Chapter Text
It’s around noon when Kiara finally wakes up.
Late, much later than she’s ever used to being left unbothered in the mornings, even during that one year of white-flag-indepence-turned-surrender that she tries, as a rule, to not wonder about. It would be nice, a tiny sliver of freedom savored in her mouth like a disc of hard candy as respite from a monotonous work week, if it wasn’t so unfound, so unsettling .
A halo of sun has sneaked through the shut beige blinds and onto her face, which Kiara tells herself is the sole reason she stirs awake feeling too warm, her cheeks flushed and feet unusually temperature regulated. It’s certainly not because her dream-fogged subconscious had found it particularly entertaining to conjure up a chronological replay of every single one of Kiara’s most embarrassing life experiences. The sole use of artistic liberty taken throughout the entire night being the imaginary insertion of JJ Maybank , smug face and careless, relaxed, posture, as he stood beside her to witness the entire humiliation —age 9 and at an afternoon tea themed birthday party she wasn’t invited to, age 12 and on the floor next to broken porcelain and a ripped, cream-coloured silk tablecloth at an etiquette class, age 15 in a dressing room with a too-tight sunshine yellow dress and a broken zipper—his expression unchanging even as her own grew splotchy and red.
She swallows, shakes her head at the fabricated memories, and takes a hurried, split-second glance at the open door separating the living room and the guest bedroom. She frowns when all she sees is an empty bed, sheets thrown haphazardly on the ground. Creased and unmade, no body occupying them.
She wonders if it’s warm there too.
In the still air, Kiara hears two voices bouncing back and forth in uninterrupted conversation, the only noise she can make out in the whole house. She strains her ears and follows the sound to the kitchen where she finds John B, his back to her while he’s facing the stovetop, and JJ, leaning against the worn out and lightly-stained laminate counter.
“Oh you’re up!” John B exclaims first, shooting around to give her a proper smile, even though JJ notices her faster, eyes heavy and lidded but taking her in all the same, with no response. “Slept well?”
Kiara tears her gaze away from JJ, replies absentmindedly, “Yeah, thanks.”
John B nods, mentions casually with the tiniest lilt of a question, “You were making some noises in your sleep, I thought it was a nightmare but JJ decided it was best not to wake you up.”
A frozen kind of apprehension surges from Kiara’s bare feet and up her calves, and she sends a quick plea to the universe that she didn’t say anything mortifyingly telling of the nature of the dream as she whips her head between the two boys. “Oh um yeah, not a nightmare, just a weird dream,” she stammers, unconvincingly.
“Anything interesting?” JJ asks, eyes twinkling and cheek dimpling. More bemused than the situation requires, she thinks with furrowed brows until a sudden realization has her liquid apprehension freeze to complete dread. His eyes roam the empty space between her collarbones where she’d taken off her necklace last night and she combs her fingers abruptly, urgently, through her bed-head mess of hair and blinks away the hazy, distorted sunlight framing around JJ’s face because it feels too much suddenly, to be this domestic around him, so vulnerable.
Oh god, he didn’t think she had a sex dream did he? On the couch? Facing his room?
She pinches the inside of her elbow, tries to get all the blood flowing there so there’s none left to rush to her cheeks. She doesn’t know what’s worse, the dream she actually did have or the one he thinks she had.
“I don’t remember,” she states plainly, shrugs, hopes her demure response is normal enough to dissuade him from the topic completely.
“Shame,” he quips, his head tilting with how incredibly obvious it is that he doesn’t believe her.
“You drool in your sleep, by the way,” he whispers to Kiara as she walks further into the room, passing him by — low-toned and under his breath — before spooning cereal out of a chipped token mug and into his mouth. She watches the corner of his lips pucker, wrap around the spoon.
“I do not,” she insists, offended, but wipes the back of her hand against her mouth anyway, just in case.
A sizzling erupts unexpectedly from the hot pan behind them and John B darts back around with a quick curse, lunging for a spatula to flip the bubbling pancake. He breathes a sigh of relief when he notices the bottom isn’t burnt, just browned, and mentions like it’s an afterthought — like the conversation is free burning and to be continued even with the addition of her in the room, not hastily, reflexively, put to an awkward end because of her outlier newness — “I had a strange dream too. Maybe we left the air on last night?”
JJ shakes his head. “It broke last week, remember? And I haven't sat down to tinker with it yet.”
John B hums. “All I know is, last night we had 400 million dollars of solid gold bars right under our nose and pocketfuls of energy as we pirated,” he says, straight-faced and a little bored, strangled mid-way through with a yawn. Then continues, the next part directed pointedly at JJ, “And this morning, we have two noise complaints and a broken AC,” he pauses, stretches his left calf causing a clicky noise, “and achy knees.”
“Even in your dreams we can’t hold on to money for more than a day,” JJ groans.
She bites down her grin.
John B spurts another circle of batter onto the hot pan, taking a huge step back when the popping fizzles intensify like a warning. “What do you think it means? They say dreams are the window to one’s destiny right, maybe we should buy a lottery ticket?”
‘We’ likely meaning him and JJ, obviously, seeing how he just met her a day ago. Kiara rubs her thumb against a particularly worn, scuffed groove of the kitchen island.
“Probably just that we’ve reached that special age in every child’s life when they realize they grew up to be just like the worst parts of their parents,” JJ answers with a sigh.
And that was kinda what she was doing. Squeezing herself into the pulsing crowd of any town that would accept her, barging her way into people’s lives until she became such a constant they couldn’t not acknowledge her as part of their daily routines — like a tree on someone’s regular route to work, recognized as part of the scenery, maybe even sometimes complimented, but never the sole reason for a trip, never directly sought after .
Isn’t that just what her mother did? Joined the tennis club, read up on art collecting, partook in committees and visited homes like it was transactional. Sold gossip for an offer to an invite-only golf club, unabashedly entering every conversation in search for a golden ticket to the life she gave away in her youth.
