Chapter 23: ♡♡♡ Mama ♡ Mia's ♡ Sweetest ♡ Show ♡♡♡

Chapter 23: ♡♡♡ Mama Mia's Sweetest Show ♡♡♡

A cloud of flour dust explodes in the air like a gender reveal balloon that forgot to pick a colour. It wafts gently down, each speck floating on the air and twirling lazily until, with a quiet mutter from somewhere out in the hazy distance, each grain pops outward and turns pink.

They are sakura petals now, not flour dust. A blizzard of them, twisting down in beautiful spirals. I open my mouth and tilt my candy head back to catch one of them on my tongue. It flutters down and starts to dissolve in my mouth. Is that... buttercream?

This is bad. The forest is gone. The fire is gone. The knight and the princess and the rock guy and all those cat-ladies and apron-ladies... all of them are gone somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all? Now, instead of standing in a calm forest next to a river, I'm on what seems like the set of a cooking tv show. Stainless steel appliances all set into the wall, with expensive copper pots hanging above the counters. Hundreds of combination stovetop-and-oven portable kitchen islands seem to stretch off for kilometres in the distance. Above me studio lights shine from a hazy almost-there ceiling. The whole thing is contained within the angled two-and-a-half wall structure of a tv set, and behind me are bleachers that I can't quite focus on, swaying behind a haze with an audience I definitely cannot see.

A whiteboard rolls into place beside a camera dolly, and I read in cheerful pink chalk:

A saccharine female voice like a sunbeam wrapped in candy canes booms across the impossibly large studio space:

The voice fades out and a laugh track kicks in, a gaggle of people laughing and cheering at nothing. Somewhere in the infinite studio space a sharp, short whistle chirps and the laughing cuts off.

I look down and find my old clothes are now gone and I'm wearing a school uniform over my candy blob body. Complete with a white button-up, red ribbon tie, and a pleated skirt. The latter falling to just above my knees and leaving my luscious candy thighs out on full display. My gummy little feet are squished into the most uncomfortable loafers, which are clearly two sizes too small even for someone with no bones.

A title card crashes into space, danbgling in front of me.

╔══ EPISODE 2: ♡♡♡♡ MAMA MIA'S SWEETEST SHOW ♡♡♡♡ ══╗

║ PROTAGONIST ▸ Gumbum (he/tasty/snack)

║ HP ▸ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ 100/100

║ GENRE ▸ Romance Otome (!!)

║ INTEGRITY ▸ gummy?

║ MEMORY ▸ intact (anomaly)

║ ROUTES OPEN ▸ 6

╚═════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

▼ PRESS START ▼

I whip my candy tongue out and nap a sakura-flour petal off my chin. Where was I? It's hazy, but there. The forest. The fire. The lady with the floaty whisks and the golden eyes... Mama Mia. We were about to fight her. But then...?

A jingling bell rings out across the studio. The title card window blinks, and then somebody behind me clears their throat. An angry hoarse clearing of the throat, like they had to force it out.

As I slowly turn, an upbeat poppy music swells, some kind of theme song, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Spotlights swing around wildly from the ceiling like searchlights, and one by one the settle, landing on the cast.

They're all here, the people I'd met just earlier today. They seem to be locked in place, unmoving, and their faces are beaming with the biggest, most joyous smiles. But their eyes...

Victor's eyes are wide and screaming. Mrs. Kim's are narrowed slightly, and tracking the cameras rolling around us with acute attention. I spot one tear sliding sideways down Lumi's flushed cheek. Bok-Nam's smile is the biggest of all, just enormous, and I can't tell if he's upset or not. Rook's stone face is unreadable, of course, except for two small divots at the corners of his eyes. Lataya... her eyes are clear.

I wave at Victor and his pupils focus in on me so hard I think his eyes are about to cross. The manic smile never budges.

The music kicks up a beat. Frantic and fast. Then the title card dissolves into pink dust, and new ones SLAM into place in front of each of them.

Victor's grin shines through the card, and I feel like it's even bigger now, somehow. A moment later the card shatters into pink sparkles, and then the next cards SLAM into place, one after another, before dissolving away.

The Rook card hangs there in the air longer than the others, wobbling. Rook is in a school blazer two sizes too small, his stone muscles threatening to rip the fabric at any moment. Finally the card flickers, then gives up and dissolves.

The last card glitches sideways into pink static and disappears. Lataya is there, smiling vacantly. She blinks slowly at me, but says nothing.

