by Emma Savant
“Breathing,” she said, between heavy inhalations. “While swimming. Hard.”
“You looked good,” I said.
“I’m getting the feel of it,” she said. “This pool is shallow, though. Your relationship with water is so superficial. I need a…” She pursed her lips and lowered her eyebrows at me. “Aqualung,” she finally said.
“Scuba?” I said.
“I guess?” she said. She grabbed a pale teal towel from a stack on the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Anyway, hi,” she said. “I’m so excited to see you. You were right, Evan’s studio is amazing.”
“I don’t remember saying that,” I said.
“But it is,” she said. “I mean, I knew he had a gift, but—”
“But why do you know that?” I said, grabbing her arm. “Lily, did you go there?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly.
She had no idea I was mad at her. She couldn’t see anything past the love-struck haze clouding her vision. I shook her arm.
“Lily,” I said. “You can’t do stuff like that.”
Her delicate auburn eyebrows went up. She looked utterly quizzical, utterly innocent, and utterly like she needed a full-time babysitter.
“It wasn’t difficult,” she said. “I know where he works. My roommate showed me how to put his name into a computer and it told me. Goose House has a shuttle. I just had them drop me off in Oregon City and then they picked me up a while later. He gave me his business card, too. Now I have two of them!”
“What, are you going to start collecting them like Pokémon cards?” I said.
Of course, she didn’t get the reference, and still didn’t get why I was upset. I ran a hand through my hair.
“Lily, this is a really delicate situation. I know he’s your true love and everything, but he also has a girlfriend and your dad is really mad at us right now. We need to go slow. We need to figure out if Evan’s even on board with this before we go disrupting his life.”
“Of course he’s on board!” she said. “Godmother, he loves me!”
Lily had lucid moments where she made sense, where she seemed to be thinking things through and even making me reconsider my life choices.
And then she turned into this sparkly-eyed terror.
All her blathering about relationships and love had been the stupid foundation for attending that stupid, stupid wedding.
I dragged her out of the pool room.
“Human lesson time,” I said. I needed a task to focus on. “You have to learn how land currency works. Among other things.”
Once she had changed into a skirt and T-shirt and wrapped her damp hair up into coils on her head, I sat her down on the floor and pulled out my wand. I waved it and a stack of bills and coins shimmered into being.
“Whoa,” Lily said.
“It’s not real,” I said. “Just an illusion. If you try to spend these, you’ll get arrested.”
I held out a handful of coins. She took them and bit her lip.
“These are your money, right?”
“This is Glim money,” I said. “The little copper ones are called comets, the nickels are stars, the silvers are moons, and the gold ones are suns.”
“Got it,” she said. It wasn’t hard to remember. Each coin had a picture of a trailing comet or crescent moon or whatever celestial body on both sides. I handed her another coin, this one silver with gold stars sprinkled across it.
“This one’s a galaxy,” I said. “Twelve of a small coin makes one of the coin above it. Like, twelve comets is a star.”
“And twelve stars is a…” She furrowed her brow at the coins. “Moon.”
“You got it. Why’d you go see Evan?”
She turned the galaxy over between her fingers. It glinted in the light.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said. “Why waste time?”
“You’re making my life harder,” I said. “I’m going to try to get you together with Evan. I’m not sure I should, but I am. But you have a super delicate Archetype. Little Mermaids die sometimes. I heard of a Little Mermaid from about fifty years ago who was murdered by her prince’s fiancée.”
“Isabelle?” Lily said. Her eyes widened. “Isabelle won’t kill me.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
She laughed, because clearly this was all hilarious.
“Evan’s told me about her, of course. She’s terribly nice. That’s why he’s so hesitant about deepening our relationship. He doesn’t want to hurt her. But he also doesn’t feel like they have much chemistry, and he’s worried he’s settling.”
“Why is he telling you this?” I said.
Not for the first time, the ambiguous morality of godparenting was not lost on me.
She shrugged. “We have a natural trust,” she said. “He finds it easy to confide in me, probably because I’m his soulmate.”
I held back a groan. I handed her a stack of bills.
“Take these,” I said. “What are these?”
“No idea.”
“So pay attention. This is Humdrum money.”
She gazed at it, fascinated, as I explained how Humdrum money changed by country and how a comet was worth roughly fifty cents. Everything to do with humanity held her rapt, because everything to do with humanity had to do with the all-important Evan.
Once I’d drilled the coins and bills into her until she could recite them backwards, she put her hand on mine and looking imploringly into my eyes.
“I’ll be careful,” she said. “But godmother, please. I’ve waited my whole life for him. I can’t slow down now. Love is about leaping.”
“Yeah, overboard the ship with a dagger in your breast,” I said. “That’s how your Story goes, Lily. Godparents didn’t even figure out to subvert it until the last hundred years. So please. Let me figure out the pace here, okay?”
She sighed and nodded. But I had a feeling her fingers were crossed behind her back, or at least would have been if that was a mermaid thing.
Chapter Twenty
“I have to find some way to push Lily and Evan together in a way that doesn’t feel fake,” I said. “I can’t hold their Story off forever.”
