Marvyn was as merciless as a mosquito when it came to Jake Petrakis. He made swooning, kissing noises whenever he spied Angie looking at Jake's picture in her yearbook, and drove her wild by holding invented conversations between them, just loudly enough for her to hear. His increasing ability at witchcraft meant that scented, decorated, and misspelled love notes were likely to flutter down onto her bed at any moment, as were long-stemmed roses, imitation jewelry (Marvyn had limited experience and poor taste), and small, smudgy photos of Jake and Ashleigh together. Mr. Luke had to invoke Angie's oath more than once, and to sweeten it with a promise of a new bicycle if Marvyn made it through the year undamaged. Angie held out for a mountain bike, and her father sighed. “That was always a myth, about the gypsies stealing children,” he said, rather wistfully. “It was surely the other way around. Deal."
Yet there were intermittent peaceful moments between Marvyn and Angie, several occurring in Marvyn's room. It was a far tidier place than Angie's room, for all the clothes on the floor and battered board game boxes sticking out from under the bed. Marvyn had mounted National Geographic foldout maps all around the walls, lining them up so perfectly that the creases were invisible; and on one special wall were prints and photos of a lot of people with strange staring eyes. Angie recognized Rasputin, and knew a few of the other names—Aleister Crowley, for one, and a man in Renaissance dress called Dr. John Dee. There were two women, as well: the young witch Willow, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a daguerreotype of a black woman wearing a kind of turban folded into points. No Harry Potter, however. Marvyn had never taken to Harry Potter.
There was also, one day after school, a very young kitten wobbling among the books littering Marvyn's bed. A surprised Angie picked it up and held it over her face, feeling its purring between her hands. It was a dark, dusty gray, rather like Milady—indeed, Angie had never seen another cat of that exact color. She nuzzled its tummy happily, asking it, “Who are you, huh? Who could you ever be?"
Marvyn was feeding his angelfish and didn't look up. He said, “She's Milady."
Angie dropped the kitten on the bed. Marvyn said, “I mean, she's Milady when she was young. I went back and got her."
When he did turn around, he was grinning the maddening pirate grin Angie could never stand, savoring her shock. It took her a minute to find words, and more time to make them come out. She said, “You went back. You went back in time?"
"It was easy,” Marvyn said. “Forward's hard—I don't think I could ever get really forward. Maybe Dr. Dee could do it.” He picked up the kitten and handed her back to his sister. It was Milady, down to the crooked left ear and the funny short tail with the darker bit on the end. He said, “She was hurting all the time, she was so old. I thought, if she could—you know—start over, before she got the arthritis...."
He didn't finish. Angie said slowly, “So where's Milady? The other one? I mean, if you brought this one ... I mean, how can they be in the same world?"
"They can't,” Marvyn said. “The old Milady's gone."
Angie's throat closed up. Her eyes filled, and so did her nose, and she had to blow it before she could speak again. Looking at the kitten, she knew it was Milady, and made herself think about how good it would be to have her once again bouncing around the house, no longer limping grotesquely and meowing with the pain. But she had loved the old cat all her life, and never known her as a kitten, and when the new Milady started to climb into her lap, Angie pushed her away.
"All right,” she said to Marvyn. “All right. How did you get ... back, or whatever?"
Marvyn shrugged and went back to his fish. “No big deal. You just have to concentrate the right way."
Angie bounced a plastic Wiffle ball off the back of his neck, and he turned around, annoyed. “Leave me alone! Okay, you want to know—there's a spell, words you have to say over and over and over, until you're sick of them, and there's herbs in it too. You have to light them, and hang over them, and you shut your eyes and keep breathing them in and saying the words—"
"I knew I'd been smelling something weird in your room lately. I thought you were sneaking takeout curry to bed with you again."
"And then you open your eyes, and there you are,” Marvyn said. “I told you, no big deal."
"There you are where? How do you know where you'll come out? When you'll come out? Click your heels together three times and say there's no place like home?"
