Mom waves her fork. “Okay, hon. Have a good day.”
* * *
7:14, Noah: My underwear. The final frontier.
7:16, Noah: All right, it’s between blue with the Starfleet insignia or the ones with the schematic of the starship Enterprise across the crotch.
7:19, Noah: I went with the Enterprise. Hope that’s okay. Now is it okay to pick out my socks?
7:23, Noah: My mom wants to know why my eyes look like raw meat. Should I tell her I was attacked by a PMS-raging pompon girl? Or should I lie?
I glare at the phone, trying to strategize, caught in the purgatory between laughing and screaming. If Noah’s play is to annoy me until I come completely unglued, it’s working. On the other hand, maybe he’s simply a loser with nothing but time on his hands and no filter. Either way, I have to set some boundaries now.
While I consider what it would take to get under Noah’s skin, he texts me a picture of his feet. One sock has lime-green, royal-blue, and fluorescent-yellow stripes. The other is orange with purple polka dots. If I look at them long enough I’m pretty sure I’ll have a seizure.
The next incoming text reads: Which ones?
Then there’s a GIF of a guy with pointy ears and a bad Caesar haircut raising one weird eyebrow.
Curse the day this kid got my number.
It’s time to take the war to his front door. I write: Text me your address. We start today.
I punch send with unnecessary roughness and toss the phone on the bed. Dealing with this is the last thing I need right now. I should be focused on Vindhya’s wish—now made even trickier by the fact that I’m going to have to accomplish it without Noah figuring out what’s going on. I seriously have zero time for teaching sketchy exes of former Cindies basic phone etiquette.
But you know what? The fairy godmother can handle any challenge. I head to the bathroom for a shower.
When I return to the phone—clean, dry, dressed, and primped—forty-five minutes later, Noah has sent his address, along with twenty-three more texts. Six are about choosing breakfast cereal, eleven are unintelligible sci-fi references, two are pictures of a “weird spot” on his knee, and four are video clips of Wiggles songs. I want to claw my own eyes out.
This is definitely weaponized geekery. No one on earth could be accidentally this obnoxious.
I check myself in the mirror to make sure I’m battle ready. Every curve is accentuated in my short shorts and pink tank top. I adjust to reveal a peek of red lace at my cleavage. My lavender waves are in a devil-may-care tousle. Carefully applied concealer has erased last night’s trauma. Satisfied with my look, I douse myself with satsuma body spray and slip into sandals.
My plan of attack is simple:
Set off every hormonal trip wire in his feeble boy brain.
Once he’s mentally incapacitated, demonstrate how easily I could crush him.
Leave him terrified to cross me again.
* * *
Noah’s house is unnervingly close to my house, it turns out. He lives six blocks away from me. The houses on his street come in the same three floor plans as the houses on my street. Mom and I have the one-story Spanish Revival the color of sand. They have the two-story Spanish Revival the color of slightly darker sand.
I park on the street and march to the front door for Operation Stalker Smackdown. I jab the doorbell. Eight seconds pass with no answer. While I wait, I scroll through the texts Noah has sent in the past hour. Thirty-six messages, and they’re all pointless. It infuriates me all over again just when I should be finding that Zen place where I could nudge something truly debilitating into his head.
Maybe I could make him forget his own name for a minute. Or eat paste. Or humiliate himself online…
Noah opens the door. Despite the fact that he has obviously been up since 7:05, he looks like he recently rolled out of bed. His hair is in a wilder mop than usual, if that’s even possible. His T-shirt has a hole near the collar and a faded drawing of the dude with pointy ears. He’s wearing lounge pants.
Lounge pants.
He’s sporting an I just beat you in a chess tournament smirk, but it morphs into openmouthed stupefaction as he registers my appearance.
Phase one complete. My adversary is weakened. Time to go for the throat.
I jam the phone toward his face. “You think this is funny, grunt? Because, so help me, I will strangle you with my bare hands and leave your worthless corpse in the desert to—”
“Noah?”
The door opens a little more to reveal a middle-aged woman. She has the same untamed brown hair and prominent nose as Noah. The expression on her face is the look one would give to a hooker yelling death threats at a toddler.
It honestly didn’t occur to me that some people’s parents are actually home on Saturday mornings. I cringe, now hyperaware of how low-cut my tank top is and that I sound homicidal. I would very much like to crawl into a hole and stay there for the next twenty or thirty years. But there are no Charity-size holes in sight, so I put my game face on.
With a big, apologetic smile, I stick my right hand out. “You must be Noah’s mom. I’m Charity.”
She purses her lips and gingerly shakes my hand. “Lisa.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, all politeness. I wonder if I could inconspicuously tug my top higher. No chance—all eyes are on the ta-tas. Actually, Noah manages to wrench his eyes upward enough to shoot me an evil glare. There’s nothing to do but hold my head high and will my hands to remain at my sides.
Noah’s cheeks turn pink in an I’m caught between my mom and a red lace bra kind of way. He slouches against the doorjamb, avoiding all eye contact. “Uh. Charity and I are working on a project together. For school. The death threats are just her thing.”
Mom’s eyebrows go up, but her look softens. “Oh.”
Noah backs away from the door, waving at me to follow him. “So we’ll be up in my room.”
The eyebrows go higher. “Oh?”
I trail after Noah into the house and down the hall, taking the opportunity to adjust my shirt to a mom-appropriate area of my chest.
When we’re halfway up the stairs, his mom calls, “Keep the door open.”
Noah goes, “Mom.”
I wonder what it would feel like to have a mom who cares about what you’re doing and who you’re with. I slap the thought away.
Noah gestures me into his room, enters behind me, and shuts the door. I look back pointedly at the sound of the click.
Noah says, “So… what’s with the outfit? Is that for my benefit, or do you dress like Shahna of Triskelion every Saturday?”
“That is a nerdy-ass comment that I’m not going to dignify with a response.” My hands go to my hips. Unfortunately he seems to have successfully rebooted his brain cells, and Lisa stole all my thunder. So much for my attack plan. I’m forced to at least pretend to negotiate. “Now, before we get started, let’s go over some ground rules.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, casting a peeved look my way.
I recite, quickly and formally, “You shall not, during or anytime following the expiration of our wish-granting agreement, directly or indirectly disclose the nature of our relationship to any living person. No part of our dealings may be posted on any public forum, including but not limited to social media, online platforms, or school-based communications.”