Hey Dela,
Are you sure you didn’t kick the dean’s dog or something? The school’s media approach has been super aggressive. Linked coverage below, though I recommend you skip . . .
Calling my contacts for opposite spin and fluff, so be ready for phone calls etc. And keep the cute pap strolls coming. Any chance of rekindling w/ Adrien?
minilink.so/7dhr
minilink.so/y89j
minilink.so/kd5e
minilink.so/bnw4
xo,
Gracie Hamilton
Hamilton PR & Management
Delali rolled her eyes and clicked out of the email window. She used to love a game of PR volleyball, but she’d forgotten how much armor she had to build to weather the bullshit for so many years. She hadn’t expected Toggsworth to go so hard, but now she was sure the debacle would have to end with a sit-down interview. In a new tab, she pulled up the Jordyn Woods episode of Red Table Talk (a classic) for study, and had just hit play when her buzzer trilled through the apartment.
Delali padded over to the door and picked up the wall-mounted phone.
“Hello?”
“I have a Miss Gabbie Nwosu here for you,” Stavros said from the other end. Delali hadn’t had the heart to get him fired. He lowered his voice. “She brought cookies—I think she might be a fan.”
“It’s okay,” Delali said, though she was a little confused. She looked at the time on her phone—she was supposed to be seeing Parasite with Safiya in less than an hour. “Send her up.”
Before Delali could get the door fully open, Gabbie started rambling. “I did something bad,” she said. Delali pulled the door open and Gabbie rushed, gesticulating as if she’d just sipped a particularly potent Energy Ale. “Something so, so, so bad and I didn’t know where to go, because no one would understand, and I almost went to Maya because that subway ride would’ve been way faster but she’s probably fucking Tatiana”—Delali froze in place. Did Gabbie just refer to sex as fucking?—“or still asleep from whatever crazy partying or whatever she did last night and let’s be honest, the only thing meaner than Maya is Maya when she’s been woken up from her slumber.”
Delali pulled two bottles of wine out of the wine cooler. “You like red, right?”
Gabbie sighed and flopped onto Delali’s sofa like a ragdoll. “Whatever.”
“What did you do? I doubt it’s that bad. You know stealing from Michaels is a victimless crime, right?” Delali said as she grabbed glasses from her cabinet.
“I slept with Faison,” Gabbie said.
“Well that was inevitable.”
“What?” Gabbie asked, lifting her head from the sofa.
“He’s celebritees right? You guys are always leaving each other weirdly charged comments. And the way you ask Maya for updates about The Bar isn’t exactly subtle.” Gabbie was open-mouthed as Delali walked into the living room and shrugged. “I don’t see the problem—he’s pretty hot.”
“But I still haven’t broken up with Dan!” Gabbie wailed.
“Ohhhhh.” Delali poured wine into each of their glasses. She’d forgotten about that part.
“Then after we slept together I told Faison everything—”
Delali grimaced.
“Then he got really upset and I just couldn’t handle it and I used my named power to make him forgive me.”
Delali’s grimace deepened.
“But it didn’t fucking work,” Gabbie said, her face knotted into an expression of total distress. “You remember that thing I told you about my apartment? About how I can never do magic when I’m in there? It’s cursed or something! I am breaking that fucking lease tomorrow!” She picked up her glass of wine and took a sip. “Not that that changes anything. Even if I could change Faison’s opinion, is it even fair to do something like that to someone you care about? Everything I’ve done is so, so wrong.” Gabbie let out a big, weary sigh.
“Oh,” Delali answered. She didn’t know what else to say. Gabbie had definitely fucked up. But it was probably too soon to tell her that.
“Yeah. Oh,” Gabbie said, then started to cry.
“Oh, Gabbie, don’t cry,” Delali said, panicking. Seeing Gabbie cry was like seeing a poodle get kicked. She grabbed a tissue from the ceramic box her housekeeper refilled every Sunday and dabbed at Gabbie’s face.
She tried to think of something that could comfort Gabbie. “Well, I’ve kind of been getting battered in the press because my former dean seems to have a vendetta against me? They’ve written some pretty mean shit.”
“That does make me feel, like, one percent better. Why in the world would the Mothers create magic and then not create an undo button? Seems like, pretty obvious that you would need one.” Gabbie started gulping her wine and Delali reached out to stop her.
“I’m sorry, Gabs.”
“And I can’t believe we have twenty-four more hours until we meet with Alba again. I need to know if we passed! Imagine if we could go over to the Sphere right now. And sit in a potions salon and hang out with a bunch of other badass witches. Or go to a store and buy cool crafting stuff. Or just feel that feeling from the other night, whatever that was. Eighty-one percent happiness sounds so good right now.”
Delali took in Gabbie’s tortured face. It was kind of breaking her heart to see Gabbie, the person who had basically kept them in one piece these last few months, crumbling. She took another sip of wine and shrugged. “Should we try it?”
“What?”
“Transporting,” Delali said.
“I thought we couldn’t yet. Until we pass or whatever.”
“Yeah but we don’t even know what a pass means. When the spell goes through? When Alba gets a vision? Why don’t we just try it? If we’re not supposed to then we’ll just, like, not get there. We’ll be exactly where we started.”
Gabbie looked up, her sobbing starting to quiet down. It only took a second for a smile to start breaking across her face, and Delali could tell she was working to hold back a squeal.
“Wait!” Delali warned. “Not without Maya.”
“Obviously!” Gabbie said, pulling out her phone to call.
* * *
It only took Maya thirty minutes to get to Delali’s, and when she did, she was dressed in her Saturday best—a knit Hanifa maxi dress and strappy heels.
“What’s this about?” Maya said as soon as she entered the apartment. Her newest install was straight and shoulder-length, bumped at the ends.
“We want to try and transport,” Delali said. “To the Sphere.”
Maya shrugged, dropping onto the sofa. “Okay.”
“Really?” Gabbie asked. She looked to Delali in disbelief.
“Listen, I don’t know the rules to this shit but in the notable figures lesson I read about a dressmaker in the Sphere who makes all the best stuff for the Gathering. It’s the first place I wanted to go when we pass but the longer we wait the longer her client list is gonna be.”
Gabbie and Delali took Maya through the plan they’d drawn up using the Sphere map from the lesson book. In the instance that they did successfully transport, they’d arrive at the Cradle, like the transportation section instructed. They’d go to the Archive inside 33,26, so Delali could find a spell to help her reliably modify her voice for the movie. Then they’d go to the big grocery store in Centre Sphere so Gabbie could get hail for her hair growth serum. Maya added Derra’s, a dress store just outside the Centre, where the best tailor in the Sphere could conjure your dream dress in three adjectives or less.
They sat in Delali’s living room and held hands. They closed their eyes and transported, their sole intention to leave the typic world behind them.