UnEnchanted Read online

  Chapter 4

  Mina couldn’t believe she was doing this. She must be completely insane and the only reason she decided to go through with it was because she heard a rumor through the grapevine that Brody was staying after school for a polo meeting.

  So if Mina rode her bike like a madman straight to the Carmichael’s residence, she could drop off the folder and ride out without seeing him. So Mina did just that. It was a fifteen minute bike ride to Sunset Drive and she was winded by the time she drove up to the palatial estate. Every house, including Brody’s, was surrounded by tall walls and heavy iron gates. Mina was unsure what to expect when she pedaled over to the call box and hit the green button.

  “No solicitors,” a voice rattled through the high tech electronic speaker. Mina looked around in surprise to see that next to the gate was a camera that turned and zoomed in on her.

  Mina pushed the speaker button and leaned in. “Um, I’m dropping off an information packet for Happy Maids for my mother. We were told to bring it by this afternoon.” The voice didn’t come back on right away. Mina assumed it was because whoever was working the voice box was checking with the Carmichael's.

  “Name?”

  “Mina Grime.”

  “Enter. Stay on the path. Don’t ride that thing on the grass!” He must have been referring to her bike, but it was her only mode of transportation and she thought it deserved more recognition then thing.

  The giant iron gates swung inward and Mina rode up the driveway, mesmerized by the extravagance that money provided. What she originally thought was the main house turned out to be the garage, which housed the family’s vehicles. Mina’s whole family plus the Wong’s and the apartments next to hers could all live comfortably in the Carmichael’s garage.

  The main house sat back from the street, three stories tall with a terracotta roof. Majestic statues of horses were scattered throughout the estate and Mina could see gardeners trimming hedges and mowing the manicured grass. Behind the estate were obvious training yards and stables for the Carmichael’s horses. Their prized race horses were probably at another facility.

  This was the first time that Mina actually felt the effects of her family’s small income in comparison to others. She didn’t really care about money but when it came to someone she liked, she understood the phrase "out of her league."

  Mina was embarrassed when she got to the steps of the main house and couldn’t find a solution as to where to leave her bike. With the kick stand broken Mina, tried to lean it against a pillar and got a heated look from a maid, she then went to lean it against a bush and received a horrified stare from the gardener. Giving up, Mina let it lay in the driveway, its back wheel spinning pathetically.

  She took the front steps two a time and found herself at huge mahogany double doors with a silver mustang knocker. Mina was almost tempted to leave the packet in front of the doors and run. Knocking, Mina decided she would count to ten Mississippi’s and if no one answered she would do just that. She only got to seven when the door opened and Mrs. Carmichael herself answered.

  She knew who it was because she recognized the soft eyes and elegant smile from the tabloid magazines. There was almost always a picture of the husband and wife and her signature pearls and perfect coif, in every month’s issue.

  “Yes?” she asked sweetly.

  “Hi, I’m Mina, and I’m supposed to deliver this Happy Maids packet on behalf of my mom.” Mina thrust the packet toward Mrs. Carmichael, hoping to get this delivery over with. Mrs. Carmichael wasn’t cooperating because she didn’t take the packet.

  “I’m sorry what?” Her brow furrowed in confusion.

  “My mother’s boss, Terry Goodmother of Happy Maid’s said you requested an informational packet dropped off and I’m doing it for them.” As Mina was relaying the story, Mrs. Carmichael still looked confused, and she had a sinking feeling that this was a huge mistake. “I’m sorry; I must have the wrong residence.” Mina turned in embarrassment.

  “Wait! What was your name again?” She called out. Her eyes softened with compassion. Or it could have been pity.

  Mina had made it to the bottom steps and turned to look back up at Mrs. Carmichael. “I’m Mina Grime.”

  “You’re the one who saved Brody!” Her confusion disappeared and her face lit with happiness. “We have much to thank you for…WATCH OUT!” She screamed.

  Mina heard a sickening crunch of metal on metal and turned to see her bike crushed to smithereens beneath the wheels of a silver Camaro. “MY BIKE!” Mina groaned.

