Allie turned the ring around with her thumb, she wasn’t used to it yet. Touching it still gave her a little jolt, in a good way, a quick flash memory of Jeremy sliding the opened velvet box across the table, the bottle of champagne. Her yes was never in question, but the thought of his nervous expression was endearing.

The nerves were all hers tonight though. They had flown to Halifax to meet Jeremy’s parents. She had talked to them on Skype before, had seen pictures, received their emails of congratulations, they were happy to finally have a daughter-in-law on the horizon. Jeremy was only 30 but they seemed to have figure that he would never properly settle down. Now that she was here, she wondered if Jeremy being with her was proper at all.

She knew that his family was wealthy. Everything that Jeremy did spoke of someone who didn’t worry about money. He didn’t do that few seconds of calculation before putting down his credit card to pay for something. His clothes were expensive, his car had all the extras, he knew about wine, some of her friends had some of those things, but he was the only one who had them all. He wasn’t flashy about it though, so she was never uncomfortable. At least she hadn’t been until she got to his parent’s place.

It wasn’t that they had a separate dining room, lots of people had that. It was that their table sat 30 people and that they had a drawing room for after dinner drinks. It wasn’t that the walls of their living room had beautiful paintings, it was that one of them appeared to be a Picasso. She was so far out of her league that she had no idea how to play this game.

So, she was one of 4 people at a table for 30, eating foods she had never heard of with utensils she had never seen before. She had no idea what to talk about, no idea what rich fancy people said to each other over dinner. She didn’t know anything about expensive cars, or art, and she had never hosted a charity ball. Movies were her only reference point for the conversations of wealthy people, and they didn’t seem to be much help to her at the moment. So she just sat, and ate with her right hand and while twirled her engagement ring around her finger with her left thumb.

She was sure her in-laws-to-be were thinking that Jeremy had made a poor choice, this woman who didn’t know how to dress, who had dropped the napkin she had tried to put on her lap. They were probably thinking that she was some sort of idiot who couldn’t even come up with appropriate dinner conversation. She felt her face redden as she realized how much she didn’t fit in.

“Allie?” Jeremy’s mother was speaking to her. What was she going to ask? Was this the question that would expose Allie as a fraud, as an outsider. Would this be the question that would show Jeremy that he had made a mistake?

She took a deep breath and bravely faced Mrs. Walters-Carr. “Yes?”

“Can you pass the salt, honey? I think I forgot to put some in the potatoes when I cooked them.”

        The whole place was like a horror movie or like something from Doctor Who. Furniture covered with sheets, streaky windows, tables furry with dust. Creaky sounds like something your over-enthusiastic neighbours would play on Hallowe’en. Mouse tracks. Wind whistling through the broken window upstairs.

The stairs.

The stairs were the worst. The whole house gave her the creeps but somehow the stairs were creepier than everything else. There was something so vulnerable about being in that space, like it would be easy to push someone down or to sneak behind them while they were going up. She even found stairs in her own house a bit off-putting so it was no wonder that the stairs here were even more distressing.

They were ordinary stairs, wooden, with a carpet trailing up the middle. In a different age, there would have been a runner of that knobbly plastic covering it, but instead, there were metal rods at the juncture where the riser met the step below. They rattled with each step she took and the sound did nothing to make her less creeped out. Neither did the cloud of dust that rose with each footfall. It had to have been years since anyone had taken a vacuum to the place, and she had no intention of being the one to do so.

If she had any sense she wouldn’t be here at all but she had to get her purse back. Of course, if she had any sense she wouldn’t have come out to the haunted house with Dana and the rest of the cheerleaders, and she probably would have left when Bill and the rest of the team showed up. And if she had any sense, she would never have given Bill a hard time about not wanting to go inside. And she definitely would not have clucked like a chicken when he refused.

If she had done any of those things, he might not have picked up her purse and flung it through the upstairs window. And if she hadn’t made such a big deal about him being a chicken, then he might have cut her some slack, but she hadn’t and he didn’t and now she was trudging up the dusty steps, eating her heart every time it shot up into her throat.

