One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Maybe this is what capturing magic feels like,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what I meant, except that the night felt good and strange and brand-new.

  I started with Ginger. I drew her long face and short hair and tiny nose and wide smile. I tried to make her hair look wet and her forehead look sweaty. I tried to make her smile look sleepy and her shoulders starting to sunburn. Maddy watched.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re good at that.”

  “Rose is good at everything,” Ginger said.

  “I’m only good at drawing,” I said, laughing. I was very much not good at everything. I wasn’t good at soccer like Ginger or diving like Maddy or being popular like Lyle. I was good at drawing. And magic. Supposedly.

  “Well, you’re really good at drawing,” Maddy said. “Can you draw me next?”

  I did. I added her to the picture of Ginger, sitting right next to her, cross-legged and leaning forward the way Maddy always did. Maddy never looked relaxed. She always looked like she was about to spring or jump or, I guess, dive. I drew her messy, knotted-up ponytail and how her swimsuit was a little too big for her shoulders.

  “Add yourself too!” Maddy said. Ginger sighed. She had seen me draw a hundred million times; she didn’t need to watch me show off now. But I couldn’t help it. I loved the way Maddy’s eyes were all lit up and how she’d point out which details in particular she liked the best. I drew myself in. My short, freckled legs. The big T-shirt I wore over my bathing suit and how the collar was all stretched out. The thick braids I’d quickly woven when we got out of the pool and the little drops of water sliding down my arms every so often from my wet hair.

  “I thought we were playing Truth or Dare,” Ginger said. “I wanted to get a dare.”

  Maddy seemed not to hear her. “Do you know how to draw boys, too?” Maddy asked. She had a sneaky smile and big eyes.

  “I guess so,” I said. I didn’t draw boys ever. I drew me and Ginger. I drew cats with fairy wings and TooBlue Lake and our houses and gardens of wildflowers and enormous birthday cakes with confetti and candles on top. But I didn’t see any reason that I wouldn’t be able to draw boys.

  “How about Evan Dell?” Maddy said.

  I blushed. Evan Dell’s name always made me blush. His eyes did too. And the way he laughed, with his head all the way back.

  “Rose looooooves Evan Dell,” Ginger said.

  “So does Ginger!” I said. Our voices were getting loud, and if we weren’t careful Maddy’s mom would get mad. Or maybe not. Maybe Maddy’s mom didn’t mind us being loud and silly past our bedtime.

  “So do I!” Maddy exclaimed. She stood up when she said it, her hands on her hips like she was proud of it and not embarrassed, and for a minute I wondered what it would be like to be Maddy. I wanted a house with a pool and fresh-baked cookies and a dad who lived in one of the little houses in the center of town, who never got mad. I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t blush when they thought about Evan Dell or any other cute person.

  So I drew. Ginger and Maddy kept correcting the shape of his head, the shade of his hair, the number of freckles on his nose. When I finally had a drawing we could all agree on, we fell asleep in a pile on the floor and woke up itchy and still tired and frizzy-haired and fresh from dreams about Evan Dell and his very blue eyes.

  In the morning, we played Rock, Paper, Scissors for who got to keep the picture of Evan Dell, and Ginger won.

  I didn’t mind. I could draw a hundred pictures of Evan Dell if I wanted to, but there would only be that one perfect sleepover, that one best day of the summer. That one day that felt magical, even though it wasn’t.

  Twenty-Six

  Lunch at the cafeteria is fish sticks for most of us. Some people use their magic to change the fish sticks into turkey dinners and chocolate cakes, and I guess if you only catch silly magic, you can only do silly things. It feels to me like they’re showing off how much magic they have, that they can use it on a random Tuesday at lunch without a second thought.

  “This week will be the worst,” Lyle said on our walk to school. “This will be the most magic, because it’s new and exciting and people can’t help themselves. You’ll see. It will get better soon. By April a lot of them will have used up all their jars.”

