Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (7 page)

In Eugene, the streets are regulated, so the cars go one direction on one street and the opposite direction on the next street. Away from downtown, that regulation changes, but downtown is ordered and everyone follows the rules.

That’s different from home too.

A few blocks from Megan’s office is the river. It’s wide and slow moving and has great trails beside it. I wish Mom’s appointment was longer because then I’d spend my Sunday afternoons walking along the river. But it’s not and I can’t so I have to go to the coffee shop.

I stop anyway and look at Skinner Butte. It’s like the center of town, and it’s kinda the backdrop for the whole downtown. It’s covered with fir trees (we don’t have those at home) and it looks like the opening of almost every Christmas movie ever made, only without the snow.

I want to climb to the top sometime, but I don’t think I have time for that either with Mom’s appointment.

The butte makes the downtown seem like it’s shoved against a mountain (a tiny mountain) and kinda makes it feel protected. Even though I screamed at Megan that I didn’t like it here, I was lying.

I like this part of it. I like downtown and I like how weird Eugene is compared with living in the clouds on Mount Olympus. I even like the way the traffic swooshes by and the way the traffic lights cheep at you when it’s time to cross the street (Mom says that’s for blind people so they know when to cross; I wonder how come somebody doesn’t just tell them) and I like the way the sun filters through the buildings to make everything seem sharp-edged and new.

Mom says the sharp-edged and new look comes from the lack of humidity in the air and that it goes away in the winter, but right now, the height of fall, it’s great.

The coffee shop isn’t half bad either. It’s better than any other place I’ve been in, including the ones in Los Angeles that I went to when we were first talking to Megan. First, it smells of really, really good coffee. My mouth waters the minute I enter. Second, it plays great music. Not the stuff the kids at school listen to. Stuff my mom says is old-fashioned. Jazz and popular song (which is a category: go figure) and blues.

Last time I was here, they played someone called Ella Fitzgerald and showed me the CD which was
Ella Sings Cole Porter
and I loved it and mentioned it to Mom and she actually bought me a copy the next day, which I’ve been listening to over and over again in my room on a CD player, which my TV/YouTube/movie watching tells me is so ten years ago.

But my cell phone isn’t smart—whatever that is—so I can’t put digital music on it, not that I would know how. So I’m stuck with no magic and old tech.

Today in the coffee shop, they’re playing something all instrumental—pianos and stuff—and I like it but not as much as Ella and Cole.

There are fresh pastries in the little window beside the coffee machine and money’s in the tip jar, and no one is sitting at my favorite table, which is by the window, across from the big clock on the post office so that I can keep an eye on the time.

I reach into the pocket of my jeans, checking to make sure I have money. I’ve learned to do that much, at least. I have a crumpled five which is just barely enough for a regular mocha with sprinkles and one of those great-looking chocolate-dipped cookies.

I get in line to order, and the guy behind the counter turns around, and who is it but that Josh kid who talked to me on the first day.

My cheeks get all hot and I actually look at the door, wondering if he’d notice if I bolt.

But he hasn’t noticed me so far, and if things are anything like they’ve been lately, he won’t notice me anyway, so I just wait, clutching my five.

The girl in front of me is talking to him about piercings, probably because she has dozens of them, all on her face, and he manages to speak to her anyway when I’d be saying, “Dude, gross!” right to her face. He hands her a paper cup with a lid and one of those cardboard cup holder thingies. She steps away to put in sugar or something and I step up, and he says,

“Hey, it’s the Interim Fate. Can you
believe
it?”

My face gets really hot and I almost drop my money. How does he know who I am (or more precisely, who I was)? Then I remember the t-shirt I wore the first day of school, and I flush even hotter. He read it. And remembered it. Which meant that when we were talking, he wasn’t looking at my face.

Which should, according to my stepmom, bother me, but it doesn’t. Instead, I clutch that five a little tighter and say, “Wow. You have a long memory.”

He winks at me. “For pretty things.”

I’m not a thing, and I don’t think of myself as pretty, but I don’t argue with him. My Aunt Aphrodite says never to contradict a man who finds you attractive, so I don’t.

Instead, I just stand there looking dorky.

“You want something?” he asks.

I want this conversation to go on and on, I think, but I don’t say, because that sounds needy and I promised myself that today, even with my appointment with Megan, I wouldn’t sound needy.

He tilts his head, like I’m some strange bug, and then I realize he’s waiting for an answer to the question. A coffee-style answer, not a life-style answer.

“Um…” By the Powers, I’ve forgotten what I want.

“Hey,” the guy behind me says, “if you haven’t read the menu, can I go first?”

“A regular mocha with sprinkles,” I say as if I’ve just remembered the answer to a pop quiz (man, that sounds even worse than needy), “and a chocolate-dipped cookie.”

This Josh kid grins at me, then shouts the order to the guy at the coffee machine. Not that the guy couldn’t have heard me; the store’s that small. But Josh shouts anyway, and the guy nods anyway, because it’s a coffee store tradition or something, and then Josh says to me, “That’ll be four-fifty.”

Which leaves me barely enough for a cheesy tip. Tips I get. Tips are how you impress the servants here. Which makes me flush even more. Josh’s a servant, and I’m thrilled he’s been looking at my chest.

I hand him the crumpled five.

He punches the cash register, which makes beepy computery noises, and says, “You ever find that room?”

School. Yeah. That conversation we had that first day, which apparently he remembers better than I do, which is weird because I thought I’d been replaying every single sentence anyone voluntarily spoke to me.

“I found it,” I say. “Not sure I wanted to.”

“Mr. McG isn’t bad,” Josh says. “He just gave up a long time ago.”

“Which I’m going to do if you don’t stop flirting,” says the guy behind me. “And then I’m coming back and talking to your manager.”

