A Possibility of Magic

by Rachael Ann Mare

  If there was any phrase Izzy hated, it was “wait til you get older.”

  “I’m old enough now,” she said. “Show me.”

  Dolores blinked.

  Ari wondered if she knew how.

  “Well, I think you… pay attention to your breathing,” Dolores said. “You may close your eyes, but you must stop everything you’re doing and listen to your breath. Breathe in deeply through your nose, and breathe out long through your mouth. In and out, and you notice only that, nothing else.” Dolores nodded to herself.

  Aristotle concluded that she had never meditated.

  Izzy, meanwhile, had gone brain-deep. She sucked everything in, feet and eyes and stomach, and tried big.

  “Like this? Am I doing it right?”

  “You can’t keep talking. You have to be quiet.”

  Iz’s shoulders rose and fell. “Ari, are you doing this with me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Don’t you want to learn to medicate?”

  “Meditate,” Dolores corrected.

  “I thought you said it was supposed to heal me?”

  “Well—”

  “Then it’s medication, don’t you think?” Iz gave the fat lady the sweetest smile Ari had ever seen on her. He couldn’t tell if it was real. Iz could make you believe whatever she wanted you to believe, and you had to know you, or you might turn into something else because she said so. He couldn’t decide if this was a terrifying form of villainy or the most awesome superpower.

  “I fear I shall never be very good at this medication,” Izzy said.

  Dolores rolled her eyes.

  “I think I am much better at dancing.”

  “DANCING IS AGAINST THE RULES.”

  “Oh, dear, Dolores, it seems like shouting is against the rules, too, isn’t it? Everybody’s breaking the rules around here today! If we’re going to do that, we might as well have an adventure of it. Dance with me, Dolores.”

  There were few things Izandria Dauntless loved more than to dance. She loved it so much, she did it every day. Mostly alone, although sometimes one or more of the animals would join in. Every now and then she could talk Mr. Riot, who ran the market near Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen, to do some odd steps he made up. But in general she didn’t much care if anyone danced with her; it was enough by itself.

  Anyone watching her wouldn’t know what to think. They might not even call what she was doing dancing. Iz had never learned any formal dance steps, so everything she did was made-up. And she was of the strong belief that if you are going to dedicate a certain amount of time specifically to moving your body, then you should make sure to make use of as much of your body as possible and to move it in as many ways as it can go. And so Izzy’s form of dancing included giant arm circles and swings and swooshes and swoops and tiny toe-tapping steps and large long lunges and cuddling hugs of herself and two cartwheels and one headstand (well, when she could do it without falling over) and a lot of ups and downs and hips and shoulders and every other thing in the world she darn well felt like putting in there.

  What it looked like didn’t matter, because when Izandria Dauntless danced, the rest of the world disappeared. She could not be bothered to think of it. This meant she bumped into things (and people) without apology; knocked things over; tripped and fell; and remained absorbed solely in moving her body, no matter what.

  And so, it turned out that, in fact, a zen garden was the perfect place for a dancing party, at least for Iz.

  For Ari, who had never experienced anything remotely like Izzy dancing, it was an awesome sight. It was as though she became the only thing that existed. Everything else faded into the distance, made blurred by the sharpness of her focus and her joy in that focus. She had no other thing to do in that moment except to move and to love moving, and it showed. This, he thought, is what happiness looks like. This is how people are supposed to look. This is how Dolores would look, if she could bring herself to give up on the rules for a day and follow Izzy’s lead.

  Aristotle had never been more proud to know his friend. How incredible that he had met her! In a tree!

  But of course, Dolores couldn’t give up the rules for a day, and she couldn’t follow Izzy’s lead, and this was a zen garden, and she had already said that it wasn’t for dancing. And so she clambered onto the sand garden, lumbered over to where Iz had stopped to dance, and grabbed her by the shoulder.

  “You’re coming with me!”

  Izzy opened her eyes and smiled up at Dolores. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sure you can’t help it. Now I shall be able to tell all my friends the story of the time I medicated and danced in a zen garden and how it healed me. And you’ve been part of it, too, Dolores—part of a great story. You were the obstacle that almost stood in the way of the wonderful experience of dancing in a zen garden. So I thank you, because I’ve overcome you, and forever after I will have a better story to tell. Because who’d listen to a story about dancing in a zen garden if it were according to the rules? It’s a much better story if I get thrown out, isn’t it?”

  “She does like to be a storyteller,” Ari said.

  Dolores’s hand wilted on Iz’s shoulder.

  “Just go,” she said. “And don’t come back.”

  This time, the two children obliged her, but not before Izzy had surprised her with a fierce squeezy hug.

  Being the Story in Which Izzy and Ari Decide Not to Have a Sleepover

  Sometime after the two children nearly drowned and danced in the zen garden, on a fine afternoon one spring-like summer day, Ari and Izzy had laid out a teanic on the back lawn of Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen.

