Love Charms and Other Catastrophes (33 page)

Ken shifted his wheelchair to better view the cart and the girl.

“Is this everything you need, Hijiri?” the nurse said to the girl. “I'll let you handle it from here.”

Hijiri glanced at the door, plainly wishing she could leave. But as soon as her eyes landed on the teapot, she seemed to relax a little. She poured the first cup. The scent of hibiscus filled the room. Children stopped playing and sniffed the air. Ken breathed in the tea's scent and faintly smiled. He felt warmer, less achy already.

The children who were well enough to walk approached the cart. Hijiri didn't look at them as she poured and handed out the tea. Her face flushed and her hands shook.

Ken wheeled himself over, letting the others cut in front of him. When it was finally his turn, he took his cup of tea and asked, “What is it called?”

Hijiri started. A few drops spilled on the cart. “H-Heart's Ease,” she said. Her voice was croaky, like she didn't use it much.

“Charmed?”

She nodded. “A love charm. Takes away anxiety for a short time.”

Ken took a sip. The tea soothed him down to the tips of his fingers. “Maybe you need a cup for yourself.”

Hijiri looked at him for the first time. Their eyes met and his heart stopped. For once, it wasn't a medical emergency.

He never got a response. The nurse came back just then and told Hijiri that her parents had arrived to pick her up. The girl breathed a sigh of relief and didn't look back when she left.

She remembered the trip as just one more failed attempt at overcoming her shyness that summer. People indiscriminately made her nervous. A full pot of Heart's Ease had sloshed in her stomach and she still hadn't been able to say hello to anyone. She tried to forget those summers and succeeded—wiping out the boy with it. Tears burned the back of her throat.

The charm kept going, showing her another memory.

A different hospital room this time. Ken's cheeks had hollowed out. He barely stirred in the bed. His father snuck a slingshot into the room and lined up empty plastic cups for Ken to shoot. His mother read to him from long, rambling novels. They tried keeping him in good spirits, but his name hadn't risen to the top of the list yet.

A doctor entered the room.

His mother looked up from her book, face collapsed in grief. “Did Doctor Petit send you?” she asked. “He said he was sending a specialist. In what? All my boy needs is a heart.”

The doctor calmly entered the room, stethoscope hanging from his neck. “Special circumstances require special attention,” he said. The doctor had a plain, gentle face with a graying beard. His coat was open, revealing a long gold chain with a key swinging from the end. “I'm here to make a deal with you and your son.”

Mr. Oshiro shifted closer to Ken. “We don't make deals with crooked doctors.”

“That's a healthy attitude. Good thing I'm not a doctor.” Love wiggled his fingers, palm out, and a beautifully new beating heart appeared. “Kentaro gets this heart if he helps me with a little project.”

Ken winced as he sat up in bed. He was mesmerized by the magical heart.

“There's a young charm-maker in Grimbaud who believes she has a tiny heart. You've met. In fact, if I know the dying thing in your chest as well as I do, you want to meet her again.” Love grinned. “Come with me to Grimbaud. You'll go to school, make friends, study charm-making. You'll have to do some pretending while you're there, but I'll make it easy for you to keep your identity a secret.”

“What will Ken be doing?” her mother said warily.

“Showing my charm-maker that her heart is bigger than she thinks. If we're lucky, she may fall in love.”

Ken's attention shifted from the heart to Love. “Who is she?”

“You've never forgotten the tea she served you,” Love said. “Hijiri Kitamura.”

Ken reached for his parents' hands. A smile pushed its way to his lips.

The charm had held all the memory it could; Ken's memory abruptly dissolved.

Hijiri pressed her hands over her heart. She thought she knew where the edges of her heart were, so tiny she could pinch it between her thumb and index finger. What she felt beating under her curled hands had slipped beyond the confines of her rib cage.

Her heart was on her tongue, twisting her speech into impossible knots. In her knees, keeping her standing upright. In her toes, turning her to face Ken, who had made his way to the side of the stage while his memories played.

