Whenever Great-Aunt Misty comes across a random key in her house and doesn’t know what it’s for, she mails it to us. We’ve been dying to find out what’s inside a locked box Luna and Romina found in the attic a couple years ago. It’s got tarnished brass fastenings and wine-red upholstery featuring a faded damask pattern. My sisters asked Grandma, before she died, what was in it, and where the key might be, but her dementia had carried her to a place where she no longer knew the answer.
“Oh, did Misty send us another key?” Romina asks, gamboling over. She had cut her platinum bob into a shaggy pixie yesterday and dyed it cotton-candy pink. She and Trevor Yoon—our landlord as well as our media/marketing director—played hair roulette at the salon, so he’s sporting a newly silver pompadour.
“Wasn’t a fit,” I tell her glumly.
Romina twirls to make the hem of her moss-green dress rise up. Her wardrobe ranges from earth-toned dungarees to frothy pastels with ruffles, the sorts of outfits you’d see anthropomorphic animals from a Beatrix Potter book wearing. “I should ask Alex to look for the missing key. He’s shockingly good at finding lost things lately.”
Luna raises her eyebrows, hovering over our younger sister like an ominous fog. “Itoldyou he’s becoming a witch. This happened to Grandpa Dennis after Grandma fell in love with him. Remember? She said that one month into dating, he was suddenly able to tell when somebody would die the next day. Which was unfortunate for him toward the end, when he saw his number would be up.”
Romina brightens. “Last night, I said, ‘Where’s my purse?’ and Alex knew without even getting up that I’d left it at Pit Stop Soda Shop.”
I dismiss myself from what promises to be a ridiculous conversation, as Romina is not a witch and neither is her boyfriend, and this is the third time this summer that she’s left her purse at the soda shop.
Delusion!I think loudly. What my sisters credit to magic is, in fact, coincidence and patterns.
Especiallydelusional is this town’s legend of love magic, which generations of Moonvillians have claimed hangs in our trees, swims in our rivers. Supposedly, a romantic love grown in Moonville is stronger than anywhere else, and if you’re here in near proximity to your One True Love, magic will physically redirect your paths so that they continue to cross. It will make your love burn forever, as bright and true in your fiftieth year together as it did your first.
Because we are the children of bitterly divorced parents, it boggles my mind that Luna and Romina espouse such garbage. Romina insists that the reason our parents’ love wasn’t lasting is that it wasn’t seeded in Moonville, as they met and fell in love in Indianapolis, where our mother is originally from. Maybe my sisters still believe the legend because they’ve never left our hometown—certainly, when I first moved away, I still believed it all, too. I would even go so far as to say that I believed it more thananyone. Magic was so tightly plaited into my worldview that Ihallucinatedmagical things. I’d treasured the idea of a One True Love, somebody made just for me.
But then I grew up. And I realized there is simply no proof that any of it is real.
Passing by the open front door, I spy a shirt with neon squiggles and triangles in the bakery across the street, and duck back against a wall. Lean out again to take another peek.
My heartbeat thumps in my throat at the sight of him.
I’m saying that you’re beautiful, and I want to spend time with you. A lot of time. Alone.
I am a jumble of electric nerves and impure thoughts. Exclamation marks. Question marks. It isn’t that I’m shocked aman is attracted to me, but the “I like you, let’s get horizontal” ritual has never played out at quite this speed with the sweet, shy fellow nerds I’ve dated. It was only last week that Morgan tried to read my palm and declared it said I’m going to take a trip to the Maldives and enjoy three nights of passion with a muscled blond man “whose name begins with anS, or maybe aK, and you might meet him online, actually, and not in the Maldives.”
Ever since I moved back to Moonville, I’ve kept my preferred distance from those outside my family, observing Morgan the appropriate amount that one observes a man who uses their shop as an unconventional workspace to write for theMoonville Tribune. I distantly recall his presence in high school. He was popular, lots of friends, lots of female admirers, lots of detentions.
I wore fake vampire teeth to school and tried to get my classmates to believe I was actually six hundred years old. I made up this whole elaborate history of my life as a horse girl from 1409, and when I wasn’t talking about that, I was writingDoctor WhoandSupernaturalcrossover fan fiction in my bedroom. By senior year, I’d stopped hissing “You foolish mortals” at fellow students, but it was too late—I graduated with honors and no friends.
As an adult, he’s charming. Chatty. Wildly extroverted, and I am…not. Too much socialization eats my energy like a white dwarf consuming its companion star. I’m gripped by the way he moves through the world, striking like a match against everybody he sees, generating chemistry with them effortlessly.
Steeling myself, I tip up my chin and stroll across VallisBoulevard, into Wafting Crescent Bakery. I’m embraced by a bellow of sugary cold; no matter what time of year it is, you always need a jacket in Wafting Crescent.
Morgan doesn’t turn at theding!of the bell, deep in conversation with Zaid. The baker’s busy building a seasonal display of small puffy pastries that must be calledsou, as the chalkboard slate beside them readsHappy Sou-mmer!Zaid dearly loves a pun. His dog is named Ruff Puff.
I survey the variety of pastries, not at all hungry, sneaking glances at Morgan now and then. My face flames when he catches me looking, but I impress myself by clearing my throat and managing a “Good morg— Good morning.”
“Morning to you, too!” Bushra sings, waltzing through the swinging door from the kitchen. Her hijab is a brilliant orange today, encrusted with dangling jewels. She is in her midtwenties and radiates an aura of firm authority, of knowing what she’s about. “I hope you don’t mind that there’s no blueberry vatrushki today, Zel—I know they’re your favorite.”
“Are they?” Morgan’s eyes slide to mine, but when he speaks he’s addressing Bushra. “If you’d be kind enough to whip some up, I promise I won’t play loud music for a week.”
Bushra crosses her arms as she considers the proposition. “Darn you. I can’t pass that up.”
They shake on it.
Oh, my poor cardiovascular system. Bushra flits off to prepare the sweet buns, promising to deliver them to The Magick Happens when they’re ready, and it’s unfair that aside from being funny and alluring, Morgan’s also sosweet. I feel excited, but sick. It is the weirdest mixture.
Morgan holds the door open for me. (Chivalrous!) I bleat “Oh thanks,” under my breath and hurry out, then hurryupto keep pace with the stride of his long legs. He’s walking next to me.Rightnext to me. Perhaps we are about to flirt again.
Get yourself together, Zelda, he’s walking this way because he works here.
He doesn’t workatThe Magick Happens, per se, but he doesdohis work here. Meaning, he writes articles for the newspaper from a desk by the window. He claims this spot makes him a million times more productive than he is anywhere else (I have yet to see evidence of him being productive, to be honest). I will never confess to another living soul the thrill that I wring from knowing his desk used to bemydesk, when I was young and wrote stories while hanging out with Grandma after school. I was irritated when I first discovered he’d usurped my spot, but it’s impossible to stay angry at somebody with eyes like that—deep, dark, long-lashed. Mesmerizing.
Standing by the desk now is a tiny older woman with voluminous bright red hair, thick blue eyeliner, and a purple muumuu. Her surly old cat, Razzle Dazzle, sleeps in a picnic basket looped through her arm. She’s toting a clipboard and her signature scent: Drunk Brunch. Her ear-to-ear smile portends snake oil.
