But who knew, maybe it had changed since the last time Sam had been.
Sam texted James to let him know he’d arrived. It was hard to shake the deeply ingrained feeling that this was rude, that he should get out of his car and go knock on the door. But after years of brusque and often vaguely homophobic interactions with James’s parents, Sam forgave himself for a little rudeness (more than once, James’s mom had said—from a place of what seemed like genuine forgetfulness but was never any less hurtful for that—“Do you have a girlfriend, Sam? Oh, I’m sorry, pretend I didn’t say that!”). Even James always said, “Don’t feel like you have to be nice to them.”
James wasn’t responding to Sam’s text tonight, though. And he kept not coming to the door, no matter how intently Sam watched it. So finally, assuring himself that he was not being nice or polite but concerned, Sam got out of his car and walked up to the door.
Right away, Sam could hear the yelling coming from inside.
“—from church, Dad. She goes to our church!”
“Don’t you fucking bring church into this, there’s nothing—”
“—can’t even believe you. Do you hear what you sound like?”
It sounded to Sam like James and his father were moving through the house, their voices oscillating between right-behind-the-door loud and so distant Sam couldn’t hear them. Sam might have known they’d be getting into one of their blowups, with James’s mom out of the house. James had told him about countless fights over the years, and Sam had been unlucky enough to be present for a few of them. James always became surly and unreachable afterward.
Sam knocked on the door. Not even knocked—pounded, really. It was like some primal, protective instinct had awakened in his brain. James was a big brother, but Sam, as an only child, was stubborn as hell. He didn’t care if he got yelled at, too—he only cared about saving James.
The yelling didn’t stop. He heard “Go to your room!” followed by an “Are you fucking kidding me?” from James, in the exact moment Sam was thinking the same thing.
But even as he stood there waiting to hear the sound of footsteps, the door creaked open, and there stood Benji, looking hollowed out and scared in jeans and a T-shirt with pro wrestlers on it.
Benji was in first grade. He was old enough to have a personality and interests of his own, although as far as Sam could tell, his interests were basically whatever James was interested in, and his personality was basically the closest approximation to James that he could get. (Yes, James enjoyed professional wrestling; it was something about him that Sam would never understand.) Much like his brother, Benji had more emotions than he had words to deal with them. This made more sense in Benji’s case, given his age. But given his age, his parents’ pig-headed distrust of magic and their firm insistence on the sanctity of gender norms—attitudes that had only hardened with their age—took a much greater toll on Benji than they did on James. It was hard to witness. James couldn’t stand it.
“Hey, Sam,” Benji whispered. “James can’t come to the door right now.”
“That’s what it sounds like to me, too,” Sam whispered back. “Maybe I could come in and talk to him?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said a voice just beyond the door, which swung all the way open to reveal Mr. Dawson, in his Final Boss state, his eyes bloodshot and hard. He nodded a hello but barely made an effort to mask the rage that had so transfigured him. Sam didn’t see any sign of James, which meant he must have stomped down to his basement bedroom by now.
“Mr. Dawson. Hi. I’m, uh. I’m here to pick up James for the fall festival.”
“Hate to waste your time, Sam, but James won’t be leaving the house tonight, and that’s that.”
“Uh,” Sam said, his heart still racing in anger. “Okay, then, I guess.”
“Something you want to say to me, son?”
Sam looked back and forth between Benji and Mr. Dawson. The absurdity of those spandex-wearing wrestlers on Benji’s T-shirt was really getting under his skin. He wanted desperately to respond to Benji’s tyrant of a father in a way that would model a real way out, if it existed.
“Nah,” Sam finally said, but at least he didn’t break eye contact.
“All right, then,” Mr. Dawson said. He pulled Benji back by the shoulders, and then he slammed the door.
Which.
What. An. Asshole.
