Chapter 28: Ezra - Entities to Lovers

I have watched so many episodes of Angel City Noir, I could probably be considered a detective by now. But clearly not one that can break a life-ruining curse.

I can’t exactly explain what drew me to begin bingeing a corny period procedural about Los Angeles detectives in the 1940s, but it’s all anyone online talks about and several of my students run stan accounts for the show. Even Delia’s always trying to get me into it.

It was solid background noise while I graded papers for a job that doesn’t want me. At least I’m not thinking about blowing everything with Rory when I’m entranced by smooth, cool PI Cord McGarrity stamping out underground crime rings and smoking egregious amounts of cigarettes. It’s not historically accurate by any stretch of the word, but damn if it’s not great TV.

And if I don’t leave the couch, I don’t destroy everything around me.

I’ve already killed the garbage disposal, accidentally added Dr. Belmont’s wife on LinkedIn, and broken three shoelaces, which is a bad omen in the first place. Three? No, I cannot leave the apartment. Our maintenance guy, Walt, is deeply baffled by what’s going on in our unit.

I called out sick from both Thursday’s class and tour shift and have at least the weekend to drown my sorrows in crime jargon and self-loathing. In my defense, if I’ve been let go, my sick time will not be paid out, so why not use it while I still can?

I can’t stop thinking about how things are going for Rory. Hoping she’s safe, hoping my idiocy isn’t harming her in any way, hoping everything at the shoot for The Out There will come together in a way that brings them many new sales and customers. I’m supposed to give the tour with her tonight, but that was before…

Our eager plans for a delightful Halloween together, where we work our shifts, soak up Boston on one of its most charming days, and then return to her apartment for scary movies and demolishing Halloween candy are moot. They’re just as wrecked as the full bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups I accidentally melted by putting them too close to the stove.

The door opens and Micah enters. Immediately, his shoulders drop in annoyance, and he groans. It’s been a long week for him, too, and I’m positive finding his flop of a brother rotting on the couch for the third day in a row is not how he wants to end the week. Micah drops his keys on the kitchen table and joins me in the living room.

“Dude,” he says. “You cannot be serious.”

“What? It’s a good show!” I argue.

Currently, Cord and his stoic partner, Quentin Crane, are mucking through the L.A. sewer system in pursuit of a lost signet ring to unlock a bank vault. Detective Crane’s ability to sniff out all things metallic is going to come in handy. He’s always the one to find hidden keys, blood spots, and now, jewelry in times of crisis. He says very little, and honestly, reminds me a lot of Vic. The fandom thinks he’s an “unsung hero.”

“I am not talking about Angel City Noir. I am talking about you.”

Micah takes a seat next to me on the couch. I’m sure this is a tragic sight. I’ve been bundled up in sweats and my Harvey hoodie since Wednesday and have barely left this spot.

After my implosion with Rory, I came home to find Micah deeply engaged in some online fantasy game where he was apparently being bullied by a thirteen-year-old who accused him of being an influencer trying to sell AARP memberships. So, clearly, we were both at a low point.

After a couple of beers, I was uninhibited enough to tell him I got laid off. So, he did what any good brother does and ordered a late-night pizza and let me put on whatever history documentary I wanted to watch—no matter how boring he found it.

It helped, but it didn’t fix the problem at hand.

I wasn’t brave enough to tell him how this led to me shooting my relationship in the foot. Truthfully, that’s the worst part of it. My subpar job was one thing to lose, but losing Rory was worse.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I tell him. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“I don’t know.” He grimaces. “To, like…your job. You have two.”

“I…I can’t.”

“I fully sympathize with your cause here,” he says. “Fuck Dr. Hugh Whateverhisnameis and his dumb mustache. But you’re going to get another job, and in the meantime, you have the one you do like, with your girlfriend!”

I flinch at “girlfriend.” Rory was never quite that for me—not yet—but she certainly isn’t now. Her final words to me were biting, and I deserved each one. Hurting her was the worst thing I could have done, but I needed to leave on my terms before she realized it herself.

Temperance warned us to be afraid, and I sure was. I still am. It turns out, I’m not very good at facing up to my fears.

“I can’t go there either,” I finally say. “And she’s not my girlfriend. Not…”

I don’t need to finish for Micah to ease into the couch and sigh in defeat. “I see.”

