by Emma Savant
Like all faeries, I had a few gifts, of which empathy was—if not the greatest—not the least. I looked at Elle’s photograph for a moment and waited for my initial impression to be confirmed by an even stronger following impression: Whoever this girl was, “fragile” was not the first word I’d use to describe her.
Objective: Arrange for Elle to attend prom with the most popular boy at her high school.
Recommendations: Full aesthetics, high drama.
Relevant Archetype (subject to change at Godmother’s discretion): Cinderella
After that was a two-page essay from Greg on why he wanted his daughter’s dreams to come true. I scanned it, but there was nothing new there. Everyone wanted their own dreams to come true, and most people wanted the same for their kids. It was followed by the usual contracts, waivers, and personal details. I jumped ahead to these, to see where this Elle person lived.
I found the name of her school immediately. The words jumped out at me: Lincoln Charter School. The very one I happened to be sitting in.
“Psst,” said a voice to my right. Imogen’s foot, sticking out into the aisle between the desks, jiggled and bounced with impatience. I looked down. A slip of paper had appeared out of nowhere onto my desk.
Omg. Have you seen the new guy?
I stared hard at the paper. When the no I wanted to send back was clearly in my mind, I touched my hand to the flower-shaped handle of the magic wand tucked into my hair. That was enough. The paper disappeared, then reappeared on Imogen’s desk. She wiggled her butt in the uncomfortable chair, barely suppressed excitement all over her face.
Imogen’s face was always just a smidgen too expressive. I loved this about her. She would have been too pretty if it weren’t for the occasional wrinkled nose or puffed-out cheeks.
I glanced at the clock, which showed I had fifteen minutes left. I went back to Greg’s essay and actually read it. It was obvious why the Processing Office had pegged this one as a Cinderella. Elle’s mom had died in a car accident when Elle was nine, and her father remarried when Elle was twelve. She even had two stepsisters, and now a faerie godmother was being called in to get her to what was basically a ball.
It was almost too easy, and I was grateful. Only a crazy person would have any illusions about this going well, but if it were as open-and-shut as it looked, at least I wouldn’t have the chance to screw her Story up too badly.
And lucky for me, as Archetypes went, Cinderellas were easy. It was true that history repeated itself. Each Archetype had been refined over thousands of years of faerie godmothering. The Sleeping Beauties kinda sat their stories out while we arranged everything for them. The Jacks conquered their beanstalks. And the Cinderellas went to the ball and met a nice guy (or girl). When things went well, they experienced their Stories according to plan and everyone lived happily ever after. When things went poorly… Well, I wouldn’t think about that until I had to.
The paper appeared back on my desk. Super cute. From Arizona. He’s in English with us.
I was in the middle of gathering my mental focus for a reply when the bell rang. I tapped the handle of my wand and the paper disappeared as we gathered our books and folders and headed into the hallway together.
“I hate pre-calc,” Imogen said a few minutes later, slamming her hand onto a locker for dramatic emphasis. The clang it should have made was lost in the noise of the crowded hallway.
“I thought you liked math,” I said.
“I did,” Imogen said. “Until I ended up in Creeper McGee’s class. I swear he takes night classes in obfuscation.”
“Nice word,” I said.
She flashed a sparkling smile at me. “Thanks.”
I knew better than to take her seriously. Imogen was good at everything, from math to twenty-dollar words to disguising herself with the most flawless glamours I’d ever seen someone our age manage. The only thing that made her bearable was that she didn’t realize any of this. She wasn’t humble, exactly, but she worked hard for her perfection and secretly never thought she was good enough. It had taken me years to realize how insecure she really was, deep down, but that insecurity somehow made it easier to be her best friend. If she’d been anything like her older sisters—effortlessly gorgeous, effortlessly talented, and way too aware of their superiority—I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off no matter how much I loved her.
