Love Fortunes and Other Disasters (6 page)

After school, she explored the stuffy stacks of the public library, finding private collections that the librarian working the front desk assured her had more to do with historical records than charms. “We don't keep back issues of magazines,” the librarian said, looking down her nose at Fallon, “but our charm-making books are on the second floor.”

“What about love charms?” Fallon asked.

The librarian cast a sidelong glance at the policeman guarding the doors. “You must be asking about
Zita
. You won't find her charms in any book. A chef doesn't give away his secret recipes, now does he?”

“Of course not,” Fallon said. “Sorry.”

As Fallon left the public library, she noticed a pink rose pinned to the collar of the policeman's uniform. She could only describe the shade as pink lemonade. The same color as Zita's shop.
Why that pink?
She thought, tucking her hands in her skirt pockets.
Does Zita have something to do with the police?
Grimbaud's emblem was a cupid, not a rose, and no officers in her hometown wore extra embellishments on their uniforms. She'd have to ask the twins about it.

Her feet took her to Verbeke Square, where she spent an hour drinking hot chocolate at one of the outdoor caf
é
s. The drink clung to her tongue, thick and creamy; she managed to relax a little. Zita's storefront was active, drawing an older crowd. A few stragglers still waited in line outside the shop to get their love fortunes, but most of the town must have already received theirs.

“How can you wear such a sad face when you're drinking hot chocolate?” asked an unfortunately familiar voice from behind her. Fallon turned to look at Sebastian.

Dark jeans hugged his legs and a green
V
-neck showed off his collarbone. He wore a navy-blue plastic bracelet on his wrist, but Fallon couldn't make out the words printed on the outside. It looked old, the writing cracked with age. Sebastian lifted his eyebrows. She swished the cooling hot chocolate in her cup. “Well, look at my view.”

He smirked and pointed at himself.

She sighed.

Sebastian grabbed a chair from another table and dragged it right next to hers. He sat close enough to touch her but was wholly focused on seeing what she was seeing. “Zita's. Nice choice. You must enjoy feeling miserable.”

“Honestly, I was hoping for some inspiration. I don't know how I'm going to find charms.”

“We'll find some.”

“How are you so sure?”

Sebastian rubbed his lower lip. “Zita wasn't the first love charm-maker in Grimbaud. She couldn't have erased the marks left behind by other love charm-makers. We just have to look harder.”

Verbeke Square lit up pink and orange as the sun bled through the clouds. Fallon pictured the ghosts of the past dancing through the square, selling crude charms, dueling on behalf of love, and exchanging encouragement and advice as old as the world itself. Could one woman really erase all that past? Sebastian had a point. Maybe there were other ways of coaxing Grimbaud's lost love charms out of the cobblestones. She stared at him, wide-eyed. “I can't believe you just said that.”

“What?” He blinked. “Did I surprise you?”

Fallon's cheeks flushed with shame. “I was under the impression that you didn't think so deeply about…”

“Important things? Well, I do. When I have to,” he said gruffly. “And this Zita business is a serious problem.”

Over the last month Fallon had figured Sebastian out: he was a smooth-talking, shallow boy with no concern for a girl's feelings. She knew boys like him in her hometown. But Sebastian had surprised her twice already since she met him at the meeting. He showed a bit of depth in the way he had spoken about princesses (whether she agreed or not) and now about the town she adored. She wanted to understand him.

“Serious problem for who?” she ventured. “You don't seem to be having a problem with romance.”

He stiffened, curling his fingers into fists. He seemed at once to lock himself up, door after door slamming over each feature. A key turned, sealing his lips shut, and he shifted away from her.

Her cup of hot chocolate was suddenly fascinating.

“Sorry,” she said, though she wasn't sorry for asking. Everyone in the group who had love fortunes shared them. Except for him. She didn't have much to go on. Rather, she was apologizing for saying the wrong thing.

“What I do is my business.”

“But if it hurts you, then it becomes my business too. The entire group's business. We're all working together now.”

“I know.”