Kiara smothers a snicker against the ridges of her wrist, chin tucked into her neck even though it’s really not even that funny. Not funny at all, actually. But a single hiccup of a self-deprecating snort escapes and JJ catches her eye at the sound.
“I’m almost done making breakfast if you wanted a plate, Kiara?” John B offers, making a show of topping off the stack of pancakes he’s piled on a plate beside him. It’s an impressive feat, at least a dozen hotcakes piled atop one another, a pool of butter licking the edges of the plate from the leftover grease of the pan, lopsided and not particularly aesthetically forgiving but, impressive.
Kiara brightens, answers, “oh, only if you don’t mind,” while making her way to the barstool closest to the window, and inadvertently furthest from JJ.
She can see JJ’s jaw clench in her periphery as she balances on the edge of the stool and curves forward, back sloped as she tries to get a closer look at John B’s cooking.
John B slides the plate across the counter, side-eyes JJ who’s dragging a hand through his hair, and mentions, “JJ was supposed to be brewing the coffee but he’s always a little slow in the morning.”
A muscle twitches in JJ’s shoulder under the faded cotton aquamarine of his t-shirt as he grabs a fork from the drying rack near the sink and steals half a pancake from the plate before Kiara can nudge it closer to him. He says, chewing, open-mouthed and obnoxious, “You wouldn’t even be out of bed right now if Ariel didn’t text that she was sick and you didn’t have to open the bakery today.”
John B gawks. “That’s not true, I’d be up for Friday hot yoga either way.”
JJ shakes his in disagreement. His fork is left clattering against Kiara’s plate as he goes to finish his cereal, shaking the excess milk off his spoon and dumping it in the sink while running his tongue against the outside edge of his mouth, leaving his lips glossy with spit. But then, instead of pouring the leftover sugary milk down the drain or chugging it down, he places the half-empty cup beneath the spout of the coffee maker. Kiara can’t see which buttons he hits or if the side tab is flush with enough water, just that JJ rotates the top lever and inserts a new filter and a spoonful of pre-grounded beans, the whirring of the machine echoing as it pours dirt-coloured liquid into the mug.
Kiara stares slack-jawed in horrified fascination.
“What did you just do?” She asks, interrogatively, as soon as JJ returns to his perched position at the counter.
JJ tilts his head at her dismay, takes a large gulp defensively. “What, the coffee? It’s ingenious.”
She grimaces at him, looks at the swirling concoction of light brown and the bobbing chunks of chalky rainbow remainders. “It’s inedible is what it is.”
John B stretches from his seat, unperturbed and removed from the argument — probably used to JJ’s outrageously poor decision making — and asks Kiara, “did you need a ride anywhere, I can drop you off before I go to work.”
“I’ve got it,” JJ intercepts before Kiara can so much as open her mouth. He jostles gently against John B’s shoulder, “don't want to mess up the bread’s delicate schedules, right?”
John B narrows his eyes at the two of them but agrees noncommittally at Kiara’s shrug of cooperation. He leaves to get changed, a pancake folded between his teeth.
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And maybe the dream wasn’t real, but it sticks to her like it was, unwaveringly syrupy in the way it leaves her feeling unbalanced and on uneven footing. Like he knows so much more about her than she does about him, sees her more fully, and she wonders —eyes lingering on the DVDs slotted under the TV as she follows him out the house— if any of John B’s old family videos include him, airless with the childish levity she can catch sometimes, mid-conversation, that he’s missing. If she can pinpoint when exactly he started leaning against every piece of furniture like gravity was created, specifically, to weigh him down and he was too tired after years of trying to hold himself up. If there’s a camcorder hidden in the bottom of a junk drawer or under a bed somewhere with recordings that can answer her curiosity, her craving of him.
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“So what’s the goal here?” JJ asks once they’re two fatigued conversations about the weather and a heartened speech about the dangers of heatstroke (as exemplified by an anecdote about a cross-faded cousin) past the house. Not that Kiara could answer a single comprehension question about the matter, she was too steel-focused on the minute movements of her arm, how she almost but never quite brushed against his shoulder with each step, those few inches maintaining a boundary she didn’t know how to cross. “What’s the witch equivalent of a part-time job?”
Kiara stalls, silence stretching as she watches the town thrum with purpose around her. She hadn’t even noticed they’d migrated from the broken link chain fences of paint-chipped homes and into the heart of the district, small businesses tricked-out like the expensively embellished ornaments her mother rebought yearly for their tree at Christmas.
She watches kids scrambling with clunky backpacks and leaving sneaker marks on the sidewalk in their attempt to reach school before the bell, bleary eyed office workers with jumbo sized coffees cupped in careful hands, and answers inadequately, “I don’t know yet. Something the community needs, I guess.”
“Using your magic?”
Kiara sighs a tired breath.
There’s a quaint greengrocer shop built precariously over the precipice of pavement, an oversized wheelbarrow compartmentalized with rustic wood crates holding tiers of polished Gala apples and a variety of fragrant citrus. The owner is a girl about their age, perked behind the stand, with strawberry blonde hair and a soft smile that she brandishes at JJ after he lunges forward to catch a tumbling tangerine, hands it to her with a self-satisfied shrug.
“Yeah,” Kiara responds slowly, watching the girl slap his shoulder in thanks then gather a miscellaneous handful of fruit she stuffs in a small plastic bag and hands off to him as compensation, like it’s a practiced routine.
“Otherwise what?” JJ asks and it takes a second for Kiara to realize he had started walking again. She hurries after him as he continues, “you have to go back, right? Give up your powers?”
Kiara gives him a strange look.
“How do you know all this?”
He shies away from her inquisitive stare, mumbles, his head tipped down at the gifted bag as if to inspect its contents, “I remember learning it from school, we had books about that kind of thing.”
