Don't Expect Magic (21 page)

Of all the Shangri-La-La Utopia places I’ve been since I got here, this is the Utopiest. It’s on the beach, next to a hotel shaped like some Arabian Nights palace, and is surrounded by a huge lawn with dozens of white tables where you can sit and look out at the ocean. Behind the tables is a line of shops, all different, but with one theme: iced desserts. There’s an ice cream counter and a stand for Italian ice. There’s sorbet, gelato and organic frozen rice milk. There are slushies and frappes and milk shakes and floats, etc., etc., forever. There’s also every kind of mix-in and a million different kinds of cones. There are so many choices, it could give you brain freeze before you’ve even ordered.

“I’ll have mint chocolate chip in a cake cone,” I tell Dad. He seems disappointed.

“That’s it? Nothing else on it? Or in it? We’re celebrating, remember.”

“That’s why I’m getting my
favorite
, Dad,” I say as sarcastically as possible so he won’t try to talk me into adding pomegranate syrup or sliced papaya on top. He ends up with nonfat, vanilla frozen yogurt. “And you think
I’m
boring.”

“It’s my
favorite
,” he says, mocking me. My attitude is rubbing off on him. I’m not sure I like it.

We carry our desserts out to a table a few feet away from the fenced-off half-moon circling the beach side of the hotel, where the hotel guests get to watch the sunset from big wooden beach chairs and have their hot fudge sundaes delivered to them on silver trays. We eat and grant wishes for the families who stroll past us, rescuing falling ice cream scoops and stopping melting chocolate from dripping on clean shirts. Maybe it’s the breeze or the whooshing waves or the disappearing sun, or maybe not, maybe all that’s extra, but each wish I grant makes me want to know more about the person than that they like Rocky Road or pretzel cones. I want to know what their big wishes are, the f.g. ones. It’s not about the wand anymore. Not in the same way. It seems funny now that I only wanted the power to change
my
life, when there’s so much more I could do with it.

“I’m sorry I haven’t brought you to the beach before,” Dad says. “I’m not much of a beach person.”

“Me neither,” I admit. Mom loved going to the Shore, but I never saw what was so great about lying on lumpy hot sand, or covering your body in grease and then doing nothing except sweating and occasionally “cooling off” by dousing yourself in seaweed-clogged water that dries sticky and washes sand into every crevice of your body. I guess this is something else I inherited from Dad. I wonder if it’s an f.g. thing. The only time there’s a beach in a
fairy tale is when someone’s taking off across the sea for Ice Island or Majestic Mountain or wherever the three-headed ogre lives. The stories with fairy godmothers tend to take place in deep enchanted forests, far away from any coast.

If there
were
an enchanted beach, this would be it. I don’t know what it says about me or my life or everything that’s happened, but it’s New Jersey now that’s far away and dreamlike, and
this
, this fairy-tale world, actually seems normal, and real. I’m even beginning to see the appeal of the ocean, with its dark endlessness—possibility stretching out in every direction. The cool breeze is pretty great too.

The good mood is back. Is this emotional seesawing between pissed and blissed another f.g. side effect? For sanity’s sake, I’d rather pick one and stick to it. But now, right now, I’m not sure whether I’d choose down … or up.

“Since we’re celebrating and eating ice cream, it seems like there should be gifts,” Dad says. “Or at least one gift.” Dad picks up the laptop case he’s brought with him. I hope he’s not planning to read me passages from his latest “motivational manual.” He unzips the case, but there’s no computer inside. Instead he lifts out a large, rectangular wrapped present and hands it to me.

“What’s this for?”

“It’s for you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. Stop asking so many questions and open it.”

So I do. Inside is a book. It’s got a gray cover with a small square photo in the middle. A little girl playing in the sand on a beach. There’s something familiar about the photo, and when I lean closer, I realize.

It’s me.

Very faintly below the photo, written in thin gray script, as if the letters have been etched into the cover:
Delaney
.

