Who Needs Magic? (2 page)

“A dime for your thoughts, Ms. Collins.”

“Happy Interdependence Day,” I say. “I’m glad you could come.”

He smiles. “We drove home early because—guess what?—I got the job I applied for at the paper. And Skids got one too. We start tomorrow.”

“I didn’t know writing Facebook status updates for Brendan’s skateboarding fan page qualified Skids to be hired as a journalist.”

“It’s an internship, it’s how you learn. We can’t all be paid professionals like you, Ms. Collins.” We circle around the soccer field, where a couple of dads are teaching drills to a confused gaggle of toddlers. I wave my Popsicle stick to stop the soccer ball from rolling into the trees. “Skids’ll be writing copy,” Flynn says, “and I’ll be taking photos. Even without a paycheck, it’ll be like I’m a full-time photojournalist for the whole summer.”

“Full-time? But I thought it was called the
Sea Foam Weekly
.” My heel catches on the edge of the concrete and I lose my balance for a second, but Flynn pulls me upright.

“
Sea
side
Weekly
. And just because they don’t publish every day doesn’t mean they don’t work every day. News doesn’t only happen once a week.”

“I know, but …”

Flynn laughs. “Were you expecting me to hang around outside your store every day and wait for you to get off work?”

“No.” I didn’t expect him to hang out doing
nothing
. He could pop in now and then to keep me company. He could even leave for a while, take a few pictures around the mall and come back. As long as he didn’t go too far.

“Anyway, aren’t you going to be busy, making boots and granting wishes?”

“I guess.” I haven’t gotten started on either yet, but I don’t tell him this.

I’m feeling on shaky ground again, even though my boots are now solidly on the path. Flynn and I have been
going out for three months, but it seems like we’ve barely started. First there was finishing the yearbook, and then finals, and then as soon as school ended, Flynn went off on some camping trip with his family for two weeks. If you subtract the group outings with Brendan and Skids and the yearbook staffettes, our time together has been microscopic. This is another area where I need practice, but until now I hadn’t been worried about it, because I’d expected we’d have the whole summer together. Just like I’d expected to have another client long before now, but here we are, back at our picnic table, where Dad is still scraping, Gina is still shooing and Theo is now sinking ships on Gina’s phone. And I am still client-free.

“This is a stupid Fourth of July,” Theo says after Flynn wishes him a happy Independence Day. “We don’t even get to have any fireworks.”

I squeeze Flynn’s hand and think,
Some of us do
. Flynn smiles, which means maybe he’s thinking the same thing. This is one of the things I would have been surer about after we spent some serious quality and quantity time together this summer, which now won’t be happening.

“I was saving these for later.” Dad takes a break from his scraping to retrieve a bag from under the table. “But you can each do one now.” He lifts out a box of sparklers and hands it to Gina.

“That’s a great idea!” she says, opening the box. “Our own individual fireworks! Right, Theo?” Theo grunts, noncommittal, but he puts down the phone.

Soon we’re each holding a lit silver stick, fiery sparks snapping off the end. Theo waves his in a big circle, the most energetic I’ve seen him all day. Flynn makes figure eights in the air.

It occurs to me that a sparkler should make an excellent wand. Maybe it’s attracting client energy right now. I swing my arm up high over my head, but a second later I hear a sizzle and look up. The sparkler’s gone out. I hear Theo moan as his fizzles too.

Flynn’s is still burning. “Make a wish, Delaney,” he says.

I close my eyes. What should I wish for? That I find a client? That my full powers work once I do? That Flynn’s job won’t get in the way of our relationship? And what about my boot-making business?

“Hurry!”

“Okay, okay! I wish for all of my wishes to come true.” I open my eyes and blow as Flynn’s sparkler sparks its last spark.

“Leave it to Delaney Collins to find a way to get everything she wants.” Flynn smiles at me and I smile back.

It’s not until he’s tossing the burnt-out sparklers in the trash that I realize I forgot something. I forgot to say
when
I wanted the wish to happen.

