by E. C. Myers
“Oh yeah. I just needed to get rid of some stuff, you know? So there's less to move.” Jena looked away from him and started piling books onto a cart behind the desk.
“Oh.” Ephraim scratched at a peeling library sticker on the spine of a book, focusing on the numbers so he didn't have to look at her. 702.11 B. “Right. Your father's job.”
Jena shoved a book onto the cart, and the books on Ephraim's side domino-ed over. “How was your date last night?”
“Date?” His voice went too high. He cleared his throat. “It wasn't a date.” Ephraim tilted the books upright on the cart shelf and slid them over to Jena's side, then tucked in a metal bookend to hold them in place. “It was a celebration. A birthday celebration. As friends.”
“Shelley thought it was a date,” Jena said. “Mary thought it was a date.” The cart jerked away from him, its wheels squeaking angrily. It rolled a couple of feet to his left, and Jena stood to pile more books on the top shelf.
He rose and grabbed onto the handle of the book cart.
“I only agreed to it because Nathan wanted to spend time with Shelley,” Ephraim said.
“They liked your present.”
“They practically ordered me—us—to bring one.”
“It was appropriate, too. I didn't know you liked The Patty Duke show,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. He didn't know what she was talking about. “No. I haven't seen it. What?”
She sang, “‘A pair of matching bookends, different as night and day.’ That's the theme song. The show's about two identical cousins.”
“Identical cousins? That sounds unlikely.”
“Well, their fathers were twins…It's improbable I suppose, but it's kind of fun once you forget about the logic of it.”
“That's right. Your dad likes all that old stuff.”
“It's pretty good, actually. I should show you some.” Her hands dropped from the cart like a puppet's strings being cut. “At least, I would if I weren't moving away. God, this isn't fair. We didn't even have a chance to…”
“You're not happy about it, are you?” Ephraim asked.
“It's a good opportunity for my father,” Jena replied. “It's good for the family.”
“Sure.” Ephraim gripped the cart handle tighter. “It's okay to think of yourself, you know. It isn't just about your father. Your whole life is here. What about school? Your clubs?”
“They have schools in L.A., Ephraim. It's perfect timing really. I'm going to college in a year; it doesn't make sense to stay just for me when I'll be leaving anyway. And the extra money will help pay for tuition.” She shrugged. “I'd be crazy to not want to move to an exciting place like L.A. over a sleepy town like Summerside. I mean, there's all that…smog. You can't get that quality of smog in New York City. And I'll fit right in there, as long as I pretend to be someone else.”
“You could dye your hair blonde,” Ephraim said. “Get a tasteful tattoo, a couple of piercings. Yeah, I can see that.”
Jena squinted at him over her glasses. “That's, like, totally making me feel so much better.”
“Look, you could come back east for college, couldn't you?” Ephraim said. “You're probably looking at some of the Ivys, right? There's Columbia, Yale, Princeton. Your friends will still be here when you get back.”
“I'm not so sure about that.”
“Come on. It's only a year. Mary and Shelley have been your best friends since forever.”
“I think they'll get by without me,” she said. “If they even wait until I'm gone.”
Ephraim frowned. “You're upset because I went out with them last night?”
“You're cute, but you're kind of slow sometimes, Ephraim.” She turned away and pulled the cart with her. Ephraim held onto it and pulled back, bringing her to an abrupt stop.
“Ow,” she said. She spun around and rubbed her wrist. “I have work to do. We have work to do.”
“I'm cute?” Ephraim said.
“Like I said: slow.” She sighed and rested her arms on the cart, leaning over it to look at him. “But it doesn't matter, because I'm leaving. And my ‘friends’ will probably be better off.”
“I'm not interested in dating Mary,” he said. “I told you, I only went on that double date for Nathan's sake.”
“See, it was a date!”
“Jena—”
“You don't have to make excuses. I know I'm probably being silly. Maybe I'm overreacting. I just feel like when I leave, we'll make plans to stay in touch, but I won't really be missed. It'll be like I never existed. Life will go on, my friends will make new friends, I'll make new friends. It'll be a different life.” Her voice shook. “But I don't want a different life. I like the one I have. I want to graduate with the people I grew up with.”
“You wouldn't change anything in your life if you had the chance?” Ephraim asked.
Her eyes searched his face. “What do you mean?”
“There's all sorts of things in my life that I've wished were different, you know? My dad left, and my mom…well, she has issues. Had issues.”
They always said you were supposed to count your blessings, but Ephraim had always cataloged his problems. Even though he wasn't the only person to grow up without a parent, all of his friends seemed to have happy, stable families. He didn't know anyone else with an alcoholic mother who worked at a supermarket.
He got decent grades, but he didn't like school much, and now that Jena was leaving, he wouldn't even have that one bright part of his life to get him through senior year.
“Ephraim? What's wrong?”
Ephraim closed his hand around the coin in his pocket, squeezing it in its plastic bag. “Never mind. It'll all work out.”
“I know,” Jena said. She straightened and took a deep breath. “It's out of my control. There's no sense stressing about it.” She tugged on the cart again, and this time Ephraim let it go. She walked backward, pulling the cart along with her. She smiled brightly, her eyes shining. “If you're ever in L.A., look me up, will you?”
