Salem Falls

“Evelyn?” a frail, elderly voice called into the antique shop. “Are you in here, dear?”

“Back here!” Evelyn called back from her spot tucked in the farthest corner. She was stretching over from a ladder to the highest shelf in the publications section, unpacking a new shipment of collectable Life Magazines. She’d been working for hours cataloguing them, mainly because her fascination kept getting the best of her – she couldn’t keep herself from delicately flipping through every page. All of recent human pop culture was right at her fingertips, how could she resist?

“Have you been working on those silly magazines all afternoon?” the voice asked, and Evelyn turned to face her with a smile and an issue in her hand. It was Loretta Nanzig, the aging co-owner of Main Street Antiques, come to claim her shift. She was a small woman with a cloud of curly white hair, bright pink lacquer covering her thin lips. And she just happened to be one of Evelyn’s closest human friends.

“Isn’t Audrey beautiful?” Evelyn asked wistfully, ignoring the question, gesturing to the issue in her hand. It was a copy from 1953, featuring a young Audrey Hepburn on the telephone in nothing but a nightshirt.

“Yes, she certainly is,” Loretta agreed, removing her driving gloves one at a time. “I love her in Roman Holiday.”

“My favorite movie,” Evelyn chimed, her grin widening before placing the magazine back on the shelf and climbing down the ladder. “Where’s Ezra?”

“Oh, at some town meeting,” Loretta hummed with a dismissive wave of her hand, leading Evelyn into the next room to clock her out. Ezra Nanzig was her husband of fifty years – desperately devoted to two things: his wife, and the well-being of Salem Falls. He presided on the board of directors for the town, always making decisions that would better the small community. The store was more of a hobby to keep Loretta busy, and when it came to Ezra, whatever Loretta wanted was what he wanted too.

“At least he keeps busy so you can have him out of your hair,” Evelyn added encouragingly. “The town couldn’t run without him.”

“Whatever you say,” Loretta sighed with a laugh, rolling her eyes and handing Evelyn her paycheck. “I suppose he can’t meddle with my stamp display if he’s busy discussing the paint color for the stoplight. What are you up to now, my dear?”

Evelyn shrugged, grabbing her purse and disguised spell book from underneath the register. “Going to finish the rest of the Tom Hanks movies on my list, I suppose,” she muttered, glancing out the wide windows to the beautiful afternoon sun, disappointed she didn’t have something better on her hands. “I think I’ve made it to the last few; Sleepless and Seattle and The Green Mile.”

“Oh, save Sleepless and Seattle for when I can come and watch with you,” Loretta protested sweetly with a wink. “He’s such a dreamboat in that movie.”

Evelyn exuded a healthy laugh with Loretta, digging around her purse for the keys to her car. “Only for you, Loretta. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Loretta called a goodbye after her young friend, who was already well on her way to retrieving her beat up green Oldsmobile from the lot. Evelyn mused a list of options to herself, feeling incredibly lame to go back to her home in the woods and lock herself in her room with a series of Tom Hanks films. Maybe she would go to her favorite café down the street and get some reading done – she was halfway through Pride and Prejudice. Or she could try and catch up with some of the other girls in the coven, it had been a while since she’d done that. Or maybe she would go to her mother’s herbology shop and help her solve some ailments. Evelyn sighed. None of that quite seemed appealing enough.

At that moment, the tonal chime of her cell phone sounded from her purse. Surprised, she extracted it at once; only to see a number she didn’t recognize from an area code she’d never seen before.

“Hello?’ she answered, perplexed.

“Evelyn?” a vaguely familiar voice replied, raspy and a little distraught. “It’s Louis.”

“Louis!” Evelyn exclaimed, surprised to hear from him. Her excitement picked up, hopeful that he would maybe save her from the isolation of her observations. “What’s up?”

“Are you doing anything right now?” he asked, the distraught tone continuing in his voice.

“No, no not at all!” Evelyn chirped. “I actually just got off work.”

“Great,” he replied with a sigh, a sound of relief echoing into the receiver and making the line crackle in response. “Do you wanna hang out? You’d have to pick me up at the high school, but…”

A smile broke out about Evelyn’s face as she crawled into the front seat of her shoddy car. “I think I could do that,” she hummed in response, trying to keep her tone even to not come off too excited. “I’ll be there in a few, okay?”

Right away, the car jumped to life and Evelyn took off in the direction of the school. One of the benefits of living in a small town like Salem Falls was that it didn’t take much more than ten minutes to get anywhere. In the blink of an eye, she was pulling up to the front walk of the boxy, brick building, Louis sitting out front on one of the benches. School had to have been out for a while – the grounds were empty aside from the boy approaching her car in his leather jacket.

