Tangled in Time Read online

  Dedication

  For Fran Forman, who through her art breathes light and air

  into my word dreams in this story

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Greenhouse

  Chapter 1: Bow Ties and Truth

  Chapter 2: Dirt Memory

  Chapter 3: The Court of the Mean Queens

  Chapter 4: “I Don’t Exactly Hate You . . .”

  Chapter 5: “You Are Mine”

  Chapter 6: The Man in the Ruff

  The Locket

  Chapter 7: Ambush!

  Chapter 8: The Diary

  Chapter 9: Thrifting

  Chapter 10: “She Stole It!”

  Chapter 11: “Princesses Aren’t Supposed to Steal”

  Chapter 12: Untangling Time

  Chapter 13: Nasty Ice

  Chapter 14: The TARDIS

  Chapter 15: A Touch in Time

  Chapter 16: A Pocket in Time

  A Prince

  Chapter 17: Greenwich Palace

  Chapter 18: “Girl, Why Are You Sleeping?”

  Chapter 19: Raiding Gran’s Closet

  Chapter 20: A Dream of Friendship

  Chapter 21: Shattered Glass

  Chapter 22: “Shame on You, Princess!”

  Chapter 23: A Question for Edward

  Chapter 24: A Cruel Game

  Chapter 25: When You Made Me the Rose

  Chapter 26: The Marks of September

  Chapter 27: A Confession

  Chapter 28: Radishes and Jane’s Shoes

  Chapter 29: A Blade of Light, a Rose Blooms

  Chapter 30: The King, Minus a Few Parts

  Chapter 31: “Imagine That, September”

  Chapter 32: Dragon Slaying and Other Sports

  Chapter 33: A Heartbeat Skipped

  Chapter 34: “Just Say Her Father”

  Chapter 35: A Glimpse

  Chapter 36: The Damask Circle

  Chapter 37: Three Awful Girls

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Kathryn Lasky

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  * * *

  THE PHILADELPHIA POST

  Fashion and Style

  Fashion World Takes Note of Tween Philly Blogger

  by Uta Bradford

  “I’m tall for my age,” says middle school student Rose Ashley.

  Indeed she is. At five feet, six and a half inches tall, the suburban sixth grader does appear somewhat older than her eleven years. But don’t let that fool you. Through years of scouring thrift stores—or “thrifting,” as she calls it—she has discovered fashion treasures that she adapts to her own style, which Rose describes as funk meets vintage. Thrifting, she is careful to note, is not yet an Olympic sport, but should be. “Much less expensive than all those gymnastic and ice-skating coaches.” She pulls out a boxy jacket she picked up for five dollars. “Christian Dior—so it had a few moth holes. I thought, you know, I can work around that.”

  And she certainly can. A self-taught expert seamstress, she has yet to find anything she can’t fix or sew from scratch. Her mom, real estate agent Rosemary Ashley, bought her an electronic sewing machine that Rose calls the Millennium Falcon of sewing machines.

  On her blog, Threads, she shares snappy observations on fashion, pop culture, and sewing. The site is peppered with photos of herself and her friends wearing some of her more outlandish getups. Rose’s following is building, with 20,000 readers each day.

  * * *

  The Greenhouse

  Chapter 1

  Bow Ties and Truth

  Rose Ashley stood in the middle of the circle as the three girls spun around her. She clamped her eyes shut and tried to block out their jeering faces. The girls took turns picking apart Rose’s carefully composed outfit.

  “What’s with the bow tie?”

  “And the shirt! My little brother wears a shirt like that.”

  “Are you a man or something?”

  “Maybe a Cub Scout. The shirt has those flap pockets with the snap buttons. Any badges?” hooted the one with the little brother.

  Rose cringed. Did this have something to do with her fashion blog? But she hadn’t posted anything in over a month. How would they have found out about Threads? Of course the article had come out in the Philadelphia newspaper, but who read that paper in Indianapolis? Oh! And she’d forgotten the YouTube thing. “How to Raid Your Mom’s Closet, or 75 Scarves She Never Wears and What to Do with Them.” That had led into a mess of crafty projects, including the bow ties.

