“So, I was on the dance floor and there was this East High boy that I hadn’t seen before. He was angel-faced, but he wasn’t my type. Too preppy, I guess. But preppy felt safe, and I was just trying to distance myself from the weirdness. He was kind of handsy, but I like that. Mind was in dirty places, you know? So, I drag him into that back closet in the basement, the one behind the punch table, and we’d not quite closed the door when the drawings showed up on the wall.
“Then he . . . switched. It was like Jekyll and Hyde, just like that. His face curled up, and he started screaming about someone named Addie. ‘Where’s Addie, how do you know Addie, Addie, Addie.’ He just kept screaming about it. I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone named Addie in my life. I told him again and again, but he just kept snarling at me. I couldn’t hear him over the music. And the music was wrong. It was this vintage stuff, all staticky and brassy, and it wasn’t on the playlist for the party—I helped Alexis make that playlist. I thought I was losing it.
“I thought he was going to kill me. There was something wrong with his eyes. They were too big for his face. He said something else, but I still couldn’t hear him. He took me by the shoulders and pulled me out of the closet, and he took me through the crowd and up the stairs, but everyone was too busy freaking out about the chalk drawings to notice anything, or it was too dark, or everyone was stoned past heaven or straight up unconscious. Sideways was out cold on the patio. Her eyes were open. I thought you were dead, Sideways. We stepped over you.”
I shifted a little. Daisy shot me a look.
“So, he takes me into the pool. He shoves me against the wall under the diving board, and then he starts acting weird. And I mean weird. He starts talking nonsense, and I can’t understand a word out of his mouth. Something about whoever the hell Addie is, I don’t know. And then he takes a permanent marker out of his pocket and writes something above my knee, and then, nothing. Seriously, nothing. Until I woke up and there were fucking deer in the pool with me, and I was freezing and alone.” Yates paused and splashed more pink water on her face. “Thank God my phone wasn’t dead. I just don’t get it. It was just so freaky. And the deer? What the fuck is that about?”
“You sure it was a preppy kid? Sounds like some hick jock who thought he was clever,” said Daisy with a snarl. She slid off the counter and bounced on her toes, shifted her weight back and forth like a boxer. “It’s fucking sick. Who the hell puts a girl in an empty pool and arranges deer around her? What even is that? I swear to God, when I find out which miserable douchebag did this, I’m going to slit his throat with a goddamned bobby pin.”
“Daisy,” Jing said.
Daisy scowled and crossed her arms over her chest.
I shoved my fists in my pockets. “He drew something on your leg, right?”
“Yeah.” Yates frowned, and she stuck her sudsy leg out of the bath. She pressed her pointer finger against a smudge above her kneecap. “It was here.”
I coughed. “Can I see it?”
She let go of a breath and gave me a nod. I crouched by the side of the tub.
The mark was faded now. It was quick, sketchy, blurred past the point of distinction, but I thought I saw switchbacks and spirals in the lines. “It’s a sigil.” No question about that much. “Not sure what it means, though.”
“Oh.” Yates’ face fell, but I shook my head, cut off the apology before it came out of her mouth.
“There isn’t an inscription. I wouldn’t know even if you hadn’t washed it off. I guess he knew a thing or two, whoever he was.” I didn’t like that. It conjured a sour taste.
I’d never met someone else who could draw sigils. I’d been under the impression that I was the only one around these parts. It was undeniably a sigil, though, and whoever had drawn it on her was good enough to skip the chants. That wasn’t supposed to be a thing.
Yates reached out of the bath and caught one of my hands, gave it a squeeze. My heart cartwheeled. I jerked my gaze away. Her thumb rubbed circles around my knuckles, and it ached, but I didn’t tell her not to. She didn’t ask about the bruising. I felt the question hang in the air, but I wasn’t in the mood to answer.
“Sideways.” It was Jing’s voice behind me. Raked a shiver down my spine.
“Yeah?”
“Can you curse people?”
Something constricted in my chest.
“I mean. Theoretically, yeah. Never tried before,” I sounded out. It was true. I hadn’t. When I had a problem with someone, I usually explained it to them with the backs of my hands.
“Let’s curse him, then. Magic works. You can do it. I want him to suffer for this.” Jing’s voice was cool, but I felt her seethe without even looking. It pulsated in the air. “Tonight, that’s what we’re going to do. Chalk be damned—I’ll deal with that in the morning. I want to curse this prick so severely he never even ponders touching a girl again.” Then, softer: “Would you like that, Lila?”
Yates frowned. She gave my hand a squeeze. “I think so.”
“Badass,” said Daisy. “I’ll order pizza.”
Daisy did not order pizza. Pizza is singular. She ordered pizzas. Three pizzas with every combination of sauce and topping the pizzeria could supply, with the addition of salad and buffalo wings and two two-liter bottles of orange soda. She put it all on a heavy-looking credit card without asking what it cost.
We sat on Jing’s bedroom floor, the four of us in a circle. Daisy had eaten most of a pizza by herself. The sauce on her cheek looked like a war wound. Yates had her curls wrapped up in a sky-colored scarf, and she sat with her knees to her chest, absently toying with the furry carpet. Jing sat across from me. She hadn’t touched the food, hadn’t looked away from my face. She stared at me so intensely I felt like she was fiddling with my synapses.
My guts felt hollow. I took a second slice.
“So,” I said. “Yates. Do you know his name? It helps if you do.”
I didn’t have my spell book at hand, but there wasn’t much of it I didn’t know by heart. The curse section of my Vade Mecvm Magici was brief and vague, but that was how it was about everything. It wouldn’t help me here. The name would, though. Might aim this thing properly.
“I don’t think I asked.” She shrugged, squeezed fistfuls of fluffy carpet. “I don’t think I cared. He was an East High loser. He wasn’t exactly interesting.”
“His name was probably Chett. Every other guy at East High is named Chett. Douchebag name.” Daisy opened the second box of pizza, which had a few toppings I didn’t recognize. I didn’t ask. I’d eat it regardless.
“Yeah. He looked like he could’ve been a Chett.” Yates picked at the pizza without much interest. “That works, I guess.”
“That might work. I don’t know. Do you remember what his face looked like?” I dropped the crust on one of Jing’s porcelain plates and crossed my legs.
Yates nodded. “Don’t think I could forget.”
“Can you focus on that while we do this? We’re going to need a poppet. A poppet . . . like, a symbol for Chett. An idol. It could be a spoon, a hairbrush, doesn’t matter. Something that we can pass around while we work.”