Turnabout

by Melissa Wong

  “It is watermelon, it just has a layer of mango puree with chili lime powder on top.”

  “That... doesn’t sound good.”

  “You’ve never had it before? Do you want to try it?”

  “No thanks. You lost me at the chili and lime part,” Melissa said before taking a bite of her crepe.

  “You’re eating ice cream made from a tuber,” Sara pointed out.

  “Yeah, but taro ice cream is good—this is the only place I’ve found in town that serves it!” she said, pouting a bit.

  “That’s my point! This is good too,” Sara said, indicating her slush.

  “She had me try the chili lime stuff on pineapple before,” Sable said as she put her phone in the pocket of her shorts. “It was pretty good.”

  Melissa’s phone went off just then, and she pulled it out expecting a reply from Cobalt. Instead she had a Me-Gram notification. She clicked it to find a picture of herself from a few minutes earlier, cookie halfway to her mouth and the ice-cream filled crepe prominently displayed in the bottom corner of the frame.

  “Sable! You put it online?” she cried, embarrassed. “And what do you mean I eat like an anime character?”

  “You do seem to like sweets,” Sara said wryly.

  “And why am I the only one eating a gelato crepe?” She turned to Sable. “She’s eating a slush and you’re eating shaved ice!”

  “I like shaved ice,” Sable said with a shrug.

  “I enjoy ice cream from time to time, but it’s kind of heavy. With the portions they have here I might not fit my dress by this weekend!”

  Melissa took another bite of crepe and wondered if that was a jab at her large crepe cone with extra toppings.

  “Plus it’s unseasonably warm today, so something icy sounded refreshing after that stuffy store.”

  “So I wasn’t the only one sweating my ass off in there!” Sable exclaimed.

  “I’ll just work this off next time we have Warrior Business,” Melissa said, “I’ll bet all that running and jumping burns a ton of calories.”

  Sara’s eyes widened, and she turned to reach for her purse. “That reminds me! I found this on the ground after our last... business.”

  She held out a white kitchen towel and unwrapped what at first appeared to be a cylindrical black crystal. When the sun caught it, the light revealed that it was actually a deep shade of violet.

  “What is that?” Sable asked in awe as she lowered her spoon and leaned in.

  “I don’t know, but the next time we transform I’m going to ask Ryan to analyze it with the Emerald Lenses. It looks like a larger version of the Petroite crystal Vetrina used to turn Mike and Maria.”

  “How did Sable sweating make you remember this?” Melissa asked. There was something about the crystal that seemed like it could draw you in, and she bit back the urge to touch it.

  “No, the Warrior Business part reminded me.”

  She felt Sable’s hand on her wrist and suddenly realized she’d been reaching for it anyway. “It’s dangerous—what if that thing turns you into Evil Mel?”

  Sara was hastily wrapping the petroite back up when they heard the scrape of the fourth chair on the cement. All three of them watched incredulously as a tall man sat at their table wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down low.

  “Do not worry, I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said. “I just want to hide and pretend I am a part of your group until that person leaves me alone.”

  He pointed at a bearded man leaning on the wall next to a nearby coffee shop, rummaging through a large satchel at his hip that Melissa recognized as a camera bag.

  “So what is he, a private investigator?” she asked. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “I have no idea why he is following me around,” he said as he took off his hat and shades, revealing a teenager with black hair who didn’t look much older than them. “My family moved here fairly recently.”

  The man with the camera scanned the crowd, giving her a good look at his equipment. It looked like a really expensive model. Whomever that was, they meant business.

  “My uh... my name is Chase, by the way.”

  “Your name is Chase and you’re being chased? Sounds fake as hell,” Sable said, pointing her spoon at him.

  “C-Chase is a pretty common name,” Sara stammered, speaking for the first time since the stranger had sat down. “My name is really common too.” She had a loose lock of hair from her ponytail between her fingers and was absentmindedly playing with it as she tried to look at him without looking like she was looking at him. What on earth was she doing? Melissa knew from experience that Sara was a bit shy until she warmed up to people, but this was overkill.