The music slowly fades down from an ear-shattering volume to nearly silent, just a soft rippling rhythm in the background, then a menu materializes between me and Victor.

Three names I've never seen before and five new friends. I eye each one in turn, taking in the frozen face. Mrs. Kim has that weird magical stop sign. I bet Mrs. Kim could probably murder Mama Mia with her perm alone.

I reach out a finger and select Mrs. Kim. The stage whirls and the world around me becomes a kaleidoscope of colours for a moment, before it all lurches back in to position. When it stops, I'm standing on a raised platform in the middle of a bright kitchen, with pastel walls filled with shelves of spices and herbs. A gigantic vase of sunflowers sits between two kitchen prep stations.

Mrs. Kim has a chef's apron over her HOA vest. She is still beaming, but her eyes are giving murder. Hovering over her head floats a new bar.

Victor stands across from her, still frozen, but now his mouth is hanging half-open.

A pink soap bubble slowly inflates in the space between them, growing larger and lkarger until it POPS with a jingling of bells. In its place a new menu floats in the air.

Three choices, and all of them clearly poisonous. A bead of sugary sweat drops down the back of my neck. I panic and pick B.

Victor suddenly jerks to life. He turns woodenly to face Mrs. Kim, his arms whipping out from the sudden movement and his eyes wide with horror. His mouth opens and he says the line with cheerful sweetness.

"Your perm is so... shiny."

Mrs. Kim's mouth purses up into a delighted little O, and her hands come up to her face to hide that blush creeping up her cheeks. Meanwhile, her eyes are promising the murder of his entire bloodline.

Mrs. Kim grins and winks at the camera, but I also notice that her left hand twitches violently for a moment.

Mama Mia's voiceover booms through the studio: **"AWWW! What a sweet boy!"** The audience aaaaaws.

Then the minigame starts.

Victor's hands are kneading dough on their own. Mrs. Kim is laughing a delicate, modulated TV laugh. Her eyes have not stopped their glare. Through the kneading a single tear escapes Victor's left eye and drops cleanly into the batter.

Three more pink soap bubbles inflate and POP one after another, each spitting out a fresh dialogue box for me to choose from. My eyes dart back and forth between Mrs. Kim and Victor, and my back is getting sticky from all the sugar-sweat.

I pick B. Victor jerks again and says the line with absolute sincerity.

Another bubble. POP.

I pick C. I don't know why, I'm just confused and, honestly, more than a little scared of Mrs. Kim at this point. Victor delivers the line with the soft purr of a long-time lover. Above her loving smile, Mrs. Kim's eyes blink four times in rapid rage and focus on the rolling pin on the counter.

Pop.

I pick A and Victor goes to work again.

Mrs. Kim's affection bar shudders and flickers, the pink of it darkens then turns purple, then finally shivers into a bright angry red. The bar text pixelates for a moment, then reforms itself into the words ♡♡ HOA VIOLATIONS ♡♡: OVER 9000.

The audience whoops and Mama Mia's voice gushes: "This is so romantic, you guys! Did you see the way he looked at her perm!"

The minigame shifts without any fanfare and all the baking is instantly completed, like TV magic. A dozen heart-shaped scones sit on the counter. A final menu pops into place above them.

If I pick B she might forgive him. She might forgive him enough, at least. I should definitely pick B. It would be stupid to pick A. Only a fool would ever-

I pick A and the studio makes a happy little chime.

Victor's mouth opens. His voice cracks like a rock in a windshield and he drops down to one knee. I haven't noticed until now that he's wearing a headband above his eyes that says GANBARE.

"Mrs. Kim? Your perm has... your perm has been the light of my... uh... please Mrs. Kim! Marry me?"

His eyes are frantic, looking around and begging me, Mrs. Kim, Mama Mia, anyone for help. Mrs. Kim stares at him for much too long, then she says, with no inflection at all, "I see." She picks up the rolling pin.

A huge pie tin materializes out of nowhere and settles into place in front of the two, fresh dough for the crust waiting atop. Mrs. Kim moves forward with a kind of animatronic jerkiness, and folds Victor into the pie. Her hands are not her own. Her smile does not move. A single tear runs the length of her cheek the entire time and lands on the lattice top.

`♡ TENDER TEAR OF JOY ♡`

The Victor pie floats through the air with a coo from the audience, straight into the oven, and the world fades to pink.

I do not select anything, but the pink void fades away anyway.

I'm back on the title-drop kitchen set. Sakura petals are now unfalling, sucked grain by grain back up and into the darkness above. Mrs. Kim is standing with the others again. Her smile is back, but her eyes are only looking at me now.

