Who Needs Magic? (21 page)

Cheyenne shrieks out a rendition of “Hey, Soul Sister.” She’s definitely got the enthusiasm—hips sway, hands slap overhead—but no sense of pitch. I glance around to see how the rest of the crowd is reacting. There are about forty people in the place, scattered among the nine or ten tables in the room. The décor is a weird mix of glitzy and gritty.

Tinted lights are hung above the small stage, and they flash and swirl whenever the music is playing, and one whole wall is covered floor to ceiling with old LP covers.

It’s dark, but the revolving lights make it possible to see that there’s nobody preparing to boo Cheyenne, no one clutching their ears in pain. They’re either chatting with each other or swaying along with the song.

It’s a friendly bunch. Jeni will be more than fine. She doesn’t seem to know this, though, because her left leg has been jiggling nervously since the moment we sat down. The heel of her cowboy boot makes soft
tap-tap-tap
s on the black-and-white-tiled floor.

Cheyenne finishes and Kevin cheers, joined by Hunter, another Fizz Master who has come along, and Hunter’s boyfriend, Austin. I clap and Jeni follows my lead, but her claps are little hummingbird-fast slaps to match her tapping foot.

A girl and boy run up to the stage to follow Cheyenne. The order is decided by numbered tickets you’re given when you pay. “We have the next one,” Kevin tells the table. “Who wants to go?”

“Hey, Jeni,” I say loudly. “You ready?”

Jeni shakes her head.

“Cool!” I say, as if she’d agreed. “We’re ready to cheer you on.” The others at the table offer their encouragement. The duo onstage bow to the applause of their friends.

I lean over toward Jeni. “Remember the boots,” I whisper.

Jeni glances down, notices her foot tapping, and stops it. She looks back up at me and I give her a supportive smile. She stands—and then clutches onto my arm and gives it a tug.

“
I’m
not going,” I say. Jeni nods. “No, I don’t sing. Not my thing.” Another staccato bob of the head from Jeni. “The boots,” I hiss. Her fingers dig in. Maybe I did do a spell, but a bad one—one that’s making her act possessed. She tugs again. Clearly, I have no choice. I stand up and let her drag me to the stage.

On the stage is a long rectangular box with a touch screen on it that flashes a list of songs. I randomly pick something and hand Jeni a microphone, hoping she’ll let me just provide silent moral support. But no—she thrusts the other mike into my hand and then immediately punches the button on the screen that says “Duet.” Lyrics pop up on a split screen. And mine are first. Of all the humiliations f.g.s have undergone for their clients, this has got to be the worst.

What can I do? I sing. I wish I could close my eyes and pretend I’m home alone, listening to my iPod, but if I close my eyes, I can’t see the lyrics, and I don’t know this song. It’s something called “You’ve Got to Have Friends,” which is too ironic, because if anybody here was my friend, they never would’ve let me get up on this stage in the first place. Luckily, the lights pointed toward us are too blinding for me to be able to see the horror of the crowd.

I never should’ve mentally mocked Cheyenne.

Finally, it’s Jeni’s turn, and at first I think she’s not singing, only mouthing the words, but when I lean closer, I can hear her, barely.

She can do this, I know it, but
she
doesn’t yet. Time to put the boots to work for real. I catch Jeni’s eyes and tilt my microphone down, angling it her way. The silver stars on the boots spark and the leather glows. To the audience, it will seem like it’s the lights creating the effect, but Jeni is close enough to see the magic.

It works. Jeni straightens up and her voice gets a little louder. She closes her eyes and I guess she does know the song, because she keeps singing, taking my lines too, and no way am I going to protest.

I step back to let her have center stage. She sings and sings, and it’s like she sounded at Treasures, but better because now she has musical accompaniment and a real audience.

I smile to myself. All I did was a little routine Atom Manipulation to cause the sparks. I didn’t add the confidence. Jeni did that herself.

After the song ends, Jeni bows shyly, blushing at the applause coming from both friends and strangers.

I feel a happy sense of completion. Maybe I wasn’t lying to her about how the f.g.-client relationship works. Maybe getting her to this moment really is enough.

It takes my eyes a second to adjust to the bright lights out in the snack bar. I lean against the wall near a rack of
gourmet potato chips and text Lourdes to tell her how it went. Jeni appears while I’m still typing. “Did you hear?” she asks, eyes gleaming.

“Yes, you sang great. It was hard to miss. I was onstage with you, remember?”

“I mean the applause.”

“Yeah, I was there for that too.”

Jeni hesitates. She picks up a bag of red pepper chips and thumbs the corner of it nervously. “Is it too late?”

“For what?”

“Is it … severed?”

I finish texting and look up at her. “Why? Don’t you want it to be?”

“Well, I … I …”

I decide to make it easy for her, especially since otherwise it’ll take all night for her to get it out. “There’s always a grace period. In case the client changes her mind.” I take the potato chips out of her hands. “It’s going to work this time, Jeni, because we’re going to let it happen naturally. No tricks.”

“Do I have to say anything?”

“To Ronald? Eventually. You’re not going to get very far if you never talk to him.”

“No, I mean to, you know, reverse the severing of the bond.”

“Oh, yeah … Definitely … It’s, um, what I made you say way back at the start. That you’re meant to be.”

Another pause, and then, in the breathless whisper
she’d used for the words before, “Ronald and I are meant to be.”

“Bond officially un-severed. We’re back on.”

