Don't Expect Magic (22 page)

Cadie’s phone buzzes. She digs it out of her bag and reads the text. She stares at the phone a beat and then shifts her gaze out toward the sports field. She has that wistful look again, and I’m worried she doesn’t want to be “just Cadie” after all.

“I’ll do it.” It takes me a second to realize she’s agreed. “I’ll go. I’ll be myself. I
can
be myself with you and Flynn, can’t I?” Her eyes pierce into me, intense. This is weirdly serious for her.

“Sure,” I say.

She grabs my arm and squeezes. “Thank you, Delaney,” she whispers, before she runs off. She’s way more thrilled than I expected. Maybe I’ve been wrong all along. She
has
noticed Flynn. She
does
know he’s her Frog Prince. She was just looking for an opening.

I should be psyched, but I’ve got this uneasiness in my chest. Like there’s something I should’ve thought of but didn’t. It must be the reversal of the client-wish yearning. Like detox withdrawal. It must be how you know the wish is about to be fulfilled for good.

It’s exactly like I told Cadie: bad food and corny rides and straw scattered all around like we’re in Iowa farm country instead of two miles from the ocean. There’s also the sweet, salty, sticky smell of popcorn and cotton candy that reminds me of the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore. The spinning rides cause the voices of the crowd and the music and the lights to swirl around in a way that makes me dizzy, but in a good way, like when I was little and would twirl in a circle, arms out, until I collapsed in the grass, laughing.

“Okay, Delaney. We should be set for the night.” Dad waves three thick accordions of yellow tickets.

We’re still at the entrance because we’re waiting for
somebody—but Dad doesn’t know that. I’ve already sent him back twice to get more tickets, and I can tell he’s starting to wonder why we haven’t gone in yet. He’s wearing jeans and looks semi-normal for once. I told him I wouldn’t leave the house if he had on his usual “I’m on the way to the golf course” khakis and tucked-in polo shirt. Although
I’m
not the reason I wanted him to look less geeky.

As soon as we got home from ice cream Shangri-La, I’d texted Gina from Dad’s phone, pretending to be Dad, and invited her to come. I knew she wasn’t working, because I remembered how
thrilled
she was that Dad’s signing wasn’t Saturday night. She’d texted back instantly to say she’d be
thrilled
to join us, but she’s not here.

“What’re we waiting for, Delaney? Let’s go.”

I’m considering a fake bout of food poisoning when my cell chirps. I hope it isn’t Gina canceling. I check the screen—Cadie: “Running late. I’ll find you.”

“Hey,” Dad scolds. “I turned
my
phone off.”

“All right, all right.” I try not to sigh in relief too loudly. Cadie’s message is no big deal. I was expecting Cadie to show up after I’d hung out with Flynn for a while anyway. Her arrival needs to look like a coincidence, not an ambush.

“Even if a new client shows up tonight,” Dad announces, “I’m going to ignore them.”

“That’s kind of cold, Dad. Anyway, did you forget you don’t have a choice about it? If the wish hits you, you’re back on duty.”

“I’ll get their information somehow and contact them later. You’re more important, Delaney.” Dad smiles proudly at this demonstration of paternal prioritizing, and I feel a stab of guilt at my deception, but I know he’ll be grateful to me later.

“Okay, I’m turning my phone off too,” I say slowly, “right … now.…”

Luckily, I can exhale another
thank God
breath a second later, because here comes Gina. She strolls through the entrance, waving cheerfully. She’s in jeans, with a white lace top under a rust-tinted velvet jacket. She looks much better out of her bookstore wear—younger and more fun. Her ratty cross-trainers kind of ruin the picture, though. Her outfit cries out for boots.

“Am I late?” she says, glancing at Dad, who is glaring at me.

“You’re right on time,” I assure her. “We just got here a few minutes ago.”

“Gina, how nice to see you,” Dad says finally. He forces a smile and I carefully step out of his sight line so he can’t fire any more accusing looks my way.

“Okay then, I guess I’ll go find my friends now. We’ll meet up later, all right? Great!” I dash off, past the ticket booth, and slip around behind a popcorn stand. When I peer out, Dad and Gina are where I left them, exchanging uneasy smiles. I’m sure there’s some small wish I could grant for Gina that would at least get them talking, but Dad would catch on and my cover would be blown.