Ugh. I hold the boot up, examining it. This is beyond frustrating. I’m at Treasures, and luckily for me—and not so luckily for Nancy, the owner—there aren’t any customers. So I can do what I like. Except I’m not liking what I’ve done so far today. I have this fantastic summer job at Treasures, a secondhand store/antiques shop. (It’s fantastic partly because it means I’m not working for Dad. He’d offered to pay me to be his “office assistant,” helping him with filing, typing, proofreading and stuff like that. But that was pretty much a job
I’d
pay
not
to do.)

It was Cadie who told me about Treasures. She said that
Nancy occasionally got boxes of clothing and accessories mixed in with the lots she buys at estate sales to stock the store. Nancy never unpacked any of the clothing boxes, though. Instead, she put them in a smaller room connected to the main room, and vintage shoppers would come in and sort through the boxes, hoping they’d find something they liked. Because this is the land of sunshine and sandals, secondhand boots aren’t big sellers, which means there were a lot of them. But I know how to redesign them to make them new, and saleable, so I persuaded Nancy to hire me for the summer to overhaul the vintage clothing room in return for minimum wage, an employee discount and permission to work on my redesigns when business is slow.

My plan is to get started on a boot business. Why wait until I’ve gone to college? Especially when Cadie and her cheerleader friends, plus a bunch of other kids at Allegro, have told me they’d buy them. My goal is to have at least twenty pairs finished by the time school starts in the fall.

But I’m already behind schedule, because it took me three weeks to unpack all the boxes and sort and organize and stack and hang everything. Today, finally, I was able to try out my first design. And it’s a flop.

Literally.

It looked so great in the sketch: the calf of the boot sliced into strips, and the strips braided and clipped at the top. But the one boot I’ve finished looks like it’s been
mauled by some mad scientist trying to build Frankenboot. The clipped strips keep collapsing, so I stitched a band beneath the clips to hold the strips up. But now I realize there’s no way anybody could ever get the boot on—unless their leg was the width of a pencil. As I pull out the stitching, a customer about my age flits past my view, darting in and out from behind tilting bookshelves and dusty lamps in the main room of the store. She’s wearing a pink ruffled skirt, a sparkly silver headband in her wavy blond hair and a kaleidoscope of pastel-tinted jelly bracelets on one arm. She reminds me of Tinker Bell. She flutters past a couple more times and then I guess she leaves, which is no surprise. This doesn’t seem like her kind of store.

I return my gaze to the Frankenboot. I stare down at it, trying to will myself back in time, before I sliced it to bits, and then back before that, when I was sketching it and should’ve known that the design wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, f.g. powers don’t include time travel. And you can’t use magic to grant your own wishes anyway. Making boots is supposed to be the thing I’m
already
good at. But I can’t concentrate properly when I’m worrying all the time about when I’m going to get my next client. And I can’t stop thinking about Flynn. I haven’t seen him since he started working at the paper. It’s only been a week and we have a date tonight, but
still
. I miss that goofy Flynn grin.

I toss the boot in the corner. Maybe I’ll reorganize the accessories again to take my mind off it all. I’ll put the hats
on the shoe rack, the belts on the hat rack and the shoes on the shelves. It’s the “meditation of doing,” as Ms. Byrd, the yoga teacher at Allegro, says. I know I’ll feel a hundred percent better when I’m done.

By the time I get to the belts, I’m feeling about half a percent better. At this rate, if I keep redecorating and reorganizing for another hundred years, I may succeed in advancing from feeling severely depressed to merely seriously bummed.

Hmm. Maybe having a screaming fit and ransacking the room is a better idea. The “meditation of flipping out.”

“Do you have anything with wings?” I glance up to see Tinker Bell, a lemon candy stick clenched in one hand, glitter-covered sandals on her feet, perched on the threshold into the room like she’s about to take flight.

“Wings? Like …” I flap my hands, imitating a bird. She nods. Is she putting me on? “Sorry. Only regular clothes in here. You might want to try a costume shop.”

“No, no, not real wings. Things with wings. I collect them.”

“There’s a denim jacket over there with a butterfly embroidered on it.” I indicate a folding screen, where I’ve hung some of the nicer shirts and jackets.

“Ech, not insects.” She shudders. This is not a reaction I’ve ever seen to butterflies. “
Magical
things with wings,” she clarifies. “Like angels. And fairies.”

“No, sorry.”

“Are you sure?” She glances around suspiciously, as if I’ve secretly stashed a family of fairy dolls somewhere in the room.

