Bloom (eBook)

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The modern world is severely lacking in magic, and those who crave it are at a constant disadvantage because they are desperate and it’s in short supply. Some places—amusement parks, country fairs, museums, old bookstores—can temporarily fill the void, but there will always be people who check every armoire for a door to Narnia, every rabbit hole for a road to Wonderland. One such person is Ro, born Rosemary Dutton, age twenty-seven, whose life imploded last year, leaving her an absolute wreck.

Ro has spent so much time deconstructing the great works of literature that she has completely failed to live an adventure of her own. Now, finally finished with her PhD at Columbia, and having published her thesis in book form with a small press and secured an assistant professorship at the University of Georgia, she is trying to create her own everyday magic. That’s why she has come to the farmers’ market enlivening the tree-lined park just off campus. There is a certain sorcery to such a market: rows of stalls and tents filled with homemade cinnamon buns, leggy tomato plants, bear-shaped jars of wildflower honey, vegetables still dusted with dirt, rosy peaches with raindrops trapped in their fur.

This is Ro’s first visit, and she can feel the glitter in the air. This place feels like Stardust and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Labyrinth had an orgy and popped out a slightly bougie baby behind a baseball field. Sure, there was a cute market near Books of Wonder back in the city, but there’s something otherworldly about this place, with the sun filtering through ancient oaks and butterflies billowing through the crowd. Ro is the kind of optimist who was disappointed to discover that the only alchemy behind the hedonistic glory of a handcrafted Starbucks frappé is three pumps of mass-produced sugar syrup, and she suspects that things here are more genuine somehow.

So far, she has a pint of strawberries, a loaf of bread, and a log of cheese made from the milk of a goat named Belinda, according to the label. She’s been in town only half a year and hasn’t made any friends yet, and is definitely not ready to date again, but this market makes her feel like she’s out in the world, doing things, hoping kismet will come calling. Most of the time, she is happy to vacillate between home and classroom, feverishly researching her next book and striving for a good word from her department head even though it’s only her second semester. She can get annoyingly hermetic and obsessive about her work, but this charming bazaar is making her feel like destiny is right around the corner. Right here, right now, she wants to be the kind of woman who carries a jute tote bag as the summer breeze blows through her long, loose hair, the kind of woman who knows exactly what to wear and where to go and what to say. She has always longed to be effortless—effortlessly cool, effortlessly confident, effortlessly thin.

That last one definitely never came to pass. She thinks of herself as curvy on a good day, chubby on a bad day. Most days, she’s somewhere in between, feeling doomed to a body that isn’t what she would choose, like she accidentally stepped into the wrong dress and now can’t get it unzipped.

As it turns out, it takes a lot of effort to seem effortless. It takes patience, which is not her bailiwick, plus a sense of preternatural chill that she has never possessed. Ro would like to be breezy, but she seems to swing between periods of dedicated, obsessive effort and slothlike, stubborn inertia. She’d like to think her unpredictability is quirky, but in their big, final fight, Erik called it impossible.

Erik said a lot of things then, most of them cruel.

Ro is still recovering.

He would hate this farmers’ market. Would call it pedestrian and tedious. Would poke fun at Ro’s attempt to blend into this colorful suburban college town when he craves the sharp, shiny sophistication of New York. But it doesn’t matter what Erik would think, because after three years of dating, one day Ro found a pink lady’s razor and a small box of tampons hidden in the back of his bathroom cabinet, did a little digging around in his iPad, and discovered he preferred the sharp, shiny hipbones of one of his sophomore honors students.

Well, she’ll take a sleepy Saturday in the sunshine over getting negged by the guy who broke her heart any day. Her mother cried when she found out they’d split, bemoaning the wedding bells she was now certain would never ring for her weird, studious daughter. There are no rich men in academia, her mother told her when she was filling out college applications. Better to get a bachelor’s degree in something money-adjacent and snag a man with a trust fund. Ro’s middle-class dad never reached his potential in sales and then died at fifty, leaving two mortgages, and Ro knows her expected duty as an only child was to marry well and provide a comfortable retirement for her mother back home in Savannah.

Oops.

Her mother kept trying to set her up with the divorced older sons of her church friends, and during their last fight they both said things that can’t be unsaid.

And so here she is: single, employed, and with her mom blocked on her phone. No contact with Erik or her last close relative. They both warned her she’d be lonely, and she is, but in a good way. She doesn’t hate it here, but she misses New York and fully believes that’s where she’ll end up long term, once she has a few years of teaching under her belt.

The market is unexpectedly crowded, with dozens of people lined up outside of a taco truck wedged in between the white plastic tents. As Ro considers whether or not buying macarons is worth having to talk to the Ms. Frizzle wannabe selling them, there’s a loud thump and a screech. A somethingdoodle the color of toast breaks free of the thickest part of the crowd and darts past Ro with a stolen sausage in its mouth. She lurches back, tripping over a knee-high boy wearing a monkey backpack with a leash attached to it.

“I’m so sorry,” she says to the harried mother, who snatches up her crying spawn like Ro tried to kidnap him.

“You need to be more careful,” the mother says before shaking her head and towing her child away.

Ro watches them go, slightly baffled by the fact that the offended mom was about her age. She still feels seventeen inside, not nearly old enough to be responsible for anything needier than her cat. How do other people already have things figured out? Until now, Ro has lived for her grades and her work and, much to her dismay, Erik. She’s not sure what comes next.

She feels eyes on her, a soft and curious prickle like moth feet, and she turns to find the most beautiful girl in the world staring at her. While attempting not to flatten a child, Ro has somehow managed to stumble into a stall she hasn’t seen before, and the girl behind the counter looks like a goddamn elf, like the apotheosis of cottagecore, like if a Studio Ghibli heroine could be a pale white girl with long hair as tawny and true as corn silk. On the table before her are bars of soap in delicate pastel colors, sprinkle-spackled cupcakes stacked on scalloped stands, butter-gold beeswax candles, jelly jars of honey with thick blocks of comb and gingham tops tied with ribbons. The sides of her stand feature wooden shelves crowded with glossy green plants in grower pots—plants with round leaves like lily pads and pointy leaves like puppet tongues and wide, veiny leaves like elephant ears. Ro doesn’t know their names, but she’s seen them on Instagram.

“See anything you like?” the girl says with a knowing smile.

For a moment, Ro can only stare at her, taking in the details of her ice-blue eyes and her constellation of freckles and her perfect, tiny teeth and the creamy skin revealed by the low-cut neck of her dress, which is lavender and long and airy and looks homemade, exactly like the sort of thing that should be worn right before someone is abducted to Faerie.

Ro doesn’t know what to say. Words are her world, and yet she is speechless. This happens sometimes. She understands books so much better than she understands people. That’s why she writes non-fiction, and that’s why she has trouble making friends and has mostly dated very nerdy guys who share her esoteric literary interests.

Before this moment, she was fairly certain she was straight, but now she is thrown into utter chaos.

“What flavor are the cupcakes?” she asks, deflecting.

The girl—because yes, of course she is a woman, and yet there is something uniquely fresh and innocent about her—points with a long, graceful finger. “Lavender, lemon, strawberry, vanilla. All the chocolate are gone, I’m afraid.”

“Do you make them yourself?” Because yes, yes, the more questions she asks, the more the girl has to answer and the longer Ro can stand here being mesmerized. She briefly wonders if eating the girl’s food is anything like Persephone slipping rose-red seeds between her lips in the Underworld.

“I do. It’s my grandmother’s recipe—well, the base recipe, at least. I like to experiment with frosting flavors.” She points to a dainty porcelain tray loaded with samples of cake, each bite-sized cylinder...