And now, Kiara may not know JJ all that well, she may not have grown up with him like John B did or danced around him on a regular basis like the girl from the fruit stand, but even she knows well enough that he’s lying. He rubs his palms back and forth against the handles of the plastic bag until it gets too twisted to sway and unravels. She squints dubiously.
He titters on the sides of his feet at her loud non-response, admits, “it was mostly pictures.”
She nudges his ankle.
“My mom would talk about it sometimes. She knew someone who was a witch when she was young and I guess that made me curious. And during detention one day there was this pile of books the school was donating for the holidays, as if that’s what poor kids are begging Santa for, books, I mean come on when all of Figure Eight is opening their new white sneakers and phones the size of flat screen TVs,” he huffs begrudgingly, the high points of his cheekbones ruddy pink, “and well, I was bored, okay? I don’t think it’s even legal for them to confiscate phones as much as they do, teachers are all just on one fucking huge power trip.”
Kiara half-smiles, thinks about how those were the exact kind of gifts she used to get, thinks about how there wasn’t even a donation program like that at her school. If any of the parents ever wanted to do an act of good, they’d throw a banquet—with long guest lists of important people and out-of-state catering and enough delicate, shatterable, glass structures to drive home the point that Kiara was the de facto bull in the china shop—to flaunt their humanitarian kindness.
She turns to him slightly, and it trips her up a little, minorly disrupting her coordination as she asks, “what else did that children’s book tell you?”
“I don’t know,” he starts off, “something about trading your magic services for stuff, like groceries and rent, a whole bunch of puritan bullshit if you ask me—I mean, you’re supposed to help us common folk with the one thing no money can buy and all you get for it is just enough to get by?”
She glances subtly at him, the frankness of his expression, the rambly nature of the way he speaks—like he knows what he wants to say but rushes over the words so no one has a chance to cut him off—replies with an eyebrow raised, “puritan, huh?” and finds herself surprised with how much she agrees with him.
She realizes then, somewhat frustratingly, pathetically, in the middle of this coastal town madeover by some billionaire to resemble a homely themed amusement park vacation spot, that she hadn’t really thought through what she would do here, where and how she fits in. She’d figured it’d be better to just jump head-first, get out and start hunting for some kind of an answer instead of dwelling over a neverending to-do list and a scarily empty notebook meant for ideas. She frowns. “I guess, I’ll just wait and see if anyone looks like they need help? And then, see if I can fix it?”
JJ nods his head at her half-assed plan, like her guess is as good as his.
They make another several rounds around main street and eventually settle in front of a fro-yo shop, lingering near the front open-entrance at a table of testers where lactose free ice cream the colours of pool floaties are neatly arranged. JJ’s mid-bite of the portion that Kiara had rejected when they hear a lady shout, shrill and impatient.
Her and JJ share a glance.
“Well go on,” he urges, “that’s your cue.”
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Kiara’s anticipated, secretly yearningly significant, act of magical philanthropy doesn’t end up being much more than a trivial favor. It turns out the source of noise was a woman who had never learned the implications of a scream. She was a mother, apparently in distress because her son had forgotten to take with him to school the lunch that she’d packed.
A real white knuckle, ‘80s golden age of horror kind of dilemma, clearly.
And Kiara was so close to backing out, to blubbering a lukewarm sympathetic goodbye and retreating back to the crowds to find a better, more weighty, more valuable task to accomplish. One that would fill her, quiet the humming reservations she had about this place and herself. If only it wasn’t for JJ’s crooked smirk of hilarity at the situation, his hand pressed to his lips like he could erase his amusement or hide it before she noticed.
That’s how Kiara finds herself standing in front of an intimidatingly tall building, built of cobblestones with swooping metal awnings. It looks like the type of place that would house gargoyles on the roof, that would stash witches in bleak concrete-slabbed holding centers in the basement before laws were made to criminalize live burnings. All it was now was an all boys boarding school.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto,” JJ announces, slapping the thick billboard dug into the front yard that spells out WELCOME NEW RESIDENTS in blocky, menacing font.
She scrunches her nose. “Why am I Toto?”
He shuts one eye, tilts his head and leans back like he needs a broader view from which to examine her, raking her over with that stupid little tilt tugging at his lip as a tell-tale sign of an incoming quip, before receding, “you’re right, the evil witch suits you much more.”
“You better not talk this much when we’re inside, I don’t think they’ll take too kindly to our trespassing,” Kiara mutters, suddenly self conscious of her denim skirt and graphic tee, her converse muddy against the lush grass. There’s not a single sparse spot, they probably have someone whose whole job is just to tend to the yard.
JJ shakes his head, a near scoff in his voice as he insists, “We? There’s no we here.”
Kiara stares him down. “I’m not going in there on my own.”
“Well why do I have to come?” He bickers. “I’m not the witch here, I have an actual job and I’d like to save all my hardworking energy for when I do get paid.”
He has a point, she would never do even half the shit she’s about to now if she wasn’t morally or magically binded to it like a contract.
“Fine,” she concurs, fighting the urge to sulk, “take your clothes off.”
His smirk twitches wider, eyes gleam just a little bit more deviously. “Now that was definitely flirting,” he says drawn close enough that she can smell him — too light to be cologne, too nautically like wood and brine and stale sulfur and the gel ice packs they sell at the beach for blistering sunburns to have just woken up like that.
She shakes off his interest, tone firm and serious so he doesn’t notice the helpless way she’s already leaning toward him. “No it —Look, I can’t enter an all boys school by myself in a skirt, that seems like a pretty dead giveaway.”
He grins at her, openly, disbelieves her openly too. “And your next best option is what? To pretend you're a guy?”
“I’m serious, I think I’m on to something.”
" On something probably,” he pauses, prods at a chipped tooth with the tip of his tongue, pensive like he’s mentally running through a list of illicit drugs she could’ve gotten her hands on. “Narcotics?”
