If only.
“Thank you,” my Voice says.
“My pleasure.”
“Thank you,” my Voice repeats in the exact same tone, no change of inflection to mean the difference between polite appreciation and the ocean-deep gratitude I owe Tom for making my life a life. But he gets it anyway. After all, my Voice is largely his work as well.
He starts to load what will fit into the giant sack he attached years ago to the back of my chair like a luggage rack but finds it already full. Nora’s sent him three dozen pumpkin cupcakes. He makes the swap, and we fist-bump. When I turn for home, I’m giddy with my prizes.
And as if all that weren’t miracle enough, just outside Tom’s door, I all but run over River Templeton.
“Mirabel!” A flash of panic as he leaps out of my way but then, undeniably, delight to see me.
“Sorry!” my Voice says.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry!” I tap again. It’s the first time he’s been alone with my Voice, and I wonder if he’ll think it’s strange—I’m strange—to have a conversation with.
“No, it was definitely my fault.” He does not seem to think it’s strange. I remember when he came to the house and couldn’t stop staring. The novelty of me has worn off, I guess. Other girls would be unhappy about this development, of course, but I am not other girls. “I was distracted.”
I type, quickly but there’s still a lag. “By what?”
“The limitations of your hardware store.” He indicates it with his chin as if there might be more than one hardware store in town. There is not. “My mom wants an extra key for the side door, but your hardware store doesn’t have a key-copying machine.”
“Church,” I tap.
“Huh?” he says.
So he has to wait while I type. “The key-copying machine is in the church.”
He waits for me to amend that statement, like maybe it’s autocorrect’s fault. It’s not. Then he waits for me to explain, but it’d take me till winter to type in a thorough gloss of Pastor Jeff’s fundraising schemes.
“Weird,” he says eventually.
I don’t disagree.
“I was also looking for spoons to practice bending with my mind,” he adds, speaking of weird, “but your hardware store doesn’t carry spoons either.”
“Do they in Boston?” my Voice wonders.
“Well no, but there’s a separate store for everything in Boston. Whereas your store seems more … general. It had this”—he opens a brown paper bag to show me his purchase: a cookbook thick as a thigh—“which is also an odd thing to have in a hardware store, so I thought maybe there was some kind of culinary section.”
“You cook?”
“No.” He grins. “That’s why I bought a cookbook. But I figure cooking’s like magic. You follow the directions, stir a bunch of stuff together, and presto! Poof! Dinner! Plus if your brain could stir the spoon for you, think how much time you would save.”
I consider what a difference telekinesis would make in my life. So that’s another thing River and I have in common.
“Can I walk with you?” he says, and I nod and push my joystick forward, and he falls into pace beside me, and we take in the perfect October morning, that lovely-all-over feeling of being outside and neither sweating nor shivering, though I am shivering, just a little, the smell of leaves drying or dying or whatever that smell is that comes when the trees turn and the seasons change and the whole world shifts toward what comes next.
But then he says, “Oh, Mirabel,” and blushes hard. “I shouldn’t have said ‘walk with you.’ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … I just meant…”
“I know what you meant,” my Voice assures him. I did, but that’s not what’s remarkable. What’s remarkable is that he even noticed. And having noticed, he could have just pretended he never said it. He could have just ignored it. Instead, he was brave. Awkward and brave.
“Thanks,” he says, which is sweet, thanking me. “I need to expand my vocabulary. I should study with your sister, come up with some other words besides ‘walk’ to mean, you know, wander around next to you. Traipse? Ramble? Take the air?”
I laugh.
“She’s great at the whole synonym thing,” he says, then scoffs, “And she says she’s worried about getting into college.”
I nod, agreeing that this is silly, not her worry but that worry. She’ll have no trouble getting in.