by March, Lucy
I reached out and poked her cheek with one finger, and she swatted my hand away.
“I’m real,” she said.
I pulled out of her grip. “Look, go away. I know you’re not real. You’re a hallucination, and the trash-can-lid dog was a hallucination, and that guy probably was, too. I’m going to call a doctor, and he’s going to give me drugs that make the whole bunch of you go away.”
Davina stared at me, and took a step back. Good. I went back into the couch cushions and my hands hit something hard and plastic. I pulled it out: the phone. I held it out to her like a weapon, hit the call button. The numbers on the dial pad lit up orange, and I poised my fingers over it to dial …
… but I didn’t have a number to call. I needed the Yellow Pages. Except—crap—it was after five. I wouldn’t be able to make an appointment. Did this qualify as an emergency? Should I call 911?
I looked at Davina. She was either real, and had broken into my house, or she wasn’t, and I was hallucinating. Both possibilities counted as emergencies in my book.
“Nine-one-one it is,” I said, and dialed the 9, but then Davina said, “Don’t do that,” and touched my arm and I wigged out and tossed the phone up into the air. My hands tingled with extreme heat, and I felt dizzy and disoriented.
“Agh!” I yelled. “Don’t do that. You’re freaking me out!”
“Calm down, Olivia,” she said.
“No. I need my phone. I need to call nine-one-one.” I glanced around the floor, looking for where the phone had landed, but I didn’t see it anywhere. I was just registering that I couldn’t recall hearing it fall to the ground when something flew past my head. I swatted at it and looked up to see a small black body floating above my head with bony wings, wisps of electric yellow light circling around it as it flew …
“Bat!” I screamed, pointing, but Davina just stared, watching it fly around. I stared, too, looking closer as it flew in circles overhead. It had bat wings, and a bat body, but on closer inspection, it seemed to be made of some kind of hard plastic.
And there were glowing orange numbers on its chest.
Davina just watched it, smiling as her eyes followed its circular arcs around the room, banging into walls, zooming back, and trying again.
“Oh, Jesus!” I yelled as the thing swooped down at me. I grabbed Davina and used her as a human shield, hiding behind her. “Oh, god, I hate bats!”
Davina angled around and looked at me, her face warm and smiling. “You have been practicing. Good girl.”
I ducked down behind her. “What the hell are you talking about?” I pointed at the bat. “Kill it, kill it!”
“I can’t kill it.” She motioned up toward the bat, her face aglow with joy. “That there isn’t a bat. Bats don’t fly during sunlight. They also don’t have glowing numbers on their bellies, and they aren’t made of plastic. That there”—she pointed to the bat, which bounced blindly off the living room wall and course-corrected into the opposite wall—“is your magic.”
“My what?” I asked.
Davina turned to where I was crouching behind her and pulled me up by my shoulders. She positioned me in front of her and said in my ear, “That’s your magic, baby. Isn’t it beautiful?”
5
Magic. I straightened, breathed in, and felt a hesitant calm wash over me.
Do you believe in magic?
Maybe.
I blinked a few times, and stepped through the open archway into the living room, leaving Davina a few feet behind in the hallway. I watched the bat fly in circles, bouncing off the occasional wall with a hard clink, leaving puffs of plaster behind with every collision. The harsh buzz-buzz-buzz sound of a phone that’s been left off the hook grew stronger as it circled over me, and faded as it moved to the other side of the living room. I glanced down at my hands, still hot and tingly, just like with the trash-can-lid dog, and I came to a sudden, calm realization.
I’d just turned my phone into a bat.
I looked behind me at Davina and pointed. “I did that.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice soft as if talking to a small child. “You did.” She patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. It probably won’t last too long. You got some good juice there, but it’s still early days. We got awhile to go yet before you start to mean some business.”
As if soothed by her voice, the bat slowed a bit. Then, suddenly, its wings pulled in and it jolted into complete stillness.
Then my phone landed, with a lifeless plop, on my couch.
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Davina said. “Such a pretty bat phone.”
There was a tap-tap-tap on my living room window and we both started, but then I released a breath and said, “Oh, hell.” I walked over and pushed the window up. “Hey, Peach.”
Peach pulled her broomstick back into her house. She wrapped her fleece bathrobe around her and said stiffly, “What’s going on in there? I thought I heard screaming.”
“There was a bat in the house.” I glanced at the broken phone on the floor. “It’s gone now.” I looked back at Peach, looking for some kind of regret in her expression; there was none. “Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no problem.”
There was a long silence, and then I said, “Okay, then,” and reached for the window to close it, just as Peach leaned even farther out her window and waved pointedly in Davina’s direction. “Hey, Davina!”
Davina moved in next to me and waved back. “Nice to see you again, Peach.”
Peach turned her smile on me, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I figured you wouldn’t mind, Liv, I gave your aunt my key when I saw her out there earlier this afternoon.”
I nudged Davina with my shoulder and whispered, “Aunt?”
Davina shrugged. “By marriage.”
“I couldn’t very well let her sit outside on your porch all day in this heat,” Peach went on, her eyes shimmering with hurt. “And what a surprise to find out you have an aunt none of us knew anything about.”
