Our Crooked Hearts(23)

“The weirdest things have been happening,” I said. “And it’s all—it’s all making me think I don’t really know my mother.”

For the briefest moment, he seemed to stiffen. But right away he relaxed, and spoke in such an even tone I figured I’d imagined it. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” My fear was abating now. In its place came a kind of recklessness. For years I’d avoided looking at this boy, but out here, in the late and the quiet, I finally could. Tea-colored eyes, dark brows that made him look kinda wicked. His bottom teeth were crooked. I got a flash of him as a kid, lisping around a retainer, and blinked.

“I see you sometimes on your porch,” I said. “When I’m awake too late and I look out the window. Even in winter I see you there.”

“Spying on me?”

“I’m just wondering when you sleep.”

“Who needs sleep?” Billy said lightly, then sighed. “Nightmares, you know? Not often, but sometimes.”

I didn’t know, but I nodded. “That sucks. I can never remember my dreams.”

Now I knew I wasn’t imagining the odd expression that skidded over his face, like a hard wind across water. He looked down, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, smacked them against the heel of his hand. Then he shook his head. “Look, would you throw these away for me? I quit.”

“In the last five minutes, you quit?”

“Yeah. I was out here having my last one.”

“So just … for your health?”

He mopped a hand over his hair. There was a dent in his curls where a hat had been. “No, for Amy. She vowed not to speak to me till I quit, and she actually did it. It’s been two weeks of total silence.”

Amy was his little sister. She had to be about twelve. “Really? That’s awesome. She must really love you.”

“I mean, probably. But no, she’s just pissed I left a pack out and Gremlin ate it. Don’t worry, he’s completely fine.”

Gremlin was their pit mix, infamous in the neighborhood for all the things he’d eaten and somehow survived: channel changers, a bag of sugar, part of a laptop. “That’s good. Poor Gremlin.”

“Poor Gremlin? He’ll be running around eating garbage when we’re all in the ground. Sometimes after he eats my shoes or whatever he leaves the pieces in my bed. Like he’s the Godfather.”

I laughed and Billy smiled a little shyly, raising his brows.

“You ready to call the cops yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You ready to go to sleep?”

“Who needs sleep?”

“Do you wanna go do something instead?”

I paused, mouth half open, and did a split-second audit of myself. Chapped lips, stretched-out tank top, my freshly bleached hair pushed back with a headband. It felt freeing to look so crap.

“What’s there to do in Woodbine in the middle of the night?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Go to Denny’s? Walk around the Super Walmart, eating baked goods?”

I looked up at him, at his freckles like stars. I didn’t want to be alone. And no part of me wanted to go back inside my house.

“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.”





CHAPTER THIRTEEN



The city

Back then

What Marion did on the beach was the first real thing she’d ever done. A flare of wicked intent, shaped by words she hadn’t known she possessed.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s us. The three of us together, that’s why it worked.”

Alone, she told us, she’d almost done lots of things. With the three of us combined, all those almosts could become ways of remaking the world.

But first we had to wake ourselves up.

You couldn’t look for things in the occultist’s book, couldn’t read it cover to cover. If you tried, it would show you blank pages, or black ones. Lines of tangled characters, rhymes that scratched at your ears. Densely inked images, sometimes, that left purple aftereffects on your vision. The way it worked, she told us, was like a tarot deck, delivering the pages you needed to see. And since the beach it kept showing her a single spell, opaquely titled and built for three practitioners. To turn your hand toward working.

It began with a purification ritual. For three days we stayed inside, playing sick so we could avoid mirrors, direct sunlight, and human touch. We drank herbs steeped in spring water, briny with rock salt, and performed ablutions once an hour between sundown and sunup. By the end of it I felt so fragile I wondered if that was part of the spell. You could’ve told me anything right then, and I’d have believed you. Including that I could do magic.

At sundown on the fourth day we gathered the spell’s ingredients—some at the store, the rest harvested from Loyola Park—and went to my empty apartment, our fingers resinous with growing things.

Marion was edgy, withdrawn, her unwashed hair skimmed back into a ponytail. She wouldn’t let either of us touch the book. She kept checking our work, again and again, until there was nothing left to prepare.

I can still close my eyes and summon up the shy, hallucinatory feeling of sitting down with Fee and Marion to perform that first spell. Shallow breaths syncing, hearts up high, nobody sure where to look. Marion was tight as a tuning peg, Fee rippling with nervous laughter. We moved haltingly through the steps, and I was sure it wouldn’t work.