Signal to Noise(15)

Daniela wrung her hands, hoping her mother and siblings would not burst in any time soon and that this whole witchcraft thing did not involve anything gross. Once, when she was little, Daniela’s mother had taken her to an old healer for a limpia. The woman had rubbed an egg and a lemon all over her body, then made her drink this bitter brew, telling her it would heal her. It hadn’t. Daniela still had lupus and her mother still would not let her play sports for fear of lacerations.

“What are you doing?” Daniela asked eventually, because standing there and staring at her two friends was starting to bore her.

“We are picking spell music,” Meche said.

“What spell are we doing?”

“Something about success.”

“Okay, why don’t we use the Iggy Pop song?” Sebastian asked, holding up a record.

“Too obvious,” Meche said.

“What? We get points for being cryptic?” Sebastian said.

“You don’t just go out there and blurt it out,” Meche replied.

“Why not?”

“Because it would be too easy.”

“Easy is good.”

“My mother will be back soon,” Daniela muttered.

Sebastian and Meche turned towards her, eyebrows arched, with that look that meant, Daniela, you don’t get it. It was a very common look.

“Fine,” Sebastian said. “David Bowie. We play Fame and call it even.”

“That’s about two degrees less lame,” Meche said.

“David Bowie is lame?”

“No, using that song is lame. There’s like zero effort.”

“Oh, okay. So let’s go with this guy we’ve never heard of,” Sebastian said, holding up another record, “because that’s not lame.”

“Without Robert Johnson you wouldn’t have Elvis, no Beatles, no...”

“The lyrics you showed me don’t say a single thing about success.”

“They don’t have to. He’s standing at the crossroads because he’s about to sell his soul to the devil.”

“I don’t want to do any devil songs,” Daniela said. “I don’t want to give birth to a baby with hooves who throws his mom down a staircase.”

“That’s like a f*cked up version of Rosemary’s Baby crossed with The Omen,” Meche said.

“No devil songs.”

“Daniela, wouldn’t you prefer to play a David Bowie song?” Sebastian asked.

Meche’s eyes said ‘absolutely not,’ but Daniela could not side with her this time. She bobbed her head timidly.

“Yes,” she said.

“That is not fair,” Meche said.

“There’s three of us and we just out-voted you,” Sebastian said, smugly sliding the record from its sleeve.

He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.

“Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.

“Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.

“Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes. Meche pinched his arm. They joined hands, clumsily turning around, like children playing Do?a Blanca, only they weren’t little kids and this was not a game at recess.

“Ugh, your palms are sweaty,” Sebastian said, drawing away from Daniela.

“Don’t break the circle,” Meche told him.

“How about I spin in my place?” he asked, wiping his hands against his trousers.

“Seriously,” Meche muttered, but she didn’t ask them to hold hands again.

They did spin. They whirled. At first, it seemed silly and Daniela thought she was going to get dizzy and throw up. But the more they did it, the longer the seconds stretched, the more it seemed to make sense. Daniela felt very warm, like there was fire blooming from the pit of her stomach, stretching up her chest and stinging her mouth. Their fingers brushed as they turned.

She watched as Meche spun. Her friend’s gaze was fixed on a distant point, her body turning but her eyes always returning to that distant something. Sebastian, similarly, seemed to have locked his eyes on something. Daniela closed her eyes and licked her lips; her cheeks burned.

She didn’t feel dizzy from the movement. Not really. But there was something dizzying, hypnotic about the music, and she was reminded of a documentary they’d shown at school in which some monks were dancing, their skirts flaring around them.

Fame, fame, fame.

Daniela’s head lolled to the side and she snapped her eyes open. Something seemed to lift from them, quickly leaving the room, cooling her skin. She blinked. She shivered, suddenly afraid because she had almost touched something that didn’t seem like another of Meche’s games.

Meche lifted the needle and they stood around the player in silence, nobody daring to be the first one to speak.

Finally, Sebastian found his voice.

“Did it work?” he asked. “Do you feel different?”

Daniela flexed her hands. Meche moved towards the white, wooden vanity with the pink necklaces strewn around its surface. She leaned forward, a hand against the mirror.

“Not really,” she said.