One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  It is the opposite of who I am right now, this idea he has of me. My heart twists a little, thinking about the big space between who he thinks I am and who I am.

  It keeps growing and growing.

  Or maybe it was always this size, but I was trying to pretend it was not.

  “Right,” I say. “Yes. I need—I wanted to catch magic somehow now. I wanted to try again. For you.”

  “You have to try for you,” Dad says. He reaches through the window and grabs my shoulder. In the front seat, Lyle watches. I have watched Lyle watching Dad my whole life. I was watching Dad too, but for different things.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Maybe that was the problem. Too focused on other people,” Dad says.

  I nod. Lyle nods. Dad jerks his head back to tell me to climb in, and I do, and we drive, but I keep hearing that sentence in my head. Then I hear more of his sentences in my head. The things he says that sound so sure and solid. They always have. Magic knows. Magic gives you what you deserve. You are Little Luck. Magic is the most important thing. Don’t try. But also be great. But also you are great, and magic will see it. You are special. You are mine. We are the same.

  He never says I think or maybe or probably.

  Wendell Anders is always sure.

  But I am Rose Alice Anders. And maybe I’ve never actually been sure of anything.

  “How do you know?” I say, when we are pulling into the lake’s parking lot. The wheels hit some ice, but Dad knows how to steer on something slippery, so it barely feels scary for more than a second.

  “Know what, Little Luck?” he asks, and I wish I could tell him to stop calling me that, the way I asked my mother to stop calling me Baby Girl a few years ago when it was getting embarrassing.

  Little Luck is worse than embarrassing.

  It feels almost like something I better become, something I have failed at and have one more chance to get right. And that one more chance is right now.

  “How do you know how magic works?” I ask. “How do you know all the things you know? We don’t learn them exactly that way at school. And some families think—”

  “How much magic do those families have?” Dad asks. He parks, his arm working a fraction too forcefully to stop the car. The car jerks just a little.

  “We have the most magic,” Lyle says, and I know he wants me to stop, but I can’t.

  “How do you know that of all the people in Belling Bright, you are meant to be the most magical?” I ask. It’s a question I didn’t know I’d wanted to ask my whole life. A question that Ginger asked once, a few days after her own father died. She had a lot of questions that day. Why my dad’s magic couldn’t save her dad. Why her dad had to die. Why magic existed, if it couldn’t fix anything real. I kept stumbling around the answers, never quite finding one that fit.

  “Never mind,” Ginger had said at last. “None of it makes sense anyway. Magic isn’t the answer to everything.”

  “Yeah,” I’d said, and I’d been wanting to ask Dad about it ever since.

  “I know I’m meant to be the most magical because I am the most magical,” Dad says. He looks at me very hard. Then at Lyle, who is looking right back at him.

  “But why?” I ask.

  “Because I know how to use it,” Dad says. He’s speaking slowly, but his hands are tight on the wheel and I should have asked this when we were out of the car.

  “Not always,” I say.

  “Rose, let’s go look at the lake,” Lyle says.

  “What does that mean, ‘not always’?” Dad asks.

  I shake my head. I said it wrong. Or I said it right, but I didn’t want to say it at all.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” Lyle says.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” I echo. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  Dad nods. When Dad’s angry, it’s big. But he takes his time getting there. It’s why I got mad at Maddy when she said she heard my dad had a temper. A temper means you are quick to anger. That’s not my father at all. That’s not him right now. He takes a big breath, like he’s resetting the whole day, and by the time he’s done exhaling, he’s getting out of the car and opening our doors.

  “Magic matters,” Dad says, like he has a million times before. “And it will find you, if you’re ready for it, Rose.”

  I nod.

  “Are you ready?” he asks.

  I wasn’t, and I’m not, and I also maybe don’t want to be. But Lyle is looking cold and nervous and the lake is looking quiet and strange and I want one last gasp of being Little Luck before I have to go back to being the girl with one jar of magic, so I nod again. “I’m ready,” I say, and it’s a lie. And it has always been a lie.