Kiara pouts unconsciously, trying to work out if she feels offended at his obvious pushback. “What, you don’t think I can pull it off?”
He doesn’t answer. Which, with the amount of opinions he seems to have, doesn’t suggest anything promising.
She clears her throat, lowers her register and says throatily, “sup.”
His face wrinkles like he just ate something out of date and he bites the corner of his mouth in a laugh before looking away. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something then reconsiders and starts walking to the door instead. “Alright I’ll go, but only because that was the worst acting I’ve seen in my life.”
The place is huge, colossal, decked out with high ceilings with long chandeliers and a godly amount of just strictly ornamental stuff . A long grandfather clock where there should be a front desk, two intertwining staircases that meet on the second floor as a bannister where there should probably be an elevator. A portrait taking up most of a wall of an old white man, an important one, with a monocle and wrinkles of a prominent sneer. Kiara thinks they probably would’ve gotten the ceilings painted like the sistine chapel if they had enough lawyers to defend the plagiarism.
The first floor is relatively empty except for a lady with a bronze badge clipped to her white button up blouse and a rectangular piece of I.D. hanging around her neck.
She’s not paying attention to them, eyes glued to her phone as she strolls aimlessly around the perimeter but Kiara spins around anyway, shuffles to the nearest corkboard and pretends to look stressfully concerned at the pamphlets and pinned posters, hoping to blend in. Beside her, JJ drops to the floor.
Kiara rolls her eyes as he tries to hide behind a milk glass vase, sticks out her foot and positions it behind his back so he doesn’t instinctively recline and accidentally send the whole piece crashing against the floor. He locks his hands together at his chest, miming a gun and peaks out the corner like he’s a world renowned spy and the underpaid hall monitor is his target.
Kiara sighs, drags him up by the back of his shirt and whispers, exasperated, “you’re having too much fun.”
He goes easy, lax under her hand, his eyes looking up at her like she’s pleasantly surprised him.
Like she could pull any which way and he would follow willingly.
She tries not to think about that.
They sneak along the perimeter of the halls, occasionally stooping when they pass a classroom door with square windows looking out and Kiara scowls the first time JJ grabs her hand and pulls her down with him — their backs sliding down the wall so roughly Kiara’s pretty sure she’ll find faint red marks in the mirror when she changes her shirt that night — and JJ flashes her a cocky grin when he asks if they need to kiss to throw a nosy passerby off their track and Kiara holds herself still, takes JJ’s chin between her thumb and pointer finger and turns his face, deliberately, resolutely, in the opposite direction from hers, pretends not to see his dimple appear inches from her finger when he laughs at her.
It’s not until Kiara spots the back of a head dense with ginger hair that she takes her first full breath since entering the building.
“It’s him,” she points out to JJ, tugging at his arm first to catch his straying attention.
JJ nods sagely. “The target.”
They stealthily track the movement of the boy, pursuing him from a couple steps back so as to not draw unwanted notice to them.
Just as Kiara had started letting hope bubble up in her body that this would be a generally hassle free first mission she would easily accomplish, they trail the boy to a bathroom. He steps inside before Kiara can notice the gendered sign on the door and tackle the kid to stop him from entering.
She turns to JJ, says with a desperate desire to not admit defeat, “I can’t go in there!”
He cracks his knuckles. “I’ll take care of it. First, I’ll disengage the security system —
“You mean open the bathroom door?”
“You're really bad at this roleplay thing,” he tells her provocatively.
Kiara presses her lips together. “Keep your kinks to the bedroom please.”
He winks and it’s just predictably showy enough that she shoves at him dismissively. Scolds, “focus.”
He quirks his lips, says “hold position at the port, I’ll give you a signal,” before walking into the bathroom, with his hands shoved in his pockets, further convincing Kiara that she’s right to have absolutely no faith in his abilities.
Kiara couldn't have been waiting outside the door for more than two minutes before a teacher detects her, face scrunched together and eyebrow raised like she’s eager to dole out some authoritarian verbal lashings. Kiara flinches. She’s really, really, not good with authority or sweet talking her way out of situations, never has been.
The teacher stalks up to her, arms crossed against her chest. Her voice is terse and intentionally deepend, to establish power dynamics probably, as she declares, “And what are you doing here missy? You know the rules, boys only.”
She searches the empty corridors walls for a lie, falters only semi-coherently, “Oh I know but you see , my boyfriend’s in the bathroom —” she cuts herself off, thinks about what would happen if JJ walked out right now and amends, “ Well, he’s not my boyfriend but I just have such a huge crush on him and and I know he feels the same but I haven’t had time to profess or tell him and —”
The teacher interrupts, in a no-nonsense tone, “such acts can be done on your own time, come on now, run along.”
Kiara blurts out the first thing she thinks of, with a shakingly booming declaration. “I love him!”
Taken off guard, the edges of the teacher’s face soften like Kiara’s unlocked some deeply hidden key to her stone fortress, nudged open the door with her foot, and Kiara decides to plow on, reminding herself that she needs to stick the landing in an internal voice alarmingly similar to JJ’s tone.
“I love him and —and a different girl, a snake, has sunk her claws—her teeth?—into him. She’s going to steal him away, ask him out on a date during lunch—yeah, so that’s why I have to tell him how I feel now. It’s urgent,” Kiara says all in one breath.
She winces at the less than smooth execution but slowly gains confidence the longer time passes without immediate refutation.
The middle-aged woman looks years younger suddenly, expression slack like she’s lost in thought and it urges Kiara to press forward one last time. She ventures, “you must know what it’s like to lose love because of bad timing, don’t put me in the position to find out. I promise I won’t be long.”
“5 minutes and no funny business,” the teacher repeals finally, hand over heart with her thumb stroking nostalgically.
