10. ~ Char ~
CHAPTER 10
~ Char ~
I was still wrapping my head around the fact that I had a fairy godmother. That all of this was real. Even my debt.
But what else could I do, but believe? There were just too many things adding up that were utterly unexplainable.
A spark of delight flared in my gut. A fairy godmother. I had a fairy godmother!
“You said you’re broke?” Estelle asked me, point blank.
My head snapped up, the reality of her existence, and what I’d blindly gotten myself into slapping me in the face. Was this where I could wish it all away despite her saying I couldn’t? I was sure there had to be a way to get my fairy godmother to make the debt magically disappear, and then for her to send me off to the ball in the most beautiful dress where James would be waiting in a stunning tuxedo and winning smile that was just for me.
“She is broke,” Josie confirmed.
I gave her a hurt look.
“What? It’s true. Even with Samantha’s mad money skills on your side, you’re still handling that canoe without a paddle.”
I frowned, trying to make sense of her analogy. I guess she was saying I was up a creek without a paddle. Sorta true. Hurtful, but accurate.
“Your debt is very large,” Estelle agreed. “But…I think I found something that will help.”
Tamara, sitting on my left, was gripping my arm in support. Clearly she believed in fairy godmothers and this debt, too. I grabbed her hand, holding it.
“I think it would be worth trying non-monetary payment methods,” Estelle said.
“Sorry, what?” I asked.
“Karma?” Josie inquired, head tipped to the side.
Estelle nodded, and began explaining how the world was made up of energy, and it all had to balance out in the end. But good could balance good. It wasn’t necessarily good versus evil, which I liked.
In my case, I could create good energy, or good karma as it was, and have it applied to my account. If I created enough of it, it could run down the balance on my account to zero by August 15.
Happily ever after.
Fight fiction with fiction.
“But any shortfalls have to be covered with cold hard cash on the fifteenth,” Estelle explained.
“No problem.” Generally speaking, I was a kind and helpful person so a karma plan would be a walk in the park.
“What happens if she can’t pay?” Josie asked.
“I totally can! I’m a nice person!” I elbowed Josie for her lack of loyalty.
Estelle swallowed hard. “Let’s just focus on making lots of good energy happen.”
“Why?” I felt a chill in the air. “What happens if I don’t pay up?”
“Igor in accounting? He. Um.”
“What?” She was acting like something huge and horrible would happen to me. “Bad interest rates?” I’d sat through a lecture about those with Samantha while watching her cut up all but one of my credit cards—which I now had to pay off in full each and every month like a smart adult. “Or do I get eaten by the dragon who ate Paxi?” I laughed, but Josie froze beside me.
I could have sworn Estelle went pale, muttering something about Igor eating someone or something. I wasn’t totally sure, but the lightness was definitely gone from the room. “Sorry,” I croaked. “What happens to me?”
“Nothing, nothing!” Estelle said brightly. “In all likelihood, your past, present and future will be placed on the scales in the Magical Court of Rules and a determination will be made at that time.”
“What does that mean?”
“My advice is do your best, and stay off of Mrs. C’s naughty list.”
“Who’s she?”
“A witch. So, are you good with the plan?”
“Um.” I looked to Josie, whose brows were furrowed in thought. I didn’t dare glance Tamara’s way. The fingers on the hand she was holding had lost their feeling thanks to her killer grip.
“It’s the only way, isn’t it?” Josie said, her question more like a statement.
“Other than sending an e-transfer for the balance, yes,” Estelle replied.
“Then that’s that.” Josie shifted, facing me. “We’re done here.”
As we got up to leave, I stopped at the office door. My mind was running around like an excited Felipe when we brought out a bag of Spitz—his favourite sunflower seeds—only I wasn’t excited. I was confused, and I was having trouble wrapping my head around all of this new information.
“My wish about James?” Estelle nodded. “That’s worn off, right? Everything he says and does—that’s him, right?”
Estelle gave me a sweet, reassuring smile as she nodded.
Feeling relieved, and with my feet practically floating like the fairy crossing the pink carpet, I coasted along after Josie and Tamara. My smile grew as we made our way to the doors. James found me beautiful and, by some happy miracle, I was that sweet man’s type.
