Chapter Text
The issue with society’s general perception of witches, beyond the crimson-speckled history that still stains some people’s views or the way it’s been shrouded with mystery as facts are lost to folktale and neighborly conversations are purged in favor of assumptions made in isolation, is that magic has somehow become synonymous to freedom.
There’s been a marketing error, is the thing. People see the wiry spun brooms made of stripped wood and the rusted spellbooks adorned with brass embossed letters and assume with green-tinted envy that witches have this liberation they lack, this ability to do all the things no one else can. To fly and make themselves invisible and brew a potion so potent their flighty summer fling falls head over heels in love enough to forget all about their convenient commitment issues.
The reality, because of course there is one, is that covens are too stubbornly steadfast in their stagnant ways to ever push the boundaries of what past ancestor witches established.
As such, only one type of magic is bestowed upon a witch at birth and, to keep the gift, said witch is expected to roam far from their hometown at the unripe age of 14 to prove their powers valuable to a new community, assimilate with their usefulness .
And the thing is, Kiara really tried to play along. She flew East, considered vacantly as her childhood home with the white gates and whiter orchids shrunk in her periphery. She landed on orange, glossy cobblestone. Found an empty basement with cheap rent and asked the landlord to help her drag in the sofa bed abandoned on the next street over, deserted and tilted against the cracking sidewalk. She wore her hair down and talked nice to the snotty old women with big hats flopped over their hairlines. She started a communal garden, flew around first to scavenge for seeds, and grew tomatoes and cucumbers and a variety of squash with long tangled roots.
She lasted 3 months. Then flew back home, her neck sore from how low it was hung in shame.
She had expected for her magic to vanish, all at once—that was the cautionary tale all her grand-relatives recounted over Thanksgiving dinners, at least—for her to bus tables at her dad’s eatery until she graduated high school then find an underpaying, unfulfilling job where she’d stare at her cuticles and dwindle away the rest of her life. Except, her magic never withdrew, never grew dormant, even when she’d spend weeks ignoring the tingling in her toes and stashed her broom behind winter corduroy and insulated jackets in the back of her closet with everything else she outgrew. New calluses formed on her soles from months spent replacing the urge to fly with testy pacing yet, still, there it was, in the curves of her subconscious, in the way she’d float off the final stone steps on the way out from her house and wonder in captivated curiosity whenever she noticed a particularly steep hill in the horizon, her magic, persisting.
The coven believes the Gods are giving her one last chance to earn her gift. Kiara thinks this is probably just one more way she’s fucking something up.
Regardless, that’s how Kiara finds herself flying, again, four years later. In one final, last-ditch attempt to make something of herself. Whatever that means.
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She skips East altogether, dives South instead.
She dips over jutting, stony mountains and slips through the slivers of sun crammed between crowds of trees until the goading, sparkling spotlights of her claustrophobic city fade from view. She pretends that if she fails, it’ll at least happen so far away that maybe word won’t reach home.
This time, she doesn’t stop until her broom shakes from the excursion. Until she starts seriously contemplating the repercussions of a failed crash landing.
Before the expected emergency touchdown, there’s a stretch of cerulean ocean that catches Kiara’s eye.
She lets herself glide along the surface, the length of her body draped over the broom so she can balance one arm in the wind and let her fingertips catch on the water. They trace the parade of smaller waves as droplets splash onto her cheek.
She stumbles upon a glass bottle bobbing in a circle of ripples, green glass reflecting onto the sky as it glints stubbornly. She reaches out, grazes the bottle, then closes her eyes and spins it, hard. Blinks one eye open to watch it point at a barrier island she can only see in the distance if she squints real sharp.
She follows the direction to shore.
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It was a pretty objectively bad omen that her broom decided to spiral into haywire, spinning in spastic circles the way an easily stimulated puppy chases after its own tail, right as she had reclined slightly to slow to a stop. The grip she’d once clutched so tightly throughout the flight was noticeably looser for just a heartbeat and as the abrupt dizziness knocked her off balance, the momentary lack of control was enough to send her straight into a tree. A loud crash following what she really hopes wasn’t the sound of her body going through anything that could be considered property damage echoes through, as far as Kiara could tell from above to be, a small coastal town with dusty stone alleyways and birch fenced luxury premises.
It’s the kind of place her parents would resort at, she realizes absentmindedly, which only stands to make the seams pinching at her waist more pronounced. She shakes the thought away.
A branch scrapes against the outside of her thigh and she hears a muffled snicker from somewhere behind her as she heaves out sharp breaths while shimmying her torso in a pitiful attempt to extricate herself from the predicament.
“You need help?” A voice sounding suspiciously similar to the same one laughing at her just seconds ago calls out, smooth and warm and young. With airy easiness that almost makes her choke up in recognition before she realizes she has no reason to.
Kiara swallows her mortification. Answers, “sure,” instead of cursing him out.
She doesn’t catch a glimpse of his face before he steps closer. Her only perception of him are his hands, hovering more than really touching, as he guides her shoulders between the two offshoots where she’d been caught in the tree. There’s a callous or two that flutter goosebumps to bud where they brush against her skin.
Once Kiara’s gotten most of her torso free from the tangle of bark, she grinds one heel in the groove of the trunk to push herself out the rest of the way. Except, she hadn’t considered that she’d need to stay balanced or that she’d have to force herself into a standing position during her landing, and instead, stumbles back as she’s freed. Right on top of her unsuspecting savior, him breaking her fall.