Kiara exhales long and slow. “Thank you,” forces the words out through her teeth, “ma’am,” then books it to the bathroom before the lady has a chance to change her mind or worse, start talking about her own, likely depressing, story of lost love.
The bathroom is just as luxe as everything else in this school, tiles patterned carefully on the floor with hard marble that makes satisfying little clicking sounds every time her shoes clink against the ground in a stomp. Which really only stands to encourage her fury.
“You were supposed to yell clear!” She snaps into the room in lieu of an introduction and finds JJ rummaging through the contents of the ginger boy’s metal lunchbox. The lunchbox that Kiara knows isn't what his mom packed because that is left in a paper bag that’s gone limp and soggy by now where it’s been discarded on the floor next to the sink.
She examines the scene in front of her more closely, the ginger boy slouched against the wall, his red eyes and mussed hair, the earthy stench filling the room despite the prison sized window that’s been pried open. Her voice is at a sharp, annoying pitch that she’ll likely regret in hindsight when she screeches, “Are you stoned right now?”
Oh she’s gonna kill him. She’s gonna kill him and then take her broom and flee the crime scene and her parents will be watching the news when they see a professional sketch of her labeled as a most wanted criminal and commit her to an unethically priced rehab center where she’ll waste away.
JJ, either oblivious or willfully ignorant of her brewing indignation, mumbles, “I wish I was stoned but someone didn’t pre roll their shit.”
She seethes, “what happened to taking care of it? The mission?”
The ginger boy looks between them, appearing more clear-headed in his worried panic. “Uh mission? Hey man you’re not working with the principal or anything right? You wouldn’t do that to me?”
“No,” JJ promises nonchalantly, then looks at Kiara for confirmation when he answers, “I’m — I guess I’m technically working for your mom?”
She doesn’t give him a response, just picks up the lunch bag from where it lays forgotten and drops it on the ginger boy’s lap.
He doesn’t look convinced, eyes wrinkling in confusion. “Is that…A real job?”
“I deliver things,” Kiara answers for JJ, “like lunch. And he helps me or tries to at least when he’s not making things undoubtedly harder.”
The idea settles something in her stomach as soon as she says it out loud, edges obscuring into a growing ivy of revelations. Yeah, she could deliver things. Maybe lunch won’t be the highlight of her hard-hitting, imperative career but it’s a start. And then when she has a customer base, she can move onto bigger things, substantial cross-city things where she’ll use her broom and get large enough compensations to financially sustain her.
Her little surge of excitement is only slightly deflated when the boy replies, unimpressed, “so you're a lunch lady?”
JJ rebuttals, “more like a non-union UberEats worker.”
“You know I can just buy lunch right?” The boy levels.
By that point, Kiara’s not listening anymore. Her job is done so she grabs JJ’s shoulder and drags him out, unperturbed at his whining complaints that they’re letting perfectly good material go to waste at the hands of a newbie.
Unfortunately, they really didn’t think through a proper escape plan because as soon as they round the first corner in the hall, Kiara makes eye contact with the lady that had tried to stop her just seconds ago.
“Oh no,” she whispers. JJ tapering to a stop next to her confused.
Initially, the woman’s face lights up, her mouth rushes to a smile as she tracks the point of contact between Kiara and JJ but as soon as she takes in JJ’s presence and does a slower, more thorough double glance at his demeanor in non-school code clothes, her eyes widen like a cat that’s just gotten sight of new prey.
She points a finger at them. “Wait a second, you don’t even go here.”
Kiara nudges JJ despairingly. “Fuck. We’re in so much trouble.”
He leans closer to her, chin gently jabbing against her shoulder when he asks, “How fast can you run?”
Kiara takes a quick peek at the front door, tries to calculate how far they are from the entrance, before answering quietly, “pretty fast. I took track.”
JJ whirls to her momentarily, doubt pulling at his expression. " You took track?!”
It pulls a scoff from her lips and she jabs back, defensively, “What does that mean?”
She inspects his legs with furrowed brows, scrutinizes, “you don’t look all that fast either, who are you to judge my track abilities?”
He answers, smug, “I can outrun any cop on this island.”
Kiara replies slowly and progressively more confused, “Okay well fine — What? Why is that your parameter? How do you even know that —”
Except there’s no time for Kiara to finish her question and even less for JJ to answer because the lady’s approaching them, clicking buttons on a two-way radio attached to her belt that Kiara hadn’t noticed the first time around and JJ is shaking his arm out of Kiara’s grasp then clasping his hand more firmly against her wrist and tugging, hard, pulling her with him as they set off running, maniacally, bolting out the building and into the street and even further than that into town until the teacher is far from their sight and instead they’re both out of breath and about to faint, holding their knees with heads bowed down and gasping for breath.
“Never should’ve helped you,” JJ moans tiredly, but it isn’t true because she can see the way his feet are jerking, pattering, on the spot, like he’s ready to run again if prompted, and she can read the way his eyes have gone bright, awake, and Kiara realizes all in that same thought that it took her less than a day to pick up on these signs, to figure him out just a little bit. She doesn’t think about that either.
Not even when he walks to the nearest shop, buys a bottle of water with the spare change he finds in his back pocket and takes a quick swig before offering the bottle to her, hair dewy with sweat and falling over his eyes as he stretches his arm between them.
Kiara takes the bottle and looks away first. Tells herself her heart’s beating too fast because of the adrenaline, face inflamed from the run.
She tips the water into her mouth, avoids the rim altogether which makes JJ snort at her.
“You have a twisted interpretation of the word helped,” she answers him finally, once her mouth’s no longer too dry to shape the words.
There’s a brief lapse of conversation between them for the first time, mirrored labored breaths filling the space instead. She closes her eyes against the sun, exhausted and exasperated but a little incredulous too, a little thrilled.
He grins at her, huffs a quietly amused laugh. “A delivery service huh?”
Kiara collapses onto her back, grass itching at skin through her shirt and sighs.