* * *
Outside YFGM, Samantha and Gabby were gone. Josie tried to explain the time differences between worlds and portals. Basically, what I gathered, was that our friends hadn’t actually been frozen, but time had done a slow-down and speed-up thing around the portal as part of a protection spell.
Still concerned for their wellbeing, as well as their mood for being ditched by us without apparent explanation, I called them only to discover that they were happily having drinks in a nearby Irish pub.
I still didn’t get it. But they told us to go on home without them, so now Tamara was driving us back to the apartment in her convertible, Benjamin, with the top up, the May evening still too chilly for letting the wind tousle our hair. As she drove, I considered how many good deeds I needed to perform over the next three months in order to pay off all of my stupid, thoughtless wishes. If each good deed was worth a buck, I needed around one-hundred thousand of them. If my math was on target, that was over twelve-hundred good deeds a day.
I turned, looking into the back where Josie was sitting. “Josie, can you do the math on my account for me? How many good deeds do I have to do to clear my account before August 15 th ?”
“How much is a good deed worth?”
Tamara had been clutching the dusty, yellowed list Estelle had given us from accounting when we’d left, and I found it on the dashboard, wrinkly from being in contact with her clammy hand. I held it up to the window to catch the waning evening light.
“Gimme that,” Josie demanded. She hunched over the list, mumbling numbers. “The average seems to be about seventy cents. Canadian.”
I let out a squeak, causing Tamara to swerve around an invisible obstacle.
“What?” she gasped. “What?”
“Seventy cents !” I complained. “Why is the Canadian dollar always so weak?”
“Exchange rates suck,” Josie muttered. “Although, I’m not sure what currency this would be exchanged from. Galleons? Spacebucks? Latinum?”
“Seventy cents is an outrage,” Tamara complained. She was still pale and had been since the door for YGFM had appeared. I hoped this wasn’t a permanent affliction, and that I hadn’t accidentally broken my bestie.
“That can’t be right.” I reached into the back seat for the price list, but Josie pulled it further away, refusing to share. Why hadn’t we noticed the prices back in Estelle’s office? And why had she sold this karma plan as something feasible when it clearly was not?
“This karmic price list has to be out of date,” Josie muttered. “Carrying someone’s groceries for one block or less: 50 cents. Seriously? Changing a flat tire for a stranger: $1.50. Shovelling a neighbour’s walkway: $0.75. Baking a treat for someone: $0.35. Where are the ideas that are worth more than a buck? And what decade is this list from?” I heard the crinkle of paper, like she was checking the back of the page for more details.
“You guys,” Tamara said in an exasperated tone like we were children, “of course, being a courteous person and doing things such as helping an old lady cross the road doesn’t pay well. It falls under the domain of good citizenry and being a decent human being.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like I’m going to have to become Mother freaking Theresa,” I muttered.
Trying to avoid the temptation to spiral into panic, I performed some quick and dirty mental math. No, that couldn’t be right. I reached into the back and snatched the list, scanning it. These prices really were rock-bottom low. If this was accurate, then a good deed average was closer to seventy cents rather than a dollar. And that meant I needed to perform closer to sixteen-hundred good deeds a day, rather than a thousand. How could I ever do that?
I couldn’t. Plain and simple. In August, I was still going to owe my fairy godmother a big stack of cash that I didn’t have.
“Stop the car.” I reached for the door handle, a tidal wave of panic hitting me, nearly pulling me under. I unclipped my seatbelt before Tamara stopped, my door swinging open.
“Whoa! Where are you going?” Josie demanded as Tamara ran one tire up over the curb in her haste to stop the car for me.
“I need to walk.”
“You okay?” Josie jumped out with me.
“I need to walk.” I began marching, Josie falling into step beside me as Tamara coasted slowly alongside us, windows down. “Just need a minute,” I called, waving Tamara away. “Go ahead home.”
“I’ve got her,” Josie assured her, and after giving me a doubtful look, Tamara complied, pulling away.
