by Emma Savant
“As you can see,” Deborah said. She’d caught the little exchange and looked like it was no more than she had expected.
Elle definitely didn’t seem to want me talking to her stepmom and stepsisters. But Deborah seemed pretty okay. Mallory was nice, if a little tactless—and if anyone should understand tactlessness, it should be Elle. And it was impossible not to like Cortney. She was a puppy: occasionally exhausting but essentially lovable.
What? I mouthed to Elle. I gestured toward her stepfamily, trying to show her it was okay, but she just looked more freaked out.
“I guess I’m not supposed to be hanging out with you guys,” I said. It seemed better to awkwardly say it than to stand there while we pretended we couldn’t see Elle waving me off.
“It’s all good,” Mallory said. She sounded bored with the whole thing. “We’re used to it.”
“She likes us, deep down,” Cortney said. “Secretly.”
“Really secretly,” Mallory said.
I gave them all an apologetic smile and then moved on, circling the room. Kyle stood up on the balcony with a few wallflowers and couples looking for a little privacy. With him spying on Elle, and Imogen busy shaking her hips to the catchy pop song that had just started, I was free to go back to watching Lucas. Every good prom needed a couple of lovesick stalkers angsting in the shadows.
It shouldn’t have been so interesting, just watching him. He was just another guy. But I couldn’t kid myself. He moved with more grace than other guys. He smiled with more warmth. He looked down at Aubrey with more sincerity than anyone else in the room looked at their dates.
I would have given anything in that moment to be her.
As the gods of irony would have it, she was unimpressed. In fact, she seemed annoyed. She was talking to him with her eyebrows raised into tense auburn lines on her forehead, and there was a little concern mixed in with all the affection on his face. She’d probably broken a nail, I thought bitterly, and he was just a nice enough person to actually care.
When the song changed to another slow one, he wrapped her in his arms and pulled her close. She let herself be pulled, but her face against his shoulder didn’t look nearly as content as mine would have been.
If she was going to be with him, the least she could do was be grateful. I scowled and forced my attention to Mallory, who’d just been led onto the floor by her boyfriend. He was a senior, too. I’d seen him around the halls and in the library a couple times, but we’d never met and I didn’t know his name. They spun together for a while, and then he stopped, shook his head slightly, and went back to dancing. Mallory’s dreamy smile turned into a frown, but she kept moving, too. A few minutes later, he shook his head again and blinked a few times. Mallory flushed bright red, and a few people around them stopped dancing to look around.
What was going on? I took a few steps forward, trying to see. And then it hit me: the overpowering rotten-egg stench of bad gas. Judging from Mallory’s cherry-colored face, it had come straight from her.
Cortney, who was still talking to her mom, mouthed You okay? Mallory clenched her face into a tight smile and nodded. She said something to her date, who laughed and shrugged.
The other people around her weren’t so kind. A few girls looked down their noses at her and dragged their dates away, and one guy guffawed loudly enough that I could hear it from here. “Can’t paint a fart!” he said, his voice booming and making his date cringe and tug on his sleeve with a will-you-please-shut-up expression all over her face. He held out his hands in innocence and said, “What?” just in time for her to march away.
I leaned back against the wall and tugged on my ear. “So sorry about that,” Mallory muttered to her date. She put a hand against her stomach. “I have no idea what I must have eaten.”
“Meh,” her boyfriend said with a good-natured shrug. “That’s what I like about us. We’ve gotten to that point where we’re basically just slobs who sit on the couch and watch movies and fart. I think that’s a good thing.”
I had never heard anything so simultaneously awkward and romantic. I kind of loved him for it. Judging by her smile, Mallory did too.
She’d just opened her mouth to reply when a thunderous fart ripped through the air. I couldn’t stop the hand that flew to my mouth. She flushed again, looking too shocked to try to cover anything. Deborah, still standing on the sidelines, moved to go onto the floor to rescue her, but Cortney put a hand on her mom’s arm and shook her head. “Better if I do it,” she said in a low voice. She offered Mallory a bright smile and moved onto the dance floor, her cheerful energy putting a leak in the embarrassed tension that surrounded her sister.