“Isn’t he still engaged, though?” Elle said. “If you ask me, Lily needs to go back into the ocean and learn to love herself before she tries loving anyone else. Especially someone who’s already in a committed monogamous relationship.”
I leaned back in my camping chair and met Elle’s disapproving gaze. She was standing behind the table in the Pumpkin Spice’s Saturday Market booth, rearranging sampler bags of coffee beans.
“I have to give them a chance to work this out on their own,” I said. “That was the whole thing with your case, remember? It only worked out because I let you guys make your own decisions.”
“You should just book her a photo shoot,” Kyle said, from his camping chair next to me. “Then you can act all surprised when it turns out they know each other.”
Elle froze, then muttered, “This could get awkward.” She jerked her chin toward the front of the tent.
I recognized the girl who’d just turned into the booth, even though I hadn’t seen her in months. The leonine cloud of auburn hair peeking from under her hood was hard to miss, as was the way she managed to look like a perfectly-curvy supermodel even while wearing a boy’s hoodie the exact gray of the wet pavement. Rain came down around her, a steady drizzle that hadn’t stopped the rush of Saturday Market shoppers.
I cringed. I’d been practicing using Amani’s shield to block the emotions of the dozens of people that wandered past us. But that got a lot harder when a distraction like this walked by.
Kyle sat in the Pumpkin Spice booth on the other side of Elle with his chair tipped back on two legs. He narrowed his eyes like he couldn’t see the girl clearly.
“You met her at the street festival this last spring,” I said, leaning over so I could keep my voice low. “The girl with Lucas?”
“Oh, yeah,�
� he said, comprehension dawning in his voice and on his face at the same time.
He leaned back in the chair and stared until I kicked him under the coffee bean-laden table.
Aubrey was the girl who had dumped Lucas, and in turn sent Imogen and me into this downward spiral.
I hated her.
She tugged her hood down and buried her fingers in her hair and shook it out. The teasing gave her soft halo of curls movement it hadn’t needed in the first place. Her steps further into the tent were fluid, her hips moving in a lazy figure-eight.
She, like Imogen, was a vivid reminder that I was not quite pretty, or sexy, or glamorous enough to be in Lucas’ league. I could have saved myself a lot of pain by taking the reminder to heart a little earlier.
I tried to pull up the shield Amani had tried to teach me, to keep all these icky feelings from getting to me. Silver shimmered across my vision and a hint of an emerald vine unfurled in a bottom corner, but then they started fading in and out. I couldn’t concentrate enough. I let the vision go and watched out of the corner of my eye as Aubrey perused the bags of gourmet coffee beans lined up on little wooden racks. Only half of them were meant for Humdrums like Aubrey. Her eyes slid over the sparkling Glim bags like they weren’t even there.
Months ago, she’d gone prom dress shopping with Imogen and me and spent the whole time offering backhanded compliments that made me sure I never wanted to see her again. A glamour would hide me well enough; I had my hand halfway up to where my wand was buried in my hair before her gaze landed on me. Then it was too late.
“Oh my god, hi!” she said. “How’s it going? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
She went to a different school than me. I took a split second to feel grateful.
“Yeah, busy summer,” I said.
Go away, I thought, but she was no faerie and didn’t pick up on the hostility that practically radiated out of my pores.
She put her hands in her pockets, slouching like a photographer had ordered her to.
“You look familiar,” she said to Kyle.
“We’ve seen each other,” he said. “But never met.”
He held out a hand, and she shook it. Above her surface-level smile, her sharp eyes took him in as though trying to figure out if he was worth her time. Apparently he wasn’t, so she turned to me.
She gazed at me just a second too long. “So,” she said. “I heard Imogen ripped you a new one.”
I flipped through my mental files, trying to imagine how she could possibly know that, seeing as how neither she nor Lucas were at the wedding and she and Imogen were hardly on speaking terms. I came up with nothing.
Even her emotions were no help. She was slightly annoyed and totally full of herself, as always.
“How’d you hear that?” Kyle asked for me.
“Imogen’s cousin goes to my school,” she said. She had a low, slow voice, the kind of voice that had nowhere to be and knew no one was going to interrupt. “Screaming match at a wedding? Word gets around.”
Great. Now even the Humdrums were talking about me. And my parents’ marriage, probably. The thought of the story reaching my mom or dad made my stomach practically fold in on itself.
“Everyone will be over it in a week,” Aubrey said. “Seriously, whose parents aren’t on the verge of breaking up? It’s kinda weird that yours are still together, to be honest.”
“So are mine,” Kyle said, frowning at her.
She waved him off. “Again, weird,” she said.
A silence fell. I couldn’t tell whether it was awkward or not. I felt uncomfortable around her as a rule; whether she ever felt the same way about anything was another question.
I let the silence drag, hoping she’d get the hint and go. But she just stood there, watching us and calmly waiting for someone to speak.
Fine. I’d check the small talk boxes. Then she could go away and never bother me again.
“So, how have you been?” I said.
I couldn’t have made my voice more fake and cloying if I’d tried.
A tiny smirk bent the corners of her mouth. “You mean about Lucas, right?”
I hadn’t, exactly, but she went there anyway.