Tugging my coat closer around me as the spring wind whistled down the street, I spied a man carrying a box into one of the brick buildings close to our apartment. I jogged ahead to hold the door for him.
Actually, maybe this was going to be a snap. I was a natural at good deeds. Only a couple more thousand left for today.
“One deed in the bank,” Josie commented as we met up again.
I groaned. “I forgot to do the chant thing in my head.”
Estelle had been very clear that I had to empty my mind before performing a good deed, and mentally say that I was acting to pay off my debt with Estelle. I hadn’t done that, which meant the positive energy I’d just created hadn’t been sent to Estelle’s account.
“Next time.”
“This is going to take me forever, and I have less than ninety days.” I turned to her. “You believe in this stuff, right? Could good deeds actually work?” I was nodding, subconsciously encouraging her to echo me in a reassuring way.
She chewed on her bottom lip, and I could see the doubt in her big brown eyes.
I groaned. “This is impossible.” I started marching again, my heels hitting the sidewalk with every step, filled with frustration and anger. Anger at myself, and at Estelle. I thought of my dad and the birthday wish that had betrayed my family’s security. That wish shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been granted.
Josie snagged my jacket, pulling me to a stop, her look thoughtful. “You need to think bigger. A lot bigger.”
“How do I do that? What’s bigger?”
“Something that helps more than just one person.”
“Volunteer at an animal shelter?”
“Maybe?” She didn’t look convinced, and I continued walking again.
“That’s got to be good karma,” I argued. “It’s for poor abandoned animals. It’s definitely got to be better than baking cookies for a neighbour.”
“Unless it’s for Randy.” She giggled. “That’s automatically worth more.”
I snorted a half-laugh.
“Maybe I could start a charity?” I suggested. Although, I wasn’t sure I had the time or expertise to get one up and running before mid-August. And even if I managed that, there wouldn’t be enough time for it to create the amount of good energy needed to bring down my debt.
“You need a project that benefits many, and can grow like a snowball,” Josie mused.
“Pyramid scheme?” I teased.
“No, yeah, maybe. You need a snowball you can push down a hill so it can grow and lead to more beneficial effects. Karmic energy is an action cycle. It’s cause and effect, cause and effect. If you can get that going, then it’ll start to do most of the work for you. Sorta like compound interest.”
I laughed, appreciating her optimism. “You sound like Samantha. She loves her compound interest.”
“Yeah, well, even though she’s a bit spoiled, she’s helped me grow my inventory business’s bottom line with all of her tips. I may even get to retire one day. Imagine that.” She bumped her shoulder into me.
“Yeah. She sucks.” We laughed, the warmth toward our friend unspoken, as was our appreciation and loyalty to her. “What will she and Gabby remember about us going into the office-portal thingy? From their perspective, did we ditch them or just vanish into thin air?”
“They won’t question it. There’ll be a rational story they both believe for why we parted ways outside YFGM.”
“But they don’t believe in…” I waved a hand in the general direction of Estelle and the office filled with fairies “…all of that?”
“No. Not yet, anyway.” She winked at me, clearly loving all of this.
What a weird day.
We passed a group of teenagers milling about, aimlessly kicking their skateboards against the curb, one of them dribbling a basketball, then bouncing it off a nearby boarded up building, leaving round ball marks on its siding. The wind pushed an empty pop can across our path, clanking along before getting caught in the fence that stretched in front of the vacant lot. At least the kids weren’t playing in the lot’s trash again. I could still see the slide they’d made earlier though, like a tempting invitation that would surely woo them back.
Josie and I hunched further into our jackets, and for the first time, the city didn’t feel full of possibilities. Our neighbourhood, Everstone, felt dirty and slightly unwelcoming. I still wished Everstone would get cleaned up and given a good dose of community pride.
That wasn’t a real wish, though. I was done with those. It was more like wishful thinking, which certainly had to be different.
As the streetlights came on, three kids missing their front teeth ran by, playing tag in the street, all smiles and shouting. I thought of them growing up here with the street as their playground.
Cleaning up our neighbourhood could be one of those big snowball ideas Josie had mentioned, but the question again was, how did someone like me do that?