“When are you leaving?”
“In a week.”
Ephraim nodded.
Not if I can help it.
When Ephraim got home, Nathan was lying on the floor by his bed, leafing through a stack of the old Playboy magazines Ephraim had rescued from the trash after his father left.
“How the hell did you get in here?” Ephraim asked.
“Madeline let me in,” Nathan said. “These are so awesome.” He was looking at an article that promised to teach “32 Surefire Ways to Put a Woman in the Mood.” Presumably, none of those included the aid of a magic coin.
Ephraim dropped his bag on the floor and noticed a plate of oatmeal cookies on his desk beside an empty glass of milk. “My mother gave you cookies?” She never let Ephraim snack on junk food before dinner, especially in his room. He popped a cookie in his mouth whole.
“She lured me in with them,” Nathan said. “I couldn't resist.”
“Don't make that sound naughty. She's my mother.” Ephraim slumped into his desk chair and woke his computer up from hibernation. “Where is she, anyway?”
Nathan closed the magazine and put it aside. “She went out. And I have to say, she looked really hot.”
She must have another date tonight.
“You didn't take a picture, did you?”
“What do you take me for?” Nathan asked.
“Hand over your camera.”
“There's no picture!”
“Nathan,” Ephraim said.
“How was work? Have fun with Jena?” Nathan asked. Everything that he had said sounded suggestive. He was being more of a pervert than usual.
“Why did you come over if you knew I wasn't home?” Ephraim asked.
Nathan's eyes were glued on a platinum blonde who was leaning over with her breasts cradled in her arms.
“I wanted to thank you for last night.” Nathan wiggled his eyebrows.
“Okay, you have to cut that ou
t.”
Nathan tossed the magazine on the floor and picked up another one. “Mary really likes you,” he said. “Why'd you have to ignore her like that?”
“I just couldn't think about anything but Jena leaving,” Ephraim said.
“Why do you suddenly like her more than Mary?”
“I just do. Why do you like Shelley?”
Nathan grinned.
“Okay, besides her obvious assets.”
“What's wrong with liking someone because they're attractive?” Nathan flipped over onto his back and held an open magazine over his face.
“Because there's more to them than that. Why do you like Shelley instead of her sister? They look the same.”
“Because she likes me.” Nathan lifted the magazine and looked at Ephraim. “Thanks to you. I guess she probably wouldn't be as interested in me without your coin.”
Ephraim smirked. “So you believe me now.”
“I think I might need more proof. What's our next coin trick?”
“What?”
“Well, this was just the start. We can have anything we want,” Nathan said.
“I still feel bad enough about what we did to Shelley.”
“What we did to her?” Nathan sat up and dropped the magazine into his lap.
“Hey, be careful with those.” Ephraim went over and began stacking the magazines neatly.
“You don't think she could like me without the coin?” Nathan asked.
“I didn't say that. But we made her like you, so we'll never know, will we?”
Anger flickered over Nathan's face. “You did the same thing to Jena.”
“That was different.”
“Of course it was.” Nathan jumped up from the bed then flopped into the desk chair. Ephraim left the magazines on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed facing him. “It was an accident when I did it.”
“But you didn't feel bad about it when you realized what had happened, did you? Do you?”
Ephraim drew in a breath. “No.”
“See?”
“I don't think we should use it to manipulate people anymore. It doesn't feel right.”
Nathan laughed, a harsh sound that Ephraim wasn't expecting.
“What?” Ephraim asked.
“Because it's me who's getting the girl?”
“No, that's not—”
“I thought we were going to share the coin.”
“I never agreed—”
“If I had found it first, I would share it with you.” Nathan crossed his arms.
“I am sharing,” Ephraim said.
“Look, what do you think this coin is for? What do you think we should wish for? World peace?”
“Something like that.” Ephraim frowned. He'd been too preoccupied helping himself to consider that he could use it for some greater good. Maybe Nathan was right and he shouldn't keep this to himself. “But we don't really know how the coin works. I think we should take it slow, and try to figure out what its limits are. It hasn't always done exactly what I expected; if we wished for world peace, we could just as easily wipe out everyone as get them to stop fighting. It's like the coin makes arbitrary trade-offs when it gives us what we want.” Like how Nathan's wish had led to Jena's impending departure from Summerside.
Nathan nodded. “Okay. We'll take it slow for a while. Stick to small wishes.”
“And we won't use it to change people's feelings or force them to do anything they wouldn't want to do,” Ephraim said.
Nathan snorted. “Whatever. People manipulate each other every day without the benefit of a magic coin, but if you want to play it safe…”
Ephraim took out the coin. “We also have to make sure we're touching when I make the wish.”
“Now who's being pervy?” Nathan asked. “So what's it going to be this time, boss?”
“I'm going to wish that Jena doesn't have to leave.”
Nathan coughed a word: “Hypocrite.”
“This doesn't count as manipulating her feelings. It's true that I don't want to lose her, not now that things are starting to work out. But she doesn't want to move either.”
Nathan yawned. “Well, let's do it.”