And maybe a bone or two considering the grunt he lets out when he exclaims, “Ow shit, this is what happens when I’m nice.”
Kiara scoffs. If he wasn’t already wheezing from the weight of her crushing his diaphragm, she’d consider faking a clumsy move that’d land her elbow in his gut. As it stands, she rolls off his heaving chest and brushes the dirt off her arms and the back of her legs before offering a hand to the boy.
His gaze follows her movements and she finds one of his sand-tinged eyebrows hiked up in response. They’re blue, the eyes still tracking her, not unlike the ocean she’d just crossed and his hair’s messy in a way that suggests it’d been drenched in saltwater then left to air dry; sticking up in spite of gravity’s pull and crossing over different strands like overgrown weeds. And his mouth does this crinkle thing when he catches her staring, like there’s some inner voice telling him to be polite or make a respectable first impression which he’s just barely managing to listen to.
“Good to know that my safety is a near second concern to the state of your pants,” he instigates from the ground, elbows still pressed against the dirt to hold his—and, fleetingly, her —weight while the rest of him leans open, splayed out.
She squints at his dimples, mutters, “They’re cotton . Stains set immediately.” Besides, she had only brought like 2 changes of clothes stuffed in that little bag she’d hung over her broom and who knew if she’d even find a place to sleep tonight, let alone a laundry machine.
“Oh I bet,” he responds, teeth bared in a grin, the rest of him at ease.
Kiara tucks her arm back at her side instead of letting it hang stupidly between them. Then presses her lips together, swallows her frustration and turns around. He is no worse than every gaggle of infuriating teenagers that pushed their way to her not-yet-scrubbed-down table during a busy shift, she tells herself.
She never has to see him again, she promises.
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The universe must take distinct pleasure in making a liar out of her.
There is simply no other explanation for why—once Kiara’s rounded the corner and unconvincingly made peace with her first uncomfortable interaction in this place, told herself it won’t be representative of the town or her experience as a whole—she’s faced with the sight of a lone, well-groomed chicken stuck on the road with wings flapping in crisis during the center of peak traffic. At first it clucks disapprovingly at the honking cars, glaring at the impatience of those behind the wheel, but as more cars shuffle forward in hopes of scaring it off the road, its squawks grow panicked and rhythmic. It hops in shaky helplessness, feathers spewing from the force like it’s trying to fly away but has forgotten how exactly.
It should be concerning, really, that her first reaction to the whole sight is empathetic commiseration.
And Kiara’s always wished she could be the type of person to care a little less, to look the other way on matters that don’t immediately concern her and save the heroics for someone else to bear, no good deed going unpunished, other unjust karmic reparations, and all that.
She’s wished for a lot of things though.
So she rolls her shoulders back, considers the scene with a new sense of urgency and turns back to where she just left in hopes of finding that bike she could’ve sworn she’d noticed in her periphery during her fall. She doesn’t expect to find herself once more chest to chest with the boy with the distracting eyes. She launches her hands forward on instinct, latches onto his biceps to just barely avoid another fall. He has good biceps, strong-looking, muscular but not hulking, firm. She wrenches her hands back, wipes them on her creased cream shorts. He probably works out a decent amount, is her point. He could point her to a gym. Or something.
The boy doesn’t seem to notice her initially irregular intake of breaths or evasive glancing. His own inner monologue running rampant if the way his teeth are picking at his bottom lip is anything to go by.
“I was going this direction before I even saw you, before you even landed here, really,” he says all in one breath before she can even open her mouth.
She blinks. Caught off guard and not following. “What?”
He clears his throat. “Nothing.”
She rocks back on her soles, just to put some more space between them. He raises one hand to run through the back strands of his hair, the same bicep she’d noticed before forming a triangle with the crook of his neck. The back of her knees have gone itchy and her cheeks are hot which makes absolutely no fucking sense because this guy has barely spoken two full coherent sentences to her and she’s already shifty and sweating like she’s in middle school and he’s her new hallway crush.
“Did you forget something or?” he asks, trailing off near the end, half-curious and maybe a little hopeful.
Kiara points her thumb to the scene behind her even though he probably can’t really see it from this angle, tells him, “There’s a chicken stuck in the road.”
He leans back a little at that, gives her an up and down like there’s some bigger picture here he’s not understanding. He mutters, mostly to himself, “I don’t remember you hitting your head when you fell.”
She balks, shaking her head. “I didn’t! There’s really—It’s blocking traffic and trying to fly out but people are honking so it’s too nervous to cross the road.”
He doesn’t believe her. His lips purse and his thumb and pointer finger ghost along one pocket outline on his board shorts but the rest of him remains relatively relaxed, steady, a quiet 360 from the way he was stammering earlier. It gives her entirely too much time to soak him in—sundrenched and bright and a little like that lucent, emerald beer bottle she saw earlier, floating as if it was its own island in the middle of deserted waters—and she wonders what he was thinking when that expression shifted.
“You’re not telling the punchline right,” he replies eventually, head cocked to the side. The position makes her blatantly aware that his grin is tipped up too high, entertained and annoyingly self-satisfied.
“Why would I be telling you a joke right now?!” Kiara huffs, exasperated.
He gives her another look, one that’s meant to, presumably, tell her the jig is up.
