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As Mellohi replayed for what must have been the tenth or eleventh time, Oleander laughed and laid back against the sea-green shingles of Plum Pocket’s roof. His feet, which hung over the edge, gave a delighted kick as he went down.
After all of his hard work and panic, he’d finally gotten the card, cake, and flowers set up just right and framed the music disc in a place where she wouldn’t miss it. He’d rearranged it over and over until everything was perfect. Birthdays were supposed to be special, after all, and he thought the Plum Witch might like something special for her birthday.
But more importantly, he thought Mildred Tillman might like something for her birthday. Ollie still held Plum’s true name close to his chest, but when it came to traditions like this—traditions they had on Earth —he couldn’t help but forget about all of the magic and monsters. It was Millie’s birthday. And he wanted her to feel like she could celebrate it.
And she liked it. She had to like it, right? Since she’d played the music disc so many times? And he hadn’t heard any angry ranting, and she hadn’t thrown the cake into the lake. Yet. So she probably liked it.
With that resolution hesitantly decided on, Oleander closed his eyes against the quickly-fading sunlight and breathed a little easier. Having gleaned all the information he needed, he rolled onto his feet and began to make his escape.
...and then he realized he wouldn’t be able to leave the roof without the chance of being caught. He paced the green tiles, peering over all of the edges. She’d hear it if he jumped into the lake, and besides, there were windows everywhere . She could be standing near any one of them.
So...he could sneak down the ladder and use the portal. And pray she was still on the floor with all of the gifts.
He shuffled over to the trap door and lifted it with agonizing care. The ladder beneath was empty of witches, so it was a viable plan, as long as he went fast enough.
Just go.
Fast, she won’t see you.
He wasn’t so sure. Still, he didn’t have many other options. He stuck his foot onto the first rung and began to descend.
In his original plan, he would have left before Plum even found the gifts. He’d been too embarrassed to give them to her in person because he knew it would be awkward. But he’d been so nervous she would hate it all, he had to stick around to gauge her reaction.
And so he’d snuck onto the roof of all places, to do a little spying. Except he’d forgotten to plan an escape route, and things would really be awkward if she found him now.
His stomach did a flip as he saw the portal. It had been closed. Plum hadn’t kept her portal regularly closed in months, so why now? He could open it from this end, but she’d hear the noisy mechanism for sure. And she’d probably hunt him down in the Nether if he somehow managed to make it through before she got up to this floor.
Beneath him, Mellohi scratched to a halt. His heart pounded in the following silence, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the record started up again.
She really must like it.
That’s the one she played on Perfect all the time, of course she’s playing it.
Maybe she hasn’t read the note yet.
A fresh wave of anxiety nearly made him lose his grip on the ladder. He needed to get out of here. But she was on the next floor down, and she’d definitely see him on the ladder. Unless she was still in the kitchen, in which case the Sweev Shrine would block her view.
He strained his ears to hear anything past Mellohi ’s slow, waltzing beat. As far as he could tell, nothing else was making noise, except for the thrumming conduit on the bottom floor. He had no idea where she was, or what she was doing.
…what reason would she have to be watching the ladder right now?
He had to chance it. He had to go before she came over and saw him stalling awkwardly on the ladder. How would he explain that?
Go, go.
Hurry.
As quickly and as quietly as he possibly could, he continued down the ladder. When he made it halfway to the ground floor, he dared to peek behind him to see if he could catch a glimpse of her.
In his half-second glance, Oleander caught sight of purple fabric covering an arched back, emblazoned with a familiar plum symbol. The witch lay face down on the bottom bunk bed, her feet dangling over the edge. An empty plate and a sprig of blue-gray flowers sat next to her.
Oleander hid his smile against the wall as he fluttered his way down to the bottom floor and tip-toed over the pool of water at the base of the ladder.
She likes the gifts!
The conduit drowned out the clicking of his shoes on the tile floor. He moved in slow motion toward the door, watching his feet as he went.
He wondered how the cake tasted and if he’d ever have the courage to ask about it. Could he get away with never mentioning any of this to her? Would she bring it up to him?
