Who Needs Magic? (18 page)

“Mmm.” I can’t look at him. I swallow the last bite of my veggie dog, and only the sourness of the lime lingers, along with that vinegary aftertaste that makes you want to brush your teeth
right now
.

“There’s an art walk right after I return,” Flynn continues, “at a bunch of galleries down near the beach. I’ll text you the date. We can go together, get ice cream after. I already asked for time off from work.”

“What if aliens land?” I suck up the last drops of my ginger lemonade, and now all I taste is bitterness.

“We’ll still go. There’ll be plenty of time to snap shots of the little green guys after they take over the White House and start eating people.” He leans in closer, trying to catch my eye, but there is no way I’m going to let it be caught. “Okay?” he asks.

This is the problem with needing people. They vanish as soon as you need them too much.

“Okay,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can say, and begin the process of de-needing Flynn. It’s going to take some time, so best to get right on it. “Whatever.”

Flynn sets down the last bite of his hot dog, wipes his hands on a napkin and swivels on his stool to face me. Then he spins my stool around, rests his palms on the vinyl on either side of my legs and brings his face to mine, his
relish breath wafting at me. “It’s not like I’m going away forever,” he says. “I
am
coming back.”

His words hit me in my chest and burst into a clenching heat that spreads up my neck to my face, and suddenly my eyes are burning with near tears. No, no, no. This goes against the de-need directive. I take a breath and attempt to tap back into my inner apathy. But before I can deny that I’ll miss him, that his absence means anything to me at all, he’s kissing me. The heat in my body intensifies and then cools down. The tears reverse and I don’t even mind the mustard-relish taste of the kiss.

He does care.

Everything, for one moment, is perfect again.

“Hey, come on,” a voice calls out from the crowd behind us. “If you’re done, let somebody else sit down.”

And then the moment’s gone in an instant, cruelly yanked away from me, like always.

The sun’s dropped out of sight, and all around the Bazaar, fluorescent bulbs snap on one by one, casting their glaring greenish glow.

Flynn and I hold hands as we walk and it all feels right, but in a detached way, like I’m watching us from the outside and recognizing, yeah, they’re a couple. But inside it feels as if he’s ahead of me, mentally moving away, taking steps toward leaving, on his way to gone. I can’t get that moment during the kiss back, that feeling of safety and settledness. I squeeze his hand like maybe I can pump the
feeling in. Flynn turns to me and smiles, misreading the squeeze. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t feel it. He’s already gone. Skids is coming to pick Flynn up so they can plan for their trip. Flynn offered to have Skids give me a ride home, but I know I wouldn’t be able to stand it: sitting in the car, listening to their excited plans about something that excludes me, that leaves me behind. So I texted Gina at the bookstore and she said she could give me a ride after she finishes work. Flynn and I kiss good-bye, but it’s brief this time, a reflex. There are no more reassurances, only a “Text or call anytime,” and then I’m alone again.

By some horrible twist of fate, I’ve stopped in front of a bin of plastic charms, and right on the top is a silver-painted angel. Smirking up at me.

The angel’s only fifteen cents, though. Hmm.

After I pay for it, I grip the angel’s wings between my thumbs and index fingers—
snap
. The wings come off so easily I almost feel like I have superpowers.

Almost.

Snap, snap, snap
. I bought a whole bag of the tiny plastic angels before I left the Bazaar and now I’m breaking their precious little wings off one by one, or rather two by two, while Gina drives.
Snap, snap, snap
.

I can’t help thinking “He loves me, he loves me not” as I break off each pair of wings.

I replace the chant with “I hate her, I hate her not,”
except that doesn’t work because it should be
all
“I hate her.” There’s no “not.”

“Is there anything wrong, Delaney?” I feel Gina’s eyes on me. “Anything you’d like to talk about?”

Yes. How does love work? How do you know if a boy really cares about you when he says he does but doesn’t act like he does, or rather he
does
act like he cares but not in the way you want him to? Why do things never go right for more than five minutes? Are you ever ahead? How can I have lots of self-esteem and none at the same time? Why is everything perfect in my imagination when I plan it out, but crap in reality? Why is snapping the wings off plastic voodoo Ariellas not making me feel any better?

“No.”

Gina purses her lips for a second, not convinced. She doesn’t say anything else, though. She doesn’t ask me again. She doesn’t press me to answer. This is a relief, because I don’t want to talk.

I don’t.

Really.

Snap
.

I sit at the kitchen counter and take a bite of Froot Loops as I scroll through my messages. Nothing. Except for the unanswered texts I’ve sent that remain ignored.

I thought I’d hear back from Lourdes by now, but I guess she’s decided I’m not cool enough to hang out with. Not that I care. It’s not like we were friends or anything. Posh and I are friends, but I’ve given up hope of ever getting a response from her. So that’s no big deal.

And how is it a surprise that I’ve only had radio silence from Flynn? It’s not.

I know he’s busy, but what about the trip down to Costa Wherever? Skids was the one driving, so Flynn had
plenty of time to call me. The only message I’ve gotten from him since he left is one “Hey” text, with a photo attached of a giant dead eel tangled up in seaweed, all rubbery and rotting—like I want to see
that
—and a link to a haiku Skids wrote about the eel in the
Sea Foam Weekly
’s online fiction section. I go online to Flynn and Skids’s Extremely Stupid Water Sports page on the paper’s website. As I do every time I visit the site, I scroll through the pictures, looking for some coded message, a sign that Flynn’s trying to tell me something with the angle of the shot or the lighting or the subject. Maybe “I miss you, Delaney” written in the sand in the background of one of the photographs, behind the handstand surfer accepting his gold medal, for example, the words barely visible, but clear enough for me to see. But there’s nothing. No message, secret or obvious, to prove he’s not blowing me off.

