LOL #3 Romantic Comedy Anthology

by Anthology

  The two siblings sat in a cozy coffee shop planning their upcoming ski trip. The next weekend would be Carmen’s husband’s birthday, and Carter was picking up the tab for a deluxe family vacation because he was rich, and definitely not a jerk, despite what he said about himself.

  “You’ll meet my friend, Elle,” Carmen said to her brother. “She’ll be at the resort the same time as us, so she’ll join us for dinner a few times.”

  He looked up from his phone and the shared calendar they’d been using to plan the ski trip.

  “You’re not trying to set me up again, are you?”

  “Elle is just a friend.” She held her hand to her mouth to conceal a smirk. “A single friend. Thirty-something, just like you. I think you two have lots in common. She’s a workaholic, so she won’t demand a lot of your time. That’s your fear about dating, isn’t it? That you don’t have time?”

  “Listen, Carmen,” he said. “I’m a rich jerk who just doesn’t care about falling in love or getting married. Accept it.”

  “I wish you’d tell me why you’re so afraid of love, you big chicken.”

  “Hmm,” he said as he sipped his latte. “This is a great latte. I love this latte. I love this whole coffee shop. See? I’m not afraid of love.”

  He winked playfully at his sister, then straightened up in his chair, stretching his handsome frame and catching the eyes of more than a few women. With his tousled sandy-brown hair, emerald green eyes, and naturally athletic physique, Carter had no problem attracting interest.

  But, for some reason, the beautiful women he’d take to business functions never stuck around.

  “I also love my new shoes,” he said, leaning down to admire his expensive-looking loafers.

  “You’re a funny guy,” Carmen said. “Don’t you want a partner to laugh at your jokes? Why won’t you let me fix you up? Have I ever told you about River? She’s in my Wednesday hot yoga class.”

  “Hot yoga?” Carter made a gagging gesture. It was his knee-jerk reaction to any mention of what he called silly things: yoga, meditation retreats, or those home-grown fermented foods that had become popular recently.

  She leaned across the table and punched him on the upper arm. “Jerk.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll meet the other one, your friend Elle, but only because it’ll make you happy, and I love you.”

  Carmen’s eyes grew shiny with tears. She sniffed. “I love you, too.”

  He crossed his arms. “Don’t make a scene. You’re nice, and you’re my sister, so I love you, but dating is ridiculous. Just two foolish people sitting across from each other pretending to be something they’re not.”

  “Shh,” she said. “We’re in a public place, and you’re upsetting people.”

  “I don’t care!” he said loudly. “Love is ridiculous. It’s a useless sentiment invented by the sellers of greeting cards and diamond rings!”

  People in the cafe stared, wondering what the attractive duo might be fighting about. To the casual onlooker, they seemed to have the world by the tail. Carter looked like a wealthy businessman, which he was, and Carmen looked like a happy wife and mother and popular lifestyle blogger, which she was.

  Across the cozy interior of the cafe, one person in particular took a keen interest in Carter and his ranting.

  This person was a Dice Witch.

  The witch watched the siblings playfully punch each other. In her magic-assisted vision, she saw the older versions of themselves they’d someday be.

  Carmen would live a long and fulfilling life, with children and grandchildren filling up large houses for the holidays. She would always include “Uncle Carter” in their activities, because he wouldn’t have a family of his own. Carter would never get around to dating—not unless you counted showing up drunk for Thanksgiving with two strippers.

  The future didn’t look good for Carter, but fates could be changed.

  The witch reached into her purse, selected two dice by touch, and walked toward the siblings’ table.

  “One dollar for a lucky roll of the dice,” she said to them.

  Carter tilted up his handsome face, and something in his green eyes electrified her. He put up a tough exterior, but there was a tender soul behind those eyes. The Dice Witch felt his potential, his hope, yearning to break free. Hope made him reach for his wallet.

  The Dice Witch was dressed like a beggar, so most people assumed she was asking for a dollar because she needed it. They didn’t realize it was a symbolic gesture of compassion, a marker of hope.