“Then?”

“Not yet.” He cracked a weak smile. “Don't forget that you have your own secrets, princess. I think we're even.”

Fallon drank the rest of her hot chocolate. “So. Charms.”

“They can't all be on paper,” he said. “Try listening and see what you find.”

*   *   *

Fallon tried keeping her ears open on her walk home, but she only heard the wheels of food carts crunching leaves and tourists snapping pictures of the canals. The red light on her answering machine waited for her. She knew without having to look that the message was from her parents.

“Call us back,” her mother said, her voice thick with impatience. “Your father and I are waiting for the good news.”

Her hands shook while she peeled the last of the potatoes and made a cold salad with them. The vinegar she used as dressing stung as she chewed. Her eyes wandered around the apartment. There was so much she could do instead of calling. The tile floor needed scrubbing. The ceiling fan needed dusting. The hole under the armpit of her favorite pink cardigan needed mending.

Outside the apartment, students chatted on the stairs or brought their homework outside to the patio. A tiny jingle nearby meant that someone had already bought a charm. She couldn't tell from the sound whether it was a charm for financial prosperity or excellent test scores, but she knew from past visits to see Robbie that the complex would look like a small shrine by midterms with all the hanging charms fluttering from railings and roofs.

Her phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her chair. She answered without thinking. “Hello?”

“There you are,” her mother said. “We thought we'd try calling you again. Eating dinner?”

“Yes.”

“What did you make?”

She knew the real answer. “I bought potatoes and green beans from the market. They still had soil on them. Very fresh.”

“Good, good.”

Mr. Dupree spoke next, asking her briefly about her classes, but then the conversation turned sour as her parents started making assumptions about her fortune. “We found a nice bakery that would be a superb place to order your wedding cake from. It's called Sweet Crumblier,” Mr. Dupree said. “They passed our inspection with flying colors. A hard thing to do, as you know. Their specialty is violet macarons, which might actually make a good alternative if some of our guests don't like chocolate cake.”

“Finding a dress will be much harder,” Mrs. Dupree said. “We'll need Robbie's help. We don't want you walking down the aisle in polyester, do we?”

“What are you going on about? I haven't even told you my fortune yet.”

Fallon felt choked by their expectations as they planned the imaginary wedding they expected Fallon to have. Like her brother. Like the rest of the family, who consistently married young.

“Well, go on then,” Mrs. Dupree said with a sniff. “It will be easier to talk about cake and dresses when we have something tangible to work with.”

“I agree. Tell us. What did your fortune say?” Mr. Dupree said.

Fallon's jaw worked. The truth wouldn't come out. It was stuck in her throat, digging its heels into her bones.

“Fallon? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” she croaked. “Zita's fortune said I had to be patient.”

“You're kidding,” Mrs. Dupree said.

“I guess I won't be meeting my future boyfriend this year,” she said, trying to joke.

“There must be something wrong with the machine,” Mrs. Dupree said. Her words spun faster as worry and annoyance interlaced. “How could my little girl be denied our family tradition?”

“Maybe she's not our child,” Mr. Dupree said. A bad joke. It only upset Mrs. Dupree more.

“It's okay,” Fallon insisted. “There's always next year. It's not a bad fortune, after all. There are worse.” Like the fortune she really got.

“It's a stale fortune,” Mrs. Dupree said. The sound of her blowing her nose rattled through the phone. “It means you're stuck, Fallon. You shouldn't be stuck.”

“I know, Mom. I know.”

“I worry about you. Next thing I know, you'll be back for winter break with a suitcase full of prepackaged sandwiches.”

Fallon snorted. “Not going to happen. I'm following your rules. Always quality.”

“Always quality,” Mr. Dupree repeated with a proud voice. “There now, dear. Nothing to concern yourself over. We'll have to be patient, just as Zita says.”

Just as Zita says. Fallon gripped the receiver tighter.

