Our Crooked Hearts(25)

It took time for the effects of our awakening to fade. For a handful of disorienting days, everyone we looked at wore a halo of colored light. Soft, mystical, unmistakably there, unmistakably magic. Fee was limned in fresh green like an elf princess. Marion’s aura was the color of brick dust. A lonesome, hard-road color. Fee told me mine was blue, that I looked gift-wrapped in sky.

Twice I tried taking the train and had to step right off, the car such a riot of overlapping colors I could almost hear it. By the end the feeling was like a high that went on too long. Even after it was gone I received occasional flashes of useful sight: the good-looking man smiling at me from across the train, his aura the color of dried blood. The girl dancing at the show, crackling with the contagious, brushfire shade of damage.

I’d always had that extra ounce of perception, always moved through a world in which I knew by instinct which streets not to turn down, and where small treasures hid. But the spell in the occultist’s book caught like a fishhook on that quiet part of me, reeling it up until it bobbed against my skin.

“Your wedding ring is stuck in your pocket lining,” I told a woman ordering food at the fish shop. She didn’t look grateful. Fee, too, had to readjust. It was uncomfortable, she said, to stand in crowds. “Everyone’s thirsty all the time. I’m drinking gallons ’cause it’s hard to convince myself it isn’t me.”

But these were small prices to pay. The spells the book served us were small, too, at first. They pointed inward, spells for good luck and good sleep and good skin. We boiled herbs to sludge on Uncle Nestor’s gas stove, we etched incantations into candles with a safety pin. We chalked complicated shapes onto Fee’s bedroom floor and whispered into a mirror unwrapped from a length of white linen. We learned the many uses of moonlight. Every piece of magic the book gave us worked like a gateway drug, until we couldn’t imagine our lives without that thrill, that bend, that shock of the world giving way beneath our hands.

We didn’t wonder where the magic came from, or why it worked. We never asked ourselves, Is this ours to take? We were three damp ducklings, green as leaves, believing with all our crooked hearts that we were the ones writing this story. Even as a dead woman’s book paved the road beneath our feet.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN



The suburbs

Right now

Billy’s car was a low-slung box that smelled like blue car tree. I climbed in feeling low-level giddy. It felt surreal to go from bloody concrete and swirling thoughts to here, in this car, next to this boy I knew but didn’t know.

Back when we rode the same school bus Billy wore T-shirts with howling wolves or leaping whales screen-printed on them, and colored rubber bands on his braces. Now he was wearing a Pepino’s T-shirt under a faded button-up, and his Adam’s apple stood out like a peach pit. He drove like a dad, putting an arm behind my seat as he backed out then taking the wheel one-handed, elbow perched on the open window.

We rolled through corridors of quiet houses, the stale warmth of the car mixing like water with the breeze. When he turned onto the main road his arm flexed beneath a patch of streetlight. I stared, then turned away.

“I like your hair,” he said abruptly. “I mean, I already liked it. But I like the blonde, too.”

I touched my fingers to my cheek. “Thanks.”

Billy kept his eyes on the road. “So. You and Nate King broke up.”

“Big-time.”

“What happened?”

“Aside from finding out that he smokes cigarillos?” I let my head fall back. “I think the real problem was neither of us was actually dating the other person. I was dating, like, Poet Boy. He was dating, I don’t know, Aloof Redhead. I should’ve just gone out with a fountain pen. He could’ve carried around a sexy wig. Everyone would’ve been much happier.”

Billy laughed. “I can see Nate King and a wig.”

“How about you?” I watched streetlights slide past through the moonroof. “Who are you dating?”

A pause. “To be honest, I’m holding out for King’s hot wig.”

My heart was speeding up, because this felt like an opening. If I didn’t say something now, I probably never would. Billy pulled into a spot at the back of the lot, and before he could unbuckle his seat belt I grabbed his arm. “Hey.”

He looked at my hand, then at me, smiling.

“Seventh grade,” I said.

The smile dropped. His face went utterly neutral.

“Seventh grade was brutal,” I told him. “Honestly, it felt embarrassing just to be alive. So, that day. That thing when … that thing when you…”

I trailed off. He looked so pained I couldn’t finish my thought.

“It’s in the past,” he said abruptly, and opened his door.

I followed him out of the car, the space between us suddenly flat as old Coke. I thought it’d make it better to acknowledge his having asked me out back then. I thought, stupidly, that we might laugh about it.

Apparently not. Neither of us spoke as we walked over the humid concrete and into the ice-age chill of the Super Walmart.

I blinked against the fluorescents. At midnight the store was deserted and carnival-bright, the song of some distant summer bleeding through bad speakers. Billy glanced at my goosebumpy arms and walked over to a carousel of grandma hoodies, tossing me one in teal.