Who Needs Magic? (28 page)

The chopstick—where is it? My hand is empty, the palm now mysteriously pain-free. Then I notice, on the ground, a shriveled line of black lying on a strip of burned grass. I lean down to touch the black and it turns to ash.

I look over at Ariella, who is scowling down at her own hands, which are covered in a black sticky mass flecked with flakes of purple and yellow. She tries to wipe it off, but her palms get stuck together. She tugs and pulls and finally wrenches them apart. “Tell her,” she orders Ronald, and points one carbon-coated hand at me. “Tell her Fawn’s the one you love.”

“Fawn?” Ronald asks, confused. “Are you—”

“Tell
her
,” I interrupt. “Tell her that Jeni is the Voice. Jeni is the One.”

Ronald doesn’t answer for a minute. “
That’s
what this was all about?” He gazes back and forth between us, his expression a mix of irritation and disbelief. I want to protest more. I want to insist. But my conviction melts away like Ariella’s candy sticks.

“I like Fawn okay,” Ronald says. “She’s an amazing writer. Kind of intense, though. Jeni’s sweet, and her voice—yeah, wow. But there’s no more than ‘like’ there for either of them. I already got a girl. I mean, I don’t
have
her—maybe I never will—but she’ll always be the one. The One. Get it?” He shakes his head, snorts out a half laugh. “This sure is a mess. But you know what? I am
definitely
writing a song about it.”

Ronald tromps off across the trampled grass, leaving Ariella and me staring at each other. Ariella glances down at her melted-candy-covered hands again, but she doesn’t seem angry or frustrated anymore, just tired.

“Our powers are gone, you know,” she says.

“How do you—”

“Can’t you tell? Try. Go on.”

I pick up a plastic knife from the grass, dropped by a fleeing picnicker. I aim it toward the stage, where two crew members are yanking at a corner of the singed tarp that’s gotten tangled up in the collapsed poles.

Nothing happens. Not to the tarp. Not to me. Whatever
it was that allowed me to turn my thoughts into energy—into magic—isn’t there anymore.

“You messed with the universe and
this
is what you have brought to pass.” Ariella swings her sticky hands out, indicating the ashy disaster around us. Up near the stage, members of the mall’s maintenance staff arrive to help the concert crew members decide what to clean up first.

“You did this too,” I say. “We’re co-brought-to-passers.”

“No. Your magic screwed up the ions, and the atmosphere got all cloudy or gunked up or
something
, and everything went haywire. You’re probably descended from some
anti-
fairy godmother. The black-hole opposite. Like angels and demons. Like when somebody takes a flash photo and you close your eyes and all the bright colors are dark and all the dark are—”

“Powers, no powers, whatever. We both had the wish wrong, which means neither of us is a real f.g.”

“I will
never
believe that.”

A security guard has joined the cleanup crew. Onstage, a guy gathering up speaker cables points our way.

Ariella and I see this at the same time. Our eyes meet for a second, and then we each run off in a different direction. We don’t look back, or at least I don’t. I don’t know what Ariella does. It doesn’t matter what she does. Nothing about her matters anymore.

It’s barely past noon when I skate up to the front door, but the gray sky has gone so dark it’s practically black now. Maybe we did screw up the ions in the atmosphere.

I dig around in my shoulder bag for the key. I don’t care what time it is, I need to be in bed, under the covers, way under, buried deep where none of this day, this week, this summer, this year, my whole
life
, can find me. I’m going to haul everything out of the trunk at the foot of the bed: both extra blankets, the comforter, and the stupid quilt Dad bought me with the nursery-rhyme characters. The more layers I have over me, the better the chance of hiding from yet another cascade of instant replays.

Not really replays, though—freeze-frames. Memories that come in blinks. A collection of still images. They’re not the obvious ones, the big moments, the things you’d think I’d remember the most—the midair explosion of colliding f.g. magic, the collapse of the tarp, the stampeding crowd. Instead, it’s the details I didn’t notice at the time but that have now emerged from the background like 3-D pop-ups. Fawn’s shock after I’d roped her with a cable; Jeni’s wide-eyed terror when the tarp caught fire; Lourdes’s disappointed frown; Ronald’s baffled stare.

And Ariella’s final glance to me as she ran off, a mix of fury and confusion.

All faces. Portraits of horror. If there was a way to develop them on film, I could have an art show that would way out-creep those mirror dolls.

I’m at the door to my bedroom when Dad rushes out of his office. “Delaney. Wait—” He cuts off his warning, because it’s too late. I’ve seen them.

Stacked up in front of my bookshelves, their tops taped, their sides labeled in Posh’s mom’s handwriting, are the boxes.

The
boxes.

Why didn’t I follow my first instinct and forbid Dad to let Posh’s mom send them? Why didn’t I call Posh and tell her I changed my mind? In what universe would seeing these make me feel better? Not in this Delaney-hating universe, that’s for sure.

“Those are only the ones with your things in them. The
rest are in the garage.” Dad puts a hand on my shoulder, so lightly I can barely feel it. Or maybe I’ve lost the ability to feel anything. Along with the other abilities I’ve lost.

“It’s gone.” My voice is raspy. I’m shaky again, but this isn’t the magic-related, screwed-up-ions shakiness from earlier. This shakiness is from natural, not supernatural, causes.

“What’s gone?”

I stare at the boxes.
“Everything.”
My voice cracks on the last syllable. Dad’s arms are around me before I even realize I’m crying. So much for not feeling anything. Soon it’s like my whole body is sobbing, and it has nothing to do with Ariella or Jeni or losing the magic, or it does, but it’s more than that. I’m worried I’ll never be able to stop, that I’ll be crying for the rest of my life until I die of it. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I choke out.