“Hey beautiful,” he greeted as he climbed in the passenger seat, a wide smile on his face. She could only see his profile, the curve of his nose and bow of his lips catching the light from the late afternoon sun. Slowly, he turned his head to reveal a secret he just couldn’t keep.

Evelyn gasped. The skin surrounding his right eye was developing into a sickening yellow-indigo shade, complete with a butterfly Band-Aid just at the edge to keep the split skin together.

“Louis!” she exclaimed, her fingertips fluttering to the spot against her will. “What happened?”

“Just got into a little scrape, that’s all,” Louis explained, his smile turning into a smirk at her touch. “It’s not a big deal.”

“About what?” Evelyn demanded.

“This kid was talking about how you and your family are weird,” Louis clarified with a shrug, removing her hand from his cut as he winced. “I went over there and told him to fuck off, that you’re a great person and that he should maybe get his thumb out of his privileged little ass. And then that kid called me a stuck up Californian fag so I decided to give him a piece of my mind. He looks a lot worse.”

Evelyn’s heart skipped a beat. Louis had gotten a black eye defending her from some prick at school. Louis had fought for her. No guy had ever done that before, not aside from Niall when that little shit Harry Styles tried to chop her pigtail when they were seven – and that definitely didn’t count. A blush rose to her cheeks.

“So that’s why you’re here so late,” she realized, pushing the car into gear in an effort to get to her mom’s herbology shop to get something to put on Louis’s eye. “Detention.”

“The whole next week,” he stated proudly, running a hand through his perfectly disheveled locks.

“You really do have a penchant for trouble, don’t you?” she questioned, only to be met with that same wide grin. “How are you going to explain this to your parents? I can’t come get you here every day to save your ass, you know.”

“I’ve been thinking about how to spin it to my mom and I think I’ve finally got it. I got two A’s on tests this last week, so I’m maintaining my four-point-oh. She can’t argue with that.”

“You have a four-point-oh?” Evelyn clarified with a stunned expression on her face.

He simply shrugged again. Evelyn practically had to scrape her jaw off the floor mat to keep from looking so terribly agape. She had no idea that the rough and tumble Californian had anything other than anger in him, much less enough school-smarts for the both of them.

“Louis,” she sighed. “You’re too smart to be getting into fights like an angsty little freshman. You’ve got a future ahead of you. You don’t need to be so angry about being here when there are only a few months left until you can go anywhere. You don’t have anything to prove.”

Louis let out a low whistle from between his pale lips, crossing his leather-clothed arms across his strong, broad chest. Upon glancing over at him, Evelyn noticed a graze of stubble around those great lips, something she found unbearably attractive in men, magical powers or not.

“I don’t think you know me well enough to make that statement,” he argued with a playful, pointed look.

“I suppose not,” she muttered, navigating her way down the winding country road.

“But I’d like you to,” he continued, his bright eyes scanning her hopefully. Evelyn tried her best not to give away her emotions, because inside she was practically screaming for him to let her in.

“How about this,” he started. “You show me your favorite spot in town and I’ll get the bill. Show me around a bit, Miss ‘My Family Has Lived Here For Centuries.’ I told you I would after you had my back with that whole thing at your store, and now I guess I owe you double.”

Evelyn’s heart swelled. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I’d love that, actually. If your mom doesn’t ground you for this.” She playfully wriggled a finger at Louis’s eye.

“I’m in a town where I don’t know anyone, there’s not a whole lot to ground me from,” he stated factually, batting her finger away. “She’s trying to just help me fit in around here, which is never going to happen by the way. I think she’ll probably die of happiness when she finds out that I’m getting out of the house to see a friend.”

Evelyn was silent, impressed at his confidence but not wanting to give it away. Louis was quite unlike any human she’d ever known before – brash and irrational, while solicitous and sweet. Already she was dying to see him again, to show him her side of town and to dig a little deeper into that mysterious soul.

“Speaking of my house, this is not the direction it is in,” Louis realized with a start, glancing around at his unfamiliar surroundings as the car whirred down the path towards her mother’s shop. “Where are we going?”

“My mom is into, er, holistic medicine,” Evelyn explained, turning into the driveway of a little white house-turned flourishing business hub. The makeshift parking lot in the yard was packed, as usual, with customers flocking to try Ella Connors’s treatments. “She’ll have something to take the color out of your eye so it won’t seem so bad to your mom.”

That familiar grin broke out on Louis’s face again as he shook his head in apparent wonder. “You really are great, Evelyn,” he muttered in disbelief, getting out of the car. “Very different from any girl I ever knew in California.”

As they walked inside, Evelyn resisted the urge to laugh. If only he knew just how different she really was.