And so it is, just like you said it would be
Life goes easy on me
Most of the time

And so it is, the shorter story
No love, no glory
No hero in her sky

(the blower's daughter, damien rice)

the florist's daughter

Bloom has gone to reform school. That's what Mitzi told everyone, at least, when the schoolyear started and she was nowhere to be found - and people tended to believe what Mitzi said. A couple of rather unsavoury rumours circulated in September, particularly about a fight with a policeman in the park and that same cop busting into Bloom's house later that night, until everyone got tired of gossiping about someone who wasn't there and the situation more or less petered out.

(Andy moped about it for a while, got all glassy-eyed whenever somebody brought her up. Poor kid never really got over her ghosting on him. Then Rio and Mark got him drunk on cheap beer at one of Mitzi's house parties - thought maybe he just needed one crazy night to let go of his old girl - and he instead ended the night sharing stories with Bloom's goth friend in a corner. He wrote Flower Shop Girl the next day on a hangover and three slices of cold pizza, the band's first and only cheesy love song.

The chicks dug it, though, so they let that one slide.

"She's not the kind of girl who would have to be dragged from her house by a cop," Andy says, six beers in. "She probably got mixed up, I dunno, helping someone."

"I know," Selina says, and something about the look in her eyes makes Andy think she might know more than she lets on.)

But high school breaks for no-one, especially when you're sixteen: Mitzi runs for prom queen and student council president, unopposed, the kind of girl who'll campaign for a position a year early; Andy's group wins Battle of the Bands; math class continues to suck. Around November Selina disappears and nobody seems to particularly care, but the November blues bring a resurgence of the old Bloom-Punched-A-Cop rumours and all of Andy's old ghosts.

People start claiming they've seen her hanging around the flower shop or doing drugs in the park. The kid who does announcements in the morning starts the Daily Bloom Sighting ; the school newspaper runs a column of its favourite conspiracy theories (top two: Bloom's an alien beamed back to her home planet, and Bloom's a government spy called back to work) until the principal shuts both of those down. Andy starts dating one of Mitzi's friends and writes Heart of Stone - which, all things considered, could really use a female vocalist - and life goes on.

Everything goes to shit, of course, when Bloom comes home for spring break.

Of course she's back, because what kind of reform school doesn't let its students home for spring break? Mitzi's the first to see her, out on her bike like everything's back to normal, and everyone loses their minds - Mitzi swears she'd pressured Bloom to fess up and that reform school andmilitary school and like, total frontal lobotomy were all still on the table. People see her all over town, motoring around on her crappy little bike, looking sad and lost and confused and kind of - well, kind of -

"-Buggy-eyed?"

"Yeah, buggy-eyed." Mark and Rio have Andy sequestered in his house because damn it, he needs to move on, and this is not good for him. They're drinking and jamming on their instruments and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. "She looks - weird. Different. Thin? Her eyes are too big. The fuck did they do to her there?"

"There's, there's this fuckin' -" Andy moves his hands in the vague outline of a person. "It's kinda - wavely."

And of course that night Bloom runs some con-men out of town by jumping into a burning building because fuck, man, not like she needed any more fuel for the total frontal lobotomy camp. It's all over the news the next day and then Bloom is gone, with only Mitzi's temper left in her wake.

Didn't even bother saying hi.

(She's back again, later on in the term, moping around her house and looking like someone roasted and ate Kiko. People know better than to talk to her, at that point; something's up that she doesn't want to talk about.

Something feels a little off-kilter in the air.

Mitzi swears that in the middle of the night she heard Bloom's parents screaming and saw glowing blue lights coming from the house and heard the sound of someone chanting in Latin, something like "y'know, like a curse, or a hex, one of Bloom's crazy military school lobotomy friends trying to kill her family with, like, an ouija board, or tarot cards, swear to God..."

By then Bloom's gone. Of course she's gone. It's like she never came home at all.)