  “Oh? What is it?” Chase asked, leaning in. He seemed genuinely interested in her response. Seriously, what was happening here?

  “I, uh... it’s... Sara!” she blurted out. She covered her mouth with her hands in embarrassment, but he smiled and continued the conversation as if nothing had happened.

  Sable tapped her on the arm and tilted her chin at the two of them. “I’ve never seen her act like this before,” she whispered.

  “I thought she was acting weird!” Melissa murmured back.

  “Man, they’re both pretty awkward at this, huh?” she grinned.

  The discussion between them had turned to the meaning of their names, and was veering off toward their Latin origins. Melissa didn’t know anything about Latin, but she was fluent in the language of attraction, and the unspoken part of their conversation was speaking volumes.

  “Dude, I think we’ve just witnessed love-at-first-sight in action,” she said quietly.

  “Ugh! Totally meet-cute. I can’t—that would never happen to me!” Sable groused, bringing a large spoonful of shaved ice to her mouth. She ate it all in one bite as if to punctuate her statement, but almost immediately scrunched up her face and grabbed her forehead, groaning loudly as she put her head on the table.

  “What’s wrong with your friend?” Chase asked, concerned.

  “Nothing. The bitterness in her heart finally attacked her brain,” Melissa snickered, earning her a kick in the shin beneath the table. It hurt, but she was too amused with herself to care.

  Sable finally lifted her head. “Brain freeze! Sorry Sara, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Oh no...” Chase muttered, sliding down in his chair and putting his hat back on. The man with the camera strode by the table, raising his camera to his face in pursuit of somebody else across the plaza.

  “Good news. Your friend with the camera seems to have lost interest,” Melissa said. Chase turned and watched him until he disappeared into the crowd, and once he was satisfied that his stalker was gone he stood and hid his deep blue eyes behind sunglasses once more.

  “Thank you for letting me sit with you,” he said with a smile, “Maybe he thought I was someone else.”

  “T-there’s a scarf!” Sara exclaimed.

  He cocked his head to the side, the afternoon sun catching a small hoop earring in one ear. “Oh, it’s not mine. I wasn’t wearing one.”

  “No, I mean there’s a special scarf that ruins photographs,” she explained, “It was developed for celebrities, so I’m pretty sure it’s expensive. But you should look it up online, in case this happens again!” She turned to Melissa, looking like an embarrassed deer caught in headlights. Melissa stared at her intently, using her hands to mime dialing a phone.

  “Alright, I will look into that. Thank you, Sara.” Chase smiled at her again before walking away. Sara watched him go, even giving a little wave to his back.

  Once he was out of earshot she and Sable rounded on Sara, both of them talking over one another.

  “He was completely into you and you rambled about, like, a scarf!” Sable shouted.

  “I was telling you to get his number!” Melissa cried.

  Sara’s face reddened and she buried it in her hands. “I panicked—I-I almost kept slipping into Spanish!
He was so cute, and he was talking to me? Boys don’t talk to me unless they want to copy my calculus homework!”

  “That’s sad,” Melissa said before taking a bite of her crepe. It was soggy—still good, but definitely not as good as when it was fresh.

  “It’s true. Guys ask her for the answers to homework all the time,” Sable confirmed.

  “What does it even matter?” Sara groaned, slouching in her seat and playing with the rest of her melted slush. “It’s not like I’ll ever see him again.”

  “If this were a TV show that statement would promptly be followed by a smash cut of those two running into each other all over the place,” Sable scoffed.

  “Definitely!”

  Sable raised her paper bowl and drank the last of her shaved ice before slamming it back down on the table.

  “That makes me so mad!” she fumed, “Neither of you asked for the other’s number, and you two were so obviously into each other!”