“We don’t even like each other. It was never going to work,” I lie. Viewing my entire relationship with Rory is like analyzing maps of old ruins, theorizing what sat at the intersection of all these roads and pathways. But once that central cornerstone comes into view, it’s clear as day. I see the old houses and stores centering around a square, a village built around a water source that dried up long ago. Once things with Rory started falling into place, I understood so much better why my eyes always went to her. Why I always wanted her around, even when it confounded me.

What I could see was what a life together might look like. It could look like movie nights on the couch with a hot tea she made herself, or early morning tarot flips where we both set an intention for the day. No card I pull could ever be that bad with her around.

“Right.” He hums. “I’ll pretend like I buy that for a second.”

“What? We literally hated each other until last week,” I lie, again. To him, and to myself.

“Ezra,” Micah says, pressing his fingertips together in front of his face, all pensive. “I am going to say this in the nicest way possible, but you have been embarrassingly obsessed with that girl for a year. Day one, you came home frustrated she didn’t like you. You brainstormed lists of history facts to whip out because you wanted to impress her. You look like a sad baby cow when you think about her, and when you were together, you looked so certain for the first time in a while. I don’t know what happened in the last week between you two, but it wasn’t really new. It’s just different. And I don’t know what brought it on, but…”

I wonder if it’s worth telling Micah the truth. He’s read enough fantasy and sci-fi novels that maybe it won’t be so far-fetched. At the very least, it’ll be an excuse for why I’m a walking tornado. It’s not all my fault.

“So, like…we got cursed. Literally. By a ghost,” I spit out. “That’s why we were together, and I think in the process of being cursed, I started to fall in love with her.”

Micah blinks a few times and glances around the room like he’s trying to figure out exactly what to make of what I’ve told him. He’s always been the out-of-the-box one between us. He’d be sketching dragons and ogres while I tried to teach myself Ancient Greek in high school (it was a phase, and not a great one), or got myself a kit to install the Dewey decimal system into my own bedroom library.

Micah’s well within his rights to ask if I’m drunk or high, or if I hit my head hard at some point, especially when such a statement comes from me.

“Cursed…”

“I know how it sounds,” I continue, “but it’s the only explanation I’ve got. Last week, Rory and I were arguing on our joint tour and we knocked over a séance table that belonged to this nineteenth-century spiritualist lady who puts hexes on people.”

“A hex and a curse are different. A Hex is a level-one spell, and Bestow Curse is a level-three spell in the Fifth Edition.”

“Okay,” I concede, not really in the mood for a D&D lecture. “We’ll go with ‘curse’ because this is damn powerful. It started the night of the tour—that was when I broke my phone, the lightbulb went out, I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet? Next day, Rory and I are in the store together and I find a rare coin. She gets good news. We leave—I am nearly decapitated by a street sign. Because we’re not together now, the Plagues of Egypt have begun again.”

As I say this, I sneeze so hard, I literally punch myself in the face. Micah frowns and shakes his head in disappointment.

“It makes sense,” he finally says, scratching his chin. “I mean, by the logic of fantasy, it makes sense. You have an inflection point where the curse is unleashed, with a set of rules you need to follow. Usually what’s at the heart of a curse is some kind of wrongdoing the cursed must atone for.”

“Are you really using fantasy logic to fix my very real-life problem?” I ask as Micah studies the TV.

“Please turn off the TV,” he commands. “I can’t focus. That man is sniffing sewer water—”

“That’s his special skill!”

I listen anyway and shut the TV off.

Micah kneels in front of his bookshelf full of sci-fi and fantasy novels, tabletop RPGs, and every edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. He weighs one of the handbooks before sliding it back in and shaking his head. “No, too technical. I think we’d be dealing with some kind of emotional or spiritual curse.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Micah grabs a thick book of fantasy tropes and skims the index for any mentions of curses before standing back up.

“Let’s get these rules straight. Tell me everything you know.”

“Well, at first, we had to be near each other. Usually being in the same building or room was enough to keep the peace, but later on, it would flare up when we argued. We asked two people who were also cursed—”

“This is a recurring problem?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “It’s a whole thing. Anyway, one of them told us there’s usually something to learn from these curses. She suspected ours had something to do with us being soulmates. The other said he had to make a choice. Then Rory and I had to go our separate ways, and I got laid off and the wires at the store got fried by a ghost. And I left before Rory could realize I was a failure.”

