The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  A quick glance to Delia confirmed that she was coming down from a similar experience.

  Rachel smiled. Her whole face lit up, as if she’d tasted something delicious.

  “I knew Vi wouldn’t show favor to just any young people. Now tell me everything.”

  They’d started out sticking together as they made their way around the room, taking in all the paintings, from “Northern Lights” to “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” But that had lasted all of five minutes, as Delia had somehow adapted to the paintings and could now experience them in about half the time it took Sam to do so. He still had a few paintings to go when he noticed she’d broken off and joined a circle of other guests, where she was now leaning in to hear something an older man in a black suit was saying. Whatever it was, it made Delia laugh uproariously, and then the man reached for two glasses of champagne before handing her one.

  Sam skipped the rest of the paintings.

  “How’s it going over here?” he said, sidling right up next to Delia and giving the man a pointed once-over, warm but wary.

  “Is this a friend of yours?” the man said.

  “Yes, this is Sam. He goes to Pinnacle with me.”

  “Is that right?” the man said. “And what do you study, Sam?”

  “Oh, I’m still figuring it out,” Sam said. “Delia’s the smart one. Especially at her age, you know? Our professors are always like, Gosh, Delia, you must be the smartest freshman in the class.”

  “Freshman?” the man said.

  “I took a gap year,” Delia said.

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to drive after that?” Sam said, nodding to the champagne.

  “Excuse us,” Delia said. She took Sam by the arm and led him out of hearing distance, where she said, “What’s gotten into you? Are you my friend or my babysitter?”

  “Sorry if I don’t like to ride in the car with a tipsy driver, illegally, during a rainstorm. But we’re clearly underdressed and underage. That dude is lying if he wants to act like he didn’t know.”

  “That dude is a Keeper working for a think-tank in DC. He could be a good connection to make.”

  “If he’s a Keeper, that only makes him more of a creep, because it means he sees right through the act and knows exactly how old you are. I saw how he was looking at you.”

  “Fine. Killjoy.”

  “Guilty as charged. Now can we please go?” Sam said.

  “Let’s at least say goodbye to Vi and Rachel.”

  They looked over together, to where Rachel was in the center of a new circle of patrons. She caught their eye and offered them a smile and a wave, then immediately went back to listening to her guests. There was no sign of Vi.

  “Is that good enough for you? Come on, Delia, please. Have you forgotten why we came here? We need to find this book.”

  “All right, all right. Damn. Heaven forbid I make a valuable life connection when you and James are having bad dreams.”

  “Ouch,” Sam said.

  “That’s not what I—oh, nevermind.”

  They descended the stairs back down to the shop, where Sam’s singing bowl was waiting for him in a bag by the door. Or at least, it was supposed to be.

  “Leaving so soon?”

  It was Vi, stepping out of the shadows, holding the bag with the bowl inside.

  “We were looking for you,” Delia said. “We didn’t want to leave without saying thank you. Really, we don’t want to leave at all, but—”

  “But we do have to get going,” Sam said, throwing a pleading look Delia’s way.

  “Yes, I imagine you do,” Vi said. “The mark on you is strong because the people who hunt you are strong.” She handed the bag to Sam. “It is good fortune that you made it safely to my shop today. This should help you with what’s ahead.”

  “Hunt us?” Delia said. “Is it really that bad?”

  “It’s what they do,” Vi said. “I’ve seen their work before.”

  “Who are they?” Sam said. “Our friend took something of theirs, but we’ve never met them. We’ve only seen them through a spell.”

  “Best to keep it that way,” Vi said. “In truth, I don’t know much more than I’ve told you. I know them by their mark, and by the customers who come to me trying to shake it. I’ve seen frightened looks like yours before. I’ve sold charms to help people disguise themselves or disappear altogether. My advice to you is, return whatever your friend took, then put as much distance between yourselves and these people as you can. Now, I must get back to my guests. I wish you well.”

  She performed a gesture somewhere between a wave and a ward. Sam didn’t know if it was really a spell, but it certainly made him feel better—less worried, after such worrisome news. Vi showed them to the door.

  The rain had picked up again, and as soon as Sam and Delia stepped foot outside the store, they took off running, Sam clutching his singing bowl against his chest, as if the water would ruin it. As if he needed to protect it with his life.

  Finally in the car, soaking wet and in mild shock, Delia and Sam turned to each other, breathing heavily from their run.

  It was clear on Delia’s face that she felt bad for snapping at him earlier, for underestimating the urgency, when come to find out, he was right to be alarmed. They were being hunted.

  “Sam, I—I mean . . . if anything bad happened to you, I—”

  “I thought the canvases were blank,” he said.

  What he meant was: it’s okay. We all get it wrong sometimes.

  “Well,” she said, “that old Keeper was definitely flirting with me.”

  At the exact same moment, they burst into laughter—far more, perhaps, than the situation warranted. They were just so on edge.

  They were laughing their heads off the whole way home.

