“Aha!” She pointed at me with her cocktail toothpick, speared with a chocolate-dipped strawberry, before taking a nibble of its tip. A vivid sense impression popped into my drink-hazed brain of what kissing her might taste like—tart and fruity and candied sweet—before I hastily banished it. “So you admit that you’ve actually sampled a Chili’s cocktail!”
“I have made the occasional late-night Chili’s run in my misspent youth, yes, before I came to know better. It’s called personal growth.”
“Never heard of it.”
I took a few more swigs, until my head felt like it was bobbing somewhere above my neck like a loosely tethered balloon. For a second, I had the vague and troubling realization that it had been a long time since I’d eaten much of anything, but I dismissed this as something I could worry about down the line.
“So,” Talia prompted, nudging my shoulder with hers. “You were going to tell me about how Gareth drove you out of town.”
“I was.” I slammed the rest of the Pandemonium down for liquid courage, fiddling with the empty plastic pumpkin. “Though it wasn’t quite that dramatic. We started dating end of my junior year. Right before his graduation, and school letting out for the summer. He insisted we keep it under wraps; too many Blackmoore haters in his business, was the alleged reason. Should have been my first red flag right there.”
Thinking of that summer, the sweltering heat cut by the balmy breezes that swept down from Lady’s Lake—like every other season, Thistle Grove summers were never less than flawless—resurrected a deep, dull pain, like prodding at a thick scar. That May, Gareth had started leaving magical-missive spells in my locker. A coin that turned into a hummingbird with a teensy note strapped to its needle of a leg, before the whole thing vanished in a puff. Origami stars that burst into miniature fireworks spelling out haiku composed just for me.
Hackneyed, juvenile spells that, at the time, seemed like the most charming and meaningful of romantic gestures.
Especially to seventeen-year-old Emmy Harlow, who in her wildest dreams would not have imagined that Gareth Blackmoore—scion of the most powerful magical family, captain of the basketball team, and swoon-worthiest male specimen at Thistle Grove High—might take an interest in her.
“Who wouldn’t have been swept off their feet,” Talia said cuttingly after I described it to her, but the edge in her voice wasn’t meant for me.
“Right? It was all so profoundly ridiculous. But it meant so much that he noticed me.” I stirred my drink absently, mouth twisting as I stared into the tiny whirlpool at the center. “You don’t know what it was like growing up here as a Harlow, permanently on the lowest rung on the magical ladder. Knowing that you were born into mediocrity and never going to work your way up, no matter how hard you tried.”
“Well, we’re not as powerful as the Blackmoores, either,” Talia pointed out. “No one is.”
“Maybe not, but you’re the next best thing,” I countered. “Even the Thorns can do amazing shit, whereas the Harlows barely even have an affinity to speak of. But being with Gareth . . . it wasn’t just about being in love with him. The really intoxicating thing was, if he could see something special in me, maybe it meant I really was more than just the Harlow girl. Like maybe I could still become someone, even if I stayed here.”
And I had always been the kind of ambitious that demanded the culmination of becoming Someone. I craved the validation of high achievement, the sense of wielding control over your own life. The fulfillment you could find only through setting up lofty goals for yourself, then knocking them down one by one.
“Fuck,” Talia said grimly, intuiting the trajectory of my sorry tale. “And then the bastard dumped you.”
“That, he did. He said he needed to start thinking about his future, and he just ‘couldn’t see himself with a Harlow long-term.’ I think he actually meant for it to be an easy letdown, like, ‘It’s not you, babe, it’s your last name.’？”
My face burned with remembered humiliation at the blithely casual way in which he’d delivered this gut-wrenching line. As if we hadn’t spent every waking moment of that summer tangled together by the picturesque ponds that lined his family estate. As if he hadn’t called me pet names, bought me a million little presents, even told me that he almost, nearly, all but loved me.
Apparently, when stacked up against the unfortunate accident of my birthright—or lack thereof—none of that mattered in the end.