“The better question is, why’re you here this early?” Trevor never drops in until well after opening. Punctuality, for him, means “an hour or two late.”
He slips into the shop. “Go wash up, gross-o, then tie every lucky flower you’ve got to a crown, because it’s happening.Today.” He raises his voice to shout past me. “Luna! Where you at?”
I frown. “What’s happening? What isit?”
Knowing Trevor Yoon, this could be anything. One time, he showed up with an ear piercer, and he and I spent the day piercing each other’s ears. Another day, he brought in a go-kart he said was “rigged with fireworks,” as a birthday gift for Morgan. (Morgan wisely has not ridden it.) He makes Luna come unglued, always accidentally knocking stuff over or forgetting to file taxes or sticking candles with polarizing energies next to each other. He’s a rocket ship with no navigation system barreling through the galaxy: the tall, lanky, Sagittarius brother we never had.
He’s wearing a fancy suit and has paired it with a novelty tee (Cersei and Jaime Lannister with their arms around each other:Bros ’n Hoes). I can tell immediately that he’s feeling himself. He’s gotten a root touch-up on his white-peach hair, styled in anundercut with a forward sweep. He’s wearing neon green sneakers, which he only busts out for special occasions.
“We’re not getting a burrito bar,” Luna calls out warningly. Snapdragon is traipsing across the slope of her shoulders, paws kneading her back, forcing her to hunch with her nose an inch from the computer keys. “Trevor, we’ve discussed this. It makes no sense to put a burrito bar in here, and we don’t have the room, anyway.”
He twirls dramatically, showing off the purple satin lining of his blazer. “We’re tabling that discussion for later because you’re so wrong that it’s ridiculous, but that’s not what I’m talking about. My dad just called. He’s here, in Moonville, and he wants me to meet him for lunch at eleven o’clock.”
Luna stands up; Snapdragon tumbles down her back and hits the floor with an annoyedmeow. “Because of...? To talk to us? To hear our pitch?”
Trevor nods, dark eyes aglitter. “What else could it be? Henevervisits.”
“I didn’t think he’d come through,” I say in wonderment. “I thought he was gonna leave us hanging.”
“So did I!”
The air is sucked from the room. Luna and I stare at each other, dumbfounded, which Trevor relishes with a shit-eating grin, before saying: “We might actually pull this off. Today. We could get the rest of the moneytoday.”
We all start jumping up and down. “It’s happening! It’s happening!”
Chapter Two
FORGET-ME-NOT:
Think of me during my absence.
What’shappening?” Morgan Angelopoulos wants to know, trundling in with his laptop and coffee, dark eyes wild with confusion, his silky black hair windswept. “Are we finally getting a burrito bar?”
He works at Zelda’s old desk, positioned in front of a window that he claims holds the most inspirational view in town, maybe the world. Two years ago, he was dragged into The Magick Happens by a girlfriend. While she browsed, he loitered by the window and stared out at the scenery: the intersection of Foxglove Creek and Twinstar Fork, banks swarmed with love-in-a-mist and flowering trees. A rounded red bridge. A bronze telephone booth in a neighbor’s front garden. He sat down at Zelda’s long-neglected writing desk and began taking notes. Then, he wrote an entire chapter of a book in a single hour while his girlfriend tapped her foot impatiently by the door. When we asked him what he was doing, he said he was a writer, that he’d been struggling with writer’s block for eons, unable to scrape a single word out. He asked if he could rent that desk as a workspace for fifty dollars a month. He’s since abandoned both the girlfriend andmanuscript-writing (although he still writes for the local newspaper), but The Magick Happens remains a tried-and-true muse. His current love is the paranormal. He’s utterly devoted to his podcast that nobody listens to, in which he talks to himself about Moonville’s lore and ghost stories.
“Trevor’s dad’s in town,” I tell him. “He wants Trevor to meet him for lunch.”
He nearly drops his coffee. “For real? He’ll give us a loan?” I smile at hisussince he doesn’t actually work here.
Trevor’s glow could light a fuse. “Probably!”
“Ahhhhh!” Morgan exclaims, shaking Trevor’s shoulders.
Trevor shakes him back, the glee contagious. “Ahhhhh!”
“Ahhhhh!” Luna and I pitch in, shaking each other. And then Aisling, her eleven-year-old daughter, emerges downstairs and we have to explain what we’re ahhhhh-ing about. Ash tries to muster the jazz for us, but gives up. Adult ventures such as asking our landlord’s rich father to give us money can’t compete with the allure of Morgan’s unattended macchiato.
Morgan dashes outside. “I’ll be right back! I need to grab celebratory donuts.” The man will seize upon any excuse to procrastinate. Often, he stretches out in his chair and naps, Snapdragon curled up on his lap, or lends unsolicited advice concerning which scents we should use for a particular new product. He keeps giving the wrong recommendations to customers and thinks he’s an expert now.
“Eleven,” Luna’s repeating under her breath. “Okay, everybody, where are the papers? Trevor, I think you were looking at them on Friday.”
We sweep the store from top to bottom. No sign of the twenty-page business proposal that we typed up a couple weeks ago in the hopes that Mr. Yoon would help us. From what I’veheard about him, simply asking for money isn’t going to cut it. Regardless of his love for his son, when it comes to business, he thinks in numbers only.
“I’ll go reprint!” Luna makes for the printer so fast that she knocks over a row of white orchid candles molded into pumpkins, and Trevor slams his index finger through the air.
“Ah-ha!”
“Okay, but you do itallthe time,” she shouts over her shoulder. “I did itonce.”