It’s entirely unreasonable, she realizes this, but she can’t help feeling cornered, a little, like she’s being scrutinized—like when her mother would ask her questions about school or her day or her non-existent dinner plans with ingenuine friends all while knowing that no honest answer would please her, satisfy her innate disapproval of her daughter — but mostly Kiara just feels like he knows something she doesn’t, like she’s not in on the joke he claims she’s the one telling.
A part of her wants to pinch herself just to make sure she hadn’t passed out in the air ages ago and hallucinated this entire interaction. Another part of her wants to slap him, right across that smug grin of his. She does neither, she clenches her jaw, tight, and straightens, stands tall even when that only manages to push their faces another inch closer.
He pats her on the shoulder. “I personally see cutesy jokes as an inferior form of flirting but I get it, not everyone has mastered that particular social skill yet. That’s alright, you got a lot else going for you,” he says it all with the condescending kindness of a polite rejection he’d give to a drunk girl at a party, one using the loud music as an excuse to whisper in his ear and who wears too much green glitter eyeshadow that winks under strobe lights.
She scoffs, pokes an angry finger at his chest. “I am not flirting with you, you egocentric asshole. And also, I am fucking fantastic at flirting. You would know if I was flirting with you and you would fall for it too.”
That seems to stop him short. He opens his mouth, closes it, rearranges his stance, before opening it again long enough to ask, “you’re not flirting with me?”
She jerks her head left and right, feels a headache building at the base of her skull.
“Huh,” he retorts.
His unfailing irksomeness actually becomes useful to her as Kiara’s mid-eye roll when she spots a sun-bleached cyan bicycle with a large cream basket hanging over the handlebars. She finds it leaning against the wall of a cabin-like family home and jolts into action, striding towards the spot, acutely aware of the way the boy chases her heels.
His gaze is burning holes in the spot on her back where the top of her cami meets the pale of her neck. One strap is coiling on itself and rolling down her shoulder, pulling with it the top layer of her skin, stingingly, electrifyingly, and Kiara tugs the strap back in place, prepares herself to sound accusatory when she asks him what his problem is now but he beats her to it and asks instead, “Was it Chrodi on the road?”
Kiara makes a quick peek back at him while untangling the bike’s wheels from a few unkempt sprouts, combing through them with careful fingers, tells him, “I don’t know what that is.”
“Chrodi, the chicken?” He answers, like that’s explanation enough. “She goes on walks after lunch, it helps her digestion.”
Kiara blusters, agitation and confusion felt at newfound measures. “I didn’t ask the chicken what its name was.”
The boy studies her, makes a soft inconsequential noise in the back of his throat.
Kiara lulls her eyes upward to the clouds. Tugs the bike from the weeds. States with equal calm regard, “I’m borrowing your bike,” before walking off.
She guides the bike to the intersection and tries to ignore the bouncing amusement in the boy’s voice when he calls after her, “If Chrodi can’t walk across the road, I’m pretty sure she can’t bike across it.”
“I can’t pick it up without it trying to peck me so I’ll drop it into your basket then ride off before it jumps out,” she calls back without a second glance.
“Alright, but it’s not—”
Kiara doesn’t wait around to hear what he has to say next. She hops onto the seat, grimaces at the heat of the leather and shuffles her feet on the gravel to get a feel for the motion. She hasn’t ridden a bike in nearly a decade, probably. She used to, back when she was six or seven, before her closet was arcanely filled with excessive, extortionate, dresses she didn’t want and wasn’t allowed to dirty.
“Hey, that's theft!” The boy professes, closer in range as if he’d been pursuing after her the whole time.
Kiara turns her head back, tries to make it abundantly clear that her glare indicates impatience and irritation, all of which is intended only and specifically for him but she miscalculates her speed and rolls over a stray pebble causing the bike to wobble to the right. She has to lurch her weight in the opposite direction, just in time to hear the boy yell out, “If you crash I’m not liable for injuries!”
“Shut up,” Kiara mutters through clenched teeth. “Go do something useful.”
“Like come hold the bike while you’re riding to make sure you don’t fall off?” He poses rhetorically, jogging a little to catch up to her pace then poking at the end of one handlebar and watching her dip abruptly and precariously in that direction. As if he needed any more proof to claim her instability.
“No!” She shouts, just barely managing to hover one hand above the handlebar long enough to flap it vaguely at the general direction in front of them. “Like go try to stop incoming traffic so I don’t die trying to save this stupid chicken.”
He puffs his cheeks out and exhales, mockingly disapproving, condemns, “I don’t think Chrodi would appreciate that kind of name-calling.”
She ignores him in favor of pedaling over the hump that separates the road from the sidewalk. She bikes past the jagged row of cars, most of them chrome and polished and blinking, nears the chicken and hesitates for only a split-second before scooping its body in her two palms and dropping it, if only a little carelessly, in the front basket. She lingers to see if the chicken will squirm against the weaved plastic and wicker or try to jump out altogether but it just sits there, waiting and staring at Kiara as if to urge she gets going. On Kiara’s other side, the boy is idling about where she’d told him to, flinging arms in not-quite-geometric gestures and surprisingly succeeding at controlling the flow of cars that have started creeping forward.
As soon as Kiara’s gotten off the concrete roads and reached the other side, the boy makes it over to her, abandoning his post and leaving an angry line of drivers free to finally rampage after being forced immobile in one place for too long.
He sticks his hand out for a high five, cheers, “Hey we did it!”
Kiara stares at the offered hand, still gasping for breath. “We?”