My left hand feels lighter. A stub of pink-and-orange candy where it used to be, the surface smoothed over like nothing had ever been there.

The HUD obligingly explains.

I am only twelve years old, and I try not to cry in front of my new friends. I don't have time to cry. The menu is already back and waiting for me.

I scrub the glossy sheen of melted sugar from my face with my now four-fingered hand, and I pick Lumi.

The set whirls and swirls once more. When it settles I'm on a school rooftop at golden hour, that perfect time for photographs and confessing your love, and I'm surrounded by sakura petals... because of course. There's a chain-link railing, and beyond the railing, a clearly fictional city skyline with tall skewering pink buildings all in a row.

Lumi is at the railing in a catgirl variant of the school uniform I'm wearing. The same red ribbon, same pleated skirt, but with ears and a tail that somehow just magical fit inside it all. She has her back to me and her tail is flicking slowly.

She turns, ears flat against her head. Her face flushes pretty-pink right on cue, and a single cute fang catches her bottom lip, perfectly. Her affection meter floats above her head at half-full and gently climbs as she looks across the rooftop at Victor.

Her eyes are electric. Not just metaphorically, I can see actual flickers of energy crackling in them, little white sparkles dancing across the whites, and the faint smell of ozone drifts over the rooftop toward me. A pink soap bubble inflates between Victor and Lumi, jiggles once, and pops.

I am so tired. I don't even read them this time, I blindly pick A. Just to get it over with.

Victor jerks to life and says it. He turns woodenly to face Lumi, his hand coming up and reaching out slightly, like he might touch the tail, and his mouth opens with all the sweetness of a man being fed into a slow cooker. "Your tail looks soft."

Lumi's flush deepens to a colour that is no longer cute and is now squarely a warning. A single drop of blood wells up on her lip from where the fang's been digging in.

Her ultimate weapon, the Starslayer, materializes on her shoulder before the dialogue box has even fully dissolved. The enormous glowing orb scans the area with a sweep of multi-coloured lights, which almost immediately hone in on poor Victor.

"BAKA!"

She's weeping silently the whole time it happens, only from the eyes, but that perfectly cute fang bite holds through the entire activation sequence without her ever once breaking character.

I lose my right ear in the white-out blast of energy that follows. I don't hear the reset, and I keep my eyes tightly shut through the rewinding and shuffling as everyone flutters through the pink void back to position one. The menu dings back into place and I blindly select it without looking, numb.

The set whirls once more, sluggish this time. When it settles, the lighting is wrong. Overhead now are fluorescent kitchen lights, not the warm cozy ones from before. A meal-prep counter slides into place from the pink nothingness. Bok-Nam stands behind it in a chef's coat, his HOA ID-tag now reads SENPAI and hangs on a pink lanyard with cute animal stickers all over it. Stacks of Tupperware containers make a neat pile beside him in a perfect pyramid.

He smiles. It's the smile of a man who has clocked in to his factory job on Christmas eve, only to be told there's no overtime this year, no bonuses, and oh we're gonna need you to work over the holidays. His hands are clasped in front of him.

Right on queue, a pink soap bubble inflates between him and Victor. POP!

This time option C has a tiny lock icon next to it. I should probably pick A. The lock icon on C is obviously a trap. I pick C. I genuinely can't tell you why, I just feel like I need to do it. It calls to me.

Victor jerks to life and turns to Bok-Nam, holding out his hands as if offering himself up for inspection. He delivers the line with cheerful enthusiasm: "Could you please seal this for me?"

Bok-Nam doesn't even blink. He gives a perfect little bow, just with his head, then lifts a giant Tupperware container off the very top of the pyramid without disturbing a single other container, like a Jenga master, and moves toward Victor with a sad lumbering gait. Victor's mouth opens like he wants to scream, but the enchantment is too strong and his smile holds. The Tupperware closes around him with a flawless snnnnck. Bok-Nam burps the lid once, twice, then sits down on top.

The audience breaks into polite applause and Mama Mia's voice purrs through the studio overhead: **"MMMMM, FRESH!"**

I lose my left hand to the wrist this time. My pixie stick bones are showing through the open stub.

The menu blooms back again before I'm ready and I blindly pick Rook. The set whirls...

When it settles I'm in a school courtyard with a single cherry tree, its blossoms a bright pink against a sky that's one solid sheet of magenta. Sakura petals are falling again, of course, but slower than they did last time, and they don't actually pile anywhere on the ground when they land, they just seem to evaporate into noithing.