  Twenty-Three

  The snow crunches under our feet, and Dad hums because even with everything that’s gone wrong, TooBlue Lake is still his happy place. Lyle and I walk a few feet behind him, and I can hear how deep Lyle’s breaths are. It’s his nervous breathing, a rhythm I learned on our rooftop. A sound that I’m so used to, it’s a little like my own heartbeat.

  “You’re going to capture something, right?” he whispers.

  “How would I know?” I ask.

  “Rose, you have to. You have to show him—”

  “You think I didn’t try last time?”

  “Even one more jar,” Lyle says. “Two. And he’ll go back to—it will all go back to the way it was.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I don’t hear it.”

  “You have to,” he says. “Take your time. Listen.”

  Dad keeps rushing ahead, unfazed by the emptiness, by the fact that we aren’t really supposed to be here. He takes steps like he’s done this before, and I guess he has, like the time he came here with me and Ginger.

  That didn’t seem like the first time either, though.

  He takes a jar from his pocket and flies it through the air, making a whooping sound when he catches something. It’s so easy for him. He does another, pulling it through the snow. Smiles at what’s inside. Two more jars of magic, just like that.

  Lyle and I stop. Lyle listens. I pretend to. I was always pretending. I was pretending to be the Little Luck Dad told me I was. Because he made it sound so true. But every time he said that magic knows what it’s doing, I knew that maybe it didn’t. And I pretended that I didn’t have that doubt. Doubt and wondering why so much magic found him, if it really knew everything.

  Because my father is big and brave and booming. He is funny and strange and charming. He makes serious people laugh and he makes silly people think and he made me feel like I could be anything I wanted to be.

  Except maybe he mostly made me feel like I could only be what he wanted me to be.

  My father is a hundred wonderful things.

  But he is also a few not-wonderful things.

  And didn’t magic see those not-wonderful things?

  “I’ve never heard anything,” I say now to Lyle. “Not once. I’ve never heard anything or felt anything. I’ve never really been so sure about any of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Lyle asks. Maybe it was hard, having a lucky younger sister. But it will be even harder to have an unlucky one.

  “I don’t think I’m meant for magic,” I say. “Like Zelda. Like her family.”

  “You’re not Zelda and her family,” Lyle says. “You’re my family. You’re ours.”

  Dad catches another jar of magic. This can’t be allowed. We came here for me to catch up, but Dad doesn’t need anything else.

  “Of course,” I say. “I know.” I take out a jar, because the look on Lyle’s face says I have to try. But when I try to twist off the top a familiar pain zaps my wrist.

  “Oh!” I say.

  Lyle looks at me holding my wrist, rubbing it with my thumb. “Your wrist’s acting up again?”

  “It’s probably going to snow,” I say.

  “Come on, you two, hurry up!” Dad says. “There’s magic to be caught!”

  My fingers are star
ting to feel like they’re going to freeze off, and I don’t like how my words have turned to icicles in the air, hanging over us. You never know how long an icicle’s going to stay around, and I’m ready for all of it to melt, right now. I’m ready for the seasons to change.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Her wrist,” Lyle says. Dad stops and takes a deep breath before turning back to us. He doesn’t like when we give up, but he knows when my wrist is hurting I have trouble thinking about anything else. It’s a mysterious, occasional bone-deep pain that can only be cured with a heating pad and the passage of time. It makes it hard to make a sandwich or to play softball or to draw. It makes it hard to open a jar and swing it through the air, looking for magic.

  “Can you try for one jar?” Dad asks. “Let one jar of magic find you?” He looks like a little kid. Like someone’s little brother who wants a scoop of ice cream or a trip to the toy store. He doesn’t look like Wendell Anders at all.

  “Okay,” I say. “I can try to let it come to me.”

  So we try. Lyle and I. We sit in the snow and wait for the magic to find us. Dad runs back and forth across the beach, catching jar after jar, breezy, bright magic, and sooty gray magic and magic that looks like it would burn you if you stuck your hand inside.

  Seventeen jars of magic that I’m not sure are even allowed. Each one caught so easily, so wordlessly, that I only know one thing for sure.

