I remember I kind of wanted to kiss her but I also didn’t want to ruin it, and I didn’t want to be the drunk girl who kisses everyone at the party even though I’ve been that girl before.
I remember wishing that I’d gotten her number but I didn’t or if I did I lost it.
I do know I never saw her again. I would have remembered. She was hot.
She had pink hair.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER is guided by giant bees down a staircase within a dollhouse to where a basement would be though rather than a basement there is now an expansive ballroom made of honeycomb, shimmering and gold and beautiful.
It is ready Mister Rawlins there is not much time left but here you go here is the place that you wanted the dancing talking place the story sculptor is waiting for you inside tell her we said hello please thank you.
The buzzing quiets, drowned out by the music as Zachary descends to the ballroom. Some jazz standard he recognizes but could not name.
The room is crowded with dancing ghosts. Transparent figures in timeless formal wear and masks conjured from glitter and honey, luminous and swirling over a polished wax floor patterned with hexagons.
It is the idea of a party constructed by bees. It doesn’t feel real, but it does feel familiar.
The dancers part for Zachary as he walks and then he can see her across the room. Solid and substantial and here.
Mirabel looks exactly as she did the first time he saw her, dressed as the king of the wild things, though her hair is its proper pink beneath her crown and her gown has been embellished: The draping white cloth is now embroidered with barely visible illustrations in white thread of forests and cities and caverns laced together with honeycomb and snowflakes.
She looks like a fairy tale.
When he reaches her Mirabel offers her hand and Zachary accepts it.
Here now in a ballroom made of wax and gold, Zachary Ezra Rawlins begins his last dance with Fate.
“Is this all in my head?” Zachary asks as they twirl amongst the golden crowd. “Am I making all of this up?”
“If you were, whatever answer I gave you would also be made up, wouldn’t it?” Mirabel answers.
Zachary doesn’t have a good response for that particular observation.
“You knew that would happen,” he says. “You made all of this happen.”
“I did not. I gave you doors. You chose whether or not you opened them. I don’t write the story, I only nudge it in different directions.”
“Because you’re the story sculptor.”
“I’m just a girl looking for a key, Ezra.”
The music changes and she guides him into a turn. The incandescent ghosts around them spin.
“I don’t remember all of the times I died,” Mirabel continues. “I remember some with perfect clarity and other lifetimes fade one into the next. But I remember drowning in honey and for a moment, smothered in stories, I saw everything. I saw a thousand Harbors and I saw the stars and I saw you and me here and now at the end of it all but I didn’t know how we’d get here. You asked for me, didn’t you? I can’t really be here since I’m not dead.”
“But you’re…shouldn’t you be able to be wherever you want?”
“Not really. I’m in a vessel. An immortal one this time, but still a vessel. Maybe I am whatever I was before again. Maybe I’m something new now. Maybe I’m just myself. I don’t know. As soon as there’s an unquestionable truth there’s no longer a myth.”
They dance in silence for a moment while Zachary thinks about truth and myth, and the other dancers circle them.
“Thank you for finding Simon,” Mirabel says after the pause. “You set him back on his path.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. He’d still be hiding in temples if you hadn’t brought him back into the story. Now he’s where he needs to be. It’s sort of like being found. That was all unforeseen, they did so much planning to have me conceived outside of time and no one ever stopped to think about what would happen to my parents after the fact and then everything got complicated. You can’t end a story when parts of it are still running around lost in time.”
“That’s why Allegra wanted to keep the book lost, isn’t it? And Simon and his hand.”