I flip through the book. The pages are photocopies of the snapshots and cards and letters I found in his desk, arranged in collages. It’s like a graphic novel; the pictures and letters tell a story. It’s as if this girl exists
now
, instead of being some faint memory from the past. I’m not sure I want to read through all the sad little letters again, though. I’m glad it’s mostly photos, because those are happy. Parties and parks and playgrounds.

“I didn’t want to keep them hidden anymore,” Dad says. I feel tears coming, but I squeeze my toes so hard it hurts and this stops them. Dad gently takes the book out of my hands and sets it down on our table. He turns the pages. “Look, here’s when we went to the carnival out by that old cider mill.” There’s a scattering of photos laid out on the page he’s stopped at, each tilted left or right. Me on the merry-go-round, waving. With cotton candy all over my face. Standing with Dad and a clown with yellow yarn for hair. I look like I’m about three. “Remember?” His eyes are kid-bright with the memory, but I shake my head. It was too long ago, and I’ve forgotten. The experience only
exists in the book now. “Really?” Dad says. “But that was one of our best days. You had a great time.” His kiddie-happy expression turns kiddie-sad. It makes me want to wave my spoon and refill his frozen yogurt cup, but I know it won’t work, because that’s not what he’s wishing.

“I know I did,” I assure him. “I can tell from the photos.” This doesn’t seem to make him any happier.

The sputtering buzz of a plane interrupts us as it passes by, over the water. A banner flaps behind it, the words barely visible in the fading purple light: “Bonita Beach Carnival! Final Week!”

“Look at that, Delaney! Can you believe it? We should go.” He straightens up, kid-excited.

“We don’t have to relive everything in this book. We’ll do other stuff. Like this.” I gesture to the ice cream eaters around us.

Dad’s locked onto the idea, though, and won’t let go. “I know, but it’ll be fun. Come on. We can go this weekend.” He winks. “Don’t you think it’s fate that the carnival’s on right now?”

I decide not to ask Dad how an f.g. could possibly believe in fate, and instead remind him about the book signing.

Dad waves this argument away. “The signing’s Sunday. We can go to the carnival on Saturday.”

Like I want to be seen out on a Saturday night with my dad. “I’m a little old for the father-daughter merry-go-round thing.”

Dad deflates again, the kid gone, and at the same time it hits me that this is one small wish I
can
do for him. A small wish that’s really a big one, and I don’t even need the wand to grant it.

“Okay. Let’s go.” Who cares who sees me? It’s not like too many Happy Highers would be caught dead at a carnival anyway.

Dad’s smile is back, and I discover that even non-magic non-client wish-granting generates the f.g. energy boost Dad told me about, or else the ice cream’s given me a brain-enhancing sugar rush—or maybe it
is
fate—because I’m blasted by a major inspiration.

The answer I’ve been looking for all week comes out of hiding. It’s practically waving to get my attention. Then another idea comes zooming up behind the first.

Mr. McElroy’s lecture on the day of the apple implosion comes back to me. I know how to speed up the reactions I’ve been trying to make happen. By using a catalyst. But the catalyst isn’t magic or the wand. It’s me.

When I linger after the end of yearbook the next day, I worry Flynn will flash back to the last time I cornered him in Mrs. Bayshore’s classroom after hours and tense up or freak out, but Flynn’s apparently forgotten all about it. He even seems happy I’ve stayed behind. “This is going to be the most awesome yearbook in the history of Allegro,” he says as we stack the proofs for the pages. “And it’s only my first year as editor!” He takes a bow for his imaginary fans.

“Like
you
did it all.”

“Ninety percent of leadership is hiring the right people.” Flynn locks up the proofs in the yearbook drawer.

I open my backpack and look for the carnival flyer I’d printed off the Internet. “Doesn’t ‘hiring’ mean your sweatshop workers—I mean
employees
—get paid? I don’t recall receiving any wages.”