Ephraim grabbed Nathan's left hand with his and made his wish.
“I wish that Jena didn't have to move away,” he said.
Ephraim told himself that he was doing this for Jena, not just for himself. He flipped the coin in his right hand and caught it.
“Tails,” he said.
Ephraim felt a sideways lurch, like he was on a train that had braked abruptly. The air around him rippled, and a moment later he wasn't in his room anymore. He was sitting in a booth at a diner. And Mary was across from him holding his hand instead of Nathan.
“Uh,” Ephraim said.
Mary jumped in surprise and blinked at him. Ephraim covered the coin in his hand.
“Whoa,” she said.
“How did I—” Ephraim closed his eyes and opened them again. He was still in the diner. Ephraim looked around, but Nathan was nowhere in sight. “What…what was I saying?” Ephraim asked as he casually slid the coin into his pocket. Whenever he thought he'd figured out how the coin worked, it always threw him for another loop. Why had it transported him to the diner this time? And where had Nathan ended up?
“Um. Weren't you wearing a blue shirt a second ago?” Mary asked.
Ephraim looked down at his T-shirt. It was black, the same one he remembered picking out that morning. “I don't think so.”
“I thought…” Mary frowned.
Ephraim didn't know what she'd seen, but he knew the coin was involved. He snapped his fingers. “I wore that shirt yesterday,” he said. “It looks just like this one, but you know…blue. Dark blue. Almost black.”
“Yeah, I guess that's it.” She popped a french fry into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully, staring at his shirt.
“Hey, have you seen Nathan around here?” Ephraim asked.
“Nathan? Shelley's out with him.” Mary sniffed. “We don't have to do everything together. No matter how many times Nathan asks.”
Ephraim gripped the edge of the table. “She's out with Nathan? Right now?”
“What's wrong?”
Ephraim looked at their plates and saw Mary had already finished her burger. Half of one remained on his plate, but he wasn't hungry.
“I'm not feeling well,” he said.
“Oh no! Was it the food?”
He feigned a pained expression. “I think so. Would you mind if we called it an early night?”
“Oh. Of course.” She looked disappointed.
“I'm really sorry. I just don't think I'll be very good company like this.” He had to find Nathan right away.
He signaled for the check. Mary picked at the fries on her plate and didn't look up.
“I'm…glad we did this,” he said.
Mary perked up. They were obviously on a “real” date, and strangely enough, it seemed to have been going well up until he ruined things. The coin had dropped him in the middle of an awkward situation. It had actually moved him from his bedroom to the diner, which he hadn't even known it was capable of doing.
He was still missing something important. Flipping a coin implied a random outcome, heads or tails. The coin had landed on tails when he made his last wish. It had also been tails when Mrs. Reynolds sprained her ankle so he could talk to Jena.
What had happened when it turned up heads? He thought back to his earlier wishes. It had been heads when he wished his mother out of the hospital, and again when he wished she were a better parent, with good results each time.
Had it been tails when he wished Shelley liked Nathan? He thought so. And that was when he found out Jena was moving, the worst outcome of all.
“When's Jena moving?” he asked suddenly.
Mary frowned. “At the end of the week.”
So that was still the same. He'd wished that Jena weren't moving, and the coin hadn't done a thing about it—it had just
pushed him deeper into some relationship with Mary. He couldn't piece this together at all.
“Ephraim, what's going on?” Mary asked.
“That's what I'm trying to figure out,” he replied.
“What?”
“I'm sorry. I need some air. How about I walk you home?” Ephraim asked.
He set the last of his money down on the table and held the door for Mary as they left. As they walked together, his head buzzed with discovery. The coin hadn't granted his wish, at least not yet. Jena was still going to move, but other things had obviously changed. If something bad happened, that would support his hypothesis that getting tails on the coin flip meant trouble.
Some of the shops they passed looked different from what he remembered, but stores were always closing and new ones opening in this section of town. He knew he was getting paranoid about the extent of the coin's alterations to the world, but it was important to understand the magic before they messed with it again.
“Hey, can I ask you a personal question?” he said.
She glanced at him sidelong. “Sure.”
“This has been bugging me for a long time. Why Mary and Shelley? How could your parents do that to you?”
Mary laughed. “It's not so bad. Most people don't even get it, until teachers make a point of bringing it up in class. But the responsibility lies with my father. He's an English professor with a fondness for his work. Mama never would have let him get away with it, if they hadn't met in a Lit class on the Shelleys as freshmen.”
“That's romantic,” Ephraim said.
“Gothic, actually,” Mary replied.
Ephraim groaned.
“If you liked that, imagine hearing it over and over again for your entire life. That probably did more psychological damage than the weird names. Though, try telling that to my brother Dorian.”
Mary stopped walking. “This is me,” she said. They had already arrived at her house.
“Do you think Shelley and Nathan are back yet?” he said.
“Our window's dark, so I don't think she's home.”
“Right. What would they be doing in a dark room?” he asked innocently.
She batted him lightly on the shoulder. “Hey! That's my sister you're talking about.” Her hand lingered on his arm. He realized with sudden certainty that she expected him to kiss her.