  “BRODY!” Mrs. Carmichael yelled simultaneously.

  Mina froze, she didn’t know what was worse, facing her long time crush with a brown chocolate milk stain on her jacket or the fact that he just run over her pathetic bike with his expensive sports car.

  The driver door opened and a shocked Brody jumped out of the car. “Mina, I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

  He wasn’t expecting her to be on his front doorstep. Brody hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Mina all day. It was pure torture for him to watch her during the school assembly. It was obvious the reporters were making her uncomfortable and he was helpless to do anything. Too bad the reporting ban his parents had on him didn’t extend to her.

  Brody had been so preoccupied with trying to find a way to talk to Mina that he couldn’t focus and decided to blow off the polo meeting and go home. He wasn’t expecting to see the vision of his daydreams standing in his own driveway speaking with his mother. It was as if fate had brought them together. He was so distracted by the mere sight of her that he didn’t even realize what he had done until it was too late. He destroyed her bike, and by the look on her pale face he had destroyed any chance he had of trying to befriend her.

  Mortified that Brody ran over her bike and embarrassed by her lack of reason for being at his house, Mina could only think of one thing to do. Run.

  It was obviously a terrible mistake that had sent her to the Carmichael’s house, and it was a cruel twist of fate that Brody drove up and crushed her red bike. It was even more embarrassing because it was a bike. Maybe if he drove up and hit her car, it wouldn’t have seemed so pathetic. But all Mina could think about was that he would ask his mother why she was there, and it would seem like she was stalking him. It wasn’t until Mina had reached the opened main gates and ran through them that she realized she had dropped the info packet on the ground. Oh, no! He would know that her mom cleaned houses for a living.

  Mina heard someone call her name, but she ignored it and turned the corner. While she ran, tears formed in her eyes and the cold wind swept them away. She wanted to die of embarrassment. Everyone at school would hear about how Mina made up some excuse to stalk Brody at his own house. How she made up a fake pamphlet so she could check out Brody. How she was so desperate and poor that she rode her old broken bicycle up to the mansion and that it was crushed like tin foil beneath the wheels of Brody’s expensive car.

  If Mina was a stronger person she would have confronted him about the bike, but when her whole reason for being there seemed fabricated, she lost her resolve. Mina couldn’t do it, so she ran and left her bike.

  It took Mina fifteen minutes to ride to the Carmichael’s house on her bike from school. It took Mina an hour to walk home from the Carmichael's. She was tired, sore and grateful that the rain had stopped shortly after sixth period. She couldn’t imagine making this walk home in the rain.

  Mrs. Wong spotted Mina walking past her restaurant and she called out to her. “Woo Hoo! Meeenha. I seen you in pahper today. You beeg celebrity.” She walked out bobbing her head holding a newspaper with a picture of Mina splattered across the front page.

  The paper was from this morning before the assembly and since they didn’t have any photos of Mina when they ran it, they used Mina’s high school yearbook picture. Mina grabbed the paper and stared at it in shock. It was the worst photo of Mina in school history. Mina remembered that horrible school picture day. Mina had attempted to wear mak
eup, even put her hair in rollers so it would look like Savannah White’s and had tried to wear something other than her signature hoody, but the fates were against her that day. Sara got a flat tire so Mina had to ride her bike, and it had rained. Mina’s makeup, curls and clothes were drenched for the photo shoot.

  “Oh no!” Mina grabbed the paper and crumpled it up. “Has my mom seen this?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Wong smiled proudly. “I show her as soon as she got home. See!” she pointed to the front window of her restaurant where she had diligently cut out the pictures of Mina’s face and had made a collage as a giant display. “I advertise we have big star, living above us. Good for beeznis. I bought every pahper from store for miles.” Sure enough there were five stacks of newspapers piled neatly against the red and gold door. “Everyone that eats here tonight gets complementary free sample and pahper. Beeznis is dooming.”

  Mina groaned and handed the paper back to Mrs. Wong. “You mean booming?”