“Your salary is the honor of working for a genius.” I roll my eyes. “But I do have a bonus for you.” He takes a package out of his messenger bag, wrapped in a cut-up mailing envelope folded and crisscrossed with red and green rubber bands. What’s with all the gifts? It must be yet another weird custom in the land of endless sunshine and perpetual smiles. I take the package and when I tear it open, I find my sketchbook, the one that the
mauvaise
Madame K confiscated and refused to return despite the three extra-credit essays I handed in and my (nearly) genuine apology
en français
.

“How did you get this?”

“I have Señora Kessler fourth period for Spanish. She likes me. I’m very polite, unlike
algunas personas.
”

“She must be nicer
en espagnol.
” I’m hit with a zing of gratitude—and something else, something like: how did he even know about the sketchbook, and why did he bother to get it back for me?

“If that’s not payment enough, I could buy you some Chinese food.” Flynn grins. “Feel free to bring your own chopsticks.”

Wait,
what?
Is he asking me out? No, he can’t be. He’s the one who implied that it was so hard to ask somebody out, and this is too easy. He must be joking around. Asking me as a colleague, or rather as an unpaid vassal. Cadie is his Princess Charming, remember? I’m just the catalyst.

Right. Okay. This is good, though. It gives me an opening. “There’s a carnival …” Suddenly the back of my throat gets glitchy and my heartbeat speeds up. What’s going on? I thrust the flyer at him. “Bonita Beach,” I manage to blurt out. “Tomorrow night.” My face is hot and I feel rooted to the ground, as if my boots are made of industrial-strength concrete. Is
this
what it’s like to ask somebody out?

But I’m
not
asking him. I mean, I
am
, in a way, but not
that
way, so this has to be something else. What if I’ve come down with some new strain of rat plague or swine flu or mad cow disease? If so, it’s really bad timing.

“Oh yeah!” Flynn says as he reads the flyer. “I’ve been to this before. Sure, that’d be awesome. What time?”

Time. I look up at the time. Oh no, I’ve got to get out of here. “Gotta go.” I dart past Flynn to the door. “I’ll text you.”

Outside, the always-fresh spring air clears my head, a little. I remind myself:
You’re the catalyst. You’re the catalyst
. Check, got it.

When I arrive at the sports field, the cheerleaders have already finished practice and are packing up their gear. I park myself against a tree and open my sketchbook. I feel a flare of a happy glow at seeing my old designs, which I’d thought were gone forever. Then I remember Flynn’s
pleased face and that brightens the glow even more. Ugh. Stop it.
I’m the catalyst, I’m the catalyst
.

I flip to a blank page and start drawing. When Cadie approaches, I let her pass and then I pop up like I just noticed her. “Oh, hey!” I say. She turns around. “Can I ask you something?”

Cadie waves at Mia to go ahead and walks back to me. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Flynn and I are going to that carnival down at Bonita Beach tomorrow night. It’s
not
a date—we’re just friends. You should come.”

“Cadie!” Up near the school, Mia glares down at us, her hands on her hips.

“I’ll meet you at the car!” Cadie calls back to her. Mia stands there a second, a statue to Exasperation, then returns to life and tromps away toward the parking lot.

“Nobody’ll know you there but us,” I tell Cadie. “So you can be, you know, whoever you want. Cadie Perez, head cheerleader, or Cadie Perez, Allegro High’s Most Popular … or just Cadie.”

“I don’t know, Delaney. I might have plans.”

“But do those plans involve dirty straw all over the ground? Nasty food? Creepy carnies and dumb ring-toss games that cost too much and are totally rigged? If not, then your choice is clear. You
must
come with us. Otherwise you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Or at least for a couple of minutes.”

Cadie smiles but I can tell she’s still hesitant. “You can
bring Mia.” I try not to sound like this is the last thing I want. “We could reunite the original Chem One, Table Six gang.” I’m sure I can trap Mia in the Hall of Terrors somehow, so Cadie and Flynn can be alone.

“Carnivals aren’t really Mia’s thing.”

Now I try not to sound relieved. “Then just bring yourself. See what happens.”