How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come Tr - By Sarah Strohmeyer Page 0,1

was up to my hip in cold, damp sand.

“Crap!”

Profanity was prohibited in Fairyland, but it wasn’t like anyone was there to bust me. I was trapped in a sinkhole, alone in the forest, and worst of all, Tinker Bell was long gone. I tried pushing myself out and found, much to my dismay, that the more pressure I applied, the more the ground gave way.

There was another rustle in the bushes. Tinker Bell? If I could nab the dog, that’d be half the battle. The two of us could huddle in the hole until morning, when the Queen sent someone to find her precious baby.

“Tink?” I called, stretching out my hand, hopeful for the wet nose, the rough lick of her tiny, pink tongue. “I have caviar!”

The rustling got closer and louder. My heart started to beat harder. This was no bichon frise. This was a much larger animal—like a human.

I detected a whiff of cologne that only the Prince Charmings were allowed to wear, spicy and so aromatic, it made you swoon. Then I heard someone say, “Gotcha!” and I was eye-to-eye with a pair of hiking boots. I looked up, but all I could see was a ball of white wriggling in some boy’s arms.

“Seems as though you’ve dug yourself into quite a hole there, Zoe,” he said, sounding amused.

Not for the first time did I curse the fact that, like the princesses, all the Prince Charmings had been taught to speak in “the Queen’s English”—complete with upper-crust British pronunciation—so visitors wouldn’t be able to distinguish one from another. He could have been any one of eight hot guys, and it didn’t help that his face was shadowed by the moonlight above.

I said, “I’m stuck. Can you give me a hand up?”

“I could,” he taunted. “But then, as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, you’d report me for being outside the park after curfew, and I would be fired and . . .”

“No, I won’t.” Honestly, I’d never do such a thing. “I will be forever in your debt.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Forever in my debt, you say?”

“Yes.” Please just get me out of here.

“I’ll hold you to that, you know. So when I come to collect, you can’t back out and claim the whole thing never happened. Or that it was all a whole big mistake.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Here I was, slipping deeper into this pit, and he was making puns. Typical cocky prince.

Tinker Bell emitted a mewling sound of annoyance.

“All right. Hold on.” He placed Tinker Bell in my arms. “But we’ll have to do it the right way. Wait here.” He gave another laugh and trudged off, returning minutes later with a long branch. “I’m going to stand clear of the sinkhole so I don’t fall in, which won’t do either of us any good. You hold tight and try to claw your way out.”

It seemed like an impossibly tall order, clutching Tink and a branch while extricating myself from what essentially amounted to quicksand, but I did my best, scrabbling and clawing as Tink kicked in protest. At last we were free. I stumbled to where he’d been standing and leaned against a tree, breathing hard.

“Thank you!” I said.

No sound.

“Hello?”

He was gone, except for a sizable swatch of black flannel dangling from a thornbush. I picked it off and held it to my nose, inhaling the unique scent of the Prince Charming cologne. Yes, definitely his.

Stuffing the torn piece of shirt into my back pocket, I found my way to the path and ran as fast as I could, Her Majesty’s royal fluff ball bouncing in my arms. Had this been a real fairyland and I had been a real lady-in-waiting to a real evil queen, perhaps a pumpkin carriage or a knight on horseback might have come to my rescue.

But this wasn’t a real fairyland. It was Fairyland Kingdom, a destination fairy-tale theme park in the Pinelands of southern New Jersey, and I was a seventeen-year-old cast member interning for the summer in an exclusive program that thousands of teenagers from across the world auditioned for every year. I was lucky to be here—everyone said so—even though I was fast learning that behind the sweetly smiling princesses and dashing princes, there was a secret world that wasn’t oh-so-innocent.

That night, I showered off the sand and slid under my own sheets, slipping the prince’s shirt swatch beneath my pillow for safekeeping. Home at last.

As I drifted off to blissful sleep, I tried to recall my rosy expectations when Jess and I had