Reluctantly, she said, “I wish you could crash in my apartment forever. But my parents…”
“I know. They’re strict about visitors. I’ll be out soon. A few more days, tops. I just have to swing back by my campus apartment and pack.”
She nodded. Zara would do nearly anything for her friends, but crossing her parents was a line not even she was ready to do. It was already a risk to let me crash for a night or two, and I hated having to put her in that position.
She planted a kiss on the top of my head. “Try to get some sleep.”
She let me borrow a pair of pajamas and a pillow, and I made up a bed on the sofa but couldn’t sleep, so I pulled out my sketchbook and colored pencils again. Added golden light to the tips of the faerie’s pointed ears.
Where was I going to go?
It wasn’t until I reached into my backpack for a green pencil that I remembered the flyer for the nanny job. I searched through my backpack but couldn’t find the piece of paper. Instead, I pulled out a leaf.What in the world?I definitely hadn’t put a leaf in my backpack.
It was an ordinary leaf, if a little on the large size, spring-green with a thick stem. I didn’t remember stuffing a leaf in my backpack, but I’d been so dazed after Professor Decker’s handsy come-on that I didn’t clearly recall much at all. I was about to toss the leaf in the trash when I saw writing on it.
Live-in Nanny Wanted
Salary and Apartment Provided
Call 202-819-2000
The text was writtenonthe leaf. The exact same handwriting that had been on the note. In fact, I felt an uncanny certainty that itwasthe same note. But that wasn’t possible. I hadn’t been so bleary-eyed at Stardust Coffee that I’d mistaken a leaf for a flyer.
So what was the deal?
Had itchangedinto a leaf?
I was losing my mind. A dissociative split. There was no other explanation. Zara was in a psychology graduate program—she might know a good hospital to check myself into…
But as I marveled at the leaf with its bizarre handwriting, I found myself slowly lifting my phone with my other hand as though possessed and punching in the number. I didn’t expect anything to happen, of course. Business hours were long over, anyway.
The phone clicked over on the first ring. A sharp female voice said, “Yes?”
For a moment, I wondered if I had the wrong number. Then, I stuttered, “I’m calling about the nanny position? I found it on a…a leaf?”
God, I sounded ridiculous.
I twirled the leaf’s stem in my other hand as though to remind myself I hadn’t made it up. I was ready to be laughed at. It was a prank. It had to be. I had to be the biggest idiot in New York to have fallen for it…
There was silence on the other end, and I was ready to tell the whole story about finding the flyer at the Stardust Coffee community board, orthinkingit was a flyer, but then the woman interrupted breezily. “Do you have experience caring for human children?”
“Humanchildren?” Though I was getting seriously weird vibes, I had come so far already through the looking glass that I figured I’d take this as far as I could, though it was feeling less and less likely that there was a legitimate job on the other side. “Um, yeah,” I answered. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I’d done my fair share of babysitting. “Yes. I spent three years taking care of—”
“Can you begin immediately? Friday? Pending an interview, of course.”
I was prepared to rattle off my meager experience, but she didn’t seem to want or care about the details of my work history. Maybe that’s what the interview was for, I reasoned. But the truth was, everything about this felt off.
“Immediately?” I repeated. I thought of my tiny on-campus apartment with its cinder-block walls and how badly I wanted out of there. “Sure, I can do immediately.”
“Come to 1 Fulton Street tomorrow for an interview. Fiftieth floor. 10:00 a.m.”
Fulton Street? Wasn’t that in the financial district? By the time I had thought through how long it would take to switch subways, I realized the woman had hung up.
I slumped back on Zara’s sofa and looked at her cat, Tater Tot, blinking lazily at me from the sofa’s arm.
What was I about to get myself into?
ChapterTwo
