Lovestuck

Chapter 7

Riya considered herself a sensible person. The kind that followed rules. Solved problems within her purview. Did her homework

on time.

Thus, when faced with the insensible invitation to date Kian Kho, there was only one logical response:

She bolted.

The school buses were a smear of yellow as she passed. Somewhere behind her, she thought she heard someone call her name—Mel,

probably—but her mind was in overdrive. No plan, no direction. Just a single overwhelming urge to get as far from Kian’s glazed,

adoring stare as possible.

Her lungs were on fire, her polo stuck to her back with sweat by the time she stumbled into the kitchen. She didn’t even remember

the run—just the singular focus of getting home. Safe. For now.

“I’m home,” she choked. More to reassure herself than anything else.

“Where’s your backpack?”

Riya jumped.

Her sister Nyra, leaning against the kitchen counter, arched a brow.

At twenty-three, Nyra was working toward an online MBA while starting a baking business from their home: Nyra’s Novelty Bakes: Cakes From Your Favorite Novels, the tagline read on her site.

One of her latest custom creations was a delicate pink vanilla cake with the words Eat Me piped across the top in intricate blue curls.

Because of her, the house always smelled like sugar and cardamom.

“Don’t need it,” Riya lied, clutching her Astronomy textbook.

Nyra put down a mixing bowl. “The perks of senior year, huh.”

Riya nodded stiffly. But now that her sprint-induced adrenaline was wearing off, she realized she’d made a glaring mistake.

She needed her backpack. She always studied after school—it was part of her nightly routine. Without it, she’d be throwing

off her entire schedule.

And if there was one thing she couldn’t afford to do right now, it was lose control.

But the missing backpack was secondary. The real problem was Kian.

The realization rattled her skull all over again. Not only had she cast a love spell, but she had cast it wrong. And now Kian was standing in the wreckage.

Nyra straightened, worried. “You look drained. You sure you’re getting enough sleep?”

Riya let out a short, broken laugh. “Of course I am.”

Nyra’s brow quirked up again. She didn’t press, but the silence that followed was as thick as her cake icing.

Riya, feeling awkward, sniffed loudly.

“Uh-huh, well . . .” Nyra wiped her hands on a towel. “You feeling up for a cupcake?”

Riya knew that tone. It wasn’t about the cupcake. It was an offering. The same quiet, unobtrusive gesture her family made when they didn’t know what else to say.

Are you okay? Do you need to talk?

“I’ve been playing around with a new recipe,” Nyra continued, crossing the kitchen toward a tray of freshly baked cupcakes,

their green frosting swirled high. “Pistachio and chocolate. Sugar always helps when I’m stressed. Try one.”

Riya’s stomach turned. If she ate anything right now, she was pretty sure it would claw its way back up.

She needed to think. To plan.

“Maybe later,” she said, already retreating like a cornered animal.

“Oh.” Nyra hesitated. “Later, then.”

Even in her panic, Riya registered the tiny flicker of disappointment on Nyra’s face. It needled her. But she didn’t have

the bandwidth to deal with that guilt—not right now.

“Greatthanksbye,” she blurted, retreating upstairs to her bedroom.

She closed the door, silently apologizing to Nyra for rejecting her cupcake, and let out a breath.

She’d successfully fled one interrogation. But she wasn’t out of the woods yet. Because the moment she took her phone out

of her pocket, it exploded with messages.

Mel.

For now, she ignored it.

She just needed a second. To breathe. To wipe the memory of Kian’s disgustingly soft-eyed stare, the way his voice had carried across the school like one of those sad Disney prince impersonators people hired for their kid’s birthday parties.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

What have I done?

When she opened her eyes again, her gaze drifted to the single poster above her desk—the Pillars of Creation. Towering fingers

made of cosmic dust and gas, surrounded by clusters of young stars. A celestial hand reaching for the universe. Her eldest

sister, Amara, had gotten it for Riya when she’d started high school, a far better present than the baby-blue dress her sisters

had given her the year before.

But Riya didn’t have the heart to inform Amara that the photo was doctored with “false color” to compensate for the fact that

human eyes can’t see all the details of gas emissions in space.

In truth, real space is dark. Cold. Colorless.

And yet, this was the poster she looked at whenever she needed to escape. To remind herself that in the grand, incomprehensible

scale of the universe, this moment was nothing.

She inhaled slowly. Her breath began to steady.

Okay. So, the facts:

She’d cast a love spell.

