And all that long, heat-sick season, we were magic.
When I remembered that summer later it was bright and dark, all my memories sun-drenched or cast in hard shadow. I was in love, with Fee and Marion and our city and the possibilities that hissed under our hands every time we gathered in a circle of three.
But in the other half of my life was my dad. His spine a column of crumbling discs, his bedside table a cache of orange pill bottles. By summer’s end I’d understand he was never going to be okay again. I think I knew I’d be an orphan soon. The knowledge was the black-eyed dog that followed me, nipping at my bike tires and curling up in the corners of my room. Magic was joy and power and control. It was the thunderclap that chased away, at least for a little while, that slinking dog.
Through everything Fee and I kept telling ourselves it was all just fun. Even as the spells we worked stained steadily darker. Even as the riskier magic we found in the occultist’s book—spells to distract, to mislead, to punish—rebounded on us with strobing headaches and a wrung-out famishment, and Fee started brewing a fermented tea that helped with the pain of blowback. Even then we told ourselves this drug we were living on, whose costs we couldn’t begin to reckon, was within our control.
Not Marion. She was a liar, but she didn’t lie to herself. From the very start she came to magic as an acolyte. Of the book, of the craft, and, most of all, of the dead occultist whose book it had been. Her name was Astrid Washington, and Marion talked about her like a girl with a crush.
“Astrid was amazing. She wasn’t just an occultist, she was a healer. She charged society people loads of money for love charms and pennyroyal tea, then took care of poor people for free.
“In Baltimore they called her the Widow’s Nursemaid—she’d off abusive husbands on the cheap, with poisons that weren’t traceable.
“Six days after Astrid was killed, John Howlett’s nephew— her murderer—died in his sleep. He was twenty-five, completely healthy. No apparent cause.”
She told us that one night in a sticky booth at the Pick Me Up, eating brownie sundae off a silver spoon.
Fee looked fascinated. “So her ghost killed him?”
Marion smiled a glassy little smile. “That’s one theory.”
“You told us Astrid was supposed to be executed,” I said. “What’d she do? Kill the wrong shitty husband?”
She shrugged, her gaze going murky, inward. “People blame powerful women for everything.”
I looked at the place where the occultist’s book was hidden in her bag. It was always with her. Neither Fee nor I had ever actually held it, and that was fine by me. I preferred to think of our magic as being drawn from a faceless place, a store of power accessible to brave girls with bright hearts. I didn’t understand Marion’s obsession with constantly reminding us Astrid had been an actual woman. Not a figure but a person, and maybe not a very good one.
I shivered. Somewhere in the future, someone was walking over my grave. Or maybe I was remembering, just for a moment, that magic was a thing with teeth, and a history as old as the world.
* * *
I try to remember how it began, the beginning of the end.
There was an evening I was riding my bike under the El, grocery bags swinging off my handlebars, and almost got clipped by a Ford Fairlane. I swerved to avoid it, food shaking out over the pavement. “Hey, asshole!” I screamed. “You broke my eggs!”
The driver flipped me the bird. “Ah, go fuck your boyfriend!” he bawled out his open window.
The chain had come off my bike. I chucked it onto the sidewalk and took off running, head empty but for a bright white rage. I threw an arm out and his back tire popped like a smashed pumpkin, sending his car fishtailing across Glenwood Avenue.
I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t thought I’d done anything. But my body was quaking with expelled magic, a headache already filing its nails on my brain. Shithead regained control of his car and went sailing on but I couldn’t stop picturing crumpled metal, blood on the pavement.
Right then I didn’t feel like a girl with a gift. I felt like a child carrying around a crate of leaky dynamite.
Then there was the night of the love spell.
* * *
Fee had a loose trigger for falling in love. She liked dirty-mouthed girls, girls with shaved heads, girls on bikes who darted like fish through traffic. But it wasn’t until we were magic that she got up the guts to actually talk to any of them.
She had her first kiss, then her second, with a bartender at the Rainbo Club, pink pixie cut and a collar of tattooed hyacinths. Then the bartender found out how young Fee really was and stopped talking to her.