  That scarf video had received more hits than anything she’d ever done. Following that, the bow tie of the month club on her blog really took off. Everyone was emailing wanting the instructions for how to make one. She even wrote an essay for school: “Not Just for Guys—Bow Ties.” Within a month, the entire girl population of her middle school was wearing them. But that was in Haverford, near Philadelphia, on the East Coast. This was Indiana, smack-dab in the middle of the country. And these girls had somehow targeted her.

  The girl with a bright neon-blue streak in her hair took a step closer. Her name was Carrie. She was short, squat really, and reminded Rose of a pug with a bad personality. Narrowing her eyes, Carrie took a deep breath.

  “I know! Let’s play the truth game with her. Find out who or what she really is!”

  “Yeah, think of this as the Circle of Truth—we get the facts!” Rose thought this one’s name was Brianna.

  Rose touched the bow tie nervously. She loved it. It was pale blue with little white daisies. She had made it herself from some scraps of material and tied it bat-wing style.

  “Oh, bow ties not for guys—we get it!” Carrie said in the snarkiest voice imaginable. So they had seen the blog! “What else did you find in your mama’s closet?”

  But before she could answer, the third girl spoke up. “Never mind. Enough about the blog and the stupid YouTube videos.” This was Lisa. Very pretty. She had a sequin pasted onto her left eyebrow that pranced up to her hairline as spoke. She also had the deepest dimples Rose had ever seen. Flashing them constantly, she took a step closer. “You’re not exactly Mia Ryles.”

  Mia Ryles! Rose nearly gagged. Mia was the thirteen-year-old YouTube sensation who was the complete creation of her fanatical mom, Monica Ryles. Talk about glitter! Mia was obviously Lisa’s inspiration. Her mom had rocketed Mia into multiplatform deals with everything from social media to hair products to fashion. The fashion was ghastly in Rose’s mind. She called it the baby-doll-cheerleader look.

  “Okay, Rose, are you ready?” Carrie growled. Rose said nothing. It was as if her voice had taken a deep dive inside her. Her mouth was quivering. She felt a hot blister of tears behind her eyelids ready to boil over.

  “For example,” Carrie continued, “when I was little, I peed in the swimming pool and the water turned this color blue.” She pointed to the streak in her hair. Some inspiration, Rose thought. Pee and chlorine! The other two girls were giggling madly.

  “Guess what I did,” Lisa of the glitter said.

  “I don’t know?” Rose croaked.

  “I had a zit once. Once upon a time . . . a long time ago.” She made it sound like a fairy tale. A fairy-tale zit that had escaped from a troll and accidentally landed on a princess’s face.

  “I did too!” Rose blurted out. “And yeah, I peed in a swimming pool once. It was at the Meadow Lark Community Swimming Pool and . . .”

  “Don’t talk!” Brianna roared. Rose knew that some might think that Brianna was beautiful in that skinny fashion-model way, but her eyes were too small and it gave her, in Rose’s opinion, a kind of rodenty appearance. It looked as if she were always seeking out crumbs or the tiniest bits of food, or more likely gossip. What kind of rodent? Rose didn’t ponder this too long. But definitely a rodent—rat, mouse, vole, whatever. A creature of the underground. Her hair was skinned back in a ponytail that made her tiny face look so sharp it might cut something. Like blades! Rose thought. She had heard that Brianna was a champion ice-skater.

  She leaned in toward Rose. Something toxic seemed to leak from her eyes. “Carrie does the talking. Asks the questions,” she snapped.

  “Right, Brianna. Thank you for recognizing that. I am the questioner.”

  Inquisitor is more like it, Rose thought.

  “So what happened to your mom?” asked Carrie.

  “She died.”

  “Your dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Carrie stuck her head forward as if she was trying to ferret out every tidbit of information. She was still shorter, much shorter than Rose. “Divorced? He abandoned you? Ran off with a prettier lady than your mom? Or dead too?”