  Teanics had become a regular sort of thing for them, a sort of ritual, if you will. They sipped their tea, Izzy’s straight black (“like my soul,” she said) and Ari’s with lots of sugar and milk, though Ari wondered whether Izzy drank much tea—she did more holding of the cup and sloshing it about as though she were a grand dame of Britain than drinking it, but then he wondered if by acting like a grand dame she became like one, and so he sloshed his tea, too, to try it out, but he couldn’t be as carefree about it as she was, which ruined the illusion, so he stopped and sipped and tried to enjoy his tea, although if he were honest, he found the taste dreadful, even with lots of milk and sugar.

  Once they were comfortable, Ari took a deep breath and a bite of rose cake. There was something he had to ask Izzy, and he needed the cake for courage. That was a thing about cake he wished his mother would understand. The thing he had to ask Iz wasn’t even his idea; it was his mother’s.

  “Why don’t you have her over for once? You always go to Izzy’s. In fact, we could make it a sleepover! Wouldn’t that be fun? Why don’t you ask her for the weekend?” his mother had said. Then she started talking of baking cookies and playing board games and all sorts of things Ari was fairly sure weren’t Izzy sorts of things, but he nodded and said he would ask.

  Now that it was the actual time to ask, Ari felt uncertain. But some of that was just being with Izzy. She had so much certainty that you started to wonder what you had done with yours.

  He decided to get it over with, like ripping a band-aid, wincing and fast.

  “Do you want to come over for a sleepover?”

  “Sleepover? What’s that?” Iz licked the frosting off half a cake. She dunked the other half in her tea, tasted it, and made a face. She added sugar to the frosting-less cake, making a small white sugar mountain on top.

  “You’ve never had a sleepover?”

  “I don’t see how I could know the answer to whether I’ve had a sleepover if I don’t know what one is.”

  “A sleepover is when you go to someone else’s house and spend the night. Like if you come to mine.”

  Izzy frowned. “Why would I want to spend the night at your house? I have a perfectly good house of my own.”

  “It would be—well, it’s supposed to be fun.” Ari realized, in the middle of saying it, that he didn’t know if it would b
e fun, having never had a sleepover himself.

  This seemed to satisfy Izzy, perhaps even more than his first answer would have. “Aha, so this is a thing we’re supposed to do for fun? There are a lot of those, aren’t there? Why do people keep making those up? Why don’t they do the things that are actually fun?”

  “Well, maybe it is fun.”

  Iz gave him the infamous side-eye. “We have fun every day. For example, right now we are having a teanic, and that is fun. We know teanics are fun. Why don’t we have another? Why would we try out this sleepover thingie without knowing if it’s fun?”

  Aristotle gaped at her. “Who are you and what did you do with my friend Izzy? She’s the queen of trying new things without knowing a thing about them. She sailed like a pirate across the deadly croc-infested waters of Sinking Pond. She—”

  “OK, point taken. But I knew what I would do while sailing like a pirate, so I could imagine that it would be fun. What would we do at a sleepover?”

  “Well… we could make chocolate chip cookies.”

  “We can do that any time we want at my house. We can go do that now if you want. Shall we?” Izzy looked longingly toward the back door of Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen.

  “We could tell ghost stories!”

  “We can do that any time, too. And it would be way better in my attic than anywhere, especially since there is a real ghost up there.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Don’t tell that to the one in my attic. Her name is Belle.”

  Aristotle rolled his eyes. “Right, then, when do I get to meet her?”

  “She won’t come out for just anyone, you know. If you’re going to be rude, I’m sure she’ll stay hidden. Anyhow, don’t change the subject. What else could we do if we decide we want to try this sleepover thingie?”

  “We could eat pizza and stay up all night. We could play card games or silly party games or board games. We could draw things on each other’s backs. We could go outside and look at the stars at midnight. We could play nighttime games in the backyard.”

  “Ooh, we should definitely play nighttime games. But that doesn’t need a sleepover! Let’s do it next week. I’ll put it on my schedule, nighttime games.”

  “My mother won’t let me go.”

  “Sneak out. That’s what we’d do at a sleepover, right?”

  “Well, yes, but you’d be at my house and then—oh, forget it.”

  “What else?”

  Aristotle shrugged.

  “C’mon, you give up so easy. What else?”

  “I give up so easy because you never want to try something unless it’s your idea. If it’s your idea, then it’s the most logical-wonderful thing in the world, and it couldn’t be any other way. But if it’s my idea, you have every reason and another million to say it’s not going to be fun.”

  “All right! If we did this sleepover thingie, where would we sleep?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Stop! You’re being a little lump of mashed potatoes.”

  “What’s the point? You already made up your mind that you don’t want to do it.”

  “I haven’t. I’m considering it from every angle. That’s how I make up my mind. Where would we sleep, if we were sleeping over at your house?”

  “On the floor, in the living room, in sleeping bags.”

  “My bed is soft and fluffy. Is it more fun to sleep on the floor?”

  “It’s different! It’s an adventure! We don’t have to do it!”

  “Hmm… I suppose… I mean, we have the teanic outside on a blanket instead of inside at the breakfast table and it becomes more fun because we have the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Ari said. “But… doing things differently doesn’t automatically make it more fun. Sun and wind make things more fun. A bed on the hard floor… well, we’d be together.”

  “We’re together now!”

  “It’s not nighttime.”

  “We could stay together til nighttime and then it would be.”

