Glimpsed

by G. F. Miller

  Memom returns, rolling her vintage tea cart. It’s from that era when mirrors made absolutely everything classy. There’s a plate of unwrapped Little Darlings right in the middle of the upper-level mirror—the chocolate cake kind with cream filling. And I’m using “cream” in the loosest sense. It tastes like corn syrup whipped together with Silly Putty.

  She parks the cart by me, lowers herself into the recliner, then waves her hand toward the spread. “You pour. I’m an old lady.”

  Even though I don’t feel like drinking it, I pour orange pekoe into two cups. Then I flop backward onto the cushions again, trying to decide how to broach the subject of my total fail.

  She does it for me. “This is your Cindy’s weekend, isn’t it? Don’t you have work to do?”

  I rub my forehead. “It’s done. She’s queen. But…” Suddenly I realize maybe it’s not me who failed. I did my job. I made the glimpse happen. Maybe it’s the Universe that failed me. I sit up and face Memom. “How do we know the glimpses are telling the truth?”

  Memom doesn’t miss a beat. “People lie, Charity. Even to themselves. When people flash us, that’s their most honest moment. Their deepest wish. That’s why it’s so powerful.”

  I’m too distraught to remind her again that “flash” is off-limits. “But how do you know? I mean, what if we’re wrong? What if the glimpses are… I don’t know…”

  She waves me off. “An eighty-six-year-old woman was doing the Electric Slide with the man of her dreams last night at the Friday social at an old folks’ home. If that’s not good magic, I don’t know what is.”

  I clutch the couch cushions, like I can squeeze coherency out of them. “But has there ever been a Cindy that you think… that they would have been better off if—”

  “Did something happen with your Cindy?” Memom leans toward me with a concerned look.

  I blow a long breath onto my tea, watching the surface ripple like a tiny, stormy sea. Then I look up. “When they crowned her queen, a whole section of the bleachers—all her old friends—they booed her off the stage. I left her bawling her eyes out in the bathroom.”

  Memom settles back into the recliner, closes her eyes, and rocks herself pensively. It takes her a while to answer, and I think maybe she fell asleep. Finally she says, “The Original Fairy Godmother had a sister, you know. There was a girl she tried to help—pretty girl, sweet as could be, but… well, she was determined to run away with this loser she thought was a prince. Our great-auntie could see what a phony he was, but the girl was completely hoodwinked.”

  She pauses dramatically. I prompt, “And?”

  “And she locked the girl in the attic and nudged the guy away every time he came around. Eventually the girl used her own hair to lower herself out the window and ran away with the King of Sleaze anyway. But—”

  “Is this RAPUNZEL?!” I slam my cup down, not caring that hot tea sloshes out. “Our great-aunt was the witch in ‘Rapunzel’?”

  “A fairy godmother makes one mistake and suddenly she’s a ‘witch.’ ” Memom dismisses that with a wave of her hand.

  “Are you telling me that all the witches in all the stories—they were all fairy godmothers gone bad?”

  “Maybe not all.”

  “MEMOM!”

  She shrugs. “Every family has a few black sheep.”

  “Black sheep?! Are you kidding me?” My whole life, all Memom has told me are stories about how good fairy godmothers are—how we fix everything and make people happy. That’s the legacy I thought I was part of. Why choose now to drop a truth bomb?

  “Oh, keep your panties on. Any woman with an ounce of self-determination was called a witch back then.”

  “She held her Cindy hostage. That’s pretty dang witchy.”

  Memom sips her tea. How can she be so cavalier about this? I’m devastated by my part in the events of last night. I mean, forget Happily Ever After—Vindhya didn’t even get five full minutes of happiness. I pretty much just completely trashed somebody’s life. What if I’m one of those fairy godmothers that my great-grandnieces never talk about because I just suck? What makes me not a wicked witch?

  I mutter, “I might be a witch.” Then with more conviction, “I might be a wicked witch.”

  “Stop it. You are not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you have a good heart—the heart of a fairy godmother. You want to help people.”

