“Because you don’t like Victoriana.” Which is true also.
Meg shrugs. “Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know. She offered me money. And the adventure, I guess.”
“You enjoy being chased by witches?”
“Until last week, I didn’t know there were witches, or enchanted foxes or talking swans. You never told me that your grandmother was a witch,” I add pointedly. “Today, I was in another country. Okay, I was only there an hour and I was trapped in a dungeon, but still. Every day I work in the hotel, and I see people from all over. Some of them are from boring places, and they travel around selling rope or bowling balls. But at least they’ve been to those places. I never go anywhere but school, the hotel, and if I’m lucky, the beach.”
“I go to those places too.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been to New York at least. I’ve never been farther than Disney World. So when Victoriana made me this offer, I figured it would be an opportunity to see things I’d never seen before—which is just about everything.”
A hot breeze ripples across the branches. I decide to look around. Below is a canopy of green with blue stretching out in the distance. I inhale the fishy odor of mangroves. The branches shake, almost like a child shivering. I look down, afraid of falling.
Below, I see a deer, nosing through the underbrush. I’ve never seen a deer before, except in the zoo. This one is smaller than those deer, about the size of a Labrador. “Look.”
Meg nods. “It’s a Key deer. They’re an endangered species.”
The deer raises her head, maybe sensing us, and sniffs the air. Then she turns and, without further dawdling, disappears into the underbrush. I sigh. “At least, I saw that one.”
We sit, silent, the comfortable way only good friends can sit. Meg’s breathing and mine and the rustling of leaves below us all blend into one song. Other than that, there’s silence. I can see the Overseas Highway in the distance, but I can’t hear the cars. Only air and birds and Meg, leaning close to rest her arm against mine.
Finally, Meg says, “We could go to New York, you know. We could go wherever you want, Europe, anywhere. We wouldn’t even need a passport with that cloak.”
I don’t know if she’s trying to be sympathetic or if she wants to keep me away from my mission of finding the frog, away from Victoriana. Either way, I shake my head. “I should probably get back to work. I don’t think Sieglinde and Siegfried are here. Maybe they have to use commercial airlines to get back. That would explain why Sieglinde tricked me into using the cloak to get to Zalkenbourg.”
“My witch grandmother couldn’t travel magically. She didn’t even have a broom.”
Good to know. “So maybe I have a day or two before they catch up with me. I’ll take you back with the cloak, but then, I need to get started.”
Meg’s lips twitch. “You want to dump me off at the hotel?”
“Sure. What else? You’ve got work and stuff.”
“I guess.” She looks up, squinting in the sunlight. “I was just thinking maybe I could help you. This summer’s been pretty boring for me too.”
“Help me? How?”
“Well, I already did help you once, didn’t I? You’d be dead if I hadn’t shown up.”
That’s true. Suddenly, it seems like a good idea, having Meg along, not being alone.
“It would be cool to have an adventure,” Meg says.
“Tell you what,” I say, knowing that by saying it, I’m agreeing to take her with me. “Next time we get in trouble, we’ll throw the cloak around us and wish like crazy to be in New York.”
She grins. “Deal.”
“Only we have to wish to be someplace specific. Otherwise, we’ll end up in the middle of Fifth Avenue or something.”
“We could wish to be in a theater seat.”
“An unoccupied theater seat,” I amend.
“Or, better yet, the top of the Empire State Building.”
I picture myself, clutching the spire like King Kong in the movie. “The observation deck of the Empire State Building.”
“Agreed,” Meg says, “but for now, we should wish to be on the ground, under this tree.”
“Exactly under it, no tricks.”
So I wrap the cloak around both of us, and we wish.
Chapter 27
“Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence, and nothing too much.’” I say this to Meg as we trudge down the path to the ranger station. I’d thought about wishing us there, but if Sieglinde heard me talking to Todd, she might be waiting. Besides, it’s a nice day, and I should get the lay of the land, maybe even look for the frog. Of course, in miles of unkempt brush, it will be hard to find him.
“I was wondering when the shoes were going to come in,” Meg says. “I couldn’t believe you’d have a quote without shoes.”
“All the good quotes have shoes,” I assure her. “And Emerson was right. Shoes are important.” I glance at the old Nikes I brought for the trip, then at Meg’s flip-flops. “Yours aren’t so good.”
“‘I still have my feet on the ground,’” she says. “‘I just wear better shoes.’ Oprah Winfrey said that.” But she grimaces. “I am getting a blister. Maybe we can pop back home sometime and get my sneakers.”
“Can you manage for now?”
“Yeah. I think I should give you this, though.” She holds out the opal ring. “In case we get separated again.”
So I take it, and we trudge closer to the ranger station. There’s tall grass on all sides of us, and the mangrove odor gets stronger as the path becomes more sand than dirt. The bright heat radiates up, stinging my eyes. I want to fish my sunglasses out of my backpack, but I know Meg has none, so I squint in solidarity. Every few minutes, a large bird blocks the sun, and for an instant, there’s relief before the beating heat returns. There are no clouds.
“Can we sit a minute?” Meg asks after a while.
We amble toward a tree stump and squeeze onto opposite sides of it. While Meg examines her blisters, I watch the sky. It’s the same bright blue as home, but the birds are different. Here, each bird is at least as big as a cat—spoonbills, ibises, herons of different colors, white, pink, blue, and gray, but with the same angular wings and long necks. They remind me of swans. I promised to help the swans find their sister. Right now, I can’t even help myself.
“Do you have a picture of the frog?” Meg asks.
“Sure.” I unzip my backpack and shuffle through it, but the first photo I find isn’t the frog. It’s one of the prince.
“Who’s that?” Meg says.
“That’s the prince, before he was a frog.”
She reaches for the photo. “Wow, he’s hot.”
“You think? He has that birthmark thing on his forehead.” But I can see he’s good-looking, with an athletic build, probably from playing some princely sport like polo.