I stopped walking once we exited the mall. Mickey was five steps ahead of me before he realized I wasn’t following anymore.
“What?”
“We never paid for the shoes.”
“Oh, that. Don’t worry. Curly Toes does things differently. Maeve has an account with them.”
“Oh, okay.”
We sat on the bench right outside of the mall that faced the parking lot and waited for Maeve.
When she pulled up, she seemed unsurprised at the number of bags we piled into the trunk and stuffed into half of the back seat.
“How was it, dears? Successful, I take it?” Mickey had beat me to shotgun, and I huffed as I collapsed in the back, buckling up.
“It was interesting,” I said.
“Oh?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Mickey chimed in. “You know, Stuart from my hometown? Well, he all but offered to give Kella free clothes. He had to be crushing on her or something, because his dad would have had a heart attack.”
Maeve chuckled ruefully. “That one’s a lost cause.”
That got my hackles up. “Actually, I thought he was sweet. And for your information, Mickey, Stuart is totally not interested in me. No guy who’s crushing on a girl can drape a dozen bras on his arm in front of her without blushing.”
Mickey chuckled. “Fair point.”
“The weird one was that Curly Toes guy.”
“Ah, Mr. Brambles. He’s a bit of a…” Maeve paused, searching for the right words. “… a difficult personality.”
Mickey shrugged. “You could say that.”
“He wasn’t too bad, surely.” When Mickey didn’t answer, she muttered something about him being a stubborn, pig-headed traditionalist.
What being a traditionalist had to do with magically appearing with twelve pairs of shoes that everyone was certain would fit me perfectly, I had no idea. Seemed to me that he and Stuart shared a pretty similar gift. Sure, it was cool, but I’d never met anyone before who could do something like that, much less two people—one of whom looked like he was ready to keel over and die. It was something that made me feel like I was in one of those elaborate prank shows where the hosts mess with your mind—except no one came out at the end and said “just kidding!”
Honestly, I was glad to be back inside of Maeve’s old forest-green Subaru. It was normal, and normal was very welcome at the moment.
Once we got home, Mickey helped me shove all of my bags into my room and then dump them out onto my bed. I sat down on the floor, overwhelmed. It was a Mt. Everest of clothes. A tsunami of clothes. An earthquake that would swallow me up, drowning me in its depths amount of clothes. And that didn’t even count the shoes. I didn’t know how, but it was as if the clothes we’d bought married and had babies even as we poured them out of the bags. We couldn’t have bought this much stuff! There’s no way we could have carried them out of the mall without a personal pack animal. An elephant, probably.
Mickey stepped back, assessing the pile.
“Huh.”
“Huh? That’s all you have to say? Huh?”
“Well…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It looks like Stuart got a bit carried away.”
“A bit? I don’t even recognize half—no, most—of these clothes.”
Mickey sighed. “I’ll talk to Stuart. I guess he saw a few pieces that he wanted you to have.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t see him ring up half these things.”
Mickey only shrugged. “I guess he snuck a few things in. He did seem to like you, after all.”
“But all this?” I swept my hands toward the mountain of clothes, that I could swear had grown another foot taller, before plopping myself on the floor. “Why do I even try to make sense of anything here? Weird stuff just keeps happening and there’s never a good explanation.”
“Magic.” Mickey grinned.
I rolled my eyes.
“What?” he said. “Explain everything away with magic, and everything suddenly becomes less weird.” Mickey had a playful, mocking smile on his face.
“Right. Magic. Okay, then. How about you magically help me put all of this stuff away?”
“What? No! It’s all clothes and personal stuff,” he said, his eyes landing on a lacy bra that I did not pick out before jerking back to mine.
“Please?” I begged.
He sighed. “Okay, fine. But I draw the line at underwear.”
“Deal.”
We spent the next half hour shoving pants and underwear into every last square inch of dresser space and packed my not-so-puny closet so full of clothes that it made me want to return half of them immediately. It was too much. With Dad, I had to buy all my clothes as soon as I could work. I never bought a lot, wanting to save everything I could. Now, looking at everything we’d bought, it seemed wasted on me. If I wore each outfit one time, it would easily take me months to get through them all. I wanted to return half of them, but when I said as much, Mickey shook his head.
“You’d just hurt Stu’s feelings.”
Well, when he put it that way, I was stuck with them—I liked the redhead too much. Unless I found a charitable cause. Mickey seemed to know what I was thinking because he added, “And giving them away won’t work, either.”
“Why not?”
Mickey shoved a long, glittery emerald dress that I was certain I’d never tried on into my closet. “Because he picked all of this out according to your specs.” He gestured at my body.
“And?”
“And, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed since you haven’t really been paying all that much attention in school lately, but do any of the students around here wear anything other than perfectly tailored non-hand-me-downs?”
“Come on,” I