The phone rings. It’s Lourdes. “So you got her to sing?” she asks. “The ‘enhancement’ worked?”

I smile at Jeni. “Like magic.”

Dad knocks on my door. “Let’s get going!”

“Okay! I just have to put on my boots.”

Things have been going so well with Jeni that I felt I could leave her alone for a day. I followed through on the plan I came up with after the fountain and Jump Kicks disasters. I time my breaks to coincide with Ronald’s so I can slip over to Nutri-Fizzy and make sure he always orders from Jeni. Sometimes I use magic to send her notes—not telling her what to say, just reminding her to be herself and not stress.

But she doesn’t really need the notes. Now that she’s
gained some self-confidence, there’s never even a hint that she’s going to run away when he appears. She was shy at first, but each day she’s a tiny bit more at ease. Each time Ronald reaches the counter, they chat a little longer. Yesterday I didn’t have to do anything, because it was Ronald who let somebody in front of him so that it would be Jeni taking his order.

It was time to step back and see how she does on her own—which led me to agreeing to the Theo-Gina adventure. It’s not like I had anything better to do.

Why couldn’t I have found something better to do?

First there was a horrid 3-D animated movie about construction trucks that turn out to be aliens in disguise. Then it was on to lunch at the pizza chain next door. Since we’ve arrived, the conversation has consisted mainly of “How about one more bite, Theo?” and “I hate mushrooms,” interspersed with glares from Theo tossed my way, as if I’d snatched his favorite toy, when I’ve taken nothing from him, not even Dad’s or Gina’s attention, which is all on him.

The proposed post-lunch activity is a visit to a batting cage, where I’ll have nothing to do but watch Theo take out his anti-Hank issues on baseballs while Dad joins in and shows off his utter lack of athletic skill.

I’m considering faking a bout of food poisoning, when my phone rings: Lourdes.

“You free? I want to show you something.”

“Yes!” I say. “Of course. Right away. I’ll be at Treasures ASAP.” I hang up and turn to Dad. “I have to get to the mall. It’s an emergency.”

Dad peers over at me suspiciously. “What kind of emergency?”

“Clothing related. There’s a fashion designer who wants to use vintage in his fall line, and he needs me to help sort through the inventory for the best stuff. Nancy’s totally clueless about that side of the business.”

Dad still seems skeptical, even though my story is beyond believable. There are lots of designers who use vintage stuff. Maybe it’s far-fetched that they’d be shopping at Treasures, but it would be less far-fetched than most of the things that have happened in my life.

Dad must be thinking along the same lines, because he gives in and drops me off on the way to the batting cage. Lourdes is waiting for me outside Treasures, a helmet under each arm. Except we’re not going batting.

We head downtown on Lourdes’s moped, and as we get closer, we leave the epic malls and fancy mansions behind. The buildings get taller and older, with sculpted cornices and Art Deco façades. There are Metro stops and city buses at every cross street, and trash and dirt. The sidewalks grow more crowded, and the pedestrians jostle each other aside, rushed and unsmiling.

I love it.

It’s an eye-opening ride. At least until we turn down a street lined with warehouses and pull up in front of a big
brick factory-looking building. Then Lourdes orders me to close my eyes and slaps her hands over them to make sure I can’t see where we’re going. She steers me down the sidewalk. “Thanks,” I hear her say, and I feel someone brush past us. I can tell from the change of sounds that we’ve stepped inside. The first thing I notice is the smell: coffee. She’s brought me to a coffee plant? I don’t hear any machinery, though, only people talking and pop music playing softly in the background.

“Okay!” Lourdes pulls her hands away. I open my eyes.

“It’s … It’s … What is it?”

“Common Grounds. It’s an artists’ café.” She says this as if there’s one on every corner, but I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in New Jersey.

It does have the look of some of the places I’d gone to with Mom or Posh: exposed brick, exposed beams, long stainless-steel counter with the menu posted above on a blackboard.

But the tables aren’t the usual café tables. There are two drafting tables, like architects use, a few large square tables with outlets in the center for laptop plugs, and a long wooden table down the middle of the room that looks like two huge doors laid end to end. There’s a sewing machine on one end of the long table and carpentry clamps at the other.

At each of the four corners of the café are easels, and at the easels and tables are the artists: drawing, painting, sewing, sculpting, designing. The people all have dyed
black or blue or magenta hair. They wear overalls or paint-spattered smocks or ripped jeans that I can tell they didn’t buy that way, but that they ripped themselves. Some have multiple piercings, and some have multiple tattoos, and a lot of them wear boots. Boots!

“I thought you’d like it.” Lourdes slaps me on the back. “Grab a table. I’ll get us drinks. What do you want?” I ask for a chai latte and then make my way through the café, still in awe.

There are a few small normal-looking white tables scattered throughout the room, and I take a seat at a free one. I gaze around at all the artists, working separately but sharing a creative energy that seems to pulse through the café, from one easel and table to the next.

“Here you go.” Lourdes hands me a tall black mug topped with frothy milk and takes a seat across from me. “Is this great or what? I saw a post about it online this morning. There’re a couple of art schools in the neighborhood, so it’s mostly the students who come here, plus some professional artists who live in the lofts nearby.”

There’s an old soup can in the middle of the table, filled with colored markers. Lourdes lifts out a green one and draws the outline of a boot on the table, upside down, so it’s right side up for me. She wipes away an errant line and I realize that the tabletop is a big dry-erase board. “We have to come back when we have more time,” she says. She hands me the pen. “But I had to show you.”