“And this is why no one should go to the Cortes Taco Cart right before prom,” she said with a grin. She touched Mallory’s elbow. “Come on over to the refreshments table. Maybe we can find something to settle your stomach. Mom’s always got something in her purse.”
Mallory, looking more discomfited than I’d ever seen her, squeezed Cortney’s arm. She turned to her boyfriend, who immediately nodded and held out his hand. Cortney smiled and turned to lead the way off the floor.
Then, so quickly I could barely see it happen, the zipper at the back of Cortney’s yellow dress fell open as if the seams around it had all come loose at once. The top of the gown fell open, exposing her back—and her front, though I couldn’t see that from here—so fast she didn’t have time to do more than gasp. The dress had slid halfway off before she caught it and clutched it to herself.
The whole thing had taken only a second, but that had been long enough for anyone who had her in their line of sight to see everything the bodice of the dress had kept hidden.
“Whoa, baby!” a guy shouted from across the room. Judging by the movement and sound of another guy hitting him and hissing at him not to be a douche, I judged he’d had a good view.
Cortney whimpered, and Mallory grabbed her arm. “What the hell?” she said.
“I don’t know!” Cortney said, her voice quiet but nearing a whine. Deborah was already halfway across the floor to them. Her dark eyes flashed to mirror Mallory’s, the two of them daring the world to say another word.
I met Elle’s eyes across the room. She’d been staring at me, just waiting for me to catch on. And when I finally did, my blood began to boil.
I barely felt my legs move, but the next thing I knew, I was halfway across the floor. I stared down the general direction the “whoa, baby” comment had come from and said, in a voice more authoritative than my own, “I strongly suggest everyone mind their own business.” A girl nudged another girl and whispered in her ear, making her giggle. I turned sharply to them and added, “That could have been you. Don’t be a jerk.”
It was good life advice for everyone. To my surprise, most of the room seemed to agree. A few of Mallory and Cortney’s friends detached from the crowd and hurried after them, concern all over their features. Everyone else seemed content to mutter and then go back to whatever they’d been doing.
Tyler stared after Elle’s stepsisters as they left the room. After a moment, he leaned over to Elle and said, “You’re not kidding about the evil stepsisters thing. I can’t believe someone as classy as you are has relatives like that.”
He had no idea what he was talking about. Until this moment, it would have just annoyed me. Now, I felt only contempt, the burning kind that wouldn’t even let me look at him. I glared at Elle.
I should have noticed when I’d talked to them, but I’d been too distracted by Lucas and by my plans for later this evening—plans I wasn’t even sure I was willing to go through with anymore. Mallory’s necklace had been enchanted. So had Cortney’s earrings. They were both loaded with some kind of stupid prank charms, and Elle had thought it would be a good idea to pull them out on prom night, just because she could.
I shouldn’t have been fooled by the way she came in here this evening all accessory-less like she’d decided to handle this magic business like an adult. She wasn’t an adult.
She was a pitiful, spiteful child, and she didn’t deserve to touch magic or to be loved by someone like Kyle.
More than anything, she didn’t deserve me. I’d almost lost my job over her, and I’d been about to risk it again, just because I had this crazy idea that maybe her happiness was more important than my job security. But she wasn’t worth losing anything over. Not after this.
She shrunk in on herself. I glared at her in silence. She opened her mouth, as if she could possibly have anything to say that would make the anger coursing through my veins burn any less fiercely.
I leaned in until I was so close I could have kissed her. “I quit,” I spat.
Chapter 29
I was halfway across the room before Elle caught up to me. She grabbed my arm and spun me around. “Please,” she said.
