Read The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell for Free Online

himself and passed the test forward with the others.
    The tests were all passed to Alex, who stacked them in aneat pile for Mrs. Peters. She always felt so refreshed after taking a test, especially one as simple as that one had been for her.
    Her brother’s test caught her eye since it was the one with the least amount of writing on it. Alex knew Conner always tried his best at school, but his best never seemed to be good enough. She looked back at him, wishing she could help him… and then it occurred to her: Maybe she
could.
    Alex looked up at Mrs. Peters and saw that she was busy looking at the notes in her lesson plan. Would her teacher notice if Alex quickly filled in a couple of answers for her brother? Was Alex even capable of doing something so blatantly wrong?
    Was it considered cheating if you were doing it on someone else’s test? Would the gracious gesture cancel out the offense in the grand scheme of things?
    Alex was prone to over-thinking everything, so she just did it; she quickly filled in some of her brother’s answers, making her handwriting slightly sloppier than it usually was, and handed the stack of tests to Mrs. Peters.
    It was the most spontaneous thing she had ever done.
    “Thank you, Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Peters said, making eye contact with her. Alex felt like the pit of her stomach had fallen out of her body. The excitement she had felt from her impulse was now overshadowed by guilt.
    Mrs. Peters had always trusted her; how could she do something so juvenile? Should she confess what she haddone? What was the punishment for her crime? Would she feel this guilty for the rest of her life?
    She looked back at her brother. Conner let out a long but quiet sigh, and Alex sensed her brother’s sadness and embarrassment; she could feel his hopelessness as if it were her own.
    The critical wheels in Alex’s head stopped turning. She knew she’d done the right thing—not as a student, but as a sister.
    “I want you all to get out your homework from last night,” Mrs. Peters commanded, “and I would like you to briefly present your work in front of the class.”
    The teacher regularly surprised the class with impromptu presentations to keep them on their toes. She took a seat on a stool in the back of the room uncomfortably close to Conner’s seat so she could keep an eye on his consciousness.
    One by one, the students presented their assignments to the class. Besides a boy who thought “Jack and the Beanstalk” was about an alien abduction and a girl who claimed “Puss in Boots” was an early example of animal cruelty, all the students seemed to have interpreted the tales correctly.
    “It was so hard to choose just one fairy tale to write about,” Alex said as she animatedly presented her seven-page paper to the class. “So, I selected the story the theme of which is present in virtually every fairy tale and every story ever written, ‘Cinderella’!”
    Her excitement was not shared by her peers.
    “Many people have had issues with ‘Cinderella,’ sayingit has anti-feminist elements,” Alex continued. “But I think that’s completely ridiculous! ‘Cinderella’ is not about a man saving a woman, it’s about
karma
!”
    Most of the class began daydreaming about other things. Mrs. Peters was the only person in the room who seemed even slightly interested in what Alex had to say.
    “Think about it,” Alex went on. “Even after years of constant abuse from her stepmother and her stepsisters, Cinderella remained a good person with high hopes. She never stopped believing in herself and in the good of the world. And although she married the prince in the end, Cinderella always had
inner happiness
. Her story shows that even in the worst of situations—
even when it seems no one in the world appreciates you
—as long as you have hope, everything can get better….”
    Alex let her mind linger on what she had said. She questioned the last point she had made in her presentation. Was