“Oh, honey.” Dad pats my back. “It’s about time.”

The sky was unable to hold it in any longer either and gave it up five seconds after I did, and now it’s pouring outside, the rain coming down in heaving sobs.

I’m curled up in one corner of the couch in the den, the Mother Goose quilt from my bedroom wrapped around me, drinking hot cocoa like it’s the middle of winter. I’m drained. Literally. Crying so hard emptied out every drop of energy I had. And with the tears came every secret, doubt, fear and experience I’d been holding in all summer. Like the sobs, it all gushed out. I couldn’t control it.

“Do you think my powers are gone for good?” I take a bite of my cinnamon doughnut, still warm from the toaster oven.

“I don’t know, Delaney.” Dad is sitting next to me. He takes a sip of his coffee. “I’ve never heard of this happening. Two fairy godmothers sensing the same wish for two different clients? That shouldn’t be possible. And you shouldn’t be able to use your magic in ways that don’t serve the wish either, much less use it on each other.”

“Ariella said I was the anti-f.g., but I think we both were. We didn’t grant any wishes—we
crushed
them. Including wishes that didn’t even come from our clients.” There was Ronald, for example, plus all of the Alcove Idol wannabes who never even made it to the stage.

Dad’s phone rings. “It’s Gina,” he says. “I’ll call her back.” He sends the call to voice mail. “I’m sorry you had to go through all this alone, honey, and I’m sorry I haven’t been paying better attention this summer. You act so independent, I forget sometimes how young you are.”

“You say that like I’m a baby. I can take care of myself.”

“See? That’s what I mean.” Dad pats my quilt-covered knee. “That act. It’s very convincing.”

“It’s not an act.”

He smiles. “Gina and I are taking Theo out. Why don’t you come with us?”

“No, thanks,” I say. “You guys have fun. I’m too tired to do anything but sit here and watch TV and not move at all.”

“I’m not leaving you alone.” Dad glances away from me for a second toward the hallway—toward my room. I know what he’s thinking.

“Because of the boxes? You think they’re going to come alive and eat me?”

“I’m only concerned—”

“I’m not going to open them tonight. I told you, I’m too tired.”

I have no idea what I’ve said that makes Dad jump up from the couch as if he’s suddenly solved some problem that’s been plaguing the human race since caveman days. “Guess what? You’re coming with us.”

“Did you hear anything I just said, Dad?”

“I heard you. And that’s why you’re coming.”

“You missed a word. You heard ‘I want to come’ when what I said is ‘I
don’t
want to come.’ ‘Don’t.’ That’s the word you missed.” Dad ignores me, picks up his phone and dials. “I’m not going out in the rain,” I say as he raises the phone to his ear. “I’m weak from everything that’s happened. My immunity is low. I’ll catch pneumonia.”

Dad gazes over my head to the window behind me. “It stopped.” He returns his focus to the phone. “Hi … Uh-huh. Sure.” I shift around and push myself up onto my knees so I can see outside. It’s not only stopped raining, the sky is clear and bright and blue. There’s not even one wisp of a cloud. “About twenty minutes, okay?” It’s as if a gigantic painted stage backdrop, one that extends to every corner of the horizon, has been plunked down over
the stormy skies from ten minutes ago. “Delaney’s coming with us,” Dad says to Gina, and a millisecond later, a beam of sunlight hits an evaporating puddle and bounces up, directly into my eyes.

I swear, the sun here definitely has it in for me.

Outside of the window, the ocean speeds past. The sky is pink, with one skinny strip of clouds where the earth curves away—all that’s left of the storm from earlier. It’s hard to look at the ocean and not remember the darkening sky over the art galleries. It was only last night, but it feels like months ago, years ago. Time really is weird.

“Theo, buddy, can you knock it off?”

“Sorry.”

Theo sits next to me in the backseat of Dad’s car, playing his naval war game, kicking Dad’s seat and sulking. Dinner was some fast-food chicken place, where Theo stuffed down his sandwich before we’d even gotten to the table. Then he spent the rest of the time playing one of the restaurant’s video games. I’m surprisingly not annoyed by Theo tonight. He’s not kicking the back of
my
seat, after all. Plus, it may be that I’m still too exhausted to summon up irritation about anything. But I can also see my younger self in him. Although my experience was different, I can relate to his frustration over feeling let down by life.

“Hey, Theo,” I say. “You want to play twenty questions?”

“No.”

I guess just because I have empathy for him, it doesn’t mean we’ll be bonding anytime soon.

“Wow, Theo. Look at that building.” Gina points through the windshield toward our destination, an ancient hotel that looms on the horizon, a castle in the sand. “Neat, isn’t it?”

Theo grunts. Dad pulls into the gravel parking lot. “Here at last!” he announces cheerfully. I think most of his elation comes from his relief that Theo’s sneaker will no longer be ramming into his tailbone every other second.

As we walk up the stone path to the hotel, Dad provides a Wikipedia warm-up to the exciting event ahead: a display of ships in bottles in the hotel’s huge lobby. “This collection dates back to the early nineteenth century,” Dad informs us. “The bottles all belong to one family, and most of them were built by family members, many of whom were even younger than you, Theo, when they created them.”

“How about that, Theo?” Gina leans down to Theo, who is still torpedoing virtual ships. “Interesting, huh?”

“Whatever.”

We reach a forked path that veers off in one direction toward the hotel and in the other toward a seaside string of dessert shops. “Dad? I’m going to go get an ice cream.” As empathetic as I may be feeling, I have to draw the line at being trapped inside with Theo, ships in bottles
and
Dad reading aloud from every posted placard in the exhibit.