Don't Expect Magic (14 page)

“There
was
a junior,” Elly, or maybe it’s Hallie, says. “Sasha Galloway. But she quit to join drama club after they offered her the lead in
Noises Off!
”

“She’s really funny,” Hallie/Elly explains.

“She’s from England,” Polly adds.

“Thanks, guys,” Flynn says sincerely, as if this is actually relevant information. The girls beam back at him and you can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above their heads. I don’t need f.g. powers to figure out that all three are in love with Flynn, in a movie-star-crush kind of way. I never would’ve picked Flynn for teen idol status.

“Anyway, we want to do something awesome and different for this year’s book,” he says to me. “But we don’t have anybody with design experience. So you can be art director.”

Excuse me? I don’t think so. It’s bad enough I have
to
be
here, I can’t be expected to
participate
too. “I’m not qualified for that position,” I tell Flynn. “Sorry.” I take a seat at an empty table, where I plan on doing nothing, like Brendan and Skids (if you count playing games on their PSPs as nothing, and I do).

“Come on, Delaney. Everybody knows you’re this awesome artist.” Flynn points to my boots. They’re my “Bad Attitude #3” ultrasuede ones. Teeth marks scratched into the ankles, red and violet slashes and zigzags painted up and down the sides. The triplets nod, wide-eyed, and even Brendan grunts in agreement, while Skids takes a thumb off his game controls to flick it up before going back to his on-screen carnage. It’s a million miles away from believable that anybody in this school has noticed anything about me that they actually liked. Come on,
really
? No. No way.

“That’s why I asked Mr. Rosenthal if you could join,” Flynn continues. This was Flynn’s idea? The unbelievable-ness is now officially record-breaking. I’m ready to look for the hidden camera. Still, it would take a lot more than a couple of nice comments about my boots to turn me into a yearbook slave.

“Unless you want the yearbook to look like a boot, I really don’t see what I can do for you.”

Flynn tells his groupies to get last year’s copy. He brings it to my table and sets it down in front of me. “Just take a look at it. Tell us what you think.” He’s not going to let me alone until I at least pretend I semi-care, so I page through.

Yawn. The usual rows and rows of the same over-the-shoulder pose, same frozen smile, same blank eyes. Although there are slight differences—darker skin, lighter hair, glasses, no glasses, boy, girl—they all still look identical. The senior photos are a little bigger and have song quotes under them, but even most of the quotes are copies.

“You can’t tell anyone apart,” I say.

“That’s because you don’t know them,” Elly/Hallie says.

“A yearbook’s not for knowing. It’s for remembering. Twenty years from now, when you’re really old, are you going to have a clue who these people are?” I point to a random photo on the page. A guy with an overbite, in a bowl cut and glasses. “This guy. What’s the most interesting thing about him?”

“Ooh,” Hallie/Elly sighs. “That’s Paul. He’s in a band.”

Brendan rolls his eyes. “All the girls are in love with him.”

“Really? This guy? You would not get that from this picture.” I pick another, a girl with bangs and freckles. “What about her?”

“Allison Pellucci,” Flynn says. “She’s nice.”

“She’s weird,” Brendan says. “She’s always feeding those cats out by the Dumpster.”

“Aw,” Polly says. “That’s so sweet.”

I shut the book. “This is what I’m talking about. This is what the photos need to show.”

“How?” Elly/Hallie asks. “These are the only kind of photos we have.”

“They’re digital, aren’t they? They can be manipulated. Like a cat-face border for this girl and a guitar in the corner for Rock Star.” I sketch some images onto the page.

“Awesome,” Flynn says for the thousandth time. He really needs to work on his vocabulary. “See? I knew you could do it.” He smiles at me, and I admit I don’t mind being appreciated for once. “Okay, let’s start a list.” Flynn opens his laptop. “Three or four traits for each person. Then Delaney will come up with a few images for each.”

“You want
me
to do all the drawings?”

“We can help, but your ideas will be better.” That’s true, but
still
—he
is
trying to make me a yearbook slave.