Either way, he planned to make himself scarce for a few days. Maybe he’d wait until she found him.
Talk to her.
No, don’t mention it to her, it would be too awkward.
Too embarrassing.
For both of you.
Oleander shook his head and grabbed the handle to the front door.
It didn’t budge.
Panic quickened his heart as he tried again and again to twist the doorknob, and was met with firm resistance. He clicked and unclicked the lock, but no matter what he tried, it seemed thoroughly jammed. With one eye on the ladder, he took a deep breath and drove his shoulder into the door with a quiet grunt.
The door’s response, however, was far from quiet. Following what he thought was a gentle impact, the iron door rattled noisily in its frame and the nearby windows shuddered. Even the conduit behind him seemed to pulse louder for a moment.
Above him, Mellohi scratched to a halt mid-track. Oleander felt as though part of his soul had drained from his body. Frozen in wide-eyed horror, he barely dared to breathe in the silence that followed.
By the time he saw her foot descend from the hole in the ceiling and step onto the ladder, Oleander had no hope of hiding. His eyes darted around the room—maybe he could duck behind the conduit? But by the time he glanced back at the ladder, he could see her shoulders, and he was left standing awkwardly next to the prismarine frame when she turned her head to look at him.
They stared at each other for a few moments. In the room’s dim light, her expression was hard to read. Or maybe, Oleander ventured, she was making it unreadable on purpose. Then, her mouth turned ever-so-slightly upward as she said, “Hello, you.”
All of his earlier anxiety came flooding back all at once, so that he could only manage a shaky, “Hi.”
And then the awkwardness he’d been so dreading filled the room. He shifted from foot to foot, grasping desperately for something to say, for a reason to be here. He studied the white tile beneath his feet for a few seconds, wringing his hands anxiously behind his back, and finally dredged up the courage to look at her again.
“…Happy birthday.” The way it came out sounded less like a celebration and more like he was offering condolences.
The glow of Plum’s eyes widened and then disappeared as she blinked. She let out a soft breath. A laugh, Ollie figured, probably at his expense. One of her hands grabbed the ladder as if to leave, but she lingered a bit longer, still looking at him.
“The door’s jammed,” Oleander blurted, “I, uh, otherwise I would have…”
“Weird,” Plum remarked. “I’ve never had problems with that door before.” She swung herself onto the ladder and disappeared onto the floor above them, leaving Oleander alone once again.
“Yeah, me neither,” he said with a sad excuse for a laugh and another quick twist of the door handle. Still stuck tight.
Well...she hadn’t asked him to leave, at least, or even tried the door herself. But what was he supposed to do now?
“You coming up or what?” she called from above.
Coming up? Oleander gave the jammed door one more betrayed glare and moved contemplatively toward the ladder. Coming up?
Well, are you?
Yes , he decided as his hand closed around a wooden rung, I am.
Plum was already halfway to the beds by the time Ollie made it to the second floor. As he followed her, he tried to shake his jitters out. Why was he so nervous? He visited Plum all the time, it wasn’t like he was a stranger here. One of the beds even belonged to him. His dog still lived here. So why—?
He stuttered to a stop as the conspicuous smell of burned sugar assaulted his nose. Oleander sent a panicked look at the fireplace, where his first two attempts at a cake had gone to die. The evidence of his mistakes hung so heavily in the air, he just knew Plum would ridicule him for it. But, while Oleander’s attention was focused on his cake catastrophes, Plum had popped Mellohi back into the record player.
A delighted laugh stumbled out of Oleander’s mouth. “I’m glad you like it so much,” he said, stepping over to the player, which she’d propped up on the window ledge next to the beds. He watched the purple and white stripes on the Mellohi disc spin lazily around. “You’d always play it on Perfect, so…”
“‘S the only one you have,” Plum said.
“You must not have looked very hard,” Ollie teased. He kept his box of records right next to the player. “Anyway… I figured you could keep this one here and listen to it whenever you wanted.” Which, apparently, was constantly.
Plum drifted away to the kitchen, humming along with the melody. Oleander sat down on the bottom bunk bed, the same spot he glimpsed Plum in earlier, and wistfully watched the record player.