A car tooted at the boys as it crawled past, and I muttered to Josie as we stuck to the sidewalk, “They’re going to get run over.”
A dog barked in the distance, reminding me of the shelter a block over and smaller, more achievable karmic ideas. “How much do you think volunteering at the shelter would earn me?”
She shrugged. “A dollar each time, maybe?”
“But I’m taking care of a poor, defenceless, surrendered animal!”
“You have to think bigger. There’s got to be something.”
I sighed and hooked my arm through hers, grateful not to be walking alone tonight.
While we walked, I took in our neighbourhood. If I were to walk dogs, where would I take them? There were no green spaces in Everstone. Just sidewalks and parking lots. Were city dogs really supposed to do their business where everyone walked? That didn’t seem right somehow, and I felt as though someone ought to do something about that, too.
Sighing with an internal feeling of defeat as we reached the end of the block, I paused before crossing the street. I turned to Josie. “Do you hear that?”
“Sounds like crying?”
We both pivoted to face the direction we’d come. The kids were no longer playing tag in the street, and the teenagers were gone.
“Shh!” She grabbed my arm. “There it is again.” From somewhere around the middle of the block, someone was crying.
Josie and I looked at each other and took off running, stopping in front of the abandoned lot, scanning for the kids we’d seen earlier.
“Right there.” I pointed to that awful barrel and sheet metal slide they’d made last week. I bent down, cramming my curvy body through the hole in the fence, getting muddy hands as I clawed my way into the lot. I cursed under my breath. “This lot!”
“You okay?” Josie called to the three boys once we were through the fence. Josie, being tall and slim, had made it through without apparent issue, popping to her feet at almost the same moment I did.
A boy’s head appeared over the barrel, his voice filled with panic. “He cut his leg.”
We came around beside the children and I sucked in a breath. A boy in sweatpants, about ten-years-old, had a bad gash in his thigh.
“You.” I pointed to the tallest boy. “Go get his parents.” I turned to Josie. “Call an ambulance.” I already had my jacket off and was pressing it to the wet wound. “You’re going to be okay. Just breathe, okay?”
He nodded, his eyes filled with tears and fear.
Josie, who was dialling emergency services, whispered to me, “Say the chant.”
“What?”
“The chant .”
I shook my head. Exploiting this poor kid’s awful moment for the betterment of my magical world financial situation felt wrong. So wrong. I was just doing what anyone else would do.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said again to the boy, hoping that I was speaking the truth. He leaned into me, tears still streaming down, and with the hand not holding pressure to his cut, I pulled him against me for a hug. He sniffled into my shoulder and I whispered reassurances and held him while we waited for help.
Despite being in a short-sleeved work blouse, I wasn’t that cold, and I took in the lot. It was actually fairly spacious, and we were protected from the wind by the brick buildings standing on either side of us. There was no alley through the block, and if someone tore down the abandoned warehouse set behind this lot and cleaned everything up, the double lots would make a decent park. There would be room for basketball nets for teens, a real slide for the kids to whiz down, or grass for them to play tag on, or even just a spot for adults to take their dogs. It could be that community piece that Everstone was missing. Something to help it become more than a forgotten collection of old buildings people had decided to live in.
There were likely grants available for creating that sort of green space. But again—how did one set a project this massive into motion?
A minute later, the boy’s parents came running, eyes wide with panic, the ambulance arriving shortly after. Josie and I stepped back through the fence, the paramedics having made the hole bigger with their giant wire cutters so they could bring a gurney in for the injured boy.
“They need a real park,” I said to Josie as we made our way home.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I felt a fire in my gut, anger and injustice swirling to create a desire to help. To make a difference. To give the people of Everstone something like what I’d had back in Eagle Ridge. Safety. Community. Greenery and beauty.
Josie contemplated me for a beat. “I think you may have found your big idea.”
* * *
I might have found an idea, but the next day was a mental dumpster fire. First, I didn’t know how to make a green space for our neighbourhood, and I obviously didn’t have the cash to buy the lots and transform them. I’d looked up grants, but I’d need about a million of them to build the park I envisioned. It didn’t help that I didn’t know what I truly needed or where to start. Plus, what was to say that a park in our tiny, kinda rundown neighbourhood would even start a karmic snowball?
