Madeline walked with a tired sort of swagger. She squared her shoulders, slid through the mess with a cool stride in her step, and the crowd just oozed apart for her. No shoulder checking, no getting clotheslined by random flailing limbs. The people she passed didn’t even look up, didn’t react; they just gravitated away. Their backs made a tunnel and she eased through the space with me tailing behind her like a leather kite. She didn’t look behind her when she reached the stairs, simply pulled me up with her, and I let myself stagger behind her two steps at a time. The music dulled as we got higher. She opened the door and I flinched.
Upstairs and downstairs were different dimensions, because in a past life, Jing’s house just might have been a yacht. It was a chrome-and-cream magazine photoshoot, all brocade drapes and matching pillows. Black-and-white balloons polka-dotted the Persian rug. A strung-out redhead was spinning in the corner, singing a song that was popular when we were little. It wasn’t the song playing downstairs. A couple across from her smoked weed and hacked like consumption victims, and, as we passed, they stopped their story swapping to look up at her and clap. Normally I’d stick around for a little while to eavesdrop. Stoner hearsay is usually true.
Madeline didn’t seem keen on stopping for hearsay.
Her sneakers stopped in front of a set of French doors that served as the living room’s back wall. These doors were the only barrier of separation between the inside’s warmth and the outside’s frigidness. She coiled her fingers around the gilded knob and twisted. The night air blew inward, ruffled her braids, and the two of us stepped into the dark.
The night was clean and dark and scalpel sharp. It cut deep, slid through my jacket and my scissor-cropped t-shirt to my stomach. As soon as both of my feet landed on the deck, the doors closed tight behind me and clicked. I zipped up my jacket and mouthed a cussy prayer that my vegan leather might suddenly be warmer than it was, but it wasn’t, because of course it fucking wasn’t. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried not to shiver like a fucking baby.
The seafoam corpse of Jing’s pool was eerie in the moonlight. It was long, vaguely elliptical, about twenty feet back from the deck. The pool lights were on, but without thousands of gallons of water to coat them, they looked as harsh and bleak as surgical lamps. Dead leaves heaped like plague bodies along the pool’s edge. A family of pale deer grazed between a set of lemony lawn chairs and odd jutting pink plastic flamingos. I rocked back and sucked on my teeth.
“So. How did you do it? Explain it to me.” Madeline didn’t look cold. On the contrary, the way she leaned her forearms against the deck railing looked as breezy as a June afternoon. Not a single shiver in sight. Her basketball jacket remained unzipped and drifted like a flag around her waist. The moonlight washed her out, made her corpsey. She looked at me unblinking and drummed her fingers on the rail.
Christ.
“You saw how I did it. You were there.” My tongue was clumsy in my mouth. Lips moved oddly. I didn’t mean to sound snide, but I did, because I guess I can’t even scrape the bitter off my tone for a cute girl. My insides felt gooey and raw. The chill was weirdly abrasive after party heat. I wrapped my arms around my rib cage and tried to hold my body together with my fists, because I had caved and was now shivering so hard I thought bits of me might shake off and fly over the deck. “I don’t know how to explain it in shorthand. It’s complicated.” I jammed my stupid tongue in my stupid cheek. I mean, that wasn’t a lie, by any stretch. It was genuinely hard to explain. It was like explaining how to fall in love with something: There wasn’t a way to do it that didn’t sound like flowery bullshit, and even if you half managed it, the explanation wouldn’t make it any easier to do. It wasn’t a checklist sort of affair. My spell book was good, but brief, it was not.
“Can you show me?” Madeline slipped her fingers through the frets of her braid and poked them out the other side. The knuckles caught inside the braid vanished for a moment, like she’d dipped her hand through dark water. Her fingertips were hypnotic. I scratched at my jacket seams and chewed on my tongue. Madeline watching me was a physical thing. I felt it like an X-ray, like she was mapping my skull for craters.
“Huh.” I looked out over the yard and tried to seem significantly cooler than I am. It’s cool when people give the yard a casual, devil-may-care surveying gaze because eye contact freaks them out, yeah? The dizziness from the spell getting yanked earlier still tasted sour in the back of my throat. Or maybe that was the jungle juice. Probably equal parts spell and juice. Madeline was curious. She was genuinely curious and had pulled us somewhere we could be alone, and opportunities like this don’t just happen. If I’m attention-starved enough to show off my magic at a fucking Jing/Daisy/Yates party, surely I’m thirsty enough to show a gorgeous stranger something killer. She wanted some magic. I had magic. I fought the urge to retch. “I could potentially show you a trick or two, yeah.”
“No tricks. I want the real magic, flesh-and-blood magic, like you did down there. They said you’re legit, and you are. What you did down there, there’s no way you could have faked that,” she said. She pulled her hand out of her hair, shoved herself off the deck rail and tossed that hand in my direction. “I’m Madeline Kline. Let’s start with that. East High. I’m a senior. Your name is Sideways? ”
“They call me that, yeah. Sideways Pike. West High. Also a senior.” I reached for her hand and clapped it. It shocked me, like jumping the wrong kind of fence. Pain zapped down my fingers toward my palm and I jumped, jerked back, shook my hand at the wrist.
“What happened? You alright?” Madeline scrunched her brows into a V. She looked between my hand and my face and back again.
“Fine. You just shocked me. I’ll live.” A thin, nervous cackle creaked out of me. I pressed my hand up against my stomach under my shirt. My fingertips throbbed, but the throbbing simmered down to a tingling. My palm itched.
My heartbeat crashed faster. The tingling washed up my arm and into my chest, and the dead energy zapped back to life in my gut. Every single synapse twinged at once. Lightning marrow deep. I hitched a breath and swayed against the railing, braced myself with my free hand. My vision bruised. Madeline gripped my shoulder, sank her nails into my jacket to keep me from falling off the rail. Her touch was fire. It shocked through the fake leather, through vinyl and cotton and sinew, and I felt it soak into my bloodstream like a drug. My ribs contracted, and every breath was bigger than the last. The world was seizing up on me. The night was speckled red.
I was so happy I could sing.
“Sideways? What’s up?” One of Madeline’s braids swung forward and dangled by my cheek. Her voice was low, measured. Moderately concerned. The hand on my shoulder moved to my back, just below my neck. I wasn’t cold anymore. I was starting to sweat. Something was blooming in my throat, and if I didn’t open my mouth, it might strangle me from the inside out.
“You want to see some magic?” I panted. I eyeballed her with a little twitch at the corners of my mouth. It felt like telling the most spectacular secret. My mind blazed. I wanted to scream.
She dimpled when she smiled.
I took her by the wrists and yanked her downward until we were both kneeling, shins on the cold, crispy deck. Wind picked up and tossed our hair, and it felt like celestial validation, like the entire night was primed for whatever I was going to do. Wreak havoc, said Nature. Raise hell. Our hands vibrated where they touched. This didn’t feel like a liquor-dusted parlor trick; this was ancient, opulent, invincible. It was the realest thing in the world. I clawed around my memory for the circle in the basement, but I didn’t need to dig for long. The image floated to mind. Long chalk lines, glow splattered but still unbreakably looped. I pictured it so vividly that the circle superimposed itself in our laps, not tangibly, but in a way that was undeniably real, and the words summoned themselves up to finish it off. “I call the chill in the air. I call down the lightning, the star fire, the dead summer sun. I call down the screaming cosmos and I cry for chaos. We want something impossible. We want something the papers can’t explain, something so wild and gorgeous that nothing could doubt it, not ever. Douse our revelry with magic. Change the way we are.”