"No, dork, you just know.” And that was all Angie could get out of him—not, as she came to realize, because he wouldn't tell her, but because he couldn't. Witch or no witch, he was still a small boy, with almost no real idea of what he was doing. He was winging it all, playing it all by ear.
Arguing with Marvyn always gave her a headache, and her history homework—the rise of the English merchant class—was starting to look good in comparison. She went back to her own bedroom and read two whole chapters, and when the kitten Milady came stumbling and squeaking in, Angie let her sleep on the desk. “What the heck,” she told it, “it's not your fault."
That evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Luke got home, Angie told them that Milady had died peacefully of illness and old age while they were at work, and was now buried in the back garden. (Marvyn had wanted to make it a horrible hit-and-run accident, complete with a black SUV and half-glimpsed license plate starting with the letter Q, but Angie vetoed this.) Marvyn's contribution to her solemn explanation was to explain that he had seen the new kitten in a petshop window, “and she just looked so much like Milady, and I used my whole allowance, and I'll take care of her, I promise!” Their mother, not being a true cat person, accepted the story easily enough, but Angie was never sure about Mr. Luke. She found him too often sitting with the kitten on his lap, the two of them staring solemnly at each other.
But she saw very little evidence of Marvyn fooling any further with time. Nor, for that matter, was he showing the interest she would have expected in turning himself into the world's best second-grade soccer player, ratcheting up his test scores high enough to be in college by the age of eleven, or simply getting even with people (since Marvyn forgot nothing and had a hit list going back to day-care). She could almost always tell when he'd been making his bed by magic, or making the window plants grow too fast, but he seemed content to remain on that level. Angie let it go.
Once she did catch him crawling on the ceiling, like Spider-Man, but she yelled at him and he fell on the bed and threw up. And there was, of course, the time—two times, actually—when, with Mrs. Luke away, Marvyn organized all the shoes in her closet into a chorus line, and had them tapping and kicking together like the Rockettes. It was fun for Angie to watch, but she made him stop because they were her mother's shoes. What if her clothes joined in? The notion was more than she wanted to deal with.
As it was, there was already plenty to deal with just then. Besides her schoolwork, there was band practice, and Melissa's problems with her boyfriend; not to mention the endless hours spent at the dentist, correcting a slight overbite. Melissa insisted that it made her look sexy, but the suggestion had the wrong effect on Angie's mother. In any case, as far as Angie could see, all Marvyn was doing was playing with a new box of toys, like an elaborate electric train layout, or a top-of-the-line Erector set. She was even able to imagine him getting bored with magic itself after a while. Marvyn had a low threshold for boredom.
Angie was in the orchestra, as well as the band, because of a chronic shortage of woodwinds, but she liked the marching band better. You were out of doors, performing at parades and football games, part of the joyful noise, and it was always more exciting than standing up in a dark, hushed auditorium playing for people you could hardly see. “Besides,” as she confided to her mother, “in marching band nobody really notices how you sound. They just want you to keep in step."
On a bright spring afternoon, rehearsing “The Washington Post March” with the full band, Angie's clarinet abruptly went mad. No “licorice stick” now, but a stick of rapturous
dynamite, it took off on flights of rowdy improvisation, doing outrageous somersaults, backflips, and cartwheels with the melody—things that Angie knew she could never have conceived of, even if her skill had been equal to the inspiration. Her bandmates, up and down the line, were turning to stare at her, and she wanted urgently to wail, “Hey, I'm not the one, it's my stupid brother, you know I can't play like that.” But the music kept spilling out, excessive, absurd, unstoppable—unlike the march, which finally lurched to a disorderly halt. Angie had never been so embarrassed in her life.
Mr. Bishow, the bandmaster, came bumbling through the milling musicians to tell her, “Angie, that was fantastic—that was dazzling! I never knew you had such spirit, such freedom, such wit in your music!” He patted her—hugged her even, quickly and cautiously—then stepped back almost immediately and said, “Don't ever do it again."