She likes it. He didn’t figure she would ever say so, but part of him would always be unsure until she did. She hadn’t...said much about any of it, actually. He couldn’t decide whether that made him relieved or more anxious. Surely she would have thrown it out right away if she didn’t like it…
A plate of cake lowered into his line of sight. He withdrew slightly before he realized it was being offered to him. “Oh. Thanks.” He reached up and took the plate from Plum, who settled down next to him with her own plate of cake...only to get up a few seconds later and reset Mellohi after it finished its cycle.
Gingerly digging his fork into the very edge of his slice of cake, Ollie side-eyed Plum. Did it taste good? He was too afraid to ask her, but he figured trying it for himself would be a good enough judge. Edging a bit of the white cake away from the purple frosting and his attempt at a strawberry filling, he lifted the morsel hesitantly into his mouth.
Beside him, Plum’s shoulders shook with a laugh. “...I know I had an incident in year 7, but I swear I’m not going to force-feed you a cake,” she snickered. “Y’don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to, Ollie.”
“No, I want to,” Ollie said, not quite sure why his voice was rising defensively, or why it chose that particular moment to crack. “I’m just, well, you know…” He looked away as his face burned brighter than the fire that had eaten his cakes. “I’d never tried to make a cake before, and I thought it’d turn out terrible.” It might be , he thought, realizing he hadn’t even tasted the bite he’d just taken.
Drumming his fingers on the bottom of his plate, he admitted, “And I...well, I really wanted it to be a surprise, so I was working really fast, and then— And then…” And then he’d accidentally’d two cakes into an open fire. “Well. This one’s my third try.” His voice’s volume had finally lowered, but its squeakiness hadn’t. “Might be for the better. Maybe the first two tasted terrible.” He stared down at his mostly-untouched cake slice and then up at Plum. “Er— this one doesn’t taste terrible, does it?”
He watched a bit of color paint Plum’s cheeks. She shifted on the bed, crossing her legs underneath her and picking at the fabric covering her knee. “S’alright,” she mumbled around a mouthful of the ‘alright’ cake.
High praise coming from Plum, Ollie figured. He chanced a bigger bite and managed to actually taste it this time.
Not the best cake he’d ever eaten—but not bad. And certainly passable as a birthday gift. “Alright” may have been an apt description, in fact.
He’d taken a few more bites when Mellohi scratched to a halt. Without the music to cover up their lack of conversation, Oleander felt another twinge of anxiety. He set down his plate and slid off of the bed to reset the needle, only beating Plum to the task because his side of the bed was closer.
Mellohi returned to life, sending its waltzy rhythm over them and across the room.
Ollie swayed to the music for a moment, humming along to the melody he’d heard so many times. “I like waltzes a lot,” he commented, sinking back onto the bed (and nearly sitting on his cake). “Mom would do dances for my birthday sometimes. She really liked old-fashioned things, so they were ballroom dances, not the, uh…the other kind. Jazz. Swing. You know. We’d dance to waltzes all the time. It was usually the best part because everyone was focused on each other, and only a few people were focused on me at a time.” He poked at his cake with his fork, not really sure why he was telling her about this. “Oh, uh, m… Mellohi’s a waltz, in case you, uh...didn’t know that. Which is why I thought about...you know.” He shut himself up with another bite of cake.
“I know how to waltz,” Plum replied, her brow furrowing the slightest bit. “I’m not that future.”
With a small gasp, Ollie leaned toward Plum. “You do ?” More excitement dripped into his tone than he intended and he withdrew, returning his focus to his cake in the interest of hiding his blush.
“Yeah,” Plum said defensively. “It’s easy.” She must have read disbelief on his face because she jumped up from the bed and stood in front of him with her arms slightly outstretched as if to prepare for a wrestling match. Then, she gave a noncommittal sway in either direction and raised an eyebrow. “It’s this one.”
Laughter trembled in Ollie’s stomach, but he kept his expression carefully neutral. He figured she didn’t actually know how to waltz, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
…but he could teach her.
No, no, no.
She’ll never let you.