  “Thaht’s wat I said, dooming.” Mrs. Wong smiled, her eyes disappearing behind her cheeks.

  Mina trudged up the stairs and unlocked the door to their flat. The neat and tidy apartment looked as if a storm had blown through. “MOM!” Mina called out. Worried something had happened.

  Sara tore out of her bedroom with armloads of clothes and a wild look in her eye. She dumped them into an open suitcase on their kitchen table and turned and pointed at Mina. “YOU! GO PACK!”

  “Mom, why? What’s going on?” Mina cried frantically.

  “Don’t you Mom me.” Sara looked panicked. “Do as I say, we are leaving.” She flipped the lid on the suitcase and zipped it. Mina grabbed the suitcase from her mother and they tugged on it until Mina won.

  “No, I’m not packing unless you tell me why?” Mina argued.

  “Mina, we have too. It’s for your own good.” Sara’s eyes were red rimmed from crying.

  “That may have worked on me when I was younger, but not anymore. Charlie will listen to you without arguing, but I won’t. What’s good for me is to stay here. I have friends, well a friend.” For a split second Mina actually decided that moving across country wouldn’t be such a bad idea anyway, after the terrible last two days. But one look at the nervous wreck her mother had become in such a few short hours gave Mina the determination and strength she needed to make it through whatever disaster was about to unfold on them.

  “You are still my daughter and you will listen to your mother.” Sara turned on Mina and put her hands on her hips, trying to instill whatever authority she could into her voice to sway her stubborn teenage daughter.

  “Yes Mother, I will listen to you gladly, and do whatever you tell me to, AFTER you explain why we are moving.” Mina was an obedient daughter but she was also old enough now to shoulder some of the burden that plagued her mother. “Tell me why we keep running. I can help. Don’t you think I need to know?” Mina pleaded.

  Sara’s eyes closed and her shoulders dropped toward the floor as if they carried the weight of the world, or at least one teenager. “I told you, it’s for your own good.”

  “Is this because of the newspaper article? About what happened on the field trip?”

  Sara didn’t say anything. Her silence was the only answer Mina needed.

  “It’s because I saved someone’s life isn’t it.” Mina challenged. It was starting to make sense; a click went on in her brain that connected the pieces together. “You always discouraged me from trying out for sports, and clubs. You encouraged me to not stand out and try to fit in, to not get noticed, to be a loser. You always feared something terrible would happen to me, but that wasn’t all of it was it?”

  Charlie walked into the kitchen with a small blue leather suitcase and began inserting his most prized possessions; bubblegum, baseball cards, his rock collection. From a distance, there didn’t look to be any item of actual clothing or shoes. Ignoring the discussion between his mother and sister, Charlie pandered around the kitchen and began to pack up his cereals.

  “But I finally accomplish something. I do something great like save a life and for one day I’m a hero. Granted I hate being in the limelight and the center of attention but that’s it, isn’t it. You were afraid for something like this?”

  Sara sighed and collapsed down onto a kitchen chair. She rubbed her small hands over her face in anxiousness. “Yes. I was trying to keep you from greatness.”

  Mina stood motionless, confused and angry. “That doesn’t make sense. Isn't that the exact opposite of what mothers are supposed to say? Don't you want me to succeed?”

  “Our family was meant for greatness, and if I could keep you away from the spotlight, if I could keep you out of public eye and hidden, then maybe I could outrun it.”

  “I don’t understand?” Mina began to shiver as a cold breeze wafted through the room.

  “You are right. You are old enough to know the truth, to share the burden.” Sara waited until Charlie had left the kitchen and headed for a second round of favorite objects to pack away. “Mina, I’ve lied to you about your name, about everything. Our last name isn’t Grime, it’s Grimm and for as long as I could remember, we’ve been trying to outrun it.

  “Outrun what exactly?”

  “Outrun what killed your father years ago….the Grimm curse”

  Chapter 5

  Mina felt as if her world was spinning. Sara jumped from her chair to grab her daughter and led her to the small uncomfortable couch in the living room. Mina sat there unmoving, trying to comprehend what her mother said. Sara returned with a hot cup of earl grey tea.