  He handed her a twenty. “Keep this, please. No fortune-telling required. I have a work ethic, and I make my own fate.”

  The sister smiled up at the Dice Witch. “We’re going on a ski trip tomorrow. Tell him how much fun he’ll have.”

  The Dice Witch responded by tossing her two dice on the table.

  The dice weren’t the usual type that showed numbers between one and six. The first had colored sides, and the color showing on top when it stopped rolling was yellow. The second had illustrations of animals, and the top-most image was that of an elephant.

  Carter narrowed his eyes at his sister. “Cute joke. You totally set this up. You and your pranks.”

  Carmen held up her hands. “I’m innocent, I swear.”

  “Listen closely,” the Dice Witch said to Carter. “Your last chance for love will come to you in yellow. You’ll kiss her by an elephant, and then it will hit you. Love will fall down on your head.”

  “On my head?” He stifled a laugh. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll be careful not to kiss any girls in yellow next to any elephants.”

  She swept up the dice, turned to the sister and said, “I have a message for you, too, dear. Don’t worry about your husband. It’s a clean break and will heal. Consider yourself lucky, because he’ll be more careful now.”

  The two siblings frowned at each other in confusion. Who was this crazy woman, they wondered, and should they be phoning the people with the butterfly nets?

  Both of their phones started ringing at once.

  Carmen answered her phone with a tender, “Miss me already?”

  “Don’t freak out,” came her husband’s voice from the phone. “I was dealing with the Christmas decorations, and do you know how they say you’re not supposed to stand on the top step of the ladder? They’re not joking.”

  She made a gasping sound and started freaking out, even though he’d asked her not to. He cut her off, saying, “Gotta go, honey. They’re loading me into the ambulance now. Wow, these pain meds are really kicking in. Yowza. Anyway, I won’t know until they do the X-Rays, but the paramedics figure it’s a clean break.”

  “A clean break,” Carmen repeated slowly.

  She could hear the paramedics talking to her husband, telling him to end the call.

  He groaned. “I guess this means the ski trip’s off. Pick me up at the hospital, will you? Gotta run. No. What am I saying?” He giggled, sounding like their young daughter for a moment. “I’m on a gurney, so I gotta roll.”

  The phone’s speaker clicked, then went quiet.

  Carmen set down her phone and blinked at her brother, who was setting down his phone as well.

  “That was your neighbor,” he said. “The kids are over there, and your husband broke his leg, which I guess you know. Apparently it was… a clean break.” His emerald eyes held an expression of pure wonder.

  They both looked around for the fortune-telling woman, but she was gone. They ran outside to check the sidewalks, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Stranger still, they couldn’t even agree on what she’d looked like. Carter swore she was short and young, and Carmen described her as tall and wise.

  2.

  Danielle didn’t mind being mistaken for a boy.

  Rich people visiting the resort expected the person parking their car to be a male valet. It troubled them to see a pretty young woman taking their keys. Some of the older gentlemen acted as though she was going to spritz perfume and
feminine hygiene products all over the interior, while grinding the gears.

  Danielle’s job had gotten a lot easier since purchasing a knitted cap at a local craft fair. She’d bought it from an unusual yet friendly woman who called herself a Knitting Witch.

  Danielle loved the vendor’s gimmick—the idea that magic could be woven into knitted items, and that a hat could work like an invisibility spell. She didn’t believe in magic, of course, but it was a great story.

  With her hair tucked up in the knitted cap, Danielle wasn’t exactly invisible, but she did blend into the background. When people did look directly at her, they mistook her petite features for those of a teenaged boy. Coworkers called her Dani, which helped keep up the illusion.

  Another advantage to the cap, besides better tips, was that people didn’t ask her intrusive questions, demanding to know what a beautiful woman with a great resume was doing here, valet-parking cars for minimum wage in a ski resort town.

  Before the Hat of Invisibility, someone had accused her of being a famous actress researching a new role.