Sam stomped back to his car, already furious with himself for staying silent, for not taking the opening to clap back after so many years of wanting that moment. It probably wouldn’t have done any good—it might’ve even made the night harder for James—but those felt like paltry excuses for not trying a little harder. Benji’s future was at stake, too, and there was nothing more important to James than that.
Sam was just backing out of the driveway, the volume on his music cranked up to an obscene level, when a voice in his ear, distinct over the noise, whispered urgently, Sam, wait.
Sam slammed on the brakes so hard they squeaked. Which was a good thing, too, because they drowned out his unbecoming scream. Sam looked in the back seat and confirmed he was alone in the car. He’d been looking over his shoulder a lot this week, jumping at things that weren’t there, but a bodiless voice seemed like a new low, even if it was a voice he recognized. Even if it was James’s voice.
He turned off his music.
Finally, when he was ready to accept that he’d imagined it—that two sleepless nights in a row had gotten to him more than he’d realized, and maybe he shouldn’t be going out tonight, let alone driving—he detected a hint of movement coming from the side of the house.
It was James, crouched down and hustling like he was in some video game that would have “Ops” in the title. He climbed through the passenger side door as quickly as he could and said, “Go, go, go,” bringing the military fantasy full circle.
“How did you do that?” Sam said, even as he peeled out of the driveway and sped down the road.
“I’ll explain on the way,” James said. “Can I see your phone?”
“What? Oh . . . sure, I guess.” Sam rooted in his pocket and handed over his phone. Without looking away too much from the road, he tried to keep an eye on what James was up to. It wasn’t like Sam had a text or a note-to-self anywhere that spelled out, I’m secretly in love with James, but who knew what all he’d said to Delia over the years? He knew there was at least one message in there from her this summer, asking Sam where he and James had run off to after leaving the bowling alley . . .
“My dad took my phone before I could ask Amber where we’re supposed to meet her. But first things first, I’m going to text my phone from yours—Sorry you’re not coming tonight. Hope your dad isn’t too mad . . . because you know that asshole will be reading every message that comes in on my phone—and now I’ll text Amber real quick.”
“You have her number memorized?” Sam said.
“It’s public on Friendivist.”
“Ah.”
They drove in silence as James finished typing his message. Sam almost suggested that maybe James should just call Amber, since it seemed like—based on the amount of time that had passed—he might have received her response, texted again, and started a whole conversation about God-only-knew-what.
Finally, Sam gave up on waiting.
“So, what was that spell back in the driveway? It was a spell, right?”
“Yeah, sorry—it’s hard to send more than a few words with that, which makes it way creepier. You remember freshman year, when I did the Sights, Sounds, and Smells event at convention? Well, that was one of the spells in my brief that year. You had to send a code word to the judges in the other room.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said. “And the fight with your dad. Same old, same old?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” James said. “I swear, I am at the point where if I could think of another place to live, a place where I could bring Benji, I would leave.”
“I wouldn’t blame you. Was he mad
that you were going out, or . . . ?”
“Basically.”
“Okay.”
James apparently received another message on Sam’s phone. He tapped out a quick response, smiling into the screen.
“Don’t you think he’s going to notice you’re gone?” Sam said.
“I doubt it,” James said, still absorbed in whatever was happening between him and Amber. “He hardly ever goes into the basement, and if he does, my door is locked, and I cast this spell to make it sound like I’m shuffling papers around on my desk.”
“Cool, cool. But—”
“Look, Sam,” James said, finally turning away from the phone, “I’m sorry. I feel like my dad has already ruined the night enough. I don’t want to give him any more time than I have to, you know? I just want to forget about him and have a good time.”
“No, yeah, I get it. No problem. I can switch to good-times mode. Done and done. It’s just . . . before good-times mode activates, like officially officially, I have to ask—any luck with the book? Or with the counter spell?”
