Chapter 5 Differing Realities
CHAPTER FIVE
DIFFERING REALITIES
The maze surrounding me only deepens as my panic grows. There’s no one here to help me, either.
Hatter told me to stay away. He told me not to follow him, to stay with Lewis and spend the day drinking tea.
But I hadn’t listened.
I followed him, staying out of sight and lurking behind him as he trekked through two small towns before landing here.
A grand red palace sits overhead, and an enormous, gleaming staircase is before it. Twisting around the mountain that the palace is perched atop, the stairs look like they’re made of glass.
The thing is, to get there, one has to get through a hedge maze. To stay out of sight, I let Hatter get too far ahead, and now I’m stuck.
I’ve even tried to find my way back to the exit to make my way back to Hatter’s house, to no avail.
Suddenly, through the fog of worry growing in my chest, I hear two voices.
“No, I don’t think you should eat it. I’ll eat it and see what it is,” a boy says.
The voices seem to hail from just beyond the hedge I’m beside, so I walk around it silently, finding two bald and frightfully pudgy boys staring at a table with a single cupcake atop it.
There’s a tag on the cupcake, and they’re arguing over who the tag is meant for.
“I’m older!” the second boy argues back.
“By one minute! I’ve told you repeatedly that one minute doesn’t matter!”
Trying to get a better look at the tag, I lean forward, wincing my eyes to focus my vision, but my foot catches a twig, and it snaps.
Both bald boys snap their attention toward me, the cupcake forgotten.
Oh no.
“You there! Come here!”
“Don’t call her over here, then we’ll never get this figured out.”
“She’ll eat it, dummy. Then we can see what kind of magic it has.”
“Magic?” the second boy says, looking at the cupcake in confusion. “It’s a sweet, not a magic.”
“Oh, shut up. You there, girl, come here!”
Sighing, I step forward, straightening the mess of a dress I have on today. It’s pale blue with white ruffles trimming it. My saddle shoes dig into my ankles, brushing against blisters forming from all the walking in circles.
Now that I’m closer, I can see that the tag on the cupcake reads ‘Eat Me,’ which is the opposite of what anyone should do, being that it’s on the grounds of the Red Queen’s castle.
I only know what little Hatter and Lewis would tell me about her, but I know that she sounds dreadfully awful.
The boy to my left, who claims to be the older of the bald boys, lifts the cupcake. “Eat this!”
“No.”
“See,” the other boy argues, “she doesn’t want it. I’ll take it.” He swipes for it, but the first boy pulls it away from his reach.
“Eat this, or we will force you to eat it.”
Both boys seem interested in this, and their attentions fix on me.
“That sounds like a fun afternoon.”
I swallow. “I don’t want it. You said it had magic in it, and I’m human. Magic disagrees with me.”
“Pish posh. Eat up, little human girl. So we can see what happens.” The second boy, clearly the more intelligent of the two, walks closer and hands me the cupcake.
I don’t live in Wonderland; I visit now and again, but I know I shouldn’t eat anything save for things given to me while in the presence of Hatter.
Even so, I take the cupcake, peel off the wrapper, and eat half.
A gripping pain clenches my stomach tightly, and I cry out, dropping the other half of the uneaten cupcake to the ground.
Both bald boys jump back, worried about whatever the cupcake contains now that they’ve seen the results.
Suddenly, I’m lifting off the ground.
No. Not lifting.
Growing.
“Oh, God! Help! Make it stop!”
At this rate, I’ll draw attention to myself, and I don’t want the Red Queen’s attention.
The two bald boys make haste, rushing out of the maze. I watch them move through it with ease and follow them.
Half the maze gets crushed when one of my feet flattens a hedge like a pancake.
Being big is kind of fun.
“You there! Come down from there this instant!” a man shouts.
Looking down, I see two guards with staffs chasing after my ankles.
They’re playing cards, I realize.
The Seven of Clubs and the Five of Hearts.
“Come down from there, or else!” the Five of Hearts shouts.
“I can’t. I don’t know how to get back to my typical size!” My voice is louder, booming, even.
They look at one another before the Seven of Clubs says, “Get the queen.”
The Seven of Clubs remains with me, jabbing his staff toward my ankles. Doesn’t he realize I could flatten him?
“Oh, dear heavens. What is it?”
A woman’s voice draws my attention downward, where the Seven of Clubs stands with his arms crossed.
“She says she can’t come down. I ordered her twice.”
“Ma’am, Your Excellence,” I correct. “I don’t know how to get small again. I ate a cupcake in the maze, and…”
My eyes fixate on her abnormally large, strangely shaped head. No wonder Hatter feels so inclined to hat her.
She lets out a mad laugh. “She ate the cake. Oh, it worked. Lewis told me it would, and now we see the result.”
Lewis?
Anger roots inside me at the mention of my friend. I don’t like this woman at first sight, and that all my friends are working for her makes me downright furious.
“Get the elixir. The one beside my throne that Lewis gave me. I’ll get her down from there.”
“Your Majesty, I really should be going. Perhaps we should…” Hatter stops in his tracks, looking up at me from below with fright painted on his face. “Eleanor?”