I sighed. “Peach, it’s … complicated.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she said. “I’m just your neighbor.”
And then she shut her window and went back inside.
I shut my window and turned to Davina, who was looking through it at Peach’s house.
“Nice girl,” Davina said. “She told me you two were like family. I think that’s nice.”
I held up my hand to get her to be quiet, and amazingly enough, she shut up. In my head, I set the tension with Peach aside; I would deal with that later. For now, I had a dead bat phone to think about. I blinked a few times, indulging myself in a distanced, packed-in-cotton feeling. Something was very, very wrong, and my rational mind (brain tumor!) was beginning to go to war with my gut (magic!) and it was giving me a headache.
“I’m gonna go get my drink.” I turned on my heel toward the kitchen.
“Good idea,” Davina said, and followed me.
I walked into the kitchen, grabbed the scotch she’d poured for me, and downed the rest where I stood.
“Oh, that’s—you’re drinking that fast, baby.” Davina shook her head back and forth, tsking like a metronome. “That is not a good idea.”
I handed her my empty glass. “Another.”
Davina crossed her arms. “No.”
I walked past her, grabbed the bottle of scotch off the counter, whipped the cap off, took a slug, and sputtered for a minute or two as the liquid actively resisted my attempts to swallow it.
“Oh, you’re gonna regret that,” Davina said under her breath.
I angled my head to look at her. “Am I going to die? Are you, like, an angel of death or something? Coming to get me? And the brain tumor that’s killing me is giving me hallucinations? Because that makes sense. Kinda.”
Davina took a moment to form her response. “You know what this is. Deep down, you know. But I’ll tell you, you keep drinking like that, and you’re gonna wish you were dead in the morning.”
I took another swig. Wasn’t so bad this time. My shoulders were starting to relax, and the sharp edges around the memories of the aluminum dog and the bat phone seemed to dull. A little.
“Not a brain tumor,” I said. “So, I’m crazy, then?”
“No,” she said, the very soul of patience. “You’re magic.”
I ignored her. “Hallucinations seem like they’d be chemical, though, right? I mean, maybe there’s some kind of antipsychotic pill I can take—”
“It’s all real,” Davina said softly, and I centered my focus on her. She really was beautiful, and she seemed like a basically nice person, gym sock of death notwithstanding.
“Definitely a brain tumor,” I said quietly.
Davina raised a brow. “What?”
“You’re not real. You can’t be—ow!”
I whipped my arm away from her, rubbing the spot on my bicep where she’d pinched me. Hard.
“I’m real,” she said.
“And mean.” I rubbed my arm some more. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”
“Good. It’ll stand as proof that I’m real, and we won’t be wasting any more time on this foolishness. You need to get with the program fast, because we do not have time for a mental breakdown right now. Give me that bottle.” She reached her hand out for the bottle, but I pulled it back by my shoulder, out of her reach. She huffed in frustration and dropped her hand. “Stop playing games; you obviously cannot drink worth a damn.”
I hugged the scotch to my chest. “My brain tumor, my bottle.”
And then I thought about my mother and her brain tumor. Her death, which had been extended and heartbreaking and terrifying. And even though I knew—or suspected, anyway—that I didn’t really have a brain tumor, that what I was going through was not quite that mundane or straightforward, my stomach flipped inside, anyway, because the imagining of your own impending death brings with it both terror and a dose of clarity.
“I’ve got something I have to do.” I put the bottle down on the counter and started toward the kitchen door.
“Baby?”
I walked out of the kitchen. Davina didn’t say anything, but I heard her light footsteps trailing me through the hallway, out the front door …
… and toward Tobias’s apartment.
*
Five minutes later, just as I was turning the corner onto Rosewood Lane, Davina caught up to me.
“Olivia?” she said, huffing as she hurried to match her pace with mine. “Where are we going, exactly?”
I turned the corner onto Rosewood. “It’s not far.”
“What’s not far?”
We walked the three blocks down Rosewood Lane in silence until I got to Tobias’s apartment building on the corner of Main Street. It was a huge Victorian, painted lavender with pale yellow trim and divided into four apartments, one for each level, including the attic. Seven people living in roughly the same amount of space I occupied all by myself.
“What’s here?” Davina asked. I darted up the porch steps, found the button labeled SHOOP, and lay on it.
“Who paints a house purple?” she asked, and I shot her a look. She met my glance, her eyes widened, and she said, “I mean, pink is completely within the realm of acceptable house colors, but purple…”
Tobias came down the inside steps to open the front door. He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweats and even in my compromised state, I felt twin surges of happiness and dread. For his part, he seemed really happy to see me there, which twisted that mixed-signal knife even more. He waved at me through the glass, then opened the door.
“Hey.” He leaned against the doorjamb and looked down at me, his smile wide and genuine. “What’s up?”
“I turned a phone into a bat.”
His face registered something and he sniffed. “Liv? You didn’t accidentally fall in a vat of scotch again, did you?”
“Not accidentally.” I stepped aside and grabbed Davina’s arm, pulling her up next to me. “Do you see this woman?”
