I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything. Steal a few months or years for myself rather than feeding them all to my parents and their broken hearts.
Except I told Charm before I ran, and she instantly told Dad. He came up to my room looking like—I try not to remember it, actually. His face was a snapshot of my own death, a time-lapse video of the devastation I would leave behind me. We made a deal that night: if I promised not to run away, he promised to stop trying so hard to keep me.
A week later I took the SAT and dropped out of high school with my parents’ blessing. Dad paid my application fee and I enrolled at Ohio University that fall. I loved it. The food was bad and my roommate was a nightmare who kept trying to sell me essential oils, but it was the first time I’d felt like a real adult. Like someone who owned their future, who belonged to no one but herself.
That feeling had been trickling away all summer as I folded myself back into the teenage-shaped hole I left behind at my parents, but what would I have done without that brief escape? What if I’d been trapped with no future and no friends, like Primrose? Perhaps I would have turned toward a darker, uglier kind of escape.
I take the knife from Primrose very, very carefully. “How … helpful. I’ll carry this, okay?” I wrap it in the least expensive-looking skirt I can find. “So. Which way to the stables?”
“What—you mean now? Tonight?”
Apparently Primrose never learned dying girl rule #1: move fast. “Yes, dummy. How long do you think you can go without sleep?”
* * *
IN THE FOLLOWING hour, several things become clear to me.
First, that Primrose isn’t quite as helpless and damsel-in-distress-ish as I thought. Rather than sneaking through the castle and making off with a pair of horses by moonlight, she simply informs the stable hands that she and her ladies are going for a dawn ride through the countryside and would like two horses saddled and waiting with a picnic packed for six, please and thank you. “They won’t miss us for hours, this way,” she says calmly.
Second, that I do not technically “know” how to ride a “horse,” to quote an unnecessarily shocked princess. “But how do you travel in your land? Surely you do not walk?” I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.
Third, that one cannot learn to ride a horse in five minutes, at least not well enough to be trusted on a midnight journey to the Forbidden Moor.
I wind up perched behind the princess on a pile of folded blankets, clinging desperately to her traveling cloak and thinking that Charm would give a year of her life to be cozied up behind Primrose as she galloped into the night on a daring half-cocked rescue mission.
Even I can admit it’s pretty cool. The air is clean and sharp and the stars reel above us like ciphers or hieroglyphs, stories written in a language I don’t know. The trees are dark Arthur Rackham-ish tangles on either side of the road, reaching for us with wicked fingers while the night birds sing strange songs. My lungs ache and my legs are numb and I know Dad would have a stroke if he could see me, but he can’t, and for tonight at least my life is my own, to waste or squander or give to someone else, no matter how little of it might be left.
We stop twice that night. The first time in a grove of tall pines, silver-blue in the moonlight, where the horse’s hooves are silenced by soft needles. I don’t so much dismount as fall sideways, barely managing to keep my phone uncrushed in my back pocket. The princess makes a graceful, sweeping gesture that somehow ends with her standing beside her horse, cloak pooled elegantly around her slippered feet. Her shoulders are a bowed line.
I don’t generally do a lot of worrying about other people, except for Charm and my parents, but even I can see she’s tired. “We could sleep here if you like.” I poke the deep-piled pine needles. “It’s nice and squashy.”
Primrose shakes her head. “I’d like to be further from the castle before I sleep.” There’s a green gleam in her eyes as she looks back the way we came.