A Wicked Magic

by Sasha Laurens

  “I know, Liss! You were dating, so he had to go everywhere you went. You were dating, so we couldn’t do the spell with only the two of us, without him. You were dating, so you got to be a part of this great tragedy of the missing boyfriend for months after he disappeared. Did it ever occur to you to leave him alone?”

  “You said you weren’t interested! You don’t kiss a boy once and own him forever.”

  “I know what I said, but that didn’t mean you had to—”

  “When are you going to learn to actually tell people what you’re thinking? I’m not psychic. I can’t just magically guess your true feelings. We had that whole love spell lined up for you and you called it off. I asked if it would bother you if I went after him and you said it was fine. How was I supposed to know you meant the exact opposite of fine?”

  “Because you were my best friend!” Dan exploded. “You were supposed to understand and you never even tried.”

  There was a voice screaming in Liss’s head, warning her to bite her tongue. If she had to leave without Dan, she couldn’t leave without the Book. It was practically crying out for her, her only hope to find Johnny.

  Liss couldn’t bring herself to listen.

  “You don’t want to be understood, Dan. You want an excuse to be miserable.” Liss stood and marched to the door. Dan wouldn’t even look at her, her head in her hands. “We were in love. Did you know that?”

  Dan tilted her head, parting her dark hair. Her eyes glinted with tears. “You didn’t love him. You slept with him for four months then destroyed him. It’s not the same thing.”

  * * *

  —

  Speeding away from Dan’s house, Liss curled a fist around the steering wheel and cursed Dan—with conventional profanity, not magically—then cursed herself for being stupid enough to have left the Book with her in the first place.

  So Dan was still jealous over Johnny, but was she willing to let him die just because he wouldn’t date her? It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Dan met Johnny first, and no one could help it that he’d fallen for Liss. Liss had honestly tried to help Dan, but Dan hadn’t been hungry for it, not like Liss was.

  That was what Dan never understood: Liss needed Johnny, and Dan didn’t.

  Thinking about Johnny, before they were together and he was just the object of Dan’s crush, made Liss feel empty and starved. She’d barely known him then, but she knew he had something that would satisfy that feeling. She tasted it when she first caught him in the hall at school looking at her instead of Dan, when she read the captions of the pictures he posted, when he held the door for her once as she dashed across the parking lot and out of the rain. Out of all these little pieces of Johnny’s attention, she was convinced that she could assemble something like happiness. And it would be better than it had been with boys in the past, who’d failed to stop that same hunger, because Dan had seen something in Johnny too. She liked him too, and Dan rarely had crushes.

  When you felt that kind of hunger, you couldn’t just sit there and do nothing about it.

  Liss hadn’t.

  Had it been worth it?

  Johnny did make Liss some kind of happy, with the moony look he got when he told her how pretty she was and how he always asked permission before he kissed her and the way he’d smile that lazy, lucky smile at her when they were pressed skin to skin in the back seat of his car. She knew he loved her; he had to.

  Liss clenched her teeth remembering how she always wanted more from him. The hunger never really stopped, sometimes even got worse, as if he was teasing her with satisfaction just out of reach.

  When she tried to talk to him about how her parents were fighting or how she worried that she’d never get her SAT scores where they needed to be, Johnny would mumble “Don’t be stupid,” then pull her in for a kiss or start packing a bowl. Every time he responded to one of her texts with haha nice, she felt desperate and miserable. One night she’d had to check that every light in her house was off, that the stove was off, and that her curling iron was unplugged so many times that she was an hour late to meet him and they’d had to catch the next showing of the movie. She could barely focus on the screen, her every muscle tense and the acid of anxiety moving through her guts, and he’d never asked her what was wrong, never noticed that she felt like she’d been twisted into a pathetic knot, tied so tight she could barely breathe. But then they’d parked the car in the empty high school parking lot and taken off their clothes. The way he looked at her, shamelessly wanting her, made Liss feel very far away from herself, from the Liss who was anxious and real. She could let herself be the Liss that Johnny was looking at, and it made her feel good enough that she unraveled around him. It never lasted as long as she wanted.