I stopped at my locker and stored Elle’s folder safely in between my world history textbook and my worn-out copy of Field Guide to Plants & Herbs of the Pacific Northwest. The purple folder sat there, looking innocent as I slammed the door shut, but I knew it would be ready to pounce the second I opened the locker again. I wished it would disappear while I was in class.
“I don’t know what Lorinda thinks she’s doing,” I told Imogen for the fifteenth time. “She’s crazy. I don’t even know if it’s legal to hand a job like this off to someone who isn’t an adult.”
“Because you’re totally going to be able to get that one into court,” Imogen said.
And of course, she was right. Unless I went through the magical system—which had virtually no laws about child labor, given that most Glimmers wanted to be involved from the moment they were born—I wouldn’t be able to get a Humdrum lawyer or judge to even see Wishes Fulfilled, let alone prosecute its Faerie Godparenting Division.
“Don’t get all depressed about it now,” Imogen said, taking my arm and steering me past a crowd of slow-moving guys in baggy pants and toward our English classroom. “You’re not at work right now. Deep breaths. Let the stress go. Remember all the good things in the world, like the cute new guy and how you’re going to go wing shopping with me after school.”
This wasn’t the most motivating thing ever.
As a faerie, Imogen neither had nor needed wings, but it was fashionable in magical circles to wear accessories that marked your special heritage, and wings were hot for faeries. Some new underage Glimmering club was opening up downtown, and Imogen was determined to make her debut in full force.
I knew she’d drag me along with her, but I’d told her I was not going to be wearing a set of gossamer wings on my back like it was Halloween. She remembered my earlier protests just in time and added, “We can go get dinner and stop at Powell’s Books while we’re downtown.”
That was more like it. I tipped an imaginary hat to her as we walked into our English class.
Suddenly, Imogen was all animation. “Hey!” she called out, stretching the word to two syllables. Her enthusiasm seemed to be directed toward the back of the room at a lanky, dark-haired guy who slouched in his seat, playing a game on his phone, his longish hair dangling into his eyes. He looked up as Imogen’s voice floated toward him. She perched on a desk beside his and said, “Hi! So glad you found the room.”
“Hard to miss,” he said. He let the phone drop to his lap and leaned back in his seat.
Imogen bit her lip in the attractive way that only she could manage—I looked like a squirrel when I tried it—and kicked her foot toward me, trying to pull me into the conversation. I stood in the aisle, staring at the “cute new guy.”
“This,” Imogen said, while I gaped at his face, “is Lucas.”
“Oh my god!” I said. “What are you doing here?” His eyebrows shot straight up and he stared right back, his expression startled and, I thought, pleased.
“Olivia!” he said. A grin spread across his features.
Imogen leaned back on the desk and pointed back and forth between us. “You two know each other?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. I hadn’t seen him in almost three years, and his general online silence hadn’t helped. He was the kind of guy who only posted a status update once every six months, usually something inane like, “Yay for tacos,” which would explain why I hadn’t heard he was back in Portland.
He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his desk. “We were friends when we were kids,” he told Imogen. “I moved to Arizona the summer before freshman year.”
“When you were living in France,” I added, glancing at Imogen.
The year of middle school she’d spent abroad for her dad’s job was the one year we hadn’t been practically living in each other’s pockets. Lucas had been my substitute Imogen that year—not as perfect as she was but still a pretty good friend.
“So, what?” I said. “You’re back now?”
“Looks like it,” he said.
“I can’t believe you didn’t let me know,” I said, although I wasn’t really sure why he should have. We’d been good friends once, but that had been before high school, back when I was taller than everyone else and he was a short kid with bad teeth and hair that wouldn’t stay down. It still wouldn’t stay down, but in the past three years he’d apparently discovered hair products and had braces.
He looked good.
“Short notice,” he said. “For me, too.”
“I’m glad you’re back,” I said. I sounded too enthusiastic. I bit the inside of my cheek and ordered myself to shut up. That only left room for an awkward pause, which he seemed not to notice.
