Page 26

“Kat?”

I open the door and push through. The familiar air-conditioning and the fluorescent lights and red shelves of Target greet me. But there’s no Kat.

I grip the bag of groceries. There’s no way I could have imagined that whole encounter. The Target changing. The wyverns. The dancing water in the fountain. The long, lazy afternoon sipping hot chocolate and having cha siu bao with Kat and her smile. Kat, wanting to see me again.

My phone buzzes with a new text.

My mind races, thinking quickly. So the door is only sometimes a portal between our worlds—it must come and go, or maybe it was just today—otherwise you’d hear of people disappearing to other worlds all the time.

I go back outside to the parking lot, setting the groceries down on the curb as I sit. I respond to the group chat, letting them know I ran into Kat in Target and then we went and had coffee. I don’t know what to say about everything else.

Magic is real.

There’s a whole other world .

I open to a new page in my bullet journal and start scribbling notes as fast as I can about everything I’d seen and observed. Kat’s groceries sit next to me, and the thick canvas bag doesn’t melt or turn into dust or disappear. It stays solidly real.

A familiar maroon minivan pulls up to the curb, and Erica rolls the window down, whooping at me. “And there she is, San Pablo High’s own Brenda Nguy ? n, just back from her date with the hottie from the coffeeshop!”

“How’d it go?” Jenn asks, stepping out of the car. She walks over to where I am on the sidewalk, her smile fading as she sees me on the curb staring into the distance.

“Whoa, whoa, what’s wrong?” Erica says, hopping out of the car and dropping down to my level in a squat.

“So I finally went on that date with Kat,” I start.

“That’s great!” Jenn says. “Did you ask about the—”

“I, um, was at the wrong shop, the first time,” I say. “Uh. Technically.”

“You were gone for more than an hour before you texted! We figured you were just doing your usual Target thing looking at cute stuff, but then there was that earthquake and we were a little worried—”

“Earthquake?”

Jenn nods, folding her hands together primly. “Not as bad as the one at school the other day, not at all. We barely felt it, and mostly everyone just kept on doing what they were doing.” She smiles at me. “I’m glad you ran into Kat! It must have gone well, right?”

“Why do you look like you’ve got a cloud of existential angst hanging over you?” Erica places two hands on my shoulders, looking me in the eye. “I feel like cute-coffeeshop-girl-isn’t-into-you would warrant some sadness, but this is, like, a totally different level.”

A high, hysterical laughs escapes from me. “Magic is real, you guys.”

Erica and Jenn stare at me, and then at each other.

“Of course it is,” Jenn says with a smile. “There’s magic in everything, in sunsets and love and friendship and—”

“No, I mean yes, all of that, of course, but like—spells and floating toilet paper and magic .” I gesture erratically with my hands, but there’s no way I can remember all the complicated motions I saw. “Kat’s coffeeshop—it’s in another world, an alternate universe—”

Erica chokes on a laugh. “Your crush is literally in a coffeeshop AU?”

“Yes? No? I don’t know—I went to Target, but it was an entirely different Target and I didn’t know what was going on and everyone was, like, shopping for spells and stuff and then there was this mana surge thing and wyverns and—” I’m babbling, and judging by the incredulous looks on my friends’ faces, they’re not taking this in at all.

“Well, Kat was gonna ask her dad for help on how to get me home and then we just—I got back here. By walking through that door. Kat was here, too, for a minute. But she went through again, and now she’s gone. And it doesn’t work anymore.”

Jenn and Erica look at each other again. Jenn’s face softens, and she holds out a hand to help me up. I take it, and she pulls me and then Erica to standing.

“I know you’ve been stressed lately, with scholarship deadlines and college acceptance stuff,” Jenn says. “It’s okay if, like, the girl you like doesn’t like you back, and it feels like she’s in another universe.”

“No, I mean she literally is in another universe. A magical one.” I bite my lip—it feels so stupid, to be so upset over this. “And she’s so cool and now I don’t have a way to contact her or like…”

“Okay,” Jenn says softly, pulling me into a hug. “It’ll be okay.”

Erica wraps her arms around us both and gives me a reassuring smile. “It sounds like you had a good time.”

“Yeah,” I sigh, thinking about the way Kat swept through the aisles, her cape thing billowing out behind her, the way she smiled when she said my name. “She’s incredible.”

Jenn squeezes me tight. “All right, tell us everything.”

It takes a while to explain what happened. Erica and Jenn still don’t quite believe me, and when I try to show them the photos and videos I took, they get distracted.

“Oh, she’s so cute!” Jenn squeals. She beams at me.

Erica shoulders me playfully as she swipes through our selfies. “Look at your smiles, you look so happy!”

“Yes, Kat is great, but look at this—” I point at the storefronts behind us in the photos and the one of the magetech store. “This is obviously Main Street, but these stores don’t exist here!”

Jenn glances down the street. “Okay…”

“And what about this?” I replay the video of Kat levitating the water.