And yet, while they compile their collection of “remember when he stole the mascot head?” and “she wears like a million rings” personality markers, the ideas start pinging around in my head, the way they do when I come up with a boot design. Images flare like little bolts of lightning. No wonder they call it a brainstorm.

It’s fun, actually, not work at all. This is how it felt when I launched the apple pie missile. Easy. It
should’ve
been how the client search played out, but now I see what I did wrong. I agonized over it instead of going with the flow. I need to de-agonize.

The three little kittens giggle at something Flynn says, interrupting my thoughts. Oh my God. Why didn’t I think of this? I’ve got three Cinderella clients right here, all pining for their Flynn Charming. All I need to do is pick one of them and grant her wish. I’m back on track!

I’m not sure it can be so random, though. If there had been more than one true ever-after girl for Prince Charming, the fairy godmother could’ve picked an ugly stepsister instead, or one of the other thousand lovelorn girls in the kingdom.

“Hi, guys!” Cadie steps into the room, brushing her glossy mane over her shoulder. She’s in her cheerleading uniform, which means her legs look even longer than usual. “I wanted to ask you if we can reschedule the squad photo,” she says to Flynn. “I got Ms. Freeman to let us cheer for the girls’ lacrosse semifinal against Stafford.” Cadie smiles at the rest of us. “Why shouldn’t the girls’ teams get cheered too, right?”

Brendan and Skids nod dumbly, caught in the mind-melting haze of supermodel pheromones. Hallie, Elly and Polly blush and appear on the verge of fainting from the shock of being personally addressed by school royalty. Polly even lets out a nervous squeak. Amazing.

If I
could
pick a random client, it’d be even easier if Princess Cadie Charming were the target. I could throw a wadded-up piece of paper into the hallway between classes and have a 99.9 percent chance of hitting somebody madly in love with her.

“Sure. I’ll check the schedule.” As usual, Flynn is the only one but me who’s not gaga. He opens a file in his laptop and scrolls through it. As he does, this sense of desperate longing comes over me. It’s not my longing, though. It’s flowing into me, from someone else. It’s like I’ve tapped
into some invisible stream of yearning and it’s dragging me along in its current.

Oh my God, it’s happening! I’ve picked up one of the triplets’ wish vibes. I peer around from Elly to Hallie to Polly (or whoever to whoever to whoever—I still can’t tell them apart), trying to figure out which one is the Cinderella. I circle their table, pretending to look at the lists they’re making and waiting to feel a surge in the vibe, but the feeling doesn’t change and now I’m wondering if it’s coming from all three at once. Three clients at the same time? This can’t be right.

“Can you do next Thursday?” Flynn asks Cadie. “After school?”

“That’s perfect!”

I head back to my seat, and as I do, the feeling intensifies. It’s not coming from the girls’ table. It’s coming from Mrs. Bayshore’s desk, where Flynn is writing something on a scrap of paper. He hands the note to Cadie.

“Thanks!” Cadie takes the paper and smiles at Flynn. He smiles back, the same smile he gave me. Maybe not quite the same. It’s shyer, dreamier.
Lovelorn
. How did I never see this before? Now it makes sense that he never paid attention to her. Because he’s
too much
in love with her. I shouldn’t be surprised. Why should he be any different from every other boy at the school?

Although he is different in one way. If I’m feeling his wish, it means Flynn’s the One, out of all of them, who belongs with Cadie.

Something’s wrong. This dizzy, wobbly, “I need to vomit” feeling I have doesn’t fit the whole mythical magical f.g. picture. Once I figured out it was Flynn’s wish, I thought the yearning would ease up a little, but instead it’s gotten worse. I don’t remember any fairy-tale illustrations that show the fairy godmother’s face turning green. No movie or TV fairy godmother ever looked like Cinderella’s wish made them want to heave. They’re confident and cheerful and knowing—not nauseous.

Hank said I might get it wrong if I rushed it, and I’ve been operating at siren-blaring-ambulance speed up to
now. I bet my f.g. antenna is totally bent out of shape and is picking up all these random signals that are being flung at me and mixing them up into a big jumble. Maybe it’s not Flynn’s wish I sensed—it’s everybody’s. The girls I spied on in the hall and the French snobs, plus the Hello Kitties, and who knows who else. That’s what’s making me want to stick my finger down my throat. That’s got to be it.