“So am I,” he said. “It’s nice to see rain again.”
“You came to the right place for that,” Imogen said. She crossed one leg over the other until her foot was almost in his lap. “I can’t believe you guys know each other! That’s so crazy. Hey, you should hang out with us!” she added, like this thought had just occurred to her.
Subtle, I said with a look. Her look back was smug and to the point: Don’t knock what works.
“Sure,” Lucas said, oblivious to our exchange. “That’d be great. It’d be nice to, you know, actually know some people.”
“No worries,” Imogen said. “You’ll get to know us.” She winked at him, then hopped down from the desk. He had a dorky little smile on his face—the exact same smile guys always got around Imogen when she was turning on the charm. I lowered my glasses just slightly and peered over them, but saw only the usual golden haze of magic surrounding her. She wasn’t glamouring herself for him. She had a tendency to use subtle beauty and charisma glamours around guys, not because she liked them but because she wanted them to like her. I pushed the glasses back up my nose, and the shimmer disappeared.
Seeing magic was one of my faerie talents. It was a rare gift, and an annoying one, except in those moments I needed to keep an eye on Imogen.
I waved a little as she dragged me away to our usual seats near the window. “Oh em gee,” she said, as obnoxiously as humanly possible. “You know him. You like him.”
Her voice was way too loud. I flushed, imagining it carrying back up the aisle to Lucas.
“I barely remember him,” I whispered back.
I slid into my chair and pretended to have a hard time finding the first empty page in my notebook. Imogen didn’t buy it. She leaned back in her chair and tapped her pen against the desk in time with her foot as it bounced in the aisle between us.
My house always felt like a grand old library when I first walked in the door: hushed, well-maintained, and full of words nobody dared speak aloud.
I tried to slip up the stairs without making noise, but Mom stepped out of the kitchen and into the oversized foyer wearing a frilly apron and a smile that looked a little tight around the edges.
“Olivia, you’re home,” she said, as if I hadn’t put that together yet. “Good. You can help me make the cream puff swans for tonight’s dinner.”
I hadn’t quite forgotten about tonight’s dinner, though I’d tried hard enough. Dad was bringing home some boring colleague from the Council, and that meant the Feye family got to spend the evening putting on the aren’t-we-just-a-big-happy-family show. I wished Daniel was in the room so we could trade exasperated glances. Daniel and I didn’t always get along, but at least we could bond over our shared dislike of our parents’ dinners.
“I actually have to go somewhere,” I said. “For work. I’ve got to follow up on that big case.”
I’d considered not telling anyone at home about my big assignment. But Lorinda was always trying to suck up to the Council, and she’d sent a memo to my dad with the big news the day I was assigned the case, hours before I’d even gotten home. He’d spent dinner that evening delivering a long lecture about how my work at Wishes Fulfilled reflected on the Feye family name and our heritage of magical excellence—exactly the kind of loving, unconditionally supportive message I’d hoped for.
Mom frowned and fingered the handle of her magic wand, which stuck out of her apron pocket. Faeries had stopped using those cliché wands with stars on the ends decades ago, but Mom was a traditionalist, and the handle of hers was carved with an elaborate swirl of stars.
I smiled at her and waited for judgment: the questionable freedom of getting back out of the house and checking out this Elle person, or the definite captivity of sitting in the kitchen, enchanting swan-shaped cream puffs to preen themselves and stretch their pastry wings until they were eaten.
Finally, she shrugged. “Be back by six,” she said. Her mouth turned down a little, like my lack of interest had disappointed her, but what could she expect? I wasn’t interested in playing assistant to her domestic goddess trophy wife. She knew that. “Why don’t you take your brother with you?”
I tried to picture Daniel and me hanging out together while I stalked my new client. The picture wouldn’t even form in my mind. “Yeah, no,” I said. I shot a quick smile that was meant to be apologetic but probably wasn’t anything close.
