Chapter 11
PANDORA’S DIARY
Amount of self-doubt: All of it
After my short and uneventful early-morning sail—oh shut up, Diary, I am not falling for that prick again—I spent a few hours helping Dad.
As always, the garden overflowed like a cornucopia.
The sky was picture-perfect blue, the perfume of fresh-picked strawberries swirled around me, and when Dad said, “Now this is a meditation, Pandora,” I couldn’t disagree.
After I brought a basket of garlic scapes and asparagus into the kitchen, Mom told me to strip the beds.
As I finished folding sheets and towels in the laundry room, my mind drifted to Leo.
What a dick. What an irresistible dick. I mean, no.
I could definitely resist him and his dick.
I wasn’t even sure how we’d started kissing at the lobster bake.
Well, I know how: I jumped him, thinking he was Gabe, while high on Deja’s sex balm.
That was a mistake anyone could make. Okay, maybe anyone who’d had too many elixirs and licked all the pie plates clean.
We kissed. Fine. A one-time thing. Except then he hinted that he had feelings for me.
In broad daylight. And I saw how he looked at me.
His eyes kept telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear and his hands kept touching my foot, holding my ankle, running his thumb along the soft skin of my arch.
Trying to comfort me with soft murmurings.
I’d forgotten how deep his voice is, how much I like looking at him, how the knot in my chest loosens when I’m with him.
He is without a doubt the kind of man I want to marry.
But not him. There is no future with us, because I will not give myself to a man who believes I’m not good enough without a gift.
I wish I could avoid him all week, but I don’t want to disappoint Leora.
She’s always been a second—entirely saner—mother to me.
Even if I can’t share anything about faerie-kin, I value that relationship.
We might grow even closer in the future if I don’t get my gift.
At least, despite his dismissal of normals, Leo has never treated his mother with anything but the utmost respect and tenderness. So fine. We can be friends? Maybe?
Friends. A line that will not be crossed.
Why do I feel like I can still taste him on my lips?
“I’m coming in!” Mom shouted outside my closed bedroom door the next morning. “This is your ten-second warning!”
“It’s fine,” I said, closing my diary. “Just come in.”
She bustled in, holding a mini vacuum cleaner. “Oh! You’re alone. I thought I heard Gabe come in last night.”
“Nope.”
She crossed to the window. “Why not? At least he’s smart enough to want his gift.”
“Well, I guess he…” I said, then trailed off because she started vacuuming the windowsill.
“What’s that?” she asked, after she turned the vacuum cleaner off.
“I said that I guess he—”
She flipped it back on and cleaned the next windowsill. When she finished with that one, she said, “So? What’s going on with you two?”
“The same thing as last summer.”
She frowned. “Pandora…”
“What?”
“If you’re not trying to pop your faerie cherry, then stop playing with his feelings.”
I started to argue that maybe Gabe was playing with my feelings, but I knew that wasn’t true. I hated when Mom was right. “Okay.”
“Get up. You can’t spend all day mooning in bed with your journal. Go help Deja at the shop—or doesn’t Albert need help at the library? Leora told me you volunteered.”
“Ugh,” I said.
She started vacuuming my toes beneath my comforter. “Up! Up, up!”
“Okay, okay!” I said, dodging her assault.
I threw off my covers, though I wasn’t so sure about the library.
I wasn’t ready to face Leo again. I couldn’t stop thinking about him last night as I tried and failed to fall asleep.
And my thoughts were far more lusty than chummy.
Why did he have to resemble an ancient gladiator? My one true weakness.
So after a shower and coffee, I put on a black sundress and slunk off to Essence instead of the library.
I passed Sheila riding her bicycle with a basket full of fiddleheads, which are essentially wild baby ferns.
It was months after fiddlehead season, but that struck me as such typical faerie-kin nonsense that I didn’t even think twice about it.
When I reached the shop, Deja was busy with customers. I headed in back and grabbed one of her white blazers, so we looked like professional twins. I rang up sales for an hour before the rush slowed, and carefully didn’t think about Leo.
After the shop emptied, I pulled out my tote bag of crystals and set it on the counter. “Thanks for these.”
“Nothing happened?” she asked.