  April feels a long way off right now. I’m sitting at a big table all by myself, choking down cold fish sticks, which I’m drenching in mayonnaise to try to make them taste better. It doesn’t really work.

  Even Jamie Ollander with her allegedly dirty hair won’t sit near me. She keeps glancing my way and sort of wincing, like it’s painful to even look at me.

  She caught seven jars of magic this year, so she’s allowed to have a friend or two.

  I’m lost in a moment of swirling my fish stick in mayonnaise and spreading some ketchup on top to see if that will help anything when I hear and feel someone sit down at the far end of the table. Two someones, actually. I look up to see who would dare, and it’s Ginger. I start to smile at her. Then I see who she’s sitting with. More than sitting with. Sitting very, very close to. Holding hands with. Holding hands. Ginger is holding hands with Evan Dell. She’s leaning toward him and she is glancing at me like she wants to be sure I see, and obviously I do, everyone sees, because when someone is holding hands with someone else everyone notices and everyone talks about it and everyone wants to know if it means what we think it means.

  Magic can’t make people fall in love or anything. Dad was always really clear on that. Magic can do a lot of very cool things, but it can’t control other people. It can change the weather and your eyelashes and what you’re having for lunch. It can help you find someone to love. Or someone to be friends with. But it can’t make someone feel something they don’t already feel. It can’t make someone different than who they are on the inside.

  But of course, it can change some of the outside things that maybe Evan Dell likes. Hair and height and clothes and confidence. And Ginger has all of that now. She’s taller, with longer hair and pink highlights and jeans with little hearts on the pockets. But she’s also just so sure of herself. It could be any of those things that is making Evan Dell want to move a piece of pink hair from her face, offer her a drink of his soda, sit alone with her when all his friends are watching and snickering at their table without him.

  I wonder if I was taller and pinker-haired and cooler-clothed, if Evan Dell would be holding my hand. My eyes feel like they want to cry, but I tell them no.

  I can’t stop thinking of the way Evan Dell used to be some boy we could giggle about and all think was cute and now he’s Ginger’s, and now she’s some whole new person that I can’t ever be. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. I didn’t think Evan Dell would ever be anyone but a cute boy I was good at drawing pictures of, and I didn’t think Maddy would ever be anyone but an annoying sort-of-friend we tolerated together, and I didn’t think Ginger and I would ever be anything but best best friends who did everything together.

  The chair I’m sitting in is all cold and metal and these stupid fish sticks are even colder and I’m tired of eating them and pretending it’s all fine.

  “Ginger, you must be so happy you finally got Evan Dell to talk to you,” I say. I don’t mean to say it. I was running through things I could say in my head, and that was one of the things I thought would be satisfying to say and somehow I thought it so hard that I said it out loud.

  Ginger turns as pink as her hair and so does Evan Dell.

  I can see her trying to think of something to say back, something that will embarrass me the way I’ve embarrassed her. Then I see her realize I can’t get any more embarrassed than I’ve already been this week, so she just zips her mouth shut and glares at me.

  I don’t let her glare for long, though. I pick up my tray of soggy, condiment-covered fish sticks and leave that table and my old best friend and her new boyfriend or whatever he is. I’m getting used to storming away. Little Luck never needed to say mean things or stomp her feet or l
eave in a huff, but I’m not Little Luck anymore. I’m Rose Alice Anders, the biggest failure Belling Bright has ever seen, and I have nothing to lose.

  And for one second that feels a little bit okay.

  But only for one second.

  Twenty-Seven

  Zelda’s waiting for me. Maybe that’s not actually what she’s doing, sitting on the bench outside the rest stop, working on a dandelion chain, humming something that sounds made-up. Her hair’s in a big pile on her head and it’s all tangled up so it looks like a bird’s nest, and Ginger and Maddy would probably make fun of it, but I love it. It looks like she cares more about dandelion crowns and stretching her legs out in the sun than she does about having shiny, straight, perfectly parted hair, and I want a little bit of whatever it is that she has.

