“We’re never getting through this wormhole!” moaned Tuni. “It’s hopeless, Princess! Let’s just rip the tail off Tiktiki One and call for reinforcements!”
The bird had its beak hovering near the squawking tiktiki’s tail when, suddenly, another possibility occurred to me.
“No, wait, I’ve got it!” I said, snapping my fingers. “Bunty, try ‘home.’ ”
“No way, too obvious,” sniffed Tuni. “I vote we rip this lizard’s tail off and tell Mati Didi to send a rescue party.”
“No, I cautiously consider Princess Kiranmala might be correct,” said the tiger. “That’s good PhD-dissertation-level logic there!”
The tiger jumped down to the H, and when we made it to the key, we all cheered. Then Bunty went up to the O, and down to M. Only, before we reached the E, Bunty’s paws seemed to slip—or did the key itself tip?—and we all fell into the dark void between the keys.
“Ahhhhhh!” screamed someone. I’m pretty sure it was me.
We started falling down a long, long tunnel. Except, I soon realized, it wasn’t any ordinary tunnel, but the dirt-packed rabbit hole of a very familiar children’s story, the one about the girl who travels to a magical wondrous land. I fell off Bunty’s back, and the bird and lizard slipped off mine, and all four of us tumbled, head over paws over tail.
“We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!” shrieked Tuni, as if out of habit. But then, a second later, the bird remembered that he knew how to fly, and just flapped his wings alongside us as the rest of us fell like stones.
Tiktiki One, for its part, was pretty quiet on the way down, but Bunty and I pretty much yelled like the world was coming to an end. Which, for all we knew, it was.
We fell for so long, I soon felt like maybe we’d be falling forever. We fell past rakkhosh masks and ancient paintings of snakes on the dirt walls. We fell past floating lemonade stalls and self-twirling jump ropes and skateboards without wheels whizzing by through the air. We dropped past giant billboards advertising romantic films with giant, colorful song-and-dance numbers. We fell past books that were turning their own pages, pirates with shiny swords, and a blinking solar system night-light that looked a lot like the one I’d destroyed recently in a fight with Neel’s mom, the Rakkhoshi Rani. We fell past desert fortresses and idyllic castles, blond Princess Pretty Pants™ dolls and brown-skinned ones too. We fell past stories that were familiar, some old and some brand-new. We also fell past butterflies of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Butterflies so bright and magical, they lit up everything around them.
I started to doubt that we’d ever make it to Parsippany at this rate. At one point, I stopped being terrified and just got used to the feeling of being out of control and falling like some kind of unhinged-from-the-sky star.
But finally, we landed with a hard thunk on the floor of the rabbit hole. “Ouch!” I complained. The floor wasn’t soft dirt, like I’d anticipated, but covered in hard black-and-white tiles.
“Let’s not do that again,” squawked Tuni.
“What are you complaining about? You just flew!” I rubbed my aching side.
Bunty was running a paw over an ear, and moaning a little. Tiktiki One just sat there, blinking and flicking its tongue so long and retracting it so fast, it kept hitting itself in the eyeball like it had before. I took this to mean it was upset.
“Do we get to have a tea party with the white rabbit now?” I wondered, looking around at the vaguely familiar surroundings—the chairs and tables hanging from the walls of the tunnel.
“Nope, we’re in a different part of the story.” Tuni pointed a wing. In front of us were three tiny doors, far too small to get through in our present size. Pointing at the doors were all sorts of arrows on stands. All the arrows said the same thing: TO NEW JERSEY.
“Well, that’s not how it goes,” I murmured. In the original tale, the girl Alice was not on her way to Jersey, and besides, she only had to deal with one tiny door. How was I supposed to deal with three?
I stared at the three teeny-tiny doors in the wall. The first was brown-red, like earth, with intricate white alpona all over it—in the shapes of leaves and mangoes and vines. The second one was bright blue like the sea with the shapes of block-print fish stamped all around it. The third door was green like the leaves on trees with a painting in the center of two angry-looking peacocks. The strange thing was that the peacocks seemed to be dancing over an old-fashioned record player, the kind people had to crank before the music came out through an attached funnel-thing. Above the first door was a sign that read:
A second sign, above the second door, read:
And then the third sign read:
“Okay, that’s not comforting,” I said. “Besides being rude.”
“That third one doesn’t even rhyme,” Tuntuni sniffed.
“Perhaps we should attempt to turn the doorknobs regardless,” Bunty said.
It was hard to do, since they were so small. Neither Bunty nor I could grab on to the tiny doorknobs, but when Tuni tried to turn them with his beak, they didn’t move at all.
“Locked, all of them!” announced the little yellow bird, landing on one of the road-sign arrows in an overly dramatic way. “I told you, we’re never getting to New Jersey, no matter what these arrows say. Besides which, we’re probably going to die.”
“Not like we could have fit through them if they were open anyway,” I replied, studying the signs again. “So where are the three keys the poem’s talking about?”
“A pointless distraction! It’s just a trick to keep us from realizing the fact that we’re going starve to death in this room!” Tuntuni grabbed at his throat with his wings and gasped dramatically. “How long have we been down here anyway? How long since we’ve eaten? A week? A month? Not a year? The days are blending into each other! I have no sense of time anymore!”
I patted the panicky bird on his feathered head. “We’ve been down here about five minutes, dude.”
Bunty ignored Tuni and instead turned their big head toward me. “There is of course the possibility of there being a smallness potion somewhere in this room. That would be narratively consistent with the original tale.”
Tiktiki One just sat there wetly on the tile floor, swiveling its eyes and sticking out its tongue. Wait a minute, the lizard was actually sticking out its tongue at something! Something important!
“Thanks, Tiktiki!” I held up a small purple bottle that the gecko had pointed out. In broad, elaborate handwriting, it said Slug Me! “This must be the smallness potion!”
“Slug? A rather uncouth turn of phrase!” sniffed Bunty. “Bit of a lowbrow wormhole, this.”
“Give it here! Give it here!” shouted Tuni. “I’m about to die of dehydration!”
“Wait, Tuni!” I snatched the bottle back from the frantic bird. “What if it doesn’t work the way we want it to?”
“What choice do we have?” argued Bunty. “You do want to make it through the wormhole to New Jersey, don’t you?”
“You’re right.” I uncorked the bottle, wrinkling my nose at the smell. “Well, here goes nothing!” I said, and took a quick gulp before passing the bottle on to Tuni, Tiktiki One, and, finally, the tiger.