Jenna’s insistence that I was lying about [spoilers!] had shaken me up. My friends tried to comfort me at lunch, but their efforts only made me feel worse.
“My mum neutralized a Beastly Beauty who’d gone crazy once,” Zoe said. “She was helping the KGB torture people. Turns out she didn’t care why a person might be lying, like to protect his family, she was obsessed with getting him to admit the whole truth. Apparently all the tiny white lies people tell had made her completely unhinged.”
“Jenna’s going to go that way if she’s not careful,” Hadley frowned, a dark look on her face. “Do y’all think I should tell Vera during our next Magic Mirror class?”
“Probably,” Zoe shrugged. “It’s not a good way to go. Not that Alices have it much better, though,” she continued. “We get lost in Portals.” I felt the echo of electricity running up my spine, and we both shivered, remembering our Portal-Gone-Wrong mishap from the previous year.
“Cinderellas lose the ability to tell Glamour from reality,” Asha chimed in. “There’s a rumor that Ms. Campbell was engaged to this handsome, amazing man - a real Prince Charming. Turns out she had Glamoured the pants off of some poor Villager. She got sent off to teach because things went too far.” I smothered a laugh - Asha was a hopeless romantic, but there was no way Mama Kapoor would ever let her get away with something that ridiculous. I was pretty sure she’d be safe from that fate.
Elodie, who had absent-mindedly been picking at her cuticles, hid her hands under the table abruptly before adding, “We get extreme obsessive compulsive disorder.”
“Is this another one of those things that you all know about and I don’t?” I asked, exasperated. “Do we all have a way we lose our minds, and nobody told me?”
They stared at me. “Well, of course, sugar,” Hadley finally drawled. “Why do you think Zennies go dark?”