  I give her a look that says she needs to try harder.

  “Just do what I always told you—the flash is the road map. Stick to the map, and you’ll be fine.”

  “I stuck to the map for Vindhya, and it. Was. Horrible.” I push the words through gritted teeth, my hands clenched in my lap.

  “Well, if you had let me finish my story… I was going to say that Rapunzel’s fairy godmother—”

  “Witch.”

  “—went on to grant lots of other wishes. She did a lot of good. So, you win some, you lose some.”

  My stomach threatens to empty itself. I cover my mouth. “I can’t do this.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “I can’t follow the glimpses if they don’t always create Happily Ever Afters.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she snaps. She seems rattled, but immediately recomposes her face into a deeply etched smile. “You can trust the flashes. And you’ve always loved granting wishes. You’ve made so many people happy. It was just one setback. Have a cake.” She scoots the plate closer to me. I pretend not to notice.

  “What would happen if I ignored the glimpses? Maybe—”

  “No, no. Don’t talk nonsense!” She looks more shaken than I’ve ever seen her before.

  “Have you ever tried to control it? Can we turn it off and on?”

  “Enough, Charity!” Memom stands on creaky knees, trembling with emotion, her smile long gone. “We don’t control the flashes! We don’t second-guess the Universe! We grant the wishes as they’re revealed to us—no more and no less. Now stop this!”

  Memom has never yelled at me before. I think I broke her. I swallow the rest of my arguments.

  She stares me down for a few seconds and, when it’s clear I have nothing more to say, she returns to her chair. She pats my knee affectionately. “Have a cake.”

  I give in and pick at a Little Darling while disturbing questions pinball around inside my head. If glimpses aren’t always HEAs, and we can’t control them, and we can’t ignore them, well… things could get real, and fast. What if someone’s wish is to die? Or what if the person is evil? What if their deepest desire is to murder someone? Would I have to help them? Or what if it’s someone like Vindhya, whose innocent reach for a little happiness ends in disaster?

  Maybe Noah’s right about me. Maybe I am the bad guy.

  I toss the Little Darling onto my saucer. I can’t make myself eat it today. Not even for Memom.

  * * *

  I had hoped that visiting Memom would make me feel better, but it actually has the opposite effect. I leave her apartment more conflicted than I’ve ever been in my life. Every family has a few black sheep.…

  A few, she said. Who else don’t we talk about?

  When I get home, I find Mom—dressed for work from the waist up, her lower half sporting yoga pants and bare feet—staring at her computer screen. I’m about to say hi and maybe “Help! I want my mom!” But she waves me off, pointing to the Bluetooth in her ear.

  She says, “That’s a good point, Steve. Thanks for bringing that up. We do need to consider the cost-benefit here.…”

  I recognize a conference call when I see one. I give her a silent thumbs-up and proceed down the hall, realizing more than ever how completely on my own I am. Mom isn’t going to help me pull myself together. Memom gave me zero useful guidance. Hope is a million miles away. Sean? Scarlett? No. They couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through, even if we were close enough to talk about it. Which I’ve made sure we aren’t. So I shut myself in my room with my tablet and do t
he only thing I can do—comb through the entire collected knowledge of the planet looking for the truth about who I am.

  Can I trust my magic? Are the glimpses really for the best? Do fairy godmothers always dole out success, happiness, and true love, like I thought? How many went to the dark side?

  Trying to sort out truth from fiction is tricky. Most of my family history—where it has survived at all—is in the annals of fairy-tale lore. And fairy-tale writers had a tendency to embellish whenever they thought that fiction would sell more books than facts. Memom raised me on these things, reinterpreting along the way. So there’s nothing new here. I reread a dozen or so stories anyway, this time paying way more attention to the witches.

  In these tales, my relatives appear as mysterious women handing out magic beans and berries, making cryptic predictions, assigning seemingly impossible tasks. Or—possibly—feeding people poisoned apples, cursing babies, and threatening to eat little kids. Their morals are, at best, ambiguous.

