Once Upon Stilettos

by Shanna Swendson

  “Lois,” my dad said, an edge of warning in his voice. “You wanted to see Macy’s and Times Square.”

  “Oh, right. I already have pumpkins, so we don’t have time for this. But Katie, make sure you look for him next time you’re at the market. I’m pretty sure he was single. And he lives on a farm. He’d be perfect for you.”

  “Mom, remember, I have a boyfriend. You know, Ethan? The guy who picked you up at the airport in his Mercedes?”

  She laughed. “Oh, right. I’d forgotten that. Sorry about that, sweetheart. Old habits are hard to break. I’m so used to you being alone and single. But it wouldn’t hurt to keep that farmer in mind, in case things don’t work out. You never know.”

  I finally got them onto a bus uptown, and then we walked across town to Macy’s, where my mother had a religious experience before practically fainting at the price tags. All she bought was a shopping bag with a logo on it to take home to her sister. Dad and I then successfully pushed her outside.

  “It’s not that far uptown to Times Square,” I said, once we were back on the sidewalk, “but let’s take the subway. There’s something about emerging right in Times Square that adds to the experience.” That was what Gemma and Marcia had done to me the first time I came to New York.

  Mom held her purse tightly against her chest and glared at anyone who came near her inside the subway station. Even my dad edged a little closer to me. I was sure I’d felt much the same way my first time on the subway, but it was such a daily part of my life that I didn’t even think about it anymore. My concern had more to do with deranged wizard geeks and magical creatures that might be following us. In spite of what Owen and Sam had promised me about extra security, I hadn’t caught sight of anyone or anything that looked like it might be guarding us.

  A train came along and we boarded. “We don’t need to sit down,” I told my parents. “We’ll be getting off at the next stop.” The three of us stood around a pole, Mom glancing anxiously around the car and at all the people around us.

  “You do this every day?” she asked.

  “It’s not so bad. You get used to it.” My usual traveling companion didn’t hurt, but I didn’t share that with her.

  When we reached the Forty-second Street station, we fought through the crowd to get off the train and head to an exit. “If everyone would wait their turn, that would be easier,” Mom huffed. “They don’t have to push and shove.”

  “It’s a way of life, Mom,” I said with a grin. “Now, we’ll be coming up right into Times Square. It’s even more impressive at night, but it’s still something to see in the daytime.”

  I might have been used to New York, but I still got a little thrill of excitement when I went into Times Square. This was the noisy, chaotic New York that outsiders usually pictured when they thought of the city. In my relatively quiet neighborhood it was easy to forget that this side of New York was there.

  I kept a hold on each parent, making sure we didn’t get separated in the throng of tourists while my parents gaped at all the bright lights and flashing signs.

  “I wonder what their light bill is,” Dad said with a frown. “Seems like a waste to me.”

  “Would you just look at this?” Mom said, over and over. “Oh my.”

  I pointed out the building where they broadcast Good Morning America, the famous military recruiting station, and some of the theaters. “A lot of the Broadway theaters are actually on side streets,” I added.

  “So this is Broadway, then?” Mom asked, her eyes wide with awe.

  “Yes, this is Broadway. Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “And look at all these people. Hey, that man’s not wearing any clothes!”

  I turned to see the guy who was famous for playing the guitar while wearing only his underwear and a pair of boots. “Oh, him. He’s a street performer.”

  “Well, he’s going to catch his death of cold. It’s freezing here.” I held tightly to her arm so she couldn’t go tell him to put some clothes on so he wouldn’t come down with pneumonia.

  My dad stared at another person on the street. “Well, would you look at that,” he said with a chuckle. “That boy must have fallen face-first into his tackle box.”

  I turned to see a teenager playing drums, his face covered with piercings. “Don’t stare,” I hissed at Dad as I held on to his arm.

