Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

LAKE

294 bobas left until we both die …

“I got them!” Lynn screams, shoving up from her chair and throwing her arm in the air. “I got two tickets!”

“No!” my mother gasps, leaning forward to peer at my cousin in disbelief. “Where? When?”

“New York, first concert on the tour.” Lynn hesitates, pushing red-streaked brown hair back from her face. She’s the hairdresser-in-training, can you tell? The melted patch of bleach blond on one side of her head is the real giveaway. Lynn drops her arm and rubs at it with her opposite hand, looking ashamed. “But … they’re nosebleed seats.”

“Nosebleed?” mom asks, and Joules leans in to explain the situation to her.

As in the seats that are as far away from the stage as possible.

Lovely.

“How much is this going to cost us?” Aunt Lisa asks, lips pursed tight, thin silver spectacles perched on her round nose. She looks just like my mom. In the right light, it’s easy to confuse one for the other.

Lisa is the official Frost Family accountant, and from the look on her face, I can tell she’s worried that we won’t have enough. That we’ll run out of money without making any progress with Tam. I heard her and my parents whispering last night about borrowing against the equity on the family homes—the one Lisa lives in with Grandma, and this one. The construction business that my Uncle Rob runs, too. They mentioned selling it.

“Seven hundred bucks, all in with tax and processing fees.” Lynn cringes, like she did something wrong. In reality, she’s the only one that got anything right. In this room right now, sprawled out across the couch, tucked into armchairs, surrounding the dining room table like a small army, are fifteen members of the Frost Family (and friends) with phones, tablets, and laptops in hand. We’ve been waiting for midnight, for the official moment when Tam’s tour tickets would go on sale.

All of us, waiting right here, with fiber internet and a literal life on the line, and nobody else could snag any. My app kept freezing; Joules got the tickets to the cart, but then the site crashed; Maria kept getting an error processing payment message despite using ten different cards.

Only Lynn succeeded, and now I’m scrolling a resale website and choking on the prices. If … if we start buying tickets resale, we’ll get to maybe four or five shows before we run out of money. Not to mention the gas. The food we’ll need on the road. Lodging.

No, no, no. This isn’t happening. This absolutely cannot be happening. I’m in disbelief, gaping at my phone screen with a slow dawning horror as I browse one site after another.

“Seven hundred in total?” Aunt Mandy asks after a minute, pausing with her hand on the trackpad of her laptop.

“Sorry, no, for each,” Lynn corrects, and Joules growls again. My dad grunts in response, and it’s easy to see where my brother got his habits from.

“Doesn’t matter,” Joules declares as he rises suddenly to his feet. His face softens when he sees the expression on mine. “The concerts were just a backup plan; they aren’t a great setup for meet-cutes.” He schools his facial expression but seems to have trouble with the curl of his fists on the table’s surface. “You have your first job lined up, eh, Lake?”

I nod.

I have three jobs lined up. One in New Jersey. One in Philadelphia. One in Boston. I rub at my forehead. Joules got work, too, as a member of security at the New Jersey venue.

“I do.” How working the food stand at the concert venue is going to get me close to Tam Eyre, I have no idea, but we have to start somewhere. I set my phone down on the surface of the table, doing my best to keep my calm.

Chloe, Luna, and Ella are here today, supporting me the same way they supported my cousin, Joe.

And Joe … I can’t be the only one thinking we worked this hard for Joe, and his Match was a local barista. Tam Eyre? World famous and rich, a household name? I feel outclassed. He doesn’t know I exist, and here I am, sitting here and obsessing over him the way hundreds of millions of other people do.

I am a speck of starlight in an endless galaxy, a black hole meandering aimlessly toward me.

I stand up, my voice caught in my throat. I’m losing my nerve because I’ve finished my drink: a black forest/panda milk tea with crystal jelly and boba. That was my shield, my armor, and I’m down to nothing but my own unshakable will.

I make myself smile.

“I’ll just have a minute,” I explain gently, and then I’m turning and quickly padding down the wood floor of the hallway in pale yellow socks with chicks stitched into the ankles. Thanks, Gram. I ignore the sign on the door that leads to the strange, small bedroom beneath the stairs.

No Food or Drink in the Archives!

My mom decorated the sign with a horrible clipart printout of a pixelated cup and a burger with a red circle and a slash over the top. I sigh and turn the knob, letting myself in and then slumping back against the door.

Make Tam fall in love with me? How am I—even with the curse’s ‘help’—going to get on the radar of his consciousness as a small blip? Before I can get started, I have to actually make his acquaintance. But that’s the goal of every rabid fan, isn’t it? Even lesser fans would fall over themselves in his presence. I’m in competition not just with the clock, and not just with the unpredictability of romance and attraction, but also with millions of people better equipped for this than I am.

I huff and snatch a book off the shelf, one with Famous Persons Guidebook scrawled in black pen along the brown leather spine of an old journal. This room is all unfinished wood walls and sloping ceiling cutting across the space in a dramatic fashion, but it’s also custom-made bookshelves from my dad’s shop out back and a cushy green armchair. I hit the button on the wall to turn on the electric fireplace and slump to the floor beside it, back against one of the bookshelves.

I thumb through a collection of knowledge gathered by Frost family members, past and present. This one is supposed to have tips for how to overcome this sort of problem, but it’s mostly filled with anecdotes—not a reassuring fact.

London 1851 - at the World’s Fair, Uncle found himself matched to the wife of a wealthy foreign businessman. When the man left the country, so did his wife. Uncle spent his life savings chasing her only to succumb to the curse on a full moon night, standing on a pier a hundred miles from his Match’s home. Her body was discovered by her husband that same night.

