The Very Little Princess: Rose's Story (5 page)

“Let's climb that tree.” (One bottom limb of an old oak tree dipped almost to the ground, so Rose simply walked up it. If the princess was impressed, she didn't say so.)

“Are you brave enough to cross that fierce river?” (It was a bubbling creek, and Rose was.)

“Look! Flowers! I told you I needed flowers.” (Shy snowdrops, but they wilted almost as soon as Rose picked them.)

Rose made it back to the house just barely in time for dinner. What a day it had been! Wasn't it amazing how fine the world could be when it was shared?

“Did something good happen today?” her dad asked, studying her beaming face.

Rose smiled and nodded, but she didn't try to explain. What could she say? Regina sat on the edge of her plate and was silent, too.

When Rose went upstairs to her room and shut the door, however, the argument began.

“You aren't going to sleep again tonight, are you?” Regina asked.

Something about the question made Rose cross. “Of course I'm going to sleep,” she said. “I sleep every night. Just like I eat every day. And I breathe, too. And I'm going to go on breathing. Every single minute.” She plopped the princess down on her bed, a little harder than she needed to.

“What's wrong with you humans?” Regina shouted in her shrill voice. “Don't you know better than—”

Rose looked up to see Sam standing in her doorway. He'd been late for dinner and held a plate in one hand, heaped with mashed potatoes and chicken and peas. “What's going on, pip-squeak?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Rose replied. She snatched Regina up and whipped her behind her back.

“It sounds like a regular ruckus.” Sam licked mashed potatoes off a chicken leg and took a big bite. His gaze traveled the room.

He'd missed dinner the last couple of nights because of baseball practice, so Rose hadn't yet had a chance to show him the doll. This hardly seemed the time for introductions, though.

Sam leaned against the doorjamb, filling the doorway. He was tall and big-shouldered and … Well, everything about him was the giant economy size. He had a bush of tangled curls, very much like Rose's.

His dark eyes searched her face. Clearly he was waiting for a better answer than “nothing.”

Rose tried again. “I was just … ah … I was practicing for the school play. I'm going to be a mouse, you know. One that gets its tail caught in a trap?” And she made her voice high and thin. “What's wrong with you humans?”
she squeaked. “Don't you know better—”

Sam laughed. Rose liked to make her brother laugh. His laugh was deep and as generously sized as he was.

He took another bite of the chicken but didn't take his eyes off her face. “What's that behind your back?” he asked.

“Behind my back?” Rose repeated. Even she could hear how guilty she sounded. Her voice squeaked again on the word
back
.

Sam said nothing. He just put the chicken leg down, wiped his fingers on his pants, and held out his hand. Rose barely hesitated before she gave up. She could often fool her father, sometimes her mother, but never Sam.

“It's just this old doll,” she said. She held Princess Regina out without letting go of her. She hoped the silly thing would stay quiet a bit longer. “I found her in the attic. And I was playing with her, talking for her, you know? The way
little kids
do.” She leaned heavily on
little kids
because she wanted Sam to see how unimportant it all was. Something for little kids, not for a big boy like him.

Princess Regina, for her part, seemed to have entered into the game. She lay rigidly in Rose's hand as if she'd gone to sleep again. Rose was pretty sure the doll was faking. At least she hoped she was.

But instead of glancing at her hand and then away again, Sam leaned close. His eyebrows rose
until they practically vanished into his dark curls. “You've found Princess Regina!” he said.

Rose started to nod, but she stopped cold.
Princess Regina?
Sam had called the doll
Princess Regina
! She hadn't told him the doll's name. She hadn't told
anyone
.

“How do you know she's Princess Regina?” Rose demanded.

“The same way you know, I'm sure,” he replied. “
She
told me.”

Rose was going to set the record straight. The doll hadn't given herself the name. Rose had come up with it herself!

But before she could, the princess sat up in Rose's hand. She looked at Sam and cried, “Why, Sammy! Just look at you. You've gotten to be enormous!”

“Prickly as a Porcupine”

The three of them sat together in the middle of the floor, talking. Rose told Sam everything while Princess Regina kept interrupting.

Rose told Sam how she'd found the doll in the bottom of the trunk.

Princess Regina said, “I don't know what took you so long. You humans are so slow. I must have been in that stuffy trunk forever.”

