Fairy Godmothers Aren’t Cheap (Fairy Godmothers and Other Fiascos #1)

Chapter 1

~ Char ~

Mail. Who sent mail anymore? Spotting something addressed to me—Char McDonnell—I clutched the bundle to my chest, and slipped through my apartment door before Randy, our apartment manager who was having a midlife crisis, could snag me. I locked my door behind me as his opened. With a breath of relief, I climbed the stairs that led to the top floor space I shared with four friends. We had the run of the second floor of a not-so-recently renovated rooming house in a less gentrified part of the city, unable to afford the private ‘manager’ apartments that lined the street-level floor of the old clapboard building.

And it was perfect. Each of us had our own bedroom and plenty of living space to share. We even had our own secret roomie, a Richardson’s ground squirrel, Felipe, who’d adopted us before last winter.

“Were you good today?” I asked him as he met me at the top of the steps. “Did you stay off the windowsills so Randy wouldn’t see you?”

Felipe chittered.

“Good boy.”

He sat up on his hind legs and impatiently stretched his tiny, tawny paws upward.

“Hold your horses.” I dug into my canvas courier bag and pulled out my lunch leftovers. “Apple core, who’s your friend?” I sang, handing our chubby little buddy the core.

He grabbed it with both paws and began gnawing.

I hung a right into the living room, dropping my bag on the faded red sofa and the pile of mail on the coffee table. Everyone had cleared out for the May long weekend, leaving me kicking about on my own just like at Christmas. Only this holiday I hadn’t planned a one-day visit to go see my dad in Southern Alberta, and found myself wishing for something to keep me preoccupied.

Right. Mail addressed to me. Probably just junk. I flopped into the cracked leather armchair Samantha had found in a thrift store, then muttered “sacrilege” under my breath while moving one of her half-full coffee cups off my new stack of Grecian pottery hardcover books. I grabbed the envelope that had been sent to me. The return address was from a place called YFGM.

Curious about the unfamiliar name, I got up and grabbed the slate letter opener from my lineup of ancient pottery shards displayed on the shelf between the two long narrow windows that overlooked the street below. I slit open the envelope and frowned at the enclosed invoice, dated two days prior: May 15.

How could a place I’d never heard of be charging me for something? Was this an error or some sort of scam?

It didn’t even say what I’d bought. I scanned to the bottom and choked at the amount due. Over one-hundred thousand dollars? Yeah, I would most definitely have recalled racking that up.

I toed off my pink slides and fell onto the couch, tossing the invoice aside. I rubbed my tired, blurry eyes. A day of data inputting at my temp job had done a number on them today. But I was one day closer to having enough money to take myself and my father to Athens on an ancient ruins and pottery tour.

I sat up again. That invoice had to be for someone else. I double-checked the billing address. Nope. That was me. Oprah Charmaine McDonnell, apartment 2A, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. They even had my first name, which basically nobody—and I mean, nobody —knew, because I went by my middle name, and always had. Tamara, one of my roommates, who I’d graduated from high school with, knew about the Oprah thing and that was it. Well, I guess, technically, my boss at the temp agency knew, too.

Obviously, my mom binged daytime TV, but at least understood to not to actually refer to her white baby girl as Oprah.

I flicked the invoice. My name was the key. This was totally a scam, because I always went by Char.

Chewing on my bottom lip, I thought through the possible implications of ignoring the invoice. It would be like the dust in this place. If we ignored it long enough Gabby did something about it. If I ignored the invoice, maybe it would go away, too.

But what if this was identity theft? They had my full legal name and current address. What if my credit rating became impacted when I didn’t pay up?

I needed to deal with this.

And what did YFGM stand for, anyway? Your Financially Gouging Mega-Scam?

I laid back on the couch, thinking. Maybe this was just a prank. I could see Samantha, our currently green-haired roommate, pulling something like this if she discovered my legal first name. Last year she’d managed to convince me that our boss had shut down the whole temp agency where we worked in honor of my birthday. Sure, I’d been flying high due to recently earning employee of the month, but still. I’d fallen for it. Hook, line and sinker. Gulp, gulp like a baby fish who didn’t know any better.

She wasn’t a regular prankster, just like I wasn’t a sucker. But every once in awhile…

It didn’t help that she had a certain regal gravitas about her, like pranks were beneath her. Honestly, I should know better by now. Just because she’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, unlike me and our other roommates, it didn’t mean she wasn’t human. In fact, in some ways she was more down to earth than the rest of us and was probably the biggest prankster of us five.