“Of course something happened. My mind opened and my spirit soared and I’ll kick you if you ask about my gift. Do you need to sterilize these or should I put them back on the shelves?”
“What, you think your giftless stink got on them?”
“My giftless glory,” I said.
“Ha!” She threw a sachet of herbs at me. “Try sleeping with this under your pillow.”
I sniffed then tossed it back. “If I want to smell compost all night I’ll sleep in Dad’s garden.”
“Please.” She crossed the room and pressed the sachet in my hand. “Mugwort is a powerful dream booster and forges bridges to other worlds.”
“Stop,” I said, trying to pull away.
She wrestled me for a second. “I’m only giving it to you—”
“Aaaaah!” I cried, loud enough to shake the shop windows. “If I hear any more talk about gifts, I will scream!”
“You just did.”
“That was barely a whisper,” I said, my eyes narrowing.
“Oh, honey, you can’t out-scream a Shrigley,” she said, with a smile that broke the tension.
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But Deja, either my gift will come or it won’t. There’s nothing you or I can do about that.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” she asked.
“Then you will still love me and I will still have an amazing life.”
She nodded. “I will still love you.”
“And…” I prompted.
But before she could say the rest, a faerie-kin customer walked in looking for rash ointment.
“I’ve got something for that.” She checked for it on the shelf and found it empty. “Poison ivy’s bad this year. I’ve just made a new batch, hold on a sec.”
“I’m off,” I told her, then removed my lab coat and hung it on its hook.
She retrieved the ointment from the cabinet. “Still friends?”
“As long as you stop helping me find a gift,” I said, over my shoulder. “Focus on Gabe!”
“Deal,” she called.
The bell jangled as I stepped outside and bumped into Hattie. Like, literally. Which was startling considering how old she was. She almost dropped the potted plant she always carried. I managed to push it back into her arms before it shattered on the sidewalk.
“Pandora!” she scolded, in a rough voice.
“Sorry!” I laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right? Is, uh, your friend okay?”
“Hmph. No thanks to you.”
I tried to pat one of the glossy green leaves. “I’m so sorry.”
She harrumphed again and whisked the plant away from me before marching down the street, the vines twined in her straw hat bobbing along with her.
Great. I’d upset sweet old dotty Hattie who never had a mean thing to say about anyone.
I consoled myself by buying a lobster roll and a cola from the shack at the marina.
I ate lunch on a bench at the top of library hill while watching tourists in rented kayaks and golf carts.
Maybe I needed to add some touristy things to my list this summer.
Swim in the ocean, watch every sunset, wake at dawn to “help” on a lobster boat.
“You are lingering,” a man declared behind me.
I spun in surprise. “Oh, Albert! Hi. Yeah. Lingering. Y’know, first Beane Isle lobster roll of the year.” I’d literally eaten it in two bites. “I should’ve gotten three.”
“You appear to have finished,” the librarian said, in his weird formal way.
“Well—”
“Except for what remains on your chin.”
“Sorry.” I wiped mayonnaise from my face. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Albert said. “To begin now.”
“Huh?”
“I understand that you agreed to look through the donated music for anything useful.”
I stood and followed him to the front doors. “Oh, right. Happy to help.”
“I am pleased to hear you’re determined to help in some way, despite your deficiency.”
“Deficiency?” I said. “I have a master’s degree in music education.”
“I meant your lack of gift.”
I almost said, “What I have instead of a gift is the bare minimum of human decency.” But Leora was counting on me, so I just looked at him for a few seconds too long.
He returned my look, then escorted me into the library and declared: “A book is a mirror to the soul, Pandora. Why? Because we live in a world not of things but of stories.”
I considered the quotation. “Who said that?”
“I did. Just now.”
“Oh. Right.”
Even when he wasn’t being offensive about normals, Albert had a way of making me uncomfortable.
He strode past the New Books shelf, running his bony fingers along the spines.
He paused at what looked like a geology textbook, then frowned at me as his fingertips walked from spine to spine like spiders.
He tapped a copy of The Girl with All the Gifts and murmured, “Well, perhaps not.” He cleared his throat dryly. “In any case, you’ll find Mr. Carter on the third floor.”
I gave him another look. I didn’t appreciate that Leo rated “Mr. Carter” while I was still just “Pandora.”