Morgana had written down the wireless password for Riley, but she’d only offhandedly mentioned which network it was. That would have been fine if she’d actually changed the default name. Was it “Bellsys12” or “BellsysLite” or “BellsysRed”? The only way for Riley to know was to try them one by one. Until then, his top of the line gaming ptop was functionally a calcutor.

  A knock at the front door caught his attention. It was hard to see the porch through his blinds, but someone was indeed standing there, holding something. The door opened a moment ter for Morgana to greet them and start talking. Morgana never talked about friends, and she had no patience for solicitors. Riley was curious.

  He crept down the hallway and peeked his head around the corner to see Morgana speaking to a Latina woman a little younger than her. Frizzy bck hair fell to her bare shoulders, and she was wearing a cute brown dress but also slippers, suggesting she meant to be outside but hadn’t come far. When she caught sight of Riley, the stranger waved.

  “Hello! You must be Riley. I’m Angelina, your next door neighbor.” She pointed toward the other half of the duplex, then held up the boxes in her arms. “I came to drop off some roots and herbs I’d collected for Morgana, but I also made some cookies as a welcoming gift.”

  Riley’s face burned a little. She was a very pretty woman, and he wanted—needed—to say something cool and smooth to impress her. Instead, Morgana pushed the box of homemade cookies into his arms.

  “Thank you, Angelina,” she said brusquely. “We appreciate it.”

  She took her own package and headed straight for the back door, to her work shed outside. Riley was left to finish the social interaction alone.

  “It’s really nice to meet you,” Angelina said, holding out her hand.

  Riley reached his sweaty hand out to take hers but hesitated when he noticed a small bracelet she had on; a tiny crucifix hung from the chain. She was Catholic. What was she doing, helping an alchemist? He’d seen what religious fundamentalists thought of people like Morgana.

  “Y-You too,” he stammered as she shook his hand.

  “Don’t be afraid to pop over if you need anything,” Angelina insisted. “It’s what neighbors are for.”

  He watched her step across the porch and enter her own side of the building before closing the front door. Riley pced his fingers on his cheeks, cursing that they were still warm. The back door opening again caused him to jump.

  “It’s cute that you get flustered around older women,” Morgana teased him.

  “Fuck off!” he snapped without thinking.

  She flinched, and Riley looked away.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, clutching the cookies to his chest and walking away.

  Once the Internet was finally set up, Riley spent the afternoon pying Diablo and munching on the cookies Angelina had given him. They’d been allowed to cool, but the chocote chips were still gooey, and she’d sprinkled them with sea salt that gave them a kick he wasn’t used to. It was a shame Morgana didn’t bake; she didn’t seem to know how to make anything that took longer than fifteen minutes in the kitchen. The previous night’s dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was not going to cut it for a whole summer.

  A popup notification about emails caught Riley’s attention, and he tabbed out of the game to clear out his inbox. Hidden among the spam, though, was a message from the university reminding him to submit a bunch of forms. Riley groaned; he couldn’t even do it online because he needed a school email for the online portal, and that was one of the forms he hadn’t submitted yet.

  Morgana was hard at work, so he stepped outside and knocked on the door of her shed.

  “What?!” she cried. “I’m busy!”

  “I need to mail something! Do you have any envelopes? Or stamps? And where do I put it?”

  She impatiently directed him through where she kept her office supplies. A small popping sound, followed by her cussing, armed him, but in another moment she was continuing the instructions. It turned out the community mailboxes were by the pool he’d spotted the other day.

  Once everything was fully packaged, Riley set out. It was a pretty nice neighborhood, and he should have been living in some shitty student dorms. Being there, nicely shaded from the summer heat by friendly trees, just reminded him that he didn’t have this kind of future for himself.

  Riley heard the pool before he saw it; people were hanging out, chatting or spshing in the water. As he got closer, Riley even saw a few girls his own age in bikinis and had to look away so he wouldn’t be caught staring. The st thing he needed was a reputation. Not that they didn’t want guys to stare, looking like that, but Riley wasn’t hot enough. If people like that weren’t so judgmental, he’d put on his own swim trunks and march right in there, ugh with the guys, flirt with the girls, have the college experience he was supposed to have.

