(Posted today because I realised I’d posted exactly twice in the last month, and since I don’t have much hope of finishing the next “Warbeck Sisters” chapter before the weekend, this will have to do instead. Sorry about that.)

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Steph knew it was weird to enjoy it so much when her parents took her to the big carpet warehouse, but she couldn’t help it.  The further back you went, the more the place turned into a maze of ten-foot-tall multicoloured rolls, like you were lost in a forest made up of the strangest trees you’d ever seen.  None of her friends had ever understood when she’d talked about it (although Crystal had said that she always looked forward to visiting the shoe repair shop because of how great it smelled, which might have been the same sort of thing.)  It looked like the carpet shop was something Steph would have to keep for herself. 

So this morning, while her parents talked to the salespeople and decided which of the carpets they were going to ruin by buying and unravelling it, Steph wandered round the forest at the back, hearing everyone’s voices grow fainter as she went, wondering what kind of strange creatures you’d find in a forest like this.  Giant carpet-spiders, maybe.  Mites the size of your arm.

Having so much soft material around muffled the sound a bit, so Steph didn’t hear Holly Stewart coming until she actually looked up and saw her there.  “Hi, Steph,” she said, with a strange smile, as if she’d just caught her doing something she should be embarrassed about.  It would probably have been unnerving, if Steph hadn’t known that Holly always smiled like that.

“Alright?” said Steph.  She tried not to show it, but she was a bit disappointed to have to stop daydreaming.  She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to get Holly to go along with it.  They were in the same class now, and they’d been in the same class a couple of times in primary school, too, so Steph knew how difficult it was to get Holly to go along with anything.  She was one of those people who always found something to whine about.

“I saw your mum.  She said you’d be around here somewhere.”

“Yeah.”  Steph took one last look at a big blue redwood where strange beings could hide.  “I’m just looking around.”

Holly looked from side to side, clicking her tongue a bit.  She reminded Steph of one of those clocks that were shaped like big, grinning cats.  “There’s a place round the corner from here where me and Tara go on Friday nights.”

“Really?” asked Steph.  She wasn’t sure who Tara was, but at school Holly usually hung around with a couple of girls from one of the other Year Seven classes.  You usually ran into them by the vending machines in the basement, and they gave you offended looks when you asked them to move aside so you could buy stuff.

“Yeah.”  Holly’s grin widened.  “They say you have to be thirteen to get in, but we go with Tara’s sister.  If you can prove that one of you’s over thirteen, they don’t bother checking any of the others.  They just let you in.”

“OK,” said Steph.

“You could come with us one day.  Like, if your parents will let you.”  As if Steph was the only one of them who had parents, and as if she should be embarrassed about it.

“Maybe,” said Steph.  She looked back at the big rolls of carpet, and thought about dryads.  A forest like this would definitely have dryads.

“A couple of weeks ago, there was this guy there who was really into Tara, but his girlfriend got jealous and told everyone lies about her.  But then we proved she was lying and told everyone, and he dumped her.”

Steph wondered what Hansel and Gretel would have used for breadcrumbs if they’d been lost in here.  Furniture polish, maybe?

“We, like, got up on the karaoke stage and told everyone.  So now she can’t ever come back.”

Steph thought about the forests you got in fairy tales, and the kind of people you ran into there.  An animal who was actually a human under a curse, or an old beggar who was actually a magic creature trying to get you to prove your worth.  Nothing was as it seemed, and everybody seemed to lie their heads off.

“You could come out with us one night.  Like, if your parents will let you.”  Holly smacked her lips as if she was chewing an invisible piece of gum.  “We could, like, teach you how to be popular.”

And at that, Steph nearly knocked over a stack of samples, she was laughing so hard.

The End