The Secret of a Heart Note

by Stacey Lee

  I pedal through the gray light of morning toward school, no closer to a solution for how to get out of the Oman crisis or how to teleport myself to Meyer. I just have to hang tight. Hope Mother sees reason and doesn’t make me go. At least Kali dropped off her mom’s stash of romance novels to Alice Sunday night. That should keep her away from school for a while.

  I swerve around a dead opossum, trying not to breathe in its decaying stench as I pump through the last block to Santa Guadalupe High School. The banner above the entrance reads “Last Day! Halloween Candy Grams for the Boo of Your Dreams.”

  Swinging into school, I glide to my parking spot at the library bike racks, and wedge my trusty garage-sale bike next to Kali’s Schwinn. Vicky leans against a post, cell phone to her ear. What is she doing here? Her eyes have lost focus and the angles of her jawline are softer. For the first time I notice a prettiness to her features. It’s as if by dropping her guard, a quieter side peeks through, and I can see why Court found her attractive.

  Her eyes snap to mine and vulnerable Vicky disappears. She clacks over to me in her dangerous-looking stilettos, which she could use as spikes to climb a wall in case she feels like going ninja. At the sight of my bucket hat, her eyeballs roll with the white of surrender, like she’s giving me up as a lost cause.

  She finishes her call and drops her phone into her Gucci purse, which is stuffed with so many beauty products, you’d think she was a klepto. The cloying scents of petroleum and polyurethane assault my nose. Vicky’s designer purse is a knockoff.

  “I dropped it in his drink Saturday night,” she says in a low voice that boys might consider sexy. “Why is it taking so long? It’s only supposed to take a couple of days.”

  How does she know that? “It can take up to a week. Plus, the chemistry has to be perfect.”

  “The chemistry is perfect,” she hisses. A clot of mascara looks like a bug caught between her eyelashes.

  “Well then, you have nothing to worry about.” I fake a smile.

  A woman and her toddler stroll by. The little boy reaches up for Vicky’s skirt, and Vicky jerks away, with the urgency of someone who has just felt a spider graze her face. Her red lips compress disapprovingly, and the pickled cabbage of sour sap stings my nose.

  The mother glares at Vicky, then tugs her child away.

  Vicky shivers, as if casting off a bad dream. “The dance is in less than a week. If I don’t get results by the homecoming game, I’m posting Kali’s journal online.” She sweeps away in a billow of fake Gucci, Poison Apple perfume, and burning rubber.

  Four more days until the game, which kicks off a week of festivities leading up to the homecoming dance. I hurry to my locker. Vicky wasn’t bluffing, I smelled vengeful sword fern on her breath, a plant that chokes out others through its sneaky underground tubers. Kali doesn’t want me to fix Vicky with Drew Reaver, but my thought pot is empty of ideas.

  Near the lockers, members of the student council hawk candy grams at a table.

  “Mimosa, right?” Lauren Foster, student council president, points a neon-pink highlighter, which matches her fingernails, as well as the rubber bands in her braces.

  “Yes,” I say, hearing the surprise in my own voice. Lauren has a peaceful wild-olive-and-lemon scent that reminds me of sipping fruit-sweetened limoncello with Mother on a terrace on the Mediterranean—one of the rare times I’d ever seen her relaxing. I warm to Lauren instantly.

  Pascha Hassan, her best friend, staples candy bars onto pieces of paper and stuffs them into a plastic pumpkin. Her delicate brown hands look like they should be modeling rings. She smells more floral than Lauren, with traces of superabsorbent polymers, the secret sauce in disposable diapers, which might mean she cares for a younger sibling.

  “You want to buy a candy gram?” she asks.

  “No, thanks. I don’t eat candy.”

  Lauren and Pascha exchange a smile that I can’t read.

  “Well, it’s not for you. You buy it for someone else. You write your message on this”—Lauren holds up an orange paper—“and we attach a candy to it and deliver it to your special someone. A buck each.”

  “Oh. No, thanks.” A million times no, thanks. I begin to leave, but then I notice Pascha elbowing Lauren.

  I split my gaze between them, not sure what I’m waiting for. Lauren hair sprayed glitter into her wavy blond hair and the sparkle makes me blink. She looks around, then leans closer to me and whispers, “Do you use potions for yourself?”

