Mulberry Wands (11 page)

She couldn’t imagine the prayer that had
necessitated inventing that particular spell, but it had certainly
been one of her relatives’ prayers to Ruby. Susan and Susie both
rarely did magic on their own account, worried about karmic debt.
Susan felt that with losing her brother and sister, being born to a
dysfunctional single mom, and all the events that had happened
after Susie switched places with her, she had more than her fair
share of bad karma. She didn’t want any more.

The last time she had done a spell for
herself (to get a new job, which had worked fine) Zoë had announced
they were moving. She couldn’t prove it, but she harbored a secret
suspicion that if she were to ever do serious magic for anything
other than altruistic reasons, she’d get her car stolen and have
her face break out in hives.

Besides, what she really wanted was a spell
to make her lose weight. In the five months she’d had this body,
she still hadn’t been able to get back to the dress size her old
body had been, despite twice-weekly gym visits and constant
dieting. She blamed Susie. Her old body had been fit; this body
couldn’t even do a pull-up. If she could just lose that last
fifteen pounds, she’d be happy, but that last fifteen pounds didn’t
want to go.

The waitress must have brought the check
while she wasn’t looking, because suddenly Paul had it in his
hands. She had planned on offering to split it with him, or at the
very least to pay for the tip, but he counted out a pile of bills
and slipped it in the black check folder before she could think of
how to bring it up. He slid out of the booth and offered her his
hand.

Outside, he nestled his hands in her curls
and pulled her into a kiss.

She hadn’t been expecting it, and had her
eyes open, but with a nice man’s lips pressed against hers, it
didn’t take long for her to melt into it.

He pulled away, and drew his hands to the
ends of her curls.

“Thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“For giving me a second chance,” he said.

“You kiss nice,” she said, cursing herself
immediately for how dumb that sounded.

“I can do more than just kiss.” He gave her
an intense stare, a not-in-public kind of stare, which felt even
more intimate than the kiss had.

Her Id and Superego got into an immediate
showdown. The hormonal, wanna-get-laid, ovulating, sex-deprived
part of her wanted to grab him by the collar and drag him home.

The rational half of her, that part that had
spent over a decade cleaning up after other people’s messes,
screamed “Are you nuts?” and hijacked her mouth, which spewed out
the Pollyannaish. “You’re a nice guy, but I’d like to get to know
you better first.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’m disappointed, but I should have known
you weren’t easy,” Paul said. “You want to go get ice cream?”

This wasn’t how to lose that last fifteen
pounds. Honestly, getting a little action would be better than
getting some ice cream. Why couldn’t she be irresponsible? Why’d
she tell him no?

“Sure,” she said.

Griff felt like he was on top of the world.
Not only had he been making plenty of money with the wand selling
(enough to move out at the end of his lease, he was sure) but
Fallon called him up and asked if she could come and play games
with him again. When he asked if she knew how to play computer
games, she said she did.

“Can you pick us up from the game store?” she
asked, in her fluting accented voice.

“Us?”

“I have a friend who would like to join us.
Is this a problem?”

“No, that’s fine,” he said. He hoped it was
not a male friend. He’d have to leave his bike at Jake’s house and
borrow Jake’s car to get them, since he could only carry one extra
person on his motorcycle and the truck was at his Dad’s house. He
didn’t want to go through that much trouble if there wasn’t another
girl involved. “I can pick you up from your house. Where do you
live?”

“We do not live together. We will take the
bus to the Game DeSpot.”

Griff was amazed that Hayden’s Ferrry even
had buses, and he couldn’t recall anyone else who took one. It
struck him as odd that she didn’t drive, and he meant to ask her
about it next time he saw her. Was it a green thing? Wanting to
save the earth? Did she get too many points on her license? Did she
grow up on a commune and never learn to drive? Maybe he could offer
to teach her how. The thought of spending hours alone in a car with
her cheered him up even more, and by the time he showered off the
plumbing grime and counted out enough profits from the wand-selling
to pitch in for pizza and beer, he was whistling.

