Off the Page Read online

  But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It’s like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation’s there, but it’s useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone’s imagination.

  This morning, just like every other morning I’ve been here, I am awakened by the sound of Pyro doing his seven a.m. flyby. Roosters have nothing on dragons, which sound like a cross between a howler monkey and a braying donkey; I have no idea how he doesn’t wake up the entire kingdom as he streaks his way across all sixty pages. I blink at the stone ceiling of the castle, still kind of expecting my mom to walk in and tell me I’m going to be late for school. Then I sit up and let my gaze fall on the spacesuit draped over the golden chair in the corner of the room.

  In the new story, I lead the citizens of the kingdom to battle the Galactoids from the planet Zugon, in order to bring down the mighty Zorg. It involves the kidnapping of space princess Seraphima, which starts an intergalactic war, and includes trolls swiping spaceships from the sky with their meaty paws, fairies listening in on top-secret meetings (giving new meaning to the term fly on the wall), mermaids running covert submarine operations into the core of the Earth, and Rapscullio being exposed as a double agent working as a henchman for Zorg. The skeleton of the story was part of a video game I used to play back in the other world; all I did was connect the dots. I used to spend six hours a day with a controller in my hands. Sometimes I’d even wake up thinking about ways to make it to the next level. It’s every gamer’s dream to actually live as your avatar—to swing the sword instead of pushing a button to make it happen, to kiss the princess instead of watching the action unfold on the screen while your score goes through the roof.

  I’m totally psyched to be here. I am.

  I just have to keep reminding myself.

  After I get dressed and brush my teeth, I head down the spiral staircase, sniffing out the source of the heavenly aroma that has been wafting through the castle. I find Queen Maureen, wearing her silver supersuit, her platinum-braceleted wrists sunk in a bowl of dough. “Good morning, Edgar!” she says, smiling brightly. “How did you sleep?”

  “Great, until that dragon flew by.”

  “He is an early riser,” she muses. “You get used to it.”

  I grab a scone from a stack that’s still warm from the oven and grunt in response.

  Maureen hesitates, then offers me a half smile. “I was just wondering . . . do you mind if I finish baking before I come down to rehearsal? After all, it’s been weeks since we were read . . . surely it won’t be a problem if I miss an hour to finish this pain au chocolat?”

  When I don’t answer right away, she wipes her hands on a dish towel.

  “That’s fine, then. I can always finish later—”

  “No, no,” I reply. “Whatever. Stay if you want to. If we need you, you’re only a shout away.”

  Her face brightens. “I’ll let you have the first taste,” she promises.

  I strap on my laser pistol and my force field interrupter, planning to head down to Everafter Beach to rehearse. I have to admit, it took a little while to get used to living in two dimensions. When you first walk through this world, it feels like you’re crossing through a pop-up picture book. Pluck a flat apple off a tree, and in your hand, it somehow morphs into something tangible, luscious, and real. I’m not sure if that’s because it actually becomes a true apple or because I’m as flat as it is. And it’s disconcerting to have to leap the fault line that the spine of the book creates to get from a left-hand page to a right-hand one. There’s gravity here, but it’s different—it’s not like being in water, where you have to work to stay sunken, but it’s not as strong as the pull in the real world either. I can easily do a backflip or climb a sheer rock wall without breaking a sweat—everything is somehow effortless. And there are no maps, and no roads to speak of. You don’t count turns, you count pages. To get from the castle to Orville’s cottage, for example, is seven jumps. And moving from page to page isn’t just continuing down a path—you step off into a great, black, dizzying nothing, letters swinging overhead, and suddenly find yourself standing at your destination without any memory of how you got there.

  Just when I pass the drawbridge on my way out of the castle, Pyro screams overhead, and I turn around. For just a moment, I’m not seeing the scene in front of me. The path leading to the castle winds and twists in the exact same pattern as my driveway at home—which I remember failing to back out of while practicing to get my driver’s license. My whole body aches, and I realize there’s a reason it’s called being homesick. Suddenly I want nothing more than to be sitting in my kitchen with my mom giving me the same old cereal boxes to choose from. I want her to yell at me to pick up the clothes littering my bedroom floor. I want . . . well, my mom.

  My mother created this book; her fingerprints are bound to be all over it. But the whole point of coming into the fairy tale was to have an adventure. And I’m not going to let a little bit of homesickness ruin that for me. I take a deep breath and turn away from the castle walkway, which might look familiar but is actually a whole world away from what I’m used to.

  Everafter Beach is the last page of the book, so it takes the longest to reach from the castle. I hike through the Enchanted Forest, past the troll bridge and Orville’s cottage. Grimacing, I dive off the cliff into the ocean, past the mermaid scene, and emerge dripping wet on the shores where Pyro lives. By the time I get to Captain Crabbe’s ship, I know I’m late, because nobody’s around. So I scale the rock wall extra fast and dive out the window, somersaulting onto Everafter Beach.

  Frump stands on a stump, trying to get the attention of the others. The trolls Biggle and Snort are having a laser fight, which is good practice for the new plot, except I think they’re getting more joy out of beheading palm trees and igniting sand into glass than out of rehearsing actual swordsmanship. Pyro is snoring, rings of smoke puffing from his nostrils. The mermaids are having snail races, betting with pearls. Trogg the troll is playing his flute. The fairies have braided daisy chains that they’re weaving through Socks’s mane; he’s beaming so much he basically emits a glow. Orville and Captain Crabbe are playing five-card stud, using sand dollars and shells for chips.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, putting my hand on Frump’s shoulder.

  He jumps, scratching his ear, a reflex. Old habits die hard, I guess. Until a couple of months ago, Frump was a basset hound. “I think people just aren’t feeling . . . inspired,” Frump says.

  “Well, how could we?” Seraphima announces, arriving on the page. “We haven’t had a Reader for, like . . .” She rolls her eyes up, as if she’s counting, and then her eyebrows knit together. “For, like, a long time.”

  Seeing her, Frump hops down from his perch. He takes her hand and kisses it. He is so whipped. “Princess,” he says, “every time I think you can’t look any more radiant, you prove me wrong.”

  “I don’t think she looks radiant,” I point out. “Where’s your space gear?” She’s wearing some silly dress from the Renaissance, with little slippers that look about as substantial as socks and are totally inappropriate for kicking alien butt.

  “Oh, do shut up, Edgar,” she says with a sigh. “As if. The aliens haven’t come for us. This is all just a joke. I am a princess. I’m not doing your dirty work for you anymore.”

  Frump and I exchange a glance. On her good days, Seraphima is about as smart as a brick. Somehow, even performing a fairy tale over and over has not clued her in to the fact that she is not actually a princess but only a character in a book. I thought she would be the easiest to convince, when I came inside, that the story had a new twist, one in which Oliver was an imposter and this fairy tale was a decoy to keep the aliens from Zorg from annihilating our planet. But when she learned that she would no longer be wearing her royal gowns and getting married to a prince every day, she lost interest.

  Rapscullio comes up to us. “