This wasn’t what magic was ever like. Magic before had been like lying on my back and clawing at the sky, trying for a fistful of stars and ending up with the occasional lightning bug. Even following my spell book by the letter, the most I could do was burn paper, unbreak dishes, make scrapes and cuts scab faster. What the four of us could do was something else. I felt seasick and disgustingly in love with it, with them.
Jing put her hands over her mouth. She stared at the doll, which didn’t feel like a doll anymore, and put on a meticulously neutral expression. “So.” She slipped her hand inside her sleeve and picked the doll up slowly, delicately, like it might spring to life and bite her. It might. I wasn’t sure. “What do we do with it?”
“I want to burn it.” Daisy looked at the poppet like it was a reliquary. Her face broke into a grin, and she tossed her arms around her stomach, dug her nails into her sides. “Can we burn it, Sideways?”
“Absolutely not.” I skittered my fingertips up and down my thighs. “I wouldn’t want to breathe the smoke. Besides, whatever we put in there, I don’t want it getting out. We need to keep an eye on it. Put it someplace safe.”
“Define safe,” said Jing. She held it closer to her face, eyes sharp on its makeshift elbows. A vein twitched in her cheek. “God. It made little tendons. They’re bunched and notched and everything.”
I cracked my neck. “Safe like a jar filled with nails.”
“Nails. We can do that.” Jing sucked her teeth. “Daze. The bat. It’s in my closet.”
Daisy lit up and sprung to her feet. She sidestepped Jing and half skipped to the sliding closet door, yanked it open, and dove her hands into some unseen back corner. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, screwed up her face in concentration, and then eased into a smile. She pulled the bat out slowly. Jing’s clothes slid to either side like curtains.
It was a Louisiana Slugger. It was a Louisiana Slugger peppered with twenty-something railroad spikes. Daisy leaned on it, crossed her toe behind her ankle. She waggled her brows.
My mouth popped open like a codfish. “What the fuck? ”
“I get bored.” Jing shrugged. She set down the poppet, shoved the spare Barbies back in the Rubbermaid container, and slithered back under the bed with it, reemerged with a ribbon-handled hammer. “Does it matter if the jar’s been used for anything before?”
“Nah,” I said. My tongue felt dry.
Was it appropriate here to ask her if she was straight?
“Dope,” she said. She tucked the hammer under her arm and strode over to her desk, where she picked up a mason jar that’d been holding pens, dumped the pens out, and then sat back on the floor. She put down the jar, took up her hammer, and reached for the Slugger with her free hand. “This spell thing is more convenient than I thought it’d be.”
Yates had been silent. She didn’t look at the doll. She looked at the rug instead, knotting her hands in tufts of purple fur like it’d anchor her in place. “Hey, Sideways,” she breathed. “Can you come here for a second?”
I sucked my teeth, shoved my hands in my pockets, and gave her a stiff nod. I mean, I was already beside her. I’d listen, though, if that’s what she meant.
Yates scooted closer and positioned herself in front of me. She leaned back. Her spine aligned with my sternum, and she let herself melt, went soft against my chest. She pressed her cheek against my neck. I forgot how to swallow. “Thank you.” There was a tickling, mothy sensation at my jawline, and I nearly jerked away until I realized it was her lashes, blinking slow. “I needed that,” she said. “I seriously needed that.”
Thank me. Thank me for what? I didn’t ask her, just nodded and said, “No problem.” My voice sounded weird and raw, like it wasn’t mine. My entire body felt grimy—it had all morning, but now it was hitting me how disgusting I was. There was a twig in my hair. Probably dead crickets, too. Yates felt too clean, too soft to be on me. My arms fit funny in my sleeves. I didn’t pull my hands out of my pockets and I didn’t wrap them around her, because I wasn’t sure I’d do it right. I’d fuck it up somehow. I awkwardly leaned my cheek against her forehead, just barely, just enough that she’d feel it.
Yates made a sound in the back of her throat. She shifted a little, made herself comfortable, and wiggled her toes in the faux purple fur. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Is Sideways mean? I mean, I know why they call you that. I don’t want to be like that. I could call you Eloise instead.”
“Well, damn.” I felt my face contort. “No. I like Sideways. I picked it myself and it just kind of stuck. No one calls me Eloise. My dads don’t call me Eloise.” Then, with a hesitant little cough, “Thanks for asking, though.”
Jing jerked her head up. She was halfway through the process of yanking the spikes out of her Slugger, and the hammer slipped out of her hand and banged against the side of her bed. The noise made Daisy jump. “Jesus fucking Christ, Sideways, your name is Eloise?”
THREE
LIKE BLOOD AND WATER
Seeing Jing’s room, now that I properly had time to see Jing’s room, screwed with my expectations of who she was. Jing at school was slick and nonchalant, dismissive, authoritative, slacking in classrooms but commanding social office, slim as a whippet and twice as quick. There was little room for adoration in her public image. That wasn’t the case up close. Under her electric chandelier was a poster of Eartha Kitt, and a stack of battered paperbacks—Ariel, The Woman Warrior, Alias Grace—sat dog-eared and unsuspecting atop her bedside table. A pair of sneakers dangled by the laces from a blade of her ceiling fan, unworn, stuffed with lavender springs, and swung in lazy circles as the fan blade made its rounds. There was a whiteboard adhered to the closet door labeled PEOPLE I’M IN LOVE WITH, and all the entries had been scratched out save three names: Daisy, Yates, and Rico Nasty. There were tally marks etched in her footboard and a crack in her TV screen.
The four of us sat on the rug again. Daisy and I had taken showers, but unlike Daisy, I’d crept back into yesterday’s crusty clothes. Not like I’d brought a spare set. We were watching a movie, but I hadn’t been paying enough attention to know which movie it was. A teenage girl was about to be hacked to pieces on-screen, and Jing was bad-mouthing her for locking herself in a cabinet instead of running out the front door. Yates was texting someone and elbowing Jing from time to time, but Jing didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or she was too invested in coaching the slasher victim through How Not to Be Slashed to acknowledge whatever was going on with Yates’ phone.
My mind was elsewhere. Nowhere in particular, but somewhere else, somewhere in a vague, hazy plane of existence at the periphery of our own.
Daisy Brink was braiding my hair.
“Hey, Sideways,” said Yates, who looked up from her phone and over her shoulder at me. “Can I ask you something?”
“Can you?” I snorted, but I couldn’t muster anything cleverer than that. Daisy’s nails against my scalp were mesmerizing. The easy, repetitive motion wrung out my nerves. I felt on the verge of hysteria, and I couldn’t place why. Maybe it was just the attention. I’m not used to attention. This was the first time in a while I didn’t feel angry, not even a little. “Yeah, sure.”