Chapter 26 Friends and Making Amends
Friends and Making Amends
Rain and hail rattle against the school walls. The building groans beneath the strain of the storm I now suspect is an outgrowth of Robin’s emotions.
My friends.
This is far worse than I ever imagined. I thought maybe I could come here and talk Robin down, but she’s transformed. If anything, revealing to her what I know has only made everything worse.
My room gives a sudden jostle as the walls seem to eat up part of the floor, and I crash to my knees.
I press my hands against the cold floor, feeling the vibrations of Swancrest twisting and contracting around me, shaping into an even more closed-off fortress, hallways tightening, rooms getting smaller and smaller.
In a twisted way, Robin might actually believe she’s keeping everyone safe… but her emotions are now reigning her magic. It’s turned fell, just like those creatures her mists protected us from.
How much longer until the school falls apart? Until it collapses all around us under the strain of her magic?
I have to stop her. But to do that, I have to figure out how to get out of this room.
I can barely see a thing in this darkness without the glow of Robin’s apparition. It takes a few moments of crawling to reach my nightstand, and I root around in my drawers until I find the stub of a candle and a book of matches. I strike a match and use it to light the candle.
Then, finally, I look around, studying everything, and even though I can’t have been gone for more than a few weeks… it all looks completely different. As if I’ve outgrown my old life entirely.
I’m not the same person I was when I left. I’ve had to learn to survive. I’ve been on my own. I’ve tested myself, and failed, and grown, and changed.
There is an iron will within me I never knew existed, and I know, if I try, I can use it to save my home and my friends from Robin.
And to save Robin from herself.
I close my eyes, trying again to summon my magic. I clutch the compact in my palm tighter.
But it’s no use. Robin’s magic is smothering everything. Her great power is like a vise.
We’re doing this without magic, then.
I look around. There must be something in here I can use to get out. I chew my lip—pillows and a comforter and a vanity full of bottles won’t do much good. Neither will a wardrobe full of clothes.
Unless—
I walk over to Wardrobe. It’s sitting in the corner, trembling slightly, as if even it is afraid. I place my hand over its brass hardware door handles, trying to comfort it.
“Would you please open up?” I ask, my tone gentle.
Robin’s magic controls Swancrest. But now I know that my mother’s magic made this.
Wardrobe stills, and my heart leaps in my throat.
Then, slowly, Wardrobe opens its doors just a few inches. My shoulders slump in relief.
My mother made me an outfit for every occasion.
Let’s see if she made one for this.
“I need the perfect outfit to break out of this room, free my friends, and save our land,” I say to Wardrobe. “Oh—with accessories.”
There’s a moment of quiet. Of stillness.
Then Wardrobe unfolds in a flash.
And I’m staring at my mother’s pink armor, a pink sword with a heart-shaped hilt, a bulging gossamer bag, and a shield with a strap so I can hold it across my body.
It’s just like the suit my mother wears in her statue. The one I’ve looked at a thousand times before.
“Thanks, Mom,” I say in quiet awe.
I feel a twinkling in my heart… almost like an answer.
Wardrobe tosses up the pieces of the armor—and they rush to my body, molding around me until I’m standing in front of a mirror, seeing myself.
I look just like her.
My eyes burn—and something in the mirror shifts.
Just like in the reflection at Dreamlake, my mother is standing right beside me. I don’t dare turn. I don’t breathe. I just stand and watch as she places her hand on my shoulder in a touch I feel not on my body, but in my heart.
She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to.
“Mom. I’m… afraid,” I say, putting words to this twisting knot in my chest. I’ve seen so much more magic now, and Robin is still the most powerful wielder I’ve ever known.
“I’m afraid,” I repeat, my voice steadier this time. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
Robin isn’t some faceless danger… She’s still the woman who raised me.
I’m the only one who can stop this.
In the reflection, my mother nods. I nod back.
She’s gone when I blink, and I get moving.
I open the gossamer bag to find it filled to the brim with enchanted baubles of all shapes and sizes, like the ones in the Treasure Trove in Dreamland.
I can feel the hum of magic inside, my mother’s magic, infused into everything she left for me.
I still don’t know what they do, but I tie the bag to the strap on my shield.
I tuck my compact beneath my armor like a talisman.
“Let’s do this,” I say, swallowing down my doubt and fear.
I have done hard things. I have tested the limits of my strength and found that there are none.
I can do this.
I run full speed ahead, right toward the door without a handle. The entrance—and exit—to my prison.
At the last moment, I lift my shield. And with a surge of magic, it breaks the wood into splinters that spit onto the floor.
When I turn, there is an almost perfect me-shaped hole in the door.
It worked.
Thanks, Mom, I think again, as screeches echo through the corridors, the birds clearly having heard the commotion. They’re coming.
I grip the heart-shaped handle of my mother’s sword—then I stride forward toward the danger.
I race down the hall, turning each corner I know like the back of my hand, racing toward the dormitories. Squawking echoes everywhere. They’re on my tail. I can’t do this alone.
Luckily, I’m not.
The armor and sword and shield are heavy, but my muscles and bones are full of purpose. I sprint down every corridor, running as fast as I ever have, and the beasts aren’t far behind. Their caws reach a fever pitch, answered by the snarl of the storm. The walls tremble. But I don’t stop.
I turn the corner, and—
There.
Callie’s old dorm room. I reach the door, and I don’t hesitate. I crash right through the sealed entrance, as I did in my own room.
And there are Callie and Paige, just as I saw them in the compact. They both stand in shocked silence.
