by Emma Savant
He recited it all like he was some junior coffee-fetcher working for our dad, fully versed in the whole ordeal but bored out of his mind. I recognized the feeling. It had shadowed my days at Wishes Fulfilled before the Elle case had fallen into my lap and replaced boredom with panic.
We reached the top of the stairs and slipped silently past our parents’ bedroom. When we were safely down the hall, I asked, “So what’s the deal with you skipping school?”
“It’s nothing,” he said, in a long-suffering voice that made clear it was everything but that I shouldn’t pry. Half of me wanted to leave it alone and applaud him for making his own choices.
The other half was his older sister.
“Skipping school isn’t nothing,” I said. “It’s kind of a big deal. Where do you go?”
“Drop it,” he said flatly. His face was still pale and tight from our parents’ argument, so I did. Instead, I offered a smile and a fist bump. It wasn’t much, but it was my way of saying I was at least a little in his corner. Someone had to be.
He disappeared into his room, and I disappeared into mine, shutting and locking the door behind me.
The air in the house stayed thick with anger and tension. I went to the window and pulled it open, lit some candles, and checked on the plants lining my window sills. They all seemed happy, enjoying the light of early summer with their leaves reaching hungrily toward the sun. I brought my laptop from my desk and settled onto my bed. I might as well get some work done.
I hadn’t been able to talk to Elle at Pumpkin Spice, but this was the twenty-first century, and I knew where to find her.
Her Facebook page was mostly boarded up, everything visible only to her friends. Fortunately, I was a faerie godmother, and we had workarounds. I entered the username wishesfulfilledgodmother, and typed abracadabra13! into the password field. A moment later, Elle’s page popped up, as open to me as every other page on social media now was.
I sent a mental high-five to whoever had first discovered how well magical signals played with electronic ones.
Her profile photo was of her and a sandy-haired guy, both dressed in what looked like elaborate X-Men costumes. Elle was in a yellow and green uniform wearing a white-striped wig—Rogue, I thought, trying to remember the cartoons I’d watched as a kid—and the guy next to her was wearing a blue bodysuit with what looked like a bright yellow diaper and sunglasses with only one lens across both eyes. I couldn’t figure out who he was supposed to be.
I scrolled down. Her status updates were mostly reposted articles about women in geek culture, ComicCon updates, and human rights and fair trade petitions. She had 329 friends, was Interested In Men but didn’t appear to be in a relationship, and had been tagged in about a thousand photos of what looked like fan conventions. She'd liked pages for Marvel, D.C., Hayao Miyazaki, a bunch of animes I’d never heard of, fair trade coffee, women entrepreneurs, costuming, fanfiction, and a page called Keep Portland Weird. This last one made me smile.
“Keep Portland Weird” was the city’s unofficial motto. It was based on Texas’ “Keep Austin Weird,” and it was no coincidence that both cities were major Glimmering hubs. Keeping a city “weird” meant no one looked twice when you wore faerie wings out in public or went to the supermarket in a pointed witch’s hat, and it was one of our biggest tools in keeping our world out of sight of the Humdrums.
Even my dad, who wasn’t the world’s most radical guy, was a champion for “Keep Portland Weird,” because a culture of weirdness kept the Glimmering world out of the Humdrums’ sight. As a member of the Council, keeping our world secret was one of his biggest priorities.
I liked Elle, from her page. She looked a little quirky, but also as if she knew what she liked and went for it. I respected that. What I couldn’t tell was whether there was any way I’d be able to successfully hook her up with the kind of guy her dad wanted her dating.
That in itself was a little weird, I thought, examining a picture of Elle in an orange wig. While parents setting their teenage kids up was a little creepy, I’d long ago accepted that it was just part of the business of godmothering. But Elle didn’t look like she was pining for a boyfriend or some kind of social acceptance. On the contrary, she seemed to have a lot of friends, most of them as nerdy as she appeared to be.
She didn’t look like she was short on boyfriend prospects, either. I clicked through another album of geek convention photos. More than a few of the pictures included guys in costumes, and, in defiance of all known stereotypes, some of them were pretty hot. Something about this whole assignment felt off.
But it wasn’t my job to decide whether things felt off. That had been one of the first lessons of being an Assistant Junior Godmother at Wishes Fulfilled.
The first case I had ever shadowed had been to get a Glimmering princess married off to an influential wizard. I didn’t see why the princess’ love life was our business, and didn’t think they’d be happy together, but Tabitha had reminded me that people had been entering into arranged marriages for thousands of years and that the mysterious Oracle herself had suggested the match.
“It isn’t up to us to judge,” Tabitha had said. “It’s up to us to do. We are the movers and shakers of this world,” she’d added, her face glowing with pride.
Tabitha liked her job a lot more than I ever would.
I brushed the memory aside and started digging through Elle’s folder. A moment later, my gaze landed on the name I needed.
Figuring out who qualified as “the most popular guy in school” had taken some research. My freshman year had been enough to convince me that high school was lame and real life wouldn’t start till college, so I had no idea who was popular and who wasn’t. It seemed safe to assume Elle didn’t know or care, either. And Imogen was no help.