This had been Delia’s breakthrough idea at lunch today, based on something she’d read on the Pinnacle syllabus. If they couldn’t locate the book with a finding spell, maybe they could reverse engineer the spell James had used in order to make a counter spell. Arnauld’s Axiom, she called this process—if you could replicate a spell, you could make a counter spell. It seemed worth a shot. The only problem was, the spell had been so instinctual for James—a reflex out of panic. He hadn’t been sure he’d be able to talk through the steps to replicate it if he tried.
“No dice,” James said now.
“I figured you’d tell us if it worked, but you never know. Are the visions getting worse?”
“And good-times mode activating in three, two, one.”
“All right, all right,” Sam said. “We’ve definitely earned a Friday night. And to that point, about good times, etcetera—Amber’s band. What do you know about them? Are they any good?”
“I think so,” James said. “I mean, they’re not like a band you’d hear on the radio, but Amber’s got a great voice, and then they have a guitarist and a drummer. Both of them are pretty tight.”
“Right. Denver’s friend, Ellie.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Seems like you and Amber are really close all of a sudden,” Sam ventured.
“I don’t know about ‘really close,’ but yeah, she’s cool. She’s one of those people who genuinely cares, you know? Like, she doesn’t just do things because everyone else is doing them. Her parents don’t make her go to church—she goes because she wants to. She doesn’t play soccer because it will be good for college apps—she plays soccer because she likes playing soccer. She really helped me with stuff this summer.”
Sam couldn’t help that his knee-jerk reaction was a defensive one. That all he could hear in James’s words was the fact that Sam didn’t go to church at all, or the fact that Delia spent a lot of time talking about her college applications. Or the fact that, if Sam was being totally honest, he’d always thought that James only drank and smoked as much as he did because that’s what everyone else in Friedman thought was cool. Somehow, Amber was succeeding where all three of them failed.
“Right, she helped you. With snack time. And the drinking.”
“You’ll like her,” James said. “Once you get to know her.”
“Can you text Delia and let her know we’re almost there?” Sam said.
“Yeah, okay.”
James went back to Sam’s phone, and Sam turned up the volume on his music, just a little bit.
Delia’s memory was correct—parking was a nightmare. The funny thing was, Sam didn’t remember that at all from freshman year, but then again, Sam’s mom had dropped them off that time, so it was hard to say if things had truly gotten worse or if it was all a difference in perception now that Sam was the one driving.
Finally, they found a parking space, then headed off toward Mary Ellen’s stand, where James had arranged for them to meet Amber. On the way, they ran into Denver. Sam spotted him a good ten yards before Denver spotted them; he was leaning against the wall of the Hick Country Café (its real name), alternating between checking his phone and scanning the crowd, and he looked so out of place in his black skinny jeans and black T-shirt, so utterly alone, that it finally sank in for Sam that this boy had moved to Friedman with no friends and no history here, and Ms. Berry had directed him to the Fascinators, counting on them to be welcoming. In return, they had promptly initiated him, “chump style,” before luring him into a battle of wits with dark magickers. Sam wanted to die.
Then Denver saw them and grinned his confident grin, and Sam determined that there was still time to fix this.
“There’s my Fascinators,” Denver said, all suave.
“‘Your’ Fascinators?” James said.
“Honestly,” Delia added, “it just doesn’t work with a possessive, ‘yours’ or anyone’s. It’s the Fascinators or no Fascinators at all.”
“Okay, okay, give the guy a break. He’s new.”
“Thank you, Sam.”
“No problem. So, have you already played Plinko and cornhole, or were you waiting for us?”
“Oh, yeah, me and Bubba over there in the hunter’s flannel made a great cornhole team. We won lots of tickets, and we were going to combine them to buy a huge stuffed unicorn, but I told him, sorry, Bubba, I need to wait until Sam gets here in case he’d rather I get him a Friedman water bottle or something.”
Sam blushed outrageously. James snorted and then looked away, as if he had never seen downtown Main Street before.