“I’m so sorry, Gina,” Dad says. Oh, no. He’s going to ruin everything. “I had no idea Delaney had planned to meet her friends here.” I let out one more relieved breath and stop myself from screaming “
Yes!
” because he’s
not
going to ruin it! He’s not going to let on that he was tricked. He knows she’d be embarrassed and he’s too nice to do that to her, even if it means he has to give in to my scheme. This is what I was counting on.

“I’m not surprised,” Gina says. “When I was her age, I didn’t want to hang out with the ‘old folks’ either. We’ll just have to have fun without her.” They both smile. Excellent.

“How about we start with some caramel corn? Get a good sugar buzz going.” Wow. He’s joking around, practically flirting—
and
suggesting they eat junk food. This is going even better than I hoped. Now that he’s over the shock, he
does
want to have fun with her. I knew I was doing the right thing.

I find Flynn where he’d suggested we meet, at the mechanical fortune-teller. No surprise he’s got a camera with him, but only one, a little pocket-sized type, and he’s snapping nonstop. His subjects are all bizarre: a cotton candy paper cone, licked clean and dropped on the ground; a rusted wheel on a lemonade cart; a little boy in tiger face paint having a meltdown because he’s too small to go on the gravity spinner. Flynn’s totally caught up in what he’s doing, like I am when I’m sketching. I’m actually feeling a little in awe, until he tilts the camera to photograph his
own foot against the straw, and I have to laugh because, I’m sorry, that is just
too
weird.

Flynn hears me and points the camera my way. He takes a picture, then lowers the camera and walks over to me. “I might create an entire photo show devoted to pictures of you laughing at me,” he says. “What do you think?”

“I think if you did that, people would laugh at you for doing it.”

“Then I’ll take pictures of those people. And then pictures of people laughing at
those
pictures. It’ll be a whole series. I’ll call it ‘Meta-Mockery.’ ”

“I’d be happy to help out by laughing at you tonight as much as possible.”

“That’s very generous of you.” Flynn smiles and slips the camera inside one of the pockets in his jacket, then fishes out a quarter from another pocket. He nods toward the glassed-in booth behind him, where a robot genie with a chipped painted-on mustache and a lopsided satin green turban stares out at nothing. “You want to ask the question, or should I?”

“How about ‘Is it a waste of money to ask a hunk of metal for your fortune?’ ” I suggest.

“I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the spirit of it, Ms. Collins, so I better ask.” He puts the quarter in a tray on the side of the booth, slides in the tray, and a reddish light on the ceiling inside the booth comes on.

The genie raises his palms toward us. “O great genie,” Flynn says in a deep voice, talk-singing the words like an
incantation, his gaze pseudo-earnestly intense. “Will this be the best carnival adventure ever?”

The robot shifts jerkily to the left and lowers his hands. A piece of paper spits out of a gap next to the coin slot, and Flynn reads it with a frown. I snatch it out of his hand. “Unlikely,” it says in faded blue letters. Flynn looks at me worriedly, like I’m going to be crushed or something.

“Whoever writes these things is brain-dead,” I say. “Nobody’s going to put in a second quarter if all it gives out is downer replies.”

Flynn smiles, relieved. “Excellent point.” He takes the fortune back. “I’m going to keep this, and after we have a fantastic night, we’ll come back and demand a refund.”

We head over to a row of “Try Your Luck” booths. We pass the crowded rifle range and darts-at-balloons game and stop at a pitching booth where there’s no line. Flynn lifts a long snake of tickets from yet another pocket and rips off five for the vendor, a tanned guy a couple of years older than us with long blond hair and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, who then hands Flynn six baseballs. Flynn offers a couple to me, but I insist that he take the first round.

There’s a big three-dimensional target propped up at the back of the booth, made of wooden hoops nested inside of each other, with a round hole in the bottom of each circle where the ball goes in. You get the most points for landing the ball in the tiny center hoop and the least for the widest one, which encloses the rest. If you miss the
hoops altogether, the ball drops onto the worn artificial-grass-covered base of the game and rolls into a trough, where it disappears.

As Flynn winds up, I casually point my blade of straw toward the hoops. One after another, the balls hit the center hoop. Flynn is amazed by his bulls-eyes. “Awesome.” He grins at me. “Are you in awe, Ms. Collins? Am I great or what? Huh?” It’s pretty amusing. The blond guy waves at a row of toys hanging on hooks along the side wall. Flynn turns to me, his proud smile still beaming from his face. “You choose, Delaney.”

