I think Alex is going to be insulted, but instead he flashes a lazy grin. “I also clean out gutters, if you ask real nice.” His eyes snap to mine. “Changed your mind about working with kids?”
The sideways attack spins me off-kilter.
I wave it away. “That was the dream of a teenager. What I wanted then wasn’t the fate my stars had in the works for me.”
“Hm,” Alex replies at length. I don’t appreciate the judgment wavering at the very top of his tone. He slides his hands into his pockets, leaning against a tree.
“You’re not doing what you thought you’d be doing when we were kids, either,” I point out snippily.
“True. I’m just surprised, is all. You always had a way with children.”
I pen in the flood of emotional bile I could dump in response. “What one is interested in changes as one ages,” Trevor observes sagely. “For example, one’s taste in significant others. Looking back, the girls I was with when I was eighteen... what was I thinking? I’m sure it’s the same for you, Romina.”
“I can’t imagine still being with the kind of person I’d date at eighteen,” I agree.
The corner of Alex’s mouth slides halfway between smirk and irritation. “Subtle.”
“Oh, right!” Trevor snaps his fingers. “I forgot. You two used to go out, didn’t you? My bad. Hope that doesn’t stir up any nasty memories, Alex.”
“I’m very over it.”
“Good, because Romina might end up being your stepsister-in-law someday.”
For a moment, Alex’s impassive stare glitches. His jaw tics, but he says nothing. Trevor decides to cap off his direct hit by leaning in for a kiss. I startle and swerve, his lips landing on my cheek. To save face, I try to kiss Trevor, but he chooses that moment to initiate again, attempting to kiss my other cheek, like we’re going for a French thing. We end up with three weird cheek pecks and one on the mouth, which tastes like waffles. Alex is poker-faced again when Trevor withdraws, arm slithering possessively around my waist.
Teyonna is quiet, fixating on a mound of dirt.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate us for being such a pretty couple?” Trevor wheedles, and Alexlaughs.
Laughs!
I hate him for it. Who does he think he is, pretending to be unbothered? He has to be bothered. I would be, if my ex were presumably sleeping with my soon-to-be stepsibling.
It is infuriating that he might not be bothered.
“Come on,” Alex tells me, and begins walking, expecting me to fall in line. “I’m not losing to that guy.”
After finishing our waffles (which involved a lot of poking and prodding from Ms. Vaughn, who wanted to know if we weresingle. Alex confirmed he is—not that I care or anything), we walk quickly to make up for precious time. Our second destination is an obvious one.
Moonville isn’t your average town. You can walk our streets at high noon in August and not need to shade your eyes, everything a few degrees cooler beneath dense trees and shrubbery, a high, leafy green enclosure that blots out half the sky. Our brick roads are more than a century old, so narrow that street parking causes chaos and locals prefer walking or biking. Vallis Boulevard is interrupted here and there with snaking creeks, waterfront shops painted up like spring tulips. Between buildings, we have lush, ancient gardens, greenery climbing brick, swaying over your head.
To the west, East Falls plunges into Raccoon Creek, which threads off into wooded hills. By the end of next month, all those hills will be blue with love-in-a-mist flowers. Back in the 1920s, a circus train crashed somewhere up there, and allegedly there are still a few exotic beasts hiding out in the wilderness. I’ve heard campers and hikers swap stories about nearly being mauled by lions, showing blurry cell phone pictures to anyone who would look.
In the opposite direction, there’s the dilapidated train station from Moonville’s days as a mining town; Pit Stop Soda Shop and its sign’s revolving malted milkshake nicknamed Scary Larry due to the chilling number of teeth in its smiling face; and Our Little Secret, a murder mystery dinner theater.
And across from my shop, brother-sister duo Zaid and Bushra are in the business of sellingsomething sugary for your sweetheart. Wafting Crescent Bakery is an apple-green Queen Anne house, the second floor of which is an apartment rented by Morgan. LikeThe Magick Happens, Wafting Crescent plays into town folklore, their windows a pink carnival of cupcakes. Someone recently proposed to his boyfriend by sticking a ring in a cupcake from that bakery, like a frosting decoration, so Zaid and Bushra have been trying to capitalize on the attention by pretending that using their cupcakes to propose is an old tradition. Now half of their cupcakes come with plastic rings on top.
For a tiny dot on the map, we get a steady trickle of tourists thanks to ghost-hunting blogs touting our history, our popcorn drizzled with pink chocolate and crushed sweets, and of course, the big one: the legend that there’s love magic in our air, in our streams and trees. Visit our town with the person you’re sweet on and come away engaged to be married, or so they say. You can trace the roots of this story back toAs Evening Falls, an anonymously authored book of poems, country sayings, and short tales written about this area in the mid-1800s. The author must have fallen in love here, romanticizing their experience into a whimsical ninety pages that sank teeth in our foundations, legends only strengthening with time. Some of my neighboring shop owners believe the stories, truly. Most don’t. But all of them welcome the tourism with open arms.
I look at the lore of love magic in the air sideways, from a cautious distance lest it ever reach out and try to gobble me up again. Twice, I have given my heart to someone in this town, albeit different halves of it, with different types of love. Both times, it was handed back to me broken. At any rate, there’s nothing in the legend’s fine print about the love beinglasting.
“Hello, hello!” Bushra chimes as we walk through the door, heavenly scents (many of them common in Bangladesh) curling up to greet us. Key lime pie. Chomchom. Rosogolla. KheerMohan. Balushai. Shondesh. Cocoa brioche morning buns, banana fritters, and every flavor of bread. She spots the paper in Alex’s hand. “You’re the third team to show up so far.”
“Because you took so long flirting with your boyfriend,” Alex mutters to me. “We could’ve been first.”
“We would’ve been first if you hadn’t insisted onarguingwith my boyfriend,” I counter.
Bushra’s smile takes on a nervous energy as her eyes swivel between us. “So... something for your sweethearts, then?”
