Love Potion

Don't Try to Shift in Your Pusheen Pyjamas

I woke up with a plunging headache and found myself not between Tilda and Betty on her creaky little bed with the frog blanket over it, but on the plum-purple duvet of a grand four-poster, in a large and splendid bedroom. It had coordinating dark wood furniture in maybe the Edwardian style, and several tall, pointed windows, though curtains were pulled tightly over them. The walls were black stone and the floor, purple carpet. I noticed a thick pair of handcuffs were attached to the wall. Light was provided by several grand metal sconces that are mounted on the walls, casting green light from green flames. Otherwise, the room was mostly greyscale, though every piece of fabric in sight: the duvet, the curtains, the carpet, the Equipool banner: were the same deep purple, and fringed with elegant gold embroidery. I could have gotten a better look at it but my eyes were unashamedly preoccupied by the luring pale body that curved before me.

"How the hell did you get into my bedroom and what the bloody hell do you want and why are you hugging a bottle and why do you look so absolutely ridiculous?" were the first friendly words that Killian Viper said to me: with his long elder wood wand still pressed firmly into my neck. 

Perhaps I would have acknowledged his hostility if I didn't find this wand-against-neck pressing so stirring. I was positively flustered. Not just because of this this boy leaning over me with his wand at my neck, but the complete and utter shambles of my brain and the billion questions that were popping in my mind like milk over rice krispies - shut up about that simile, I have other things to worry about - had the shift actually worked? Was this a dream? If not, how do I get back to my world? Am I stuck here forever? Will my friends and family forget about me? If I fall asleep now will I wake up back in Tilda's bed? If the shift had worked then why had I ended up here, in this rather private bedroom?

My thoughts were interrupted when Viper furiously shrieked, "Answer me or I hex your head into a chicken right now!"

Yes. Viper. Killian Viper was seriously here and he seriously existed and I was seriously lying in his bed. I could not have possibly dreamt this so realistically. I could smell his very fragrance, the burned mint and earthy embers (and boyish body odor...) that stained his bedsheets and clung to his own, textured skin. Of course it was Viper. He looked just as the book described him - maybe a little different to how I imagined him, but it was him all the same - skin as white as bones, a long, thin body, hooded, slender, and untrusting blue eyes, snappy thin lips with a ridged upper lip that were always sneering, a gaunt face with an equally pointy and equally upturned chin and nose, and platinum hair that flopped meekly over his forehead. If anything, he was less good-looking than the Viper in my mind. But that was the Viper that I romanticised and dreamed about, and in the books, he was not made to be good-looking. He was made to be mean.

"Answer me, you freak!"

And he was certainly being mean right now. As well as scared. Killian Viper was secretly a massive coward, but he hid it well behind his superior and arrogant and 'higher-than-thou' aura. I realised quickly how much I knew about him, and how much he would be freaked out at me if I let on - if any of this ridiculous happening is real at all!

I managed to make out: "Uhhh..." 

He stared at my with rude dubiety. "Well?!"

I could hardly believe how I got here myself. And I didn't much fancy telling Viper the real reason how it happened. "Honestly!" I said, "I don't know what I'm doing here either!"

Viper scoffed. "Yeah, I bet that's right. Not you sneaking in here to steal a peek at the viper's wand of life-"

I snorted loudly. Killian Viper - yes, Killian Viper, good hell, I can't quite believe it, but Killian Viper - snapped his head to me, his features screwed up in a very sour sneer. "Something funny?" 

My face got suddenly and furiously hot. I hadn't decided whether it was a good idea to be snarky with him or not. Ermis and his friends, Erik and Troy, were snarky with him all the time, and that never did them any favours. But, that was because Viper hated them. I guess the only way to get on Viper's good side is if he decides to like you. And me, a stranger looking 'absolutely ridiculous' who randomly appears in his royal highness' bedroom in his very bed one morning... I didn't suppose that Mister Viper would take a liking to me. 

"Nothing funny," I spluttered. "I mean..." I paused, and sighed. In Greamelts, it was compulsory for every dormitory to make up a password, so that boys couldn't enter girl's dormitories and vice versa (and if you did tell someone of the opposite gender what the password was, you'd get immediately hexed to have the word 'BLAB' spelt out on your forehead in boils for a week). But Viper had his own room, so I didn't know what the rules were. "I can hardly believe how I ended up here either..." I glanced up at him.

Maybe I'd hoped that he would look interested. He didn't. He held his typical unpleasant sneer and his eyes, snide and cynical. "Yeah," said he, though it wasn't in an agreeing way. His next words were in spits and spats. "Look, I don't know how you thought you could just frinxing sneak into my room, cripe. Try and convince the others that you 'stayed the night' here? Get a frinxing life. I don't even know who you are. And I'll make sure my mother hears about it, a pathetic girl who must have worked so hard to break into my room and my privacy and try to snuggle up into my own bed for her detestable reasons. He'll get your revolting self out of this school before you can say 'desperate'!"

My mouth was a furious 'O'. I didn't get into situations like this often, but when I did, I never managed to say what I really wanted to. I tried to say something now. "Excuse me!" I cried, "You are the most arrogant boy I have ever met! You think I - wanted to end up here? And for those 'detestable reasons'? Get a load of yourself!" It quickly came to me that I had actually and deliberately come here - even if I hadn't believed it would happen - and that it was perhaps for detestable reasons! But I would never, ever tell that to Viper, of course. Realising I still held the green wine bottle that held the words I'd written of my imposterish life in Greamelts, I stuffed it behind me and added in a fleetish finish, "Look here! Of course you don't know me. I don't even go here! Not this school, not this - world! This has been a wicked mistake!" 

Viper looked quite disbelieving. Not intrigued, though; only as though he was stuck deciding how was best to keep his superiority in this situation; to be angry or snide or bored or laugh at me. Trust Viper to put his high-maintenance ego above letting himself be curious about an actual epic mystery. I didn't give him time to choose. I leapt out of his bed, embarrassedly clinging to the wine bottle, and dashed for the door - it was strangely small, a little black metal door that didn't match the rest of the room, and  tucked into a nook of the wall-

"W... wait!" Viper cried, "That's not the door!"

What? I turned to him blurrily with my hand on the tiny doorknob.

"It's over there," he said, edgily. His long finger was pointing to another door, an actual human-sized one, that was the same dark wood as the furniture. I don't know why, but a sudden stab of the embarrassment of going for the wrong door and my idiocy and the confusion of the entire unbelievable situation brought tears to my eyes, and I stumbled sobbing to the door, throwing it open and shutting it fast behind me.

It came out to a cold stone passage, with thin windows on either side of me that showed me a dark orange sky, and a staircase in the corner going downwards. The sudden cold stiffened me to my bones. I was flaky with embarrassment and terror and woe. I had really met the boy of my dreams and I had made him think I was desperate and I went for the wrong door in my dramatic exit and I started crying in front of him because of it. 

Dolefully, my head drooped down and I let out a hard sob at the sight of myself. I was really wearing my pink pusheen pyjamas that Betty had got for me three years ago. And my legs were really that patched and hairy. I choked and scowled and fiercely rubbed my eyes and went sprinting down the staircase. If I had really shifted to Greamelts then the first person I needed to find was Hwelpum - the great headmaster.

As I ran I thought of how I was glad Viper wasn't as handsome as I'd always imagined him. I didn't want to be tricked into thinking he was as pretty on the inside.