The Very Little Princess: Zoey's Story (4 page)

The doll took a step back. She couldn’t help it. She never quite got used to the size of these girls!

(Just imagine looking into a face, a very close face, twice as tall as you!)

Still, she knew it was important to take charge right from the beginning. So she put on
her most royal tone. “Every princess has a servant,” she said. “That means you’re mine.”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. What a cavern her mouth was. Worse than her nose! The doll took another step back. She bumped into the canopied bed and sat down.

“Princess?” the girl said. “Are you really a princess?”

“Of course,” the doll replied. “Can’t you tell?” And though she spoke with assurance—a great deal of assurance for such a small doll—she felt uneasy. Why should this enormous girl believe her? If the creature wanted to, she could snatch her up again. Or simply squash her with a gigantic thumb.

The girl leaned even closer. The princess couldn’t help herself. She shut her eyes.

When she opened them, the huge face was pressed so close to the open side of the dollhouse
that the princess could have reached out and touched the turned-up nose. She didn’t, though. She still wasn’t feeling entirely friendly toward that nose.

“Is that why you’re allowed to talk to me?” the face asked. “Because you’re a princess and I’m your servant?”

Allowed
. The doll didn’t like that word any more than she liked
owner
. She didn’t want to think that anyone
allowed
her anything. She talked to whomever she chose, didn’t she?

Still, the idea of having a servant was good. Very good. Every princess needs a servant. So the doll turned things around just a bit when she replied. “That’s it exactly,” she said. “It’s because you’re my servant that you’re allowed to hear me talk.”

“Oh-h-h-h!” the girl said. The word came out long and slow, carried by a breath that was, for
the tiny doll, like a warm wind blowing. Then the girl added, “But if I’m going to be your servant, I need to know your name. ‘Princess … ’?”

So here the doll was, right back where she’d started … trying to remember her own name. It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t remember, though. She assured herself of that. After all, what kind of a servant couldn’t manage a simple task like keeping your name for you while you slept?

The doll drew herself up to her full three and one-quarter inches. “That’s your job,” she said. “Have you forgotten? You’re supposed to keep my name in your mind every minute.”

The girl’s expression melted into worry.

The princess leaned into the worry. “When I wake, you’re supposed to say, ‘Welcome, Princess …’ And then you use my name, you see?”

“I see.” The girl nodded. She closed her eyes. The doll could practically see names scrolling across her freckled eyelids. When she opened them again, she said, “I don’t suppose you’d like to be called Molly. Princess Molly? My best friend is named Molly.”

“Of course not,” the doll snapped. “No princess in the entire world has ever been named Molly.”

The girl didn’t argue. She just closed her eyes again. Her eyes, the doll noted before they closed, were a coppery color, as bright as her hair.

After a moment, the girl opened them once more. “Jessica? Ashley? Megan?”

“Ordinary.” The doll shook her head. “My name isn’t anything so ordinary.”

“Amy?” the girl offered. But she said it in a way that already accepted the fact that Amy wasn’t right, either.

This time the doll didn’t bother to respond. Couldn’t this creature come up with anything better than Jessica, Megan … Amy?

But even as she was thinking this, even as she was trying hard to remember her name herself, a voice floated up the stairs. “Zoey?” it called. “Are you up there?”

So that was this one’s name … Zoey.

“Yes,” Zoey answered the voice. “I’m here. I’m in your room.”

Footsteps on the stairs. The doll went still. She didn’t want this adult, whoever she was, to know that she had awakened. Nothing good ever came from a grown-up’s discovering such a thing. They tended to get much too excited.

But the footsteps stopped, halfway up the stairs. “Hazel has fixed us some lunch,” the voice called. “Come on down. Let’s eat.”

“I’ll be right there, Mom,” Zoey replied.

Clearly an obedient child, she stood immediately and started for the door. Then she stopped and turned around. “Do you want to come down and eat with me?” she asked.

“Of course not!” the doll replied, indignant. “Do you think I eat and drink like an ordinary human being?”

Zoey looked surprised, but then she said, “Eating is … well, it’s kind of nice.” She seemed almost hurt.

“Don’t you know?” the doll said, trying to be patient. Sometimes these girls could be a bit slow. “If you eat, then you have to go to the bathroom. And that’s disgusting!”

Zoey laughed, as if going to the bathroom were the funniest thing she’d ever heard of. “Okay, no lunch for you,” she agreed. “But do you want to come downstairs anyway? You could watch
me
eat.”

The doll thought about that. Those enormous teeth chomping. That cavernous mouth slurping. She shuddered.

But then she thought about being alone in the room again. That was even less appealing. She had been alone too long. Much too long. Loneliness had seeped inside her … (I almost said
inside her bones
, as if a tiny china doll had bones, which, of course, it doesn’t.) But it had seeped inside every part of her until everything about her felt lonely, even her blue eyes and her alabaster skin. (And I know you remember that word,
alabaster.)

So she said, “Well … since it’s important to you, I’ll come. But you have to remember the secret.”

The girl was reaching to pick her up. “Secret?” she said, her hand suspended in the air. “What secret?”

“Grown-ups can never know.”

“That you can walk and talk?”

“Of course,” the doll said.

The girl nodded wisely. Apparently that was something she understood. Then she cupped the doll gently in her hand and lifted her into the air.