  Determined to dig deeper, I type “fairy mythology” into the search bar. Now we’re getting into the realm of “tiny winged mischief babies.” They’re not remotely real or relevant. They fly around, disappear at will, turn into animals, emerge from flowers… Just. No.

  About the time I want to beat my head against my tablet if I have to read one more word about insipid little pixies, an overly academic sentence buried in some fairy zealot’s blog catches my attention: “The Latin verb fari means ‘to speak,’ implying the faeries’ ability to make predictions or to prophesy someone’s destiny.”

  Holy crap. I found the Grail.

  Maybe the glimpses are predictions about destiny—not wishes at all. My heart pounds as I plow forward. In another of his posts, the blogger writes, “Folkloric references to faeries seem to preserve within children’s bedtime stories a veiled remnant of a conquered people group.” It makes perfect sense—all this “hide who you are and what you can do” stuff started as a way to survive some kind of premedieval genocide.

  Two hours and dozens of blog posts later, I’ve read about Celtic, German, Italian, English, and Scottish fairy stories and made a list of what I know:

  Real fairies look human (I would say are human)—no wings or green skin, not weirdly small or anything like that.

  All fairies are women. Not a big revelation. Memom already told me the magic only manifests in females and only once we hit the big P.

  Fairies are sometimes helpful and sometimes kinda horrible.

  Fairies manipulate people for their own purposes kind of a lot. (Sigh.)

  Humans who fall in love with fairies are royally screwed. Seriously, it always ends very badly for the hapless human. Which explains so much about my family tree.

  Several blog posts talk about a woman called the Queen of the Fairies, Morgan le Fay. She was the last queen of the conquered people group in the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh myths. I keep reading and reading about her, clicking every link, comparing every story to find the threads of truth.

  And I want to love her so bad—my great-grandmother a zillion times removed. But here’s the truth: She was a train wreck. A manipulative, self-absorbed, relationship-sabotaging control freak. Which is eerily, depressingly similar to Noah’s assessment of yours truly.

  I shove my tablet under the comforter and bury my face in my pillow. I can’t take any more. For a few minutes my thoughts spiral out of control. Then I sit up, drag my hair out of my face, and take a bracing breath. I’ve come to a very important conclusion.

  I need an intervention.

  14 Humble Pie Basically Tastes Like Chicken

  I drive to Noah’s but can’t make myself actually stop the car, so I end up driving around aimlessly for an hour. There is so much raw emotion swirling inside me that I feel like a human blender of angst. I still have a guilt hangover from the Vindhya debacle. I just found out I might be evil. And there’s the whole “asking for help instead of giving it” role reversal that is obviously way out of my comfort zone.

  On top of all that, I’m about to try to get a friend back (or, more accurately, a frenemy). That’s not something I’ve ever done before. Goodbyes are always on my terms, and they’re for keeps. Trying to figure out how to reverse that scenario is terrifying. Maybe it’s not even possible.

  And how did I even get to the place where Noah is the one person I think can help me out of this tailspin?

  I think about this a lot as I circle his block ten or fifteen times. The thing is, he’s the only person outside of my family who knows two things about me: that I’m magical and that I’m screwed up. Actually, I may be giving my family too much credit. Noah saw way before I did that I was in trouble, and if I’d listened to him earlier, maybe I wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Eventually I swallow my dread and my pride (easier than expected, as there is so little of it left) long enough to park the car and march myself to the front door. Because if it’s between baring my soul to my nemesis or spiraling into a legit evil fairy, I’ve just got to be brave.

  I trudge along the walkway and up the front-porch steps, glancing around to make sure there are no potential eavesdroppers. What I have to say is scary enough without extra ears listening in. The street is empty.

  As soon as I ring the doorbell, I can hear muffled activity inside. Noah’s mom’s voice calling from deep within. Scuffling and arguing. The doorknob jiggles from the inside, goes still, jiggles again. Right inside the door, Noah’s little sister sings part of the “k-i-s-s-i-n-g” song, some of the words muted like her mouth is being covered. Noah yells, “OUCH! Mom, Nat bit me!”