  Before I’d learned about magic, when I’d seen even stranger things on the streets of New York that nobody else seemed to notice, this was what I’d been afraid I looked like—a green tourist straight from the sticks. “This is probably the weirdest part of New York,” I said. “The rest of the city isn’t like this.” Well, actually, there were weirder parts of the city, or so I’d heard, but tourists generally didn’t go there, and I didn’t plan to tell my parents about them.

  Mom came to an abrupt halt, pulling Dad and me to a stop with her. “Now, she’s good,” she said. She released her death grip on her purse and opened it. “I want to give her a dollar.”

  I turned to see a fairy hovering above the sidewalk. She wasn’t a street performer. She was the real deal, just going about her business. That sick feeling in my stomach came back in full force. My mother could see the fairy.

  It would have been nice if the fairy had been someone I knew, someone I could get to play along with me. Unfortunately, she was a total stranger. Before I had a chance to react, Mom tried to hand her a dollar. “I don’t know how you do that, but I’m impressed,” Mom said. “Lovely costume, too.”

  The fairy looked at her like she was crazy. “What the f—” she started to say.

  “Mom!” I interrupted, dragging my mother away even as my head spun trying to think of what I could do for damage control. If she was magically immune, that would make things infinitely more complicated. Automatically, I scanned the area, looking for anything else magical I might have to explain, but Times Square was so full of oddities, it was impossible to spot the magical oddities in the midst of everything else.

  “Kathleen Elizabeth Chandler, I did not raise you to be that rude,” Mom protested.

  “Mom!” I hissed. “Hush and listen. That wasn’t a street performer. I think you insulted her.” I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure a pissed-off fairy wasn’t following us, but I didn’t see anything. It wasn’t until I was about to turn back to my mom that I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked back again, and there was the fairy, a shimmering haze around her so that she looked like she was blurring. I grabbed my parents and pushed them into the nearest doorway, in case she was putting together a spell to use against us. I’d be safe and apparently so would Mom, but I wasn’t so sure about Dad. What if she was one of Idris’s people? Worse, what if she’d actually been stalking us on purpose?

  The doorway turned out to lead into a souvenir shop. “Look! Postcards! You’ll want to send one to each of the boys, right?” I said with forced enthusiasm. The huge rack of cheap postcards would distract my parents for a good five minutes while they argued over which ten to buy and which view of the skyline was nicer.

  That gave me time to check out the situation and figure out what to do next. I ducked back out of the souvenir shop and looked up and down the sidewalk. It didn’t seem like the angry fairy lady was going to come after us, so maybe I’d been overly paranoid to assume she was working for Idris. I was sure I’d feel better if I could spot one of my MSI bodyguards and verify the situation, but I didn’t see anyone I recognized, human or otherwise. There was never a gargoyle around when you needed one.

  That brought up my next problem: what should I do about Mom? My first instinct was to call the office and ask for advice. Rod knew all about immunes. He’d know what to do. Then I realized that would be a very bad idea. The company was desperate for immunes to help them guard against other magic users, and we were increasingly rare. I couldn’t let them try to recruit my mother. If she knew what I was mixed up in, she’d haul me back home, magical immunity or not. We were going to get throug
h this visit, and then I’d put her back on a plane to Texas where she could live a blissfully unmagical existence. All I had to do was keep the secret for a few more days. Fortunately, my mom was primed to think New York was exceptionally weird. I’d lived here a year before I learned the truth. Surely I could get my mom through a few days.

  I counted to ten to steady myself before going back into the store. Mom and Dad were still arguing over postcards. “This night view is a good one,” Mom said.

  “But you can’t see anything other than lights,” Dad pointed out. “The sunset one’s nicer.”

  “Get both,” I suggested. They turned to look at me, and I realized they hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone. They finally settled on ten cards, and I got them to the cash register before they could start discussing which card to send to which person.

  As we left the store, Mom asked, “Now, Katie, what was that all about?”