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She doesn’t know how she ends up at the open-air market—any warmth of the day has been zapped out of the air, the skies have gone gray and the wind has decided to prove to her why layers are so integral to any day-to-night outfit—but her reward for a job well done was a homemade meal she scarfed down alongside JJ and a giftcard to the market that JJ had oh so generously renounced— rich people trinkets and candles the size of my face aren’t really my vibe , he’d deigned—before leaving for his afternoon shift at a fishing supply rental shack on the other side of town.
The market looked like something out of a movie, with flashy cyan-hued fairy lights strung along the trees framing the street and the diverse setup of different booths fighting for space as products were crammed on top of each other. Irregularly shaped lighting fixtures hung from a plank wood flat roof—amber glaze and stained glass and prismatic-colored mosaic crystals on frosted orb pendant lights—and european silk scarves in delicately vibrant patterns pinned to a laundry line, twillies even her mother would fawn over, love letters sold with accompanying tarot cards, old vinyls, plant pots and painted ceramic mugs. A mix of old and new, of homemade, craftily loved and used flea market goods.
She would almost think she’s in a different country altogether. Except that it’s blatantly clear from the people, or, really, one person in particular—the obnoxious, nose-in-the-air entitlement of upper class Americans—that she’s not.
“What do you mean there’s no warranty on this?” A boy asks, outraged, scowling in a freshly ironed salmon pink vineyard vines plaid shirt and leather twisted flip flops. His feet are tapping impatiently when he asks, “how am I supposed to trust the quality of your materials? Where’s your outsource supply located?”
As far as Kiara can tell, the rest of the people working in the booths seem to be immune to him, like he’s a pothole and they’re the slew of drivers making uniformed, illegal swerves without blinking an eye. Even the worker behind the register —Cleo, her name tag reads—is ignoring his progressively loud complaints, spinning the bottom sole of a steeply edged knife on her pinky.
The boy’s holding a bronze cocktail shaker he’d lifted from the booth, bringing it close to his face and tapping it on it with sharp fingers then shaking his head. “It doesn’t sound expensive.”
Cleo’s lip curls. “Either give me your money and buy the damn thing or leave before I find a different use for it,” she hisses threateningly.
The boy scoffs, taking a step back and nearly dropping the antique in his haste to show he’s offended. Red-faced, he gripes, “if it can’t take a little gentle fondling now, how will it age gracefully during boy’s night?”
“Do you need a drink?” Kiara suddenly hears whispered from behind her.
She looks around to catch a blonde smiling at her conspiratorially. Kiara tilts toward her. “What?”
She flashes a hint of silver from inside her emerald green corduroy overalls, reveals, “I always carry a flask with me on market days, eases the homicidal urge.”
Kiara chortles at first, sure that she’s kidding but at Sarah’s unchanging coaxing head-tilt, her eyes widen and she tucks a stray curl behind her ear before murmuring a delayed, “yeah, okay.”
She winces as something cold and sharp and strong slides down her throat and burns in intermittent pockets along her chest, licks her teeth .
A boy pops up from behind a pyramid of stacked coolers, kicking forward one of the bins with his feet. He’s wearing a plain gray dress shirt that matches the banner tied to the front of the booth and fiddling with a black clay bead necklace with one hand while the other moves to unlock the icebox, revealing a small raw octopus wriggling unamusedly.
His eyes narrow at her and Sarah’s exchange and he has to visibly shake himself to pull his attention away from them after muttering, “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t see that.”
“That’s Pope, he usually joins in on my bad decisions when he’s not this stressed,” she gestures to the boy now struggling to click on a hotplate, the switch winding with a stutter. Then adds as an afterthought, eyelashes fluttering as she looks up to flip through a mental memory book, “though, he spends more time stressed than he does breathing so it’s more of a once in a blue moon type of situation.”
“And I’m Sarah,” she announces with a hop, pointing to the nametag — plastered slantedly on her chest and covered in doodles made with a gold gel pen — that Kiara had already noticed.
“Kiara,” she answers in turn.
“Nice to meet you, Kiara,” Sarah says briefly before a loud thump of two heavy boots stomping to the ground followed by a measle-like squeak arguing, “it’s my right as a customer” interrupts them.
Sarah rushes forward to the scene before Cleo can lean over the table and, rightfully, make use of the pointed weapon strangled in her palm. She places a hand on the boy’s chest to force him away from the table, chastises, “Topper, literally no one here gets paid enough to talk to you about product insurance it’s
—”
He cuts her off automatically, digging his heels in. “It’s what? Understandable? Reasonable? Yes it is completely justifiable for me to want all the information about a product before purchasing, what a logical perspective from you for once.”
“Oh I see how it is,” Sarah bites, eyes darkening the way Kiara imagines a lynx would sharpen their claws into the flesh of someone’s arm.
Topper falters, “See what?”
Sarah fluffs the bottom of her hair, delicately pushes the strands behind her shoulders and places a purposeful pat on Topper’s forearm. She fusses, voice so sweet it’s dripping in burnt honey, “It’s okay Topper, I can lend you some cash if you’re short. You don’t have to haggle about the quality for a discount, it’s getting embarrassing to watch and frankly you’re exceedingly bad at it.
“Or you could just use a keg for your ‘boys night’ like a normal person,” Pope grumbles from behind the scene, too quiet to be heard by anyone other than Kiara who shares a hidden smile with him.
“I am not —” Topper spits out, his ears going red as he notices the crowds of people suddenly eagle-eyed and attentively observing the commotion. He waves his arms in reassurance, announcing loudly, “I’m not poor. I’m doing quite well actually, I just bought a rug without even looking at the dimensions, okay? Making lots of irresponsible financial purchases with no forethought of income.”