  “You think he liked me?” Sara asked hopefully, sitting up a bit straighter.

  “For someone so smart you’re an idiot about romance, ya know that?” Sable sighed.

  “Hey!” Sara protested.

  It was true though—Sara had been completely oblivious to the fact that Chase was flirting with her. Did that same thing happen with her and Cobalt? His confession had come as such a shock; had she been just as oblivious to the signals he was putting out? Or had she inadvertently made Cobalt think there was something more to their friendship by acting a certain way? No, that didn’t make sense—she hadn’t treated him differently until after the confession. Cutting him off completely had been a result of her initial panic, but the more she’d thought about it, the only conclusion she could draw was that he really didn’t have those kind of feelings for her. It had to be that since they were already best friends, he felt like she was a safer target, that he thought he had a better chance with her than with any other girl.

  And that had been the driving force of her anger through this debacle; how dare he treat her like a commodity, and a low-risk one at that? But now that she was forced to work with him—forced to reconnect—she’d found that he didn’t seem to hold any kind of contempt for her due to how she’d treated him all those months. In fact, the more time they spent together, the more she was forced to see the flaw in her knee-jerk reasoning.

  He wasn’t like that. Cobalt wasn’t the kind of guy who would reduce her to an object or a goal. He was too nice. And not in a white-knight, fedora-wearing kind of way, but in an awkward, not wanting to tell you about your garlic breath because he doesn’t want you to feel bad kind of way. Was it possible that—

  Melissa was ripped from her thoughts by the shriek Sable gave when Sara threw her spoon at her. As the two girls dissolved into laughter, one thought screamed through her head, drowning out everything else.

  Was it possible that his feelings for her were genuine?

  Chapter 7

  Black Tie

  Ryan closed the door behind him, shifting the large bag over his shoulder so that he could remove his shoes. He pushed them beneath a table in the entryway, next to several other pairs.

  “Mom, are you home?” he called out as he re-locked the door.

  “Yeah.”

  He turned the corner into the dining room, already expecting the scene before him. His mom sat at the over-burdened kitchen table, almost hidden from view behind the stacks of old mail, photo albums, and the screen of her laptop. She had one hand curled protectively over the rim of a small glass tumbler, only removing it to take a sip of the clear liquid within it.

  “Oh good, I wasn’t sure if you remembered that I was going out tonight.”

  “Going where?”

  “That big birthday party I got invited to.”

  She set the glass down with a heavy thud, the harsh light of the screen highlighting the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes and the lines starting to form alongside her mouth.

  “I thought you weren’t going,” she said.

  “When did I say that?” Ryan replied. He opened the door to the refrigerator and pulled out the gallon jug of red sugar water that seemed to live in there. The label said fruit punch, but it didn’t ever taste fruity—not that brand, anyway. He took a swig straight from the container before putting it back.

  “Ryan, I already told you we can’t afford to rent you a suit for it!” his mom cried.

  “And I told you a few days ago that Sara’s dad was giving me one. I think it belonged to one of his relatives or something. Anyway, that’s why I’m late—I swung by her place to pick it up.”

  “Well isn’t that just nice of him,” she said sourly.

  “It’s not like that, Mom. He wants me to go with Sara so she won’t be alone. He’s working late tonight and her little brother is sick so her mom is staying home with him.”

  His mom stood abruptly, stumbling out into the kitchen and opening the cabinet over the stove. She pulled out a bottle with a red label and took it back to the table with her. Ryan watched closely as she opened it, trying to see if the seal was already broken. The cap came off easily and he breathed a small sigh of relief as she poured herself more vodka. Good, it was one of the bottles he had watered down.

  “Don’t over do it,” he warned hesitantly, “You’ll need to watch the twins and Carrot-Top until I get back.”

  “I sent them over to Lindsay’s,” she growled, taking a large sip from her refilled glass. “She asked if they could spend the night.”

  “But... you hate Aunt Lindsay.”