And it had misfired on to Kian.

But how?

Her brain jumped into motion, cycling through possibilities.

Was it because she’d lost focus while casting?

Or—maybe this wasn’t her fault at all. Maybe it was a prank.

A sick social experiment. Maybe Kian was just very, very unwell.

She almost hoped that was the case. That would be easier. Less her fault.

But hope wasn’t enough. Even she couldn’t avoid the reality: that she had made a very big mistake. Again.

Shoving aside her panic, Riya flipped open her laptop. The glow of the screen steadied her nerves, if only a little.

First, she needed more information.

She clicked open a free tab, her fingers hovering over the keyboard for a moment. Then, hesitantly, she typed: Kian Kho.

A logical place to start. If she had messed with his feelings with magic, she should at least know who she’d messed with.

Except there was hardly anything about Kian online. No social media presence. No tagged photos. No YouTube or Twitch account.

Just a bare-bones listing from a shady Find People website:

Kian Kho, 17 years old

Lives in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

Family: Crisanto Kho, father, 41, catering business (Founder of CoKo Catering).

Strangely, there was nothing about Kian’s mother. Not that it was Riya’s business. For all she knew, Kian’s mom simply valued

privacy.

Still, it was weird. Most people their age left some kind of footprint online, didn’t they?

With a sigh, Riya snapped her laptop shut. If she wanted real answers, she’d have to ask the one person who knew everyone at their school.

Her phone buzzed again.

Mel:

RIYA. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. HELL.

DON’T YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL ME????

LIKE MAYBE AN EXPLANATION FOR WHY KIAN KHO JUST CONFESSED HIS UNDYING LOVE FOR YOU IN FRONT OF EVERYONE????

I THOUGHT YOU DIDN’T KNOW HIM

anyway please call me RIGHT NOW before I literally die

LOVE YOU

but also FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CALL ME <3

Riya exhaled.

She had fully expected Mel to freak out, considering she’d witnessed firsthand how Kian Kho, of all people—had asked Riya, of all people—out. It would be concerning for Mel not to have questions.

But reading the words on her screen, the reality of it all pressed in, thick and suffocating.

Kian liked her.

Because of her peri magic.

Riya chewed the inside of her cheek. What would she even say to Mel? She could tell the truth. Admit that she’d botched the

spell, that it had somehow rebounded on to Kian instead. But that would mean admitting she’d royally messed up, and worse,

didn’t know how to fix it.

That she needed help.

Her stomach twisted violently.

She took another deep breath. Right. Panicking wouldn’t fix anything. She just had to compartmentalize and focus.

Finally, she bit the bullet and called Mel, who, predictably, picked up after a single ring.

“AREYOUOKAYANDWHATISHAPPENINGTELLMEEVERYTHING,” she squealed so loudly that Riya had to pull the phone away from her ear.

“I’m . . . okay,” she answered carefully. “Just, breathe first.”

Mel took a deep gasping breath on the other line.

“Good,” Riya continued. “Now, quick question: Did Andrew . . . ever say anything to you today?”

“What? Oh. Um, not really.” Mel’s energy dimmed slightly. “I bumped into him after last period, and he said hi in the hallway.

He was nice and polite to me, as always.”

So that was it, then. The love spell for Mel and Andrew really had failed. Now Mel sounded even more deflated than before.

“. . . I’m sorry,” Riya murmured.

“It’s not your fault!” Mel insisted, her voice warm, as if she were the one comforting Riya. “I know you did your best. Maybe it still needs more time.”

Or maybe I just failed that badly, Riya thought as the thick, cloying smell of chocolate and pistachio wafted through the air, making her stomach lurch. It

reminded her of Kian’s sickeningly sweet smile.

“But that’s not the most pressing issue right now,” said Mel suddenly, reigniting with energy. “You need to explain what it is I saw because my brain literally cannot comprehend it! And don’t you dare spare any details because I swear to God, Riya, you tell stories like my dad.”

Riya sat on her bed, rubbing at the knot forming between her brows. “There’s nothing to tell,” she muttered. The lie left

an ache in her chest.

Lying, hiding her feelings from her family—she’d learned to live with that. But lying to Mel, whose default setting was always

100 percent honesty, felt different.

“Nothing to tell?!” Mel shrieked. “RiRi, he gave you a bouquet. The boy’s in loooove!”

Riya squeezed her eyes shut. Not real. Not real. Not real.