I yanked my arm away. But she looked so upset that I stopped marching. Her eyes were round and pleading. “I did not mean for that to happen,” she said. I put my hands on my hips and glared, waiting for her to start rambling on about what she did mean and how it wasn’t her fault, but she fell silent, watching to see if I believed her.
“Go on,” I said. People were giving us weird looks. Anyone who was dancing had to maneuver around us, and I didn’t want the attention, so I walked to the edge of the floor. Elle followed me. I leaned against the wall and waited, knowing she had no defense.
She bit her lip and twisted her hands together, then said, “I completely forgot I’d set those charms,” she said. Her voice was tiny. “I’ve been forgetting a lot of stuff lately. I’ve been having a hard time thinking clearly.”
“Badly managed magic will do that to you,” I snapped. It was hard to feel any sympathy at this point. I’d warned her more than enough. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would have gotten the memo.
“I know,” she said.
For the first time, she said it like she actually did know, like somewhere in the past few months she’d actually bothered to listen. I pursed my lips and waited.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I got excited. I get kind of crazy when I get interested in stuff. Kyle always says my mind is a serial monogamist—obsessed with one idea at a time before it switches gears. Those charms were amazing. I got carried away.”
“Enough to humiliate your sisters like that?” I said. “Seriously, what is your problem with them? They’re nice. Your stepmom’s nice, too.”
I saw her stop herself from rolling her eyes, just in time. She pressed her lips together and then said, with the hesitance of someone trying to be both honest and generous, “Our family didn’t blend so well back when my dad got remarried. Intellectually, I know they’re decent people. We’ve never connected.”
“Hard to do when you’re screwing them over with enchanted jewelry you’re not competent enough to handle,” I said.
She took the blow more graciously than I expected. She blew out a long sigh. “I know. That was stupid. Look, Mallory and Cortney and I are never going to be friends.” Her eyes darted up to meet mine. “If that’s what you’re holding on for it’s just not going to happen. I just can’t go there, you know? They’re not my family. Deborah is never going to be my mom.”
I held up my hands. If she thought that was an apology, she was doing them wrong. “I’m sorry your response to that is to humiliate them in front of everyone they know,” I said. I pushed off from the wall, ready to get some air and get out of here. But she stepped in my way.
“Me too,” she said, the urgency of her voice trying to convince me to stay. “Like, a lot. I can’t believe I did that.”
I folded my arms and let myself fall against the wall again. I felt oddly grateful for its solid weight; I needed some kind of ally right now, and if a wall was the best I was going to get, well, I’d be thankful. “Why did you?” I said.
To her credit, she actually took a few seconds to think about it. After a moment of tense silence, she said, “I don’t know. I was stressed. It seemed like an easy way to relieve some of the pressure.”
“What pressure?” I said. “You seemed like you had destroying your dad’s business pretty much in hand.”
“What pressure?” she repeated, incredulous. “Are you kidding? You.”
My eyebrows shot up. She was really going to try to pin her bad behavior on me? “Seriously?” I said.
“Yeah, seriously. I was doing fine and then you marched in and started trying to hook me up with Tyler, which was bad enough, and then you told me there’s a whole world of magic going on right under my nose. Yeah, that was a lot to deal with.”
A freshman girl and her date brushed past us. Elle stepped out of their way and stood by the wall facing me. She lowered her voice. “I’d been focused on my business and what I was going to do after high school. But this?” She waved a hand at me, seeming to try to indicate not just me but everything I represented. “Imagine someone just walking up to you and saying ‘The sky is hot pink and you have to date this random kid on the soccer team or the world is going to end!’ That wouldn’t throw you for a loop?”
“I didn’t say the world was going to end,” I muttered.
“And then I found those charms, which were awesome, and they made me feel super powerful and on top of the world so I gave in and started dating Tyler—which was a bad decision on my part, let me be clear—and then—” she cut herself off, at a loss for how to explain what happened next.
My stomach churned. I hadn’t expected her to turn this on me. More than that, I hadn’t expected her to be right.