"Like I'd have a choice,” Angie mumbled, but Mr. Bishow was already shepherding the band back into formation for “Semper Fidelis” and “High Society,” which Angie fumbled her way through as always, two bars behind the rest of the woodwinds. She was slouching disconsolately off the field when Jake Petrakis, his dark-gold hair still glinting damply from swimming practice, ran over to her to say, “Hey, Angie, cool,” then punched her on the shoulder, as he would have done another boy, and dashed off again to meet one of his relay-team partners. And Angie went on home, and waited for Marvyn behind the door of his room.
She seized him by the hair the moment he walked in, and he squalled, “All right, let go, all right! I thought you'd like it!"
"Like it?” Angie shook him, hard. “Like it? You evil little ogre, you almost got me kicked out of the band! What else are you lining up for me that you think I'll like?"
"Nothing, I swear!” But he was giggling even while she was shaking him. “Okay, I was going to make you so beautiful, even Mom and Dad wouldn't recognize you, but I quit on that. Too much work.” Angie grabbed for his hair again, but Marvyn ducked. “So what I thought, maybe I really could get Jake what's-his-face to go crazy about you. There's all kinds of spells and things for that—"
"Don't you dare,” Angie said. She repeated the warning calmly and quietly. “Don't. You. Dare."
Marvyn was still giggling. “Nah, I didn't think you'd go for it. Would have been fun, though.” Suddenly he was all earnestness, staring up at his sister out of one visible eye, strangely serious, even with his nose running. He said, “It is fun, Angie. It's the most fun I've ever had."
"Yeah, I'll bet,” she said grimly. “Just leave me out of it from now on, if you've got any plans for the third grade.” She stalked into the kitchen, looking for apple juice.
Marvyn tagged after her, chattering nervously about school, soccer games, the Milady-kitten's rapid growth, and a possible romance in his angelfish tank. “I'm sorry about the band thing, I won't do it again. I just thought it'd be nice if you could play really well, just one time. Did you like the music part, anyway?"
Angie did not trust herself to answer him. She was reaching for the apple juice bottle when the top flew off by itself, bouncing straight up at her face. As she flinched back, a glass came skidding down the counter toward her. She grabbed it before it crashed into the refrigerator, then turned and screamed at Marvyn, “Damn it, Ex-Lax, you quit that! You're going to hurt somebody, trying to do every damn thing by magic!"
"You said the D-word twice!” Marvyn shouted back at her. “I'm telling Mom!” But he made no move to leave the kitchen, and after a moment a small, grubby tear came sliding down from under the eyepatch. “I'm not using magic for everything! I just use it for the boring stuff, mostly. Like the garbage, and vacuuming up, and like putting my clothes away. And Milady's litter box, when it's my turn. That kind of stuff, okay?"
Angie studied him, marveling as always at his capacity for looking heartwrenchingly innocent. She said, “No point to it when I'm cleaning her box, right? Never mind—just stay out of my way, I've got a French midterm tomorrow.” She poured the apple juice, put it back, snatched a raisin cookie and headed for her room. But she paused in the doorway, for no reason she could ever name, except perhaps the way Marvyn had moved to follow her and then stopped himself. “What? Wipe your nose, it's gross. What's the matter now?"
"Nothing,” Marvyn mumbled. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, which didn't help. He said, “Only I get scared, Angie. It's scary, doing the stuff I can do."
"What scary? Scary how? A minute ago it was more fun than you've ever had in your life."
"It is!” He moved closer, strangely hesitant: neither witch, nor pirate nor seraph, but an anxious, burdened small boy. “Only sometimes it's like too much fun. Sometimes, right in the middle, I think maybe I should stop, but I can't. Like one time, I was by myself, and I was just fooling around ... and I sort of made this thing, which was really interesting, only it came out funny and then I couldn't unmake it for the longest time, and I was scared Mom and Dad would come home—"
Angie, grimly weighing her past French grades in her mind, reached back for another raisin cookie. “I told you before, you're going to get yourself into real trouble doing crazy stuff like that. Just quit, before something happens by magic that you can't fix by magic. You want advice, I just gave you advice. See you around."
Marvyn wandered forlornly after her to the door of her room. When she turned to close it, he mumbled, “I wish I were as old as you. So I'd know what to do."