So maybe it wasn’t the gravitas. Maybe it was those practiced innocent eyes and fluttering fake lashes that made me want to trust her. Every time.

Hook. Line. Sinker.

Even when my brain was saying “Nah. That can’t be true. She’s got to be pulling your leg…” I found myself believing that an agency of a hundred people got the day off because it was my birthday.

Yeah. She’d made me look stupid and I absolutely adored her for it.

Thank goodness she hadn’t noticed my crush on James, the Thor-like security guard at my favorite museum, or who knows how she’d torture me.

I opened the group chat on my phone that the five of us had going. Tamara, who loved to name things, had called it GAL PAL, which was an acronym for something I couldn’t remember.

Samantha? I typed. I then sent a photo of the invoice.

While I waited for someone to reply, I shuffled to the thermostat, upping the heat. I knew Josie, the most environmentally conscious of us five, would turn it back down to save on fossil fuels when she came home Monday night, but until then I could happily bake in our drafty little abode.

Samantha replied: Is this what you owe Book Emporium? Laughing emoji

Ha, ha. Yeah, okay. So I had a little book problem, which was especially noticeable since both Samantha and I were temping in at a book depository right now. Everyone said I had a horseshoe up my you-know-what because I always seemed to get the best temp jobs. Which was true—the job part, not the horseshoe.

Not to brag, but I was the best manifester I knew. For example, I’d wanted the apartment to myself for a few nights to binge watch some Discovery Channel history documentaries without judgment and to drool over possible tours I could book as a surprise for my dad, and suddenly my roomies all had plans this weekend. (That never happened.)

As for my book hordeing? I firmly believe it’s not hordeing if it’s books—unless the stacks became so numerous and precarious that they threatened to topple and kill you on a regular basis. And even then, just buy more shelves or get creative. For example, a solid stack of hardcovers made a great bedside table.

As for my noticeable problem, over the past week, numerous books that were destined for destroying, had found their way home. I mean, with the discount they were offering us at the emporium, how could I not bring them home like poor abandoned kittens?

Samantha, on the other hand, was heartless. She hadn’t brought a single book home, saving absolutely nothing from the clutches of the spine grinder or page shredder. Completely. Heartless.

How many innocent books had been pulped on her watch?

Then again, she might actually leave her position at the end of our two-week stint with a pay check, unlike me.

Tamara: wide eyes emoji

Tamara: bag of cash emoji

Me: I’m not falling for this one, S.

Gabby: Wait. ur first name’s Oprah!?!?! I’ve got to tell Lamonte. He’s going to die.

I rolled my eyes. Everything with Gabs was always about Lamonte. How had the man not yet figured out how eager she was to leap out of the friend zone? Then again, maybe he wanted her stay there.

Just like James probably felt I was best suited for the friend zone, too.

We needed to start falling for guys in our own league.

Tamara: Her mom’s a big fan.

Tam-Tam was my bestie for a good reason. She was always there for me. Just like I was with this apartment when her high school sweetheart decided—like most people in long-term relationships seemed to—that he wanted more excitement in his life. In other words, not Tamara.

We were currently in the process of showing him we were very exciting and doing just fine without him, thank you very much.

Gabby: How did I not know that?

Samantha: Same!! FYI, we would have paid big money for that info.

Tamara: zipped lips emoji

Samantha: Y u think I’m pranking u? One little time…

Gabby: Been more than once.

Tamara: finger pointing up emoji this finger pointing up emoji

Me: How come I’m the one who always falls for her jokes?

Maybe Josie, our fifth roommate, was the one pranking me. She hadn’t jumped into the text string yet, and was likely busting a gut at me all the way from the Kananaskis. She’d been hired to do some inventory management for someone with a bunker in the Rockies an hour from the city in her spare time. The whole thing was so hush-hush she’d even had to sign a nondisclosure agreement when she’d taken the job. But she’d let it slip that someone super wealthy had built a secret bunker in case of an apocalypse. We’d all looked to Samantha on that one, as her family’s social circle ran a little higher than ours.

As in, her family held a seat quite comfortably in the top one percent of the city’s—and province’s, heck, probably Canada’s—financial elite. She didn’t act like it though, as she was slumming with the rest of us. But still—she probably knew whose bunker it was, and was on the list to get inside should we face Armageddon.