Second on the disaster list was my data entry shift at the Book Emporium. That had been awful for the first time in a very long time. I’d made more mistakes in one day than I had over my entire temping career. At one point, Samantha had hissed at me over her stack of books, telling me to smarten up.
How could she act so calm and like life was normal?
Yeah, I know. She didn’t believe in fairy godmothers, and thought the three of us had simply headed home after not finding the source of the fake invoice while she and Gabby had gone for drinks. That was her reality. And it was a little different from mine right now.
And anyway, if she had this kind of debt, she’d pay it off herself with her fantastic money juggling and investing skills, or simply ask her mommy and daddy to take care of it.
But in my world, none of that was happening. Despite my attempts at proper financial management, I was a long way short of a hundred grand and my parents were no help. My mom had basically disowned me via rampant disinterest, and my dad was on disability and barely making ends meet.
What was really tweaking my brain, though, was the idea that if fairy godmothers were real, other things might be, too. For example, hungry dragons. Ogres. Leprechauns. Santa Claus. Witches. Maybe even garden gnomes were alive and real, like in that movie Gnomeo and Juliet . What about Godzilla and zombies? Where did it all end? What was truly fiction?
During my bathroom breaks, I’d half expected Moaning Myrtle to appear, because what if J.K. Rowling had been telling the truth about that particular ghost and she was actually real?
Although Myrtle was part of Hogwarts which was in England. So chances were, I wouldn’t meet Myrtle due to geographical issues. Not to mention that Hogwarts and Myrtle were both fictional.
Supposedly.
Yeah, that was where my brain was at. Doubting everything. Plus, I was tripping over myself to be exceedingly helpful to the point where I was almost knocking people out of the way to open doors for them, muttering Estelle’s payback mantra under my breath, and getting sidelong looks like I was losing my grip on reality.
If only they knew.
Finally at home, eyes closed and splayed on my back, I soaked in the comfort of my bed. It was going to be a very long three months.
I’d even tried being patient with Randy when I gotten in, murmuring Estelle’s chant under my breath while letting him tell me all about the dating app he was on. That had to be worth at least five bucks, right? Especially since the entire time I ignored the fact that my long-awaited order from an online pottery shop that sold ancient Grecian pieces was sitting on the mail shelf behind him.
Honestly, I needed to delete the shopping app from my phone, because whenever I got down in the dumps, I found myself mindlessly scrolling and bidding in more auctions than I should. And right now, I was in a prime mental space to do a lot of bidding.
I needed a distraction. Like a date with James.
I laughed in the silence of my room. Right. Talk about getting wrapped up in a fantasy world. Although, that was one I’d happily enter.
Maybe I could get lost in a good book. I rolled off the bed and went to the living room and settled onto the couch with one of my recently saved hardcover history books. Within minutes I was absorbed, my mind a few millennia away.
Samantha came home, plopped down on the chair beside me, kicking her new black boots up onto the coffee table.
“Aren’t they pretty?” She angled her feet one way, then the other.
“Better take them off or Gabby’ll shoot you.” I turned a page, admiring the glossy photos. Gabby, when she wasn’t mooning over her best friend Lamonte, scolded us for living like pigs. I swear the handheld vacuum spent more time being carted around by her than sitting in its charger.
Realizing I could do something nice for Gabs, I went to the kitchen and gave the coffee table a wipe, clearing off the dust and crumbs while mentally saying Estelle’s payback chant.
“Gabby is wearing off on you,” Samantha said as I sat down again.
“Just trying to be a good roommate,” I said, grabbing my book again.
She reached over and flipped up the cover of my book before dropping it again. “Ew. Bor-ring.”
“Hey.” I hugged the book to my chest, whispering, “It can hear you.”
“What’s your deal? You were messing up all over the place today.”
I let my head fall back against the cushions. “I’m stressed.”
“About what?”
“That fairy godmother thing.”
“The fake invoice? Ignore it.” She began unlacing her tall boots. “I found a new restaurant. It sucks. But its bar is hopping. We should go on Friday.”