“It snowballed,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “I could feel it happening but I couldn’t think straight enough to even realize it was the charms. Which seems so stupid-obvious now, but my brain wasn’t working straight.”
Which I could have told her.
“It’s been stupid,” she said. “I’ve been so stupid. This whole thing has been a mess. And now I’m here with Tyler, which is… ew.”
“I thought you were starting to like him.”
She gave me a look that, despite my lingering irritation, made me laugh.
“Give me a break,” she said. “Tyler is the kind of guy I can barely get through a conversation about the weather with. There is nothing going on in his head except basketball stats and weird political ideas he inherited from his rich parents and opinions on whether or not he’d ‘tap that.’” She shuddered. “And his friends are the worst. I don’t even remember what it feels like to be around people who don’t weird me out.”
She ran a hand through her hair, forgetting it was still done up in curls and ribbons. “I don’t even remember what being myself feels like!” she said. “I know I used to care about stuff and be interested in things and not be a jerk to my friends, but I feel like I’ve forgotten all of that. I just kept doing whatever popped into my head. I didn’t even think about giving them those charms. It just sounded funny.” She frowned. “It doesn’t even make sense now. Why would that be funny?” She shook her head as if that could shoo all her thoughts away.
“Anyway,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I’m done with that.”
“You sure?” I said. “You really want to give all that power up?”
She held my gaze. “Absolutely positive.” She bit her lower lip again and said, in a more timid tone, “Are you really dating Kyle?”
It took me a second to place the question into this conversation. When I did, my expression widened. “No,” I said. “We’re here as friends.”
“You said something the other day at Pumpkin Spice,” she said. “Or Imogen did. Or someone. My memories from the last little while aren’t great.”
I’m telling you, Olivia, Imogen had said. Kyle is in love with you. No wonder Elle had looked so sad the other day.
She was in love with him, too.
Maybe this wasn’t a disaster, after all.
I’d totally failed as a faerie godmother intern at Wishes Fulfilled, but I was still a faerie godmother. And Elle had been a cl
ass-A moron over the past little while, but she was still my client. We were both kind of stupid, and we’d both messed up more than a few times since we’d been thrown into each other’s paths. But did being imperfect mean we couldn’t make the best of our situation?
“I’m so sorry,” Elle said.
I blew a stream of air out between my lips and allowed the tension of the evening roll off me. I could still feel it vibrating on her. “I’m not the person you should be apologizing to,” I said.
I pushed off the wall again, took her arm, and pushed her out from under the balcony. Kyle still stood up there, watching the spot where we’d left the dance floor, determined not to miss a second. I waved up at him, but he didn’t see me. His eyes locked with Elle’s for a long second before she turned bright red and ran away.
She pressed herself against the wall we’d leaned on before. A new kind of panic was in her eyes.
“I can’t talk to him,” she said. Her voice quivered. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or about to cry. “He hates me! And I don’t blame him.” She rolled her lips together, looking up toward the ceiling, and I saw bright tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. She wouldn’t let them fall. She breathed carefully through her mouth a few times, then blinked hard. “I’m a jerk, Olivia,” she said, still looking up. “Why would he talk to me after this?”
Elle’s Story had gone exactly right. It was only ten and she’d already had a dance with her assigned dream date in this gorgeous ballroom. Doing anything to disrupt this evening would be to subvert her Story and risk it all going wrong. If Lorinda was right about how this all worked, Elle missing even a few hours with her designated Prince Charming could upset the magical balance of the city and, in turn, the world.
But I had to give Elle a chance to choose.
Elle had deserved to know she was a Glimmer. I’d known that, and even though I’d handled it badly, I hadn’t been wrong. And now she deserved to decide what happened next.
“I did something tonight that’s probably going to cost me my job,” I said. “Again. Probably for real this time.” I took her hands in mine. “But I did it because I need to take responsibility for my decisions and make things right. You need to do the same thing.”