“Then when you left, what happened?” he ponders, now pacing. “What was happening around you?”

“Oh, everything was, like…metaphorically on fire. Things fell off the walls, I almost got hit by a car…I broke the garbage disposal!”

Micah drops his face into his hands. “And you didn’t stop and think maybe that was a sign you were doing something wrong?”

I think back to what Eddie told us. There’d come a moment where we’d have to make a choice. I swore it was when we had to part ways, choose to be brave without each other, but maybe…maybe the test was what came in the aftermath?

We simply didn’t rise to the occasion. Instead of grabbing hold of each other tighter, we pushed each other away.

God damn it, Micah is good at this. I bet Cord McGarrity couldn’t figure something like this out in five minutes.

“Oh…”

Micah tosses the book in the air. It lands with a sad thud, pages spread on the coffee table. “My god, you are obtuse! You know you’re under a curse, a curse that makes things go haywire when you step out of line, and you start fighting and things explode and go crazy, you think, ‘Yeah, seems like we’re on the right track, we should stay apart’? It’s like you got your master’s from clown school. You were supposed to take that guidance and do the right thing with it. And instead, you didn’t.”

“Obviously, Micah!” I shout at him. “I’m sitting on the couch sadly watching a historically inaccurate detective show. Of course I didn’t do the right thing! I never do. And that’s how it always goes, isn’t it? No matter what I’m faced with, I don’t make the right calls. I disappoint someone. I’m never enough.”

Micah blinks a few times and sits down on the armchair in front of me. Something in his expression tells me he wasn’t expecting to hear something like that, which…well, I don’t know what I was expecting either.

“You really think that?”

I nod. “I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? I spent all those years being great at school, getting A’s in everything, even if it ran me ragged. I struggled to find and keep a decent job. Everyone I’ve tried to be with gives up on me eventually and decides I’m not worth the effort. It doesn’t come easy for me like it does for you.”

Micah laughs and then keeps laughing. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Dead serious, dude.”

He scrubs his hands over his face. “You know none of us—me, Mom, Dad—are thinking about how you’re a failure. At the top of your class, degrees from great schools? Not even to mention the second job that you just like and care about. When Mom and Dad ask you about money, it’s not because they pity you. It’s because they want you to be okay. None of us thinks you’re failing. We all see how hard you’re working. I’ve always admired that about you.”

He stops talking and we’re quiet, but my brain isn’t. I’m endlessly lucky to have a family that does support what I want to do, but often, I don’t know how to let them. Just like I didn’t know how to let Rory be there for me when I knew I needed her. All because I was so swept up in fearing I was a failure.

Rory has never seen me that way. Neither has Delia.

Why can’t I grant myself the same grace?

Why can’t I grant myself the same grace when I know Rory would if I let her?

Fuck.

“What if I’m not enough for her?” I finally ask. “She’s fucking fantastic, Micah. She deserves the world.”

“You know what she probably wants?”

“What?”

“Someone who shows up. It matters. Even if it’s not always perfect. The only way you guarantee your failure is by not trying at all. You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, man.”

“Thank you, Wayne Gretzky. You’re very wise,” I tell him.

Micah nods. “I know. Now, where’s your phone? Has Rory tried to contact you since you left?”

“I don’t know. I have adopted the ways of the ancients,” I lament, but I also don’t really know where my phone is. I pull up seat cushions to see if it’s fallen in there over the past two days.

“By turning off your phone?”

“Yes.”

He blinks and drops his face into his hands. “A master’s degree does not buy common sense. Come on, find me your phone. You’re going to fix this.”

Micah dials my number and my phone vibrates on one of the bookshelves. I drag myself from the couch, fearing each step like I might destroy the apartment. Baby steps. Nothing rains down hell on me, and I think of Micah’s words and what I’ve learned from Temperance. Things go right when I’m on the right path. I have many notifications—lots of Canvas messages from students, sales at Best Buy, but one sticks out against the rest.

I don’t want to quit on us.

I don’t want to quit on her either. I just hope I’m not too late to make this right.

“We need to go,” I tell Micah. “We need to get to the store.”