  Chapter 8

  DELIA’S PARENTS WERE WATCHING TV IN THE LIVING room when Sam and Delia crept through the back door into the kitchen, still sopping wet, Sam hiding the singing bowl behind his back, as if they’d have any idea what it was if they saw it. Anyway, they didn’t see it. They called out, “Delia, is that you?” To which Delia shouted back, “Yup, and Sam,” as the two of them took off their shoes and made the short trek down the hall to Delia’s room.

  “Did you tell them we were going to Atlanta?”

  “Hell no,” Delia said.

  “What about my windshield? Did you tell them about that?” Sam collapsed into the bean bag chair beside Delia’s bed.

  “Why would I?” Delia said.

  “I don’t know,” Sam answered. He was always trying and failing to get a handle on Delia’s relationship with her parents. As the youngest of three, with an older brother and sister who were already working full time, Delia received a fraction of the parental oversight that Sam did. She always painted this like it was lucky for her, but to Sam, it seemed like her parents had meant to stop at two and now couldn’t be bothered to care for their third child. It was one thing to tell your daughter you wouldn’t pay for out-of-state college; it was quite another to make her buy her own clothes and gas with her paycheck, when you were fronting the down payment on your oldest’s house. Again: she said it didn’t bother her, so who was Sam to tell her it should? But it was one more reason to root for Delia’s Pinnacle dreams to come true. “I guess I just wondered if they would be coming back here to check on us.”

  “Ha. You’re funny, Sam. They haven’t set foot in this room in ten years. Moving on. Do you have the note with you?”

  Sam reached into his pocket and removed the note that had been wrapped around the brick last night—the one with the lightning-bolt V, subtext: Bring us the book, or else.

  Delia pulled a pillow off her bed to use as a cushion, taking a seat on the floor across from Sam. Sam set the note down between them.

  “Perfect. Are you ready?” She planted her hands on her knees and scooched forward until her knees were touching Sam’s, forming a circle.

  “How will we know if this thing is working?” Sa
m said, holding the singing bowl tensely, as if it were poisonous, or an active grenade.

  “You know as much as I do. I guess if you start to see those faceless people, break off the spell right away.”

  “I will if I can,” Sam said darkly.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to try this again?”

  “I’m sure I’m ready to try something.”

  Sam gripped the bowl in the palm of his right hand, tilting it toward the mallet that he held in his left. He rotated the mallet around the outside edge of the bowl, and right away, the sound it produced was so loud that he had to stop in surprise. He and Delia exchanged a nervous glance, and then he tried again. This time, when the sound began, he was ready for it, and he continued to rotate the mallet until the sound became steady, hypnotic, pleasing—the ringing in your ears after an excellent concert.

  He and Delia closed their eyes and attempted the finding spell again, imagining the book they still hadn’t seen in person, but this time with the extra associations that came from the note that lay between them. Whoever had made it wanted to find the book, too. Their urgency had left an imprint, like a bruise.

  Just like last time, Sam’s mind started to wander, bringing him along with it. It was impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when Sam’s imagination ended and the magic began, but all at once, he realized that he was outnumbered by details—that his surroundings were too filled in to be the byproduct of his own mind’s attempt to reconstruct them. Only, instead of the warehouse office space where Sam had expected to find himself, what he saw when he turned to take it all in was a field, the grass cut short and the dirt poking through in patches. Two beat-up soccer goals formed the field’s border, and Sam stood equidistant between them, a dense forest just beyond two sides of the field, an old country road and an empty parking lot past the others.

  Sam had been here before.

  He would never forget it.

  It was suddenly harder to convince himself that the spell was working. So vivid was his memory of the night when he’d ended up at this field, coming out of those trees to find a single, still-working spotlight in the parking lot casting an eerie yellow glow over the whole place, that he now thought maybe he was imagining it from the ground up, every single blade of grass and the smoke-gray sky of that night. If this was the spell, a simulacrum pulled out of his memory, it was a very cruel trick for his memory to play, bringing him here all alone, to revisit the moment without James.

  Sam took a step forward, and in so doing found that his feet worked normally here.

  He took another step, and another. It didn’t feel right to run. Humming through the clouds was the distant sound of a bell, reverberating more than ringing, a metallic constant that beckoned him steadily toward the trees.

  It was right at the border of these trees where James had thrown out his arm to stop him—“Wait. Sam.” They’d been wind-sprinting through the woods for at least five minutes by then, trying to outrun that awful party, which Sam hadn’t wanted to go to in the first place but which James had finally convinced him would be fun, because it was spring break, because Delia was working and there were no good movies playing at the movie theater, because what else were they going to do.

  The party had not been fun.

  From the moment they’d arrived, Sam could feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on him. The party wasn’t all that crowded, for one thing. In movies, high school parties were always filled with bodies—bodies falling out of bathrooms, sitting on counters, double-stacked on the sofa. You could crowd-surf from one end of a room to the other in a movie party. At Bridget’s house that night, there were eleven people plus James and Sam. The rest of them were all sitting in a circle, on chairs and a couch and the floor, when the two boys walked in.

  “’Sup,” James had said, with his nonchalant up-nod. “Hey, everyone,” Sam had said, somehow already sticking out before they’d even fully entered the room.