Tobias’s eyes landed on Davina, and cooled a bit. “Oh, yeah. Chocolate Belgian waffles, right?”
“That’s me.” Davina’s voice was flat and unamused.
“Okay, so you see her?” I asked. “She’s all … real, and everything?”
“I see her.” Tobias focused on me, the distant expression in his face morphing into concern. “You okay?”
“Could still be a tumor,” I muttered.
“It’s not a tumor,” Davina said.
“Well, of course you’d say that,” I said.
Tobias kept his eyes on Davina for a moment longer, then turned to me, putting his hands on both my shoulders. “Liv? You okay?”
“No,” I said. “I turned a phone into a bat.”
“We’ve had a few drinks.” Davina reached her hand out to him. “I’m Davina Granville. Liv’s aunt.”
Tobias held my eye for a moment before reaching out to take her hand. “Nice to meet you. Tobias Shoop.”
“Davina’s the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee Champion, University of Louisiana, 1981.” I busted out into giggles. That seemed really funny to me all of a sudden.
“Yeah. You’re cut off.” Tobias put his hand on my elbow and pulled me inside, then held the door open for Davina and jerked his head toward his apartment in invitation. “Come on. I’ll make you guys some coffee.”
“I think I’m gonna go on home,” Davina said. “I’ve got some things to take care of. She should be okay with you, for tonight. You’ll keep her safe?”
Tobias hesitated for a second, then said, “Yeah.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Liv,” Davina said, then disappeared into the dusk.
Tobias shut the door, double-checked that it was locked and turned to look at me, his eyes sharp and sober. “Liv?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the other day. The thing with Stacy, and … you know.” I rolled my eyes. “Just everything before that. I don’t want us to be mad at each other anymore.”
He hesitated for a bit, watching me. I stayed frozen, barely breathing, waiting for him to just say something, damnit. But after all that hesitation, he just said, “Come on upstairs and I’ll make you some coffee.”
He stepped back in the foyer to let me by, and I led the way up the stairwell to his apartment. I’d been there a few times, although usually we hung out at my place because it was bigger. It was one long open room, with finished walls all the way up to the top where they met in a steep angle, and dark-stained support beams spanning across overhead. Four window seats sat in the cutout windows on each side of the length, and bookcases filled every bit of wall space between them. At the north end was a wall that separated his bedroom and bathroom from the big kitchenette, living room, and dining area. All told, maybe eight hundred square feet. The perfect amount of space for one person. Or two.
He grabbed a blanket off the back of his couch and wrapped it around my shoulders, then sat me down. The couch was really ugly, some kind of plain brown corduroy thing, but it was so soft and welcoming that I sank into it, sighing. Then he went to the kitchenette. I stared out the window at the streetlights while the coffee brewed, and it seemed like just seconds later when he was holding out a mug to me. Possibly, I may have nodded off for a minute.
I took the mug and held it under my nose, breathing in the comforting scent. Tobias sat across from me on the old shipping trunk he used for a coffee table, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked at me.
We sat in silence for a while, and he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk before.”
I snorted and looked up. “It’s been that kind of a week.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on me. “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
I let my eyes drop to the floor. “Nothing’s going on.” Except that I might be crazy. Or possibly dying.
Or worse.
“You know you can tell me, right?” he said. “Whatever’s happening to you, no matter how cr
azy it sounds. I’ll believe you.”
I thought about that for a bit. Reversing the situation, would I believe him if he told me that his fairy godmother had shown up and given him magical powers that made him turn household objects into living critters?
No. But then, I wasn’t as good a person as he was. Still …
“Nothing’s going on,” I repeated, meeting his eye steadily.
He went quiet for a moment, then stood up. “Come on.”
I looked up at him. “We’re going somewhere?”
He jerked his head toward his kitchenette. “I’m gonna feed you before you puke eighty-proof all over my couch.”
I glanced back at the couch as he grabbed my arm and pulled me up. “Yeah, I don’t think anything’s going to make that couch worse.”
He led me to the kitchen island counter, where I sat on a stool. He moved around the kitchen, grabbing flour and eggs and oranges and something from the spice rack, and it looked like dancing, his movements were so smooth. I had watched him cook at work, and he was always in command, moving fast and lithe, but at home, he cooked like it was fun. He smiled and teased me and it felt like it had always been, the two of us comfortable in our little bubble where we were always us and nothing would ever change.
“Okay,” he said as he drizzled the hot syrup over the tops of the two plates of waffles, “these are cinnamon orange Belgians with an amaretto pecan caramel sauce. It’s my own recipe, so if you hate it, lie.”
He placed the plate in front of me, and I looked up at him.
“Waffles? Really?”
He put a fork in my hand. “The best you’ve ever had, yeah.”
I raised the fork, and could see Tobias watching me with a big smile out of the corner of my eye. I cut off a bite, put it on the fork, and then hesitated.
“Something wrong?” Tobias asked.
“No.” I lowered the fork down an inch, then another. The warring voices inside my head said, You’ve already had eighteen hundred calories today, and that was before the liquor, and the other said, oh my god they smell so gooooooood …
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I white-knuckled the fork. “I’ve given up waffles. Well, most food, really, but specifically waffles.”