Josh rolls his eyes at me, then hands me fifty cents. I put the fifty cents in the tip jar, wishing I had more money (okay, so I like this servant) and go over to the little window where you’re supposed to wait for your order.

The guy behind me orders a triple shot of something caffeinated with a spurt (his word) of liquid sugar, which means he hasn’t learned the language of coffee, which, my mom told me, is one of the first things that marks you as a Northwesterner. You have to have the lingo down. Which I pretend like I do. Because without magic, I really don’t want to call too much attention to myself. At least as someone different.

The coffee machine guy sets the mocha in front of me, and I take it, thanking him, then head to my favorite table. I crack open
American History
, but I’m not really looking at it. I find the dang thing confusing. Apparently everybody knows who this George Washington is and what he did except me. (When that came out in class, the looks I got were incredulous [which is another word I learned last week, only that one in English class] and I felt like a total loser. When the losers think you’re a loser, then you’re really lost.)

I stare out the window, wondering what the heck a dream is or a goal like Megan was talking about when that Josh kid comes over and straddles the chair across from me. He isn’t wearing his green coffee shop apron anymore, and his hair, in the back, is sticking up like it got tangled when he took the apron off.

He hands me a chocolate-dipped cookie.

I take it, frowning.

“You forgot it,” he says. “Unless it’s a tip or something.”

“Oh,” I say, and delete the curse I was going to add. Because my curses are weird here. I said “By the Powers” the other day and some teacher in the hallway looked at me like I’d grown fangs.

He sets the cookie between us.

I swallow hard. “You can have it if you want.”

“You look like you need it.”

What does that mean? How does a person who needs a cookie look? Pathetic? Interesting? Pretty?

“Thanks.” I take it, break it in half (keeping chocolate dip on both pieces) and hand one to him.

He grins. “So, I couldn’t find any rock band named Interim Fate on the web.”

I shrug. “We weren’t very famous.”

“I guess.” He leans his chair back and grabs a to-go coffee cup from the napkin/sugar packets/stirring stick table. Apparently he left it there, a ploy maybe, so he could sit at my table.

And I didn’t even notice. Daddy would’ve yelled at me.
The magical must be aware of everything around them
, he would’ve said.

But I’m not magical anymore and he’s not here, not that he ever was. Just a naggy voice stuck in my head.

“So how come you’re downtown on a Sunday?”

“I got an appointment with my therapist.” The words come out before I can stop them.

“On Sunday?” he asks. “Now I know you’re yanking me.”

Yanking. As in yanking my chain, not that anyone has a chain. I’m just learning the slang and not entirely understanding it.

I could lie to him, tell him, yeah I’m yanking you, but I don’t want to. This is the first conversation I’ve had with someone interesting in a while.

But I also don’t want to be that pathetic girl who has a therapist. You know, the one in all the movies who is so hopeless that no one can rescue her: not her family, not her therapist, not even our heroes who are the last people to try.

“She flies in from L.A.,” I say, hoping the flying-in part mitigates the therapist part. Even though she doesn’t fly. She just kinda pops in, like Nicole Kidman in that
Bewitched
movie.

“You’re kidding,” Josh says, and he sounds impressed.

“I wish,” I say and close
American History
.

“Then you come here for a much-needed cookie,” he says, biting into that much-needed cookie.

I shrug.

“Or are you waiting for someone?”

“My mom,” I say.

He nods. “You must be important for someone to fly in for you. I thought you were from some European place or something, not L.A.”

“Greece,” I say. “But I spent the summer in L.A.”

“And your therapist flies in just for you?” He leans back in the chair and cradles his coffee cup. “You must be special.”

No, just different. I shake my head.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “This’s all personal, right? And I’m being nosy. I don’t mean to.”

“It’s okay,” I say, but my voice comes out really small.

“Let’s start over,” he says. “I’m Josh and I just got off work at this wonderful” (he says that really sarcastic) “coffee shop and I’m wondering if you’d like to walk to the river with me.”

“I’d like to.” I glance at the clock. I got a half an hour, maybe less if I want to look settled back in the waiting room. “But I gotta meet my mom.”

“Now?”

“Twenty minutes,” I say, so I have time.

“So this must be different from Greece, huh?” Josh says.

I nod.

“Do you like it?”

Why does everyone ask me that? I eat my cookie and decide I don’t want to answer it. In fact, I’m never answering that question again.

Instead, I lean forward, and say, “How long have you been here?”

“In the coffee shop?” he asks. “Since ten.”

I brush crumbs off the table. I must really be dumb. I don’t even understand simple answers to simple questions.

“You mean in Eugene?” he asks, his voice different, like he’s trying to be nice now. “I was born here.”

I try to imagine what it’d be like to be born in a place like this. Births are religious at my home. I mean, everyone’s there, and the baby goes through some great ceremony (unless it rises out of the sea foam like my Aunt Aphrodite [who was a grown woman when she did it] or emerges from my father’s forehead like my sister Athena). But the ceremony is really cool, with the baby at the center. There’s bubbles and sacred animals bowing down and lots of feathers and—

I shake it off. I can’t think about home. Not the home of Brittany and Crystal, and not Mount Olympus either. Right now, Eugene is home.

“Then you stayed here?” I ask.

“Like I have a choice,” Josh says. “My dad teaches at the U of O.”

“So does my mom,” I say, and he grins at me. “Only I didn’t grow up with her.”

“Harsh,” he says. And then he tells me that his dad teaches chemistry and everybody expects Josh to be good at science and he couldn’t care less and he’s gonna be an artist someday, but he has to get into art school, which is hard without someone supporting him—like a teacher or something—but the school cut art a long time ago and his folks won’t fork out for extra classes at the U because his parents don’t think artists can make any money.