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“Magnus Chase, what on earth have you just planted?”
Magnus looked up from the bush he was in the process of planting and smiled innocently at Alex Fierro. “Oh, this? It’s a berry plant that can grow up to thirty feet long.”
Alex froze. “The plant thirty feet long or the roots?”
“The roots. And then they push up new plants.”
Alex looked back over her shoulder to her own front garden, directly across from Magnus’s house. “That means they’ll come up in my garden!”
“Oh dear. I suppose they might.” Magnus said cheerily. “I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll just have to hope that the roots get stopped by the pipes under the road.”
“I’m sure you didn’t think of it.” Alex folded her arms. She crossed the road and went back to her own house.
Magnus made a face at her back as she went.
-
Their next altercation, which was probably the 30th or so, involved a set of Christmas lights.
In October.
Magnus made sure to be smiling when he knocked on Alex’s door. “Alex! How lovely to see you! I was out shopping the other day and I saw this and I thought of you!” he held out a calendar.
Alex said something rather rude and shut the door in his face.
Magnus sighed and changed his plan. He folded the calendar up and pushed it through the letterbox, which was rather difficult owing to the layers of bristles Alex’s letterbox had, but eventually it vanished from view and thudded onto the floor.
Magnus smirked and turned around to walk away. He made it three steps away when there was another thud behind him. He turned back around to see what had happened.
The calendar had been pushed out of the letterbox and onto the path.
Magnus gawped at it. “You…”
He picked the calendar up, folded It in half, then opened the letterbox without putting the calendar through. “Alex Fierro don’t you dare push this back.”
“But I don’t want it!” came the muffled reply.
“Then put it in your recycling! Besides, it’s a gift, you can’t refuse it!” Magnus shoved the calendar through and then before Alex could possibly retaliate in any way at all, he grabbed a handful of grass, wrenched it out of the lawn and put that through too.
He legged it before Alex could open the door and hit him, but that still didn’t stop him getting away fast enough to escape the sound of a long string of swear words with his name attached at the end.
-
Halloween was always a very interesting and very hotly contested time of year on their street.
It was not hotly contested because the houses tried to outdo each other with Halloween decorations. Instead, it was hotly contested because the various households tried to show what they had managed to grow the largest, most beautiful, most delicious fruit and vegetables they could possibly put into their gardens without negatively impacting their lawn or their flowers or their neatly trimmed topiary hedges, which made up their contests the rest of the year.
Magnus had always loved the outdoors, always felt most at home in it. Unfortunately for his chances in the unofficial contest, this had not translated itself into any sort of gardening skill beyond growing the occasional slightly caterpillar-eaten cabbage and a couple of bushels of egg-sized potatoes.
Alec Fierro was a genius at gardening.
Every year, Ale grew bed after bed of beautiful berries, trees dripping in fruit that had formed out of the glorious flowers that won Alex all kinds of praise in the spring. Bushes appeared to have been doubling up as the leaves for root vegetables and tubers.
Magnus found it most infuriating.
This Halloween, however, Magnus had come up with a plan.
He went across the road to visit not Alex Fierro, but Alex Fierro’s neighbour two doors down, who also happened to be Alex’s half-sister.
“Magnus! What can I do to help you?”
“I need your help with something.” Magnus said. “And it’s very important. And it’s also of a rather delicate nature.”
Sam looked absolutely horrified.
“Of a delicate nature? Magnus, you know full well I can’t-
“Uh, yeah?”
Magnus walked in as fast as he could. Shut the door. Please. I don’t want your sibling seeing us.”
Sam groaned. “If this is about all your neighbourly competitions, I do not want to be caught up in any of this.”
“It’s just about vegetables. That's all it is. I want to know what it is your sibling does to manage to grow plants so well.”
Sam groaned. “Oh for goodness sake get over your feud already! Now out! Out of my house!”
-
Christmas was a whole other kerfuffle.
Lights.
Lights and decorations in the windows and in gardens and hanging off trees both indoors and outdoors, along hedges and fences.
Magnus always triumphed over Alex at Christmas.
He put lights up all over the front of his house, hung patterns of them up in each and every window. He planned the colours and the pictures and the joyous Christmas scenes months in advance.
Meanwhile, Alex tended to have a flickering electric problem and regularly ended up with displays fling together at the last minute.
Magnus’s shame and crushed ego which occurred yearly at Halloween was always restored to fully glory when Christmas rolled around and he saw Alex Fierro struggling with a wobbly ladder hanging lights out of the window while he sat on his sofa drinking coffee in peace.
-
That particular year, there was a New Year’s Eve party.
Magnus felt rather out of place; he hadn’t realised how posh it was going to be, so he hid in a corner sipping champagne.
Suddenly Alex joined him. “This is ridiculous.”
“I never thought I’d agree with you, but yes.”
“Wanna sneak off to the garden and make out like teenagers?”
Magnus downed the rest of his champagne. “Why not?”
The next year, Alex and Magnus continued to compete. Though after a few months of frantic dating, they found themselves competing from the same house.
THE END.