Ken stepped up onto the stage, breathing clouds. He stopped a few inches from her. Snowflakes melted on his red cheeks. If he was blushing there, his scar must have been glowing furious-red under his wool coat. “You're my missed connection,” he said. Out loud. Without choking or coughing or covering his tracks with thin lies. Delighted, he shouted it again.

Hijiri's hands moved from her heart to her mouth. She cried. Tears and snow burned her skin. “I can't feel my heart,” she confessed. “I think it's everywhere.”

Ken let out a soft laugh. “An extraordinary heart.”

The townspeople woke from their spell of awed silence. Men and women alike dug handkerchiefs and tissues from their pockets to dab their eyes. Femke and Mirthe whistled.

This was the part in the presentation where Hijiri was supposed to explain how the responses from almost-loves worked and what to do when you received one.
I never thought in a million years I'd be demonstrating it
, she thought fuzzily.

And that was where her thoughts ended. She threw herself at Ken and kissed his face, wherever her lips landed. His blushing cheeks. The line of his jaw. His eyelashes, spiky and wet from the snow. She almost made it to his mouth before the volume of claps and whistles grew too deafening to ignore.

Oh, right. The competition.
Hijiri reluctantly drew away from Ken and gave the audience an awkward bow. “Meeting your missed connection might not go as smoothly as this one,” she said, cobbling together the last of her speech, “but it gives you the chance to find out.”

The crowd cheered. Stamped its feet. Ken, still befuddled from the flurry of kisses, flashed her an adorably shy smile.

Her insides melted.

“Please, if you can possibly
bear
it,” Bram said with some impatience, “we have a winner to vote for. How about it, Grimbaud? Do we know which love charm-maker is the best?”

As each townsperson approached the tables to drop their vote into the appropriate table's box, Hijiri waited. She didn't want to make herself more anxious by watching the length of both lines, trying to guess which one was longer. So she tried keeping her mind blank. Hard to do when Clea shot her daggers.

Counting the votes had to have taken a significant amount of time, but Hijiri couldn't remember it passing slowly. One minute, she was standing with Ken, wishing and waiting, and the next, Hijiri stumbled back to center stage in front of a roaring crowd. Confetti rained down on her head.

“Congratulations, Hijiri,” Bram said with not even a speck of cynicism in his tone.

Hijiri wiped the golden confetti from her face and joined Bram. She tugged Ken along with her. As far as she was concerned, their hands had melded together. There was no way she was letting him go.

Her friends rushed the stage for a group hug. Chins bumping, shoulders pressed together, the twins' hearty laughter, and Bear's too-strong handshake. Bram plucking a missed connections charm from the table, slipping it into the pocket of his trench coat with a wink at Hijiri.

She saw Clea and Mandy walking away—Clea clenching her fists, almost in tears, while Mandy looked happier than ever. “We lost, so you have to keep your promise,” Mandy said. “No makeup for a whole week…”

When Hijiri turned back to her friends, she saw her mother crying happy tears, then her father's arms were around her. “Thank you for coming,” she said into her father's suit jacket. “It means everything to me.”

Her mother wiped her eyes. “You've grown so much. I can't believe…” She looked at Mr. Kitamura. “Hitomu, we shouldn't miss these kinds of things anymore.”

Mr. Kitamura pretended to consult his planner, then laughed. “Perhaps you're right.”

“If it wasn't for Ken, we would never had made it here in time,” Mrs. Kitamura said, smiling at Ken. “He found us at the train station.”

Hijiri looked at him, eyes wide. “So that's where you were.”

Ken squeezed her hand.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kitamura? I'm Fallon,” Fallon said, flashing a knowing look at Hijiri. “I'm Hijiri's best friend. My parents would love to meet you.…”

Then there was Ken, his breath in her ear. “Hurry,” he said, “before we lose another chance.”

Hijiri jumped off the back of the stage with him and ran across the cobblestones. For the second time, they sprinted through a ghost town. Their feet moved faster than their heartbeats.

“Let's go somewhere warm,” Ken said.