“Last I checked you have remained completely three-dimensional, not squashed like a cockroach because a red BMW ran you over so yes, we ,” he replies, equally unmoving.
He’s infuriating. Most people that take this little amount of time to uncover her argumentative, combative, disposition are just as quick to cut off contact, walk off mid-conversation, or avoid her at every turn before they can even have one. Instead, he seems to find it engagingly entertaining, like he enjoys it, even. She frowns. Chrodi croaks.
“See even Chrodi agrees, don’t you?” The boy coos, reaching down to pick her up.
Kiara slaps his hand away, ignores his offended cry and warns threateningly, “Excuse me, I haven’t decided if I trust you with her yet.”
His eyes widen in disbelief. “What do you think I’m gonna do, cook dinner?”
She chokes on a gasp. Kiara asks, incredulous, “why is that even a sentence your brain thought of?”
The only reason Kiara becomes conscious of an approaching figure is because the boy suddenly goes stock-still, cheeks sucked in from the way he’s biting against the inside flesh, nudging at her waist like a little kid anxious of being reprimanded by the teacher. But when Kiara looks out onto the field, all she sees is a little girl—a couple years younger than them with walnut toned hair pulled back from her face where a pair of fogged up indigo glasses are perched. Pieces of her hair bounce off her shoulders with every step, eventually revealing two polished, dainty horse stud earrings—instead of an overzealous authority figure.
A burst of hot, red, adrenaline-fueled optimism rushes up her spine.
“Do you think it’s her chicken?” She asks excitedly.
He winces a little, answers, “I wouldn’t bet my money on it, no.”
Kiara side-eyes him. “What does that mean?”
The girl doesn’t announce herself once she reaches them. She doesn’t say anything at all, just takes a giant step forward and grabs the bike straight from Kiara’s hands all while giving her the stink eye.
Kiara, having been given zero indication that this interaction would be a hostile one, is entirely unprepared when her whole body tilts forward, chasing after the bike. “Hey what—”
The little girl’s immediate defense is to permanently force Kiara back, pushing herself up on her toes until her two tiny palms are exerting force against Kiara’s shoulders so hard she topples back. Kiara winds both arms in circles to stop herself from tipping completely but quickly finds there’s no need when the blond takes a step back, angling his torso so the weight against him steadies her.
This seems to enrage the girl further, her nostrils flare and she twists her feet, digs them in the dirt in frustration.
“JJ!” She yells, bug-eyed and borderline crazed—though Kiara doesn’t immediately notice, not with the way her brain takes its sweet time cataloging the mysterious boy’s name against her conscient will, JJ , she wonders what it stands for—before elaborating, “she stole my bike, this is not someone we want not falling.”
Kiara huffs a relieved sigh, realizing there’s only been a slight, solvable, misunderstanding. She kneels to the girl’s height and says gently, “this isn’t your bike, I think you’ve just got it confused with yours. It must look pretty similar.”
The girl’s glare only deepens so Kiara looks to her main defense. “Right?” She asks him, “tell her how this bike is yours.”
He doesn’t, is the thing. He blinks and shifts his weight to his other leg and whips his head to look, strangely, suspiciously, interested, at the scalloped tiles of the copper coloured roof of a nearby house.
And alright maybe that’s not the most immediately reassuring response but Kiara doesn’t let herself slip into alarm, not immediately, she pitches her head to the side and motions with a nod for him to back her up.
“Right?” She repeats, “you wouldn’t let me steal a little girl’s bike thinking it was yours?”
“I’m not little, I’m 13!” The girl in question objects either unaware or unbothered by the new tightness suddenly warping their surrounding air.
Kiara waits, narrows her eyes at the boy and asks him one last time, “Right, JJ ?”
JJ goes silent for a minute then preemptively recoils as he retorts, sheepish and guilty, in what he must think is his most witty, charismatic voice, “She’s not little, she’s 13?”
Kiara squeezes the grip she’d managed to keep on the handlebar so tight the flashy silver bell attached to the front shrieks.
She closes her eyes and forces a deep, long, slow breath which seems to provide the 13-year-old girl just enough time to rip her bike out of Kiara’s hands. Kiara doesn’t put up a fight, she doesn’t grit her teeth or mutter a response when the little girl plucks an indignant Chrodi from the front basket and places her on the street, riding away as she yells out, “Buy your own damn bike lady!”
“Good mouth on her huh? I mostly taught her that.” JJ says when he realizes Kiara still hasn’t shown any sign of a reaction beyond simmering like a pot of boiling water about to implode.
He coughs against the back of his hand, gives a stilted exhale and an abashed laugh. “Uh, we live near each other and her parents hired me to clean up the lawn so—that’s what I was doing before when you saw me on the yard. Earlier.”
Kiara is stunned. The air is blistering with wet heat and her hair is sticking to her forehead and her nose and her lips in frizzy tendrils and the strap of her top has slinked down her shoulder, again , tugging, tight and uncomfortable. She rubs a hand across her face. “You let me steal some random stranger’s bike? A kid , no less?”
His mouth twitches. “Technically I’m a random stranger and you had no qualms about stealing when you thought it was mine.”
She meets his eyes, stares him down at the weaseling statement which seems to be enough for him to backtrack. He defends, smally, “I mean I did try to warn you—”
Kiara interrupts, voice piercing, “You should’ve tried harder!”
