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Luz’s jaw dropped as she tried to process what Eda had just told her.
“Oh, close your mouth, you’ll catch a fly,” Eda scoffed. “What’s so surprising about it anyway?”
Luz started, “Waitwaitwaitwaitwait, you’re telling me that you, master conwoman of the Boiling Isles, who hates commitment, are married????”
“Was,” Eda corrected. “We got divorced after, like, a week.”
Luz snorted, “Ha, that’s more like the Eda I know.”
Luz waited patiently for Eda to elaborate, but the older woman just sat silently and drummed her fingers on the table.
So Luz prompted, “Well?”
Eda looked confused. “Well what?”
“Tell me about it!”
“Um, no thank you. It was not one of my finest hours, which is saying something because I’m fine all the time.”
“Come on, Eda, pleeeeeaaase?” she begged.
“Ugh, fine, but only if you promise to never talk about it again.”
“I promise!” Luz said eagerly.
Eda sighed and began.
“It was a long time ago, a few years after I’d gotten my hands on the portal. I was maybe twenty-five, thirty, and I had yet to break my habit of taking the occasional trip into the human realm to go on gambling sprees all over Vegas casinos.”
Luz wasn’t sure why that surprised her, but it did.
“Wait, I didn’t know you’ve been to the human realm!”
“Kid, what would’ve been the point of having the portal if I never went through it? Do you wanna hear the story or not?”
“Okay, okay, point taken,” Luz surrendered.
“As I was saying, I was on one of my casino sprints when I met him. He tried to pull a scam on me to get more winnings. Well, you know what I say.”
“You can’t scam a scammer,” Luz nodded, filling in.
“Exactly. So I scammed him right back,” Eda stated triumphantly. “It was love at first con.”
“You mean, ‘love at first sight’?”
“No. Moving on! We sat down together at the bar and exchanged some of our favorite scamming techniques—genuine bonding. Oh, he thought he was so slick, trying to pickpocket me while I was looking right at him! Guess he just couldn’t accept that I had outsmarted him. Wanted to even the score. So I set him up. I purposefully made myself an easy target so that he thought he could get away with stealing from me, but by the time he was done, I’d taken his whole wallet off of him!”
“Wow, you guys are like the same person.”
“Yeah, that’s what we thought too. We had this little charming banter thing going on, and one thing led to another and we hopped in his car and went to one of those drive-thru chapels after getting a license with fake IDs—at least, I used a fake ID. Never really thought about it much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did too.”
“Wait, so your entire hour-long relationship was built on lies and cons but you somehow thought a marriage would work out?”
“Hey, cut us some slack, it was a heat of the moment type thing, we just acted impulsively. That’s what you’re supposed to do in Vegas, isn’t it?”
“Uhhhhh—”
“Anyway, we got married that night and went to some random hotel nearby. We went to the hotel bar and got a few more drinks before heading up to our room. Bet you can guess what happened next,” Eda smirked at Luz.
Luz covered her face with her hands and groaned, “Ewwww, Eda!”
“What?! Ohhhh, nononono, Luz, that’s disgusting!”
Luz peeked through her fingers.
“So then…what did you do?”
“I stole his money, keys, and blazer and took his car. Or, rather, I tried to. You know, after getting around on magical staffs your whole life, you surprisingly don’t know how to use one of those human wheel machines.”
Eda crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes with a sigh.
“I was all excited too. No one in the Boiling Isles has seen a human car; it would’ve sold for millions of snails! But anyway, without transportation for an escape, I couldn’t get to the portal since it had a stationary location in the human realm. I was stuck. So I went back to the room, replaced the stuff I stole—I kept on the blazer, though—and pretended like it never happened. The guy was still zonked out by the time I got back, so I don’t think he suspected a thing.”
“Why’d you even marry him if you were just gonna up and leave? And why didn’t you just get the marriage annulled?”
“Well, it wasn’t like I didn’t like him! We really hit it off. But like you said, I hate commitment. Maybe he hadn’t yet had to deal with the lasting impact of people backstabbing you your whole life. Oooor maybe he was just a playboy. Honestly I could see either. When he finally did wake up, he seemed really happy. He took me around the city, treated me well all day, reminded me how much fun we had the day before. He was quite the charmer, I’ll give him that,” she chuckled.
“What can I say? We understood each other. We were in the same game, and we both knew how to play it. We made a good team. I guess that was why I couldn’t bring myself to leave right off the bat. Even if we could’ve gotten an annulment, which we couldn’t because we were both of sound mind and agreed to get married, he wouldn’t have wanted to. That, and I also still had no way to get back to the portal.”
“Why didn’t you just use Owlbert?”
Eda shrugged, “Eh, didn’t want to risk getting caught by some random human.”
“What happened next then? Why didn’t you stay with him?”
“Well, obviously, a witch can’t permanently live in the human realm! That was the longest I had ever been there at once. I was lowkey freaking out. Like, I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any weird side affects or anything, but it’s not exactly precedented territory. And besides that, it was pretty hard to keep an illusion going to hide my ears for that long. I was around my husband practically twenty four hours a day, which didn’t give me many breaks.
“I had stuff back here at the Owl House. I didn't really think it out when I went through with the marriage. I needed to get back to King and Hooty and my business. Luckily, it didn’t take long for an out to present itself.
“Since we were both kind of freelance scammers, we didn’t have actual day jobs to go to, and we spent all our time together. That was our ultimate downfall.”
Luz stared with interest.
“You see, we were very, very similar people. Too similar. By the end of the week, we were getting fed up with each other. We almost started expecting the other to be exactly like ourselves, which inevitably set us up for disappointment. We argued a lot, and found out that we didn’t really work. So we filed for a divorce, and I had him drive me near the portal entrance. Maybe as one last symbol of how our relationship crashed and burned, we had both made up our minds to pickpocket each other before we separated. I stole his wallet again, he stole mine, so I figured we were even.”
“Though, not really. That was just a fake ID, and I hardly ever use human money now anyways. I definitely won,” Eda cackled.
“Do you still have the wallet?” Luz asked with starry eyes.
“Umm,” Eda shuffled through her hair, tossing out some various items before pulling out a brown leather rectangle and opening it to confirm it was the right object.
With a nod, she slid it across the table to Luz.
Luz looked over the driver’s license in the clear pocket, reading out, “Stanford Pines. Resident of Oregon?”
“Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that? He wanted me to pick up everything and go live with him in some shack in Oregon. So unreasonable! But maybe that was a lie. The ID is probably fake anyway.”
“I don’t know, Eda, it looks pretty official to me, ”Luz said skeptically, holding up the license to the light to look at the glare. “He’s good-looking though. Seems smart. Like a scientist or something?”
Eda ruffled her eyebrows.
“What? Lemme see that.”
She yanked the license out of Luz’s hands, looking at the picture more closely before backing away and widening her eyes.
“Yeah, that’s not him. Knew it was fake. It looks a lot like him, but his jaw was different. Also, I’m pretty sure he didn’t have glasses. Probably a brother or something.”
“But the name is right?” Luz asked.
“I mean, he introduced himself as Stan, but it could’ve just been to go with the ID, who knows? It’ll just have to be one of those mysteries I’ll never solve,” Eda concluded, shrugging again as she stood up and walked out of the room.
Luz looked at the discarded ID on the table, agreeing, “Yeah, I guess so.”