  “Of course not.” Is that what people think? “I’m not even allowed to date. Plus, that would be unethical.”

  Pascha stops stuffing. The folds of the scarf covering her head ripple in the breeze. “Then how do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  The girls look at each other again.

  “How do you get all those boys to like you?” Lauren asks.

  I snort. Try living in a garden bursting with aphrodisiacs all your life. My particular brand of boy problems must be more obvious than I thought. I try to disinfect my followers as soon as I detect a problem, but I’ll need to be more vigilant. Wouldn’t want a jealous mob of teenage girls after me, like the ones who threw six-fingered Hyacinth into the sea. It hits me that maybe Larkspur’s concerns weren’t so far-fetched.

  “I drywall better than I give love advice,” I say. “Sorry.”

  Lauren deflates a little, and her sigh smells of diet soda and stomach acid. She could use more leafy greens. “I just want to know how I get a certain boy to ask me to the homecoming dance.” She dabs her eyes with a tissue.

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “I couldn’t do that!” she gasps. More dabbing.

  “Why?”

  “What if he said no? I’d need a sign that he’d say yes first. What are the signs that a guy likes you?” She clasps her hands together and implores me with her hazel eyes.

  I tug at my sleeve. “When a person has a crush, their top notes become buttery and their middle notes brighten by a factor of sixteen. Plus, they smell like heartsease, which is a kind of wildflower.”

  A hundred yards out, the soccer team in their blue-and-white uniforms returns from their morning practice, slapping hands with members of the track team jogging past them. Number ten, Court, walks with his customary slouch. His shirt hugs his lean body like a wetsuit. Number nine, Whit Wu, runs to catch up with him.

  Lauren’s lips separate. “Um, what?”

  Pascha’s kohl-rimmed eyes narrow as she appraises me. Without lifting her gaze from me, she hands Lauren another tissue. “Listen to the witch. She knows what she’s talking about.”

  I cough, putting into doubt that perception. My eyes drift toward the field again. Court looks up and our eyes connect. My heart does a backflip, and a dozen different scents burst from me, the sugar maple of happiness, the chicory of regret, and more rambling sunflower, a plant notable for its tendency to change directions several times during the day. I rarely smell like rambling sunflower. I usually have the Rulebook to circumscribe my path, and if not the rules, then Mother.

  Court waves, then trots toward the locker rooms.

  “But how am I supposed to know what, er, what she just said?” says Lauren to Pascha.

  “Your body knows,” says Pascha. “It’s hormones. We just can’t smell them like she can.” Her dark eyes swing to me. “Am I right?”

  Not exactly, but it’s close enough.

  Pascha doesn’t wait for me to answer. She slaps her friend’s arm. “Weren’t you paying attention in sex ed? Hormones are like these candy grams that pass messages to people, only we get the messages mixed up because we’re teens.” She pulls a note out of the pumpkin. “‘You’re nice.’ Ha! That one really means, ‘You have nice buns.’”

  “What does that have to do with whether he likes me?” asks Lauren.

  “Just because you think you like him doesn’t mean you do. Maybe you just like his buns.” Pascha uses her spindly hands to help her talk.

 
“I do not.” Lauren grabs a candy bar from the table and opens it. “You’re so lucky you can just smell these things.”

  “Right,” I say, not feeling lucky at all. “Well, I should go to class.”

  Pascha pushes a silver cuff up her arm. “Okay, well, try not to have too much fun today.” Her brown lips fold into a smile.

  Cautiously, I sniff but don’t detect any disdainful dirty bathwater odors. “Okay.” Shouldn’t be hard. I’ve never had much fun, let alone too much.

  I shift around on the plastic seat of my desk. Only ten minutes into algebra and my legs have already gone numb. Mr. Frederics’s argyle cardigan bunches and pulls as he writes an equation on the board. The fluorescent lighting shines off his scalp.

  As I copy the problem, Drew Reaver’s pen scratches rapidly behind me. I glance over my shoulder. Instead of the equation, he’s flourishing the words “soul sucker” under a demon he etched into his notebook.

  What would be so wrong about fixing Vicky with Drew? He likes drawing soul-sucking demons, and she is a soul-sucking demon. It’s perfect.

