Glimmers of Glass (A Glimmers Novel #1: Cinderella)

Chapter 22

Pumpkin Spice buzzed with conversation. Tyler had taken up residence on one of the couches, surrounded by a posse of the kind of people who usually didn't acknowledge me when I passed them in the halls. He didn't join in on the conversation going on around him. Instead, he stared dreamily toward the counter, where Elle was blowing kisses to him in between making lattes. He'd glanced at me when I walked in, said, "Hi! Elle's friend!" and then gone back to staring.

It occurred to me in that moment that I wasn't just screwing with Elle's life. I was screwing with his, too. What if he had other stuff he needed to be focusing on during his last two months of high school? What if the blond girl—who still kept finding ways to sit next to him—was the one he was supposed to be with? He was completely ignoring her these days, except to tell her how spectacular Elle was. What if I was breaking her heart?

I'd come to Pumpkin Spice hoping to discover my charm on Elle's necklace had performed even better than expected and brought her down to something approximating normal. But she still giggled loudly enough to be heard from across the room and made kissing faces at Tyler. Nothing had changed.

I turned to leave, then saw Kyle sitting at the right-hand table by the window. He was buried in a giant red sweatshirt with REDSHIRT: Because tomorrow may never come emblazoned on the front in blocky silver lettering. He stared vaguely at the space behind me, then his face jerked into a smile and he waved me over.

I slid into the seat opposite him, slipping my purse off my shoulder and onto the floor.

"Hi," he said.

"You okay? You look kind of out of it."

He blinked several times, then looked pointedly over at Elle and back at me. "Why is she broken?" he asked.

It was such a concise way to put it that I couldn't help laughing. No one else would have thought she was broken. Her dad was probably thrilled. But I could see it, and Kyle could see it: She wasn't herself. The cogs in her brain weren't connecting right. Something had snapped.

"She's been exposed to a lot of magic lately," I said.

"This is your fault?" he said. He looked about ready to pin all the blame on me. I deserved it.

"You see all that jewelry she's wearing?" I said. "It's all charmed, and she bought it all for herself. I tried to stop her but stopping Elle is like trying to convince the sky not to rain."

He pulled a chair over from a nearby table and propped his feet up on it so that he was sitting sideways. He turned his head to look over at me. "Where would Elle get charmed jewelry?"

"Saturday Market," I said.

"Yeah," he said, "but how?"

It took me a second to realize what he was asking.

"Oh," I said. I shrugged. "Elle's a Glim."

His eyebrows furrowed and he stared at me. Then he swung his feet off the footrest chair and spun to face me full-on. "She's a what?" he said.

"A Glimmer," I said. I frowned. "I thought you'd put it together. Faerie godmother and all." I waved toward myself.

"So?" he said. "The original Cinderella was human, wasn't she?"

No one knew who the original Cinderella was, and it wasn't like we godmothers just randomly picked deserving souls out of a hat. But of course, he was a magician. He didn't know how this all worked.

"Her mom was an earth witch." I'd looked it up a few days ago. Elle must have pulled in a recessive gene from a great-grandmother or something, though, because she definitely leaned more toward the fire spectrum. Titania knew she hadn't gotten that spark from her dad.