“Not a chance,” Adelie said. “Knowing my luck, I’ll be the one getting lost, and you’ll have no riddles to help you find me.” She added a smile to lighten the statement. “I’m staying right out here, where I can breathe. And Suz, after this, I’m going home.”
Suzie’s face fell. She broached the few steps back to Adelie’s side. “I thought you were having fun with me.”
A hint of remorse struck her. Suzie had always been flighty and daring, while Adelie was the timid, down-to-earth type determined to keep her feet on the ground. She should have known not to leave paying the mortgage in her dreamy sister’s hands. It was almost like she was a child instead of a few years older than Adelie’s twenty-five.
Adelie gave her a smile, trying to will away the skepticism that had been plaguing her since they arrived. She hoped it was enough to make up for her surliness. “It’s not that. This has been really fun, probably the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
“Then why can’t you just loosen up?” Suzie shook Adelie’s hand by the wrist.
Adelie dipped her head. “I’m sorry, I wish I could. I’m just worried, Suz. Guilt has been eating at me since we got here. I can’t spend the whole day here when I could have been looking up places that accept washouts who can’t find work anywhere else.” Another smile. At this point, she’d have to start applying at fast food places.
She was really looking forward to getting her nursing degree, but until she finished school, she’d have to do what she could to make it through. Adelie wished she could skirt around her worries and indulge in the lighthearted fun everyone else around her seemed to be having. But she’d been born practical, it was in her nature. And her practicality couldn’t allow her to ignore the threat hanging over her head with every step she took.
“All right then,” Suzie said, shaking her head as if dusting away Adelie’s doldrums. “But you’re so missing out. See you on the other side.”
Adelie laughed and waved to her sister as Suzie stepped through the door. Several more people quickly entered behind her.
Pivoting, Adelie shuffled the few feet and took one of the empty seats around the vacant tea table. Her feet aching, her soul weary, she rested her elbow beside a plastic triangle of cheese, plunked her head into her hand, and began tracing the rim of a wide, pink polka dot teacup with her finger.
She should have lied. Told Suzie how awesome the day had been, pretended away her worries. That had never been her style, though. She was honest to a fault, and timid as well.
If it hadn’t been for Suzie, she probably wouldn’t have done half of the gutsy things she’d attempted in her life. Like trying out for the community softball team. Volunteering on the community theater board to direct teenagers on the light and sound crew. Signing her name on the mortgage of their late grandparents’ house.
She released a sigh with that last thought. What were they going to do?
“You look lost.”
A man leaned his hip against the table. If the blue, striped teacup hadn’t been fiberglass and attached to the cutesy table, he would have tipped it over and spilled its contents.
He may as well have tipped her over though. The insides of her brain were slowly seeping out. His mahogany hair was gelled away from his forehead, his green eyes held teasing glints of riddles and rhyme, and he rested a hand on the table as he stared. Right. At. Her.
Her heart picked up the pace. He looked familiar. Why? Where had she seen him before?
She shook herself, remembering too late to reply. “No, I’m not lost. I know exactly where I am.”
“And where is that?”
She raised her brows, glancing around. Could anyone be here and not know where they were? “Do I really have to answer?”
He sank onto the orange, backless stool beside her. She caught a whiff of his warm, amber musk. “No, you don’t have to. But if you did answer, what would you say?”
He was too gorgeous for his own good. How could anyone be that good-looking? Adelie found herself tongue-tied, unable to form a coherent answer. Something about his tousled hair, the mischief dancing in his eyes, and the seduction in his smile made her feel like a pot set to boil. Her temperature rose. Bubbles reached the surface, and heat coursed through her the longer he sat there staring at her.
“I’m in Wonderland,” she said. “At a mad tea party while thousands of people are chasing a white rabbit.”
“No rabbit-chasing for you?”
She grinned in a sardonic kind of way, attempting to slow her racing pulse. “I’m not that desperate.”
Well, she kind of was. But she wasn’t about to admit it to him.
He rested an arm on the table. “What would make you be?”
Adelie was taken aback. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What would make me be desperate?” That was an odd question for a first meeting. Not to mention kind of personal.
He shrugged. “Desperate enough to put it all on the line for a silly white rabbit chase?”
She couldn’t follow his train of thought. Who asked questions like this? Still, this flirting was harmless. She’d be off and leaving the park as soon as Suzie came back out again.
Adelie rotated on her stool and decided to humor him, though the directness of his gaze didn’t help her pulse. “If I were going to be desperate, it would have to be over something I really wanted. Something that meant more to me than anything else in the entire world.”
“And that might be?”
Adelie rubbed her hands together and stared off at nothing for a moment. “Security,” she said unexpectedly. “Knowing everything is going to be okay.”
He considered her answer for a moment. “Sounds worth it,” he said, his voice deep.
She couldn’t believe she’d opened up to a practical stranger. Adelie needed a subject change, stat. “What about you? You’re not interested in finding the rabbit?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get what I wanted out of this,” he said, winking at her before standing up and striding away.
Adelie stared after him. Their exchange played over and over again with every step he took. Without a doubt, that was the weirdest conversation she’d ever had with a total stranger. Catch the white rabbit? Please. Chasing rabbits led Alice into a totally bizarre world that she couldn’t escape from until she woke to find it was a dream.
Adelie didn’t need the distraction of dreams. She needed reality; a new job, to make enough to catch up on their mortgage, and to keep her feet firmly on the ground.
People were visible through the windows of the fun house. They treaded in and out, flocking in a steady line to and from the front of the park. Looking beyond, Adelie allowed herself to be momentarily hypnotized by the whirling rides and the distant, lazy Ferris wheel.
“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” she muttered, bumping her elbow into the plate beside her.
The table hummed beneath her. The plate began to sink. A creaking noise sounded. The mechanical dormouse in the center of the table stopped his repetitive mutterings and descended slowly into the table itself. Cups disappeared, and in the middle of the transformation, as the table lost part of its contents, a cage slowly began to rise in their place at the table’s center.