Stardust Promises

“A raspberry swirl, please,” asks the brown-haired boy from the other side of the counter. He smiles at me in a way I don’t see often in teenage boys, and I see a lot of them, what with working in an ice cream shop. I smile back as I pick up the spoon to get him his scoop.

“That’ll be four eighty,” I say, and he slides a five-dollar note across the counter.

“Keep the change,” he says, winking at me. Another smile creeps up my face, even though I do my best to suppress it.

Without looking down, and without him noticing, I sprinkle some stardust onto his ice cream, just enough so that he’ll want to come back, and slide it across the counter to him. “If you want a spoon, they’re in the bucket just there.”

I smile at him one more time as he thanks me and moves to sit at the table outside where his friends are waiting. They jeer at him, and I think I hear one of them teasing about flirting with the ice cream girl. I smile to myself before serving the next customer.

“Jemma,” my boss says, sidling up to me once we hit a lull, wiping her hands on her jeans. “What have I told you about using stardust?”

“Don’t?”

“Exactly. It doesn’t matter how blue his eyes are,” she says, bumping her hip against mine. Hannah’s a cool boss, only three years older than I am. I needed a summer job to save money for the post-graduation trip Mum has planned. With all the stress of the last year of high school coming up, I thought serving ice cream to strangers every day would be a good distraction. And I was right.

“I just want to bring more customers in,” I say, glancing out the window to where he and his friends are laughing. “Is it really that bad?”

“You’re basically drugging them, manipulating them into coming back, so yes,” Hannah says, grinning at me in a ‘we’ll talk later’ kind of way before she walks away.

The boy comes back in five minutes later, his friends in tow. “Thanks for the ice cream,” he says. “It was the best I’ve ever had.”

I pull twenty cents out of the register as he slides me a piece of paper across the counter. I slip it into my pocket and hand him the twenty cents. “Your change.”

“But, I told you-”

“I get paid enough, sparky. I don’t need twenty cents.” I smile at him and he takes the change gingerly. His friends snicker behind him. When he leaves, I hear them calling him ‘sparky’, like I made up a new word for them to try out. I don’t know why you’d be friends with people who constantly laugh at and tease you, but I don’t have his life, so I can’t really judge.

No customers come in for the last half hour of my shift, and the paper is burning a hole in my pocket, but I don’t take it out until I’ve turned the car off in the driveway back home.

:) Luke Bridges 0433…

Oh hell, no. I scrunch up the paper before I finish reading his phone number. The only thing worse than connecting him to the ice cream parlour is connecting him to me. That would be a disaster. Like always. Every single boyfriend. Every single wink. Every single number slid across the counter.

But what if this guy is different? No. He won’t be. He’ll find out who I really am and think I’ve manipulated him into whatever giving me his number will amount to. A week. Two, at most. That’s my lying limit. I can’t keep it hidden for that long, and I feel bad about lying to people over and over.

Then why did I stardust him today?

I could get away with it. I’m only scrunching up his number and not calling it because of Hannah. She wouldn’t fire me for having another one- to two-week boyfriend. But she could fire me on grounds of bribery. So, if I tell him before anything starts between us, then I won’t even be lying to him. I won’t be caught in a lie, and I won’t be fired for bribery. I’ve already been caught doing it twice, and third strike, I’m out, so coming clean straight away is my only option.

So, I text him.

Jemma: Hello. I have to tell you something.

I’m in my room scrolling through Instagram by the time he texts back, and it’s been way too long to consider him ‘just wanting to be friends’. Because, as everyone knows, the longer he takes to text back, the more he wants you. You know, instead of being courteous and keeping the conversation going at the time it started. Anyway.

Luke: heyy

Jemma: Hi. Are you ready to talk now?

Luke: sure

Jemma: Ok, so,

I backspace my message and sit there, glaring at the blinking cursor, goading me into fessing up. I can’t think of how to phrase it.

I kinda drugged you today, so you’d come back for more ice cream

I’m magic, and I can use it to make ice cream taste good enough that you’ll come back every week forever

I manipulated you today, and I’m magic, kind of a witch, actually, and I thought I’d tell you now instead of waiting for a couple of weeks down the line

I throw my phone across my bed, and it slides to a stop right before falling off the edge. My head falls back into my pillow with a thump and I stare at the mould growing on my ceiling. Bloody hell, this is the worst. No wonder I string them along. Immediate magical confession is so hard.

My phone buzzes near my feet.

Luke: you still there?