"Ha,” Angie said, and shut the door.
Whereupon, heedless of French irregular verbs, she sat down at her desk and began writing a letter to Jake Petrakis.
Neither then nor even much later was Angie ever able to explain to anyone why she had written that letter at precisely that time. Because he had slapped her shoulder and told her she—or at least her music—was cool? Because she had seen him, that same afternoon, totally tangled up with Ghastly Ashleigh in a shadowy corner of the library stacks? Because of Marvyn's relentless teasing? Or simply because she was twelve years old, and it was time for her to write such a letter to someone? Whatever the cause, she wrote what she wrote, and then she folded it up and put it away in her desk drawer.
Then she took it out, and put it back in, and then she finally put it into her backpack. And there the letter stayed for nearly three months, well past midterms, finals, and football, until the fateful Friday night when Angie was out with Melissa, walking and window-shopping in downtown Avicenna, placidly drifting in and out of every coffeeshop along Parnell Street. She told Melissa about the letter then, and Melissa promptly went into a fit of the giggles, which turned into hiccups and required another cappuccino to pacify them. When she could speak coherently, she said, “You ought to send it to him. You've got to send it to him."
Angie was outraged, at first. “No way! I wrote it for me, not for a test or a class, and damn sure not for Jake Petrakis. What kind of a dipshit do you think I am?"
Melissa grinned at her out of mocking green eyes. “The kind of dipshit who's got that letter in your backpack right now, and I bet it's in an envelope with an address and a stamp on it."
"It doesn't have a stamp! And the envelope's just to protect it! I just like having it with me, that's all—"
"And the address?"
"Just for practice, okay? But I didn't sign it, and there's no return address, so that shows you!"
"Right.” Melissa nodded. “Right. That definitely shows me."
"Drop it,” Angie told her, and Melissa dropped it then. But it was a Friday night, and both of them were allowed to stay out late, as long as they were together, and Avicenna has a lot of coffeeshops. Enough lattes and cappuccinos, with double shots of espresso, brought them to a state of cheerfully jittery abandon in which everything in the world was supremely, ridiculously funny. Melissa never left the subject of Angie's letter alone for very long—"Come on, what's the worst that could happen? Him reading it and maybe figuring out you wrote it? Listen, the really worst thing would be you being an old, old lady still wishin
g you'd told Jake Petrakis how you felt when you were young. And now he's married, and he's a grandfather, and probably dead, for all you know—"
"Quit it!” But Angie was giggling almost as much as Melissa now, and somehow they were walking down quiet Lovisi Street, past the gas station and the boarded-up health-food store, to find the darkened Petrakis house and tiptoe up the steps to the porch. Facing the front door, Angie dithered for a moment, but Melissa said, “An old lady, in a home, for God's sake, and he'll never know,” and Angie took a quick breath and pushed the letter under the door. They ran all the way back to Parnell Street, laughing so wildly that they could barely breathe...
...and Angie woke up in the morning whispering omigod, omigod, omigod, over and over, even before she was fully awake. She lay in bed for a good hour, praying silently and desperately that the night before had been some crazy, awful dream, and that when she dug into her backpack the letter would still be there. But she knew dreadfully better, and she never bothered to look for it on her frantic way to the telephone. Melissa said soothingly, “Well, at least you didn't sign the thing. There's that, anyway."
"I sort of lied about that,” Angie said. Her friend did not answer. Angie said, “Please, you have to come with me. Please."
"Get over there,” Melissa said finally. “Go, now—I'll meet you."
Living closer, Angie reached the Petrakis house first, but had no intention of ringing the bell until Melissa got there. She was pacing back and forth on the porch, cursing herself, banging her fists against her legs, and wondering whether she could go to live with her father's sister Peggy in Grand Rapids, when the woman next door called over to tell her that the Petrakises were all out of town at a family gathering. “Left yesterday afternoon. Asked me to keep an eye on the place, cause they won't be back till sometime Sunday night. That's how come I'm kind of watching out.” She smiled warningly at Angie before she went back indoors.
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