  As if sensing me lasering the back of her head with my eyes, Vicky turns languidly around and gives me the once-over. She taps the eraser tip of her pencil against her chin, then, just as unhurriedly, turns back around.

  The door opens. A freshman enters, bearing a basket of candy grams.

  Drew’s pen stops. The freshman’s sneakers squeak softly as she walks up and down the rows, doling out candy grams like communion wafers. Melanie shrieks in delight when she gets two.

  The freshman stops at my desk, smiling oddly.

  Dear God, no. I sense what she’s going to do before she does it. It happens in slow motion. She puts a hand under her basket, then upends it onto my desk.

  Candy grams overflow my desk and spill onto the floor. The cloying scent of chocolate and nougat makes my eyes tear. There’s a shocked moment of silence, followed by exclamations and tittering. As I wilt in my chair, I realize why Lauren and Pascha singled me out for advice.

  Vicky frowns while Melanie glares at me and stuffs her two packs of candy into her purse.

  As coolly as I can, I sweep the grams into my bag. It’s just as I feared. I missed a few admirers, or ten or twenty. What if they’re anonymous? How am I going to scent them all? No doubt they’ve been touched by several hands—the sender’s, members of the student council, the messengers. I put one to my nose and sniff. Sure enough, the human smells are faint and hard to separate into individuals, plus they’re overwhelmed by the chemical smells of felt-tip marker.

  Drew helps me gather the grams that fell to the floor.

  “Hey, thanks,” I whisper.

  “Bimbo’s Chews.” He holds up a candy bar. Each of his fingers is adorned with silver rings with skulls and crossbones. “These are the best.”

  “You can have all of them, but I’ll keep the messages.”

  He grins, making his lip ring stand straight out. “Seriously? That’s cool.”

  Mr. Frederics waves his hands. “Settle down, class, settle down. Let’s return to the equations on the board. Do I have any volunteers for problem four?”

  No one raises a hand.

  “Mimosa, since you seem to be the lady of the hour, will you help us out?” He holds the dry-erase pen to me.

  I fake some composure and walk to the board. As I start writing, I hear the door open once again, a sound that causes my spine to shrink. Oh no. No more candy grams, please.

  Slowly, I turn around.

  The dry-erase pen nearly falls out of my grip.

  Alice strikes a pose, one hand on the doorframe, the other holding a pink pastry box that I can smell is full of chocolate cake with coconut buttercream frosting, no nuts. A plastic shopping bag dangles from her wrist. Gone is the velour tracksuit, and in its place, a dress in sapphire blue to match her eyes. Her hair is swept into a French chignon, and thanks to her rinse, contains not a hint of gray. She holds up the cake like a pizza and says in a huskier voice than I remember, “Hello, Franklin.”

  TEN

  “AN AROMATEUR WITHOUT ETHICS, NAY,

  SHE IS A RHINOCEROS IN A FIELD OF PANSIES.”

  —Myrtle, Aromateur, 1602

  “MOM!” MELANIE CRIES out, gripping the sides of her chair like she’s afraid it might eject her. Vicky bites the end of her pencil, eyes lit with amusement.

  Still at the classroom door, Alice wiggles her fingers. Her nails are painted glossy red. “Hi, dear.”

  Mr. Frederics walks halfway to the door. “Mrs. Sawyer. What can we do for you?”

  “Alice, call me Alice.”

  “All right, Alice.”

  She turns her bright smile to me. “I know you’re all trying to watch your carbs, but what’s life without a few treats now and then?”

  Melanie’s shocked expression doesn’t change, but several people cheer. The box with the cake starts to slip but Alice catches it before it drops. “Oh!”

  Mr. Frederics hurries the rest of the way to Court’s mom. “Er, let me help you with that.” He sets the cake and Alice’s plastic bag, through which forks are sticking, on a bookshelf.

  Alice, still standing in the doorway, beckons him back. Mr. Frederics waves his hand at me, carry on, then follows her into the hallway. We all watch them leave.

  Standing at the white board, I break into a cold sweat. The elixir has kicked in. I’m too late.

  Everyone’s eyes shift to me. I turn back to the problem on the board, which suddenly looks like hieroglyphics. How do I do this again?

  “Your mom’s hot, Melanie,” calls one of the smart mouths in the back of the room.

