Chapter 1 #2
“How can you care so little while I care so much?” Gabe grumbled.
“Because I know a gift isn’t the key to my happiness! The faerie-kin community will still take care of me, you’ll still be my best friends. My parents are obsessed with me—perks and drawbacks of being an only child—it’s impossible for them to love me less.”
“That’s great for you, but I’m not an only child,” Gabe moaned. “My sister’s gift of communicating with dolphins helped get her a tenured position at Stanford. My parents have greater expectations than a jewelry-maker eking out a living in his grandfather’s old house.”
“Oh, poor baby.” I patted his arm. “Someone needs cheering up.”
Then I whispered into his ear that I’d heard twenty-three percent of faerie-kin feel closer to their powers during sex.
So here I am: a twenty-nine-year-old woman waking up in her childhood bedroom with her old friend/ex-lover sprawled naked next to her.
My earliest memory of Gabe is watching him play three-on-two football on the beach.
Gabe and Deja were the team of two, because his athleticism made up for the lack of a third player.
When Deja spotted me, she bellowed at me to join them.
I trotted over in the pink shorts and navy T-shirt that made me look little-girlish instead of teenaged like Deja in her ribbed tank and cutoffs, even though we were the same age.
There’d been a discussion about whose team I would join, whether or not they should split up the girls, and Gabe had said, “Don’t be sexist. She’s on our team. ”
I’ve liked him from day one, but I’ve never been sure how I like him. I’ve always been dim that way, never quite fully tapped into my emotions. I’m not heartless like Deja implied, just baffled.
When Gabe’s eyes fluttered open, I toyed with his hair, which is a thick dark curtain that falls seductively around his otherwise-plain face.
“Have you found romance yet?” I asked.
He ran a fingertip down my spine. “I’m working on it.”
I pushed a lock of hair behind his ear and wondered if he meant with me. It sounded like he did. Particularly when his fingers dipped lower and my body began to unfurl. The summer sun streamed through the open windows, heating the room, and Gabe tossed the covers off as he climbed on top of me and—
“Pandora!” my mother yelped from the now-open bedroom door. “Whose ass is that?!”
Gabe scrambled under the covers as I snapped, “Mom, get out!”
“I didn’t even know you were here,” she said, “and you’re already bringing strange buttocks home?”
“Mom!”
Gabe poked his head out. “Hi, Mrs. Voss.”
“Oh, it’s just you, Gabe,” she said.
“The door is right behind you,” I said.
Her expression brightened. “I see what you’re doing! You’re trying to kindle your sparks, aren’t you? Sex is a good method. I’m so pleased, Pandora. You want your gift after all! Did it work?”
“What?” I made shooing motions. “No, go away. That’s not what—”
“When I was your age, we had this phrase,” Mom said. “Pop your faerie cherry.”
“Mom! That’s not why we slept together.”
“It’s not?” Gabe blurted. “That isn’t what you told me last night.”
I elbowed him. “Mom! Go away!”
“Fine. There’s zucchini muffins in the kitchen.”
“Who made them?” The mention of zucchini made me suspicious.
“What does it matter?” she asked. “Sheila made them.”
It mattered, because Mom is a lousy cook.
Well, more like a “deranged” cook. Her gift gives her a talent for comfort and hospitality, which is why the Inn is so popular, but she’s barely allowed in the kitchen.
Fortunately, Chef Sheila has a true cooking gift and produces three gastronomic orgasms per week, which are booked months in advance.
Normals take the ferry over from the mainland just to dine at the Inn.
“We’ll be down in a moment,” Gabe said. No one can turn down food made by Sheila.
Mom harrumphed at the clothes strewn across the floor, then shut the door behind her.
Gabe and I quickly got dressed, me in a red T-shirt dress, him in the purple shirt and green carpenter pants he’d worn to the Driftwood last night.
We found Mom downstairs sitting at the kitchen table with its purposely mismatched wooden chairs.
She wore her usual summer outfit of one of Dad’s old T-shirts and a mini-skort.
I read once that we find our mothers’ bodies comforting.
And sure enough, the way she sat in her favorite chair made me feel like I was home.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” she asked.
I plated a couple of muffins from the tin cooling on the stove, while Gabe poured us coffee. “Can we talk about this later? Like, after Gabe leaves?”
“Sure, we can chat while you help me prepare for the lobster bake.”