Rose told about the way her mother's hand
and hers had knocked into one another, sending the doll over the banister.

Princess Regina cried, “You dropped me? You mean you actually dropped me? What a klutz! You're lucky I wasn't broken.”

(Rose wondered why
she
was the lucky one. After all, it was
Regina
who didn't get broken.)

Rose told Sam about taking the doll to school for show-and-tell and about how she decided not to show her after all.

Princess Regina said, “What a shame. I'm sure the children would have been impressed.”

Then Rose explained how Regina came alive in her hand as she ran out of the classroom.

Princess Regina added, “And she was crying. Would you believe it? I thought I was going to drown in her stupid tears.”

Now Rose got to the part about naming the doll. While she was telling that, a thought
struck her. “The name I gave her—Princess Regina—it came from you!”

“No.” Sam grinned. “It came from
her.
” He nodded toward the doll, who was perched on the toe of his sneaker. “She told me her name was Princess Regina a long time ago.”

Rose shook her head, trying to clear the jumble of her thoughts. “But,” she pointed out to Sam, “you used to call
me
that!”

Sam shrugged. “What can I say? I'm not good at making things up the way you are. I named you after the only other princess I knew.”

“And then I gave the name back to her!” Rose said, amazed at the circle of events.

“I told you,” Princess Regina said. “You didn't
give
me anything. Don't you think I know my own name?” And she went on like that.

(You and I know, of course, that when Regina first woke she had forgotten her name
entirely. So Rose actually
did
give it to her, even if the name had belonged to her before. But you can bet the princess would never admit that.)

Rose shook her head and smiled at Sam over the fuming doll. He grinned back.

Rose loved her brother so much that sometimes just looking at him made her heart ache.

“How did you know about the doll?” she asked finally. “Did you find her in the attic, too?”

Sam touched Princess Regina's spun-gold hair. “Mom gave her to me,” he said, “when I was a little kid. Younger than you. I'm sure she'd been hoping to have a daughter to give her to. But she'd been waiting a long time. I guess she decided I'd have to do.”

Rose ducked her head. She loved thinking about her mother hoping for her, waiting for her. She wasn't sure she had lived up to all that waiting and hoping, though … or ever would.

Then she thought about the fact that Hazel had given Princess Regina to Sam when he was younger than she was now. And yet she had never brought the doll out for her. Even when Rose had found Regina in the attic, her mother had clearly not wanted her to have her.

Rose shook those thoughts away. To Sam she said, “So Princess Regina came awake for you, too?”

“No,” he said. “Not at first. When Mom gave her to me, she was just a doll. And I wasn't much interested in dolls, you know?”

Rose grinned. The very thought of her big brother playing with a tiny china doll was funny.

“I played with her a little bit,” he said. “I used to give her rides in my race cars when they were going very slowly … no crashes. Then I put her on a shelf in my room so nothing bad would happen to her. I knew she was important to Mom. I didn't pay much attention to her after that until …” But he didn't say until when.

Rose stared up into Sam's face. “What happened?” she asked.

Sam lifted his great shoulders and let them fall again. “I'm not sure. One afternoon I had a fight with my buddy Brian. A pretty bad one. Fists and a bloody nose. Brian's nose, not mine.”

He stopped as if he wasn't going to say more, but when neither Rose nor Regina spoke, he started again. “I came home to hole up in my room, and I took the doll off the shelf. I don't know why, exactly. I was feeling awful, and I just needed something to mess with. I guess I was kind of blubbering. Then—I never knew what happened—there she was, talking to me, walking all over me, telling me what to do and how to do it. I was …”

He stopped, looked hard at Regina, and let out a low laugh. “
Surprised
isn't a big enough word for what I was. I never understood how it happened. All I knew was that I was there, alone in my room feeling pretty bad, and suddenly I had this big
secret
. The little doll Mom had trusted to me could move. She could talk, too! Yell, actually.”

Rose could see the moment exactly. Hadn't it happened to her in almost the same way? She loved that! She and her big brother shared a secret, the best secret ever!

“I couldn't tell anybody,” Sam said. “I sure couldn't go back to school and tell my buddies that I had a little dolly at home that walked and talked.” He ran his fingers through his curls and shook his head. “I almost told Mom, but then … Well, what could I say? ‘This little doll you gave me, she's a princess, you know'…? I didn't think even Mom would …”