Who Needs Magic? (5 page)

Ten minutes left until he gets here and I still can’t decide.

When I texted Flynn to ask what I should wear, he texted back that whatever I chose would be perfect because everybody will probably be dressed in black. I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of being like “everybody,” even everybody at an art gallery, but it does make getting ready a little easier. I’ve narrowed it down to the black dress with the lacy trim, the long black beaded tunic, and the black velvet skirt with the black satin tee. I circle my bed, where I’ve laid them out, with different black boots propped up on the floor below each outfit: the dragon boots, the snake boots and the “Attitude #3” boots with the crisscrossed slashes.

This is another one of those times when I really wish Mom were here. She could help me decide.

Not that I ever went out on a date back in New Jersey. It wasn’t something we even talked about. She never gave me any tips about dating, and I never asked. It’d been just the two of us for so long, I guess I thought it would be that way forever—although I never really thought ahead very far. It was enough that it was the two of us in the present. Until it wasn’t.

But now I wish
Mom
had thought ahead, a little, to the possibility that I might actually one day have a boyfriend and need to know something about how it’s all supposed to work.

The Tinker Bell night-light winks up at me from beside the bed. I bet Ariella would love to give me advice. She’s just the type. She’d have me outfitted in bubble-gum-colored boots and a matching pleated dress, with a big bow in my hair.

Why am I thinking about
her
? Possibly because I still haven’t purged the bedroom of the kiddie décor Dad dressed it up in before I came. I should at least pack up all the stupid dolls, and the frog prince alarm clock, and the Snow White lamp. But the first thing to go is that night-light—

Stop
. I don’t have time to obsess over this now. The clock is ticking and I’m starting to feel nervous, like this is a first date or something. It’s because this will be the first time we’ve been alone together, without friends or family around, in over a month. Which is like forever.

Yet, weirdly, our first night together feels like it happened only a week ago. Not even a week. The memory of it has crystallized in my mind so sharply that the time-travel restriction doesn’t apply to it. I can go back and relive it, and every detail is vivid, like I’m watching it happen now. I like to rewind a little first, to the night before, when we went to the carnival together, when I thought Flynn still liked Cadie. It feels as if my heart is being squeezed when I think about it. It’s like when you’re watching a movie, and you know the boy and girl belong together but some tragic misunderstanding has caused them to misinterpret each other’s actions. It’s a weird sort of psychological torture, but it makes it even better when I skip ahead in the movie to the happy ending:

It starts with me standing barefoot on the sand, my boots in one hand, my other hand grasped in Flynn’s. Seagulls and waves and the laughter of the body-surfing beach-partyers are the background music for the scene—for the moment our story had been building to.

The beach sound track fades as we walk along the sand to the wooden steps that lead up to the pier, and a new tune kicks in, a mix of children’s voices and merry-go-round music and snippets of conversations that sprinkle over us as we move through the crowd.

This is the part of the memory where it becomes more than a movie. It’s as if I’ve been transported there. All five senses come alive. I feel the rough, sandy surface of the
boardwalk press into the soles of my bare feet as we walk. There’s the smell and taste of the damp salty air, and the cool bloom of the lavender sky as the sun finally sinks into the sea. Through it all, there’s the warmth of Flynn’s hand in mine.

That warmth stays there, all the way to the Ferris wheel, a miniature version of the one from the carnival, but this one has music, and tiny green and purple lights that blink and beam along the perimeter. As we rise, the tinny music from the Ferris wheel speakers becomes our new background theme. The wheel pauses when we get to the top, and Flynn looks over at me, and even though the sun has set and his eyes are shadowed, I can tell he’s gazing at me in a way that signals an impending kiss. But I have to tell him everything first. About him and Cadie, about Dad, about small wishes and big magic—but he only lets me get halfway through the story before he stops listening.

And then it happens.

We’re kissing. My first real, official teenage kiss. It’s a kiss that starts off soft and hesitant. It breaks, just for a second, and then I lean in or Flynn does or we both do, I’m not sure—it’s the one detail I don’t have nailed down. It changes every time I remember it, but it doesn’t matter, all of the versions are so … spectacular. It’s the only word that fits.