Rook is under the cherry tree, dressed in a school blazer that's at least two sizes too small, yet unbreakably strong. The lapels are cracking the stone around his shoulders into little hairline veins. His tie is on, but it's wrapped around his neck twice for some reason. A single sakura petal lands on his head and then slides off like he's water.

The magic of this place is trying to put a blush on him, but it isn't working out. A small pink circle keeps materializing on his stone cheek, hangs there for a few moments, then slides off and falls into the dirt at his feet. Then a new one appears a few moments later. Slides off. Another. The ground at his feet is slowly piling up with discarded blush spots like little candy hearts.

A pink soap bubble tries to inflate between Victor and Rook, but it doesn't pop. It just hangs there until it finally dissolves with a sad little fizz. The menu it leaves behind is... wrong.

The options are blank. I stand there confused, not sure what to pick. But it doesn't matter.

Victor's mouth opens anyway and his tongue flutters around in there, but no sound comes out. He tries again. Still nothing. His eyes find mine, really find them this time, locked on and crazed. The HUD menu goes pink, then angry red.

Rook tilts his head with a sound of stone on stone like a mill turning. Then he says, with profound and absolute clarity, "BAD ROCK," and stomps the prep station flat. The cherry tree falls down with it. Half the magenta sky pixelates and crashes down, and the little pile of blush spots under his feet boucne with each impact.

The set fritzes around me, and the reset comes back jagged. I lose a chunk of shoulder. When the sakura petals come back this time, they're paler. More of a salmon colour.

The menu pops back and this time I pick the first name on the list. The candy one.

The set whirls again, slower and softer than the others, and when it settles I find myself in a little kitchen with an actual window, and sunlight streaming in. The audience seerms to be gone now. Or at least, very quiet and somewhere very far away. The studio half-walls have moved closer in, like the show pulled the camera in tight for a more intimate scene.

A girl floats in, pink and demure and made entirely of candy. Unlike my friends, her face matches her eyes. It seems like she actually likes being here in this weird kitchen.

Across from me, Victor blinks. His head turns toward me, only the tiniest degree, but it's really toward me this time.

A pink soap bubble inflates between him and Sugar-Plum-chan, rises slowly through the air, and then pops quietly without any of the jingling bells from the others.

They're all fine? They're all kind, and none of them feel like bait. I reach for A.

Sugar-Plum-chan smiles before I can pick, but she isn't smiling at Victor. She's smiling at me. And then she just... steps off her assigned spot on the set, walks past Victor and the prep station, and walks right up to where I'm standing.

She tilts her head and looks at me. She has my eyes. She has the same shoulder-sash as me, except hers is pink, and we have exactly the same hands. Except for the one I'm missing.

"You're not supposed to be here, big brother," she whispers, and the whole set freezes around us. The softly thrumming music stopscuts out. Then the studio lights all blow out at once, like someone overloaded a power strip.

Mama Mia's voice cuts through the chaos like a needle scratch across vinyl: **"NEXT EPISODE!"**

The reset is bad this time. The petals come back gray for half a second then change to pitch black like poisonous ash, then back to the cute pink. I lose something, something I can't point to, but I know it's gone. I don't think it was a body part this time. Maybe a memory. A song I used to know? No menu pops up to tel me what it was.

I am missing a pinky, an ear, a hand, a chunk of shoulder, and now... something else.

The menu pops back up, bright and cheerful, and I'm back on a school rooftop with no railing, with Sugar-Plum-chan's whispered name still stuck in my mouth. The music kicks back in and everything is reset.

So I run. Through the prep station, past Victor frozen mid-confession, through the audience that isn't there, past the camera dolly and past the bleachers, all the way to the back wall of the set, where I brace my remaining shoulder ready to slam through it. The wall doesn't even bother to stop me.

The studio lights stutter as I push through, sakura petals freezing in the air around me. The audio drops out one channel at a time. Laugh track first, then applause, soundtrack, then nothing at all. The set goes flat and painted-on behind me as I move, and I push my way through what's left of it the way you might push through a paper backdrop. Except there's no backdrop on the other side. There's just forest.

I stagger to a stop and stand there a moment to take it in. Real grass smell. Real afternoon light coming down through real leaves. There's a bird singing somewhere above me, an actual bird, not a piped-in laugh-track substitute for one.

Off to the side I spot a little clearing, with a fallen log, and a teenage girl sitting cross-legged on it.

