Chapter 1 For once Maddie didn’t need her alarm clock to wake her up She rose with the sun perky and full of life and she got out of bed without a single groan of protest In a matter of minutes she had showered brushed her hair and put on her favorite dress the one with the blue floral pattern and the bright red sash She sat down at the kitchen table to find that her dad had already whipped her up a plate of strawberry waffles her favorite She wasn’t normally a morning person but this was a morning worth waking up for her birthday It had always been her favorite day of the year Haffy birfday to me sang a familiar voice coming from down the hall Haffy BIRFFFFFFFFDAY TOOOO MEEEEEEE Maddie groaned Today was also her rotten stepbrother Holden’s birthday He had annoyingly been born on the same day she had and now that their parents were married Maddie had to share her special day with her least favorite person on Earth Even as he brushed his teeth he couldn’t help singing a garbled off-key version of Happy Birthday in his own honor As she took her first bite of waffle Maddie seriously considered using her birthday wish to make tomorrow come ASAP She tried to remind herself that Holden would be gone for most of the day off zip lining at an adventure park with three of his goony friends So at least it would be a quiet birthday Then that night she was going to have the most awesome sleepover party ever and their parents had made Holden promise not to ruin it This was the upside of Maddie’s dad remarrying He never liked parties himself but his new wife Carol lived for them In the old days Maddie’s dad would blow up a few balloons and stick some candles in an ice cream cake from the grocery store Everything was done at the last minute But Carol had been planning for months She and Maddie decided on an Aladdin theme and Carol had gone all-out She helped Maddie make
gummy magic lamps sleeping bags that looked like flying carpets and veils that said Happy birthday Maddie which they would wear while belly dancing to some Middle Eastern music Originally Maddie had resisted choosing a fairy tale for her party’s theme Ever since her stepbrother came into her life her love of fairy tales had caused her a lot of aggravation It started when Holden pointed out the plot holes in Cinderella The next thing they knew the story had completely changed and the prince proposed to one of the wicked stepsisters Then Maddie and Holden got sucked into a tablet computer They found themselves in the world of the story Maddie as a stepsister and Holden as a palace guard The only way they could get back home was to give Cinderella back her happily ever after and it wasn’t easy You might think Holden would’ve learned his lesson after that but then he started picking apart Beauty and the Beast and the Beast got thrown in jail for kidnapping Holden and Maddie had to rescue him before he got his head chopped off It was while they were in that story that they learned they’d been cursed by a mixed-up fairy named Resplenda She wanted to teach Holden a lesson for being such a brat so as long as he kept snarking on fairy tales he and Maddie were going to keep getting sent in to fix them Maddie had to admit though there was something fun about getting to live in a fairy tale for a little while Taking a quick trip into Aladdin actually sounded kind of cool especially if she got to be the glamorous Princess Nazeerah She’d live in a towering palace overlooking the mystical deserts of Arabia and be wooed by the handsome young rebel Aladdin There would be magic and wonder and flying carpet rides by moonlight She could think of worse ways to spend her twelfth birthday There was another great thing about throwing an Aladdin party it drove Holden nuts He wanted nothing to do with the decorating the games the food Whenever Maddie and Carol would start talking about it he would run out of the room with his hands over his ears shouting Worst party idea ever Normally he was the one trying to get under Maddie’s skin so it was a nice change for her to be irritating him for once In fact she
