CHAPTER THREE
Walking through Boston on any given day, you’re likely to run into a number of vibrant street personalities—performers, panhandlers, educators, or any combination of the three.
There’s the guy who improvises little songs about the passersby who tip him.
The redcoat reenactor who patrols the Freedom Trail with a scowl and a terrible British accent.
Or Geoff Potts and the Nobody Else, an exuberant one-man band who plays about sixty instruments at once.
Finding one of these notable figures on purpose, though, is a challenge.
Especially when I only have a thirty-minute lunch break and an eerie, hazy memory to go on.
There’s no one by the doorway where I met Fedora Guy and no sign of him on the street.
Not a single person nearby has more than one hat.
I make my way to the Public Garden, a hot spot for tourists and buskers alike.
No luck. The normally bustling pathways are quiet today, not an entertainer in sight.
Just a chic older woman with a blond updo and a bored expression, sitting by the footbridge atop a vintage-looking suitcase.
I’m about to pass her when I catch sight of the gleaming cowbell she holds in one perfectly manicured hand and a crystal dish filled with coins beside her.
Another street performer, it would seem.
I don’t know if there’s some kind of professional network for these people or if they’re bitter rivals who dare not speak each other’s names, but I’m about to find out.
“Excuse me,” I say, approaching the fancy woman. She doesn’t acknowledge me. “This is a long shot, but I’m looking for someone who grants wishes—”
“Aren’t we all,” she says in a monotone Slavic accent.
“No, someone specific,” I clarify. “I ran into him down the street the other day. Fedora, long beard, weird eyes. By any chance have you seen him?”
She sighs. “Them.”
“Sorry?”
“Them, darling. Have I seen them. Don’t assume.”
With that, this glamazon lifts a finger to tip down her spectacular cat-eye sunglasses, and I nearly fall over. Two shocking, swirling glacial eyes stare at me from a fully apathetic face.
“Ta-da.”
But this cannot be the same person. The most gifted prosthetic makeup team could not create such a seamless transformation.
Hair color, complexion, bone structure—everything is different.
Everything but those impossible eyes. And yet as I stand here, locked in their spellbinding stare, something tells me the Logic and Reason train left without me a long time ago.
“It’s … you?” I stammer. “You’re the wish granter?”
“Not today,” they say matter-of-factly, shoving the glasses back up. They hoist the bell toward an oncoming crowd of sightseers. “Today I do weather.”
I wince as the loud clanging strikes my ears, followed immediately by the accented voice shouting at everyone and no one in particular.
“It is about to—” They flinch, then delicately dab one red-nailed finger on one very high cheekbone and sneer at what they find there. Another exasperated sigh. “It is currently raining.” They turn to me blankly. “Damn. So much less impressive when precipitation beats me to the punch like that.”
They stare at me a moment, then sigh yet again. “You have a question or something, darling? It is going to downpour in thirteen minutes. I would like to be somewhere with a margarita in hand by then.”
I clear my throat, as if that will help me figure out where to begin. It feels ridiculous even putting this into words. “So, the other day I wished—”
“To be the next Anna Matthews protagonist,” says the strange person in front of me, lifting their sunglasses to the top of their head.
“Next thing you know, Anna announces her new project, and you get swept off your feet in a too-good-to-be-true way by a handsome veterinarian or bookseller or prince from a made-up European country. And now you’re wondering, how can this be, what is happening, I need answers. How close am I?”
I’m fairly sure my pulse has stopped.
“I think he’s a lawyer,” I croak.
They sigh heavily and, with all the enthusiasm of a theme park employee rattling off a safety speech, begin: “What’s happening is you got your wish.
You’re the new Anna Matthews heroine. Whatever she’s working on now—the story, the characters, the dialogue—it all comes to life around you.
If she writes you a love story, you get a love story.
If she writes you the lottery, congratulations, you’re temporarily rich. ”
“Temporarily?”
They snort. “It’s not permanent, baby doll.
Haven’t you read Cinderella? When Anna writes THE END, your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.
The story will play out until it’s over, then it all disappears and your life goes back to normal.
Ta-da.” They glance down to inspect their nails and, as an afterthought, add, “Unless you die. It’s like a dream; if you die in the dream, you die for real. ”
The rain turns icy. My voice squeaks out of me. “Unless I die?”