“Eleanor? What is an Eleanor? You know this beast?” the queen asks.
Hatter’s eyes deepen with worry, and I swallow the same feeling.
If he’s afraid for me, I shouldn’t have come.
In his defense, he tried to tell me.
“I do. She’s my… ward.”
“Well, your ward, as you say, has escaped your home, stolen into my hedge maze, and eaten my security cupcake.”
“Daft girl, that one. Just look at her head. Perfectly awful to walk around with a head like that, don’t you think?” Hatter riddles.
The queen looks up at me. “Mm. You have a point, dear Hatter.”
The Seven of Clubs comes running back, holding a bottle. He hands it to the queen, and then she holds it up to me.
“I’ll allow her leave this once because she helped me prove Lewis’s magic works, but if I catch her again, Hatter, I will kill her.”
Kill me?
I knew they said she was horrible, but murder?
I take the bottle, swallowing what tastes like a drop of something, considering how large my mouth has gotten, and slowly, I shrink.
My clothes, however, do not.
Hatter removes his coat, covering me with it and helping me to stand on my tiny, wobbly legs.
“Take her home. Come back tomorrow to finish my hat.” With that, the queen and her massive red gown sashay toward the palace, her guards in tow. “Where are my Tweedles? Find them for me. They’ve wandered off again!” she tells the guards, and they scramble to listen.
“I told you not to come!”
“Eleanor?” Someone shakes me awake, and I bolt up from the ground, my heart racing.
“It’s only me.” Lewis looks down at me as I gain my bearings. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was trying to…” I swallow. “I was trying to go home. To my home. Up there.” I point toward the sky.
“Only I got lost.”
“Mm.” He nods.
“Let’s get you up.” He helps me stand, and I give him a once-over. Something seems off.
“What’s the matter?”
“Horrible business, especially when one considers we were on time.”
I’m puzzled but can’t get much out of him as he leads me back to Hatter’s house, leaving me right outside the tree line.
When I’m inside, I find Hatter stirring about in a panic. His forehead is covered in blood, and he’s throwing things around the living room haphazardly.
“Hatter!” I shout, trying to get his attention.
“The this is missing and the that… The blue tulle. We’ve been robbed!”
Grabbing his shoulders, I stop him. “You haven’t been robbed. I cleaned everything up. It’s all in your workshop.”
He takes me in. “Where were you?”
“I was… Never mind that. What happened to your head?”
“Bad hatting day,” he grumbles. “Head too big, not the right moon to wear blue. I tried to tell her.”
I walk him toward the kitchen table, plopping him down. Getting a rag and wetting it, I set to cleaning his forehead.
There’s a gash, and it’s pretty deep.
In my world, it would need stitches. Here, I don’t know how it’ll heal.
“Who did this to you?”
He doesn’t answer, only keeps muttering nonsense to himself.
“I remembered the Red Queen. In my dreams, a memory came back to me. The day I followed you there, do you remember?”
“I remember everything. Every moment that had you in it, Tiger Lily.” He taps his forehead. “It’s all right here. All the time.”
I swallow over a growing lump in my throat. Emotion is clogged there, and I can’t get past it.
“You do?”
His eyes soften before he flicks them away. “Awful woman.”
I don’t know if he means me or the queen, but either way, I smile.
“I’ll need to wrap your head to keep this closed. I fear it won’t heal otherwise.”
He only nods.
Wrapping his head brings me very close to his face, and his green eyes darken when I’m near.
His breathing changes, keeping pace with mine, which shallows by the second. It has me wondering about indecent things. Like, has he had a woman before, sexually?
As innocent and unhinged as Hatter seems, it seems highly unlikely that he has, which I can’t deny has me feeling thrilled at the possibility of being his first, his only.
I bat the idea away because getting close to him would mean ignoring what I should be focused on: going home.
“You must be the beholder of beauty,” he whispers, and I hover close to him, even though I’m finished with his bandage.
“What?”
“It’s in your eyes.”
“I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”
He shrugs as if it’s no matter to him how anything goes, which is part of his charm. “You’re beautiful.”
I swallow as my mind is back to thinking indecent things about a man with crooked buttons and mental instability. “Thank you.”
He leans in hesitantly before placing a kiss on my cheek. Drifting his nose over mine, he floats over my lips. Our breathing mixes, and my body flutters to life like the rapid heartbeat of a hummingbird. I can’t control how my belly burns or how the space between my thighs clenches tight.
“We should get you to bed. There’s no telling if you have a concussion. I’ll keep watch for awhile. You rest,” I tell him, breaking the tension.
Standing, he mutters something before heading to the bedroom.
I take a moment to breathe through how my body reacted to his proximity. Am I that desperate to throw away my escape plan for a man who speaks in riddles?
I have to keep my wits.
But just when I’ve got myself calm, my feet carry me into the space where Hatter is fully nude. His back is turned toward the door as he slips into silk sleep bottoms.
He turns back around, a lock of his brown hair curling on his forehead, his rippled abs stretching, and the silk bottoms clinging over a very thick part of him. And I have to swallow through more attraction.
If I don’t get myself together, I will end up as mad as the rest of them.
For a split second, I wonder if that would be such a bad thing.