She's maybe fifteen, with earphones in that doesn't appear to be connected to anything. There's a half-eaten box of candy on the log next to her, and a perfect row of nine pixie-stix wrappers laid out like trophies in a museum. A spiral-bound notebook covered in stickers and hearts and glitter, and what I'm pretty sure is some dried snot, sits open on her lap. A pink gel pen is held between her teeth.

She looks up and her eyes go absolutely huge. "Oh my god. You're not supposed to be here."

I stare at her. That middle-aged baker with the dough-streaked apron and the floaty whisks and the frizzy roots doesn't actually exist anywhere. I'd figured the voice was coming from her up until just now, but the voice was coming from this kid the whole time. Mama Mia is a kid, that's the thing, she's just a teenage girl on a log in the woods.

She tilts her head and considers me for a moment. "Wait. Wait wait wait, you can see me-me? Like, the actual real me?" She waves a glitter-streaked hand around her own face. "That's never happened before. Huh. That's not supposed to—" She trails off, shrugs, brightens up like a sunrise, and skips right past the whole problem. "Oh well! I'll figure that out later."

She's delighted to have company. She starts talking at me at light speed, like she hasn't seen another person in a year, and most of it I can't quite keep up with. The baker is her in-game avatar, she explains, her host persona, like when streamers wear vtuber masks. She picked a middle-aged cooking-show mom for the persona because moms-on-cooking-shows are the coziest, like, the absolute coziest, you know? They always have that one mug. You know the mug I mean.

She loves three things, she explains, counting them off on her fingers, which are sticky with pocky cream.

One: cooking shows. Her grandma used to watch them. They were on every afternoon after school back home.

Two: dating sims. Her phone has, well, it had, she's not really sure of the tense anymore, 67 gigs of save files on it.

Three: friendship bracelets. She holds out her left wrist for me to see. There are six of them, all colourful and beaded, and she made every one of them herself. There's one in there for me, she says, only she didn't know my name yet so she just spelled CANDY in the beads.

She got isekai'd here, she explains, by a really stressful test. She'd been studying super hard for it, and then suddenly she was just in this forest. She was so scared at first, but then she figured out that she could make stuff. Like, actually make things, with her hands and with her mind. And the very first thing she made was a sweet little candy boy to keep her company.

"That's you," she says, beaming at me. "I'm so glad you came back."

She doesn't know I ran away from her, she just thinks I wandered off somewhere and now I'm back, hooray. Oh, would I like a Twizzler?

She holds out a Twizzler that's half-melted from the heat of her pocket. I take it because she's offering, but I'm made of candy myself, so eating it would be wrong.

We share a long, quiet beat together. Then, very carefully, I ask her about Victor. About Mrs. Kim. About their faces, the way the smiles never moved. About their eyes.

She blinks at me. She's genuinely confused by the question. "What eyes? They look so happy. Look how they smile."

And she means it. There's no lying anywhere on her face, no awareness she's hurting anyone, and as I watch her watch me I realize she literally can't see what I see. Inside whatever bubble her show is putting up around the cast, all those people are just characters to her, and the audience laughter sounds happy to her ears because she made it that way.

So she's the worst kind of villain. The kind who doesn't even know. I don't have the heart to tell her. What I do is ask if I can finish her episode the way I want.

She brightens like a sunrise. "You'd help me? Really?" She slides her notebook across the log toward me. All the route plans for each character are scrawled inside in glitter and hearts, crossed out and rewritten over each other. "It's just a draft," she says.

I take the pen and I start to write...

***

I'm back on the set.

The cast are all lined up the way I left them, the candy girls on one side and my friends on the other, my friends in their puppet poses with the wide smiles and the screaming eyes. The opening theme music hovers low.

Mama Mia's voiceover floats down over the whole studio, fluffy and warm. **"AND WE'RE LIVE AGAIN, EVERYONE! ARE YOU READY FOR ROUND TWO?"**

The menu pops up between me and Victor again.

I look at it. Then I look at Victor. His eyes meet mine, pleading silently for release. I don't pick anything.

The menu blinks at me, expectant.

I still don't pick.

The audience laugh track stutters somewhere off in the distance, a heh-heh-heh in completely the wrong place. It catches itself, tries again, regroups for a few seconds, then just stops.

The locked smiles on the cast start to crack, one face at a time. Mrs. Kim's mouth-corners tremble, just barely. Lumi's tsundere pout slackens by maybe a millimetre. Bok-Nam's enormous host-face grin lists slowly to one side. Their eyes stay forward, locked toward Victor where they're supposed to be looking, but the tears are visible now, running clean lines through tv show makeup.

