Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(108)

By this time (you won’t have known this either), she’d got a job. It wasn’t much of a job, and it wasn’t a legal job, but a kid has to have some cash on hand, you know? You won’t remember Mr. Spinner. He was the janitor at the middle school. He used to tell these great stories to any kid who would listen. This girl was pretty starved for attention and interaction, so she listened. And maybe he listened to all the things she didn’t say, because, one day, he offered her a job helping him mop and buff the floors after all the other kids had gone home.

I saved up every penny I earned for a whole year. I realized my ? 327 ?

? The Mirror Tells All ?

mistake, see, with the ribbon. It was too cheap for your tastes. I knew this time I had to do better. So when the girl—yeah, that’s still me, in case you’d forgotten—had saved up enough money, she went into town again.

Quit squirming. I know there’s no action in this story. What do you expect? Not much can happen when the main character is just standing there.

The girl thought she was on the right track with the hair thing, even though the first time she’d got it wrong. And maybe she was feeling a little guilty for having thrown her mother’s good hairbrush at the mirror. That hairbrush was like something out of the court of some French king. Unbelievably ornate, with bristles tough as the day they were plucked from the boar. So very you. What I wanted was to find a matching comb. That, I thought, would bring you out of your stupor. Because sometimes, if I stayed up late enough at night, I’d catch you brushing your hair.

The girl found a comb, a perfect, silver comb that maybe wasn’t as ornate as the hairbrush, but was still eye-catching and breathtaking in its beauty. She didn’t even know they made stuff like that. It cost her every cent she had, but she didn’t care. Her mother would have to be blind to ignore this gift, she was certain.

This time she didn’t take silence as an answer. She held the comb out to her mother, and nothing happened. She waved it in front of her mother’s face, and nothing happened. She started shouting, “Mom, look! I brought you this comb! Look at it, take it, will you?”

and nothing happened. Her mom just stood there with that dead look on her face, staring into the mirror.

The girl wanted to cry, she wanted to sit down on the floor right then and there and wail her heart out. Do you remember what she did instead? No? She moved around behind her mother, and started combing her mother’s hair. That’s what she did. Gently, so as not to pull on the tangles, she combed out every strand until they lay, soft and shining, against her mother’s back. Then she put the comb on the dressing table with the brush and left the room.

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? Erzebet YellowBoy ?

Getting bored, are you? I bet. All right well, I’m nearly done. I’ll pick up the pace a little, if that will help.

Fast-forward two years; the girl is now sixteen. Sweet sixteen, and her mother is still there, in front of that mirror. Do you know how awful puberty is when you have to go through it alone? At sixteen the girl, now a young woman really, was in the throes of it. All sorts of stuff was going on in her body and in her mind. All sorts. She’s trying to achieve some kind of independence, to be her own person, that kind of thing, and here she’s got this monster in the closet, right, this dirty secret that she can’t share with anyone. Because how, really, do you tell someone that your mother has been standing in front of a mirror for years on end? It’s ridiculous. No one would believe you anyway even if you did tell. They’d think you were making it up.

That’s what you’d become to me by then. A monster. A horrible dragon clutching its treasure in a dark room. I had to do something.

Anything, I thought, would be better than this.

But what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know until one day, who knows why, Mr. Jonet—he was the English teacher that year—started talking about apples. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, apples. He went through every story that ever had an apple in it, he went on and on about the health properties of apples, the symbolism of apples, all of this stuff about apples. It drove the class nuts. Rumor had it that he’d fallen in love with Miss Hayton, the biology teacher. We made jokes about him bringing her an apple, like some pet schoolboy. We got sick of hearing about apples.

Then he told a story about a woman named Eve. She was apparently the first woman, ever, on earth. She was good, pure good, no evil in her at all. Kind of like you used to be, before the mirror came. Or at least how I remember you to be. Rose-colored glasses and all that. So anyway, this Eve lady was brought low by an apple. The fruit of evil, it was, and she took a bite and then she wasn’t so good any more. Cast out of the garden, I think it was a garden, by a serpent or something.