  Life has so many twists and turns, she thought. One day you’re at the top of your game, pitching a print and TV campaign to America’s most beloved grocery store brands, and the next day you’re lying on the floor in your corner office, having doused yourself with ketchup, crying that it did make a lovely marinade, it did.

  The doctors had said Danielle’s episode was a simple stress reaction—as if there was anything simple about having a complete and utter breakdown over a condiment pitch.

  After a few weeks of monitoring and evaluation by the best mental health professionals in the city, Danielle left the city and took the first job she was offered, working at the same ski resort she’d enjoyed visiting as a child.

  She enjoyed the job, and communal living with her coworkers. Housing in the resort town was scarce and expensive, so a dozen of them rented a house together. They slept like barn mice, crashing wherever they could find a quiet place. Danielle had spent more than one night outdoors, on the covered porch, staring up at the stars from beneath a dozen blankets layered high to keep out the snowy chill.

  And she loved it.

  She loved everything about her new bohemian life, except maybe her love life.

  She had a crush on her Australian ski instructor roommate, but he was in love with the Canadian bartender, who was infatuated with the Swiss chef. The chef liked Danielle, but he was bisexual and liked the Australian ski instructor better. Danielle and the chef would share cupcakes sometimes and moan over how unfair it was that the Australian ski instructor didn’t love them like he did the Canadian bartender.

  “Our international love rectangle,” they called the situation.

  Danielle was talking to the Swiss chef on her phone and leaning on the valet parking stand when a luxury vehicle pulled up.

  She barely glanced over, because she was focused on her conversation, trying to get food snuck out to her.

  “I’m past hungry,” she moaned. “I’m getting into the angry phase. I’m hangry.”

  The Swiss chef groaned on the other end of the call. “That’s not even a word. Hangry. Ugh! That’s something you devilish advertising monsters dreamed up to sell more of those revolting pizza pops you Americans treat like food.”

  “Pizza pops? That sounds great,” she said brightly. “Send me out some pizza pops. C’mon. I’ll rub your feet tonight, and I’ll let you have the good pillow. C’mon!”

  He chuckled. “I do love hearing a woman beg.”

  Giggling, Danielle continued talking into her phone, getting louder, “Pizza! Gimme! I’m hangry! Open the window and just TOSS THEM AT ME!”

  Ten feet away from Danielle, the man driving the luxury vehicle put the vehicle in park and opened his door. This man was Carter, who’d gone on his ski vacation even though his sister and brother-in-law had to cancel due to a broken leg. The trip was non-refundable, and if there was one thing that bothered Carter nearly as much as the idea of falling in love, it was paying for empty plane seats and empty hotel rooms.

  Carter stepped out of the car, keys in hand, and dimly noted a human-sized blob in a knitted cap standing near the valet station. The blob was yelling, “TOSS THEM AT ME,” so he did, not knowing she was referring to pizza pops and talking on the phone.

  The keys sailed through the winter air, smacked Danielle in the chin, then fell down into the snow.

  Danielle gasped in shock at being walloped in the face with a not-insubstantial set of keys. She didn’t realize the man who’d tossed the keys had only done so because she’d been yelling, “TOSS THEM AT ME!”

  Carter didn’t give the blurry blob of a valet a second look. Thanks to the cloaking power of the Hat of Invisibility, he concluded that the young man who’d failed to catch the keys was high or stupid or both.

  Carter walked into the restaurant and stopped in his tracks. He’d found another elephant.

  Ever since the stranger had tossed her dice on his table, and warned him about his last chance at having love fall on his head, Carter had been seeing elephants everywhere he went. In advertisements. In movies. Even on his niece’s favorite sweater.

  Now here was a wall-sized mural of an elephant inside the restaurant, mocking him.

  He told himself it was meaningless, just a quirk of consciousness. The human mind was a pattern recognition engine, constantly sorting stimuli into things to notice and things to ignore. The elephants had always been around, cloaked in the invisibility spell of the chemicals in his own brain.