“He was an idiot to let go of me that quickly, to be honest,” she said. “I tried texting him the other day and all he said was, ‘I’m with Imogen now.’ I was just checking in to be sure he was okay, but I swear he thought I was trying to seduce him or something.”
I couldn’t imagine saying something like that as matter-of-factly as she did. It must be a whole different world, thinking that highly of yourself.
“But it’s cool,” she said. She examined her nails. “I’m dating a guy now who is much better for me. He’s in college, so, you know. We have more in common.”
“I thought you were in high school,” Kyle said.
“I am.”
“So how does him being in college mean you have more in common?”
She stared at him for a moment, then twitched her head as though shaking off a fly and turned back to me.
“Having said that, his shiny new girlfriend is still an interfering bitch. So what are you going to do about it?”
The idea that it was my job to do something about it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Aubrey face was tense but expectant.
She actually thought I had a plan.
All I could manage was a shrug, which was not at all what she’d been looking for.
“Don’t tell me you’re just going to roll over like a puppy,” she said.
It was amazing how someone whose opinion I cared about so little could make me so instantly eager to justify myself. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from leaping to my own defense.
“I don’t see how Imogen’s my problem,” I said instead. Take the high road, Feye.
“Imogen is everyone’s problem,” Aubrey said. Her emotions flared, and this time, I felt something sharp embedded in her self-interest. “Look, I didn’t do anything about her because if Lucas wanted to ditch me for someone as skanky as that, you know, let him have her.”
She raised one ring-studded hand into the air and flicked it, like she was washing her hands of the whole thing.
“But you didn’t do anything to Imogen, and she was a megabitch to you at that wedding. My cousin’s friend’s sister told me all about it. And I want to know if you’re going to take that from her or if Imogen Dann gets to run the whole world like some pathetic princess.”
It was hard to tell how much of my thoughts were mine and how much were Aubrey’s. Ever since the wedding, taking on other people’s feelings had become as easy as slipping on a coat. Now, outrage—barely suppressed as it was—coiled up inside me, ready to strike.
I took a deep breath and tried to untangle whatever was hers from whatever was mine. But it was hard, because while she was angry, I agreed completely. Imogen was an entitled monster, and, while she was not technically a princess even in our world, she was acting like the worst of them.
I didn’t like Aubrey. But that didn’t mean she didn’t make sense. We were definitely on the same page when it came to how evil Imogen was.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I was still taking Imogen’s crap, like I had for our whole friendship. After I’d gotten over licking my wounds, I’d even been willing to forgive her for lying to me and stealing a guy before I even had a shot with him, because I was either a saint or a doormat, I wasn’t sure which.
But Imogen Dann had crossed a line when she’d started shouting about my family.
Aubrey sighed. She picked up a bag of beans and flipped it over, eyes scanning the label without seeming to see it.
“Whatever,” she said. “Obviously I’m talking to a wall. Have a good week.”
She flashed a smile that barely made it to her cheeks, let alone her eyes, and left, her effortless slouch turning the path out of the booth into a catwalk. She threw her hood up. The grey hid her hair like water dousing a candle.
I felt her
expectation as she walked off, like she was maybe waiting for one of us to come after her. None of us moved.
Elle waited a tactful five seconds before speaking. “Yikes,” she muttered.
Kyle had grown tense beside me.
“You’re not going to listen to that, are you?” he said, his voice lined with concern.
I took a deep breath and turned to face him. “Of course not,” I said.
I blew a long stream of air out between my lips, then smirked as a thought occurred to me that would have been a whole lot more help months ago.
“I don’t know why I was ever so upset about Lucas,” I said. “He dated that—” I jerked my head toward Aubrey “—followed immediately by Imogen. What does that say to you?”
Elle laughed, but Kyle’s face stayed blank, so I spared him the trouble of answering.
“Lucas has a thing for crazy girls with drama problems,” I said. I felt myself relax for the first time in days. It was almost funny. “And he doesn’t like me like that. And I just realized—I should be flattered.”
And that was true. But it didn’t stop Aubrey’s words from ringing in my ears long after I’d left for home.
Chapter Twenty-One
A year ago, work had been a drag—a thing that tied me down to the Glimmering world and wasted time I could have spent on my garden or in the forest or doing just about anything not related to my aggravating faerie-ness.
These days, at least when I wasn’t dealing directly with Lily and her ethical gray areas, Wishes Fulfilled almost felt like a sanctuary. I could clock in, shuffle papers around for Tabitha, and clock out, all without having to think about anything important.
I wasn’t sure if word of Imogen’s outburst had reached my family; I hadn’t let myself go home long enough to find out. It had been a couple of weeks since the wedding, and I’d managed to be gone during dinner every single day. I’d be gone again tonight; I’d decided to take Lily out to give her dining skills a test run.
Rain pounded on the windows. The first week of October had hit in usual Portland style, with heavy gray clouds and rain that never let up for more than a few minutes. This was a rougher downpour than usual, and I liked being in my warm, well-lit cubicle while the world stormed on by outside. I was so zoned in on the comfort of organizing Tabitha’s calendar for the next week that I didn’t even hear Lily come in.