  She had told Dan that she loved him, and magic had proved it wasn’t a lie. Right before Johnny was taken, things had been changing between them for the better. He had been so sweet to her on Valentine’s Day, she’d nearly cried for real. He drove her all the way to Santa Rosa, where they had dinner in an Italian restaurant with candles on the tables and walked around the downtown eating ice cream and made out frantically in the middle of a park, high on the idea that they didn’t know anyone there, not like in North Coast where anyone passing by could be a friend of your parents or your elementary school teacher. On the way home, she fell asleep in the passenger seat holding his hand.

  Then two weeks later he was stolen from her by something that wasn’t even human, and Liss was left wondering what they might have been—if their love could have fixed her, or if she would have given him permission to kiss her, then let him go.

  FOUR

  Dan

  One thing about running at night in North Coast was that the road unspooled obsidian and silky before you, more and more of it around each turn, and you could smell the salt the wind carried off the black ocean—you could lick that salt off your upper lip, where it mixed with your sweat.

  This was the second thing about running at night in North Coast: it wasn’t safe. The roads weren’t made for it, all blind turns and soft shoulders that fell off into the sea or cut into the cliffs so there were only a few spare inches where Dan’s feet found the tarmac. The streetlights were few and far between, and Dan didn’t have a headlamp as some other runners did, so if she ran on the coast side, there were places where she knew she risked slipping in the roadside gravel and over the edge into the nothingness below. She’d leave no trace—no one knew where she was, where she was going, and this struck her as dangerous.

  After Liss stormed out, Dan felt wild and small, so after dinner she’d pulled on her running shoes. As usual, her mom didn’t ask where she was going and Dan never offered up the information. If her dad had been home, he might have called out “Be safe” from his spot on the couch, and Graciela would have swatted at him with her pottery magazine. Graciela believed that safety was the enemy of experience, that girls were told too often to be safe and boys were told too rarely. “I’d rather you be strong than safe,” she always told Dan. But Dan’s father wasn’t in front of the TV because he was driving back from a job somewhere inland, so Dan left her mother engrossed in a complicated crochet project in the incense-smogged living room.

  Dan pushed herself further into the darkness: the wicked beat of IronWeaks blaring in her ears, the wind stinging her eyes, her chest tightening around each breath as it fought to get away.

  She’d begun running only a few months earlier. When school started, without Liss, Dan barely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t exactly difficult—she’d been spending all her time with Liss for so long that the kids she’d grown up with hardly seemed to remember her. She didn’t want them to. She had changed, and explaining how felt impossible and terrible, an effort that could only end in them seeing her for the worthless, destructive thing she’d become. She joined the cross-country team because she’d heard long-distance running was a solitary sport, but then quit when the coach
emphasized the team dynamic and suggested running with music wasn’t allowed in competition.

  So now she ran alone, the cold mist of the fog chilling her skin while her muscles blazed with pain.

  That was the point of running: that if you pushed yourself hard enough, it hurt, and if it hurt enough, you could give all your thoughts over to that pain. The same way, alone in her room at night, she dug long scratches into her thigh where no one would see them and listened to IronWeaks loud enough to damage her hearing. If it hurt enough, it satisfied that empty thing inside you enough so you could have a little peace.

  The relief was only temporary. The punishment never truly erased the crime. The guilt was always there. It filled her, sluggish and thick, as if were she cut, she’d bleed something black and putrid—although repeated experience demonstrated this wasn’t true. The guilt always came back just as savage.

  But tonight, although she was running harder than usual and her quads already felt filled with liquid fire, her mind wouldn’t quiet. She felt Johnny’s name in the rhythm of her stride; she heard the whisper of Liss’s name with each of her breaths.

