Magic and the Modern Girl by Mindy Klasky Page A

independent.” Even in my emotionally frazzled state, I barely suppressed a grin. The independents were the best. Or at least the weirdest.
    “Where’d you meet him?”
    “At the wholesale flower mart. I went down there yesterday to buy some herbs.”
    “Oooohhh…A man who knows flowers!” I put all my energy into being fake-impressed.
    “Yeah. But I’d never seen him there before. He pulled up in a dusty Chevy truck—one hundred percent baseball, mom and apple pie. Big guy—he looked like Grizzly Adams’s more athletic brother.”
    At the mention of the pickup, my heart twinged, but I continued gamely, “So you fell for his outdoorsman’s soul?”
    “Looks can be deceiving.”
    “Can they now?” I tried not to sound too pitiful, thinking of the deception I’d experienced the day before.
    Unaware of my momentary mental retreat to my own dating disaster, Melissa shuddered and plucked at the loose shirt she had donned for our yoga class. “At first, I didn’t think anything was strange. He left his truck at the flower mart, and we took the subway over to Chinatown. When we got up above ground, he whipped out a bottle of gel, you know, that antiseptic stuff?”
    I nodded, wondering where this was headed. Melissa had a very low tolerance for kink, and I didn’t think Purell was going to make any great hits with her. She went on. “He said, ‘Gel up?’ and I thought, why not? I mean, we had just been pawing over all the greenery at the market, and the subway is, well, the subway.”
    I nodded and said in as careful a voice as I could manage, “So you’re rejecting this guy because he offered you hand gel?”
    Melissa glared at me and swirled her coffee before saying, “I didn’t mind the gel after the subway.”
    “But?” I prompted.
    “But the subway wasn’t the end of the story. We decided to eat at Tony Cheng’s. You know, Mongolian barbecue? The restaurant that has those heavy glass doors?”
    “I love that place! It’s got those giant fu dogs outside, protecting the world from disaster.”
    Melissa sighed. “Those fu dogs apparently aren’t enough to protect the doors from infection. Kevin had to gel up after opening the outer doors.”
    “Well,” I said, perversely forced to carve out some explanation. “Hundreds of hands touch them every day.”
    “And the inner doors,” Melissa deadpanned. “The ones that actually go into the dining room.”
    “Gel up after those, too?” I asked, trying not to laugh.
    “And after unrolling his silverware from his napkin. And after collecting his barbecue ingredients in a bowl. And after the chef handed back his cooked food.”
    “You have got to be kidding,” I said.
    “Do I look like a woman telling a joke?” Melissa grimaced and drained her iced coffee.
    “That gel stuff is nasty,” I said. “It’s got to be ninety percent alcohol. Murder on the cuticles.” Neko had told me that once.
    Melissa rattled the ice cubes in her cup then stretched her hands out in front of her, studying her nail beds as if they held the secret to the universe. “Yep,” she confirmed. “Murder on the cuticles.”
    “You didn’t,” I said, staring at her hands with a queasy twist of horror rippling through my belly.
    “I did,” she confirmed grimly.
    “You gelled up every time?”
    “What was I supposed to do?” Melissa yelped. “He kept offering me the bottle, with that same little smile each time. ‘Gel up?’ I mean, I could see the concern in his face. If I’d passed on the offer, he would have thought that I was some sort of heathen. Or worse—he might have called the CDC and announced that he had found the vector for every disease in North America.”
    “But what was that?” I asked, still grappling with disbelief. “Five doses of gel, in less than fifteen minutes?”
    “I won’t even mention his paying the bill. Do you have any idea what they do when they take your credit card to that back room?” She shook her head. “I grabbed a