  He has done this before. He hasn’t been following the rules the rest of Belling Bright follows.

  When Dad comes back to us, he’s sweaty and full-backpacked. His cheeks are ruddy and he’s proud.

  “What’d you get?” he asks. He looks at our hands. They are empty. The magic didn’t come to us. Not to me. Not to Lyle. Not to our open jars. “Nothing?” he asks, his voice a little louder, his neck a little redder.

  “I hear it,” Lyle says. “I do hear it.”

  Dad looks at me. But I’m tired and my wrist aches and I am trying to understand why Dad is allowed to catch seventeen extra jars of magic on January 4 and why he seemed so comfortable doing it. I am trying to do too many other things to manage lying as well.

  “I’ve never heard it,” I say. “Even the magic on New Year’s Day—I needed Lyle for that. I’m not—I’m not Little Luck. I’m not sure I’m even meant for magic.”

  Dad doesn’t say a word. He stomps toward the car, and for a moment I think maybe Lyle and I will stay here, on the shores of TooBlue Lake, where it’s cold but probably warmer than the car with my father will be.

  We run to catch up with him. To fix it. Because we have to fix it.

  “I’m—” I start, thinking I’ll apologize and see where that gets me. But he doesn’t let me finish.

  “You are Rose Alice Anders,” Dad says, and I guess in a different voice it might sound like a pep talk, but it comes out as a snarl. “Little Luck. We are the Anders family. And you will not embarrass me like this. Your mother will not— I worked hard to be where we are, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. That jar of magic you caught—we will assume it is the most magical jar of magic in all of Belling Bright. In all of the world. Because that’s who you are meant to be. I won’t hear any different.”

  “But I told you—” I say, even though my brain is telling me to stop talking immediately. Dad’s voice only gets louder and surer.

  “I told you!” he says. If we weren’t at the deserted lake, maybe someone would hear, would ask if everything’s okay. They have asked before.

  But we are alone and I am alone and my jar of magic is alone and nothing is right, it only keeps getting more wrong. “Not another word. You work things out with your friends. You shape up. You be who you are meant to be. Which is magical.”

  I look to Lyle for what to do or say. But he only gets in the car. In the backseat with me instead of in the front with Dad. It’s the best he can do for me, and I know that. He hangs his head. I bet he wishes he could do more, but what’s the point of all our wishing? This is today. This is our father. This is the inside of the car. There’s nothing to be done about any of it.

  We don’t speak the whole way home. Dad takes on turns like they’re his enemies and we slip and slide over the ice. I hang on to Lyle’s arm and wish as loud as I can in my head for my father to slow down. But Lyle’s giving me shut up looks, so I stay quiet and Lyle stays quieter, and Dad puts his foot even harder on the gas, and we go even faster, and nothing, not even my own father, is safe anymore.

  I look out the window as we go, but I look extra hard when we pass Zelda’s family’s rest stop. I’m pretty sure I see Zelda and Lucy sitting out front, sticking their tongues out of their mouths, smiling at the taste of snow. In Belling Bright, kids make the snow taste like strawberries or ice cream or Swiss cheese. But Zelda and Lucy know the taste of snow is perfect because it only tastes like cold, like winter, like the promise of a snow day, like the wonder at white covering the earth.

  Some things are better without magic, I think.

  Maybe even some people.

  Twenty-Four

  The snow is gone by Friday. Some jar of magic has turned the season into spring. I would have liked a few more weeks of sweaters and mittens and hot chocolate. Maybe seasons stay as long as they’re meant to stay and we shouldn’t mess with them. Maybe magic isn’t the only thing that happens for a reason.

  Ginger, Maddy, and another girl named Layla all have the same bright pink streaks in their hair. Ginger has a new gray dress that looks like it’s made of something soft and special. I want to touch it. Maddy’s skin looks shinier. Or rosier. Or something-er. They all get A’s on their math homework. I’m pretty sure they even all smell the same, like apples and vanilla, and that they are, somehow, the same height.