Her tone eggs him on and instead of conceding, he asserts his own argument. He sighs, as if he has any reason to be exasperated at her , “It’s such a small bike, kidsize, I mean how did you even think it was mine?”
“You were standing right next to it,” Kiara argues.
“You’re standing right next to that trash can, doesn’t mean it belongs to you.” He points out unhelpfully.
She crosses her arms across her chest, briefly contemplating homicide, when Chrodi hesitantly approaches her, pecking against the top curve of her shoe. Kiara scoffs once, at herself, then hunches down. She waves her hands in front of her, shuffling forward until Chrodi gets the hint and allows Kiara to shepherd her forward.
JJ doesn’t take this as the sign of defeat that it is, he spouts, in an attempt to rebuild their weaking correspondence, “I saved you from falling! More than once! Doesn’t that garner some of your trust back?”
“You were the reason I fell for two of those three times!” She retaliates.
He drums his fingers against the side of his leg. “So what, you're just gonna leave with the chicken?”
“Yup.”
She can almost hear the frustration in his voice, strained, when he exclaims, “I know the owner, I could show you where he is!”
Kiara doesn’t turn around. “That’s what they all say!” She tells him over her shoulder.
“That doesn’t even make sense!” He responds. Then, seconds later when he accepts that Kiara’s really not turning back, when she’s built enough of a distance between them that he has to raise his voice for her to hear, “Welcome to the neighborhood I guess!”
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It doesn’t take long for the overgrassed sidewalk to turn into a curvy dirt path, for the claustrophobic intersection to be replaced by lines of quaint hobbyistic shops hanging large plank signs that spell ‘closed’ in loopy, cursive letters, against their floor-to-ceiling display windows.
It takes even less time than that for Kiara’s back to shoot aching jolts across her torso in protest of the constant bending Kiara had resorted to until she straightens up and realizes with defeated resentment that she actually didn’t need to herd the chicken at all, it seems to know exactly where it’s going all by itself.
She’s just the glorified babysitter.
Kiara’s halted briefly, staring longingly at a pile of freshly baked breads and a pyramidal mountain of muffins with sticky white glaze overtop, both of which are locked behind the shut doors of a bakery when she hears a faint voice echoing shouts. There’s a boy pelting pumpkin seeds from a plastic baggie onto the ground, yelling, “Chrodi, Chrodi where are you?!”
He’s dressed a little like a desaturated cartoon character, the collar popped on his cobalt and lilac printed Hawaiian shirt, buttons undone so the only thing covering his chest is the bandana he’s rolled into itself which hangs like a necklace between his collarbones. His mauve shorts are tightened at the waist with a teal, crosshatch-patterned drawstring like he went in and personally replaced the lace that originally came with the shorts. On purpose. Which would be a ridiculous image to have of any teenage boy but for some reason she can really picture it with him, sitting with both arms perched on either knee on a rundown sunporch of an old beach house, playing top 40 pop music on vinyl while meticulously sliding in the string, one eye closed and tongue poking out.
Currently, he’s framing his mouth with two cupped hands in an attempt to amplify his voice, exclaiming, “Chrodi you’re going to miss supper time, I made that green gazpacho you like so much! Even added baby spinach which set me back more than I’m comfortable admitting.”
Kiara clears her throat to get his attention as she walks closer to him, the chicken tottering ahead. She asks with tentative keenness,“Is she yours?”
“Chrodi!” He surges to the ground for a hug but Chrodi’s too busy collecting the scattered pumpkin seeds to notice or even lift her head so he stumbles to a stop before popping back up to standing level.
He doesn’t seem to find this as embarrassing as Kiara does, just shifts his attention to her, smiles and says, sincerely, “thank you so much for finding her.”
Kiara nods but it’s short, more forced than not, and she can’t help but blurt out, “She was in the middle of the road, chickens really shouldn’t be let out of their pen like that. She could’ve gotten seriously hurt.”
He doesn’t wave away her concern like she was worried he might. Instead he strokes his jaw thoughtfully before giving a defeated shrug, admits to her, “Chrodi suffers from wanderlust, she’s impossible to pin down.”
Kiara looks at the chicken. She’s plucking at the ground despite having already eaten all the fallen seeds, her little claws kick up dirt on Kiara’s feet. Her eyebrows furrow. “Yeah, that’s—I get that.”
He seems pleased at her response, grins enthusiastically and places both arms on his waist before he introduces, “I’m John B by the way, thanks again. I don’t want to imagine the type of trouble she would’ve gotten up to if she was left to her own devices all night.”
“Kiara,” she answers in turn, reciprocating his handshake, tries not to find it pathetic that she preens a little at the idea of having finally done something right.
“Are you new here?” He asks. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
Kiara nods. “Just got here today actually.”
His eyes go wide, mouth twisting downwards in sympathy.“And you’ve already gone on a rescue mission with this fellow?” He clucks disapprovingly at his chicken like a mother would their rascal toddler. “You must be exhausted.”
Now that he’s mentioned it, the adrenaline that’s been fueling most of her unconscious movements—since she first saw Chrodi’s anxious squabbling, no, since she narrowly landed and scratched an entire side of her body that’s still throbbing, or actually, more accurately, since before sunrise when she scarfed down the breakfast her dad woke up early to make for her as the ring she stole from her mother’s jewelry box scraped against her fork, the scritch of whining betrayal the only noise in the silent dining room—has rubbed off, leaving in its wake a sore body dropping to the floor by the second. She stretches her arms out in front of her, hears a pop from between her joints. “You could say that. You wouldn’t happen to know a cheap hotel nearby would you?”