It all looks equally junky: bags of tiny plastic zoo animals, squirt guns, flimsy-looking sunglasses. “It’s just going to go straight to a landfill.”

Flynn looks at me with mock annoyance. “That is so you.”

“You mean environmentally conscious?”

“It won’t go straight into a landfill if you
keep
it.”

“Fine, I’ll take the dog.” I point to a hideous stuffed dog with baby blue fur. Breed: cartoon mutt. Exactly what I need, now that I’ve purged my bedroom of its little-kid aura. At least it’s not pink.

Blondie hands me the dog and gives me a wink. He’d be cute if not for the stinky cancer stick, so I shoot him my standard hostile look and he backs off.

Flynn offers to buy me a round, but I suggest we go in search of better prizes. It’s not a very successful search, but Flynn is too high on his “awesome” athletic feat to care. “I
can’t believe it. I was always lousy at baseball. Maybe you naturally improve as you get older.”

“Yeah, I bet that’s it.”

We end up at the beanbag toss. I don’t need magic to get three “X’s” in a row, one after the other. “There was a pond near where we lived in New Jersey,” I explain. “My mom and I used to having skimming contests in summer.” I let Flynn pick out the prize this time. He chooses a bracelet of red and yellow beads and hands it to me.

“You need to add some color to your life, Delaney Collins.”

This is the type of comment that normally puts me into attack mode, but it doesn’t now. Even when he dangles the bracelet in front of my face, saying, “You know you love it,” I don’t slap his hand away or make a nasty reply. Instead I take the bracelet and put it on, letting the elastic snap against my wrist.

“You don’t think it clashes with my attitude?” I ask.

“You like to clash.” It’s true, I do. He’s gotten to know me, and this feels good, bad and weird all at the same time. “Where to next?”

As we stroll over to the rides, we pass other couples, some holding hands. Of course, we’re
not
a couple, we’re just two people, walking next to each other, but still … it makes me wonder if this is what it’s like to be on a date. I’ve never been on one, because I never wanted to. By the time I was in eighth grade, the boys were afraid of me and I didn’t care since I knew all boys were jerks.

Except Flynn’s not. Brendan and Skids may be mockably ludicrous, but they’re okay too. And there are other boys at the school who, now that I’ve learned more about them—

“Is that Dr. Hank?” A woman nearby slaps her friend’s arm and points to Dad and Gina, who are walking right toward us. I grab Flynn’s jacket and drag him behind a row of recycling bins. “It’s my dad,” I whisper.

“Really? Your dad’s Dr. Hank?” Flynn squints in Dad’s direction. “He looks different in person.”

“
Shhh
.”

“Doesn’t he know you’re here?”

“Of course. We came together.”

“Then let’s go say hi!” Flynn gets up, but I yank him back.

“
No
. He’s on a date.”

Dad chats with the posse of fans now surrounding him. He leans in toward them, looking earnest and imploring. They nod and murmur and back off.

Flynn and I stay in our spying position and watch as Dad buys Gina a cotton candy, powder blue, like my dog. “It looks like they’re having a good time, don’t you think?” I whisper. Dad says something to Gina and she laughs. They both break off pieces of the spun sugar to eat.

“Do you want them to?”

“Of course! I set them up.”

Flynn smiles slyly. “Ah, I see you’ve directed your matchmaking impulses elsewhere.”

“Uh-huh.” It’s the truth, technically. I
have
directed my matchmaking impulses elsewhere … in addition to their original target.

Dad and Gina laugh again and amble off. Flynn and I step out from behind the bins, the danger past. We weave our way through a pint-sized mob surrounding the face-painting station and the balloon animal man.

“What’s it like, having Dr. Hank for a dad?” Flynn asks.

“Challenging. He thinks he knows everything.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“He didn’t know
me
very well, until I moved here. I hardly ever saw him until a few weeks ago. Up to then I hated him, for most of my life anyway.” It’s surprisingly easy to tell Flynn this. He watches me like he’s really listening, and it makes the words easier to let out. “If my mom hadn’t died, I’d never have gotten to know him at all.” An image of Mom comes to me, skimming a stone across our pond and doing a victory dance when she beats my record of skips. Then she’s hugging me, throwing me off balance, causing us both to fall into the water as we laugh. After a second, the vision vanishes, like a light going off.