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Now, you have repeatedly said you are nothing like your sister. In other words, you are her opposite. If that’s the case, then the potion in this bottle should have the opposite effect on you than it had on her, and make you grow.” He gave Henry a push toward the bottle’s neck. “Go on. In you go.”
    The round opening at the tip of the bottle’s neck was wide enough and tall enough for Henry to walk through as easily as if it were the Arc de Triomphe considering his current vertically challenged state. He hurried down the long neck to the bottle’s barrel, which turned out to be a much longer walk for him than he anticipated. By the time he reached the very bottom of the bottle, where there was a small puddle of purple liquid, he was exhausted.
    He took a sniff, and nearly gagged. It smelled like a combination of the locker room at school after an especially rough football game, and the dumpster behind the Mickey D’s on a hot summer day. He glanced back toward the mouth of the bottle. Did Hatter really expect him to drink this nasty crap?
    Hatter’s voice called to him from the bottle’s mouth, as if Hatter had heard his thoughts. “Go on! Take a sip!”
    “What about you?”
    Laughter floated down the long bottleneck, the sound growing louder and louder until it rumbled like thunder. Suddenly a pair of huge, dark eyes were looking in at him through the green bottle glass. A mouth stretched into a smirk as wide as a train car. “I’m the Hatter. I don’t need potions. Magic is in my blood. Go on now. Take a sip. We haven’t got all day.”
    It felt like Hatter had somehow tricked him, which made him angry all over again, but there was nothing he could do about it while he was still so very small, and Hatter was now so very big. He felt he had no choice but to drink from the small pool of liquid ugliness floating at the bottom of the bottle, but he made himself a promise. As soon as he got big again, he was going to punch Hatter right in the mouth. See how that smirk worked for him with a few teeth gone.
    The thought somehow made him feel a bit better.
    Holding his nose closed with two fingers, he dipped his hand into the purple liquid, gathering a bit up in his palm. He put it to his lips and drank it down as quickly as he could, trying very hard not to taste it as it slid over his tongue and down his throat.
    Tried, but failed.
    It tasted every bit as ugly as it looked, viscous and slimy at the same time, but happily, he didn’t have long to explore the horrid flavor because at that moment, things started happening that took his mind off his mouth.
    No sooner had he swallowed the muck but he began to grow. His body expanded in all directions—upways, downways, sideways, and slantways—quickly filling the bottle. For a heartbeat he was stuck there, unable to move, unable to breathe, his face smooshed flat against the glass. He could feel the pressure building as his body insisted it continue to expand, and the non-giving glass refused to bend. Then… smash! The bottle splintered into millions of tiny glass bits, exploding away from him in a shower of fragments glinting in the sun.
    Freed from the glass, he grew even more quickly, as if someone were using a tornado to blow up a balloon-shaped man. Within seconds, he’d grown to his former height and weight, or as close to it as he could tell, anyway.
    And found himself facing a pair of mischievous, sparkling dark eyes.
    He barely felt his fingers curling into a fist, or his arm pulling back to throw a punch squarely at Hatter’s handsome, smirking face.

C HAPTER S IX
     
     
    H ATTER SCARCELY had time to blink as Henry’s hard fist caught him just under his jaw, the force of the punch lifting him off his feet, and planting him on his ass in the dirt. He rubbed his jaw, feeling—for the first time in a good, long while, if ever—completely stunned. “You… you struck me!”
    Henry, busy dancing around with the hand he used to strike Hatter tucked