Happily Never After

I wanted to warn them. I wanted to tell them that her sweet words were a lie, everything was. She wasn’t really who she was pretending to be… But then she would flash that smile of hers, and I would start believing in the lie too.

Okay. I’m exaggerating. I knew she wasn’t really Princess Iris – the newest in the line of Disney princesses – just as I knew I wasn’t really Quentin, the inventor’s boy who gets dragged on a grand adventure with the princess whom she ends up falling in love with due to his gracious charms and swashbuckling good looks.

I eyed Iris warily from where she sat at the front of the table – it was tea party time – as she posed for a picture. She seemed so innocent in that little pink dress, so so so very innocent until…

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

I fumbled with my teacup, then cleverly shot back, “Your face.”

“Of course,” she replied with a smirk. “I’m beautiful.”

I choked on my tea.

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A little girl materialized before us. “How can I be like you, Princess Iris?”

Iris ruffled the girl’s hair and said, “Just believe in yourself and you can do anything.” I was halfway to an eye roll when Iris added, “Right, Quentin?” and shot a death glare at me.

“Absolutely positively, Princess Iris,” I chimed in on cue. Then let out a manly chortle of manliness and slapped my knee.

The little girl frowned, then whispered to Iris, “Is there something wrong with Quentin? He’s acting all creepy.”

“Quentin spilled some oil down his pants and he’s being grumpy, that’s all,” Iris replied, patting the girl on the shoulder. “Well, he said it was oil but who knows why his pants are wet…but shhh. We don’t want to embarrass him.”

The girl giggled. I fought the temptation to rip off Iris’ wig and throw it across the room. Perhaps into the fake chandelier.

As another family stepped forward, the girl hopped over to my side. “It’s okay if you made an,” she lowered her voice, “accident.” She nodded vigorously. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

Iris snorted.

“You are absolutely right,” I said with gritted teeth.

The girl smiled up at me, a genuine smile, and I felt guilt rumbling in the pit of my stomach.

“I hope your day gets better, Quentin,” she said. And then the guilt bulldozed over me with the force of a thousand Huns being chased down by an avalanche.

“Yeah?” I asked. I tried ruffling her hair like Iris had, but it felt unnatural to me. The girl leaned forward, and I saw Iris watching us curiously.

“Truth is, being the princess looks pretty boring,” the girl said. She poked me on the nose. “I’d rather have fun making things like you, Quentin! You’re my favorite.”

I smiled, a bit out of relief that Quentin wasn’t that much of a loser.

“Okay kid,” I said, relenting. “You wanna take a photo?”

She nodded again, her head bopping up and down. I put my arm around her tiny shoulders as her mom took a quick snapshot.

“You’re my favorite,” Iris mimicked when the girl left. I glared at her, intolerant of any remark she would make next, but she wasn’t smirking or anything as I thought she’d be.

In fact, I was being pretentious. She wasn’t looking at me.

I followed her eyes. Oh.

A dainty glass slipper appeared in the doorway, followed by a loud but infections laugh. The whole room turned all smiles, then thousands of little girls jumped up to hoard the newly arrived sparkly, blonde princess.

“Now now now,” Cinderella said with a shake of her head. “Proper ladies wait in their seats. Sit back down.”

The girls obediently shuffled back to their seats like a flock of sheep.

“Princess Iris,” Cinderella greeted regally. Her Prince, did he have a name?, was a Ken doll by her side, saying nothing but looking great.

Iris stiffened. “Cinderella,” she said.

“And ah…” she paused as she looked over at me. “Hello to you too,” she said. She gave a tinkering laugh, but quickly turned her attention back at Iris. “Your new house is…” pause “lovely. Could use a bit of a touch up here and there, perhaps I could lend a hand and…”

Iris grabbed my arm.

“What?” I asked. She nudged me hard on the ribcage. I wheezed. “What? I’m not looking at her breasts!”

Silence.

“Well, I’m not…”

Iris cut me off with a hard tug, and she laid her head on my shoulder. “Quentin dearest was just telling me about his newest invention. Care to listen?”

I was far too confused, and yet oddly elated, at the moment to understand why she was blatantly lying. Iris kept smiling up at Cinderella – who almost grimaced, but caught herself and smiled. “Of course.” She nudged Her Prince as he pulled out a chair for her to sit in beside me.

