If someone had told me I’d be starting my day stuck inside the world’s least charming art project, I wouldn’t have even blinked.
But I hadn’t planned on the purple ooze or the glitter.
Or the way it instantly turned the tile floor at Vale Provisions into a Slip ‘n Slide for idiots with no sense of self-preservation.
Beth, Carol, and Deva rounded the corner first, all of them skating instead of walking, arms windmilling as plastic bags and shopping baskets skidded past them in slow motion. I tried to step lightly, but the slime grabbed my sneaker and spun me halfway around. I pinwheeled past a cluster of customers who were busy shaking globs of glitter out of their hair.
One woman shrieked as a hunk of lavender goo dropped from her ponytail onto her shoulder. The entire store pulsed with a weird hush, punctuated only by the sound of shoes squeaking and the occasional wet plop as another victim joined the ranks of the freshly splattered.
All this, and we hadn’t even gotten through the front half of the shop.
Beth lurched into me, sending a puff of fine glitter right up my nose. I sneezed hard enough to see stars.
“Where’d Susan go?” Deva asked, wiping purple off her earring with a sour sigh. “No way she set that up and just wandered out the front.”
I spotted Summer, hunched under her jacket in the middle of an aisle. Her phone was clenched in one hand, somehow free of goop, even though purple dripped from her jacket. Her raised eyebrows and the deathly pallor on her face showed she was probably rethinking her entire employment contract.
“Where’s Susan?” Carol glared at the girl.
Summer didn’t say a single blessed thing. She just raised her arm and pointed—stone-faced, mute, finger trembling—directly at the front door.
Not a word. Just that.
Every customer in the place stared at us. Deva shot them a withering look. “Don’t get involved unless you want magical herpes, people.”
I shuffled forward and hooked an arm around Beth so we could two-step our way toward the door.
Halfway there, the next disaster struck.
A bang erupted from somewhere above, up in the ductwork or maybe hidden on a shelf. Beth shrieked and ducked, and all at once the room drowned in a choking black cloud, thick as tar and reeking like burnt licorice and rotten eggs.
It hit my face like a slap.
In two seconds, my eyes watered, my throat sealed shut, and I was down on my knees gagging. The world narrowed to smoke and Carol’s red sneaker inches from my nose.
I could barely see my hand in front of me, let alone the way forward.
“Down!” Deva hacked out, and I saw the other ladies hit the floor next to me. “Smoke will rise.”
Beth coughed so hard that I thought she might lose a lung. “How the hell—” she rasped. “Who does this? Is she trying to kill her regulars?”
Carol’s hand materialized on my shoulder out of the fog. “Group up! Huddle!” She yanked us together, wrapping her arms around both me and Beth with more muscle than I’d ever given her credit for.
I could taste the smoke on my tongue, bitter and acidic, like chewing on a burned sock. I yanked my sleeve over my mouth, but it didn’t help.
Carol reached into her pants pocket and fished around until she came up with a marble-sized white ball. She flashed a manic grin despite how her cheeks were streaked with purple. “Watch this,” she croaked.
She slammed the ball down on the ground.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the thing shimmered, expanded, and inflated into a see-through bubble bigger than a beach ball. The surface rippled and stretched, then steadied.
“Stick your heads in,” Carol wheezed, already plunging her own face into its surface.
I didn’t overthink it. I just did as I was told.
The moment my head broke through, fresh, clean air rushed into my lungs. Not just clean. It was maybe the best air I’d had since I was eight years old, hiding from Henry’s stink bomb in the backyard. For a heartbeat, breathing wasn’t a cruel joke.