“Nope. That’s the feeling exactly.” Hank wheels his cart to the olive bar and grabs a plastic container. We’re in the superstore of grocery markets. It’s so big, it’s practically its own country. Actually, it’s a continent of random real countries, scaled way down. Instead of buildings and cars, there are tamale stands and tapas stalls and sushi stations.

“You’re not listening. I’m telling you, I feel like I want to barf all over these olives.” Nearby customers back away with worried looks.

“Let’s keep it down, Delaney. Okay?”

“No. It’s driving me crazy. I want to get it out, but it’s trapped there, churning around in my stomach.” Hank pushes past me to add some tiny raisinlike black olives to his collection. “You need to tell me how to turn it off.” Hank snaps a lid on his olives, ignoring my agony. I’d like to slap the olives out of his hand, but I’m too weak from my warped f.g. affliction.

“It’s unpleasant for a reason,” he says. “If it felt good, you wouldn’t be driven to help. You can’t ‘turn it off,’ or will
it away, or outrun it. You could go to China and ten years from now you’d still feel it.” He sets the olives in the cart and wheels toward the six-mile-long deli counter.

“But you said it would take a couple of years before I’d get a client. My empathy meter or whatever isn’t developed yet. I’ve hardly done any small wishes.” I haven’t done
any
small wishes, actually, but I don’t have time for
that
lecture. I get a brain flash. “Maybe I have the flu.”

Hank gives me a once-over. He holds out a hand to feel my forehead like I’m three years old, and I push his arm away. “You’re not sick. I agree with you, though. It’s happened faster than usual, but it’s always easier to tap into someone’s emotional wavelength if it’s a person you care about.”

“I don’t care about Flynn. I care that all my nerves have been twisted up into tiny corkscrews. You warn me about everything else, but you don’t warn me about
this
? If I’d known being an f.g. meant feeling like you have permanent food poisoning, I would’ve locked myself in a closet for the rest of my life.”

“You’re being a little melodramatic. I know the first one is hard, but that’s because the feeling’s new, so it’s more intense. You’ll get used to it after a while. Eventually it settles down into more of a mild anxiety.”

That doesn’t exactly make me feel better. “I don’t want to get used to it. I want it
gone.
”

Hank offers me a cracker spread with some nasty mold-speckled
cheese from a sample display. Is he trying to make me feel worse? I make a retching noise and wave it away. He frowns. “There’s a very simple way to solve your problem, Delaney.”

“What?”

“Get Flynn his wish.”

“What if I’m ethically opposed to it? I’ll be perpetuating the offensive male fantasy of the nerd landing the hot babe. It’d be different if Flynn had a noble wish. Like inventing solar cars. Then I’d believe I got it right, because it’d be something I’d
want
to help him do.”

“The big wishes are always about love. That’s just the way people are.”

“People are idiots.”

“This is what you wanted, Delaney, and you got it. It’s bigger than you now; it’s beyond your control. You can fight it—and lose. Or you can view it as a chance to help others, starting with Flynn. Who knows, maybe you’ll like it. Stranger things have happened.”

It’s hard to imagine that my life could get any stranger.

Posh was run-on-sentences-to-the-max ecstatic at this proof that she was right, and that I now had a chance to advance the cause of “Science: Paranormal Division” even further. “It means I can’t come home yet,” I pointed out, but she insisted that the speed at which everything had happened for me so far, for which she had developed this
complicated quadratic equation, proved that it should only take me 7x + 23
⁵
/b
²
days (or something like this) to get Flynn his wish.

As usual, I only understood about ¼
³
of what Posh meant, but by the end of the conversation, she’d convinced me to embrace my destiny: a lifetime of motion sickness (even when I’m standing still), balanced out by the power not only to move mountains (okay, maybe not mountains, but big stuff) and transform plain shoes into glass slippers, but to transform my
life
. She reminded me why I started all this in the first place: because it’s going to be worth it for the full powers. Once I have them, I’ll be powerFULL and the bad stuff won’t matter to me.