  Rose gasped. This was too awful. It was only her second day of school. They had obviously done their homework on her, finding Threads and then her YouTube stuff. She could never have imagined such a start to the school year. This was one for Guinness World Records. Rose was no stranger to first days in a new school. She and her mom had moved around so much she was practically a professional at first days! Her mom had been a real estate agent in Philadelphia. And for her mother, new houses were investments. After she moved into them, she would fix them up and sell them. She was a serial renovator. New houses in new neighborhoods had never really bothered Rose. Her mom always said, “I don’t sell homes. I sell houses. Home isn’t four walls and a roof. Home is you and me.”

  For her second day at this
new school, Rose had put together the perfect ensemble. The first day she hadn’t done anything too wild. Just an old shirt of her mom’s and leggings. A few months before, she had made a belt to wear with the shirt from all the lanyards she had woven in summer camp. One sixth grader had even admired it. The outfit was low-key. Her outfit today, however, was hardly outrageous. Bow ties and boys’ collared shirts were so in right now. Or so she had thought. She had felt confident.

  But today they had reshuffled the homeroom assignments, and she was put in with the three meanest girls in the entire school. Every school has its mean girls, but usually Rose managed to dodge them. These three seemed particularly vicious. Like mythical creatures, harpies perhaps, with human heads and bodies but the wings and talons of predatory birds. She was their prey. Fresh blood.

  Yes, it all fits, Rose thought.

  Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rose—Rose Ashley. And over three weeks ago, she became an instant orphan when her mom was killed in a car crash. Now she’s surrounded by three of the most horrible girls—pardon, harpies—in a new school, in a new city, living with a grandmother she barely knows.

  Their game was about to begin again. Rose hardly had time to pick up her backpack and flee when there was a screech from one of the girls. Rose looked up just as a boy in an electric wheelchair came crashing into the middle of the circle.

  “Sorry, coming through. Didn’t mean to crash into you, Brianna.”

  “Just buzz off, Creepo Palsy,” Brianna sneered. Rose was shocked. It was a terrible thing to say. Her new homeroom teacher, Mr. Ross, had already told her that she would be sitting behind the boy in the wheelchair, Myles, who had cerebral palsy.

  “Learn how to drive!” Carrie shouted. She gave Rose a sharp look and then the girls scattered, like flies shooed off food at a picnic.

  “Uh . . . thanks,” Rose said to the boy. “You’re Myles, aren’t you?” He wore very cool, squarish glasses. The lenses were thick and seemed to magnify his dark brown eyes. Shaggy black bangs fell across his forehead. He was cute—“a handsome lad,” her mom might have said. Or if he had been a girl, “comely.” Her mom had a penchant for old-fashioned phrases.

  “Yes,” Myles said. “The student in the wheelchair. My reputation precedes me.” His head wobbled a bit as he shifted slightly. His left hand was bent inward and appeared immobile. His right hand hovered over the chair’s controls, the fingers open and relaxed. “And you’re Rose Ashley. The new student.” His speech was thick, like cake batter, as if his tongue had to scrape and push the sentences out of his mouth.

  “Uh . . . yeah, I’m Rose, and thanks for c-crashing into them.” The very word was hard for her to say since her mom’s accident. She hadn’t been allowed to watch the news that night or in the days that followed the accident. Caroline, her mom’s friend from work, stayed with her until they could figure out where Rose was to live. She had unplugged and hidden the cable box, so Rose wouldn’t hear about the crash on television. But Rose still heard snippets of the phone calls whenever Caroline thought she was sleeping: “Engulfed in flames . . . died instantly . . . no remains.”

  I’m sort of a remain, Rose thought. In her mom’s will, it said that Rose was to go to her grandmother’s house if something ever happened to her and that proceeds from the sale of the house were to go to Rose.

  “Yeah, Myles. You showed up at the right time.”

  “My pleasure,” Myles said.

  Rose looked off toward the girls, who had retreated to another corner of the schoolyard.

  “The girl with the ponytail—she’s Brianna, right?”

  “Yeah, but the real ringleader is Carrie. The short one with the streak in her hair. Kind of the Cruella de Vil look, except the streak is blue and not white. She thinks it’s cool and ‘creative.’ NOT. And that’s Lisa. Uh . . . not much to say about her except she likes sequins, glitter. Sparkle on the outside. Dim on the inside.” Myles tapped his head. “But she is a good horseback rider. Watch out for her spurs.” He laughed. The chuckles sounded a bit like bubbles breaking through water.