  It had only gone downhill from there. Sam had known coming in that he didn’t like Bridget and Bridget didn’t like him—her feelings about gay people had been made clear to their whole English class in the first week, when she’d loudly objected to a book called I’ll Give You the Sun having been on their summer reading list without a content warning. But James had assured Sam that he’d hardly have to interact with her, even if the party was at her house—that there would be at least a few Friedman people Sam liked there.

  But Sam did have to interact with her. And there weren’t any Friedman people Sam liked among the others. And James kept trying to leave Sam alone with them—to grab another drink, to smoke a cigarette outside, to go to the bathroom—which made it painfully obvious to everyone that Sam kept going far out of his way to stay close to James. Even if he had to stand outside the bathroom and pretend to read something on his phone.

  “What do you do in that magic club anyway?”

  That was a boy named Marshall, a senior at the time, two hours and countless drinks into the evening.

  It was directed at Sam, in a moment of silence after James had joined a few others to smoke up on the back porch. The only things Sam knew about Marshall were that he was on the baseball team, that his dad worked the line at the Titan fulfillment center where Sam’s dad was an engineer, and that he’d just asked about the “magic club” with such disdain in his voice that it was clear he was more suspicious about the answer than interested in it.

  “Mostly we practice for the state convention,” Sam had said. “There are all kinds of scholarships for the top teams. That sort of thing.”

  That hadn’t satisfied Marshall.

  “But like, what do you do at the state thing? Spells and shit?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What kind of spells? Like basic stuff?”

  Here, Marshall had surprised Sam with a perfectly executed if low-level fire spell. A snap of his fingers, like flint on tinder, and there was a flame in the palm of his hand, brief but not small. No one else in the room reacted, like this was a trick they’d seen him do before. But Sam scooted forward onto the edge of his seat, intrigued and a little scared.

  “Some basic stuff. Some not-so-basic stuff.”

  “Like what? What’s the hardest spell you can do?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam had said. “It sort of depends. There are lots of different ways to define hard.”

  Marshall snickered. “I bet. Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  The others had laughed at that—and at Sam’s flush of embarrassment. His first impulse was to say, Just wait, James will show you. But he knew if he said that, he and James would never hear the end of it, as long as they lived in Friedman.

  “Well, okay,” Sam had said. “How about this?”

  Sam had circled his fingers around each other, intending to show them a lesser version of the spell he had performed at convention the previous November. The task had been to craft a micro-storm of many elements; you had to include at least three distinct components for the storm to count, with bonus points awarded for every component beyond three. Sam had spent months on wind, rain, thunder, and hail, the last of which seemed a hair safer than lightning—the more popular choice. (The winner of the event had found time to summon a sandstorm and a blizzard, too, though Sam maintained that was stretching the rules.)

  That night at the party, the micro-storm had gone off beyond Sam’s wildest hopes; it was much more effective than it had been at convention even, which was insane, considering that Sam hadn’t practiced it once since then.

  The problem, of course, was that Sam was not in a fiberglass cube as he had been at convention. He was in Bridget’s living room. And even at micro-levels, wind, rain, thunder, and hail had been enough to send Marshall and the other guests screaming and ducking for cover, their drinks flying and mixing in with the gallon or so of indoor precipitation, soaking everyone and everything in surprise.

  Marshall hadn’t wasted any time with words. As soon as he’d realized they were all safe, that t
he storm was over, he’d thrown the chair off his head and made a lunge straight for Sam, his eyes absolutely murderous.

  And then he’d frozen in midair.

  Sam’s heart was beating so hard he thought he was having a heart attack, but he recognized the presence and the direction of the magic, and he whipped his head around to find James, returned from outside with Bridget and the others. Sam wasn’t sure how much of the fiasco they’d seen, but he didn’t have time to ask.

  “Come on,” James had said, grabbing Sam’s hand and pushing past the others before they even knew what was happening. He threw open the back door and yanked Sam through it, and then they took off running, down the steps into the backyard, then into the woods.

  James never let go of Sam’s hand, and as they ran and ran, Sam started to suspect that James must be using magic even now, to keep their path clear or to keep them upright, Sam wasn’t sure which. He only knew that at this speed, in these woods, he should have tripped many times by now.

  Then they’d reached this field.

  James had stuck out his arm to stop Sam from running forward. “Wait. Sam.” He’d scanned in all directions, as if making sure the coast was clear, but then, instead of pushing ahead, James collapsed onto the ground of the forest, his body shaking with laughter that sounded deep and genuine even as it reminded Sam that James was high off his ass right now.

  “You did. A storm. In Bridget’s. Living room.”

  Which, okay, when he’d put it that way, Sam had started laughing, too, even as he’d looked behind them, squinting and trying to listen for any signs that Marshall or the others were chasing them. As far as he could tell, they were safe.

  “They asked for it,” Sam said.

  “I’m sure they did,” James said.

  “No, I mean they literally asked for it—like, ‘what’s the most complicated spell you’ve ever done for convention’?”

  “Fair enough.”

  James was still laughing. He spread out his limbs like he was making a snow angel in the underbrush, and then he closed his eyes and laughed some more.