  As he passed by the wrought iron fence, several people waved at him and said hi. He looked down and shoved his hands into his pockets. Why did they have to acknowledge him? It was so embarrassing. How was he even supposed to respond in that situation?

  Pissed at himself for floundering the most basic of human social interactions, Riley picked up the pace and finally spotted the mailboxes further down the road. Of course there was another person already there, shoving fliers into the boxes. Riley couldn’t have one moment to himself, could he?

  This guy looked like a douche. His short hair glistened with product in the sun like he’d doused it in cooking oil, and he was wearing a blue polo shirt of all things to show off that he did bicep curls. He wore a stupid grin while on his stupid task, and to Riley’s dismay, he looked over as Riley approached.

  “Hey there!” he said. “Checking the mail?”

  Riley grunted in agreement and started shoving the mani envelop into the tiny outgoing slot. It didn’t fit well, and the material crinkled, threatening to tear if he shoved any harder. With one big push, Riley managed to get it properly stuck halfway into the box, then had to slowly inch it the rest of the way in.

  “I’m William, by the way,” the stranger said. Riley nodded but didn’t reply. “I go to Greenway Baptist Church over by the university. Here, have a flier.”

  A sheet of paper found its way in front of Riley’s face. He gave the envelope one st shove, satisfied to hear it thunk at the bottom of the outgoing box, then took the flier. It was a weirdly formal-looking thing, like Riley was being invited to a business meeting.

  “If you ever need friends your own age, a guy like you would always be welcome at the youth group.”

  Riley ground his teeth and looked away. He really wanted to tell this guy to fuck right off, but he could still hear people at the pool nearby and really didn’t want to cause a scene. New guy in town harasses church goers? Not a good first day of the rest of his life.

  “Thanks, I’ll think about it,” he mumbled, turning to walk away.

  The boy continued putting fliers in mailboxes, that uncanny smile never fading. Once Riley had turned a corner and was safely out of sight, he crumpled up the flier and dropped it into a trash bin a neighbor had left out. Hopefully not everybody in this city was a weirdo.

  Finding a way to feed himself was becoming something of a hassle. For the third day in a row, Riley was eating cereal for lunch while scrolling Reddit. Morgana came in, scowled at the milk he had spshed on the table, and opened the freezer to pull out a microwave meal.

  Since he was done anyway, Riley stood up and dropped his bowl in the sink before stepping away.

  “Hey! You left a mess.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Riley said, stopping in the doorway. “You’re going to clean up when you’re done anyway, right?”

  “That’s not how this works. I’m not going to clean up after you while you live here.”

  Rolling his eyes, Riley grabbed a paper towel from the sink and wiped the table once before throwing it away.

  He was barely out the doorway when Morgana said, “You left streaks on the table!”

  “Jeez, it’s fine!” Riley stormed out the front door. “It’s okay for a house to be lived in!”

  He closed the door a little harder than he’d meant to, but at least he was outside in the fresh air again. The neighborhood was still oppressively affluent, and it felt like the windows from every house were judging his ratty windbreaker and worn shorts. In some ways, he hadn’t really left home at all, had he? And the more time he spent around Morgana, the more she reminded him of his mother in the worst ways.

  The mailbox didn’t have anything for him from the university, so he turned around and walked back, keeping his head down to avoid acknowledging the neighbor walking their dog or the occasional sedan driving by. He thought living in the city meant never being more than fifteen minutes away from something to do, but he didn’t even have money for a bus pass and was in no mood to ask Morgana for help. Part of him couldn’t wait for the school year to start.

  Riley still hadn’t memorized which house was the right one, so as he got close, he started scanning the house numbers. They all looked simir enough that he skipped over the one with a bck girl smoking on the porch, then stopped to check again: 213. He stopped, locking eyes with the stranger on the porch just as the acrid stench of weed hit him.

  She was hot: bck leather miniskirt and cutoff jacket, fishnet gloves and tights, bck jackboots. Her hair was in box braids, and while she wasn’t wearing makeup, she had more ear piercings than Riley could count, as well as a very visible naval piercing. This straight hottie looked at Riley like he was a bug she found particurly distasteful. His heart beat in his chest like it wanted out.