So I guess that proves it.

In summary: deserted by friends, by boyfriend, by client. And you know what? Totally fine.

I pull up Facebook and check Posh’s wall. Lots and lots of photos of her and Christopher, hugging and laughing and sharing pizza. I could click “like” on a few, to remind her I’m alive, but I
don’t
“like,” because it’s not fair. I should be having a summer of romance too, and I’m not.

Although, as I said, I’m fine with that.

“Did you have breakfast?” Dad enters the kitchen, dressed in weekend-outing-wear: jeans, striped shirt and sneakers.

I lift up my bowl toward him and clank my spoon against it. “Right here, blind man. Unless that was a rhetorical question.”

“Tone down the attitude until I’ve had my coffee, please.” He pours a cup from the pot that he’s programmed to start brewing the second his alarm goes off. “It wouldn’t hurt you to put a little real fruit in there, you know.”

“Yes, it would. It would cause me intense, agonizing physical pain.”

Dad ignores me and retrieves a loaf of his multiseed, multigrain bread from the fridge. He lays six slices neatly on a cutting board.

“How much toast are you having?” I ask.

“I’m making sandwiches for the zoo.”

“They have food there, you know.”

“It’s all processed. The sodium alone is ridiculous.” He holds up the bag. “You want one to take to work?”

“No, thanks. I’m always afraid that sprouted-grain stuff will germinate in my stomach.”

Dad twists the tie around the bag. “Funny. I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“Two words: massive cover-up.”

Dad smiles and returns the bread to the fridge. “I’m sorry you can’t come with us. We’ll do something on your day off next time.”

The trip to the zoo is part of the continuous assault on Theo, following the theory that the more time Theo is forced to spend around Dad, the quicker it will break
down Theo’s resistance to Dad being in Gina’s life. Sort of like a prisoner-of-war interrogation with a domestic twist.

I fish out my last few Froot Loops while Dad spreads mustard on the bread in delicate, precise sweeps. It actually
is
my day off, but when Dad first asked me to go, I said no because I thought I’d need the time for Jeni. Now I don’t, so I
could
go, but spending the day watching Theo pout and scowl isn’t going to cheer me up, so I decided to go into Treasures anyway. Fate may be screwing with me on every other level, but it’s definitely created time for me to work on my boot designs.

I wish I could talk to Dad about Jeni. He’s stopped asking me if I have a client, and we never talk about his either. Being an f.g. was the one thing that bonded us when I first moved here, and now it feels like it’s pushing us apart. We joke around, but we don’t talk about anything serious. If Mom thought there was something going on with me, she’d bug me until I caved, but Dad leaves me alone. It’s as if whenever I say “Leave me alone,” he takes it literally. Not that I care …

Except I
do
care. I care about it all. My force field is up, but care keeps creeping in, seeping through cracks I can’t detect—because if I knew where they were, I’d patch them up.

Life used to be so simple, before all these other people came along.

“By the way, Posh’s mom called me last night about sending some of the boxes that are in storage.”

I hear nothing from Posh for weeks, but Dad gets calls from her mom? Calls about things that are personal to me and have nothing to do with Dad? That’s so messed up. “No.”

“Delaney—”

“It’s
my
stuff. I want it to stay there.” Because it’s Mom’s stuff too. It’s a reminder that all that’s left of her is stuff.

Dad puts the lid back on the mustard. “It can’t stay there forever.” I don’t answer. “I’m not going to keep paying the storage fees.”

“You owe me, for past child support.”

“I paid child support, Delaney.”

“The financial part, maybe. But there was emotional neglect. Pain and suffering.”

Dad tightens the lid on the mustard and studies me, as if deciding whether to defend himself or apologize. Instead of doing either, he puts the mustard away. He keeps his attention on the inside of the fridge and gathers up the rest of his sandwich ingredients. “What if we have a couple of boxes shipped out to start?”

I’m about to press the automatic “no” again, but then I think, Maybe that’s what I need. Just one or two things that belonged to Mom, that will summon up her strength for me, and will patch the cracks. Plus, there’s still a lot of my boots back there, and I could use the inspiration.

“Okay. A couple.”

“Okay.” Although Dad’s now focused on his sandwich-making again—layering cheese, ham, tomatoes and lettuce
neatly onto each mustard-painted slice—I can tell he’s relieved by my answer. “If you want a ride to the mall, honey, you should get ready. I met a new client yesterday, and I have to stop by his house to grant his wish.”

The one thing I
do
know about Dad’s clients is that there’s been a lot of them this summer. This is like his fourth or fifth. I get that he’s a professional and has been doing it even longer than Ariella, but he’s the one who told
me
that magic is only a superficial fix, and who’s writing a book on how you have to “accept the you that is you” or whatever. He’s definitely not telling any of this to his clients. Instead, he grants their wishes the second he figures them out.

It’s
shazam
, new clothes, and then
kapow
, girlfriend landed.
Abracadabra
, house decluttered, and then
kaboom
, ex-wife comes back. Did either of these rushed unions work? Who knows? Who cares? Dr. Hank definitely doesn’t. He’s too busy with his
own
personal life to care about his clients’.