I frown. Not helpful. Also not a ‘famous’ person though I suppose this ‘Uncle’ of ours didn’t have it easy either.

I flip the page.

California 1999 - we went to a matinee movie showing today, bought popcorn and all the works. My brother, Henry, was matched to the lead in the movie. He moved to Hollywood and died in a bar downtown, all alone and penniless. Fuck this curse.

The journal slams shut in front of me, and I look up suddenly to realize that Joules has snuck up on me, using his foot to close off the source of my rapidly ballooning anxiety.

“Here.” He thrusts a hot cocoa my way, sloshing liquid over the edge and cringing. He mops it up with his sock, and I roll my eyes. “Don’t tell Mom that I brought this in here. You know how she is about these ancient dust collectors.” I take the mug from him, and he sits down cross-legged beside me. “I’ve already scanned them all in, uploaded them to two different cloud drives. What do we even need all this for?”

I nurse my drink, and then he steals it from me, sipping on it himself.

I smile.

There’s a reason I didn’t eat any of the mini marshmallows floating on top; those are Joules’ favorite.

“Nosebleed seats in New York, huh?” I say as Joules focuses his thunderous glare on the bookshelf across from us. All the rules of the curse are written here, discovered the hard way through repeated Frost family deaths. We’re lucky to have access to all of this now.

Though … understanding the curse only makes it a little bit easier to break.

Can the coroner put pop star down as my cause of death? Or would it just be ‘magical family curse that’s been around since the Declaration of Independence’?

“When do we leave?” I ask when Joules doesn’t fill in the silence. I lean my head on his shoulder and close my eyes, the smell of warm cocoa and melting marshmallows mixing with the ink and paper smell of the Frost family’s most important book collection. Don’t tell Auntie Lisa though: she thinks her special edition romances with the sprayed pages take precedence. I think she may even have them insured.

“First week of January.” Joules sounds distant, thinking of Joe again. It’s been eight months now and still, the pain is a constant kick in the teeth. How can somebody who was there every day for your whole life just disappear like that? How can I ever watch my favorite movies without wishing Joe was there so badly that it becomes a curse all on its own, cold fingers of grief wrapping around my throat?

I jerk like I always do when my body is falling too deeply into memories, but Joules quickly sets the hot cocoa aside and puts his arm around me. We sit there together with our legs straight out in front of us, catching beams of flickering orange light from the fireplace. Cocoa-stained white socks and yellow ones with chicks.

“I turned in my notice for my apartment, hired a replacement for my job. Everyone else is going to stay here and work overtime so we have more money in the family fund. There’s nothing that Mom or Dad could do on the ground with us anyway. This is going to be up to me and you, kid.”

“Mostly you, you mean,” I tease, fully aware that the curse-induced meet-cutes are going to play a major part in my success. Any little interaction I have with Tam, I need to nail it. I need to be exactly what he wants me to be. What exactly that is, I’m not sure. Do I go in flirting and batting my eyelashes? Do I take the opposite approach and act openly hostile toward him, hoping my cold demeanor is a welcome relief from all of his fawning sycophants?

Shit.

I’m overthinking this now.

Maybe … if he’s supposed to be my soulmate, I should just be myself?

“When I meet Tam, I think I’ll just tell him about the curse straight-off and see what he says.”

Joules rears away from me like I’ve spit on him or something. He shoves me off his shoulder with a scowl and retrieves the discarded hot chocolate that he supposedly made for me. He drinks two-thirds of it in one gulp before offering it back to me.

I take it between the overly long sleeves of the pale pink cable knit sweater I’m wearing.

“Don’t you dare do something so reckless and stupid, Lakelynn Frost. When you meet that man, I’ll tell you what you’re going to do …” He trails off, and stares at me in such a way that I’m tempted to slap him.

“Excuse me, what?” I retort, lifting my brow. This is what I get for being best friends with my older brother. An unfiltered male opinion on literally everything. “Don’t be disgusting.”

He lifts a dark brow at me, lips parting.

“Uh, not where I was going with that.” Joules flicks me in the forehead again, and when I go to slap at him, more hot cocoa sloshes out of the mug and spatters just barely over the cover of the journal on the floor. We exchange a look, and I sacrifice my pink sweater for the sake of the artifact. I imagine that Joules and I could be fifty, and we’d still react to our mother’s potential wrath this way. “Just do what I say, and we’ll get there.”

“The entirety of my success rests on me doing exactly what you say?” I repeat, and he nods. I laugh and take another sip of the cocoa. “Yep, we’re fucked then.” I laugh as I drain the rest of my drink and Joules narrows his eyes at me.

“Just get your affairs in order, so we can leave on—” I think he’s going to say on time. Or maybe he was going to say right after our last chance at the holidays with our family. Just after the New Year. In eight weeks. Doesn’t matter. Whatever Joules was going to say is lost in the unintentional innuendo.

Get your affairs in order.

But he isn’t wrong.

Right.

I’ll get my affairs in order then, starting with my pre-need. If I die, I want to go through the same process that Joe did, the terramation thing. I’ll become fertile soil, and then I can be brought back home and tucked around the redbud tree in the yard. It’s important to me that the family knows this.

I lick a stray bit of whipped cream from the edge of the mug and settle into the idea.

My life, as I knew it, is over forever.

Whether I succeed or not, this is the end of an era.

“Tam’s rich, isn’t he? When you guys get married, pay the family back for all the money we’re wasting on you.” Joules kisses my forehead and stands up, leaving me alone with old memories and dust motes.

Getting me used to the idea of becoming either or both of those things.