“So, what?” Sam said. “You’re saying we have to meet even less often than we already are?”
“I’m saying that instead of the whole group text thing, maybe we should put a standing meeting or two on the calendar, and whoever can make it can make it, and whoever can’t, can’t.”
“That makes sense to me,” Amber said—super unhelpfully, Sam thought. “That’s how we do it in soccer.”
“Yeah, but if you miss a soccer practice, don’t you have to run wind sprints or something the next day?” Sam said.
“Sure.”
“But we don’t have a coach to answer to,” Denver said. “And Delia does already seem to have her convention categories down, so it’s not like the group will suffer if she misses a practice or two.”
“Except that Delia is our best teacher,” Sam said, trying and failing to not sound like he was whining—to sound instead like he was paying Delia a compliment and not fighting her in front of everyone.
“What do you think, James?” Delia said. “You’ve been pretty busy, too.”
“Yeah. I mean, whatever the rest of the group wants. I can go either way.”
“Two practices a week would actually be more than we’ve had the past couple weeks, and I definitely need more practice in my categories,” Denver said.
Delia looked pleased. “All right, then. It’s settled. If we want to say Tuesdays and Thursdays, I should be able to do at least one of those days next week.”
“Same,” James said. “The rest of this week is out for me, too.”
“Let’s start next week, then,” Amber said, all chipper-like, as if it wasn’t obvious she was saying she didn’t want to meet with Denver and Sam alone later this week.
Which, to be clear, was fine by Sam. He wouldn’t have met just the three of them, either.
What would be the point?
It wouldn’t be a Fascinators practice.
Chapter 14
WITHOUT FASCINATORS PRACTICES TO LOOK FORWARD to, Sam’s days at school started to feel—put politely—like a miserable slog. Lunches were awkward, with Amber now joining them every day and dividing their conversations in two just like she had their practice. Kevin had told the whole sophomore class about the seismic fight at his house party, and somehow Sam was implicated in the assholery along with James, so he felt even more non grata as a persona in his classes than he normally did.
Worst of all, the big worries of senior year suddenly seemed much bigger. Did he definitely still want to go to UGA if it wasn’t to be James’s roommate, or should he be seriously considering all these emails from other colleges, weighing his options? Would these other schools require SAT scores higher than the eleven eighty he’d gotten last year, and if so, would he need to find a tutor who could help him improve?
In his vision of how this year was supposed to go, this was the time when he and James would get to gloat about having their lives already sorted, while everyone around them freaked the eff out. Admittedly, that’s where the vision ended, but Sam had never doubted that with James in his corner, other visions would just sort of follow very organically from there.
Now, with that vision in jeopardy, Sam found himself trying to pay more attention in his classes, giving each assignment the additional weight of wondering whether it represented something he could do for the rest of his life. There were only so many careers in which a person could get by on magic and magic alone, and Sam had never kidded himself that he was good enough at magic to do any of them.
Maybe he would become a real estate agent. Pick up the business from his mom. Live in Friedman forever.
Die alone.
On Friday afternoon, bored and depressed at the prospect of another weekend with nothing but homework to look forward to, Sam texted Denver during his last period class to ask if he wanted to go see a movie that night.
Oh! Sorry, already have plans.
Of course Denver had plans tonight. Denver was outgoing, funny, charming. Three months into living in Friedman, he probably had so many friends that he had more plans than he knew what to do with. For some reason, he’d liked Sam, but Sam may have totally screwed that up, too.
No worries! Sam replied. I’m around all weekend if you want to hang.
Cool, Denver texted. Then, the three dots of a further reply kept appearing and disappearing, like maybe he was typing with his phone under his desk or else thinking hard about what to say. It turned out to be the latter. Actually, Arjun is visiting this weekend. Long story. But definitely another time!
No worries! Sam replied again, realizing too late that it was exactly what he’d responded last time. To mix things up, he tried to find the perfect emoji to show that it was all good and no big deal at all that Denver’s ex was in town, but after staring at each individual emoji and deciding that he hated all of them, Sam finally gave up and let the conversation go.
He texted Delia.
Hey! Know you’re busy today, but text me if you have any free time and want to hang out this weekend.
He added the man-doing-cartwheel emoji. Maybe that one wasn’t so bad.
Sorry, Delia replied after a few minutes. My brother’s got so much stuff! Will probably take all weekend.
Um. What?
Thought it was your sister?
Again, Sam stared at the text window as the three dots of doom appeared and disappeared. Did Delia have an ex in town, too? Or maybe she was planning to be the third wheel for Denver and Arjun?
My sister’s the one moving. But my brother has a lot of his stuff at her place, because he has no storage at his apt. So we have to move it with the rest of her stuff. So much stuff!
Delia added a smiley-cry emoji and a skull emoji, and those, more than any of the rest of her overly detailed explanation, proved to Sam that she was hiding something.