  I touch my own hair. I have bangs because Ginger got bangs and I was worried that soon everyone in the grade would have bangs and I wouldn’t and they’d all be talking about me. I brush it in the mornings and worry about it all day long, carrying barrettes in my pockets and hairbands around my wrists in case Something Happens and I have a Hair Emergency, and it suddenly seems so ridiculous, to be worried about a strand of hair falling out of place.

  “I love your hair,” I say to Zelda instead of hello.

  “Rose Alice Anders,” she says. “You came back.” She doesn’t sound surprised at all.

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  She ties off her dandelion crown and places it atop her hair-nest. “What do you think?”

  “It’s perfect,” I say.

  “I can make you one.”

  “Okay,” I say. “It won’t look as—it won’t look the same on me.”

  Zelda squints. “Well, of course not,” she says. “We don’t look the same at all.”

  “Well—right. But like, it won’t be as cool.” I blush. I’m not making any sense at all. I’m trying to compliment her and it’s coming out all jumbled and weird.

  Zelda shrugs. She wiggles her toes. I somehow notice her wiggling her toes before I notice that I can see her toes, which means she’s barefoot.

  “My father likes to be barefoot, too,” I say. “It helps him with the magic.”

  “Oh,” Zelda says. She’s thinking. She thinks for what feels like a while. “Well, that’s definitely not why I like being barefoot.” She smiles. “I just like being outside. And being barefoot means my feet are outside, too. You know?”

  I don’t know, but I nod like I do. It’s sort of weird, but it’s always felt like Dad owned being barefoot. Like that was a thing he invented. But here’s Zelda, coming up with her own reasons to be barefoot.

  It shouldn’t be weird, but it is weird, and that’s what makes it so weird.

  She finishes the crown for me quickly and puts it on my head. It feels light. I feel lighter, too.

  “I thought you might be back,” Zelda says.

  “You did?”

  “Well, hoped, I guess.” Zelda smiles. It’s big and bright. She doesn’t look embarrassed even though it’s the kind of thing that would embarrass me to say. I’m embarrassed by how much I wanted to see Zelda today. “We don’t talk to lots of people. Especially not, you know, you guys.”

  “Is it weird that I’m here? Mom says I shouldn’t go anywhere I’m not invited.”

  “I don’t know anything about that rule, so it’s fine with me,” Zelda says. “What other rules do you have?”

  There are so many I don’t know where to start. “We try to be quiet if Dad’s sleeping,” I say. “We don’t touch the jars of magic. We—I don’t know. We try to be good all the time.”

  “All the time sounds like a lot of time to be good,” Zelda says. She’s right. It is so, so, so much time to try to be good. It’s suddenly impossible that no one’s ever said that before. It’s so obvious. No one’s good all the time.

  Especially if what it means to be good changes sometimes.

  “I’m sort of failing at it,” I say. “My dad thinks the goodest thing you can do is get a bunch of magic.”

  “I guess I’m pretty awful, then,” Zelda says. She smiles again, but it’s a smaller smile. “It’s not so bad, you know.”

  “What isn’t so bad?”

  “Being Not Meant for Magic. That’s why you’re here, right? To see what it’s like?” Zelda starts in on another crown. There’s no one else here to give it to, but someone like Zelda could probably wear a dozen flower crowns at once and look like it was always meant to be that way.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” I say. It’s easier to tell Zelda the truth than anyone else right now.

  “You want to make a dandelion necklace?” Zelda says, like maybe that’s the reason. And maybe it is.

  “Sure.”

  Zelda gets off the bench and bends down to the grass. There are a zillion dandelions under our feet. Whoever did the Spring magic made it strong and fast, weeds and flowers and trees growing and blossoming all around us, as if winter never happened. She pulls two huge fistfuls of dandelions and we get to work. I try to do it exactly the way she’s doing, making my hands mirror hers. When Zelda notices, she shakes her head.