Until finally, Paige says, “What is she doing here?”
“She’s saving us,” Callie exclaims, her smile wide.
Then her arms are around me. “Barbie! I was so worried about you! Sunny and I came to see if Headmistress had heard anything from you, and she… well…” Callie waves her hand around the dorm room turned prison cell.
She steps back and takes me in. “Loving the outfit, by the way.”
I squeeze my best friend against me again, throat thick with emotion. How I’ve missed her.
“And I came here looking for Callie once she didn’t come back, and Headmistress trapped me in here, too,” Paige said, her voice barely leashing her irritation. “I’ve missed, like, eighteen depositions for this. Thanks a lot, Barbie.”
I roll my eyes. Paige will be Paige, even when the walls are literally closing in on us.
“Come on, both of you.” I can hear Robin’s massive monster-birds crashing against the door, trying to squeeze through the me-shape punched through the wood. It won’t be long until they find a way through.
“Come on where?” Paige says. “The door is blocked!”
“So we’ll have to make a new one,” I say. Then I duck my head, lift my shield in front of my face, and crash through the right-side wall (that coincidentally happened to have all of Paige’s old report cards pinned up).
“Hey!” she says, but I don’t look back.
I just keep going. And going. Crashing through empty dorm rooms, wood splintering, my shield and armor holding, like my mother’s magic is coursing through its metal.
She’s here, even when she isn’t, I think.
She’s in the example of bravery from the legends. She’s in the clothes she made for my future. She’s in my heart like an eternal summer, a spot of sunlight that never dims. I feel it.
I feel her.
She didn’t follow the rules. She carved her own path.
I do the same, until I finally screech to a halt, knowing exactly where I am. Callie nearly crashes into me, arms flailing as she slows.
Paige doesn’t stop in time and crashes into both of us, and we go flying into Sunny’s room.
“This is so much worse than what I did to the classroom.” Sunny sits on the edge of his bed, unfazed, like explosions and people crashing though his walls are a completely normal part of his existence.
He casually leans to the side, looking through about a half dozen cookie-cutouts of me in the walls, a clear view all the way back to Callie’s room. His gaze slides to me. He shakes his head as a grin overtakes his face. “You’re my hero, Barbie.”
“Not yet,” I murmur as screeches begin echoing through the tunnel we formed. I look through the series of holes just at the moment that a cloud of feathers bursts into Callie’s room. They’re in.
Iron-solid beaks start banging against the wood. Apparently, the walls between the dorm rooms weren’t as sturdily built as the doors, because it isn’t long before Callie’s gives entirely. They’re one room closer now.
Callie’s eyes widen. “Whoa. I didn’t think those birds could get any creepier.”
“Yeah,” I breathe, watching the wall turn to dust as they break through it. Now they’re only a few rooms away.
“What do you need?” Callie says, straightening, looking braver than I’ve ever seen her.
I hate to ask anything of my friends. They were imprisoned because I left.
All this was my fault, even if Robin was the one who caused the destruction.
Part of me wants to just tell them to try to get away, leave Swancrest if they even still can.
But I can’t do this alone.
And even if I told them to go, I have a feeling they wouldn’t leave. All of them—even Paige—have a gleam in their eye, ready to help me finish this.
“I need you to distract them.” I’ll never get to Robin with the monster-birds in the way.
“Distraction is my middle name,” Sunny says.
Callie lifts a brow. “You have a middle name?”
“Yeah.” Sunny shrugs a shoulder. “Distraction. I just told you.” His gaze drops to the gossamer bag I have strapped to my shield. “We can use those.” At my questioning look, he says, “I know explosives when I see them.”
Explosives? I narrow my eyes at the star-, heart-, and butterfly-shaped baubles. Wow, Mom. You really did contain multitudes. Carefully, I hand the bag over.
Paige sighs. “You guys are so getting sued for this,” she says. Then she turns to me. “I’m guessing you’re going to go sacrifice yourself to save us all and slay the monster that’s taken over Swancrest, like some perfect knight in pink armor?” she says, her tone oozing disdain.
But I see a flash of something else there. A little jealousy and an old hurt grown inflamed. I feel myself empathize with Paige for the first time—we’re more alike than we thought, both of us in pursuit of a level of perfection that’s always just beyond our reach.
I want to show her that being perfect doesn’t matter.
The birds are just two rooms away now. Their screeches are ringing through my skull.
Still, I take Paige’s hands (she looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind, and maybe I have), and I say, “I’m not perfect.
I never have been. I’ve fallen flat on my face, and landed in Rock Bottom, and questioned everything about myself, and ugly-cried, and been thrown into a prison.
” I shrug. “I’m perfectly imperfect. Just like you. ”
She just stares at me. Her mouth opens… then closes.
I turn to my friends. Both of them look more shocked by what just happened than when I crashed through half a dozen walls wearing my mother’s armor.
Callie blinks, snapping out of her shock as the final wall before Sunny’s bursts into splinters. “Go!” she says to me.
I do. I run right through Sunny’s door, into the corridor, then sprint toward the stairway. As I reach the first step, I feel the floor beneath me tremble.
An explosion sounds close by.
Another.
Another.
Another.
“I really hope Sunny knows what he’s doing,” I mutter out loud before I begin racing down the spiraling stairs toward Robin. Not her projection or apparition, but the real Robin.
According to the compact, she’s in the deepest depths of Swancrest.
She controls all the magic in Heartland. She’s dangerous. She’s been lying to me all my life.
And now—
I’m headed right toward her.