Fallon was waiting in front of the game
store, wrapped in a belted raincoat, with long gloves that made her
look like Ingrid Bergman in ‘Casablanca.’ She looked up as he
approached, and while she didn’t smile, her eyebrows went up and
she tilted her head back as if to say, “Aha, this is the one I’ve
been waiting for.”

Her friend resembled her closely, with
espresso-dark hair and olive-hued skin. She had wide dark eyes that
seemed a little too large for her face. Her skin had an odd matte
sheen to it, as though she were deathly ill. Or maybe she’d just
used too much of the wrong color of foundation? She didn’t speak,
and she held herself still, twitching her head to watch him as he
approached. The whole effect was so unsettling that Fallon seemed
quite normal by comparison. He opened the car doors for them and
they both climbed into the back seat.

“Fallon, why don’t you sit up front?” Griff
asked. “I don’t want to feel like a chauffeur.”

Fallon looked at him. He stared back, holding
the passenger side door open expectantly. Didn’t she know the
shotgun rules? Driver’s date automatically gets the front seat. It
was one of those unspoken expectations that no one had to discuss.
Fallon got out of the back seat and into the front. He was waiting
for a laughing explanation, but both women said nothing.

“So, how come you don’t drive?” he asked
Fallon.

She didn’t answer. After an uncomfortable
pause, he turned the radio on.

When he let go of the knob Fallon grabbed it
and turned it completely off.

“You don’t like that song?”

“I like silence,” she said.

“How come you don’t drive?” he asked again.
“Too many DUIs?”

“I have no car,” she said.

They drove in silence, because Griff couldn’t
think of any other way to draw them into conversation, and when he
turned on the radio again, it was a commercial so he shut it off.
By the time they got to Jake’s house, Griff was beginning to think
that bringing her along was a bad idea. They didn’t even say
anything as they walked up the drive and he knocked on the door.
Why had he wanted her to come so badly? Then he opened the door,
and people murmured in appreciation as Fallon walked in. Oh yeah.
She was a hottie.

If he had brought Fallon and her friend to
one of his D&D sessions, he was pretty sure at least one of the
players would have fainted. His role-playing crowd was a little
like the shortbus team all grown up. They were mostly functional,
but socially deficient. A twelve-year-old who played D&D was a
normal kid. A twenty-four-year old who played D&D often wasn’t
hip deep in social skills. Every once in a while someone wrangled
in a new player, an outsider, some guy who remembered liking
D&D back in junior high, but the few times it had happened the
guy left after a few sessions, inventing a work problem or
unspecified family issues to explain away his absence. Griff was
fanatical about all sorts of games, but even he was getting weary
of the D&D crowd. Role-playing games appealed strongest to
those who had a life they wanted to escape.

The board game crowd were all whip-smart
people, generally older, who liked strategy and tactics but
couldn’t handle the twitchy-twitchy aspects of complex computer
games. They had pot-bellies and beards, but they also had wives and
day jobs. They played competitively, and didn’t waste time with
getting to know one another. He’d been showing up at the Game
DeSpot’s board game nights for years now, and still only knew most
of them by sight, not name.

Console games were more universal. Some of
the guys who he played with were the ones who’d been on their high
school wrestling teams, like him, and some of them were the guys
who would have smoked cigarettes across the street from the gym.
Some of them were underemployed, like Griff, and others, like Jake,
had the excellent salaries that came from being the only one at
their office to truly understand the computer system. The beers
they drank were everything from organic microbrews (Jake’s
girlfriend) to Corona Light (Trevor, an asshole sales guy that Jake
worked with) to nothing, as in the case of Brett the Mormon. When
Jake turned on his expensive sound system, passed out the
controllers, and dimmed the lights, all differences were forgotten
in the desire to kick one another’s ass.

“Everyone, this is Fallon and—“ Griff waited
for an introduction, but apparently that, along with the shotgun
rule, was one social convention that Fallon and her friend didn’t
get. After a ten second awkward pause, Griff continued. “--And her
friend. Don’t let Fallon’s pretty face fool you. She’s got killer
insincts.”