  She should have been happy—no, happy was too high a bar. She should have gotten some kind of satisfaction from resisting Liss’s influence, but now Dan could barely remember what she’d said, only that she’d gotten what she wanted: Liss had driven off feeling abandoned.

  It was only right that Liss got to taste that feeling too.

  It was true that Dan had promised to go along with her plan, but Liss hadn’t held up her end of the bargain. She’d made a promise to Dan too—that they would help Johnny, but they had to wait for the right time.

  Dan had waited. She kept quiet and lied when she had to and trusted Liss to tell her when the waiting was over. Neither of them liked talking about that night. Plus, Dan felt for sure Liss was mad at her for wanting to do the stupid spell in the first place, and it was only a matter of time before that anger exploded in her face. Now, Dan remembered the day in June, more than three months after Johnny had vanished, when she finally asked Liss what the plan was, because once school was out, they could focus on getting Johnny back. Liss had grimaced and admitted that she would be in Guatemala all summer. Her parents had signed her up for a program to generate content for her college admissions essays. She was leaving a week after school ended.

  That was when Dan knew: promises weren’t binding forever, and the clock on theirs had already run out. Dan was ashamed to admit it, but it had come as a sad relief. Part of her had always known that the time would never be right, because Johnny was gone.

  That summer, Dan had been afraid for what it would mean for her to be Liss-less. Dan had expected to miss her, but distance made it easier not to have to pretend that whatever once made them inseparable had turned bitter and broken. It made it easier to try to forget what they’d done.

  Dan rounded a turn onto an uphill slope. The road clung to the cliff, then turned sharply at the top of the climb. She forced herself on, although her legs felt heavy as lead and the air kept slipping from her lungs. One foot, then the other, then the other again.

  Obviously Liss would have no problem making Johnny’s death about how much she’d sacrificed to try to find him, then bulldoze back into Dan’s life just to rub it in her face. Had she expected Dan to thank her, after everything she’d done? It was as if nothing at all had changed between them: the more Liss demanded of her, the more Dan resented her—the kind of anger that was only possible when you really, truly loved someone—and the more Dan resented her, the more Liss demanded.

  Why had Liss needed to get involved with Johnny in the first place?

  Dan’s foot came down funny, and she stumbled over to the very edge of the road, gasping for air. She pulled out her earbuds and set her hands on her hips. “Fuck,” she gasped.

  This hill was too steep for her. It beat her every time. Her legs turned to deadweight, her muscles seized. She heaved in air and spat on the ground and looked back the way she’d come. She still had to make it home, and anyway, she was almost at the Black Grass Spiritual Advancement Center, which had a severe gate that always gave her the creeps. Up ahead, she could barely see where the road curved around the hill. It was a blind turn, she knew, from the thousands of times she’d driven it on the way from her house to Liss’s in Marlena.

  On the road’s narrow shoulder, Dan kneeled in the sharp, cold gravel and pressed her fists into her stomach.

  In her mind, she saw a road not unlike this one, not so far from here. She saw the scattered salt of the broken line. Johnny’s pupils blown out black, filling his eyes, as the woman took him, and Dan herself standing there, doing nothing to stop it.

  Thinking of Johnny opened a cavern inside her, a gnawing abyss that made her want to fold herself in two. The abyss took whatever she could give it, and never went away, never shrank, never healed.

  Dan wanted to scream.

  Instead, she stepped back onto the road. Her heart was beating in her ears—a quick, monotone thud—as she lay down on the asphalt. Above her, fog obscured the night sky. Below her, the ocean curled against the cliffs with a quiet purr. The road was cool against her sweaty shoulders and back. Gone was the heat she’d burned with while she ran. She shivered.

  Dan could barely breathe.

  If a car came, would she hear it? Could she, if she wanted to, move in time? Or would she let it crush her, alone and unprotected out here on the road?

  She held her hands open to the sky and ground her knuckles against the rough pavement until they stung. She pushed harder. She hoped they would bleed.