("Earth? Bloom, the reason there's no magic on Earth is - well, you needn't worry yourself about that."

"But Headmistress Faragonda -"

"- I think the girl from the woods is waking up. You should go to her.")

Twelfth grade brings with it all sorts of trouble, like prepping for the SATs and applying to college and worrying about the future, and Andy's calculus teacher is a real piece of work. One of those dudes that seems to get off on causing misery. Andy breaks up with his girlfriend and and the fight between Rio and Mark that ensues over who gets to date her next causes the band break up for two weeks. The student body goes nuts and, in the absence of stability, starts thrumming with stories about Bloom sightings over the summer - she'd been in town for two weeks, putzing around on her bike, selling weird flowers in her mom's shop, making small talk with old people.

Early in the autumn she'd appeared the day her mother testified in court, though that story is sidelined by hearsay about some thugs getting the shit beaten out of them by some random girls at the local club.

"She's like a cryptid," Andy says, over a page of derivatives.

"I think she gets cell service at military school," Mitzi says. "Hey, what if I invite her to my Halloween party?"

Mitzi's always had it out for Bloom. It's probably one of those prepubescent jealousy hangups that never really resolved itself, what with the whole fucked-off-to-reform-school thing. Bloom, to everyone's shock, accepts the invitation to the party and asks if she can bring five friends.

Andy doesn't go.

He finds out the next day that the whole thing was supposed to be a massive setup that ended up backfiring anyways.

Mitzi threatens to cancel prom unless someone finds her "that pink sparkly dress that Bloom's weird friend wore, you know, the one with the brown hair -"

At least Bloom's made friends.

Bloom doesn't come home that summer, nor does she answer any more of Mitzi's texts. Andy gets the band a pretty steady gig at a local juice bar run by Roxy's dad and starts saving for college.

That was the autumn that the oceans rumbled and the air tasted like ice in everyone's mouth and nobody knew why.

Hey, quick multiple-choice question. Your girlfriend disappears right before your eleventh grade year. Has she:
a) Gone to reform school?
b) Gone to military school?
c) Had a total frontal lobotomy?
d) Learned that she is a fairy and also an alien, and run off to Magical Space Hogwarts for all the other fairies who are also aliens?

If you answered d , you're right! Follow-up long-answer questions (4 marks each, use a blue or black pen, please):

1. What do you do if your girlfriend comes home from Magical Space Hogwarts and announces that she's betrothed to a king?
2. Can Bloom's techno friend track your internet search history?
3. How do you live your life knowing that magic is real but you're just a regular person who can't talk to animals or sling fireballs?
4. Maybe, just maybe -

"- She could have sent me an email. Written a text. Anything. "

"I'm sure she meant to get in touch, she probably just forgot."

"Just like she meant to tell me that she was Magical Space Jesus and everything we knew about, about everything was all a lie? And that all this time, when I was missing her - she'd moved on - she was seeing a fuckin', a fuckin' prince -"

" - King."

" - Sorry."

"It's all good. I made mistakes too." Sky takes a sip of his drink. Andy wants desperately to hate him but can't; he has the noble bearing of an old-school legend, and the down-to-earth chill of a regular human being. That's the hardest thing to process about the whole damn situation: aliens speak English, and they're so unbelievably normal. "When we started dating, I was still engaged. The look in Bloom's eyes when she found out - I could have died on the spot."

"She's special."

"Mmhmm."

"You better treat her right. I can't do magic, but I'll - I'll steal a nuke and blow your planet right out of orbit. You own the planet, or just a kingdom?"

"Just the kingdom. - I'll keep that in mind."

On stage, one of Bloom's friends belts out Heart of Stone. It's astounding how good she is, but then again, some people were born on planets where everyone's good at music, and some people are born on planets where everyone can physically inject themselves into the Internet, and some people are born on planets where plants can speak, and everybody else just lives on Earth.