There was a pause. Then Mel continued more hesitantly: “. . . Okay, I have to ask,” she said.

“You know, since the timing of it is pretty wild—do you think this could be some side effect of the spell? Like, I don’t know, some magical backlash or misfire or something?

What if the spell hit the wrong target and—”

Riya froze.

“W-what? No!” she blurted quickly. Too quickly. “That would be absurd. I mean, magic is messy, but that would be—” Her voice

cracked. “That would be next level.”

Mel was silent for another beat.

“. . . Okay,” she said finally, her voice light but laced with something else. “You’re right. That would totally be next level.”

Riya swallowed, trying not to wince. She hated the distance in Mel’s voice, but she had to push past it—had to fix what she’d

done to Kian before she could admit anything to anyone.

She cleared her throat. “Actually, out of curiosity, could you—could you tell me what you know about Kian?” she asked. “So

I can, you know, figure out how to deal with him.”

Mel scoffed, thankfully taking the bait. “No one knows anything about Kian Kho. He’s rarely at school, and if he is, he keeps to himself. I’ve heard . . . rumors, though.”

Riya felt a prickle down her spine. “What kind of rumors?”

“Not good ones, I’ll tell you that.” Mel hesitated. “Some kid—Jake Townsend?—claimed Kian jumped him in the field behind school

for no reason, end of middle school. Broke Jake’s wrist; he had to stop playing ice hockey for a while. Kian got suspended.”

The world spun. Riya’s grip on her phone tightened, her fingers going numb.

Jake Townsend.

One of the three boys from the Incident, whose face still went paper-white whenever he saw her in the hallway, even if he

no longer remembered why.

She forced herself to listen as Mel continued, but her thoughts had already unraveled, caught in the snare of memory:

A younger her, telling an uninterested Mr. Davis, the recess supervisor, what she’d seen.

Jake and his friends were hurting someone, I saw it. You have to do something—

I will, he’d promised. He never did.

A younger her, a week later, flipping through notes from her lessons with Sirah khala. If no one else was going to stop them, she would. Not with a love spell, but emotion magic—turning their guilt up tenfold.

A younger her, seeing Jake the next day, gray and hollow-eyed, twitching at every bell, retching on the blacktop. He looked

up at Riya. You—I saw you in my nightmare. What did you do to me? You monster. You’re a monster!

She hadn’t meant to hurt them. Only scare them into stopping. But she’d pushed the dial too far, too fast. She hadn’t been

ready, Sirah khala had told her afterward—when she unbound Riya’s mistake and, in the unbinding, blurred the edges of the boys’ memories.

After that, Riya kept her distance from magic—kept everything under control—so she’d never become a monster again.

Until now.

She took a slow, measured breath. “Go on.”

Mel obliged, blissfully unaware. “So Kian gets suspended, right? Then he starts high school the next year with a shaved head,

stops talking to anyone. Some days, he doesn’t come to school at all. And when he does, the counselor’s office calls him in.

People say he has anger issues—he’s, like, a human matchstick of a boy—but I don’t know. That’s not my place to say. Although

I guess he did break my mousetrap car.”

Riya pressed a palm to her forehead, her skin fever-warm.

This was bad. She still had a million other things to deal with—her VP duties, her Caltech essay, her entire future—and now she had this hanging over her.

And if Kian ever found out what she’d done, he’d be right to be angry. Furious.

Unless . . .

Maybe it was better if Kian never knew. That was the easiest solution, wasn’t it?

Yes. If Mel was any indication, crushes—maybe even spell-induced ones—weren’t exactly life ruining. They were simply a nuisance. Like a persistent rash that eventually went away if you just ignored it long enough.

And if worse came to worst, she could just wait it out for a month, until the next full moon—until the spell faded on its

own.

She told herself it wasn’t about fear. It was—it was about strategy, efficiency.

Riya swallowed. Yes, for now, she’d simply . . . wait.

And in the meantime, she’d take the long way around school to make sure they never crossed paths, find new routes between

classes. If he tried to talk to her, she could hide out in the office, in another classroom. And if he got too persistent?

She could always run, just like today. That, she could happily do. Spell or no spell.

“Anyway,” said Mel, breaking Riya from her thoughts, “I’m glad Kian’s seemingly pulled a one-eighty. At the very least, it

means he has good taste.”

But Riya wasn’t listening. “I should buy a taser, just in case,” she muttered.

Mel gasped. “RiRi, no!”