“I don’t pay attention,” she’d informed me over lunch. “Humdrum popularity is just a sad consolation prize for not having powers. Now, if you want to know who’s going to be at Gilt this Friday night…”
Left to my own devices, I’d holed up in a bathroom stall after the last bell rang, and propped my glasses atop my head. I saw magic whenever I took my elf-made lenses off, but sometimes even Humdrum charisma, brains, intuition, and other talents left their own kind of residue. I’d waved my wand, focusing all my energy on the charm that would enhance my ability to see these mundane powers.
Being in the school hallways without my glasses had made me dizzy. Colors whirled around the Glim kids as they passed one another on their way out to the parking lot. Faeries had been surrounded by shimmering nebulas, witches walked out of classes with smoky familiars curled on their shoulders or around their arms, and wizards sauntered through the halls with stars spinning in constellations around their heads. One girl had had a galaxy forming near her right ear. There weren’t many Glims here, but they’d stood out.
But they weren’t who I had been after. I’d felt a pull drawing me toward the source of the gift I was looking for. Just past the band room, I had turned a corner and found him.
A well-built guy with dark hair and a sports bag over his shoulder had walked down the hall toward me. A pretty blond girl had strolled alongside him, carrying a pair of his shoes. The air around them had glowed misty white.
Now, I thumbed through my file to Elle’s work schedule, where I’d scribbled the guy’s name in the margin: Tyler Breckenridge.
His Facebook page looked like someone’s application to a preppy frat. His profile picture was a faux-casual, airbrushed senior photo of him looking soulfully at the camera. His status updates were almost entirely about how he felt after working out, his hopes for getting onto a college basketball team, motivational quotes, and selfies, most of them including various girls with too much eyeliner. He was from California but had moved to Portland in his sophomore year, and I could see absolutely nothing that might make him interesting to Elle, or Elle interesting to him. They were completely different species.
On the bright side, he did appear to b
e available. While the blond girl who’d been walking with him in the hallway did appear in a lot of his selfies, so did a lot of other girls, and he listed himself as “Single.”
Not that it would have mattered.
Godparents had rules we had to follow. If the case file said “the most popular guy at school,” that meant the most popular guy at school. I could think of four or five guys off the top of my head that Elle would probably get along with better, but that wasn’t how it worked. Tyler had been the one with the white cloud around his head.
I wondered if godmothering always felt like trying to shove puzzle pieces into the wrong spots.
But the noble calling of a godmother was to make her clients’ wishes come true, and I had to trust in that. The Oracle had said so, and she knew better than any of us what would make our world a better place.
I sighed, feeling an increasingly familiar weight settle in my stomach. Two more years of this and I’d be free. I’d be eighteen and have saved up enough gold to take the whole heap to the Glim-Hum Currency Exchange. All I needed was enough dollar bills to pay for my first year of college. After that, maybe I'd be established enough in the Humdrum world that I could get a normal job to pay for the rest of it.
I could put up with anything to make that happen.
“I can even be a faerie godmother until Tabitha gets better,” I said aloud to my plants. I watched them, waiting for some kind of reaction, but of course there was none.
In the meantime, I’d have to look into getting special permission to use a short-term love spell on these two. Since the assignment really only stipulated the relationship last one night and give the girl a nice memory of prom, I hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to push the paperwork through.
The sick feeling only intensified. Even if it was only for one night, was it really right to force a girl into a relationship that probably wouldn’t make her happy, just so her dad could feel better about her not fitting in?
Perhaps the dad was the solution. Maybe I could go talk to him and get him to see reason.
There were too many things to worry and wonder about. I did what I always did when the stress of daily life got to be too much: I looked up Oregon State University’s botany program and spent the next hour clicking through their website, letting myself daydream about leaving this all behind.
Chapter 5
Elle’s dad was an airhead.
I’d been sitting at Pumpkin Spice with him for the last half-hour, trying to explain why hooking Elle up with Tyler was a bad idea. He’d spent most of the time saying things like “every girl wants to feel like a beautiful princess on the night of her prom!” and “he seems like a nice boy—exactly the kind of kid who could help her fit in better.” He seemed completely oblivious to the idea that Elle might not want to fit in—that she preferred to hang out with fellow geeks and spend her time on hobbies that interested her more than going to high school football games or proms, or whatever else her dad had picked up about adolescence from watching Sixteen Candles.
Greg was a tall guy, balding up top, with thin wire glasses and a pleasant smile. He was a pleasant person all around, with a mild voice, friendly manners, and, apparently, a deep-seated desire for his daughter to be happy. He was just completely off about what would make that happen.
It wasn’t just my own inferences from her Facebook page that led me to this conclusion. The real clincher had been when I’d walked in the door and seen her at the counter, quietly arguing with him.
“I don’t want to go to the movies with Sabrina,” she’d hissed at him. “Sabrina and I are not friends. Just because Sabrina is Cortney’s friend does not mean she is my friend, and I can promise you we’d all rather I not be there.”