Hijiri tugged on his arm. “We're warm enough. Let's go there,” she said, pointing to Love's park. Snow camouflaged the white marble of Love's statue with the boy and girl. Hijiri sat on the lip of the fountain. The water had been turned off, but the coins hadn't been picked up yet. She stared at the twinkling metal peeking starlike through the snow when she felt something hot being pressed into her hands.
Tea.

“This is my favorite tea,” Ken said, pouring himself a cup of tea. Through all their running, his portable tea-for-two set had survived—a hearth charm in disguise, perhaps, crafted to withstand household accidents. The ceramic cat's head painted on the top made her smile.

Hijiri smelled the hibiscus of her Heart's Ease tea. The first sip soothed her tired muscles.

Ken shifted so that their knees touched. “So you solved me,” he said.

He was real. He had always been real. Kentaro Oshiro hadn't been born in a gift-wrapped box, but he was a little weird anyway. He had a heart transplant scar that glowed and blushed for him. A heart that was probably not real, but still worked better than his old one.

For some reason, the truth didn't hold as much power as she thought. Instead, it felt like the beginning. “I haven't solved you yet.”

“You haven't?”

“I don't think I'll ever solve you. There's so much I want to know about you, and even if we sat like this for years asking and telling, I still wouldn't know it all. And that's thrilling. I can keep unfolding parts of you, the good and bad sides of Kentaro Oshiro, and you would … you would do the same for me.”

“I want the same thing.” Ken swallowed thickly. His eyes went glassy. “I want you to know everything.”

Hijiri finished her tea and carefully put it down behind her. She moved closer. “I've unlocked one door, but I have so many more to open. This time, when I ask you questions, you
have
to answer.”

“With pleasure,” he breathed.

“Did your dad really sneak a slingshot into the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“You've never been to school?”

“Homeschooling was my only option. I'd been sick so often.”

“Why do you like hearth charms?”

Ken shyly drank the last of his tea. “My parents are hearth charm-makers. They run a shop in Lejeune. Actually, I convinced Ms. Ward to order from our shop for the library.”

Hijiri placed her hand on his knee.
For balance
, she assured herself, even as her cheeks burned.

Ken's eyes flickered to her hand. He gently removed it, only to stand up and adjust himself on the lip of the fountain so that they were close, so so so close. He brushed his nose against hers and her fingers dug into his rough wool coat.

“You fell in love with me
twice
,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “How?”

Ken kissed the corner of her mouth first, then pressed smaller, soft kisses that made her heart twist and her hands creep up to his neck. He tasted like hibiscus and spicy cinnamon, a new, more delicious way of drinking her tea. They kissed with time to spare; Grimbaud was celebrating for them back at the square.

“I don't think,” he said, pulling back, catching his breath, “I can put that answer into words.”

Her charm-boy. Her puzzle-boy. Hijiri tucked away her box of questions and enjoyed letting her heart roam free.

 

Acknowledgments

Until I finished revising the last few lines of
Love Fortunes and Other Disasters
, I hadn't known that Hijiri Kitamura still had a story to tell. Thank you, Swoon Reads, for helping me find out and giving me the chance to share her story. To my editor, Holly West, for solving the puzzle of my first draft and helping me reshape it into something magical. Special thanks to Lauren Scobell and Emily Settle for teaming up with Holly and bringing the awesome. To Eileen Savage for the adorable robot ARE cover and her work on the final cover's layout. To Zara Picken for returning to the sequel with another gorgeous cover. Thanks again to the Swoon Reads community and the growing list of wonderful authors I'm happy to call my extended writing family.

I need to thank my zany coworkers for their support and making the cubicle life a fun one. To Andres Unda, for believing that robots in love would be more interesting than just robots. To Steven Georgeson, for answering my even stranger questions about hearts this time. To the Bemelmans family in Florida and their relatives in Belgium for the authentic Flemish names for pets. To the dueling pianists and staff of Jellyrolls, for providing a musical reprieve from reality. Lauren Christian, for your unfailing belief in me and your friendship. To the real Hijiri, who I was lucky enough to meet by chance at Epcot years ago—thank you for letting me fall in love with your name.