  Just then, the bell rang. He gave a jaunty salute with his right hand, then buzzed off in his wheelchair.

  Rose was standing alone now. So alone. If her mom were alive, she would have gone home and told her about these obnoxious girls. And her mom would’ve said something like “Oh there’s always kids like that. . . .” And maybe told her about some bully from her own school days. And Rose would’ve whined and said, “You don’t get it, Mom.” But now there was no mom to try to understand her. There was no mom for her to whine to. “Puleeze, Mom, gimme a break. Things have changed since your day.”

  There simply was no mom.

  The Philadelphia house had sold quickly, and the very next day Rose was bundled up like some sort of package and put on a flight to Indianapolis to live with her grandmother, Rosalinda. Caroline came with her to help “settle her in.” But there was no settling in to speak of. Rose felt entirely adrift.

  That first night she had been too tired, too shocked, too sad, too everything to even eat. So Rosalinda’s live-in cook sent dinner upstairs to her bedroom. But she just pushed the food around on her plate.

  The next night she came downstairs when called and was surprised to find that she was to eat alone. Caroline had already left.

  “Where’s my grandmother?” she asked Betty, Rosalinda’s caretaker.

  “She likes her supper in the greenhouse,” Betty answered. For the next twelve days before school started, this was how it went: Rose ate alone, her grandmother treated her with general indifference, and no one mentioned her mom. If Rosalinda was bothered by the death of her daughter, she didn’t show it. The one time any mention of Rose’s mother did come up was when Rose came out of the bathroom one evening and ran straight into Betty and Rosalinda.

  “Betty,” Rosalinda said, turning to the caretaker, “am I upstairs or downstairs, and who’s this young girl? She looks so much like my daughter.”

  “She’s Rosemary’s daughter—your granddaughter, Rose,” Betty answered, giving Rose an apologetic look. She pointed to a picture in a frame on a table. It was the one taken on a beach in Florida. Rose was just five or six at the most. In the photograph, Rose was wearing a bathing suit with mermaids on it and leaning up against her mother. Her mom wore a bathing suit that she called a mom-kini, as it was fairly modest. “She’s almost all grown up now, Mrs. A, but just a little girl in that picture.”

  “Oh yes,” Rosalinda answered. Rose looked up hopefully, but only for a moment. “I remember I had a daughter or a granddaughter once. I think I misplaced them.” She giggled as if she were describing a missing remote from a television—oh dear, where did that remote go?

  “Misplaced” was the perfect word, Rose thought. It seemed to Rose as if her father must have been misplaced as well. She had learned quickly as a child not to ask about him. Whenever she did, a strange mist that was not quite tears came to her mother’s eyes, and a sadness seemed to cling to the air. Her mother appeared to nearly dissolve into some distant place beyond anything Rose knew.

  Rose felt very “misplaced” now as she returned to her grandmother’s after her second day of school. Rosalinda lived in a stucco house that presided over the corner of two tree-lined streets. It was so different from the neighborhood where Rose had lived with her mom. They had lived on Sylvan Lane in a suburb of Philadelphia. Her mom joked that Sylvan as a name was wishful thinking, since it did not have a tree on it. All the houses had been built in the past ten years and were for the most part boxy, brick, one-story ranch-style houses with garages that took up a third of the lot. The lawns were severe squares of green grass with fiercely trimmed shrubs that stood at attention. But Rose liked it. It was home.

  Her grandmother’s house was on the corner of Meridian and Forty-Sixth Street. It was a neighborhood of stately houses, and though Rosalinda’s was no more or less grand than the next, it had an otherworldly feel about it, as though it belonged to another time, another place. Ivy crawled up the walls, forming a patchwork of green against the pale yellow stucco. It reminded Rose of a map, where the ivy was the sea and the stucco made up the continents. Perhaps it was like one of those very old historical maps that showed monsters swimming through unknown seas with the inscription Here There Be Dragons. But instead: Here There Be Grandmother. Grandmother Rosalinda.