“Relax, sweetcheeks. Anna Matthews writes romance, no? But I have to say it to everyone. You’d be surprised how many people wish for Jurassic Park or the Great Molasses Flood.”
“I don’t understand, though,” I say. “How can I be a character in a novel when I’m also an actual living person? Is my real life on hold? Is everything I’m saying just dialogue in the book?”
They roll their otherworldly eyes, setting down the cowbell and retrieving an already lit cigarette from their coat pocket.
“Settle down,” they say. “The fiction doesn’t override your real life; it runs parallel.
You’re still you and you still have free will.
One hundred percent adherence to the plot is unlikely; the story simply adapts to your decisions.
I had one lady wish to be in Pride and Prejudice and she gave Mr. Darcy a Xanax.
She wound up with a very different version of that story.
” They stare off as if haunted by the memory.
My heart hammers as the reality of this situation settles over me. According to Crazy Eyes here, Anna Matthews is writing the story of Jack and me as we speak. Unless I can outsmart her, my life is about to become a minefield of grand gestures and love declarations.
It would be ludicrous to believe. And somehow, it seems just as ludicrous not to, or to even consider my own opinion. Like standing upright and wondering whether I believe in the ground.
That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
“How can this—” I splutter. “How can you—who are you?”
They shrug, taking a long drag from their cigarette.
“Some days I am this. Some days I am that. Once a month or so I moonlight as a server at Dick’s Last Resort.
Wherever I go, I give people gifts. Wishes, curses.
My presence. Whatever I feel like.” They lazily slide their sunglasses back on and glance my way.
“Consider yourself lucky, darling. You’ve been given a wish come true …
from the Gifter.” This, they say with a dramatic flourish, hands spread wide as if casting a spell.
I blink at them. “The Gifter? Not the Giver?”
“It was taken.”
The feeling welling up in me isn’t gratitude, but indignation. This person has impossible magical powers? Fine. That doesn’t give them the right to mess with people’s lives.
“Why?” I demand. “Why would you do this?”
“Simple,” they say, tapping ash from their cigarette. Ash, which, in midair, turns to purple glitter, because of course it does. “Because you made a wish, and I felt like it.”
“Pretty sure I also wished for a better apartment and a cooler job.”
They flap a dismissive hand at me. “Apartments and jobs. Boring. You got a good wish. Why complain? You don’t look a horse mouth in the gift teeth, do you?
I didn’t have to grant your wish, after all.
I could have wished for your life to turn into a silent film, and then where would you be?
Not blah-blah-blabbing in my ear, for one thing. Maybe I made a mistake.”
My retort dies in my throat. Best not to bite the hand that chucks enchanted purple glitter at you.
“I—” I attempt to shake my head clear. Inhale. Exhale. “Fine. But … what do I do now?”
They silence me with a bap-bap-bap! and a raised finger.
“Listen. I am the Gifter. I am not the Figure Outer. I am not the Wish Logistics Planner. You go, and you let your rom-com happen. Honestly, it does not take an all-knowing mystical being to figure that out, and yet here I am, doing all the work for you. Now—” They shoo me away with a flick of the hand and reach for the cowbell.
I reluctantly stumble away, somehow flooded with clarity and more confused than ever.
My head swims, the impossible and the real and the ridiculous all smashing into each other.
Somewhere in the mess is a prickle of irritation that the next Anna Matthews novel will be spoiled for me, because I will have lived it.
And somewhere else is the nagging feeling that I should be asking more questions.
“Wait,” I call out, turning back.
But there’s no one there.
Then there’s a great snorting laugh from behind a nearby tree. The Gifter steps out, shoulders heaving, clutching the suitcase and cowbell.
“You should have seen your face! That trick never gets old. Anyway, yes. I do accept tips via Cash App. Ta-ta, darling.”
· · ·
IT’S INCHING CLOSER to eight o’clock, my apartment measures approximately four hundred square piles of tried-and-rejected clothes, and I have become completely unhinged.
On my way back from meeting the Gifter this afternoon, in a dumbfounded haze, I texted Jack, I’ll be there.
Then I spent the rest of the work day Googling how to unsend text message.
All evening, I’ve been on a nauseating seesaw of decision-making, pacing around and muttering to myself.
I can’t go. This is stupid.
I have to go. How many romance lovers would kill for an opportunity like this? I owe it to the genre. To the fans. To the world.