“You’re welcome to look around.”

Tinker Bell steps into the room and then stops, her blue-eyed gaze locked onto the hat rack, where I’ve just hung a trio of blue belts over one of the hooks.

“That’s a hat rack,” Tink informs me as I drape a white canvas belt over another hook.

“Yes, it is,” I confirm.

“But those are belts.” She directs her lemon stick to the remaining belts in my hand, to make sure I understand.

I lift up the belts and study them closely. “They are indeed,” I say, and then resume hanging them.

Tink folds one arm across her stomach, rests the elbow of the other on her wrist, and bites off the end of her candy stick with a frown. “The hats are on a shoe rack,” she says between chews.

She may not like insects, but she’s starting to remind me of one. The pesky, buzzing kind.

“In case you were curious, there
is
a belt rack.” I tilt my head toward it. “That’s where the scarves are.” I make a sad face. “No angel scarves, though.”

“But it’s wrong.” Tinker Bell waves her half-eaten candy stick around the room, like she can make it all go away.

“It’s
cre-a-tive
,” I explain, sounding it out slowly in case she’s never heard the word before.

“Hmm.” She taps the candy stick against her teeth, as
if she’s considering whether or not discipline is in order. Unfortunately, I don’t have a human-sized flyswatter, so I’ll have to come up with another way to get rid of her.

“Thanks for coming in!” I say brightly. “Hope to see you again soon!” Not.

She doesn’t leave. I notice she’s studying my mangled boot, lying on its side like a soldier fatally wounded in battle. I truly won’t be able to endure any snide comments about
that
, so before she provokes me into swatting her for real, I say, “I may have seen an angel pillow in the other room.”

Tink cheers up, forgetting all about the abomination of my decorating choices. “Can you show me?”

That backfired. I sigh, drop the belts and stride into the main room of the store, Tink on my heels—heels with which I’d like to crunch her pink-frost-painted toes. But that would be bad customer service.

Behind the counter, Nancy, swaddled in the eight million scarves she’s wrapped around her shoulders, reading glasses slipping down her nose, is hunched over one of the ratty paperbacks she’s taken from the selection that fill the store’s bookshelves. “Hey, Nancy. Do we have any angel stuff?”

Nancy is too deep inside her cocoon of 1980s-trashy-novel bliss for the question to penetrate. “Mmm” is all I get. I shrug apologetically to Tinker Bell and lead her around a three-legged coffee table that’s been propped up with old board games, past a pair of scuffed easy chairs, to
a sagging couch. Sifting through the pillows that’ve been piled onto the couch, I find the perfect one and pull it out.

“Oops, sorry,” I say oh-so-sincerely. “It’s a duck, not an angel.” I show her the pillow: a faded needlepoint mallard on a threadbare pond. “It has wings, though.” Tink doesn’t seem amused by my joke.

“This room is very unorganized,” she says.

I happen to agree with Tinker Bell on this, but there’s no way I’m going to admit it. “Not my department.”

Tink picks up a Porky Pig saltshaker and lets out a disapproving huff. “You should have some new stuff in here. To mix in with the old.”

“It’s an
antiques
store.”

“So? Lots of the regular stores have retro stuff too now. It’s the same thing, right? Just in reverse. I think you’d get more customers.”

I don’t bother to tell her that we don’t
need
more customers, because every other week some interior designer comes in and pays Nancy a few thousand dollars for some old piano or a clock that’s apparently the last one left in the world. “I need to get back to the area that
is
my department,” I tell Tink. “You can keep looking if you want, see if any
antique
mythical creatures with wings are lurking about.”

“What about chopsticks?” I freeze for a second when she asks this. “You know,” she continues, “the fancy shellacked kind, with the Chinese letters painted on them.”

Why would she want chopsticks? They don’t have
wings. I worry she’s toying with me and I glance down at my boots. It’s my “Fires of Hell” pair, with orange flames shooting up the sides, and I’ve sewn a pocket inside one of the skinnier flames. But it’s zipped up now, my chopstick out of sight.

Tinker Bell is staring at me, waiting for an answer, and I realize I’ve overreacted. Her family probably just orders takeout a lot.

“No, no chopsticks. We had some, but we sold them all.” To
me
.