. Before Owen could even say one word, Bethany grabbed another book and jerked him straight into its pages. He shouted in surprise, but then went quiet as they landed on a checkerboard field, mostly because he couldn’t stop looking all around.
“See?” she said. “We’re inside the books. This is the fictional world, Owen. You can’t change things here, because they’re already written. If we’d jumped into the last page of The War of the Worlds, the Martians would have all been defeated. I just didn’t really look before leaping.” Which, admittedly, was horrible, and something she never, ever did. But this was a special circumstance.
Owen didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, he reached out a hand and let a small rocking horse with wings land on his fingers.
“Where are we now?” he whispered, and the horse neighed at him.
“Wonderland,” she told him. “Well, Through the Looking Glass. I think that’s still Wonderland, but I was never really sure how that worked.”
“Wonderland? As in Alice?” he asked her as a bread-and-butter-fly landed in his hair.
“She’s probably on her way to the nameless woods around this page,” Bethany told him. “I make sure to avoid the main characters, since that’s the easiest way to not mess up the story. Plus, then I don’t have to get involved with all the plot stuff, and I can just enjoy myself.”
He turned back to her, various impossible insects hovering all around him. “Please tell me this isn’t a dream. I know it has to be, I must be asleep at the front desk, but please let it not be a dream—”
She reached out and pinched him as hard as she could, letting out some of her annoyance. He gasped and yanked his arm away, then gave her a dirty look. “You could have just said no!”
She shrugged. “So remember what we were talking about? How we’re never going to speak of this again?”
“How can you do this?” he asked her. “How . . . how can you just jump into books? They’re words on paper.”
She sighed. “They are, but right now, so are you. If you can be quiet, I’ll show you what I do. But no shouting or anything this time, okay?”
He nodded, and she grabbed his arm, and again, jumped them both right out of the book into the library, just a bit more gently this time. She let go of his arm, held up her hand for him to see, then slowly pushed it into Through the Looking Glass.
As her fingers touched the page, they melted and re-formed, becoming various words like “knuckles” and “fingernail” and “thumb,” all describing whatever part they’d been. Those words then spread over the page like brownie batter, absorbing right into the book. Finally, she just shoved her arm in up to the shoulder.
“I’m wriggling my fingers at you right now in Wonderland,” she told him.
Owen laughed oddly, then made a weird face and fell backward to the floor, unconscious.
Bethany sighed, shaking her head. “Alien invasions and rocking-horse-flies are fine, but this, you faint at?”