A couple passerbys snicker in his direction, whispering with secretive, cupped hands like highschoolers gossiping at lockers —w hich, they probably are, actually —until Topper leaves, empty-handed, his head tilted up haughtily like he’s making a statement.
“Nicely done,” Kiara cheers to Sarah once she’s returned, straightening the ‘Crystals & Calamari’ sign on her way behind the counter of the booth.
“Thank you,” she preens. “The people in this town are a little hyper judgemental but it comes in handy when you can make good use of it.”
Kiara nods like that’s not single-handedly the most threatening sentence she’s heard since arriving here.
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Now that there’s no longer the distracting aura of a self-titled elitist man muddying her peripheral vision, Kiara can finally take in the area around her. Her eyes roaming from the metal semi-portable kitchen setup taking up the half of the booth implicitly marked as Pope’s, to the makeshift eating area just outside the stall — plastic blue chairs that burn waffle patterns on the back of your thighs and laminated menus adorned with cartoon animals and cursive lettering — and opposite to that, Sarah’s side where long velvet trays hold dozens of smooth pebble crystals the colors of kaleidoscopes.
Her fingers hover over the line of gems, not wanting to smudge any of their surfaces, before her hand skids to a halt unconsciously. She blinks at a freckled light turquoise stone.
“We sell under-the-counter crystals too,” Sarah mentions off-handedly, teetering with both hands planted on the counter and scooting her eagerly closer like Kiara’s potential purchase is a playoff game and she doesn’t want to miss a second of the action.
Kiara does a double take at her Cheshire smile. “Under-the-counter?”
“For the specially-charged stones, you know? Cash only, no receipt, no paper trail, no information about what one plans to use the crystal for so I can claim plausible deniability,” Sarah explains sagely.
Kiara laughs. “I have very normal uses with my crystals so I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
She hums. “Besides, one crystal has already caught your attention. Hasn’t it?”
She looks up to catch Sarah staring at her knowingly. Straightens her shoulders, laughs nervously. “What do you mean?”
“Oh just that it’s pretty interesting that you were summoned to that crystal in particular.” She whispers like it’s a secret, neck curving to the side like she’s trying to look at Kiara from a new angle, like Kiara is the type of person to need that sort of figuring out. She continues, “you know, a lot of people think that rose quartz is the ultimate love crystal, but really, I quite like the turquoise stone for a love like salve, that cleanses. The way the ocean cleans a wound.”
Kiara lets her eyes wander, says cynically, “Except that the ocean doesn’t clean a wound, it aggravates it, causes infections. I used to surf, they say to be careful about that type of thing, it doesn’t always heal.”
“She’s got a point,” Pope chimes in, hand knuckle deep in a bowl of batter-covered seafood.
Sarah shakes both their words away with a hand. She assures, “It’s the basis for saline solution though, the epitome of salt water.”
They both turn to Pope like he’s the scorekeeper, waiting for input. His face wrinkles as he thinks it over, bottom lip jutting out in thought before he nods and gestures to Sarah. “Yeah that’s true.”
“Ha!” She exclaims like the words have bubbled out of her. “Having some love troubles?”
Kiara scratches at her elbow, loops one hand around her forearm to keep from squirming and reckons, only a little endeared at this random stranger’s interest in her love life, “I think that flask is getting to you.”
Sarah’s eyes twinkle and her blonde lashes wisp up giddily like Kiara blatantly confessed her culpability. “Maybe or maybe I’m drunk on intuition.”
“Yeah that must be it,” she says sarcastically.
Sarah presses the turquoise crystal in Kiara’s hands, having dug it out from the display somehow without Kiara ever noticing. “Here, take it. On the house,” she insists.
“Oh no I couldn't —”
She interjects and Kiara tries not to laugh at the stern expression that floods her face. “You don’t want to argue with me, I’ve mastered the art of manipulating polite platitudes to get what I want.”
“I really could’ve used you in the ninth grade,” she blurts out without meaning to, without realizing she’d even thought it.
Sarah beams.
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The worst part, Kiara realizes a little ruefully, regrettably, is that Sarah’s not really all that different from her.
She dabs perfume on her collarbones instead of her wrists and when she smiles it’s something compelling and cardinal more than it is a bright extension of an offering but she gets distracted when a song she recognizes comes on —says wistfully, God I love this song , bopping her head along instead of properly getting up and dancing to it—and she has a story for every one of Kiara’s, grabs her arm and pledges to tell it once Kiara is done with hers. And Sarah also lived in a house that forced her to shine brighter than she was capable of, just to warm the place, fill it with something other than silence. Kiara knows because she tells her as much, oversharing in a way Kiara’s mother would call pitiable and Kiara would call comforting, words spilling like a tidal wave from her mouth until she bites her lip, presses them together and laughs remorsefully with her feet pointed at the closest exit until Kiara laughs with her and nudges forward with a pledge of her own.
Kiara thinks they would’ve been good friends when she was younger. She’s sure they’ll be good friends now too but she can’t help but wonder how things would’ve been different if they had met before — back home, when being with Kiara was more of a hardship than a friendship, when not being alone was the thing she needed most — before she realized she was stubborn and tactless and that there was something wrong with those things. Maybe they would’ve had those types of endlessly intertwined childhood friendships that she hated to see in movies so much. The type she’d called imaginary, unbelievable, a fraud, the way people at school talked about her magic.
She wonders if it would’ve changed anything. Thinks it probably wouldn't have, except to maybe make it worse, the way eating strawberries rinsed with cold water from a hose after being just plucked from a bush forever sours every one bought in plastic cartons from the store.
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Kiara’s still huddled around the C&C booth when a little girl tugs at her sleeve, chirps an, “excuse me miss, I need some help,” and leads Kiara away from the booth with determination to the narrow path of the walkway.
Pope takes notice of the interaction, eyes zeroing in on the little girl’s expression with rapidly widening eyes.