  The guy next to him chortles. “Yeah, does she do home deliveries?”

  “Shut up,” says Melanie.

  From the front row, Valerie, who prefers Val, probably because she fancies herself the future valedictorian, stabs her perfectly sharpened pencil toward the board. “Could you finish the problem?”

  I start writing numbers while I run what-if scenarios in my head. If I don’t PUF Alice soon, no amount of elixir will stop her crush from developing. Like a car with balding tires on black ice, she’ll careen out of control.

  “Um, wrong,” says Val.

  The string of numbers I wrote on the board are as random as a lottery draw. Mr. Frederics is still out in the hallway chatting with Alice. What could they possibly be talking about for so long?

  “Mr. Frederics?” I call loudly.

  He reappears in the doorway. “Yes, Mimosa?”

  “I’m just not sure what to do here.” Probably it’s the easiest problem on the planet. From behind Mr. Frederics, Alice stretches up on her tippy toes to see me.

  Someone snickers, probably Vicky. I do my best to block her kumquat smell from my nose.

  “Ah, well, I stumped you.” Mr. Frederics chuckles.

  “Yes, you sure did.” My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of thirty pairs of eyeballs.

  “Just sit down,” Val mutters.

  Mr. Frederics swivels his head back and forth between Alice and me.

  “Oh, I don’t mean to keep you,” says Court and Melanie’s mom. “Please, go back to your work. Enjoy the cake. Good-bye, Melanie.”

  Melanie’s gone as white as the board. It’s hard to say which of us is more horrified.

  A trail of black scuff marks leads out the classroom door and into a marble hallway, ringing with the noise of the eight hundred kids who attend SGHS. I keep myself even more closed off than usual, eyes peeled for signs of pollen-induced crushes from everyone who passes too close. I’ve infected more people than I realize, more people than I have enough BBG for. My chest seems to squeeze my heart like a fist, and I can’t help wondering if my being here is causing more harm than good.

  Everything feels more acute when the body is stressed, and it’s the same with my nose. All the smells barrel down on me, noisy as an orchestra of ten thousand instruments tuning up. As I walk, I identify them one at a time, an exercise that rela
xes me.

  Pictures of homecoming courts from years past line the walls, hairstyles broadcasting the decades. I stop in front of last year’s photo, in which a taller and prettier version of Vicky smiles back at me. On her head is the tall, dazzling crown that marks the homecoming queen.

  “That’s Vicky’s sister, Juliana.” The student council president Lauren’s voice causes me to jump. She shakes her hair, throwing off glitter, and pops the tab off her diet soda.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Yeah, she was a senior when we were sophomores. We all wanted to look like her. She was smart, too. Got into Oxford. And a nice person.”

  A trifecta of talents. Vicky has some pretty high heels to fill. Maybe that explains why homecoming is so important to her, because as far as I can tell, she is neither a nice person, nor valedictorian material.

  Lauren’s braces twinkle. “So you got your candy grams?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “No, thank you. You boosted our sell-through rate by 10 percent.”

  “Oh wow.” Nothing more original comes to mind.

  “I got one and it said, ‘You have nice buns.’ Pascha thinks she’s funny.”

  “I’d take one good friend over a hundred admirers any day.”

  She grins. “Me, too. Hey, Pascha and I are getting froyo after school. We used to do ice cream, but I need to lose some weight.”

  “You?” I eye her five-foot-two frame with its normal-size everything except for a larger-than-average chest.

  “Yes, I’m totally gross. I can’t fit into my favorite jeans anymore. Anyway, you want to come?”

  I’m stuck between wondering why someone who seems to have her act together could think herself gross, and the realization that she’s asking me to hang out. Like a normal person. “I’d love to, but I can’t today.” Someone finally seeks my friendship and I have to reverse an elixir. “Maybe next time?”

  Her bracketed smile sags. “Sure. See you around.”

  My head throbs by the time I pass through a double door with the sunburst design that leads into the main courtyard. I trudge down interlocking cement tiles, looking for Kali. I haven’t seen her all day since we don’t have Cardio on Mondays. She’s probably already scooping the goop. Kali works harder than any teenager I know, probably even me. She’s saving up to be the first person in her family to attend college—a fancy creative writing program on the East Coast.