  Mina was about to ask more questions but Sara held up her hand to stop her. “Please sweetie, let me explain.” Taking a deep breath Sara tried to gather her thoughts before proceeding. “It goes farther back to your great great great grandfather Wilhelm Grimm and his brother Jacob.”

  “Do you mean the brothers, the ones who wrote the fairy tales?” Mina asked skeptically.

  “Yes, the very same. And no, they didn’t write all of them, they collected them and wrote them down. But more importantly, they actually survived the tales. It’s part of the curse that plagues the Grimm family. Each generation is cursed, chosen, fated to relive the tales. It is why the tales keep changing throughout history, because another’s action or decision changes the outcome.”

  “Do you mean like Cinderella doesn’t always get the prince?” Mina felt this was too much to believe, so it was easier to make fun of it than not.

  “This is serious, but yes. More often than not, the stepsisters do,” Sara argued.

  “Oh, come on Mom. You really believe this stuff. This is what is making you pick up and run. Why not try and get the prince and live in the castle?”

  “Because that’s not how it works.” Sara looked frustrated; she kept gnawing on her bottom lip as she pondered her words carefully. “You don’t get a choice in the tale, you don’t get a choice in the part you play and if you remember they are not all happy endings. Do you think everyone could survive reliving these tales? Your Uncle Jack didn’t.”

  Mina’s jaw dropped in shock. “But I thought that it was an accident?”

  Sara shook her head. “The curse followed your Uncle and then when he died it latched onto your father. Strange things started happening and he ignored the warning signs. He believed that he was smarter and stronger than his brother and could make it through the till the end.”

  Is there a way to stop it, to break the Grimm curse?”

  “It’s believed that if a descendent of a Grimm can survive all of the tales then the Story will be satisfied and the power of it will be broken. Your father survived ten tales before he died.” Sara started crying and buried her face into the couch throw pillow.

  Mina felt her mouth go dry and she had to lick her lips and clear her throat before she could ask the next question. “How many tales are there total?”

  Sara looked up, sniffed and then looked over at her daughter and her heart ached. “Oh sweetie, I won’t l
et it find you; it’s why I changed our last name and why we keep moving. Every time we move, it seems to takes longer for the power of the tale to find us, even longer if we don’t do anything special to get ourselves noticed.”

  “How many?” Mina repeated feeling the strange tingling sensation throughout her body.

  Sara reached for Mina’s hands, clasping them. “We don’t have to stay. We can keep running and it won’t drag you into the tale. You won’t suffer the same fate as the rest of the Grimm family.”

  Mina stared at her mother hard.

  Sara avoided making eye contact and whispered out. “Over 200. Jacob and Wilhelm together made it through over 190 but they couldn't complete all of them before they died. So then it started over again with Wilhelm’s children. Honey, they were the only ones to even come close to breaking the Grimm curse and that was almost 200 years ago. More Grimm’s have tried to overcome it, but didn’t survive, like your father. So I decided to try and run from it instead.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to run.”

  “Mina, we have to. I was hoping that the Story wouldn’t want you because you were a girl and a child. After your father died, it seemed we were safe because it left us alone for a few years. But then you always were gifted and kind-hearted and wanted to help others, so it kept finding you. It was the day I saw you in the backyard talking to a frog, that I realized I was wrong. Too many of the fairy tales had a female heroine.”

  “You make it sound as if it’s alive?”

  “It is. There is something far greater at work here than what the human mind can process. It’s ancient, it’s old, and it’s powerful. Some say it’s God, others say it’s fate, but whatever it is, it can’t be stopped.”

  “What about Charlie?” Mina asked worriedly. Her brother was back in the kitchen and this time he was putting on every single piece of costume he owned; layer after layer. A Spiderman suit, batman’s utility belt, and what looked to even be a Dr. Who scarf and hat.

  “So far the story isn’t interested in Charlie, not when it has you.”