By the time she got off the phone with her parents, Fallon felt achy all over. A shower would solve the problem, she thought, so she quickly grabbed her nightclothes and let the hot water melt the knots in her shoulders. Gradually, her sweet lemon body wash distracted her from thoughts of her parents' premature wedding plans. Suds hid her skin. Her eyes burned from soap, not tears, and she had to stand under the showerhead for a few minutes before she could open her eyes again.

An idea came.

She emerged from the shower in a hurry, her short hair clumped and dripping, and threw on the first thing at hand. Her pajamas were boyish, with pink-and-purple stripes shot through with silver. Fallon took the velvet bathrobe her mother had bought her for her birthday last year and slipped it on. She tied the sash snuggly at her waist. Even though the bathrobe had set her mother back a paycheck due to its authentic crushed velvet material, Fallon didn't think anything of the fact that it dragged in the dirt on her way to Anais's.

 

chapter 5

READING MATERIAL

Anais's father received a lot of strange deliveries as a drugstore owner. “Look at it this way,” Anais had explained, “a drugstore is a weird and wonderful place. You never know what we're selling. And yet, we always sell what you need. How do you think that happens? It's not magic. It's persistence.”

Persistence in the form of small-time inventors and companies plaguing Mr. Jacobs with shipments of their products. Every Monday morning, a truck would park outside the store with a new set of boxes and manila envelopes. Mr. Jacobs carefully opened everything, considered the products, and usually wrote back brisk rejections in the same day. Mondays were slow.

Sometimes Mr. Jacobs liked what he'd been sent. Last year, he had decided to carry tweezers shaped like Zodiac animals. He sold ready-made sandwiches from down-on-their-luck chefs and shower caps patterned with monster trucks (those hadn't sold very well). Yet, much to Anais's annoyance, her father kept every sample he ever received. The stockroom was hopelessly cluttered.

Mr. Jacobs might have saved love-charm contraband, whether he knew it or not. Since Fallon had no other leads at this point, it was worth trying out. The night was surprisingly warm, or maybe it was the insulated weight of the bathrobe. She checked the clock hanging in the window of an antiques store and was startled to find that it was almost 11:00
P.M.
People still roamed the streets; some gave her strange looks as she passed, but she understood the attention. If this had been any other night, she would have already been asleep in her bed. She tightened her sash and entered the store.

The drugstore's atmosphere was oddly sleepy for a weeknight. Her shoes stuck to the tile floor. A fluorescent light above the freezer section flickered like a twitching eye. Voices from Anais's portable radio whispered through the aisles. She found Anais with her head bent toward the little radio.

“Is your father asleep?” she asked.

Anais nodded. “If he wasn't, I'd be blasting this station. Hard-boiled Hal's talk show is coming up in a few minutes. I hate having to listen like this. Makes me feel like I'm doing something covert.”

Fallon wanted to laugh at that. Just yesterday, she'd joined a rebellion.

Anais peeled her eyes away from the radio long enough to take in Fallon's clothes. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong.”

“Uh-huh. Then how do you explain the bathrobe? And are those pajamas underneath? The Fallon I know would rather eat the cafeteria's frozen chicken nuggets than show up in public with her jammies on.”

“I have a favor to ask.”

Anais's lips curled. “I'm intrigued.”

“If you have time,” she started, noticing that no one else was in the store, “please let me into the storeroom. I want to see if your father saved any old magazines or books sent to him.”

“The storeroom is a mess, but Dad's got his own system. He might get upset if you move things around.”

“If I find what I'm looking for, I'd be happy to pay for it.”

“Of course you would. I'm just not sure if…” Anais's thought strayed when a three-note tune announced the beginning of the talk show. She inched the dial up further and Hard-boiled Hal's amiable voice filled the store:

You won't find anything sappy on our show. Stick around, grab a beer, and we'll talk about the other things that matter in life. Yes, other things
do
matter.

“He says that every night,” Anais explained, chuckling. “I wish you'd stay up sometimes. You don't know what you're missing. I may be happily dating someone, but even I can appreciate Hard-boiled Hal's no-romance policy. It's awfully refreshing.”