To Prevent Warm Welcomes

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  “Florence!” Felicity’s voice called.

  Her head shot up, and she spun around. “Felicity!” she cried in relief. “You’re late!”

  “I know, I know, I know, but guess what?” Felicity burst out. “Guess what! I asked Daniel out, and he said yes!”

  Florence’s heart plummeted. “Great . . .”

  “Ashley and Michele and Donna convinced me, and I did it!” Felicity squealed. “And he said yes! We’re going on a date!”

  “Terrific,” Florence muttered. “Can we —”

  “First I said, ‘Daniel, can we go to the movies?’” Felicity narrated breathlessly. “Then he said, ‘Will you buy the tickets?’ And I said, ‘Uh huh!’ And he said, ‘Okay, there’s a movie I’ve been wanting to see.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let’s see it!’ And he said, ‘Cool. Nice to see you again, Flossie.’ And I said, ‘It’s Felicity.’ And he said, ‘Oh, right, Felicity. Nice hairthings.’ HE SAID ‘NICE HAIRTHINGS’! EEEEEEEE! I think he’s madly in love with me!”

  He didn’t even offer to buy the tickets? Florence thought sourly. What a cad.

  “So now I’ve got to get to the theater and buy us tickets!” Felicity squealed, hopping up and down, squeezing her hands together.

  “After practice, you mean?” Florence asked sharply, holding up her focus item. She’d spun the bracelet so many times, it’d left white scratches around her wrist.

  Felicity looked crushed, but she recovered. “Okay, but we’ve just got to finish quickly!”

  Florence glanced around to make sure nobody was near them, then lifted her arms in the air. “Pink Dragon . . . flare!”

  She whooshed into the air, spinning around as her braids grew longer and coiled into corkscrew curls. Bat wings exploded out of her shoulderblades, and fluffy pink popped all around her in her usual dress. She landed in a swirl of fire.

  “‘Daniel’ is such a fun name to say,” Felicity was saying, giggling. “Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel . . .”

  Florence felt a flare of frustration. “What did you think about my transformation?”

  “What about it?” Felicity asked blankly.

  “Did it look any different this time?!”

  “Oh.” Felicity blinked. “I wasn’t looking.”

  Florence set her jaw. “Okay, I’ll detransform and retransform. Watch this time, okay?”

  “Okaaaaaaay.”

  The fluffy pink around Florence dissolved, and her hair uncoiled and shrank back into its normal braids. Her bat wings folded down and shrank into her brown skin.

  “Pink Dragon . . . flare!”

  This time, Felicity watched with rapt attention as everything happened again. That was extremely uncomfortable when Florence reached the split second while her clothes were in the process of dissolving from one outfit to the other. Her hair was always wrapped around her like a giant cocoon during that stage, which was the reason she had it grow ten times longer while she transformed in the first place, but sheeeeesh. Transformation scenes just weren’t meant to be watched that closely.

  “Well?” Florence asked, landing.

  “Your wings are bigger,” Felicity reported. “And your dress is redder. And it doesn’t look as fluffy. It all fades back to normal at the end, though. Maybe you aren’t going to be Pink Dragon anymore. You could be Red Dragon.”

  That didn’t sound too bad. “Or I could go with something fiery, like Flare Dragon,” Florence suggested.

  “But then your transformation words would be ‘Flare Dragon, flare.’”

  That did sound pretty stupid, now that she mentioned it.

  “‘Flare Dragon, flame’?” Florence hedged.

  Felicity giggled. “You could say, ‘Flare Dragon, fluster’!”

  “Definitely not!” Florence cried.

  Felicity giggled even harder. “Or ‘Flare Dragon, flounder’!”

  Florence burst out laughing. “Worst transformation words ever!” She glanced over to see Kendra’s indignant expression, because Kendra always took transformation things so seriously, but then she realized that Kendra wasn’t there anymore, and her heart lurched.

  “Or ‘Flare Dragon’ . . . um . . . um . . . ‘fly’!” Felicity said.

  “That sounds halfway decent,” Florence said soberly. The humor of the moment was gone for her.

  Felicity seemed to notice, and she stopped making jokes. “Maybe I’ll power up again, too,” she said hopefully. “Because Daniel’s my boyfriend.”

  You call one date a boyfriend? Florence thought skeptically. But she didn’t pick a fight. “Just transform already.”