John B sucks air between his teeth. “Cheap? Not likely. The prices in these parts are always inflated this time of year, it’s the top vacation spot for people with deep pockets.”
Kiara deflates. “Oh.”
There must be some clearly visible despair written all over her face because he immediately brightens up, overenthuses his words when he offers, “but I got a house with a free couch that you could use if you're desperate.”
Kiara falters in disbelief, “That’s nice of you to offer but—”
He puffs his cheeks out and swivels back to look at what Kiara can only assume is the direction of his house. He comes to a decision, looking at her once more and nodding his head. “I don’t normally do this I swear but I have a good feeling about you, the fact that you helped Chrodi and Chrodi led you back to me—Did you know she’s actually incredibly shy? I’d call her an introvert but that’s an understatement. She barely approaches strangers so I guess it just, it means something that you two found each other. It feels kismet, you know?”
She really, really, doesn’t.
But free lodging? Even just for the first night? That’s too good of a deal to pass up, granted only if he’s not gonna murder her in her sleep, that is.
“I have a roommate if it makes you feel better.” He exclaims, voice bright, before adding almost in hindsight, then peculiarly like he’s speaking on personal experience, “he’s also a guy, but he’s pretty like a girl in the right lighting.”
She blurts out a laugh, whether from deluded exhaustion or genuine hilarity, she’s not sure.
It’s not really like she has much of a choice. Maybe if she hadn’t spent most of the day flying, trying to escape the reach of word of mouth, or chasing after Chrodi’s rightful owner, she would’ve had more time to properly seek out somewhere to spend the night but that’s not an option anymore. The wind is starting to whistle from the beach with how secluded it’s become and Kiara can much too easily imagine herself lying on a hard bench, waiting for the streetlights to come on.
She shrugs, confirms, “Okay, if you’re sure your roommate won’t mind.”
John B beams. He snaps his fingers and announces, “I have this board game that we never get to play because we don’t have enough people but now—”
“Maybe let’s save that for tomorrow morning,” Kiara interrupts.
It doesn’t seem to dissuade him. He just grins at her, says, “sure thing,” distractedly like he’s still actively thinking of all the other things he can rope her and probably his roommate into doing now with this new headcount.
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John B doesn’t lead her straight to his house, he ends up giving her a makeshift tour of the town first even though she didn’t actually ask for one. He takes her to the wide street in the center of town, that smells strangely of cinnamon soap and aloe and freshly bloomed asparagus, where a farmer’s market is supposedly set up every Friday morning and shows her the striped oak deck where his best friend dragged him to for most of their childhood—before we discovered this one spot in the middle of the ocean where the waves hit the highest peaks and like, enfold you in them, he tells her like he’s revealing a secret, eyes twinkling—dipping their heads underwater, sinking to the bottom to rake their fingers in the sand like they’d find hidden treasure there, trying to beat the thick heat of their non-air-conditioned homes.
He talks about life on the island, Outer Banks, apparently—it’s paradise on earth, I swear, like you’re in the middle of an endless summer, he says with a fond, overly-romantic expression—and the mini-farm he’s started right in his backyard— here’s this wheat I’ve been looking to buy, it’s organic and filled with the good kind of micronutrients, but man do they make you sell all your organs to afford it—and his dad, absent—always off on his escapades, he’s like a real-life pirate. Ever since I was little, he’s always been chasing after a different fortune, something to make him feel important, he says wistful and yearning but not resentful, understanding even as his grin drops on one side and his tone falls frayed.
She doesn’t understand that either, how John B gets the emotionally unavailable parent and the caring for things, wholeheartedly and without pause, to make up for those who didn’t care about him but not the bitterness, not like hers, not the hostility for people whose validation they’ll both spend their whole life fruitlessly chasing.
But the most interesting line of topic throughout their conversation turns out to be John B’s best friend since the third grade and, coincidentally, current roommate. They met in class when the boy chewed so hard on the back tip of his blue marker that the ink sprayed all over his mouth and into the creases of his lips causing John B to jump into action and ram his latest christmas present, a checkered bandana, right onto the boy’s mouth in an attempt to stop the dye from dripping over his shirt and on the desk. A few days later the boy, in turn, saved John B from getting punched in the nose during recess by a particularly rowdy crowd of older fifth-grade bullies. And just like that their unbreakable bond was formed like most male friendships are born, from 99 cent artificial blue-raspberry scented markers and a little blood.
They’ve been living together since high school—frankly, I would’ve offered you the guestroom if he hadn’t basically carved his name into the bed’s headboard, if you get what I mean, he divulges with a badly executed wink—and as such, all of the science fiction and cult horror DVDs stacked in the half-mounted, second hand entertainment system under the TV were stolen by him and most of the permanent dents and scratches on the kitchen appliances belong to him too, though John B tells her he should be given leeway on that front considering he never would’ve been allowed in a kitchen at all by any other family’s guidelines.
He sounds like the type of harmless fun she would regret. Like the type she’d make anyway, just to see what happens.