“Oh I wouldn’t —” He tries to object, darting around in search of Sarah who’d just left to the back to rummage through her storage of crystals for a specific hand strung sun catcher she’d wanted to show off. “Sarah? You might want to get out here.”
Sarah pokes her head out at the panic in Pope’s voice, jolts up at the scene and demands exasperatedly, “Wheezie come back here.”
Kiara hesitates at the strangeness in reactions but the girl doesn’t let her halt completely, only letting up her grip so she doesn’t faceplant when she trips over her feet, stumbles lightly instead. Her face is young but set firmly with tenacity, a nagging familiarity tugs at Kiara but she can’t quite place it.
“Is your name Wheezie?” She asks eventually, following the girl further down the set of booths and shivering at the glimmering, ominous, change in ambience.
“That’s not for you to know.” The girl answers with too much overtly expressive conviction to possibly mean anything other than yes.
Kiara eyes her suspiciously. “Have we met before?”
“I meet a lot of people,” is all she says, flippantly, dismissively, like it’s moronic of Kiara to have even asked.
The inkling of a bad feeling solidifies in Kiara’s gut. “That’s not really an answer.”
Wheezie guides her to an unsuspecting fruit shack built mostly of barrels and decorated with various juicing instruments. With green trim and a crinkled sunshade in such picturesque cottage fashion that Kiara lets her shoulders drop, feeling silly for ever suspecting a blameless kid.
She exhales in relief, finally allowing her guard to drop. That, she will look back on later, was her first and most perilous mistake.
“Can you get that basket of peaches down for me?” Wheezie having slowed to a stop asks, suddenly perky, her grin a little too wide to be casual.
Kiara is less graceful with her landing, skidding on the cobblestone and hitting her knee against the wood board jutting out from the end of the storefront hutch. She rubs the joint, questions, “You…brought me all this way because you couldn't reach the peaches?”
Wheezie nods, hands clasped behind her back like the pristine picture of an angelic school girl.
Kiara shifts her weight, looks at the woven wicker hung from a metal hook near the roof of the store, brimming with fuzzy golden peaches and back to Wheezie. “Why didn’t you just get Sarah? It looked like you two knew each other?”
“Will you help me already or just wait there until I die of scurvy?” Wheezie snaps, a depraved snapshot of truth behind the innocent facade and Kiara brightens at the evidence of her vindication.
Too caught up in her self-satisfaction for having noticed an air of suspenseful apprehension and mind busy with mental flurry as she tries to work out what exactly could be going on —thinking back on her twelfth birthday when she was handed a witch handbook, chapters on possible child possessions, vengeful ghosts and preceding steps — Kiara reaches for the peaches absently, plucks them from the hook and hands them off the Wheezie. She turns around with another question perched on the tip of her tongue only to be met with the sight of Wheezie’s back, dashing further into the market until her figure disappears entirely.
It’s quite bad timing, really, that it’s only from the shadow of her dashing back that it finally clicks in Kiara’s memory where exactly she’d recognized her from. The bike incident. That brown hair and demonically glinting eyes were identical.
The cashier clears her throat curtly, tapping fingers against the timber kiosk.
Fuck. Did Wheezie just set her up?
She blinks. “Uh —”
“Fifty dollars.”
Kiara tries not to balk at the price but if the way the worker studies her for an uncomfortably long moment says anything, it’s probably written all over her face.
She reaches for her wallet, rummaging through the pocket to pull out her card when she’s stopped by an antagonistic hand pointing to a rectangular cardboard sign where various forms of payment including vias have been drawn in black sharpie and striked out with a circle-backslash.
Faltering, offering a likely wobbly smile that does nothing to win anyone over with her charm, she admits, “I only have a card and some coup — ”
“Cash only,” is all the worker repeats.
Kiara nods, asks timidly, “does cash by any chance happen to include Apple Pay?”
The cashier stares at her, eyes narrowing like she’s stupid and at this point Kiara isn’t even offended.
She opens her mouth, smells the slightly tangy burnt alcohol on her tongue, closes again. Rubs a rough hand over her eyes. “Um but, see I wasn’t even trying to buy those, this vengeful, kind of evil, girl asked me to help get them down and then just — I think she just scammed me,” Kiara finally manages to defend.
The worker’s eyes narrow. “So now you scam me?”
Kiara shakes her head vigorously, objects, “what, no of course not —”
“Money doesn't grow on trees,” the cashier asserts, tone cutting.
The rational part of Kiara’s brain must have shut off somewhere miles ago, days ago, even, before she landed here on this island where havoc seems to follow her and hindsight haunts her. It’s the only explanation for why she argues, scoffing, “no but peaches do.”
Which was pretty certainly the wrong thing to say since the cashier’s face goes dark, shoulders extended sharply like a bat about to stretch its wings while she menacingly takes her pointer finger and reaches for the button on her desk in slow motion, pressing what must be an intercom and articulating crisply, “security, we have a code 322.”
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Kiara would like it to be known that the officers never actually call it an arrest. She gets escorted by some very nice, if not concerningly buff, men who link their elbows with hers and is told they’re walking her to the back of a cop car to a temporary holding center but it’s enthusiastically civil, there aren’t even any handcuffs involved.
They cross past Wheezie who’s sat on an upside down empty milk carton painted cherry red plastic and handing out peaches to passing pedestrians like a particularly spiteful Robin Hood and then, more dishonorably, past the C&C stand where Sarah gasps and Pope mutters, “I knew something was up, Wheezie never approaches the stall, not even for free tasters,” and Sarah calls out, hands cupped around her mouth, “Don’t worry, I’ll find someone to bail you out.”
“We’re having a dinner party tonight,” Kiara yells to them, digging the soles of her feet in the ground and kicking up dust that showers speckles of dirt over her legs to stall the guards long enough to exclaim, “you should come if you can!”
She’s still within earshot when Sarah leans down and says to Pope, “We’re going, I like her.”