Alice much ado about nothing”'s Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Alice noticed her dress first. The blue was gone. Only the pencil lines remained, the way a drawing looks before someone fills it in. She stood in a clearing of inky trees with a black flamingo tucked under her arm. The flamingo blinked at her, slow and certain. Harrietta the White Rabbit waited a few steps ahead, ears twitching, eyes flicking back to check that Alice was still following. Alice was not sure why she had agreed to help a rabbit find her way home. She had only been pulled from a book an hour ago. Her best skill, she would tell anyone who asked, was leaving places she should not have entered. She had not figured out how to leave this one. The first poster was nailed to a striped tree. A girl's face crossed out in red paint. NO ALICE'S in fat white letters. Alice pulled it down. Behind it was another. Behind that, three more. She walked further and found a whole wall of them papering the side of a purple frosting shop. A raven watched from the eaves, then flew off toward a tall tower in the distance. At the cobblestone square, strangers had gathered around a wooden notice board. A sign on it read: the only rules. Alice is nonexistent. you not see her because she is not really there. A girl with long hair stood at a counter mixing batter for a cake. Alice asked for a slice. The girl kept stirring. Alice waved her hand in front of the girl's face. Nothing. At the tea table, no one set out a chair. A flock of winged books burst overhead, swerved around Alice, and crashed into a teacup fountain instead. Even the books refused to hit her. A purple cat sat on the branch above the table, tail swishing. "Don't bother," Chester said. His grin did not move. "Posters say no. World agrees. Tidy." Alice held up her sketched sleeve. "I'm standing here." "Standing isn't being," Chester said. "Ask the sign." He blinked one yellow eye, one green, and was gone. Harrietta tugged at Alice's hem. The rabbit's face had that look again, the one that expected Alice to fix it and doubted she could. Alice walked past the square, past the pools of black ink, until the noise thinned. In a quiet corner behind a hedge, she set the flamingo down. She gathered fallen pages, white rose vines, and a few stones. She built walls. She built a door. By the time she stepped back, a small dark blue cottage stood there, wrapped in white roses, with a crooked spire on top. The blue of it was the blue her dress used to be. Alice carried the flamingo inside and shut the door. The posters could not reach her here. She was somewhere now. That was a start. Outside, Harrietta sat on the step and waited, because the cottage was Alice's proof, not hers, and the way home was still missing.