Between the lines

food poisoning from tonight’s dinner.”

The queen’s eyes filled with tears. “This isn’t funny, Oliver. You could die.”

“I’m not Father.”

The minute Oliver said it, he regretted it. His mother bent her head and wiped her eyes. “I’ve done everything I can do to keep you safe,” she murmured. “And you’re willing to throw that away for a girl you don’t even know?”

“What if I’m supposed to know her?” Oliver said. “What if I fall in love with her the way you fell in love with my father? Isn’t it worth taking a risk for love?”

The queen lifted her face and gazed at her son. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

For the next hour, Oliver sat transfixed as his mother told him about a boy named Rapscullio and the evil man he’d become; about a dragon and three fairies; about the gifts that had been bestowed upon him at his birth, and the one gift that wasn’t. “For years I’ve worried that Rapscullio would return one day,” she confessed. “That he’d take away from me the last bit of proof I have of your father’s love.”

“Proof?”

“Yes, proof, Oliver,” the queen explained. “You.”

Oliver shook his head. “This has nothing to do with Rapscullio. Just a girl named Seraphima.”

Queen Maureen reached for her son’s hand. “Promise me you won’t fight. Anyone or anything.”

“Even if I wanted to, I probably wouldn’t know how.” He shook his head, smiling. “I haven’t exactly worked out a plan for success.”

“Oliver, you were blessed with many other talents. If anyone can succeed, it’s going to be you.” His mother stood up, reaching for a leather cord tied around her neck. “But just in case, you should have this with you.”

From the bodice of her dress, she pulled out a tiny circular disk that hung on the end of the necklace and handed it to Oliver.

“It’s a compass,” he said.

Queen Maureen nodded. “It was your father’s,” she said. “And I was the one who gave it to him. It’s been passed down in my family for many generations.” She looked at her son. “Instead of pointing north, it points you home.” She smiled, lost in her memories. “Your father used to call it his good-luck charm.”

Oliver thought of his bold and daring father, riding off to fight a dragon with this looped around his neck. Yes, it had brought him home, but not alive. He swallowed, wondering how on earth he could rescue this girl without even a sword by his side. “I guess Father never got scared,” he muttered.

“Your father used to say that being scared just meant you had something worth coming back to,” Queen Maureen said. “And he used to tell me he was scared all the time.”

Oliver kissed his mother’s cheek and slipped the compass around his neck. As he walked out of the Great Hall, he resigned himself to the fact that his life was about to get very, very complicated.

OLIVER

JUST SO YOU KNOW, WHEN THEY SAY “ONCE UPON a time”… they’re lying.

It’s not once upon a time. It’s not even twice upon a time. It’s hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

“Oliver,” my best friend says. “Checkmate.”

I follow Frump’s gaze and stare down at the chessboard, which isn’t really a chessboard at all. It’s just squares scratched onto the sand of Everafter Beach, and a bunch of accommodating fairies who don’t mind acting as pawns and bishops and queens. There isn’t a chess set in the story, so we have to make do with what we’ve got, and of course we have to clean up all evidence when we’re done, or else someone might assume that there is more to the story than what they know.

I can’t remember when I first realized that life, as I knew it, wasn’t real. That this role I performed over and over was just that-a role. And that in order for me to play it, there had to be another party involved-namely one of those large, round, flat faces that blurred the sky above us every time the story began. The relationships you see on the page aren’t always as they seem. When we’re not acting our parts, we’re all just free to go about our business. It’s quite complicated, really. I’m Prince Oliver, but I’m not Prince Oliver. When the book is closed, I can stop pretending that I’m interested in Seraphima or that I’m fighting a dragon, and instead I can hang out with Frump or taste the concoctions Queen Maureen likes to dream up in the kitchen or take a dip in the ocean with the pirates, who are actually quite nice fellows. In other words, we all have lives outside the lives that we play when a Reader opens the book. For everyone else here, that knowledge is enough. They’re happy repeating the story endlessly, and staying trapped onstage even when the Readers are gone. But me, I’ve always wondered. It stands to reason that if I have a life outside of this story, so do the Readers whose faces float above us. And they’re not trapped inside the book. So where exactly are they? And what do they do when the book is closed?

Once, a Reader-a very young one-knocked the book over and it fell open on a page that has no one but me written into it. For a full hour, I watched the Other-world go by. These giants stacked bricks made of wood, with letters written on their sides, creating monstrous buildings. They dug their hands into a deep table filled with the same sort of sand we have on Everafter Beach. They stood in front of easels, like the one Rapscullio likes to use when he paints, but these artists used a unique style-dipping their hands into the paint and smearing it across the paper in swirls of color. Finally, one of the Others, who looked to be as old as Queen Maureen, leaned forward and frowned. “Children! This is not how we treat books,” she said, before shutting me out.

When I told the others what I had seen, they just shrugged. Queen Maureen suggested I see Orville about my strange dreams and ask for a sleeping potion. Frump, who is my best friend both inside the story and out, believed me. “What difference does it make, Oliver?” he asked. “Why waste time and energy thinking about a place or a person you’ll never be?” Immediately I regretted bringing it up. Frump wasn’t always a dog-he was written into the story as Figgins, my best buddy from childhood, who was transformed by Rapscullio into a common hound. Because it’s only a flashback of text, the only time he’s ever read he’s seen as a dog-which is why he stays in that form even when we’re offstage.

Frump captures my queen. “Checkmate,” he says.

“Why do you always beat me?” I sigh.

“Why do you always let me?” Frump says, and he scratches behind his ear. “Stupid fleas.”

When we’re working, Frump doesn’t speak-he just barks. He follows me around like, well, a faithful pup. You’d never guess, when he’s acting, that in real life he’s always bossing the rest of us around.

“I think I saw a tear at the top of page forty-seven,” I say as casually as I can, although I’ve been thinking of nothing but getting back there to investigate since first spotting it. “Want to come check it out?”

“Honestly, Oliver. Not that again.” Frump rolls his eyes. “You’re like a one-trick pony.”

“Did you call me?” Socks trots closer. He’s my trusty steed, and again, a shining example of how what you see isn’t always what’s true. Although he snorts and stamps with the confidence of a stallion on the pages of our world, when the book is closed he’s a nervous mess with the self-confidence of a gnat.

I smile at him, because if I don’t, he’s going to think I’m angry at him. He’s that sensitive. “No, we didn’t…”

“I distinctly heard the word pony…”

“It was just an expression,” Frump says.

“Well, now that I’m here, tell me the truth,” Socks says, turning in a half circle. “This saddle totally makes my butt look fat, doesn’t it?”

“No,” I say immediately, as Frump vigorously shakes his head.

“You’re all muscle,” Frump says. “In fact, I was going to ask if you’d been working out.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.” Socks sniffles. “I knew I shouldn’t have had that last carrot at breakfast.”

“You look great, Socks,” I insist. “Honestly.” But he tosses his mane and sulks back toward the other side of the beach.