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Except for Henry, who got it, and that was only because of the book, and because he hadn’t been born in Fairy Tale Land.
    “The Evil Queen had to get the curse from her old frenemy, Maleficent,” Henry explained. “She went to her castle and they had this huge magic battle, and the Queen stole the curse from Maleficent’s scepter. It was a crazy battle!” Emma nodded. “But to make the curse work right,” Henry said, “the Queen had to use the heart of whoever she held most dear in the world.”
    “Whoa,” Emma said. “Intense.”
    “I know!” said Henry. “And guess whose heart she ended up taking to make the whole spell work? You’re never gonna guess.”
    “I can’t imagine who an Evil Queen would hold dear.”
    “Her father’s heart. She killed her father to make the curse!”
    “Now that,” Emma said, “is some serious Oedipal anger.”
    “The best part,” Henry said, “is who you are.”
    “I’m from Fairy Tale Land?” Emma said. “Who knew?”
    Henry ignored this and explained to her that she was the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming.
    Emma found this to be hilarious.
    Not only that, Henry said, but she was the only person who could break the curse. It was all in the stories. She was the little baby born right before the curse came down.
    He spun his backpack around and removed a set of pages—Emma saw that he must have ripped them out of his book. Heshowed her an illustration of the baby wrapped in a blanket, with the word “Emma” embroidered on the front.
    “That’s your smoking gun?” Emma said, looking at the illustration. “There are other Emmas in the world, you know.” Emma took the pages from him and looked through them, searching for an author name or a copyright date. But there was nothing—no date, no author. Maybe in the book itself. It was anyone’s guess where the thing came from. Either way, though, quite a coincidence that the baby had that blanket. It reminded her of the one she had had with her when she was found, the one she carried through all the foster homes. She still had it somewhere, packed away in a box back in Boston. It wasn’t the type of memento she liked to pull out, though. Most of the memories that came along with it were painful.
    “I think you should read all of the pages,” Henry said. “This part is your story. I know you’re not going to believe me until you do.” He nodded to himself, then said, “You can’t let her see these pages, though. You can’t. That’s why I ripped them out. It would be… very bad.”
    Emma looked at the book.
    “Really?” she said, looking at a picture of the Queen. It did look a little like Regina; she could see how Henry could have convinced himself of all this.
    Sort of.
    “Really bad,” he said. “Really really really bad.”
    Emma and Henry soon reached the school. Before he left, he looked up and smiled and said, “Thanks for believing me about the curse. I knew that you would.” It almost killed her, he was so much in earnest. No problem kid, I didn’t believe you at all!
    “I didn’t say that I did, kid,” she said, thinking that itwould probably be best to be honest, but a tempered honest. “I just listened.” That was totally true.
    Still, Henry continued to smile, then turned and ran off toward class. Emma watched him go, still unsure how to handle his “interesting” relationship to reality. This “Operation Cobra” game seemed to give him endless joy, and some instinct told her it was never a bad thing for your child to feel joy. That was a mother’s job, wasn’t it? But a part of her thought that she was behaving recklessly, like the grandmother who steps in and gives the grandkid sweets until he’s sick. An outsider who is playing the game for short-term gains, not long-term goals.
    “It’s good to see him smiling.”
    Emma, startled, saw that Mary Margaret had approached.
    “Oh. I guess it is,” she said. “I didn’t do that, though. Magic