Gabbie jiggled her key in its lock three times before her apartment door finally swung open. After closing it behind her, she bypassed her sofa completely and flopped onto her bed, feet throbbing. Breaking out her trusty booties this morning was definitely a mistake. She and the other third-grade teachers had taken the kids on a field trip to a farm just outside the city, and somehow having powers made the experience harder, not easier. Sometimes they were helpful, like when she realized her worst-behaved student, Eddie, had left his lunch box in the classroom and was able to make it reappear just before everyone sat down at the picnic table to eat. But she was pretty sure her powers were also the reason every single egg she collected from the coup broke in her hands, and why, twice that day, she’d tapped a student on the shoulder and accidentally infused them with what seemed like the exact amount of rabid energy you’d get from eating ten packs of Fun Dip. The kids had run her totally ragged, but at least she’d have some stories for her call with Dan. She’d opened her camera roll to look at the picture of the fox that she swore looked like Dan, when a text from him came in.
Dan
Gabbie sighed. There went her social interaction for the day. She opened Instagram to check on Maya and Delali. It was Thursday, which meant they still had three sleeps until their second meeting with Alba. Gabbie wondered if they’d ever become friends—Maya and Delali seemed so busy. She tapped through the slides of Maya’s story: a video from an early morning boutique workout, a beautiful selfie from her office desk, and then several slides of her drinking at The Bar, with the girls Gabbie now recognized as her roommates. Delali didn’t have stories up, but her last post had a picture of her dressed up in her school’s colors; a selfie from the bathroom at Department of Culture; and her sitting next to a guy and a girl with the caption: It happened to me: my school best friend met my home best friend and now I’m the third wheel. She looked at the Instagram of Eliza, the girl she’d met at Michaels who, it turned out, lived in Nebraska.
Then, reflexively, she opened Dan’s Instagram. She understood why Maya and Delali were so busy, but what was keeping Dan so occupied? After all, she was a teacher too, and she managed to make time for their calls. As she scrolled, there was one person who showed up over and over: Kim. Kim and Dan making ugali in a volunteer kitchen. Kim and Dan feeding a giraffe. Kim and Dan kicking a dusty soccer ball with the kids. Even in group photos, they were always next to each other. Gabbie felt like crying. She didn’t actually think Dan was cheating on her—he wasn’t capable of that. There was a way worse thought that kept popping up . . . Did Dan just enjoy Kim’s company? Gabbie did the thing she’d been resisting for months: she visited Kim’s Instagram.
Her bio read:
Kim Mutuku
Explorer. Educator. Woman of the world. 🌍✈⛰
Take nothing but pictures 📸 Leave nothing but
footprints 👣 Kill nothing but time. ❤✌🏾
Stanford ’18
Fulbright ’19
Nairobi for the foreseeable 🇪🇹
Gabbie sat up in bed, dumbfounded. Kim had over 200,000 followers, and as Gabbie scrolled through her page, it was easy to see why. Every single picture Kim posted (and yes, some of them included Dan) was perfect: blue skies, glimmering streams, mossy green mountainsides. She posted herself sparingly but effectively—a bikini pic here or hiking snap there. There was a glowing picture of herself open-mouthed with a crowd of smiling schoolgirls, underneath which she included the link to her NPR hygiene piece. Spread out on her yellow bedspread, Gabbie scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. She got up to get an apple then returned to bed and scrolled more. Tagged photos, friends’ profiles, videos—Kim had hundreds of posts and Gabbie consumed them all. Every picture had tens, sometimes hundreds, of adoring comments. Gabbie would’ve commented herself—she was totally impressed by Kim’s homemade backpacking power bars—but she thought the Dan connection might make that weird.
By the time Gabbie reached the end of Kim’s Instagram feed, which was a Valencia-filtered picture of her high school graduation, she knew what she wanted to do. If she grew Crafting and Coconut Oil, she could kill like, ten birds with one stone: she’d have something to keep her busy, a reason to get better at her powers, a way to meet new people like Eliza, and maybe even a way to win Dan’s attention back while he was halfway across the world. She leaned over the side of the bed, pulled her journal out of her backpack, and started planning.
Maya
Maya
Gabbie
Gabbie
Delali
Delali