  Dad gave one of his long-suffering sighs. “Lois, you tried to give some girl on the street a dollar. I know she was funny looking, but if you tried to give a dollar to every funny-looking person you saw on the street in this town, you’d run out of money awful fast.” He put his hands in his pockets and walked ahead of us, like he was ashamed to be seen with us in public. I couldn’t entirely blame him. In fact, I wanted to join him.

  “She wasn’t a street performer, Mom,” I said.

  “But Katie, she had on wings. What kind of person wears wings, when it’s not even Halloween? And I could swear she was flying.”

  I scrambled for an explanation and came up with something she wouldn’t dare question. “Mom, there are all kinds of alternative lifestyles, and they’re pretty open about them in this city. I don’t think you really want to get more into it than that, okay?”

  She looked stunned, then frowned like she was trying to put together a mental image. Finally, she shook her head as if to clear it. “Okay,” she said at last in a small voice I could barely hear over the traffic.

  “Let’s catch up with Dad,” I said, relieved that I’d managed to get away with telling a version of the truth. All I had to do to get through the rest of the week was think of the places in the city where we were least likely to run into magic. Oh yeah, piece of cake.

  Unfortunately, I’d already promised to show them Central Park. There was maximum weirdness potential there, as I’d discovered soon after joining MSI. Any enchanted frogs should have been hibernating for the winter by Thanksgiving, so that wouldn’t be an issue. I’d hope there wouldn’t be any pranks like the one played on Marcia’s boyfriend, Jeff, when his friends cast an illusion that made him and everyone else think he’d been turned into a frog, so that he did things like crouch naked beside a pond in the park. I could probably explain any naked men squatting by ponds as deranged drunks. I was more worried about the number of male fairies—they called themselves “sprites” because they thought it sounded less gay—and gnomes who worked in the park. Sprites could be more “alternative lifestyle” people my mom wouldn’t want to talk about, but how could I explain living garden gnomes?

  As I expected, my folks were charmed by the Plaza Hotel and the lineup of carriages they’d seen so often in movies. I led them to the Mall so they could look down the lane of elm trees. It wasn’t as spectacular as it was during the summer when there was a canopy of leaves, but I thought it was still an impressive sight. Dad studied it for a while, then asked, “About how many acres do you think this place is?”

  “I have no idea, but it is a huge park. If you get into the middle of it, you can almost forget you’re in the city.”

  He nodded. “Hmm. That’s good. You need something green around to keep you feeling alive.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” We both turned when we heard Mom’s voice.

  “What’s what, Lois?” Dad asked.

  “That!” She was pointing at the base of a nearby statue, where a garden gnome was at work with a tiny shovel in the flower bed beneath the statue. I did a double take, for I was pretty sure I recognized that gnome, which was odd. I didn’t know too many magical people who didn’t work at MSI, and I definitely wasn’t acquainted with the park’s magical groundskeeping staff. The gnome’s look of sheer panic when he looked up at me was proof that this was someone I knew. After a moment, I realized who he was: Hertwick, a member of MSI’s sales force. But what was he doing in the park during business hours? Then I remembered that the more important question was how I’d find an explanation that would satisfy my mother without making my dad, who probably didn’t see anything at all, suspicious.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said. Hertwick looked indignant, but then I caught his eye, inclined my head slightly toward my mother and frowned. He got the message and jumped behind the statue while my mom was glaring at my dad.

  “It’s right there!” Mom protested, turning to point to the place where Hertwick had been. Then she frowned and looked puzzled. “Or it was. I could have sworn I saw something. It looked like one of those little statues in Louise Ellerbe’s front lawn—which I always thought were as tacky as plastic pink flamingos—only it was moving. It was like it was digging in the flower bed.”

  This time it was my dad who took her arm and moved her away. “Maybe we’d better head back to the hotel,” he said. “You’re probably tired.”