Then Victor's mouth twitches and falls open, and for one breath he's himself again, truly himself, looking down at his gym shorts and then back up at me. He mouths "what the fuck" without making any sound, doesn't speak it out loud, but for the first time this whole chapter he isn't waiting for me to make him say something either.

I walk right through the menu and past Victor, who turns his head to watch me as I pass, slowly, like he's the only one moving in a room full of statues. Then on past the candy girls, Sugar-Plum-chan at the very front of the line, already looking right at me when I get there.

I stop in front of the nearest camera and the camera turns on its own to follow me, lenses focusing in. The audience holds its breath. Or doesn't have any breath to hold. Or maybe never existed in the first place, who knows.

I look right into the camera.

"I don't want to a love interest," I say, calm and tired, in my own actual voice. "I just want to be a good brother to my sister."

The HUD glitches in front of me.

The pink screen-fade doesn't come.

All the candy people turn away from Victor and turn toward me instead, their soft faces recognizing me as one of their own kind. Sugar-Plum-chan is already smiling at me. They walk over and they don't say anything because they don't need to. They just surround me with their hands out and touch my missing pieces, carefully and with love.

Beyond them, beyond the whole cast, the studio walls are starting to peel back. The trees push their way through walls. Sakura petals reverse in mid-air and fall back up, condensing back into the mist of flour somewhere above us. Through the widening gap I can see out into the real forest.

Mama Mia is sitting on her log out there. The glitter pen is frozen mid-stroke in her hand. She's watching me, not crying or anything, just very, very quiet. She wipes her face with the back of her hand and smudges some glitter up into her hairline. She closes her notebook with a sad smile.

The set lights above us start to dim, popping out one by one.

Sugar-Plum-chan looks up at me, her little hand in my hand, and she is so small. "Can we come with you?" she asks.

I look past her, through the dissolving wall of the set, out to the kid on the log. Mama Mia shakes her head once, slowly. Her mouth shapes the word please.

I look back down at Sugar-Plum-chan and shake my head too. Just once. She nods and squeezes my four-fingered hand.

Then they all start to dissolve, all of them at once, smiling at me like party guests politely showing themselves out. One after the other they melt away into sticky sugar puddles, looking at me as they go and looking strangely happy about it.

Sugar-Plum-chan is the last to go, but she doesn't dissolve right away. Instead she pulls back from my hand, looks me up and down, and then lifts her free hand to my forehead to press a kiss there, gentle as anything, candy-cool and smelling like vanilla. When she pulls away there's a small pink star left on my forehead where her lips were.

She steps back. And then she's powdered sugar dust, floating away in the wind up and away and gone.

The walls finish peeling away around me, and we're fully back into the forest. I sit down. Very, very carefully.

***

The real party drops out of their puppet poses around me like cut marionettes. Everyone rushes to check on each other, make sure they're okay, but it's a very quiet kind of energy. Everyone is confused and exhausted.

Through it all, Victor stands very still. His gym shorts and headband are gone, he's back in his proper kingsguard clothes again. His jaw is working slowly, and he's staring at the middle distance like a man who's just remembered a song he hated and hasn't thought about in years. Then he meets my eyes and just holds the look for a long time. He walks over to me, stops, reaches up, and claps me on the shoulder once. He doesn't say anything.

I look past him then, between the trees, and that's when I spot the girl, way off in the distance, earphones in and notebook tucked under her arm with the glitter pen still between her teeth. She catches my eye, gives me a quick two-fingered wave, and then she steps behind a tree and just... isn't there anymore. I blink at the empty space between the trees for a second, but I don't say anything to anyone. It's fine. No big deal.

Lataya comes over next and looks me up and down, taking in all the holes I'm working with now. Pinky gone, ear gone, hand gone, big chunk missing out of my shoulder. She doesn't make a big deal of it either, which I love her for.

"What happened to you?" she asks.

"Bad episode," I tell her.

I raise my one remaining hand and bite my pinky finger off at the knuckle. I roll it long and thin and then shape it into a circle.

I hold the candy friendship bracelet out and offer it to her.

"Wanna be best friends?" I ask.

She makes a face. "Ew." But she takes it anyway, slides it onto her wrist, then holds her hand up and tilts it in the light, watching how the candy reflects the sun. Then, half-distracted, she palms a pebble in her other hand. There's a soft thump from her closed fist, and a moment later, the pebble explodes with rock dust leaking from her hand.

I smile. Everything always works out okay.