It was the most corny, clichéd, wonderful happily-ever-after ending you could ever want, and sometimes I rewind and replay just that one little loop over and over
again. We kiss, we kiss, we kiss, and every time it’s for the first time.

It wasn’t really the happy
ending
, though. It was the happy beginning, since it’s where we started, not finished. And tonight, we can finally get the story going again.

Oh my God, he’ll be here in five minutes! This is the problem with memory-driven time travel. You don’t return to the same second you left. I grab a random pair of boots. Flynn will like whatever I wear; I don’t need to stress about it. I don’t need advice. I just need to redo my mascara and put on lip gloss.

My cell rings. He’s here. “I’m almost ready,” I say into the phone. “Do you want to wait in the car or come in?” Maybe that purple gloss that’s so dark it’s almost black. Hmm. I rifle through my makeup drawer, but I don’t see it.

“That’s why I’m calling.”

“Okay. Come to the door. I’ll let you in.” I pull out the drawer and dump everything onto the bed.

“Uh. No, I mean—I’m really sorry this is so last-minute, Delaney, but they found the top of this lighthouse washed up on Aurora Beach. They have no idea where it came from.”

“You want to go to the beach instead of the gallery? I’m not dressed for that. I’ll need another ten minutes.”

“We’ll go another time, Delaney. I promise. I have to run. Skids is picking me up.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re not coming here at all?” I watch myself in the mirror as I fling my arm out in frustration.
“You’re blowing me off? For a waterlogged lighthouse?” I look so good in this outfit. Even pissed off. And it’s completely wasted.

“It’s breaking news, Delaney.”

“If you want something broken, I’ll be glad to take care of that for you.”

Flynn laughs as if I’d made a joke. “I knew you’d take it well. You’re the best.”

“I’m not the best.” I put my hand on my hip—an even better look. “The only superlative that applies to me is ‘most enraged.’ ”

“I
am
sorry, Delaney. I’ll call you tonight when I get home. Okay?”

Is it okay? If I say yes, am I being supportive or wimpy? If I say no, will he laugh it off or cancel his plans?

“We’ll go out this weekend. Whenever you want. Wherever you want. We’ll declare it Delaney Collins’s day.”

“I’m not sure there’s a greeting card line for that.”

“Then we’ll design it together.”

Together
. The magic word. “Okay.” And for a second, it is.

But after I hang up, the emptiness of the evening ahead rolls in, and doubt comes with it. The rules of romance are as confusing to me as the rules of fairy godmothering, and it makes me wonder if being an f.g. and being a g.f. are somehow linked. I’m supposed to be helping people land their true loves, but how can I do that when I have hardly any experience in the subject? And maybe if I’d granted
more wishes by now, I’d know exactly what to say, do and feel when I’m talking to, with or thinking about Flynn. I’d know when I should worry about us, and whether I should worry a lot or just a little.

I flop back on the bed, tempted to transport myself back again to the Night of the First Kiss, to fill the time and blot out the angst—but I can’t just dwell in fantasy.

What I’d like is for the conversation with Flynn to have been the fantasy. One of those dark ones that come sometimes at the end of a long worrying jag, before I drag myself back to the present and realize I imagined it all and everything is fine.

But no, it happened, because there’s Flynn’s name, right at the top of “recent calls.” Right above Ariella’s …

How can I even be tempted? Didn’t I decide I was done with her? Do I want to make myself feel worse? No. I do not. Absolutely not.

I am
not
calling her.

“The crimson halter dress with the black sling-backs.” Ariella’s mom, who’s just as blond and high energy as Ariella but less sparkly and more serious, gives clipped orders into her Bluetooth as she drives. “No. The ones with the open toe.”

“She’s on with her beneficiary,” Ariella explains. “She likes them to pre-dress to her specifications before the transformation. It’s not a technique that I embrace, personally. But every fairy godmother has their own style, my grandma says.”

I’m not really sure how it happened. It was like some horrible self-destructive impulse caused by Flynn abandoning
me to photograph debris, and before I knew it, I had dived off the bridge—or rather, tapped Ariella’s number. The phone dialed and Ariella answered and then I was calling Dad to tell him and then it seemed like only a second later Ariella and her mom were pulling up outside my house in this long pale green car that had to be from like fifty years ago but looked brand-new.

