This is a preview if Chapter 1 of Beauty Sleep!
Divorce had become a forbidden word. It hadn’t even appeared
in the emails telling Alice that she was going directly to the Case’s for
Christmas break and that she would be remaining there until the school year
started. Now that she was here, it was a topic that would not be brought up,
though it seemed that there were more than a few close calls in the first
couple days.
Alice wondered if that was for her benefit or if she was
going to have to tell them that not talking about it wasn’t going to stop it
from happening.
It was a little sad, but she could understand why they
didn’t want her there right now. She hoped that she could see her parents one
last time before she was taken away forever. They wouldn’t miss her, though. She
wasn’t sure they would miss her even if they did remember that they had a
daughter. She had caused them a lot of problems, had likely been the cause of
their divorce despite what Lori tried to tell her. Maybe with her gone they
could work out their problems and be happy. Just one more semester.
She could send them an email or call them before the
Bandersnatch took her away. Evan’s disappearance had taught her that the
Bandersnatch didn’t seem to be as good at cleaning up electronic evidence. Not
that either of them would know what her email was about after June.
Again, she found herself wondering if there was really a
point to trying to say goodbye to anyone before she was taken away. The point
was to give them some closure about her disappearance and to let them know she
was thinking of them and sorry, but it meant nothing once she wasn’t there
anymore. When he took her, it would be like she never existed.
Statistically, there was a chance she might be able to
figure out a way to get around the Bandersnatch. There was likely some way
to convince him to leave and to win the bet, but all of her looking through the
books and trying to work out a method of trapping him or throwing him back into
Wonderland had so far proven fruitless. She didn’t have any more ideas.
There was nothing to do but try to finish as much as she
could before she was gone once and for all. Hopefully Adam would come back
without too much of a fight, and she could find Matt before it was all over.
She should do something about the Queen of Hearts, but Wonderland could
probably figure that out without her. She would need to teach someone else to
return hearts, but that was it. If she could just finish that, maybe she could
find some time to have a bit of fun before she faded away.
For right now, though, she tried not to think about it, even
though it continued to creep into her thoughts at every waking moment now that
she was enjoying her very last Christmas. Adrianna was off with one of her
brothers doing something else, leaving Alice and Lori to hang out with Ryan and
Travis as they prepared cookies for tomorrow. Again.
Cookies had become a thing Alice was making more or less
constantly while she was here, seeing as they were eaten with fair regularity.
While the people in the Case household were mostly their usual selves, kind and
friendly, there were still flashes of hostility that came out of nowhere. Peter
had shown her which flower would dispel that and so she had made it a point to
be in the kitchen at least a little each day to sprinkle a some of the cure in
the food so that she would not have to deal with that any longer. She wasn’t
sure how much longer the flowers would last, but she had far too much on her
mind to be worried about that as well.
“My baby sister’s almost in high school!” Lori said, pleased
as they put the cut cookies in the oven and set the timer. Alice was careful to
be the one to make the dough, remembering all too well how Lori tended to
forget ingredients like sugar when she was baking. “New classes, new dorms, new
everything.”
“Except Addie,” Travis told her. “You don’t get to lose her
just yet.”
Alice smiled, though she felt a pang of guilt at the
reminder. She was going to be abandoning Adrianna to high school all on her
own. She would be all right, going in with plenty of friends who could give her
a hand and without Alice to distract her from her classes any longer, but
perhaps she was someone she should say farewell to before she left. Or maybe
not. If she was gone the next day, it would be easier for everyone and they
wouldn’t have to be sad at all.
“I have to get there, first,” Alice reminded her, a smile on
her face. It was out of her hands now, and there was no reason to make anyone
else worry about it. She would be gone no matter what happened. And it was
Christmas in a house that really liked celebrating the holiday with family. Who
had basically been adopting her the last few years. And with a sister that she
thought she might never see again. She could let herself relax at least a
little.
“You’ll get there,” Lori said, ruffling her hair a little.
“Ms. Miller taught you all this stuff years ago. You could probably have jumped
right into high school with her help if you really wanted to.”
“Does that mean she can tutor you in Chemistry?” Ryan asked,
looking over at the pair of them. “Because I saw that last test.” He smiled
gently, though Lori looked embarrassed about her grades and stumbled through an
explanation.
“Not my fault that teacher hates me,” she said. “I
missed one question on the test and the whole multiple choice was off
after that.” She looked and sounded irritated from the whole thing, but Alice
still smiled and tried to gently calm her back down. She didn’t want Lori to be
upset during their last Christmas together.
“Can you retake it?” Alice offered.
“Yeah, I’m doing a makeup exam with a different teacher in
January,” Lori told her. “No scantron, so I shouldn’t screw it up this time
around.” That seemed to calm her down, or at least she pushed the feelings back
down before they could boil over. Alice could tell she had already been
stressed about this enough, so she didn’t press any further. Ryan looked like
he wasn’t sure if he’d said something wrong, but neither of the girls would say
anything.
“Is your girlfriend coming tomorrow?” Alice asked, trying to
divert the subject to something a little happier. She did like seeing her
sister happy, and knowing that she was in a relationship and watching her light
up talking about it was one of the things Alice had come to enjoy. It was great
spending so much time with Lori this year, but she did hope that she wasn’t
taking her away from other people in her life. Well, maybe she was okay with it
since it would only be one last time. “Her name is Jennifer, right?”
“She’s coming by for lunch on Boxing Day,” Lori said,
already looking excited. “But I’m going to be heading there for dinner tonight.
You’re okay with putting up with all these guys without me for a night, right?”
She smiled, looking up directly at Travis, who looked offended.
“Hey!” he snapped back at her, but he was smiling as he said
it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you know exactly what it means,” she told him.
“I think you need to elaborate.”
“I think you need to learn how to peel a carrot
again.”
Travis jumped and realized that he wasn’t so much peeling
the carrot anymore as he was whittling it into a very sharp point. Ryan laughed
as Travis put it casually to the side, patting it like it could keep his
secret, and moved onto the next one. “You know, if someone tried to attack us
right now, I could protect us all with Frosty’s nose. You should be thanking
me.”
“Thank you for turning a nose into a murder weapon,” Ryan told him, giving him a light whack on the back. “Now, if you could continue cooking like there were still two extra ravenous mouths to feed, that would be great.” Even as he said it, confusion flickered across Ryan’s face like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of it. He shook the thoughts away. Alice looked back at the timer for the cookies.
Beauty Sleep is out on June 19th! Order it now on Amazon!