“Hey,” Delia said, “that’s my cousin in the hunter’s flannel.” She looked stone-faced and insulted, but when Denver’s face blanched in mortification, she said, “Denver, I’m kidding. You think I have a cousin named Bubba?”
“I don’t know!” Denver protested, laughing with relief. “I barely know you, but based on the fact that you live in Friedman, Georgia, home of this here Hick Country Café, I wouldn’t put it past any of you to be cousins with a Bubba, if not that particular man, with whom I did not play cornhole, just so we’re clear.”
“I think I see Amber,” James said, picking up the pace as he led them the rest of the way to Mary Ellen’s stand.
She was talking to two girls whom Sam had seen at school but never talked to, presumably Ellie and the guitarist. You could tell they were a band from the way they were standing, synchronized in their effortless coolness, two of them smiling and leaning at complementary angles whenever the third was talking.
There was an awkward moment as they all came together and introductions were made—it turned out the guitarist’s name was Carrie—because a group of seven was honestly too big for a single conversation. James ended up in a clump with Amber, Carrie, and Delia, while Sam somehow found himself on the far side of the circle with Denver and Ellie.
“It’s so cool that you’re in a club all about magic,” Ellie said to Sam. “I’m so bad at it, I don’t even try, but I think people who’re good at it are amazing.”
“Thanks,” Sam said. “I wasn’t all that good at it either until I started hanging out with James and Delia. Now I’m good by association.”
“Bullshit,” Denver said. “You’re good on your own, too.”
“How would you know?”
“Just a hunch. If you believe it, you can achieve it,” Denver said, ridiculously. “That’s like the number-one rule of magic.”
“I thought it was ‘Don’t dream it, be it,’” Sam said.
“No, that’s Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Denver replied.
“I think he knows that,” Ellie said, sharing a grin with Sam.
“Yeah, we have movies and culture down here in Friedman too, you know. Even though we wear plaid and attend elementary school fundraisers on our Friday nights.”
Denver smiled, as if to say, Touché. Sam didn’t even know why he was defending Friedm
an, exactly, since it would never defend him; he only knew it was fun to disagree with Denver.
“Speaking of fundraising,” Ellie said, “can we go get some food and play some games before I have to be on? I always like that game where you have to go fishing for rubber ducks with a magnetic pole. It’s fun because you can’t lose.”
“Magnetic rubber ducks it is,” Denver said. “The epitome of culture if ever there was one.”
It turned out Amber’s band was one of a few musical acts lined up for the evening. The Friedman Elementary chorus kicked things off with rousing renditions of “This Land Is Your Land” and “Over the Rainbow,” and damn it, Sam actually got sort of emotional during the second song, watching all those innocent little souls who hopefully had no idea yet what it felt like to want to be somewhere else that badly; although of course, if Benji’s face tonight and Sam’s own memories from elementary school were any indication, they probably did. Then a trio of brothers with two fiddles and a guitar made a valiant effort at “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a song that Denver had apparently never heard before, because he looked at Sam with bug eyes and mouthed, What the hell is this?
Sam shrugged. It was a good song, even if—to be fair—it was taking on a more menacing air than it normally did, given the things Sam had seen at the corners of his vision this week. Things he was trying not to think about tonight. Good-times mode and all that.
By the time Amber, Ellie, and Carrie got up onto the little raised platform in front of Kelsey’s Florist, a pretty sizable crowd had gathered, and the floodlights had come on, making everything and everyone look just a little more intense than they had before. You could start to feel the energy shift as a few adults here and there went unchecked in their tipsiness. James bent over like he was trying to read his phone while keeping it in his pocket, and in the same moment Sam remembered that James didn’t have his phone, he realized that James was sneaking a sip from a silver hipflask. Which—damn. So much for cutting back on the stuff.
“Hey, y’all. I’m Amber. These are my girls Ellie and Carrie. We’re In His Name, and we’re going to play a couple songs we wrote.”
The Fascinators Page 7