Chapter 2 I Am Effie?!

•MARILYN•

"No," I snorted. "I think you have me mistaken with someone else. I am not—"

"I told you that Effie is trying to get a free pass from doing her chores today, Mama," the girl scoffed. "She wants to lie to you and claim to have a headache, as she did a week ago. We both know that she does this every time she wants to sneak out of the house."

"That's a pity because she's not slacking off this time. Or do you want to tell me that you have a headache again?" The older woman asked, and I nodded. I wasn't even lying. My head was spinning.

"Then you will feel much better after some honest work," the woman answered. "Downstairs in ten minutes, Effie. If the floors are not shining by noon, you will not eat tonight."

She spun around and marched out, and her long skirt swished behind her. The girl in pink gave me one last smirk and followed her.

The moment the door clicked shut, I threw off the silk sheets and stumbled across the room. My legs felt too light, and my feet were smaller than I remembered. I stopped in front of a tall mirror with a gold frame, took a deep breath, and looked up.

A stranger stared back at me.

She had long, wavy hair the color of warm honey and big green eyes that looked kind even when she was frightened. Her skin was smooth and pale, with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. She wore a plain white nightgown with a tiny tear at the sleeve. When I lifted my hand, she lifted hers. When I opened my mouth, she opened hers. I screamed so loud that I thought the mirror would break.

"That is not my face! That is not my face!" I patted my cheeks, my chin, and my hair. Everything felt real. "Where are my glasses? I wore glasses! Why can I see perfectly?"

I backed away from the mirror and turned in a slow circle, and that was when my heart began to pound for a different reason. I knew this room. The tall window with the blue curtains, the crooked wooden dresser, and the small desk with a cracked jar of dried flowers were all things I had read about. On page forty-two of "The Fated Princess", Effie sat at that very desk and wrote a letter to her late mother, and I had cried over it in my room.

My knees felt weak, so I sat down on the edge of the bed. "Okay, Marilyn," I whispered. "Think. You were in a car accident. You hit your head. This is a very detailed coma dream."

I pinched my arm and yelped. It hurt, but I didn't snap out of whatever dream this was.

I pinched myself again, harder, just to be fair. It still hurt, and I was still there.

A funny, panicky laugh bubbled out of me. Only an hour earlier, I had been sitting in traffic and complaining that Effie was too soft. I had said out loud that I would do a much better job. I had said it to a book, which is not a thing people expect to be answered.

"Nobody warned me that the universe listens to sarcasm," I muttered. "Fuck me. What am I going to do now?"

Underneath the jokes, though, my chest ached. I thought of my grandfather's picture, which had been in my jeans pocket, and I wondered if it was lying on the road somewhere.

I thought of the interview that I would never get to attend and the promise that I had made to him. Tears stung my eyes, and I wiped them away with the back of my hand.

I couldn't fall apart yet. If this was really the world of the book, then I had to figure out exactly where I was standing in it, and I had to do it without anyone knowing who I really was before finding a way back to my own body.

I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. Below me was a stone courtyard, and beyond that I could see rooftops, a bell tower, and a hill with a white castle on top. It looked like a painting. A servant was carrying a basket of bread across the yard, and a horse pulled a cart behind him. There were no cars, no power lines, and no phones. I even checked my pockets, but the nightgown did not have any.

"So this is where I live now," I murmured, "in a house with a wicked stepmother and no Wi-Fi."

Someone knocked on the door, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. A young maid with a round, worried face peeked inside. She held a bundle of gray cloth against her chest.

"Miss Effie, your work dress," she whispered. "Lady Angela says you have two minutes left."

"Lady Angela?" I asked. "Is that her official title? Does she get a business card?"

The maid blinked at me as if I had spoken in another language. She set the dress on the bed, glanced nervously at the hall, and hurried away. I made a note to be less funny out loud, since the last thing I needed was for people to start wondering what had happened to the real Effie.

I picked up the gray dress and held it at arm's length. It was scratchy and plain, and it smelled a little like soap and old floors. As I pulled it over my head, another thought crept into my mind, and it made my fingers stop halfway through the buttons.

If I was at the beginning of the story, then something big was coming. Effie's life didn't stay the same for long. There was a moment when everything changed for her, and it was the moment that ruined her.

I rushed to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Under a pile of folded handkerchiefs, I found a small calendar with a ribbon tucked between the pages. My hands shook as I opened it to the marked day. Someone had drawn a tiny golden circle around a date, and beside it were three words written in neat, curling letters.

"Mate Choosing Ceremony."

I counted the days between that date and today, and then I counted again because I couldn't believe it.

The ceremony was only three days away.