  The woman in the coffee shop had merely planted a suggestion. The fact that he was going for a blind date at a restaurant named The Snowy Elephant didn’t mean anything at all.

  It was actually a smart name for a restaurant. Most elephants didn’t live in climates with snow, so the name implied something special. Excellent branding, he decided. His expectations for the evening rose considerably.

  3.

  While Carter’s hopes rose, a grumpy valet attendant’s mood kept dropping.

  Danielle parked the rich key-tossing jerk’s car and looked around his vehicle’s interior for evidence of his awfulness. The car was spotless. She snorted at herself. Had she really expected to find a copy of Wealthy & Rude magazine on the back seat? Perhaps the low blood sugar was getting to her. The buttery-soft leather of the driver’s seat was starting to look like edible.

  She jumped out of the car and hustled back through the forest shortcut to the valet station.

  Her coworker, a young man named Eddie, who was not part of the international love rectangle, stood in her place, grinning.

  “Chef says you’re hungry,” he said, referring to the chef as Chef, because his real name was Andrew and there were three other Andrews working at the lodge.

  “I’m hangry.” Danielle grabbed for Eddie’s pockets like an eager dog frisking a pet store employee for complimentary dental biscuits.

  Eddie jumped back. “Easy there, Dani. You’ll get food, but it’s not on me. We’ve got a deluxe prank planned. It’s going to be the prank of the season. Years from now, our children will be talking about the shenanigans we’re about to pull off.”

  “Do these shenanigans involve me getting pizza pops from Chef?”

  “Even better. I’m taking over the valet station so you can go inside. And you can have anything you want from the menu.”

  Danielle’s mouth watered. “From the menu? You mean not just stuff Chef burned or had to throw out of the fridge?”

  Eddie grinned. He was cute for a twenty-year-old redhead with a gap between his teeth—like a young David Letterman.

  “The whole menu. As much as you want,” Eddie said. “But there’s a catch.”

  Danielle’s mouth kept watering. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’ll cover myself in ketchup and re-enact my finest hour working as a corporate drone, if that’s what the gang wants.”

  Eddie’s gap-toothed grin got even wider. “Get inside and go straight to the kitchen of
fice. They’ve already got your costume picked out from the Lost and Found.”

  Danielle grumbled that she didn’t like the sound of that, but secretly she was excited. This prank involved a makeover, and she hadn’t had a makeover in years, since she was a teenager going to slumber parties.

  If she’d known being broke would be so much fun, she would have doused herself in ketchup years ago. The only thing missing from her life was a boyfriend. But Danielle wasn’t greedy. She appreciated the other things in her new life, like friendships, and sleeping under the stars, and shenanigans.

  Tonight’s prank promised to be a fun one. Ordering from the menu! Life was good.

  4.

  As Danielle had guessed, the first part of the prank did involve a makeover. Her coworkers laughed and swooped around her like the small animals in the classic Disney Cinderella movie.

  A few of them hummed that classic schoolyard hopscotch song, about Cinderella dressed in “yella.”

  Soon Danielle was dressed in “yella”—a figure-flattering dress in a buttery shade of ombre yellow, darkening to a peach hue at the top and green at the hemline. She’d never seen such an attractive and distinctive garment before. She swirled this way and that, admiring herself in the office’s door-mounted mirror.

  Because the lodge catered to a wealthy clientele, there was no shortage of expensive clothing to be found in the Lost and Found box, but this dress was beyond exquisite.

  “Why has nobody else snagged this yet?” Danielle asked. She gave the fabric a sniff, fearing the worst, but it smelled brand new.

  “That color would make me look like Big Bird,” said a tall prep cook.

  “Sadly, it’s not my size either,” said the Canadian bartender.

  “We all saw it this morning and set it aside for you,” said a third.

  Danielle held her arms out and hugged the girls. They were all younger than her, some barely out of their teens, but they treated her like she was no different from them.

  The prep cook made some final adjustments to Danielle’s amber waves of hair while the bartender applied a liberal coating of what she called “the face,” meaning makeup dialed up to a glamorous level.