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There’s a grimy little convenience mart that’s made of too much rusting metal and flammable wood logs to have possibly passed code inspection, lighted up more like a cosmic bowling alley than an actual grocery store, on their way to John B’s house. It’s got neon blue letters hanging on the ledge of its roof, the ‘A’ crooked and flickering, and huge windows that reveal sparsely shelved dry ingredients in multicolored packages and long wall-to-wall, frosted-over, fridges stocked with energy drinks and sodas and the full size, artificially flavored, popsicles Kiara used to sneak into the family shopping cart during mid-heatwave grocery trips.
John B hesitates near the door before they can pass by and Kiara shoots him a curious glance. He asks, bouncing on his heels, “do you mind if I hop in to buy a couple things for breakfast tomorrow? I’m afraid we don’t have much in the fridge, weren’t really prepared for a guest.”
Kiara pauses. “Oh. Yeah sure but you really don’t have to—”
He’s already left as soon as she so much as implies agreement and her politefully resistant words fall on silent air. Kiara hangs back while he strolls inside, the little chimes hanging atop the door ringing his entrance. The evening air slips through the thin material of her top and Kiara shivers at the cold. She wraps her arms around her middle and decides to walk around to warm up. She wanders aimlessly, making sure not to move so far that she’s no longer in immediate view from the store, past the sharp-featured gnome placed in a little pile of dirt right outside the mart, shining like it’s just been buffed, and a smattering of overgrown wisteria growing like ivy over someone’s garage.
It’s all very pretty. Picturesque. It makes the bottom of Kiara’s stomach churn a little.
Until she faces the sunset and finds a row of neatly lined, cedar privacy fences separating the public lot from a forming neighborhood of houses and, the captivating part, huge, sloppy, graffiti letters in faded black chicken scratch, taking up so much space that not an inch of the wood is left untainted.
She stands there transfixed, trying and failing to figure out what it says.
John B approaches her after some time has passed with two thin gray plastic bags in tow, a lump lugging down the bottom with how heavy the purchased items are. He glances at the wall she’d been staring at and shakes his head in parental disappointment while he informs her, “Vandalism is a huge problem on this side of town, little scoundrels skip classes to spray paint all over the buildings they want to keep off limits from the firms marketing to tourists.”
“We did that one,” the same voice from this morning reminds John B, casually and with mirth, and Kiara tenses every muscle in her body to keep the surprise off her face. When she turns her head just an inch further she realizes JJ had inconspicuously, whether on purpose or not, followed John B out from the store without her noticing.
“Oh shit you’re right. I forgot about this one,” John b says, suddenly puffing his chest out in some sort of half-earnest pride. It deflates almost immediately as he huffs a laugh at the one spot where the paint dripped too low, pooling onto the ground in a hardened shell. “I don’t know who ever let us buy spray paints.”
“Obviously not the police squad,” JJ retorts, conspiratorial. He looks younger when he’s not smirking. Sweet, even.
John B considers the wall with this new perspective but Kiara’s still looking at JJ. He hasn’t changed much but in the past hour he’d rolled his sleeves up and somehow obtained new scuff marks on his shoes. His hair looks more feathery too, like he’s run his hands through it one too many times.
“Hey, my outlining was pretty good though huh?” John B asks, bumping his shoulder against JJ’s. He turns to Kiara and explains, “we could only afford the damaged cans of spray paints, the discounted ones, but they always had the worst nozzle control. Honestly it’s impressive that you can even tell what I spelled out, I think.”
Kiara looks back at the bold lettering. She would be pretty firmly lying if she said she could make out even a single actual word from the piece but John B is still looking at her anticipatorily so she smiles a little and nods vaguely. It seems like it’ll pacify him until JJ snorts at her forced levity.
There’s a lull in conversation and John B uses it to spin around, motions for them to head back which Kiara is infinitely grateful for but when she follows she notices JJ’s still trailing behind, seemingly in the same direction as them.
“Are you stalking me?” She hisses to him under her breath while having an internal minor revelation about John B’s adept habit of adopting strays.
JJ flicks a flat glance at her. “You’re kidding right?”
She crosses her arms across her chest. “No I’m not kidding, I mean it seems like you know John B for some reason but that doesn’t necessarily clear you from suspicion. You know, they say that everyone in a small town has walked by a murderer at least once in their life.”
“ Jesus, ” he chokes out, sending John B some sort of telepathic call that has him turning around to face them so JJ can question, “I thought you said you did tell her everything about the living situation?”
“I did,” John B exclaims automatically. He scratches at his chin and looks quizzically at Kiara. “I mean, I know I rambled about other stuff but I really thought I mentioned a roommate?”
Kiara’s mouth drops open without her approval. She juts a finger at JJ, splutters in aghast disbelief as she asks, “ He’s the roommate?”
John B nods, head tilted like he’s unable to identify her out of place reaction while JJ snaps a gratuitous, triumphant, grin at her.
“Oh,” Kiara mutters, defeated and a little embarrassed. “He just, sounded much more pleasant in your stories.”
John B narrows his eyes at JJ, asks, “What did you do?”
“Me?” JJ bleats at the accusation.
John B undeterred and unconvinced, levels him with a look, replies easily, “Dude she hasn’t even been here 24 hours, how could you have possibly pissed her off already?”
He smiles blithely. “It’s a gift I guess”
John B mutters under his breath, “the one time I actually need you to be charismatic.” He attempts to pacify Kiara with a hesitantly encouraging reassurance, “you won’t even notice he’s there I promise”
JJ salutes his cooperation. “I’ll be quiet as a stuck mouse in a glue trap,” he promises.
Kiara keeps her doubts to herself.
