Quite Contrary Read Free Page B

tanks. “No, I mean where is this place?” I insisted.
    “No one knows,” he squeaked impatiently, “It’s lost. You’re lost, this place is lost—adventures don’t happen if you know where you are. Hansel and Gretel didn’t meet the witch until their breadcrumbs were eaten. Circe’s Island might be a place, but Odysseus couldn’t draw you a map to it. If he did, all you’d find there would be pigs, not transformed sailors.”
    Great. I’d gotten the smart-ass rat. I guess we get the rat we deserve.
    I begrudgingly turned back and looked the way he’d originally wanted, and wasn’t entirely surprised that the greenhouse was bigger on the inside than the outside. Or longer, at least. The trees on either side of the stone aisle went on and on and on.
    “And where are we going?” I asked.
    “I’m getting us more lost. We can stay here in the modern stories if you like, Miss Mary, but they don’t have many Happily Ever Afters,” he answered. He was trying to sound encouraging and respectful. He really would stay if I wanted.
    “I’d like to get cleaned up. Period.”
    “We’ll have better odds of finding water in a forest, Miss,” he pointed out. It made me look back over my shoulder at the industrial yard, but it wasn’t like there were any fountains or rivers to contradict him with.
    Broken glass tinkled under my sneakers as I stepped over the fallen doors. The trees got bigger, crowding the glass ceiling, and they got less dead. The leaves might be brown and red, but they were still on the branches and it didn’t take long until I couldn’t see the roof. I
could
still see the cement block walls on either side, right up until they ran up against another wall made of piled up stones. A wrought iron gate stood right in the middle of the path, but before it could block me, Rat-In-Boots ran up and knocked on it with his tiny knuckles. It swung open.
    On the other side were more trees, and a complete lack of greenhouse. The canopy crowded the top of the stone wall, and I itched to climb up and peek over, but something else caught my attention.
    On a branch a few trees ahead of me hung clothes. Clean clothes. Garish scarlet and white with skirts, but clean.
    I darted down the path to them, wrestling with my blouse. I hadn’t even noticed the path, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with forests. By the time I reached the dress, the bare dirt track in the middle of the dry undergrowth was obvious.
    “What are you doing?!” squealed the—my, I supposed—rat in horror.
    “The mess is all on my clothing,” I explained irritably as I threw my blouse down on the path. It splatted.
    “But don’t you know what you’re putting on?” he insisted. Wow, I’d stunned him. It made reaching up to run the thick, soft, clean cotton through my fingers all the more heavenly.
    “It’s a Red Riding Hood costume,” I acknowledged. “Tacky, but it’s Halloween, and it’s clean. Not like—ugh!” I shimmied out of my skirt and threw it on top of the blouse. The noise was even wetter and more nauseating. My shoes I could just tuck off, but I had to peel the stockings off with great care to keep gunk off my fingers. The real blessing was that my hair had stayed dry!
    “Mistress, you can’t put that on! You have to know the story of Red Riding Hood. It’s a thousand years old, and still alive and growing! You know what happens!” The little guy was panicking. I felt kind of sorry for him. Not sorry enough to let him tell me what to do.
    “Yeah, a woodsman comes along and chops the wolf open and Red and her granny fill its belly with stones and it dies and they make a coat out of it. The End,” I filled in smugly as I pulled several layers of petticoats over my head. Oh, it felt good. It felt really, really good.
    “Only in one version in a thousand years,” my rat squeaked, pulling on his ears in what I had to admit was the most adorable gesture possible. “In all the others Red dies. All of them.