I knew why she was asking. But Daniel’s recent detentions weren’t my problem, and I was not about to ruin this case on the first day by trying to swing double duty as his babysitter.
“Fine,” Mom said, throwing her hands up in the air. “Bring my ring when you come back down. I left it in my bathroom and there’s no way I’ll move fast enough to get this all done without a little help.”
I ran up the stairs to dump my backpack in my room. In my parents’ elegant sage green bathroom, I splashed my face with water and glanced in the mirror to make sure I looked at least presentable. As usual, my head looked like it was being eaten by a monster made of dark curls, but there was next to nothing I could do about that. Titania knows I’d tried.
Mom’s favorite enchanted ring sat on the edge of the sink—an antique gold band with a piece of quartz carved like a rose, which seemed to contain every common charm under the sun all rolled into one. I tossed it in the air, caught it, and then headed back downstairs with my wand wedged in my hair and Elle’s case folder under my arm.
“Back at six!” Mom called after me as I handed her the ring and headed for the door. “Your dad is working till the last minute, because some idiot decided to fill a Humdrum building with poltergeist charms.”
“Back at six,” I repeated, but my thoughts were already on the contents of the folder.
I had to find Elle and scope her out. Something about this case and “the romance of a great teen movie” sounded just a little too sugar-coated to be real. Most parents wanted the best for their kids, or at least that was the theory, even if I questioned it sometimes when it came to my own. But most parents didn’t arrange romances for their teenager, let alone with “the most popular boy” at her school. Most of the time, if a parent wanted a godparent to meddle in a kid’s love life, they were either trying to use their kids’ marriages to create alliances between powerful Glimmering families or, more often, were hoping we could get “the most popular boy at school” to stop trying to get into their daughter’s pants. But Elle’s dad apparently wanted this young Mr. Popular to have a shot.
There was something weird going on with this case. I had two hours to figure out what.
Chapter 3
A faded orange paper from Elle’s folder said Pumpkin Spice in curling brown letters. I followed the address printed at the bottom to a one-story café tucked in between two brick buildings, one a narrow three-story Lebanese restaurant and the other a two-story real estate office that looked like no one had bother
ed to come in to work in a while. The same curling name, Pumpkin Spice, repeated itself across the windows of the small café in vinyl lettering.
I peered over my glasses, but no sign of magic disturbed the cozy little façade. This was a Humdrum establishment through and through. I blew out a long sigh, reminding myself to let the tension out with the air, and went in. The door’s bell clanged as I entered.
Coffee, some kind of perfume, and the distinct scent of a well-stocked spice cupboard all hit me at once, followed immediately by the impression of butterscotch-colored walls. The door opened between two windowed alcoves. Each held a delicate table and two spindly metal chairs with burnt-orange cushions. Three sets of brown wraparound couches lined the right side of the room, books and board games littering the tables standing at their centers. People lounged around on the couches with their feet propped up like they planned on being there for a while.
The left side of the room was all tables, each decorated with a whimsical candle holder in the shape of a pumpkin. A long orange-cushioned bench ran along the left side of the room, and the tables were fringed on the other side by wooden chairs with tendrils of leafy vines carved on their backs. The whole place gave me the impression of having walked straight into a piece of pumpkin bread.
At the far end of the room, a counter curved around an array of shiny machines and racks of Italian syrups. A small doorway stood to the side, curtained in burnt orange, with the word Restrooms hand-painted above its arch in forest green. The R was trimmed with more pumpkin vines.
These people really know how to pick a theme, I thought, scanning the room for anyone who looked like the sardonic blond girl in the folder. I checked out the aproned people behind the counter: a tall girl with black hair and close-set eyes, who was texting and ignoring everyone, and a freckled guy who looked like this was his first-ever job and he was determined to be enthusiastic about it.
“Hi!” someone shouted behind me, and a hand squeezed my shoulder. I jumped and smacked it away. Letting the tension go apparently hadn’t worked.