“Oh, is that tonight?” The annual lobster bake officially kicks off the summer season for faerie-kin on Beane Isle. It’s a potluck party full of magic, food, and entertainment to boost everyone’s energy before we roll up our sleeves for a solid three months of catering to tourists.
“Leonard and Leora will be so pleased,” Mom continued. “You’ve missed the party for seven years, but you won’t miss this one.”
“Has it been that long?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
The reason I’ve avoided the lobster bake is because I can’t stand to be in the same room as Leora and Leonard’s son, Leo.
And yes, “Leora” and “Leonard” named their kid Leo.
I didn’t even realize that was weird until I was twelve, because we’d basically grown up together.
Leo’s and my parents had been best friends for a decade before we were born.
The four of them had been like one big rowdy family.
They still are, even though Leora never came into her gift and doesn’t remember half the things they’d done in their twenties.
Anyway, when Leo was born, Leora and Leonard bought the property next door to the farmhouse my parents were converting into an inn.
Leo and I went back and forth so many times as kids that there’s a permanent trail through the blueberry field between our houses.
We’d adored each other. In fact, Leo is still at the center of many of my happiest girlhood memories. My favorite times with Leo were playing in the woods and kayaking and didn’t involve any magic, so those memories are safely locked in my mind.
Then at seventeen we started dating… until things fell apart.
Now whenever we see each other it’s awkward. Painfully, tinfoil-chewingly awkward.
Mostly because Leo makes me feel inferior for multiple reasons.
First, he came into his gift early, while on a field trip to Washington D.C.
in eighth grade. During a tour of the National Archives, he immediately knew the rarity of every manuscript in the museum and that their copy of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, was a spectacularly forged fake.
Then he’d passed out, and a baffled Leora had to fly down to take him home.
Second, he is now a renowned rare books dealer.
Well, as renowned as one can be in that field, which turns out to be an absolutely depressing amount.
Like, he flies business class around the world to…
I don’t know, look at books? He lives in a fancy two-story apartment in Boston and I try not to notice the Saint Laurent suits he wears in the pictures Leora shows me, but I am only faerie-kin.
Third, he looks a lot like Paul Mescal. Dark blond hair, ice blue eyes, and not quite gorgeous, yet intensely alluring.
But the fourth reason is by far the worst. I couldn’t blame Leo for stumbling into his gift as a thirteen-year-old, but what I’d stumbled from at seventeen was a beach porta-potty, during a midnight bonfire, when I’d overheard Leo say he could never love anyone as ungifted as me. Not really.
“Of course I could never settle for someone normal,” he’d told Gabe. “I’d hate to hide the most important part of me from someone I loved.”
Gabe had scoffed at him. “Oh, like you’ll break up with Pandora if she doesn’t get her gift.”
“She’ll get her gift,” Leo had said.
“But if she doesn’t?”
“She will!”
“You’d leave her if she became a normal?”
I’d frozen with my hand on the half-open door, my heart thumping, as I waited for him to answer.
“Normals are fun,” Leo said. “But faerie-kin are for life.”
I slammed the porta-potty shut so hard it almost fell over. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Sure,” he’d said, after a pause. “C’mon, it’s not like you disagree.”
I’d blinked back furious tears. “You think I agree that I’m not good enough for you?”
“You’re going to get your gift, Pan!”
What I didn’t say was, “You said you loved me. You said you loved me. The actual me, not some imaginary possible future me. You said you loved me, but you lied.”
And yeah, Diary, I’d still been young enough that I’d expected to receive my gift at any moment. But his flat acknowledgment that he’d reject his feelings and throw me away for someone he thought was better hurt more than anything I’d ever felt.
I couldn’t even look at him after that.
Ever since then, he’s maintained that he doesn’t understand why I broke up with him.
But that moment changed me. I didn’t want to believe that without a gift I couldn’t still live a life full of wonder and splendor and happiness. I’m special enough, I don’t need magic to complete me.
Which is why I usually return to the island after the lobster bake, just in case he turns up. But this is the last summer I can fully experience the magic, and I don’t want to miss it.
“I’m making a curry lasagna for the potluck,” Mom said.
“I’ve, uh, never had curried lasagna,” Gabe said politely.
“Because it’s not edible,” I said, less politely. “Hey, maybe food poisoning will spark your gift.”
“I’ll give you two servings, Pandora!” Mom stood from her chair. “I’d better get going. The fusilli won’t cook itself.”
“You’re using fusilli pasta to make lasagna?”
“It was that or spaghetti.”