  Felicity held her arms wide on either side. Her focus item, the silver ring with the pink flower, bloomed out of her finger.

  “Green Fairy . . . flutter!”

  Felicity spun wildly with the speed of a like a top, drilling upwards so quickly that by the time her costume was transforming, you could barely catch a blur of green and brown and peach. The blur burst out in a cascade of leaves, and Felicity descended in her unmoving pose of head down, knees tucked up, hands together. Her wings flapped once, and she landed gracefully on the sidewalk.

  “Nothing different there,” Florence noted. You are so not getting a power-up because you asked Daniel out on a first date.

  Felicity flapped her large, sheer green wings that resembled a cross between butterfly wings and leaves. Little dots of pink flowers dotted the rest of her clothing.

  “I’m going to breathe poison at you,” Florence said. “I need you to dodge —”

  “Felicity?” a voice asked from behind them.

  Florence jerked back, startled. Had someone been standing behind her?

  Felicity’s face went white with shock. “D-D-D-Daniel!”

  Florence spun around.

  “Felicity?” he repeated, looking stunned.

  “I — I am not Felicity!” she stuttered, spinning around and fluttering her wings. “I am the great magical girl . . .” She posed dramatically. “Green Fairy!”

  “I just saw you transform!” he shouted, pointing an accusing finger at her.

  “I . . . I couldn’t possibly . . .” Felicity said frantically, looking around shifty-eyed. “I mean, I am the great Green Fairy!”

  Florence suppressed a groan. I miss Cream Angel’s short-term memory eraser. Now they had somebody else in on their secret. They’d have to hope the guy wouldn’t blab.

  “Oh, Daniel, I’m so sorry!” Felicity burst out, flinging herself at him and hugging him desperately. “I can’t lie to you! It is me, Felicity!”

  “You don’t say!” he snapped.

  She pulled back with an eager look on her face.

  “But you will forgive me, right?” Her eyes widened with daft cluelessness, and her ponytail bounced behind her. “I mean, honesty only makes a couple stronger, and —”

  “No way,” he interrupted. “I’m not dating you.”

  Felicity’s jaw dropped in shock. “Why not?!”

  “Duh!” Daniel said, jabbing a finger at her outfit. “I don’t want some villain to brainwash me!”

  “That’s an urban legend,” Florence said. “Powerless bystanders don’t usually get brainwashed that much. Maybe once a year for a few minutes so a villain can use their life force to power a random monster, if that. It’s much more common for a magical girl to get brainwashed and attack her boyfriend —”

  Daniel spun on his heel and walked away.

  “Wait!” Felicity screamed. “Daniel!!”

  Florence swallowed. She would not have seen this coming. It was better than having a boyfriend who turned out to be a villain, but not by much.

  Felicity collapsed onto the ground in a sobbing heap. Her sheer green wings drooped, and the flowers on her costume wilted. Her shoulders kept on shaking, even after the sounds stopped.

  Florence swallowed, not sure what to do or say.

  Finally, Felicity raised her head.

  “Florence . . .” she said quietly, “. . . I quit.”

  “Wh
at?” Florence asked dumbly.

  Felicity jumped up, wrenched the ring off her finger, and flung it across the street into a nearby dumpster.

  “I QUIT!”

  It flew all that way with superhuman speed and accuracy, landing with a gigantic CLANG!

  “Hang on,” Florence said desperately. “You don’t mean —”

  Felicity took off after the boy who had just left her. Leaves whooshed behind her, stripping off pieces of her green costume. In two seconds, it was nothing but a mass of swirling leaves that formed back into her normal clothes again.

  “Daniel!!!”

  “Felicity!” Florence yelled at her. “You can’t! We’re —”

  “Daniel! Please! I love you!” Felicity was sobbing in the distance. “Please! I’ll do anything!”

  Florence wrapped her hand around her bracelet. The focus item that now seemed completely meaningless.

  “. . . Supposed to be a team . . .” she whispered.

  In the dumpster, between an apple core and an orange juice can, a tiny ring sat, glinting in the dim afternoon sun.

  A whirlwind of tiny green glowing leaves surrounded it. As if by a gust of wind, the leaves blew off and twirled into nothingness. The flowers wilted and tumbled down into the garbage as blackened lumps. The ring crumbled into ash.

  Green Fairy was finished.

  Wings of Justice was gone.

  Florence was alone.

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