  Lisa shouts, “You two, STOP IT! Natalie, come here.” And Natalie’s voice recedes in a whine about life not being fair, she’s bored, and what is there to eat. Nat the Brat indeed.

  Noah opens the door a second later, his face a mask of disdain. It’s so incongruous with what I just heard through the door that a surprised laugh catches in my misery-clogged throat and chokes me. As soon as I get the coughing under control, though, I shove a dry-cleaning bag at him. “Here are the costumes. I had them cleaned.”

  Noah takes them without a word or a look of acknowledgment and moves to close the door.

  Before he can totally shut me out, I stop the door with my hand and blurt, “The glimpses can’t be trusted like I thought. I should have listened to you. You were right about everything. I really screwed up, and I shouldn’t have borrowed the costume for Vindhya without telling you. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry about everything with Vindhya and Holly and… everyone. I want to make it right, but I don’t know how.”

  He crosses his arms. “Maybe my idea, where you just stop. Let’s start there.”

  As if I haven’t humiliated myself enough, now I have to admit how little I actually know about my own magic. I stumble over it. “The problem is, I can’t control the glimpses. They just sort of… happen. But maybe I can ignore them? Memom says we can’t. But I’ll try.”

  For an instant Noah looks puzzled. Then he gives me the look who turned out to be human face from Tuesday. I’m ridiculously relieved. He drops his defensive pose. “You’ve had this thing your whole life?”

  “Since I was twelve.”

  “So five, six years. And you have no idea how it works?”

  I shake my head. It seems so pathetic when he says it like that. “And, um.” Out with it, Charity. You’ve come this far. “There’s something else I can do.”

  “Okay?”

  “Remember at Arctic Marble when you were making me that… thing. And you kept feeling like maybe you should stop?”

  “Stinking conscience,” he mutters. Then his eyes go wide. “How did you know I— Wait, that was you? You were messing with my head?”

  I press my lips together and look at the ground.

  “That’s so evil!”

  My head pops up. “It was self-defense!”

  He drags his hand down his face, back up again, and through his curls. “Why are you telling me this? Why now?”


  I hug myself but force my eyes to meet his. “You were right all along. Homecoming proved that. I don’t want to be the bad guy, and I don’t know who else could help me.”

  “You want my help?” He’s still holding the dry-cleaning bag. It rustles in his arm. “The last time you asked for my help—”

  “I know! I said I’m sorry!”

  He narrows his eyes at me for an uncomfortable beat. Then, without a word, he turns around and goes into the house. I let my head fall back against the porch pillar in defeat. I wonder how much a ticket to Baghdad costs.

  But a minute later he returns, free of the dry-cleaning bag. He doesn’t look upset anymore. Actually, the mixture of curiosity and concentration on his face makes him look like a very young college professor or maybe a mad scientist. He clears his throat. “Okay. I’ll help you figure out how to control your psychic abilities.”

  I’ve never thought of my magic like that. It sounds completely off. I shift uncomfortably.

  “But no more lying, and definitely no—” He pokes at his forehead.

  “Nudges,” I offer.

  “Seriously. No nudges.” His eyebrows pop up behind his glasses. “Unless you think we could send telepathic messages back and forth? Because that would be awesome.”

  “It really doesn’t work like that.”

  “Yeah. Forget it.” His eyes roam the yard for three or four seconds. Then he focuses back on me. “I would say the first step is to try to glimpse something.”

  “Wait, what?” I seem to have stumbled into Opposite Land.

  He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Yeah. If you want to teach a dog not to bark, first you teach it to bark on command. So it—”

  “I’m not a dog!”

  He looks appropriately flustered. “No. Yeah. I just mean, doing a thing is easier than not doing a thing. If you can choose to do it, then you’ve found the switch, as it were, and you should be able to turn it off, too. See?”

  It scares me so freaking much that what he just said makes sense. I realize my eyebrows are pinched together and press my finger to the spot between them. I lick my dry lips. Then I nod. “Okay. I’ll, um. I’ll do that.”