  “I don’t hate her—she hates me!” she exploded, slamming the tumbler down on the table. “Always looking down on us, buying you kids expensive shit you don’t even need! Your friend’s parents are the same way. They only do these things so they can flaunt their money and pat themselves on the back for helping charity cases like us!”

  “Mom, I don’t think that’s it...”

  She spun the laptop around so that the screen faced him. She was on Facespace, and had pictures up of some brightly colored place. “Look at this! She and Brandon have only had them a few hours, and she’s already posting about how they took them to some fancy indoor playground. She just can’t wait to get her hands on my kids so she can play house and rub the fact that she still has a husband in my face!”

  Ryan’s heart sunk. He’d had a feeling one of these episodes were coming, but he hadn’t expected it so soon.

  “Mom...” he said gently, going around the table to give her a hug, “Why don’t you get off Facespace, set your laptop up on the toilet and watch Webflix while you take a nice long bubble bath? You’ll have the apartment to yourself tonight, and I just cleaned the tub yesterday.”

  She reached one hand up, patting his head gently. “You’re a good boy, Ryan. It breaks my heart sometimes that you remind me so much of him.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He knew she meant it as a compliment, but even after four years those drunken words still managed to stab him in the heart. He looked at the time on the microwave before standing up straight, adjusting the garment bag and his book bag on his shoulder as he did so.

  “I’ve gotta get a shower in if I’m gonna be ready in time for Maria to pick me up,” he said.

  “I thought you said you were going with Sara?”

  “Yeah, but Maria is picking us both up and giving us a ride.”

  “Ah,” was all she said, turning back to her computer and taking another swig from her glass.

  Ryan walked down the dark hall, turning right at the end to go into the room he shared. He put the bags on his bed and glanced over at his brother’s side, looking for any sign that he’d been home recently. His bed was still made, indicating he hadn’t been home in a few days.

  “Dammit Cody,” he muttered, emptying his pockets onto his bed. “You’d better not be dead in a ditch somewhere...”

  He was at the doorway when he heard his phone go off from the bed. He almost didn’t go back for it, but si
nce the party was tonight it could be something important. The notification said it was a text from Pinky.

  “What’s he want?” he sighed, opening the message.

  “I’M A FUCKING GIRL!” greeted him in all caps.

  He snickered as he replied. “Shouldn’t you have that figured out by now? I mean, there are telltale signs...”

  “No asshole, turn on Cartoon Land and see for yourself!”

  “We don’t have cable,” Ryan sent back.

  A few moments went by with no response. He was about to give up on the conversation and go take his shower when a video finally popped up.

  “Good thing I’m at home on the WiFi. What am I made of, unlimited data or something?” he groused as he pressed play.

  It was a recording of a TV screen showing a girl with long black hair in a ponytail, drawn in an anime style.

  “Cerulia, we need Pink Ocelot!” the distant audio said.

  “Right!” the black-haired girl replied.

  A transformation sequence followed, the camera bobbing slightly as the video taker adjusted to get the whole screen in. Ryan felt a smirk building as he watched, and by the time the pink, heart-filled sequence ended he was laughing so hard he had tears running down his face.

  “OMG, I’M DYING!” he texted back.

  “It’s not funny!”

  “The hell it isn’t! They gave you some epic boob jiggle at the end, too. That’s gonna be made into a meme for sure!”

  “Oh god... no...”

  Ryan wiped his cheek with one hand while typing with the other. “Well, I have to shower so I’m not late for the party, and I’m sure you need to go paint your nails to match your dress or something. See ya later!”

  He was about to drop the phone on the bed again when a final text came over. He opened it curiously.

  “Fuck off!” was all it read, and just that sent him into another fit of laughter.

  “So, you nervous?” AJ asked quietly as they got out of the car. He was tugging at the bottom of his tuxedo jacket as if he wanted to rip it off.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, aren’t you? Isn’t that why you keep pulling on your jacket like that?”