She did indeed. She played poorly the first
game, as though she were not used to the controllers, but later on
she picked up. Except for a little team-killing, she did very well.
So well, that Griff was getting partially concealed thumbs-up from
his friends. Fallon’s friend stood in the corner, watching
everyone. Griff could tell people were getting creeped out, so he
finally invited her to have a seat on the chair Jake had brought in
from the kitchen. She wouldn’t have sat if he hadn’t pressed on her
shoulder to let her know that staring at everyone like the
creepiest little gloom-cookie ever wasn’t the kind of thing that
normal people did at a party, and he wouldn’t take not-sitting as
an option.

Not that she was that much less strange
sitting in a chair.

“What’s up with your friend?” he asked
Fallon, when he managed to catch her alone in the kitchen.

Fallon stared at him for a moment with her
wide eyes. Griff almost laughed. Asking Fallon why someone else was
strange was like asking Stalin why Pol Pot was such a meanie.

“My friend would like to meet your mage.”

“My mage?” When she didn’t clarify, Griff
guessed. “Oh, you mean Alex? My business partner? Um, I’ll find out
from Jake if he’s here.”

Jake met him in the hallway. “Dude, what’s up
with that chick?”

“Fallon? I met her at Game DeSpot.”

“No, the other one. She’s freaking us out,
man. I like hot chicks as much as the next guy, but she’s sucking
the life out of the room. Is she a mage or something?”

“I don’t know,” Griff said. That would
explain it, he supposed. Fallon stepped into the hallway, followed
by her freaky silent friend.

“Alex!” Jake shouted. “Got visitors.”

Alex came out of the back bedroom, red-eyed
and stumbling as though he’d been sleeping, even though it was too
early in the evening to go to bed and too late to take a nap. He
wore a grungy tee shirt and boxers. Griff wondered if Alex had been
smoking pot, though he didn’t smell like it.

“Yeah?” Alex mumbled.

“Fallon’s friend wanted you to come with
us.”

Alex rubbed his eyes. “Huh?”

“To a party,” Fallon said in her fluting
accent. Tu a pair-tee.

“A party?” Alex scratched his balls. He
seemed to be considering it.

The room was one that Jake used as a computer
room, and it had a futon couch that Griff had slept on a couple of
times when he and Jake had played World of Warcraft for so long
that he got too sleepy to drive home. He saw that Alex had been
using the same lumpy flat pillow that he’d used. In fact, the room
didn’t have any of Alex’s stuff in it, not even a pair of Tevas and
shorts once Alex put them on.

Jake had always said he didn’t like having
roommates; he didn’t trust strangers to live in his house and
living together ruined friendships. Griff had been a little
surprised that Jake had let Alex move in. Jake’s compromise,
apparently, was making sure that Alex didn’t cross the ‘houseguest’
to ‘squatter’ threshold by banning all Alex’s crap to his car.
Griff didn’t blame him. Even if Jake had been willing to have a
roommate, Alex was not the sort of guy you’d peg as being one who
paid rent on time.

“Okay, cool. Where we going?”

“I will lead,” Fallon said.

Alex shrugged and grabbed his keys.

Griff rode his motorcycle with Fallon riding
pillion behind him, and Alex followed in the crap-mobile with
Fallon’s friend squished in among the clutter. They took the
freeway east, through the sprawl of Brighamville. At first he tried
to anticipate where they were going, but after a few miles he
decided to enjoy the surprise, the rush of the wind, and the feel
of Fallon’s slim arms wrapped around his waist. She squeezed his
bicep to tell him where to turn, like a rider guiding a horse, and
eventually he realized they were going to a park, a swath of land
with horse trails, a shooting range, and hiking trails so long that
only the lights of the city and the ever-present haze of smog
reminded you of how much desert the Phoenix metropolis had
eaten.

There was a moon, not full, but full enough
that he could see Alex get out of his car even after he dimmed the
headlights. Alex had parked his car on the other side of the
parking lot. Fallon slipped her hand into his and led him across
the road towards a narrow wash overhung with mesquite and palo brea
trees. The wash bed was sandy and dry, its smooth surface marred
only by an occasional fallen branch or canine footprints.