“Come on, honey,” he’d said. “It’s the weekend. You’ve got to get out and live a little. Enjoy your youth while you still have it.”
“I’ll do that when Pumpkin Spice is in hands that aren’t trying to drive it into the ground,” she’d said. “You’re more than welcome to help with that. Any day now.”
The sarcasm in her voice had been palpable, and I had a feeling the disagreement would have escalated if I hadn’t caught his eye and nodded at that moment. He’d given in, then, and she’d sighed loudly and disappeared into the back, leaving Noah to handle the slow straggle of customers.
I’d been pretending I hadn’t heard them fighting, but that didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. I waited for Greg to pause, then cut in with, “So what did Elle mean about someone ‘driving Pumpkin Spice into the ground’?”
My voice was a little too casual, and Greg’s pleasant face drooped into a slight frown. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “Elle just doesn’t agree with the way I run this place.”
I leaned forward. This was more interesting than listening to his ideas about teenage prom dreams. “What’s the deal?” I asked.
I expected him to wiggle away from the question or try to brush it off, but he only shrugged. “She doesn’t think I’m professional enough and she thinks I have poor business ethics,” he said. He didn’t sound embarrassed or upset by this. If anything, he sounded tired. “She really wants to replace everything on the menu with organic fair trade coffee, and we just can’t make that happen right now.”
“Why not?” I said. Everyone else in the entire city served nothing but organic fair trade coffee, if the signs in café windows were to be believed.
“It’s expensive,” he said. “I know—it makes me sound like a monster, right?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know enough about coffee or running a café to have an opinion on the subject. I’d heard people’s comments about it, of course, but I only drank coffee when I came to places like this with Imogen.
Regardless, Greg didn’t strike me as the monster type. A little clueless, maybe, but clueless wasn’t a straight shot to evil.
“I don’t know, honestly,” I said. “What’s wrong with the coffee you have now?”
“It’s not fair-trade enough,” he said. He was slender enough that his sigh seemed to make his entire body cave in for a moment. “She was upset about it, and I thought she had a point about making sure the people who grow coffee aren’t exploited, so I started buying coffee with ‘fair trade’ on the label. Deborah—my wife, you know—helped me find a good brand we could afford. But apparently that’s not good enough. It has to be fair trade, organic, shade-grown, bird-friendly, carbon-neutral, Rainforest Alliance coffee from one of three specific startup companies whose beans cost three times more than what we use now. And Elle’s got all these requirements for the milk and soymilk and cocoa we use. And I’d be fine with that. It sounds like a great idea, really. But we can’t afford it. We can’t keep enough clientele as it is. This isn’t a great location. I know it makes me a bad guy to put the evil dollar ahead of everything else, but I’ve got to keep the doors open. This place feeds my family.”
I remembered Elle getting mad at her stepsister for taking money out of the register, perhaps because it meant even less cash to invest in fancy ingredients. But the dots still refused to connect in my head.
“Why are you sending her to prom?” I said. “Sounds like she’s more unhappy about the business than a dance.”
He leaned forward, face lighting up like he’d just had a good idea.
“I think she’s lonely,” he said. “She doesn’t hang out with friends like the other girls do. She just works and spends time with her best friend and doesn’t try to get to know anyone else. And she spends an awful lot of time and energy telling the customers how bad our coffee is and trying to make them feel guilty for ordering it,” he added, giving the counter a sidelong glance. “It’s not great for the business or the family.”
“Why are you letting her work here, then?”
He frowned and shook his head. “We’re a blended family, you know, and she had a hard time when I married Deborah. Pumpkin Spice started as Elle’s mom’s project. I don’t feel right taking it away from her.”
<
br /> “How does she feel about Deborah now?” I said.
“She’s always struggled to get along with her stepmother and stepsisters,” he said. The way he spoke, I got the feeling he was being delicate. “I think maybe if she got caught up in some other drama, some good drama, she’d realize there’s more to life than yelling at anyone who thinks it’s okay to buy our coffee.”
He said “drama” the way old people always try to say things like “took a selfie” or “went viral,” like he was hyper-conscious of trying to be hip and with it. It was weirdly endearing.
“So you’re trying to distract her by making her the star of some eighties teen movie?” I said.
He looked pleased, like I’d caught on at last. I forced my expression to stay still.
“Exactly,” he said. “Just distract her for a while. Give her a chance to see that there’s more to the world than taking on the family business. She’s a senior, so by the time prom is over she’ll be heading off to college and starting her own life.”
“And then everyone can move on.”
He nodded. It was all making sense now. Weird sense, but sense.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“I think it will,” he said. “And that’s what you people do, right? Faerie godmothers? You make people fall in love.”
That was a gross oversimplification, but I couldn’t pretend it was the first time I’d heard it. Everyone associated us with romance and midnight balls, even Glimmers who knew better.
“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t think she wants a magical eighties-teen-movie prom night.”
Greg laughed at this. His laugh was loud and likeable. Everything that came out of his mouth was driving me crazy, but I couldn’t actually be upset with him.