Forever 21

By eleven in the morning on her twenty-first birthday, Sashara Jones has eaten cake for breakfast, hugged everyone she loves, and decided this is the best day of her life. When a fortune-teller named Rose appears at the party - uninvited, unbilled beyond a twenty-dollar joke gift from a friend - she asks Sashara one simple question: what do you actually want? Sashara answers without thinking, the easy, golden answer of a girl at the best party of her life: I just want to stay twenty-one forever.

Across the table a few minutes later, a quiet, bookish friend named Michael makes his own wish - to follow his unfinished novel all the way to the end, no matter what it takes, and something that won't let him quit before he gets there.

Four years pass. Sashara and Michael build a life together - an apartment, a career, a debut novel with his name on the spine at last. And neither one of them notices, not really, not until a phone camera and a shoebox of old photographs force the question: why does Sashara's face never age? Why do plants die within weeks of coming into her home, batteries drain in days instead of months, a beloved cat gone at eighteen months for no reason a vet could name? And who is the woman with Sashara's exact green eyes and exact red hair who has started appearing at Michael's signings, sending him messages signed with a single letter - H - and leaving marks on his skin that a shelf bracket never could?

Forever 21 is a genre-blending novel of magical realism and literary horror about the wishes we make without understanding their true cost, and the reckoning that comes when two people who love each other realize they've each been quietly, separately haunted by the same granted wish for years - and that the only way through is to finally stop hiding it from each other and start facing what's been collecting interest the whole time. Set against the specific, aching backdrop of a dying Southern California mall - the last store standing, the ghost of what used to fill every storefront - it is a story about the terrible clarity of getting exactly what you asked for, and the harder, better magic of choosing, finally, to be honest.

For readers of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and anyone who has ever made a wish on a good day without stopping to wonder who might be listening.