The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic 0)(30)
Now, as the family was celebrating Franny’s acceptance to Radcliffe, Jet did something terrible. She wished that Franny wouldn’t be able to leave New York. She knew she was being selfish and she chastised herself for it afterward, but it was too late, the wish had been made. It was bitter and carried the acrid scent of smoke, and when it lodged somewhere inside Jet it made her cough, a hacking rattle that lasted for months.
“Cheer up,” Vincent said as Jet despondently watched their parents open a bottle of champagne. “It won’t be as bad as you think.”
“What won’t be?”
Vincent tousled her black hair. “Your future.”
It was then she realized that Franny could provide the perfect excuse to see Levi. Every time she said she was going to visit Franny in Cambridge, she could get off the train at New Haven. Levi had gotten into Yale, and he would be there waiting for her. She thought she would bring him a new coat on her very first visit, then he wouldn’t have to keep the old one his father had him wear. She had changed her mind about Franny going off to school. She even drank some champagne. She took back her wish right then and there, but unfortunately such things simply can’t be done.
Haylin’s letter from Harvard arrived in the mail the following day. He came around to collect Franny so they could celebrate their impending independence from their small-minded parents and their dreadful school and awful childhoods, for which they were already feeling nostalgic. They nestled close together to avoid a pale rain as they walked toward Madison Avenue, pretending to fight over a single umbrella.
“The only thing I’m taking with me when I leave is the microscope,” Haylin announced. “I’m donating everything else.”
At the coffee shop on the corner, they ordered waffles and eggs, and because all of Manhattan smelled like bacon that day, a side of Canadian bacon as well. Hay topped it off by wolfing down two jelly doughnuts, which he’d craved ever since his marijuana experiments. They were both starving for food and for freedom. The brilliance of the day made them dizzy and hopeful in ways they had never imagined. In Cambridge anything could happen. The rain was stopping; the air was green. Spring was thick with lilacs and possibility. Everything was delicious, their food and New York City and their futures. Hay was to live in Dunster House, Franny a stone’s throw away, if you had a strong arm, which Haylin did, at South House on the Radcliffe Quad. They toasted to liberty, clinking together their glasses of orange juice. O joy, they crooned to one another. O learning and books and baked beans and the Red Sox and the filthy Charles River.
They had all spring and summer to enjoy Manhattan. The magnolias and ornamental cherry trees were blooming in the park. They met at twilight, free spirits, no longer tethered to their parents’ wishes. They explored every acre of the park they so loved and would sorely miss, watching constellations from Sheep Meadow, wading in the chilly Loch, studying the white-footed mice that collected acorns along Cedar Hill, tracking the red bats nesting in the English oaks and black locusts. Lewis the crow followed them, and Haylin fed Franny’s familiar bits of crusts when they brought along sandwiches.
“You’ll spoil him,” Franny said. “He’s supposed to be wild.”
“Maybe he’d rather be tame,” Haylin responded thoughtfully.
Hay had already confided that if he were ever to inherit his family’s money he would dispose of it, for every time he walked into their limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, he felt he had made a wrong turn and had mistakenly come to live with a family who would have been much happier with a different son. “You’re the only person who really knows me,” he told Franny.
She kissed him then. She didn’t plan it. She simply felt a wave of emotion she couldn’t name. It was impossible for anything to happen between them. Still she kissed him again, and then once more for luck.
Vincent was at the Jester, where he had become a regular, and he was drunk. He hadn’t told his sisters how much of the future he could see, because he didn’t like it one bit. Luckily Franny rather than one of their parents picked up the phone when the bartender called to say the Wizard might need help getting home.
“Who on earth is that?” Franny said.
“The kid who does magic tricks. He gave me your number. He said he was your brother.”
When she said that he was indeed, Franny was informed that Vincent could usually be talked into performing tricks after he’d had a few: the lights would flicker, matches would flame with a puff of breath, silverware would rattle as though there was an earthquake. Now, however, he was plastered, and likely a danger to himself. Franny took a cab, then made her way into the dimly lit bar.
The bartender waved her over. “He’s been drinking since noon,” he said.
Franny asked for a glass of tomato juice, extra large, then proceeded to a booth where Vincent was resting his head on the red plastic padding behind him.
“Hey there, sister,” he said when Franny flung herself into the seat across from him.
She’d brought a cure for drunkenness: a powder composed of cayenne, caffeine, and St. John’s wort, which she now dispensed into the tomato juice. “Drink,” she said.
Vincent sipped, then shuddered in disgust.
“You’re better than this,” Franny said.
“Am I? I see things I can’t change, Franny. When I drink I stop the visions. It was in pieces but it’s coming together in one picture. And lately, what I’ve been seeing is an accident. A bad one. And soon.”