It’ll be embarrassing.
Yeah… But I could try it.
Decision made, he realized he’d spent a few seconds just staring at her. “Um, maybe you learned a different waltz than I did,” he suggested, trying to help her save face.
But Plum swiftly sat back down, one hand twitching through her hair and the other grabbing to fiddle with her fork. “No, pretty sure it’s the same one, actually,” she chirped.
Mellohi faded out once more. Thinking fast, Ollie jumped up and lifted the needle from the record, but instead of resetting the song, he guided the needle to its resting spot along the edge of the player.
“Well, if it is,” Ollie said, taking Plum’s place in front of the bed, “you forgot the most important part. Waltzing is a two-person dance. And the first thing you have to do…” He held his hand out toward her and bowed his head. “Is ask: Will you dance with me?”
He waited for the laughter, for a swat at his hand, or a proclamation of how lame he looked right now. But instead, Oleander watched Plum’s luminous eyes widen and her face turn the color of the crimson vines hanging from the ceiling. Her lips parted, but she said nothing as she reached up and took Ollie’s hand.
With a gentle tug, he guided her to her feet and then back a few steps into the kitchen. Plum had gone stiff, and Ollie felt a pang of regret as he noticed how lost she looked.
I hope she’s a quick learner.
What if this just makes things worse?
She’ll get mad at you if you embarrass her.
He forced himself to look at her, reminding himself that he was supposed to be teaching her, not worrying about their current…situation. “Um…the, uh, the pose…”
The pose…oh. She’s the same height as me. Another wave of embarrassment hit him. He’d always danced with someone shorter than him or, when he was learning, with someone taller. He’d never…
The awful warmth of a blush rose to his face. “Um, your left hand,” which currently hung at her side, “goes on my shoulder.”
The witch obliged almost immediately. Oleander responded by putting his right hand in its proper placement: at the small of her back. He pulled her a half-step closer. Eye-to-eye, shoulder-to-shoulder, he tried to shorten his breaths, but after a few inhales he only found himself breathing heavier than before.
Swallowing past a lump in his throat, Oleander maneuvered their other hands until they were folded together and held slightly away from their bodies, at shoulder height. Their heads turned simultaneously, distracted by the movement.
Drawing his thumb across the back of one of her smooth knuckles, he admired how neat her hands were compared to his. He wanted to hide his dry, cracked skin and ruined nails beneath her long fingers. She twitched, digging her fingertips into the back of his hand. He squeezed back, observing the pink tint coloring her nails and the raw skin around them where she’d tried to scrub it off.
“Okay,” Ollie said, in a much softer voice than before, “the steps.” He forced his gaze away from their interlocked hands and found Plum staring at him expectantly, a too-pleasant smile etched on her lips.
“I know the steps,” Plum replied reassuringly, though, from the way her eyelids twitched, Ollie knew that her gaze was flicking about, likely waiting for him to make the first move.
Oleander quashed the amused smile that tugged at his lips. “Well, then,” he said, “let’s do the first one.”
She nodded, but, as Ollie expected, she didn’t move her foot at all. So he said, “First, you have to move your right foot back—woah!” In her haste to follow his instructions, Plum put them both off-balance, and Ollie had to press his hand into her back to keep them from toppling over. “Okay! Not that far! A small step,” he said.
“You were taking too long,” Plum said with a shrug, adjusting her grip on Ollie’s hand.
Was I? Oleander fretted as he guided them back into their starting position. He swallowed to try and clear the tremor in his voice. “We take a small step back, back for you, forward for me. Then, we go to, uh… the right. Your right. My left.”
This is terrible, he thought as he felt her fingers flex on his shoulder. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to follow his movements, and she took her steps stiffly, without any of the bounce of a waltz.
“That’s the first and second step,” he said, “but when we go faster, it’ll feel like one step. You don’t put your foot down until you’ve gone out to the, uh, second step.” She nodded like she already knew that, so Oleander continued, “After that, the third step is just to bring our other feet up so they’re side-by-side. And then, we do the same thing, but in reverse.”