It’s one of those cars with the fins like you see in old movies. Each corner of the car’s body, where the headlights and taillights are, juts out, as if the metal had been pulled away and pinched to a point. It had never really occurred to me that there might be an f.g.-mobile, like a Batmobile. Dad’s boring blue Honda definitely doesn’t qualify. But
this
. This is a car for magical women bearing wands.

We’re on our way to yet another mall. This one is in the same area of town where Ariella’s mother’s client lives. “She drops me off and I walk around and do small wishes until she picks me up.” Ariella told me this over the phone, and I could picture her eyes gleaming in manic f.g. glee as she said it. It’s like she’s a wish-granting junkie. Either that or all of the sugar she consumes makes it impossible for her to turn off or even power down.

She hasn’t stopped talking since I got in the car. “… and then there was this boy at the beach who’d broken up with his girlfriend and wanted her back, and she was there that day with her sister. That one went so fast, I never actually even
met
him! At the end of June, just before Fawn, was Hannah, who lives two blocks over from
us. She was in love with this piano. Isn’t that funny? To be in love with a piano? But she was. So I got her a job at the piano store, where she can play it all the time. Tell me about some of yours.”

I give her a second, in case this is just her usual brief pause before another ten-minute verbal assault, but she continues staring at me in eager anticipation. “I don’t really keep a list,” I say. This should get her started again on the pros and cons of lists, or list organizational strategies, or examples of lists she keeps of things besides clients: candy stick flavors, headband colors, types of wands, things with wings.

But no, instead, I get another question. “Tell me about the last one. When did you grant it?”

I could change the subject, ask her another question. But if the reason I’m here is to learn how to improve my f.g. skills, which will help me gain confidence in the g.f. area too, then I need to tell her the truth.

“April.”

“But that was like three months ago,” Ariella says in a hushed voice. She leans back and regards me with barely veiled horror. Her mom, too, pauses to glance at me in the rearview mirror, lips pressed together, either disapprovingly or disbelievingly, I can’t tell—and the little “mm” she lets out doesn’t clarify it at all.

Ariella’s mom returns to her client conference a second later, but Ariella remains quiet, possibly in shock, which
confirms everything I’ve suspected: it’s taken me a grotesquely long time to get another client.

Ariella continues to stare and her silent, stunned gaze is infinitely more annoying than her nonstop chatter. “I wouldn’t have called you if I wasn’t desperate,” I finally say, but she takes it as a compliment and squeezes my arm, her horror softening into sympathy.

“Don’t feel bad, Delaney. I told you it was fate that we met. And it was fate that you called me! And that mom had to go out tonight to meet her beneficiary! Who happens to live near the Castle Gates Mall! And … what do you think it was that your house is on the way?”

“Fate.”

“Right!” It wasn’t exactly multiple choice. “Our destinies have collided, Delaney, because I’m destined to help you get your next beneficiary. I already granted a small wish for you—why not a big one?”

“So
my
big wish is to grant somebody else’s big wish?”

“You should be proud. It’s the most admirable wish there is. Totally selfless.”

“I’d rather find a way to hang on to my ‘self’
and
get a client.”

Ariella lets go of my arm. “You call them ‘clients’? That’s so … clinical.”

“It’s because my dad—”

“Mom! You’re going to miss it!” Ariella flings herself between the front seats and stretches one arm toward the
windshield, straining against her seat belt, as she indicates a curved indentation along the sidewalk where a couple of other cars have pulled in to drop off or pick up passengers. The mall version of the elementary school car circle.

We get out of the car, to the left of an escalator that leads up to the mall. All that’s visible from down here is scattered pinpricks of light poking through the hedges. There’s also a low hum, the sound of many voices too far away to distinguish but close enough to recognize what the sound is.

Ariella rises on the escalator a few steps above me. “What you need to do first is get your motor up to speed.” She tosses this advice to me over her shoulder. When we move up through the shadows of the lower-level pedestrian drop-off and into the golden glow of the mall’s lights, the sequined angel embroidered on the back of Ariella’s pink denim jacket gives off more and more flecks and flicks of sparkle, making it look like the wings are fluttering and propelling Ariella forward. “I aim for fifty small wishes a day.”