Erica glances at Jenn. “I would say it’s a cool special effect, but you don’t know anything about video editing, and even if you did, there’s no way you could have done this in an hour.”

“And there were wyverns?” Jenn asks me. The gentle skepticism at the beginning of the conversation has now been replaced with soft worry.

“I cast a Lightning Bolt for real! And it melted my lucky d20. Kat says it was major magic, and I could have gotten seriously hurt if there wasn’t a mana bubble or something…

” I fumble through the explanation, but here and now under the bright fluorescent lights of the food court with people enjoying their hot dogs and pretzels I feel silly and self-conscious.

It’s the bag of groceries that finally does it. Among a few bananas and a loaf of bread are two boxes that defy explanation.

SINGLE-USE TELEPORTATION SPELL

EASY AND EFFICIENT—UP TO 10 MILES OF TRAVEL

NO RUNEBOOK NECESSARY!

JUST ASSEMBLE AND CAST, NO MAGES NECESSARY!

ENERGY COST INCLUDED, READY TO USE!

At first Jenn thinks it could be some sort of board game, and she rips open the cardboard box with the same determination and efficiency she uses for our annual Key Club bake sale.

She pulls out a sheath of old-fashioned paper, like a newspaper from the eighteenth century.

“These are the instructions,” Jenn says, studying it like she’s preparing for any other school assignment.

“This is either the best prop I’ve ever seen or an actual build-your-own teleportation spell,” Erica says, poking a sachet of dark gray powder. “Let’s do it!”

“But if magic only exists in Kat’s world, would it even work?” Jenn asks.

We all look at one another, our curiosity and excitement rising, a thrill I haven’t felt since the seventh grade during the third season finale of Halfway Hollow .

My phone buzzes again. It’s my mom, asking me what time I’m going to get to the nail salon.

“Brenda?” Erica waves the box at me. “Wanna try this?”

“I have to go,” I groan. “But yeah, let’s do it. I wonder if I could use it to get to Kat?”

Jenn nods. “We could do it after D there she was, as old as I am now, smiling and declaring her hopes and dreams of becoming a nurse. Liên Mai Nguy?n: Most Likely to Succeed.

I watch her delicately paint the client’s nails blue with surgical precision, imagining her in scrubs and rushing about helping patients.

I’ve asked Má about it before, if she thought about going back to school, but she always just hushed me and said that there’s no point in focusing on the past, and to make sure I do my best in the present.

I just want her to be able to rest. I know that she worked hard over the years to save up and finally own the salon with my aunts, and the three of them are pretty successful now, leasing out stations to other technicians in the area.

I know a big part of the Plan is me saving the world and being successful, but a lot of it is because I know there’s a lot riding on my shoulders, to achieve everything that Má didn’t have the chance to.

Má finishes with her client and nods at me.

The woman opens her immaculate designer handbag, fiddling slowly as she approaches the counter.

“That’ll be twenty-six dollars for the manicure with the gel tips,” I say, watching her slowly pull out her wallet and examine the bills inside with a finely pointed nail.

“She told me it was twenty-one,” the woman says, handing me a twenty and pursing her lips, her fingers pausing on a single. Behind the single, I can see a fat wad of twenties and something that looks suspiciously like a hundred.

I resist the urge to snort. Designer clothes, freshly blown-out hair. She can afford twice what we’re charging. “You got the gel tips,” I remind her.

“Oh, right,” she says absentmindedly, and hands me another five.

I put it away in the cash register and give her my best Go away now smile.

It’s clear she’s not going to leave a tip and I’m in no mood to point out to her that she’s been here over an hour with Má, who listened intently to her complain about her day, and helped her pick out colors to complement a dress for an event.

Fundraising for something, the woman had boasted. She’s a pillar in her community.

The woman sniffs and turns around, walking out of the store, red soles of her heels standing out against the cheap linoleum of the floor.

She picks up her phone, talking into it loudly.

“Yeah, I’m on my way. Just finished doing my nails.

Oh, you know. Overcharged as usual. Lazy Vietnamese workers. Can’t even…”

The door slams shut, and I rise from my chair, my temper rising. I’ve already started to go after her, but Má gently taps my shoulder. “Don’t you have homework to do?”

“Yeah, but it’s busy,” I insist.

“Aimee can do the cash register,” Má says, smiling at the new girl. “Go on and sit in the back; there’s hot tea.”

I sigh and trudge to the back room. It’s a small, cramped space that’s cluttered with the debris of its multipurpose life: boxes of nail and beauty supplies, a small mini fridge bedecked with magnets and photos of everyone’s kids, a microwave and hot water boiler balanced precariously atop it.

There’s a table scattered with purses and empty Tupperware and a single chair.

I clear a space and pull out my laptop, trying to work on my essay for English, but my mind keeps drifting.

I open my bullet journal and start a new list.

HOW TO GET ANOTHER DATE WITH KAT

1. Figure out interdimensional travel