  “You grew,” I say to Ginger after we get our math homework back. I’m not talking to Ginger, but the words come out anyway. I try to say them in my head, but I’m not very good at keeping things in my head. It would have been a good thing to use magic for. Magic to make my mouth slow down, to make me more careful. Maybe if I had that kind of magic, Ginger and I could be ourselves again.

  Maybe, with that kind of magic, my family would be okay.

  “I never would have used magic to make me taller,” I say, because I’m not about to say all the other things.

  “I didn’t,” Ginger says, but I know she’s lying because she whispers it, and she always whispers when she’s lying. Ginger hates lying, so she does it really quietly.

  “Come on,” I say.

  “You can’t control what kind of magic you get in your jars,” Ginger says, which isn’t exactly her saying she did in fact use magic to grow, but it kind of really is her saying that.

  “You did your hair too.”

  It’s common for the youngest capturers to get the silliest magic. That’s how it works. That’s what we’re meant for, I guess.

  Then I remember I don’t even have the silliness, I only have my one jar of practically nothing.

  That’s all I was meant for, I think. I deserve less than the silliest, smallest things. I am almost worthless.

  “We always said we’d do our hair,” Ginger says. “If we got the right kind of magic.”

  “Right,” I say. “But I didn’t do it.” I try to make my back as straight as I can, in case Ginger can somehow see all the things I’m thinking. There is magic that helps you know what someone is feeling. It doesn’t usually find someone as young as us, but Ginger is looking at me with a strange new look on her face, so who knows.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I figured you can’t. Unless you think that’s the kind of magic that’s in your jar?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I just wouldn’t.”

  “So. Right. I have more than one jar. So I can try—”

  “You can do anything you want, I guess,” I say.

  It seems like a hundred years ago that Ginger and I made our list of the top one hundred things to do with our magic. Get matching pink hair was somewhere around number twen
ty-two. After we magick ourselves to Bermuda and before magically fixing Lyle’s bike.

  Lots of kids open their jars of magic and find that what they’d hoped would make them taller is actually a magic for growing trees, or that magic they thought was for getting a beautiful singing voice was actually for turning up the volume on someone else’s voice.

  “You get the magic you’re meant for,” I say to Ginger now. “I guess you’re just made for superficial magic.” I shrug like it’s no big deal, and like it’s not a kind of mean thing to say. I wait for it to hurt her, but I don’t think it does.

  “Maddy said you’d be this way,” Ginger says. “Bitter.”

  “I’m not bitter!” I say, but it comes out like a whine.

  “We got what we were meant for,” Ginger says, nodding her head toward Maddy, who is walking our way. “And you got what you were meant for.” Her mouth curls into a little bit of a smile. Maybe her eyes look sad, maybe her eyes sort of miss me or wish one of us would stop being mean. But her mouth is happy to smile at Maddy and pretend I’m not there. She grabs Maddy’s hand and the two of them walk toward their new best friend, Layla, and they all brush their fingers through their pink-streaked hair and pretend I don’t exist.

  I hate the way she’s acting. But I hate the way I’m acting even more.

  Twenty-Five

  A Story About the Friends I Used to Have

  Six months ago, Ginger, Maddy, and I played Truth or Dare at Maddy’s mom’s house. She’d invited us over for a sleepover, and Ginger didn’t want to go, but I thought it might be nice to swim in her pool, and sometimes I thought Maddy said something funny or smart or a little different than anything Ginger and I would have come up with, and I liked that.

  Plus Maddy’s mom let us watch whatever we wanted to on TV and sometimes made cookies and gave them to us fresh out of the oven. No one really cooked at my house. And at Ginger’s house there was only ever chicken fingers. I like chicken fingers and all, but not every weekend.

  The three of us sat in Maddy’s bedroom with a plate of cookies. Our hair was wet from the pool and the smell of chlorine was coming off every surface of our skin. The whole room smelled like chocolate and pool chemicals and sunscreen and I took out my sketch pad and started drawing us. I wanted to draw the way summer felt, the way friendship felt, the way it felt for it to be ten at night but not be in pajamas and for our hair to still be wet and to have our knees touching and the day never-ending.