They walk home, John b in the front, JJ and Kiara on opposite sides of the path.
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“Well this is it, home sweet home,” John B announces once they’ve reached an area of moss and wild grass secluded enough from adjacent houses. He reaches into his back pocket for a ring of keys and unlocks the front door to a house with cracked white paint and a tall roof, branches of a huge tree creeping near as if to reinforce the outside of the walls.
He swings it open as he steps through so it’ll stay ajar enough for everyone to walk in but JJ beats Kiara to the door and slips his hand against the wooden frame’s edge, pulling it with him, so it just barely closes in front of her nose before she squeezes her shoe in the open crack and wedges it back open and wiggles inside.
She glares at the back of his blond head even as he acts wilfully innocent.
John B’s leaves them to grab spare blankets and a pillow for her as she roams the living room—surveying the cluttered walls, the whole house a make-shift pinboard of aged maps and crumpled photos, postcards and arcade game prizes pinned as hanging decor, the worn wood of furniture and general, palpable breath of permanent, content, residence—while JJ stretches obnoxiously in her way. He exclaims, loudly and pointedly, “I can’t wait to get into my nice, coil-free, cushioned bed. My body is just so sore since some strange girl fell on top of me today.”
John B asks from the other room, oblivious to the purposefully detailed descriptions, “oh no kidding? New touron?”
JJ barks a laugh while Kiara places her hands on both knees, exhausted, and sighs.
When John B comes back in the room and catches JJ’s shit-eating grin and Kiara’s wrinkled nose he looks between them a couple times before pleading, “Please don’t involve me in this.” He points at JJ, “especially when I’m 99% sure you’re in the wrong.”
Kiara rolls her eyes and turns her back to JJ, she takes the pile of stuff from John B, eager to move on from this line of conversation that seems to be repeating itself, stalking her. “Thanks again for letting me stay here tonight. I promise I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I find a place,” she admits.
“You’re welcome,” JJ voices from behind them, unnecessarily. Kiara presses her lips together.
“No worries” John B says, “and take your time, seriously, we don’t mind.”
Kiara doesn’t even register JJ’s interjection this time, she might even figure out how to perpetually block him out during her stay.
The pull-out couch takes up most of the space in the room, it’s battered but thankfully not stained and looks surprisingly comfortable. There’s a single sheet placed haphazardly across the seats and Kiara stretches an arm to pull it off so she can put her stuff down when she finds, to her surprise, a metal bowl filled with a blob of something round and beigy-white under the cover.
“Oh sorry about that,” John B moves quickly to move the bowl for her, before Kiara drops everything she’s clutched to her chest, and takes it, presumably, to the kitchen.
“Was that dough?” Kiara asks once she realizes that there’s no explanation to follow the odd moment, that apparently the context is normal enough to not deign one.
John B nods once he re-enters view.
“I’m making bread,” he says simply, then clasps his hands together and says excitedly, “oh we can have some for tomorrow and invite people over, like a little welcoming dinner!”
“Sure, that sounds fun, but, also, what was the dough doing in the living room?”
His smile doesn’t falter. “The yeast needs to be fermented at a cool temperature.”
She blinks. “So you put it on the couch?”
“This one didn’t fit on my bed,” he replies simply.
Kiara stops asking questions after that.
He points her to a bathroom where she washes her face with the one skincare product she remembered to bring with her and brushes her teeth with a half-emptied tube of peppermint-forward toothpaste that was lying against the porcelain sink. She thinks about the time change, whether anyone back home would still be awake like her, and the type of start-up service she can provide to make use of her powers and how she wishes she had more time to just bathe in the adjustment before chasing after the next goal—like how nice it was to just coast over the ocean, if she’ll ever find time to do that again, the ever-present, childish urge to want lots of what’s usually in small quantities—and how she’d noticed boxes of fruit loops in the grocery bags John B had placed on the countertop, whether or not he’d notice if she opened one tonight.
By the time she comes back out, John B is in his room and the door is shut. She takes a glance at the neon green numbers on the clock embedded into the oven and reels at how late it is, shuffling silently to her bed for the night where she makes an even more startling discovery. If she lays down, head perched on the curved arm of the couch, she’s pointed to face directly into the open door of the guest bedroom, JJ’s lying body mirrored back at her.
She makes a, likely high-pitched and frantic, mortifying squeak loud enough that JJ opens a single eye and gives her a cursory look-over. He asks dryly, bleary-eyed and mouth twitching to yawn, “Are you gonna watch me sleep all night?”
Kiara pushes herself up, scuffles to the single separation between them and passive aggressively, though as quietly as possible as to not wake up John B, slams the door shut. There’s a single, short, passing moment of complete peace as the oak wood grain blinks at her in amicable tranquility, until Kiara takes a step back and watches in horror as the door creaks back open on its own.
Kiara keeps staring at it like the door might apologize for the confusion and return itself to the position she had placed it in.
JJ groans from the bed, breaking her from the spell, explains solemnly, “the hinge is rusty, it doesn’t close all the way.”
She flicks an irritated glance at him before marching back to her comforting pile of blankets. She resists the urge to scream into her pillow. She closes her eyes and settles into the lumps of the couch, feels the notches of her spine sink into the depression between the two cushions. She worries it’ll take her a long time to fall asleep, what with knowing that JJ could be watching her at any given moment, but it’s barely two seconds since she’s shut her eyes that she’s out like a light.