Jemma: Yeah, I am

Luke: you gonna tell me the thing, or…

Texting him is getting nowhere. I have to call him. It’s the only way. I press the phone button and hold the phone to my ear, listening for him to pick up. The dial tone rings four times before the line connects.

“Hello?” Luke says, like he has no idea who’s calling.

“Hi,” I say. “It’s Jemma. From the ice cream shop today.”

“Oh, yes, hi,” he says, sounding relieved. “I believe you had something to tell me?”

I must stay silent for a bit too long, thoughts whirring through my brain, because Luke coughs.

“Okay, okay, um, I’m… I’m magic.” I say it all very fast, ripping off the band-aid.

“Yes, you are,” he says, nonchalant, and I blanch.

“What?”

“I’m… I’m flirting with you. Isn’t that what you were doing?” My surprise must have thrown him off.

“I… no,” I say, apparently as incapable of speech as he is. “I’m- I’m not a human, like you. I’m a witch. Kind of. I can do magic. Like today.”

“Hold on,” he says, as though he’s holding out a hand to stop me talking. “You’re saying… you used magic on me today?”

I pause for a second, trying to think of the best way to phrase this. It could make or break his opinion of me. “Why do you think that was the best ice cream you’ve ever tasted?”

“I’m guessing it’s not just because a pretty girl made it for me.”

That stops me in my tracks, but I recover quickly. “No. I put stardust on it.” I’m on a roll now, so I keep going. “That makes the ice cream taste so much better than it actually does and convinces you to come back the next time you want ice cream, which is at least once a week, from what I can tell.”

I can hear him take a deep breath. “Wow,” he whispers, like he didn’t want me to hear it. “That’s… that’s really cool.”

“You’re not… mad?”

“Why would I be? I met a magic person today. She gave me ice cream. She’s talking to me on the phone right now.”

I smile in spite of it all. “You’re not too bad yourself.”

“Is this flirting now? Or is there something else I don’t know?”

“No, this is flirting.” I laugh, and he laughs with me. I don’t know when I hang up the phone, but I do know that we’re going to get coffee together tomorrow. I do know that I’m not going to put stardust in his coffee.

I arrive at Kettle and Pot five minutes early, and rock back and forth on my feet, waiting for Luke to arrive. If he stands me up, I’ll-

“Hey!” Luke calls, striding over to me from where he turned the corner. I wave at him and stop rocking on my feet. He speaks again once he reaches me. “I didn’t catch your name yesterday.”

This confuses me for a second—I’m sure I told him my name over the phone—but I go with it. “It’s Jemma. Didn’t you see my name badge? Or hear me when I called you?”

I say it with a smile, but my stomach is churning. This guy… hmm. “I guess I was too lost in your eyes, and your voice.” He smiles at me like he means it, then offers me his elbow. “My lady.”

I take his elbow and he leads me into the café, where we get a table near the window, which has a nice view of the city, and the park across the road.

“Nice day,” I say, breaking the silence the only way I know how: small talk. “Only a couple of clouds.”

“Yeah,” Luke says, then picks up a menu and lays it flat in front of him, scanning the list. I copy him, and soon discover waffles as an option. It’s only five bucks as well, which suits me just fine. I opt for a hot chocolate instead of a coffee, since I’m not really a coffee fan. I tell the waitress what I’d like when she comes over, and Luke orders, too, grinning up at her as he hands her the menus.

“So…” Luke says, stretching his hands out in front of him, his fingertips touching the table. “How long have you known?”

He catches me off guard with his question, but I answer honestly. I don’t want us to have any lies between us if we can avoid it. “Since I was little. Well, I figured it out when I was ten, but I’d been using magic since I was a toddler. I’d stardust away my bruises when I fell over, that kind of thing.”

Luke grins in amusement, and I smile back. “Oh, by the way, you can’t tell anyone, okay? It’s a secret, just between us.” He nods with a slightly grave expression, a silent promise. I try to lighten the mood. “What about you?” I ask, then realise that’s a stupid question, given his raised eyebrows, I add, “What were you like as a kid?”

“Being the youngest of three boys, I was at the bottom of the dogpile a lot,” he says, chuckling at the memory. “But no magic to get rid of bruises, unfortunately.” He points to a scar above his eyebrow. “Got this when I was five. My oldest brother, Jack, threw a deck of cards at me, split my face open.”

I look from his eyes to his scar in horror. “When you were five? How old was Jack?”

“Seven,” Luke replies, somewhat proudly.

Without thinking, I rub my fingers together until I feel fine dust gather between them. I lift my hand across to him. “I could… I could fix it, if you like.”

