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“How long have you been in New Orleans?”
“Oh…” She shrugs, making it clear she doesn’t want to talk about it. “For a while. I haven’t made my way here yet, though. I…I don’t know. I mostly stick around my home.”
By the time we reach my car, I’ve already put together a bit of a game plan in my head. “I know you said you didn’t want to work for me, but will you please come in tomorrow and at least just show me where I went wrong and where you hacked it?”
She appears to consider it as she pulls open the door and slides into the car silently. She stays that way until we’re halfway back to her place, so I decide to up the ante.
“Well, that and we could figure out what to do about the curse? Maybe go and talk to my granny? Or my brother and cousin? The ones who have been cursed already. They’re quite overwhelming all at once, but I could call what we call an emergency meeting, and they could help us figure it out.”
Lindy sighs. “The ones who have found their soulmates will just tell us how wonderful it is to be cursed, and the ones who haven’t will probably just try and figure a way out of it, all the while knowing there is no way out, and there will be this hard air of finality. I’m not really much of a finality person myself. And I seriously don’t like crowds.”
“I just took you to one of the most crowded spots in the city!”
Her brows knit together, and her right eye twitches twice. “That was for cursed experimental purposes, so I sucked it up.”
“This would be too.”
She grasps her bag of cotton candy so hard in her lap that the plastic stretches thin, the air gets very airy inside, and I have this image of it exploding and bursting all over the car in a sweet, sticky scented rain of absolutely wonderful pink and blue cloudy goodness.
“Please?” I don’t know why I'm suddenly begging.
I don’t beg. And it shouldn’t matter to me so much that I get to see Lindy again, but it does. Me, who hates pretty much all forms of commitment. Me, who should be heading the other direction if she really is my soulmate. Not saying that she is, but she is the only one who can make the necklace glow. We really should get this situation figured out because it’s messed up and very messy. Loose ends suck. I think we can both agree on that.
“Look,” Lindy says softly when I round the corner before the street she lives on. “I’ll agree to one more day. Tomorrow. I’ll come in at noon and show you where I hacked your system, but only because your granny paid me a lot of money, and I feel guilty about it, even after knowing she might have cursed me in the process. I’ll help you with that for free, and you can have my time until five. If you want to get your family together or your granny to try and help us, then that’s fine, but after that, I think we should just forget about this and uh…never speak of it again and go our separate ways. Is that a deal?”
I know Lindy is being more than generous, given the strangeness of the situation. Wait, strangeness? More like an absolute absurdity. “It’s a deal.” For the life of me, I don’t know why I feel, um, less than enthusiastic about wrapping things up and getting her out of my life.
I should be ecstatic because soulmate avoided and curse and granny thwarted. That would make for a good story. Maybe it’s just that today has been, oddly enough, one of the most exciting, fun days of my life. It’s not every day someone burglarizes my house, leaps off my roof, and magically appears with my cursed necklace at my place of work a few hours later. Oh, and that’s after they hacked the unhackable. Lindy has some pretty amazing talents. She’s exciting, funny, and she’s a massively good sport. She’s also quick thinking, clever, and not afraid to kill wasps. Besides all that, she’s generous—she ordered all those desserts to give to her neighbors—loves animals—I mean, come on, she has like a zillion and one cats—is willing to do strange social experiments in crowds, and also, she didn’t really make fun of my crazy underwear. She just briefly mentioned it. She’s also beautiful and intriguing, and anyone would want to know her story, not just me.
I also want to know how she walked out of the house without a single cat hair clinging to her clothes with all those cats she lives with. I imagine it must be like a constant cotton candy explosion in her house, except with cats and cat hair, like a spontaneous hair ejection. They probably just saunter through the house, shedding and dropping hair all over the place like the way porcupines eject quills or skunks emit stink. I’m not sure if I’m talking about hair or bad smells now. Cats are clean, but they do eat tuna, and tuna is smelly. Their breath, farts, and um, poo poo doo doos—yes, I borrowed one of Granny’s terms—must smell abysmal.