This time, since he could move his feet without hitting Plum’s, it was a lot easier to guide her back a step. He showed her how to complete the cycle, and then, somehow, they did another rotation through the steps, despite his shaky instructions and her insistence that she knew exactly what she was doing. Both of them kept a close watch on their feet, and they moved through it so slowly it could hardly be called a dance, but it was a start.
“Good!” Ollie said. “Now, let’s try it a little faster.”
He verbally counted the steps as they did a few more cycles. Their feet bumped once or twice, but not enough to trip them up. When Ollie felt his elbow brush one of the barrels on the kitchen floor, he brought their dancing to a halt.
“You’re doing a great job, Plum!” He paid no mind to the strained, flustered noise she made in response to that. “Think we can do it with the music?”
Ollie couldn’t wait for Plum’s affirmative “Of course,” before he broke away from her and ran for the record player.
“We should dance over there!” He pointed to the “classroom” area on the other side of the enchantment table. “There’s more room, and less to trip over. We’ll just have to make sure not to, heh, fall down the ladder.”
An inexplicable, nostalgic giddiness rose up inside of him. He took a deep breath, but the words kept rushing out of him. “I’ll move the player over there, that way we can hear the music better. And so we don’t have to run across the room to restart it every time. Because it’s—it’s short, so we’ll probably go a few rounds.”
He turned around, hefting the record player snug against his chest, and peered at her over the top of it.
Millie stared back at him, her eyes glinting in the half-light. Her jumper was draped over the back of the couch. He wondered if she could feel the rising heat of the room as much as he could. She moved to help him with the record player, and together they set it down on the table beside the couch.
Undoing the clasp on the cloak Edomie made for him, he shrugged his outer layer off as well and tossed it on the couch next to Millie’s. Cool air touched his bare arms, but for once, he didn’t feel the need to cover up his scars.
“Ready?” Oliver asked.
She fiddled with the cuffs of her button-up shirt and nodded, still wearing her self-assured smile.
Oliver moved the needle to the edge of the disc, and as Mellohi started up once again, he hurried to guide Millie out into the center of the floor. They fell back into the waltz pose effortlessly.
Mellohi sped through its first few measures, and Oliver’s foot bumped right into Millie’s as he tried to keep up. Soon they both fell into frenzied giggles as they realized just how inadequately prepared they’d come to this dance.
“It’s too fast!” Oliver laughed as his foot stuttered against the floor, nearly tripping up both of them.
They tried in vain to keep up with the music. If one of my tutors were to witness this sorry display , Oliver thought gleefully, they’d have a heart attack!
“Let’s try again,” he gasped as the song ended. He and Millie raced to the record player so they could reset it. “Maybe we should count our steps in half-time.”
But that only proved to be more confusing than their first attempt. Oliver couldn’t hold back a laugh every time he or Millie missed a step, and to his relief, she laughed about it, too. He figured as long as they were both doing terribly, it wouldn’t be too embarrassing.
They tried dancing up to speed again, they tried counting the steps out loud, and they even tried finding a way to slow down the record player. After the fifth reset of the disc, though, they were both struggling for air and so exhausted they could only gasp out a bit of laughter from time to time.
Oliver drew Millie back into the waltzing pose, but instead of moving anywhere, they both gently swayed to the music. Tiredness sat heavily on their eyelids and dragged down their limbs. Their proper form drooped until it looked more like a one-armed embrace. Ollie let out one more breathy laugh and leaned his head towards hers, so close their noses almost touched.
“Happy birthday, Millie,” he whispered, before drawing both of his arms around her in a tight hug. She tilted her head to rest on his shoulder and placed her hands loosely on his back. He felt her tremble ever-so-slightly as they rocked back and forth to the beat of Mellohi .
When the music faded out, they lazily wandered back to the record player. Oliver lifted the needle over to the side just as Millie turned the player off. The record completed one more spin before slowing to a stop.
They collapsed on the couch side-by-side, still working on catching their breaths. Oliver tilted his head toward Millie and grinned. She stared at him out of the corner of her eye and offered a smile of her own.
Staying tonight? Was the silent question.
Of course I am , he answered as he reclined against the couch and closed his eyes.