Every step took an eternity, she was a living example of slow motion, the sound of her own breath rattled in her ears, she worried about peeing in her new GAP jeans. She wasn’t backing down though, she wasn’t giving Bill the satisfaction of being able to call her a chicken. And if that wasn’t motivation enough, her car keys were in that purse and it was a long, long walk to her house. Especially if she had to walk it alone.

The room housing her purse was at the front of the house, to the right at the top of the stairs. Maybe 25 feet away. She could do this. She could totally do this.

*****

The purse was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, light streaming in from moon outside highlighted the clear spot in the dust where it had landed. She bent down to pick it up. A shadow crossed in front of the window.

They could hear her scream from outside.

(I wrote this last night but forgot to post it. There will be two posts today. Also, the last line really doesn’t work so I have to let it simmer for a while until the right words bubble up.)

    At first, Joanna used her newfound magic for good. She didn’t know how long it was going to last, and she figured that she might as well spread as much fun as she could. So little old ladies had flowers appear in their hands, the writer-guy at Starbucks saw his coffee cup fill right back up, and the Mom at the grocery story discovered $30 in her pocket right after her card had been declined.

Joanna felt like someone from a fairytale. She kept checking behind her to see if she was leaving a trail of sparkles or rose petals, as would befit her magical status. She smiled so hard her face ached, there was a little hop in her step as she walked home.

She probably would have just gone on adding fun to the world around her if that guy sitting on his step hadn’t been rude. She could have handled a wolf-whistle, or even a ‘Hey, beautiful!’ – that would have been creepy but somewhat tolerable. His comment, however, was not the least bit tolerable and she wasn’t even sure anyone COULD do that, even if she had been interested. Her first thought was to wonder if his technique had worked on some hapless woman before so he was trying again. Her second thought was to wish that he’d come down with a dreadful itch in a tender spot so he’d stop dreaming up suggestions for passers-by.

It was only when he smacked at his crotch two or three times before jumping up to run into his house that she realized that she could apply her magic a lot more broadly.

She started making a list of what to wish next.

Janna leaned her head back against the bus seat. It should have been more comfortable than it was, but even one of those plush bus seats offers no comfort when it is worn thin over the metal frame. She left her head there anyway, the base of her skull bouncing on the fabric covered metal. It generated a kind of muscle-y headache but it distracted her from thoughts of facing her aunt.

    She knew what Aunt Sadey would look like, wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt – the crew neck, plastic-y kind that no one else wears anymore – leaning her left shoulder on the door frame, an unlit cigarette hanging from the fingers of her right hand, hair dragged back in a ponytail except for a scrappy little bang that would be standing up in sections from being swept off of Sadey’s forehead. And she’d be shaking her head, just a little, so Janna would know that she’d let her family down again.

“You were your mother’s pride and joy, you know. You were going to save the lot of us.” Sadey wouldn’t even have to say the words aloud, Janna knew the script. “I knows how hard it is. Sure, haven’t I had the same troubles myself?”

It was the same thing that Sadey said every time, but Janna didn’t believe it. She couldn’t imagine that grey Aunt Sadey had ever gone off excited for anything, let alone for a job. Sadey always seemed happy enough working at Mercer’s Convenience, keeping the local kids from stealing chips and beer, standing on the front steps for a smoke on her break. Janna wasn’t like Sadey though, she was excited. Every single time.

The problem was that Janna she always started with such confidence. She was always sure that this was the one that was going to pan out, this was the job that would switch them up over that line from almost having enough to finally being able to get ahead.

It never was though.

Lots of times it was close, but when it all came down to it, Janna just didn’t fit. Her clothes were a little too cheap, her make-up a bit too heavy, her language a bit too ragged. After the interview it was always completely clear, a glance in the mirror told her what she had done wrong this time. She’d love to have that insight beforehand just once, when it would be of some use.

She was just tired. She needed a break somewhere. But if that break wasn’t coming, then she needed Sadey to not be waiting at the door when she got home from trying. It was never not getting the job. It was never the pursed lips of the interviewer. Never the sad head shake from the secretary on the way out. The gut-wrenching part was Sadey, standing on the steps, knowing that Janna had let them all down again. The saddest part was never not getting the job, the saddest part was getting back home.