Who Needs Magic? (24 page)

“I’m gonna read the lyrics to the song I’m doing Saturday
at that Alcove singing-competition thing,” Ronald tells Lourdes. “It was Fawn’s idea to test it out here, without the music.” Ronald smiles at Fawn, who smiles back.

So
that’s
how it happened. Fawn paid enough visits to the shoe store in her constantly changing wardrobe that she was able to get to know him better. Again, it feels like Ariella stole my strategy, although I don’t think she did it intentionally. She was trying to get Ronald to fall for the dress. That didn’t work—but the by-product was their bonding.

“Tell me it’s not the song about your car,” Lourdes says.

“It’s symbolic, L. You’re too literal. You miss all the layers.”

“Mmm, yeah.”

While they argue about the worthiness of Ronald’s ode to auto, I turn to Fawn. “I really did like your poem, you know. How did you come up with it?” Fawn squints my way, like the question might have some hidden evil meaning. “Was it a dream or what?” She puts on her glasses, presumably to help her detect my true intentions. “I’m interested,” I say sincerely, because although my priority is to keep her talking to me and not Ronald, I actually
am
curious how somebody can think up something so strange.

Fawn tilts her notebook up and considers the words she’s written. “I never know how my poems evolve. I start with something, and it sort of … becomes something else.” She reaches up to push her hair behind her ear, except there’s no hair there, it’s all swept up, the frizz hair-sprayed to a shellacked brilliance. Her fingers feel it
to make sure it’s there, and then her arm hovers a moment, as if it’s not sure where to go now that this nervous tic has been taken away. Her hand flops back down. “That sounds dumb, doesn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “I know exactly what you mean. It’s the same with me when I’m working on a pair of boots.” I kick up a leg so she can see one of the “Suture” boots I’m wearing—zippers sewn up and down the sides in random patterns. “I get an idea for an image maybe, or a color, and then it builds, and the pencil moves and the design takes over.”

“Yes!” Fawn declares, her myopic eyes shining. “It’s like there’s this invisible river, swimming with ideas, and if you’re really into what you’re writing, the current catches you, and you just … flow.”

“That could be a poem, what you just said.”

Fawn laughs. I notice doodles she’s drawn up the sides of her notebook pages. “Are those illustrations?”

“Oh, no, I just do that when I’m thinking. Sometimes if I have an idea, and I can’t figure out how to describe it, I draw it and it sort of lets my mind relax and then—”

I spin the notebook around to face me. “They’re good, though.” They are. “You should think of adding them to the poems. Illustrated verse. Do a chapbook, maybe. You could sell it at your store.”

Fawn considers the doodles. “I haven’t really done the publishing thing yet.”

“Why not? What are you waiting for?”

Fawn pulls the notebook closer, protective.

“You just read your work aloud in front of strangers five minutes ago,” I point out. “What’s the difference?”

“They’re poets.”

“Not all of them. And they
all
clapped.” She’s as bad as Jeni. I wonder if this “hiding your talents” thing is a shared trait with all f.g. clients.

“You really think I’m good enough?”

“Definitely. I’d buy it. Everybody here would buy it. Print some copies and bring them to Treasures in the Annex, where I work. We’ll sell them there too.”

“Wow, thanks!”

“You need to follow your muse,” I tell her, not adding that, ideally, she should follow it as far away from Ronald as possible. The waitress brings our scones and tea. She pours more hot water into Fawn and Ronald’s teapot and this unfortunately replugs the Fawn-Ronald connection.

“Hey, Fawn,” Ronald says. “Listen to this:

“This is about his car?” I whisper to Lourdes.

She shakes her head. “This is a different one.”

“I like it,” Fawn says. “How about switch ‘light’ and ‘night’? Make it something like ‘Step from the night, into the light.’ It’s closer to the rhythm of the rest and it follows better narratively.”

“Oh, yeah! Right!” Ronald makes a note.

I bite into a scone, grim. Now it’ll start. Ronald glancing with grateful admiration at Fawn. Fawn beaming back, flattered by the adoration. Ronald may not have seen this as a date initially—why would he have invited Lourdes?—but it’s become one.

Then, as I pour more tea, Ronald turns away from Fawn to show his rewritten lyrics to Lourdes. Fawn hunches back over her notebook, writing in more of her tiny looped scrawl. It’s as if they’ve each forgotten the other was there. I take a sip of my multi-voweled tea, which tastes like I’m drinking sandalwood incense. It’s disturbing—but not bad, actually. Or maybe I’m just cheered by the realization that I don’t have to come up with a new way to block the bonding of these two human elements, Ronald and Fawn, because there is absolutely no chemistry between them at all.

He’s seeking “the Voice.” And who is the Voice? She’s the Nutri-Fizzy clerk he sees every day. My phone buzzes. It’s probably Dad, wondering where I am, even though I left him a message. But how perfect would it be if it was
Jeni? Right at the moment I can tell her I have written proof that
she
is the princess Ronald’s been looking for.

I open the text. It’s not Jeni, or Dad. It’s better:

“Art walk tomorrow night? Aliens have promised to postpone invasion a week.”

I text back: “:)!!!!!”

I swear to God I am so happy, I could even write a poem. I’d call it “Fairy-Tale Endings for Everybody.”

Black velvet skirt, gauzy cap-sleeved top, gray diamond-patterned tights and “Twizzle” boots—the ones I scraped wavy vertical lines all around so the boots look like thick licorice sticks.

Something’s missing.

I turn up the radio. I’ve tuned in some station that plays the same slow, old-fashioned jazz crooner tunes that the mall fountain does at night. Dangerously sappy, but I’m in a dangerously sappy mood, a romantic mood. Every hour of today has been better than yesterday, and I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.