  Whoever she was, whatever she was doing on his porch, she didn’t have anything to say to him. She took another puff of the blunt, out in the open like she didn’t have a care in the world. He needed to say something, to impress her, to get her to see him for real. But his mouth was dry, and his legs shook.

  Fortune favored the bold, so he licked his lips and stepped up onto the porch, leaned against a support pilr, and folded his arms.

  “Hey there,” he said, throat tight even as he spoke. “They say smoking is bad for your health, you know. If no one’s told you you’re hot enough on your own, let me rectify that.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and scoffed, turning away before asking, “You the new neighbor?”

  Red alert! He was floundering! Fuck! Why did Riley think he was suddenly attractive to women? A girl like this could have any guy she wanted. How stupid of him to think he stood a chance!

  “I… Yeah, but you don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

  A siren went off in his head, too te. The gorgeous stranger rolled her eyes and put out her blunt on the railing, then turned and walked into Angelina’s side of the house. She flipped him the bird before the door closed.

  Riley was such a fucking idiot.

  Morgana was still wiping down the table when he stepped inside. She gnced up at him, scowling, then did a double take.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, standing up straight. “You look like you saw an alien parade and aren’t sure how to process it.”

  “That goth girl next door. Who is she?”

  Morgana snorted and went back to cleaning. “That’s Lynn. Angelina is lending her a spare room.”

  “Does she go to the university?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, is she… like… seeing anybody?”

  Morgana stopped and fully turned her attention to Riley, grinning slightly. “Bit of a schoolboy crush, then?”

  “Nothing like that; don’t be stupid.” He turned away as the blush intensified. “Forget I said anything.”

  “You want to know if she’ll go out with you? Let me run a quick compatibility test.”

  “What?”

  She started walking toward the back door, gesturing for him to stay put while she expined, “Some people are more compatible with each other than others, but a lot of people think it’s based on looks or hobbies when personality and worldview py a much rger role. I can run an alchemical test to see how well you’d compliment each other.”

  Morgana returned from her shed with a rge cy bowl and several small pstic containers. She mixed some herbs and powders at the bottom, then piled in some colorful stones before filling the bowl with tap water. Though Riley protested, she also clipped off a bit of his hair with the kitchen scissors.

  “It would be better if we had some of hers, too, but it’s not—”

  Riley didn’t wait for her to finish. He ran out the front door to scour the porch, finding some curly bck hairs that had been shed earlier. Morgana said nothing when he dropped them into her palm, but when she turned away, he could see her smirk.

  She dropped both hairs into the liquid and mixed it all together with a big wooden spoon. Her whispered chanting was barely audible over the scraping of rocks against the bottom of the bowl. In moments, the disturbed herbs and soil floated to the top, where they remained in a dizzying pattern once she removed the spoon.

  “Hmm…” Morgana tilted her head to the side. “Interesting.”

  “Come on, spit it out.”

  Without turning, she batted at him so he’d stop talking. “You’ve both got room for new influences in your life. It says she’s seeking something but doesn’t know what, and you know what you want but not how to get there. She’s a more dominant personality than you—don’t look at me like that, that’s what the test says—but she’s not domineering and you’re certainly no pushover.” Morgana shook her head. “What I don’t understand is that the test says there’s a chance, but also this.” She pointed at a nondescript swirl. “She is one hundred percent a lesbian.”

  There it was, the other shoe: a work boot nding square on Riley’s head and giving him a concussion. He’d never had a shot with her. The hottest girl he’d ever seen, and of course she was a lesbian. Why would a girl that attractive give a guy like him a chance?

  “Great, so I live next door to a couple of hot women who are going to keep me up all night with their sex noises.”

  “Don’t be crude. Also, Angelina is straight. Like I said, she’s just letting Lynn stay there.”

  “Well, that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Riley asked, storming out of the room in a huff.

  Morgana gripped the edges of the bowl so tightly that her hands turned white. This living arrangement wasn’t going to work. Something had to be done about the boy.

  QuillRabbit