  She jerked her arm out of his grasp. “I am not tired. And don’t tell me my hormones are out of whack, either. I know what I saw.” She marched right over to the statue, then walked around it. Hertwick ran around the statue base, keeping it between him and her. When she’d made a full revolution around the statue, she returned to Dad and me, a frown wrinkling her forehead. “Huh,” she said, then looked up at Dad and wagged a finger in his face. “And don’t you dare say a word, Frank Chandler.” She headed off down the path without a backward glance, with Dad and me hurrying to keep up.

  As luck would have it, she just about ran head-on into a uniformed park ranger. A uniformed park ranger with wings. A uniformed park ranger with wings who used to date one of my friends. It was Pippin, Trix’s ex (?) boyfriend. This was supposed to be a big city, so why was I running into more people I knew in Central Park than I’d expect to in the town’s only grocery store back home?

  Mom took one look at him, with his pointed ears, slanted eyes, and wings, and screamed bloody murder. He looked almost as shocked, then closed his eyes like he was mentally checking the status of his veiling spell. I ducked behind Dad to make sure Pippin didn’t recognize me. The last thing I needed was for him to ask me about Trix. I couldn’t begin to explain how I knew a guy with wings who worked in the park.

  Dad grabbed Mom’s arm again. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said with a nod toward Pippin. “She’s heard too many stories about muggers in the park.”

  Pippin looked vastly relieved. “No problem, sir,” he said. “But the park’s changed a lot in the past twenty years. In daylight, you’re as safe here as you are anywhere else in the city.” Then he went on about his business, and I let out my pent-up breath in a sigh.

  “I didn’t think he was a mugger, Frank,” Mom protested. “That boy had wings. Was he another one of those alternative lifestyle people, Katie?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. No matter what I said, one of my parents would think I was either crazy or a liar. How had I managed a whole year as a magical immune in this city before I had to face the truth, when Mom was getting so close in only one day? I supposed it was because she wasn’t even trying to be cool or fit in.

  “You know what, Mom?” I said at last. “I learned a long time ago to give up figuring out every little weird thing in this city. It’s the only way to stay sane.”

  Mom came over bright and early Thanksgiving morning to get the turkey in the oven. I was her trusty lieutenant for the cooking. Gemma and Marcia, who weren’t so adept in the kitchen, served as foot soldiers, helping clean up so we could keep cooking. Dad, who knew what was good for him, stayed out of the way.

  Once the Macy’
s parade was under way, Mom flitted back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, which wasn’t a huge distance. “Frank, can you believe we were just there yesterday?” she kept saying.

  “Yes, Lois, we were there,” he always replied, with infinite patience.

  After one of those bouts, she returned to the kitchen and said to Gemma, “Did Katie tell you what we saw in Times Square yesterday?”

  “The naked guy with the guitar?”

  “Well, yes, we did see that. But have you seen the people with wings?”

  Gemma looked at me over the top of Mom’s head and mouthed, “Wings?”

  “I think Times Square was a weirdness overdose,” I said. “It can be overwhelming.”

  “There are some very strange people in this city,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” Gemma agreed. “You wouldn’t believe half the weird things I see on a daily basis. And New Yorkers don’t even look twice.”

  The downstairs buzzer sounded and Marcia answered it. She returned to the kitchen and said, “Jeff’s here. He’s on his way up.”

  Speaking of weird things, I thought. Jeff was magical, though Marcia didn’t know it, and he had a tendency to get magical pranks pulled on him. That was potential disaster around my mother. I managed to be nearest the front door when he got up to our apartment. “Hi, Jeff, good to see you,” I greeted him loudly, then whispered, “My mom’s an immune, so play it safe, okay?” His eyes widened, but he nodded. I brought him further into the apartment. “Dad, this is Jeff, Marcia’s boyfriend. Jeff, this is Frank Chandler, my dad.”

  Dad stood to shake hands very properly, which took Jeff aback. “Oh, um, hi, good to meet you,” he said.

  “And it’s nice to meet you,” Dad said. “Marcia goes way back with us. She’s like part of the family.” There was a stern warning underlying his friendly words. Jeff wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he nodded like he got the idea.