A moment later, the doorbell jingled again. Cherie looked up, frowning. A teenaged girl entered. She was of slim build, with shiny, straight brown hair. She wore a blue-and-gray argyle cardigan paired with a poofy, leopard-print skirt. A pair of oversized black steel-toed boots completed the ensemble, aside from stacks of colorful bracelets and necklaces that jangled and chimed as she moved.
She paused just inside the doorway, looking around at the dim, empty diner. It was a small room, ten-by-ten, with three round tables that each had a pair of chairs perched under them. The tablecloths were blue gingham, and each table had a small vase of spring flowers in the middle of it along with a sugar shaker and a little jar of toothpicks. The counter took up one entire wall, with a swinging door that supposedly led to a kitchen but actually led to nowhere. "Are you open?" the girl asked, doubtfully.
Cherie hesitated, and then smiled warmly. "We just closed, but I haven't powered down the coffee maker yet," she said. That was a lie, but a simple clockwise swipe at the counter powered everything up again, including the lights and music.
The girl smiled. "Is that Taylor Swift?" she asked.
Cherie nodded. She was a Swiftie. Ninety percent of the music in her cafe was just musical versions of Taylor Swift songs done with full orchestras. As the girl approached the counter, his version of "I Know Places" hit a single harp glissando while soft timpani rolled beneath delicate, tiptoeing violin notes and a low clarinet hum.
"What is this place?" she asked. "And was that Abe Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe I saw outside?"
This girl was full of surprises. First of all, nobody aside from Abe and Marilyn entered or exited through the door. They were summoned by Cherie and just appeared at whichever table she wanted them at. Cherie had not summoned this girl. Second, the girl was surprised but not shocked at seeing two dead human celebrities leaving the establishment, dressed as a waitress and a busboy. Third, she hadn't blinked when the lights and music had come on, as though by magic.
"It's a liminal space," Cherie answered.
"A liminal space," the girl said. "What's that?" She paused, then before Cheri could answer added, "I wanted a place that doesn't really exist in a specific time or place, where I could just think for as long as I needed to," she said. "Is that what a liminal space is?"
"Close enough," Cherie said. "How did you get here?"
"Lush," the girl answered, simply. She gestured toward her ears, where two gold studs gleamed in her ears. "I've had them since I was a baby, and if I think of a place I want to be, I can just go there."
"Neat," Cherie said. What the girl called 'lush' was a collection of microscopic psychic supercomputers that clung together like magnets and could be manipulated like dough. They could take on the properties of anything from living flowers to plastic to cooked food. She supposed that the girl wouldn't need more than a few billion in order to transport herself from place to place. Cherie utilized a lot more than that. Her entire cafe was built of lush.
The girl grinned. "It used to freak my mom out. She just thought that I was magical because she adopted me from a mermaid and mermaids don't exist in our world -- I mean, they're supposed to be mythical." She glanced down. "I was born with legs and no gills, so my birth mom couldn't take care of me." The girl shot her hand out. "Sorry, I'm Aura. And you're Cherie?"
For a moment, Cherie was taken aback again. Had the girl's earrings told her that? No, her nametag had. Cherie mentally rolled her eyes at herself before shaking the girl -- Aura's hand. "Nice to meet you," she said. And for the first time, maybe ever, she meant it.
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