So much stuff indeed.
Good luck with the move! I hope you’ve picked out some good spells to make things easier.
You know me, Delia said.
Sam gave it an hour after he got home, halfway pretending to do other things, before hopping back into his car and driving over to Delia’s sister’s apartment.
Sam was fully prepared to find Delia there, packing up a storm, loading a U-Haul. If that was the case, he was also fully prepared to say that he’d been so bored at home that he wanted to come help with the move, even if that meant he would actually have to follow through with the offer.
He halfway expected to find no one home, in which case he would drop these dark thoughts, assume that the family was already en route with a load of furniture, and gladly go home, never to speak of this again.
What he truly, sincerely did not want to happen was exactly what happened when he got to Katherine’s door. Namely, Katherine opened the door, looking very surprised to see Sam, and revealing behind her an apartment that showed no signs of going anywhere soon.
“Everything okay?” Katherine said suspiciously. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Sam.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Sam said. “I thought Delia said she was coming over to your place to help you move, but now that I think about it, she actually said it was your brother who was moving.”
Katherine sized him up, a look of pity on her face.
“Far be it from me to get my sister in trouble, but Tom finished his move two weekends ago. I’d been storing a lot of my stuff at his old place, so now my apartment’s a bit of a mess, or I’d invite you in.”
“My bad, my bad,” Sam said. He couldn’t believe it. Delia had cared enough to make the story 49 percent true, but as he’d feared, she was 51 percent lying. “That must be what she said. I left my cell phone at school, or I would text her.”
“Right,” Katherine said. “Well, tell her hello from me when you see her.”
She closed the door.
Sam felt winded. Felt sick to his stomach.
It was like the time he got food poisoning from a gas station hot dog, and then, instead of waiting it out, he had tried a spell h
e found online that was supposed to cure food poisoning, but actually seemed to have the effect of tripling food poisoning.
One of his best friends had lied to him.
Had possibly been lying to him on an ongoing basis.
In the span of a second, his mind went to all the dark places he worked hard not to let it go. The places where he wasn’t talented enough to deserve Delia’s friendship. The places where James wanted so badly to reciprocate Sam’s feelings, but he couldn’t, because at the end of the day, Sam wasn’t whatever enough. (Masculine? Cute? Religious? What?)
These places looked like memories, except they were his memories from the perspectives of others. They looked like hypothetical parties where everyone was having the best time without him—maybe all of them were somewhere together right this moment, uncovering the true secret of magic and the spirit world, now that he finally wasn’t weighing them down.
Without even really thinking about what he was doing, he got in his car and drove over to Delia’s neighborhood. He parked on the corner where he could see her house, turned off his car, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until finally, a little after seven, Delia pulled up and rolled into her driveway, and Sam got out of his car and started walking toward her.
“Delia!” he called out before she reached her front door. She turned around on the stoop with a bewildered expression on her face.
“Sam? Are you okay? You look terrible.”
He paused in the driveway, beside her car.
“Where were you?”
“I just came back from my sister’s. We finished the first load in record time.”
Sam scoffed, but it came out sounding more like a choked sob.
“Sam, what’s wrong?”
“I was just at your sister’s, Delia. She said to tell you hello.”
Delia’s face drained of color.
“You . . . what? I mean, why? Are you spying on me?”
“You’re the only person in the world who’s as bad of a liar as I am,” Sam said.
The color quickly returned to Delia’s face, until it flushed a bright, angry red.
“You did spy on me!”
“I don’t exactly feel good about it, let me tell you.”
“Oh, that makes me feel a hundred percent better, thank you so much.”
“Delia, where were you? Were you ditching me?”
Delia sighed and rubbed her temples, but Sam refused to be deterred.
“Were you?”
“No, Sam, I was not ditching you. Not everything is about you, you know.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I was at the warehouse, Sam. There. Are you happy?”
“The warehouse? But those people are horrible, Delia. What were you doing there?”
“They’re not horrible,” Delia said immediately. “They’re powerful.”
“They threw a brick through my window.”
“Only because James stole their book.”
“They literally invaded our brains.”
“Because they wanted their book back. Tell me, Sam, have you had a single vision since we gave them back their book?”
“Oh, yes, that’s very fair of them. Very generous.”
“You don’t get it, Sam. How could you? You’ve never had to work a day in your life. Your parents give you everything you want, as soon as you want it, and they never make you do anything you don’t want to do. Shit. They have a college fund saved so you can keep on doing whatever you want to do for a long time.”
“Not go to Pinnacle. I couldn’t get in there with all the money in the world.”
“These people can get me into Pinnacle, Sam. Hell, with these people, I hardly need to go to Pinnacle at all. That’s how powerful they are. They know things that the undergrads at Pinnacle only wish they were learning.”
Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was her choice if she wanted to go to college or not, of course, but Pinnacle had been the next step in Delia’s dream life for years. Every dollar she earned, every test she aced, it had been Pinnacle, Pinnacle, Pinnacle. It would have to take some powerful magic indeed to push her off that track—and so suddenly. If it were anyone else, Sam might have expected the work of some legit mind-control magic. But not Delia. Delia was far too strong-willed to have anyone else make up her mind for her.
“I don’t think James is going to like the fact that you’re hanging out with these creeps.”
“If you tell James or anyone else about where I was, I will tell James that you’re madly in love with him.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’m serious, Sam. If you tell anyone, our friendship is officially over.”
Sam didn’t know what he’d expected to happen, waiting in his car for this confrontation. But it wasn’t this. Never in a million years or with a million spells would he have seen this coming.
“Okay, I won’t,” he said. “Jeez. Will you at least tell me what you’ve been doing there?”
Delia paused to consider.
“I’m sorry. But I can’t.”
“Oh.”
“And even if I could, I wouldn’t, because you spied on me. And that’s a dick thing to do, Sam.”
“Yeah, but—okay.”
“Anyway, I can’t.”
“Okay.”
“Bye, Sam.”
And then Sam went back to his car, and drove home, and cried.
Chapter 15
ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHEN THEY GOT BACK FROM church, Sam’s parents could tell right away that he was still in the funk that had been following him all weekend. He was curled up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket so that only his face and his feet were peeking out. The TV show he’d been streaming had paused at some point in the indeterminate past to ask if he was still watching, and it was one of the rare times when he wasn’t, really.
His mom stood over him and looked him in the eye.
“I think I know what you need. Come on, go take a shower and get dressed. We’re going to Qatl.”
“Oh my God, no.”
“Yes. I’m not asking. You haven’t been in two months, and I can tell. You are officially spiraling. It’s coming off you in waves.”
It was true—she looked like the waves of his mood were actually rocking her on her feet. Feeling things this way was the price she paid for being an empath—it was the reason, she said, that she could never be a therapist.
“None of my friends will be there. They’re all in college now.”
“You can make new friends. That’s the whole point of Qatl.”
“Can we please stop saying Qatl?”
“What? That’s what it’s called.”
“It’s called Q-Atl. Queer Atlanta. When you say ‘Qatl’ it always sounds like ‘coddle,’ and that only makes it feel more like a daycare than it already does.”
But even as he was saying it, Sam got off the couch and headed for the shower. The truth was, he was already happy that his mom had made the strong suggestion. Sam had been going to Q-Atl meetings off and on since sixth grade, having come out right around when the group was forming. His mom had even helped the director with the paperwork to buy their building after an early online fundraiser had gone viral. The group was almost like a family at this point.
As with family, spending time with them sometimes felt like an obligation. Sam hardly brought up the desire to go anymore unless his mom expressed a desire to go first. Unlike in sixth grade, he had close friends at home now, and Q-Atl wasn’t really a great place to meet a boyfriend, although Sam had tried it once. (This had amounted to the few awkward dates freshman year with Eliot from North Georgia—dates that included their moms, sitting on the other side of a FroYo place, then on the other side of an Applebee’s, then on the other side of a movie theater. The mom thing aside, it was just hard to get anything off the ground with a shy guy who lived that far away—all texting, no chemistry. It didn’t help that, at t
he time, Sam had already begun falling for James. The two of them definitely had chemistry.)
Today, the parking lot for the Q-Atl building was surprisingly crowded.
“Must be the back-to-school crowd,” his mom said.
“You’d think we’d have found a way to cut down on the bullying by now, after all these years.”
Sam’s mom put the car in park and turned to look at him.
“You’re not dealing with that kind of thing anymore, are you?”
“I mean . . .”
“Truly? Still?”
“I think people at Friedman view me as some kind of weird bird that could attack them at any moment. If they can keep me in a cage, it makes them feel safer.”
“Cage?”
“It’s not the best metaphor. I just mean I don’t get outright bullied, but I still don’t feel welcome.”
“That Denver seems nice and welcoming.”
“All right, time to go in,” Sam said, climbing out of the car and leading them into the building, while his mom tried to act like she had no idea what she’d done to cause him to blush like this.
The Q-Atl building—the “head-queerters,” as Sam lovingly called it—was a two-story townhouse, though that was maybe putting it generously, as the buildings on either side were a cell phone store and a Hungry Henry’s. Hanging from the second-story window was a rainbow flag, which had been replaced twice in the years that Sam had been coming here, after the first flag had been stolen and the second one had been vandalized.
The Q-Atl director, Emma, was there in the entryway to greet them. Emma was a white trans woman from Portland with a hearty laugh and a wicked sense of humor, and she personally oversaw the teen group because her background was in counseling homeless youth.
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