I nodded to acknowledge her, but didn’t ask for details like I normally would. Instead, I hugged my book, my mind back to spinning about how I was going to pay off my debt.
She pointed to the Grecian pottery book still snuggled in my arms. “Don’t you already know everything there is to know about old crap made from clay?”
“Hey, we all have something quirky about us. You have an unhealthy shoe obsession, for example.”
“It’s a womanly right.”
“Yeah, well. At least my quirk isn’t…” I tried to pull up a positive quality about my thirst for knowledge and failed “putting anyone in danger.”
She snorted, brows raised. “Unless you talk about the book.” She threw out a few pottery terms, gave a fake yawn and sagged into the chair, making little choking sounds while flailing like she was in the throes of death.
“Ha. Ha.”
She sat up again. “You need to get out more.”
“Yeah, I wish. No! Not really! Not wishing that.”
Samantha gave me a concerned look.
“So, hey.” I leaned forward, realizing this would be a great time to pick her brain about the financial aspects of my karmic park plan. “Say I was going to start a charitable project. What do I need to do?”
She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Write some bylaws, create a board. Get signatures. Apply to become a charitable society with the provincial government. Get approved. Hold meetings and fundraisers, etcetera, etcetera.”
That felt like a lot of sitting around and paper pushing.
“What if I just wanted to clean up that lot down the street where the kid got hurt last night?”
Her brows pinched. “That was awful. I’m so glad you and Josie were there.”
“Yeah.” I tried not to think about it, which was difficult. The boy’s parents had managed to catch me coming into the apartment lobby tonight and had gifted me a homemade pie of gratitude and had returned my jacket—the blood miraculously washed out of it. Their son was going to be okay, but I couldn’t ignore their teary eyes and the feeling that I needed to make a change, so stuff like that wouldn’t happen again. “Could I clean up that lot, or turn it into a park without creating a charitable society?”
She shrugged again. “Complain to the city. Get the lot owner to clean it up.”
“I did. And the mom said she complained weeks ago, too. Nothing’s happened.”
“But now that a kid has been injured, I’m sure it’ll get a new fence at least.”
A fence would do nothing. “It should be a park.”
Samantha’s brows lifted at my insistence. “So do it. Raise money. Get grants. Buy the lot. You don’t have to be a charity.”
“I don’t?”
“No. Clarisa always does crazy stuff like this. She steps up and helps, you know?”
Samantha’s stepmom was a lady who lunched. And apparently did good deeds for her community. I needed to become her, but without the lunching part. I needed to figure out how to do all of this in enough time that it could snowball some good energy right into my magical bank account over at Estelle’s.
“Where would she start?”
“Call the city and find out who owns the lot. Then look up what it’s worth. Take it from there, I guess.”
I nodded as my phone buzzed with a message. I patted around beside me to find the device in the couch’s cushions. I held it up, staring at the screen as my heart leapt with joy.
James: Joining leisure league. Wanna help me shake the dust off my pitching arm?
I hunched over my phone and typed out a reply.
“Ooo. Is it James?” Samantha cooed. “You’re smiling and blushing.”
“Shut up.” I was crushing, yes. But it would never come of anything, even if he did seem to like me back. The two of us wanted different things, so why entertain the idea? We were just friends who enjoyed each other’s company.
“Tell him I say hi.”
“No.”
Me to James: Of course! When? Where? Think I still have a catcher’s mitt around here somewhere…
This would be a perfect way to increase my good karma, right? Say the mantra, catch a few balls….
I hesitated before hitting Send. But I wanted to hang out with James and I loved baseball—which he knew. So, if I wanted to do this, and took great joy from it, did that lessen its karmic payback value? Should I be spending my time on tasks I didn’t enjoy but had greater payback value?
Or did doing things that made me happy increase the positive vibes and spread the good energy even further?
There was so much I still didn’t understand. Shaking off my thoughts, I sent the message. If I didn’t have some fun, I’d give up. Tomorrow I’d check in with Estelle and see how my account was coming along, and ask her more questions about how this whole fairy godmother thing worked.