  “This is just how I do it,” she says.

  “I want to do it the way you do it,” I say.

  “But then it won’t be yours.” Zelda squints and cocks her head. I think about all the years of trying to be just like my father. I was sure that if I imitated his rituals and used all his tips and had his bare feet and his lucky scarf, I’d be as good at capturing magic as he is. Even if I felt a bunch of things in my heart that he never felt.

  “In town, we’d make these out of magic,” I say. “They’d be different colors, or bigger, or they’d have glitter shooting out of them or something.”

  “Then they wouldn’t really be dandelion crowns anymore,” Zelda says. She shakes her head and looks up at the sun, then at me. “Magic’s so weird. I don’t get it.”

  “But it’s everywhere,” I say. “Like every kid anywhere around here just waits to turn twelve and we all have lists of all the different things we could do with it, and we change all kinds of things from the magic, we make things better and ourselves happier and—I mean, even the way the sky looks right now might be from someone’s magic. These dandelions. The fact that winter is gone and it’s January and we’re outside making these crowns. Magic is—it’s everything and everywhere all the time.”

  “Well. It’s not here,” Zelda says. “Even when Mom and Dad said Lucy and I could go try to capture it—I don’t know. It seemed sort of weird.”

  “Weird to make the world better?” I ask. I wish I could put on Zelda-glasses and see the world the way she does.

  “There’s a lot of non-magical ways to make the world better,” she says.

  She sounds so sure, but I’ve only ever thought of magical ones. Still, I like the idea that I could still do something good, even without one hundred sixty-one jars of magic to help me do it.

  “You sort of look like Lucy,” Zelda says out of nowhere, but I’m trying to keep up, so I just nod.

  “I guess,” I say.

  Zelda isn’t bothered by silence, so we sit in it, the silence, and make dandelion necklaces. Hers are better than mine. And I keep trying to imitate her fingers and she keeps shaking her head when she catches me doing it.

  “Dad says we have to find our own way,” she says.

  There’s something different about the things her dad tells her about the world and how to be in it and the things my dad’s told me. Just like there’s something different about what it means that Zelda likes to be barefoot and what it means that my dad does.

  “How did you know you weren’t meant for magic?” I ask. I try to say it casually, like it’s no big deal if she answers or not and I don’t really care what her answer is anyway.

  But in the pause between my asking and her answering, I realize I do actually care.

  “I guess it never felt like something I needed. And it seems silly to spend all
that time and effort on something I don’t actually need.” She makes it sound so easy. Like magic is an accessory. That’s not how Dad makes it sound, when he talks about it. And it was so easy to get caught up in his excitement. Dad’s excitement is bubbly and fun and big and beautiful. It’s easy to get caught up in.

  “What do your parents think about magic?” I ask.

  “Don’t you know all this?” Zelda asks. It’s a funny question.

  “I don’t know anything,” I say, because I only just learned about being Not Meant for Magic, and I only just met Zelda and her family. But Zelda looks at me like I’m the one saying kind of wacky stuff, not her, and she puts down all her dandelions to look right at me.

  “My dad decided we weren’t meant for magic,” Zelda says. “He did it for a while. Went to TooBlue Lake. I guess he was even sort of good at all the magic stuff—”

  “The capturing.”

  “Sure. The capturing. But then when he was a little older, he just—couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t capture magic anymore?” Zelda is speaking so vaguely, and I want to know everything. I’ve never heard a story of someone who stopped capturing magic.

  “Or wouldn’t?” Zelda says, like there’s no important difference between the two. “I don’t know. He said that magic is really beautiful. And does beautiful things. But that it’s fake beautiful. And it made people sort of . . . fake beautiful too.”

  I’d think I’d have a bunch of questions about this idea. But instead it feels like Zelda is answering something I’ve always known.

  “So he just . . . gave it up?” I ask.