After the first rush the doll always felt when she was picked up, she settled comfortably into the curve of Zoey’s fingers. She was ready, she told herself … for anything, for everything.

My, but it was good to be awake again!

The Throne Room

Do you know what I mean when I say that an argument can change the air in a room, even after all the talking has stopped? When Zoey walked into the kitchen, the air felt heavy.

Neither her grandmother nor her mother spoke.

Hazel stood, leaning against the stove, her plump arms crossed.

Zoey’s mother sat at the table, her spine curved into a question mark. She was concentrating on a bowl of tomato soup and a sandwich.

Another bowl of soup and another sandwich, toasted golden brown and cut into two neat triangles, waited on the other side of the table. Zoey could see the cheese, all warm and gooey, oozing from the toasted bread.

She sat down in front of the food.

“I’m glad you’re here, Zoey,” Hazel said. She seemed to mean it.

Zoey smiled at her grandmother. She was glad, too, of course. Or at least she would have been glad if Hazel and her mother weren’t arguing. Why were they so angry with one another, anyway?

Zoey peeked at the tiny doll cupped in her hand. She had gone rigid, as though she had never moved in her life, so Zoey figured it was safe to set her down. She propped her carefully on the edge of her plate. She just fit there, her tiny feet resting on the table.

“I see you’ve found Regina,” Hazel said. Her eyes were fastened on the doll.

“Princess
Regina,” Zoey’s mother corrected, her voice sharp.

“Princess
Regina,” Hazel agreed, still studying the doll intently. Did she expect her to move? Zoey wondered. But then Hazel turned her gaze back to Zoey. “Your mother always insisted that Regina was a princess,” she said.

Zoey nodded, satisfied. So that was the doll’s name!

Princess Regina sat staring straight ahead, but Zoey could see that her tiny mouth had turned up at the corners. She was sure the doll hadn’t been smiling before, at least not that much.

A light breeze wafting in the window over the sink gathered up the rich smell of tomato soup and toasted bread and stirred it around the room.

Zoey took a spoonful of soup. The warmth
of it followed all the way down to her stomach. She bit a point off one triangle of her sandwich and let the cheese melt on her tongue.

“Mom, did you used to play with Regina?” she asked, testing the name. “With
Princess
Regina?”

“Sure,” her mother said. “Your grandmother
did, too. And her mother before her. I suppose her mother before that, too. Princess Regina has ruled this family for a long time.”

“When we weren’t being ruled by pure obstinacy,” Zoey’s grandmother said.

Zoey wasn’t quite sure what “pure obstinacy” was, but judging by the look on her mother’s face, this was the beginning of more arguing. She didn’t want to hear it.

“It’s kind of hot for soup today,” she said, grabbing her sandwich in one hand and the doll in the other. “I think I’ll take Princess Regina outside.”

And without waiting for permission, either her mother’s or her grandmother’s, she rose from the table and headed for the front door.

“Be good,” they both called after her.

Zoey ignored the command, whatever it meant. It was something grown-ups seemed to
need to say—“Be good! Be good!”—as though, if they didn’t say it at every turn, kids would go right out and rob a bank.

She let the slam of the screen door answer

“Be good.”

As soon as they were out of sight of the adults, the doll began to squirm in Zoey’s hand. And the instant Zoey felt the movement, her irritation fell away.

A princess! A tiny princess! Of course she would be good! She would be too busy taking care of Princess Regina to be anything else.

Zoey took another bite of her sandwich and held Princess Regina up to inspect her. The afternoon sun glinted in the doll’s golden hair.

“You’re beautiful,” Zoey said.

“I know,” the princess replied. Somehow it didn’t sound stuck-up when she said it, just matter-of-fact.

Zoey laughed. “Where do you want to go?” she asked. “You’ve lived here for … what? A hundred years? You must know all the best places.”

“Of course I do,” Princess Regina said. “We’ll go to my throne room. Where else?”

“Okay,” Zoey agreed easily enough. Then she waited. When the doll said nothing further, she asked, “Where is it?”

“You don’t know where my throne room is?” Princess Regina exclaimed.

Zoey shrugged. “I don’t know where anything is. I’m new here. I need you to show me.”

Princess Regina threw up her tiny hands. “How can I show you? It’s far away. Far, far away. It would take me a hundred years to walk there by myself.”

Zoey considered that. If she put this tiny doll down in the grass, it would take her a
hundred years to get almost anywhere. She couldn’t even climb the steps to the porch to get back into the house!

“You’re my servant,” Princess Regina added, rather ominously. “It’s your job to take me there.”

Zoey sat down on the top step of the porch, set the doll on her knee, and took a big bite of her sandwich. “Maybe,” she said around a mouthful of bread and cheese, “if you’ll tell me what your throne room looks like, it will be easier for me to find.”

And so the little doll did. In a dreamy voice, she talked and talked and talked.

Her throne room, she explained, was made of sunlight and shadows. It was made of lace … green lace. (Not
pink?
Zoey thought, but she didn’t interrupt.) It was made of summer breezes and flowers. Every kind of flower.

The carpet was so soft that you didn’t need
furniture. You could simply sink into it the way you would sink into a comfortable bed.

In fact, the only piece of furniture in the entire room was her throne. It was tall, tall enough that she could look out over everything. And it was covered with silvery-green velvet.

Her throne room was private, too. Nobody came there, nobody even knew about it except Princess Regina and whatever girl was her servant at the time.