He holds out a hand to stop me. “No, it’s alright. I like it.”

With nowhere to put my stardust to use, I shove it into my handbag at my feet. Luke absentmindedly brushes his fingers across his scar, and I can’t take my eyes off it. His fingers. His face. His scar. I don’t recall seeing it yesterday, but maybe I was too distracted by how blue his eyes are. Anyone would be.

Our orders arrive not long after that, and we’re silent as we eat, occasionally pausing to rave about how good the strawberry syrup is, or how fluffy the waffles are. Luke ended up getting the same as me, except he got a coffee, not a hot chocolate—which comes with two marshmallows floating in it, by the way.

Once we’re finished, and our plates are taken away, Luke leads me out of the café to the park across the road. There’s a bench under a jacaranda, which has long since lost its purple plumage of October, but is green enough in time for Christmas. Before I forget, I should mention that Luke paid for us both, which I wasn’t happy about, but I let it happen anyway. If that’s what he wanted to do, then whatever.

“Hey,” Luke says as we sit down on the bench, close enough that our legs nearly touch. I can feel a kind of electricity passing between them like they’re magnets trying to inch closer together.

“Yeah?” I say, looking over at him with a smile. I could kiss him right now. He’s right there, looking amazing and completely accepting of me as a non-human person.

“I have something to tell you, too.”

A thousand possibilities shoot through my mind and I inch away from him. “What?”

“I’m a different person every day.”

“What?” I inch further away.

“I go to sleep as this person,” he says, gesturing to himself. “And I wake up as someone else.”

A sliver of doubt crosses my mind. “Then how can you look the same as yesterday?”

“I do my best,” he says. “To make myself same-looking, but I miss bits sometimes.” He quirks his eyebrow to emphasise the scar.

I stand abruptly, pulling my bag up my shoulder. He looks at me, deep concern in his eyes.

“I was hoping… hoping that your stardust could help me out… so I can just be me again.”

“Fat chance,” I say, shaking my head and putting my face in my hands. “If I’d known… you’d been using me… this whole time…”

I start to walk away, back to the street’s edge. I’m forced to pause as a car trundles past. Luke catches up with me and takes my elbow.

“You have to believe me,” he says. “I like you, Jemma, I really do. But I really want some stability again. I want to be able to wake up the same person I fell asleep as. I want to be me.”

I shake his hand off my elbow and cross the street, heading to my car. When I get in, Luke stands at the window.

“Please,” he says. “Please!”

I wind down my window halfway and turn my engine on, which should let him know I don’t have much more time for him. He rests his fingers on the edge of my window, ducking down to peer in at me.

“Jemma,” he says. “Please help me. You’re the best chance I have. Please.”

If I do this, everything will go back to normal, but I’ll feel terrible. What does that matter? It’s all about quality of life. God damn it. I reach into my bag in silence, pulling out as much stardust as I can. “Okay,” I say. “You asked for it.”

I blow the stardust off my palm and into his face, thinking hard about him being a normal person again, and also about him not remembering who I am at all. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I watch him cough and shake his head. Then the strangest thing happens. He splits. Into two people. It’s like what I imagine cells splitting looks like, except instead of a single cell, it’s a full human, and instead of two identical copies, the second person looks nothing like Luke. He has blond hair, for a start, and brown eyes. He looks a bit dazed for a moment, as does Luke, and I don’t hang around after that. I chuck the car in reverse and high tail it home. My stardust worked, at least.

A storm brews in my head and by the time I get home, lightning and thunder roar around. I have to remember that it’s a win for both of us. He’ll off my case and me not looking like I bribed another person at work. Telling myself this only works when I don’t think of the genuineness in his blue eyes.

Work is a struggle now. I can’t bring myself to use magic on anyone, which seems great, but it’s because it reminds me of him. I wish I’d given him a chance, but I’m so glad I didn’t. It wouldn’t have ended well. It never does. He’d keep using me for my magic, and I’d keep obliging, and eventually, I’d get sick of it and wipe his memory of me, which is why I nipped it in the bud when I did.

A week later, at roughly three o’clock, the bell above the door rings and I look up and see the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. I search for recognition in them but see nothing. I know I’m not going to stuff it up this time. I’m going to give him normal ice cream, normal service, and I’ll give him his change like I normally do. When he asks me out, I will tell him everything in a normal way, and everything will be fine, and normal.

When Luke gets to the counter, there may be a flicker of recognition in his eyes, but I ignore it.

“A raspberry swirl, please.”