  If Alexa asked about her knuckles tomorrow, Dan would have to lie to her.

  Alexa somehow saw a person in Dan who was worth discovering. Dan ached with how badly she wanted that to be true.

  Alexa would tell her that she shouldn’t give Liss this power over her—shouldn’t hurt herself because Liss had already hurt her.

  Dan took a breath. She flipped her hand over and pressed her palm onto the road.

  This was the final thing about running at night in North Coast: the roads were empty. You might run for miles, never seeing another car or another person. You might lie down in the street just beyond the edge of a blind turn and wait, and a car might never come by.

  Dan got up and ran home.

  SPRING OF SOPHOMORE YEAR

  Dan

  They both should have stayed away from Johnny Su. He had black hair that fell in slashes across his forehead and a collection of actual records and a sheepish way of smiling the tiniest bit when you caught him looking at you with those rich brown eyes and eyelashes out of a mascara commercial. He played the guitar and loved surfing in the freezing Pacific and spoke Chinese, he said, like a five-year-old who loved to swear. He was a year older than Dan and Liss, so that he gave the impression of a better-formed version of the boys their age. He lived on the outskirts of Gratton and could be spotted skateboarding to school on the sunny mornings that were so rare in North Coast.

  Dan met Johnny in Spanish class—she had been the only sophomore in Spanish 3—but she didn’t get to know him until she got a job at Achieve! that spring. Johnny had been working at the tutoring service for a year already, so he trained her in how pull up the right math or reading program for each kid on their assigned computer and what to do in the nightmare situation that one of the younger ones had an accident. Most of the job was standing around in khakis and an unflattering red polo while the kids tapped away at their keyboards with headphones on, handing out stickers, and taking their parents’ credit cards.

  Dan didn’t like working with children. She didn’t know how to behave around them. When they had questions, she couldn’t find answers simple enough for the younger ones, but the middle schoolers would tell her they weren’t little kids anymore. The embarrassing fact was that she really wanted them to like her, but kids had a way of seeing right through
you, of finding you boring almost immediately, and they didn’t have any interest in pretending otherwise.

  Johnny, on the other hand, was a natural. He got the elementary schoolers to sit still and convinced the tweens to put their phones away. The parents beamed at him as their kids grabbed onto Johnny’s leg and whined that they didn’t want to go home. When he was on shift, Johnny was the glowing center of Achieve!

  At first, they barely talked over closing—whose turn it was to take out the trash, whether the keyboards had been cleaned yet. Dan assumed that if he wanted to talk to her, he would, and anything else would probably be bothering him. But then he asked her for help on when to use the imperfective in Spanish and commented approvingly (“Nice”) of the IronWeaks patch on her backpack.

  After that, it was all music all the time—classic punk, new wave, indie rock. Liss wasn’t really into music, and now Dan realized there was a special thrill in discovering new bands cool enough to tell Johnny about and listening to his recommendations. When he heard Dan didn’t have a record player, he invited her over to listen on his, because everything sounded better on vinyl, although they never actually made plans to do it and Dan never found the nerve to follow up. Once, they stayed late after closing to watch videos of the Germs on the computer in the back office. She only half watched the clips—pale bodies covered in sweat and convulsing with rage—and instead her gaze wandered to Johnny, shards of black hair bouncing along with the frantic beat as he tapped out the drum line to “Lexicon Devil” on his thigh.

  He ran his fingers through his hair in a totally unselfconscious way that snagged Dan’s brain, and she blurted, “You don’t seem angry enough to listen to music like this.” Johnny looked at her from the corner of his eye. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Don’t apologize.” He brushed his hair back again, but it was silky and long and always falling where it looked perfect but didn’t belong. The lights of the rest of Achieve! were already switched off, and when he turned to her, Dan felt sharply how alone they were. “You don’t have be angry to listen to punk. It makes me feel alive. All that energy. It makes me want to . . .” He spread his hands wide.