  “Yes. And then we could each sleep in our own fluffy soft beds.”

  “That does seem more fun, doesn’t it?”

  Ari never quite knew how it happened, but Iz had a way of making her way of thinking look like the only way, even without seeming like she was trying. He didn’t know how to stop it.

  “So. It seems we’ve come to an uglymate. Everything we think we might do at a sleepover seems less fun than doing it as we could the rest of the time. There also don’t seem to be any parts of it that we couldn’t do at a different time and in a different place. Does that seem right?”

  “Well… yes. But no.”

  “Why no?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Whose idea was this? It wasn’t yours.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  Izzy shrugged. “Since when did you become the sort of person who does whatever anyone else does because you’re supposed to? I thought we were friends based on our both’s important wish to have the best lives, and that we would fight to our end to learn how best to do that.”

  Ari had no idea what they were talking about anymore. There seemed to be something getting in the way of the words, as if the ones he said did not mean the same thing to her as they did to him and vice versa. Something big and round and unpleasant rose in his chest like a balloon, and as it did, the words that came out stopped making sense even to him.

  “You want to do everything and have everything your way and—and— you’re like a grown-up!”

  This was the worst insult he could think of. He felt terrible as soon as he said it.

  “Oh no, I’m the least grown-up grown-up,” Izzy said, and that was her usual way, breezy and fast. But then she also said, “I want to play nighttime games and sleepover, I do, Ari. It’s… let’s do them at my house?” and something happened to her face. The only way Ari could think to describe it was: collapse. When Izzy said that one please, it was like all her toughness and brightness crumpled. Her shoulders curled inward, and she shrank. She looked like a different person; he barely recognized her.

  Suddenly he didn’t think it was such a good idea to make Izzy sleep over, and it didn’t seem like any of the things they’d been arguing about mattered one whit, and he wanted to forget the whole thing, to do anything to get that look off his friend.

  “Okay,” he said, without knowing why it was the right thing to say. “You’re right. Sleepover was a stupid idea. No fun. Anything we could do there, we could do at your house, any time we want. Who’d want to sleep on the floor anyhow? Especially when they could already sleep in a bed! What a ridiculous idea! Leave it to my mother.”

  Izzy and Ari dropped the whole sleepover idea right then and there, as far as words went, but she made him another cup of tea, with plenty of milk and sugar, just the way he liked it, and she gave him the last rose cake.

  Later that night, when Matthew told his mother that Izzy wasn’t going to come for a sleepover, and she asked him why, he had no idea what to tell her. “We didn’t think it would be fun,”—that was what he thought he was going to say; wasn’t that what he and Izzy had concluded?—but now with his mother, the thing that had made so much sense with Izzy a few hours before, seemed to not make any sense. It was like Iz didn’t make sense in the world, or the world didn’t make sense without her. Somehow, somewhere, something didn’t line up. Or everything did, but only when Iz was around.

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Matthew mumbled.

  His mother frowned in confusion as her son went straight up to bed.

  In his room, in his bed, in the dark, Matthew thought that perhaps Izzy’s house was part of what made her strong. Perhaps there was some sense there, to why she didn’t want to have a sleepover, and to whatever happened to her face when she said she asked if they could do it at her house, but… he didn’t have time to figure out what it was, because as soon as he’d thought it, he fell
fast asleep and didn’t wake til morning, by which time, in the light and excitement of a new day, he had quite forgotten.

  Being the Story in Which Izzy and Aristotle Have a Fight

  Izzy’s eyelids drooped. She half-sat, half-lay on the white wicker loveseat on the back porch of Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she murmured, possibly half-asleep, though she’d never admit it, “if books came to life? If things that were in them came out into our world? Or if we could go in them? What if we could go into books, Ari? Which one would you want to go into?” She yawned.

  Ari had been reading to her from Peter and Wendy, and it had made her sleepy, not because she was bored of the story (she wasn’t; it was a wonderful story! her papa used to read it to her…)—but because it was so quiet and relaxing and warm and cozy on the back porch. But suddenly, Izzy sat up and answered her own question.

  “Wait! I know! We won’t go into someone else’s book. We’ll write our own.”

  Ari blinked. He should have known. Even with made-up questions, Iz couldn’t follow the rules. He wondered how in the world she was going to be when she grew up. She wouldn’t make much of a Wendy, that was certain. She was more like Peter. And boys—well! They could get away with not growing up, couldn’t they? But girls… well, he had the impression that it would hurt her more. It wasn’t a well-developed thought, more of a feeling. He wished he could protect her. Make it so she didn’t have to grow up, so she could live in Never Never Land, like Peter. But then, Iz wouldn’t want that either. She wouldn’t want anyone to think she needed protecting.

  Ari sighed. Sometimes it was rather difficult being Iz’s friend.

  “Our story will happen in Alwaysland,” Izzy continued.

  “Is that the opposite of Peter’s Never Never Land?”

  “Yes.” Izzy’s eyes shone. “I always thought it was a dumb name—like nothing happens there. In Alwaysland, the thing you didn’t think could happen, always does.”

  “So… if you thought it, and thought it could never happen, then it would happen?”