“I always do, love.”
“Look,” I said and held out the place card to him. On the front was my name. On the back in that same handwriting it readListen to me.
“Listen to what?” Duke asked.
“In the book, Alice finds food and bottles that say ‘Eat me’ and ‘Drink me.’ This one says, ‘Listen to me.’ So there has to be something to listen to. Try the teapot?”
“The teapot? You want me to listen to…a teapot? Darling, have yougone mad? I’m ready and willing to pinch you if I must. Even if I don’t, I’m willing—”
“Let me try,” I said. But Duke held up his hand to stop me.
“I feel absolutely mad doing this,” he said, “but I suppose that’s the point.” He put the spout to his ear. His eyes suddenly widened.
“What did it say?” I asked.
“You listen,” he said.
He passed me the teapot, and I put it to my ear.
This is what happens when you spend more than five minutes in Wonderland. You’ll put teapots to your ear to listen for secret messages. And sometimes you’ll hear them.
A voice, like the whooshing echo from a seashell, whispered to me, “Wrong March Hare…”
“Wrong March Hare?” I repeated, then took the lid off the teapot and shouted into it. “What do you mean, ‘Wrong March Hare’? There’s only one March Hare in literature, and he’s supposed to be hare! I mean,here!”
No answer.
“It is an English teapot,” Duke said delicately, as if speaking to someone defusing a bomb. “Perhaps try using your manners. If you have any?”
Infuriated but also desperate, I put the spout to my lips and said with feigned politeness, “Ever so sorry for losing my temper, but could you please elaborate, my dear teapot? If it’s not this March Hare, pray tell, what March Hare is it?”
“Not sure that was much better,” Duke muttered.
Ignoring him, I put the spout back to my ear like we were playing telephone.
The teapot replied, “The answer is staring you in the face…”
“What the heck’s that supposed to mean?” I shouted back into the lid.
But the teapot started to make a strange sound, a low, faintly annoying, yet instantly recognizable, buzzing.
A dial tone. A teapot had hung up on me.
“Tea is the worst hot beverage!” I said, which wasn’t true but it felt good to shout.
“An infuriating piece of crockery,” Duke said, nodding.
“Did I mention I hated Wonderland?”
Chapter Eighteen
So we had the wrong March Hare, apparently. Not the one in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books but a different March Hare that was somehow more obvious—staring us in the face, the teapot had said—yet less obvious because, well, I had no clue where to find another March Hare.
Nothing to do but go home and keep looking.
Usually when escaping a story, I chant, “Our revels now are ended.” It worked as a charm, popping me out of the story like popping a champagne cork. But since we weren’t going home but back to Gatsby’s library, I tried a different charm this time: “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
Jordan Baker’s famous line about parties did the trick. One moment Duke and I were walking swiftly away from the home of the March Hare, and the next, we were tumbling into Gatsby’s library.