To my left, a pale girl pushed a plate of apples away from her. To my right, a red head forked at some crab puffs. I did my best to play the shy, introverted Quentin by staring awkwardly at everyone else and giving sheepish smiles.

“You’re Quentin, right?”

I half-jumped when I realized Cinderella was speaking to me. Then I nodded quickly.

“Fascinating!” she exclaimed. “So you invent things? What kinds of things? I want to hear all about them!”

“Well, I--”

“Your home is… quaint. But, we’ve had our palace for a while now and it’s gorgeous there. You could come visit us anyti-”

“Children,” Iris said suddenly. “How about Cinderella sings us a song? Wouldn’t that be divine?”

Cinderella stopped to look up at Iris. “Certainly,” she answered. A slow smile spread across her face. “But only if Iris sings along.”

“I… couldn’t…” Iris said slowly, but Cinderella had already dragged her up to the front of the room. Cinderella took a deep breath, then trilled out a first full note. The room was completely silent.

Iris joined in the second verse. And then it was… not so silent.

Iris warbled, her voice trembled, her notes wavered. She cleared her throat and tried again, but she still sounded shaky.

The children laughed.

I felt mortified for her, but she continued on – and on and on into the wrong key. Cinderella finished perfectly, but Iris stumbled on the last few notes. She recovered with a smile, pretending like her rendition was meant to be comical. The look of concentration I’d seen on her face told me otherwise.

When the tea party ended, Cinderella pulled Iris aside.

“Princess Iris? Mind if I have a word?”

Iris looked like she minded very much, but she could hardly deny The Queen’s request. Cinderella stepped over to us.

“Iris, are you incapable of carrying a proper tune?”

“I-”

“Princesses are supposed to be perfect. If we don’t set a good example for these girls, what will they have? Absolutely nothing.”

Iris stared at her feet.

“We need to shape them, so that they look, act, and talk like us. That is our job here. And we… Are… are you rolling your eyes at me?” I froze, but then realized Cinderella wasn’t talking to me. “Princess Iris! That is not proper for a…”

“That’s bullshit.” Iris spat loudly, then stomped out the door.

Cinderella sighed. “I can hardly tolerate that girl. Everyday she comes here with such a poor attitude!”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But it’s rude and self-imposing to assume that it’s your job to tell Iris how to do her job. Not proper behavior at all.”

As I reached for the door to follow after Iris, I heard Cinderella chuckle. “Silly boy. We are not our characters.”

--

It wasn’t too hard to find her. She was squatting beside Cinderella’s palace, marking up the side with graffiti using a marker. A newly opened stationary box sat beside her. The way Cinderella’s face on the packaging was ripped in half made me suspicious she’d stolen this from the park.

I sat beside her.

“I know you originally applied for the Cinderella position when you first came here,” I said.

She paused and let out a dry laugh. “That’s funny because I’m nothing like her.” She continued doodling, and I wondered why she was scarily good at drawing what she was drawing.

“Well she is quite beautiful,” I said. Iris glared at me. “And selfless, and kind, and graceful.”

Iris scoffed. “But she isn’t those things for herself. She is those things for the sake of impressing other people. I’m not like that.”

She stopped again, eyes cast to the ground.

“But being selfish is a form of being yourself – in the ugliest, darkest, most vain way possible, but also in the most honest and true,” she finished. And maybe I’m just a really ugly person.

I stared at my hands, my feet, the wall. Anywhere but her face. She looked at me apprehensively, waiting for a counter argument, but I didn’t have one. She’d taken off her wig, and her hair was slightly greasy from being under it. Her make-up had long since faded, and her dress has some grass stains along the hem. She looked nothing like a princess now.

But she looked a whole lot like Iris.

“This whole place is a lie anyway,” I said. “‘Happiest Place on Earth?’ Why do we think that’s true? Because dear old Walt says so, or because we believe him? How can we prove that?”

She blinked at me, and I avoided her eye again.

I pointed at her drawing. “You’re drawing it wrong.” I took the marker from her hand and added one more line. “Done,” I announced. I offered my arm to her. “Shall we return to the palace, princess?”

She smiled.