Before I left the tea salon, I told Fawn about the
Sea
Foam Weekly
. I knew from Skids’s gross dead-eel poem that they had a fiction page, and I offered to ask Flynn to ask Skids to put in a good word for her. I did this partly to prove to Fawn that I meant her no harm, and partly because I genuinely wanted to help her. I was feeling so happy, I wanted to share it, especially since Ariella was only giving her misery. Then I texted Ariella after Lourdes dropped me off at home. It was a preemptive strike, before Fawn could tell her I’d been at the tea salon. I said I was surrendering, that once I’d seen Fawn and Ronald together, I knew they were destined for each other, and that, as a true f.g., I had to step aside.

I didn’t hear back until this morning, but Fawn must’ve confirmed that I didn’t try to sabotage her, because in the voice mail she left, Ariella congratulated me for doing the right thing and offered to help me work on my powers so I can get “a real beneficiary” next time.

I was only semi-irritated by the call, because it was exactly what I wanted.

I met Jeni early, before her shift, at the mall office where the sign-ups were for the concert. The woman in the office brought the performance schedule up on her computer, and although registration had closed, with a little flick of a pen, I put Jeni’s name on the list of singers. Jeni gave the woman the name of the song she wanted to sing, so they’d have the instrumentals loaded into their stereo system. I guess it’s like a big karaoke machine.

Jeni and I are meeting again tomorrow morning, before
the concert, so I can help her get ready. She and Cheyenne are going shopping tonight for her dress, and I ordered Jeni to steer clear of her usual shades-of-dull-brown choices and find something with color in it.

Maybe I should take my own advice for once.

The boxes haven’t arrived from New Jersey yet, but I do have a pair of boots I brought with me when I moved here, which I’ve never worn. I drag them out from the back of my closet. They’re the first pair of boots I ever made. They have pointed toes, which I usually hate, but when I try them on, they’re not bad. I can definitely walk around a gallery in them. And they have color. There are cross-hatches of purple and silver along the sides, and around the top I’d cut small slits that I’d woven old hair ribbons through. Pale baby blue for the left boot, frosty mint-ice-cream green for the right. That’s the main reason I stopped wearing them. The colors were a bit too friendly and un-intimidating.

When I look in the mirror, it’s still not right. My boots take center stage, which would be okay any other day, but tonight I want Flynn’s eyes to be up, on
me
.

I glance around the room, looking for ideas. My gaze lands on a pair of dolls. Each doll is dressed in a long satin cape—one baby blue, one mint-ice-cream green. Now I’m glad I haven’t trashed any of the kiddie décor—it’s all source material. I cut the capes into strips, tie them together, alternating the colors, making two long thin scarves. One I tie around my waist, the other around my
hair.
Voilà
. I check it out in the mirror. This is definitely it, the perfect outfit for visiting an art gallery, because
je suis un objet d’art
.

I hear Dad, singing along with some eighties tune in his room as he gets ready for his own date. I’m not even annoyed. I’m happy for him. It’s another fairy-tale ending. He and Gina are a good match. If I didn’t like her, I wouldn’t have fixed them up in the first place.

Dad leaves his room and his footsteps creak down the hall, and then it’s just the faint clink of the piano and hiss of the snare drum from the song on the radio. Outside my window the lights in the yard blink off and on. I sit on my bed and, for once, instead of flashing back, trying to relive or correct a past that’s gone, I see ahead, to tonight, to the ideal date, to the beginning of the rest of my flawless life.

Since it hasn’t happened yet, there’s not much detail to grasp—glimpses of Flynn smiling at me and holding my hand; me making some snide comment about a painting and Flynn laughing; us standing outside later in the yellow glow of a lamppost, having paused on the way to the car to wrap our arms around each other at exactly the same time, like it’s part of a dance we practiced. The night is cool and misty, but the embrace warms us up. We pull apart for a second, so we can look in each other’s eyes, and then we kiss … and it’s flawless.

I’m holding my cell in my hand and I feel it vibrate before I hear the buzz. Flynn. Not canceling. Not blowing me off. He’s here: “Your carriage awaits.” I smile.

Tomorrow, Jeni can be the princess who finally snags her prince. Tonight, the f.g. gets to be Cinderella.

The fairy tale is not playing out properly.

There’s a second, a moment, half a heartbeat, when I meet Flynn’s eyes after I get into his car and I feel the tingling serenity from that night on the Ferris wheel, before we kissed.

But when we lean toward each other this time, it’s as if an invisible air bag has exploded between us. Hesitation and nervousness and awkwardness fill the space, pressing us apart. We kiss, but it’s off. My lips hit his cheek, my hair gets caught in the seat belt. He laughs, I laugh, although it isn’t really funny.

I want him to shatter the awkwardness right there, tell me how much he’s missed me. I’m waiting for the declaration of devotion I’d daydreamed about, but it doesn’t come.

“So …,” Flynn says finally, but then he lets the rest of whatever he was going to say, if anything, just hang there.

So … 
what?
Am I supposed to fill in the silence? I could demand to know why he didn’t call during the whole time he was gone.

No. Too confrontational.

I could say it seems like he was pretty busy at his Extreme Water Sports thing, since he never had time to call me.

No. Too passive-aggressive.

Too bad this date isn’t happening one day later, because
then I could tell him, at last, about my f.g. success. But even though Jeni’s wish is practically granted, it would be bad luck to say anything now.

I need to forget the f.g. stuff and think like a g.f.… I’ll ask him about his trip, but without the “Why didn’t you call” part. Just a nice, supportive “How did it go?”

“How—”

“We’re here.”

What? I spent the whole drive here lost in my inner monologue? Why didn’t Flynn say anything?

He pulls into a metered parking space. This will be better anyway. We need to get out of the car, be together without seat belts and gearshifts and dead air separating us.