Tomorrow was the flocking. Covens from all across the states would be gathering to sift through the recovered specter hoard for the stolen parts of their dead friends. It’d be the most witches I’d ever met in one place, my mother’s coven included, and I would sort out my feelings in the morning. Magic and a comfortable crossfade meant I didn’t think much about how I’d been waitlisted by two of the three colleges I applied to, or wallow in disappointment about how getting my specter back hadn’t instantaneously reversed my mental illness, or that it was “imminently confronting my foundational childhood traumas” o’clock and so on. I walked down a torn-up drive with my friends. It was late on a Friday in mid-March. The five of us shivered in our little outfits, all slathered in scribbled sigils, slaphappy from the pregame, and I loved them, which made this easier. I loved them completely. You’ve got to lean on what you have.
The warehouse flickered in the dark. From outside, Homo Erectus looked like Giovanni’s Room flipped inside out. Grime oozed between its jaggedy bricks and drooled in fingers down toward earth. It looked structurally unwell, multiply risky. I’d bet this had been just another factory once upon a time, i.e., in the eighties, that’d choked with the rest of the Rust Belt. Maybe lumber had been pulped here and beaten into flags of paper, or it could’ve been an auto manufacturing plant, or a steel mill or something. Whatever! It’s for mischief, now. Its windows strobed magenta and lime and music slammed inside it. The bass throbbed in the soles of my boots. There wasn’t a sign. We traipsed along, Jing leading with bravado in a swishing leopard coat, and as I marched on behind her I wondered vaguely how Shiloh had found out about this place. They’d known themself for all of five months and were already a rave connoisseur, which meant that suddenly I was a rave connoisseur, and that my coven had a reputation beyond the corporate limits of Sycamore Gorge. There were bigger scenes than house parties. My girls were not without ambition.
There was a line. We stomped past it. Waiting dancers eyed us and a vaguely familiar few flashed us scrunchy, unsober smiles. Jing stretched her arms over her head, then relaxed her shoulders, let her leopard coat dip to the small of her back. Yates tucked herself into Daisy’s side, and they clung to each other, ran after Jing on synchronized tiptoe, and Shiloh and I edged behind them, all of us within a yard of each other. Particulates in our own little planetoid. Tall girls with little shorts and choppy mullets murmured something about those witches.
Hot to be preceded. These days, we held ritual service every time we went out.
As she ran, Daisy unhooked one arm from Yates’ waist and produced a bottle of Gatorade from nowhere. She cleared it in one swallow then flipped a Lego between her teeth. Yates mirrored Daze and pulled one hand free to check her phone, then blinked fast, eyes shiny, either from the chill or the fact that it still wasn’t Ivy Day, even now, thirty, forty-five seconds since the last time she’d checked her inbox. She’d pulled her curls into two puffs on either side of her head and the spirals of a hangover-proofing sigil sparkled on the nape of her neck. Up front, Jing reapplied her lip gloss. She balanced the kitschy clamshell compact I’d gifted her for Christmas in her palm. It caught the party lights above her, sparkled on her mouth like it’d struck water. Jing snapped the compact shut. She turned to Daisy. Daisy flicked her eyes up and down her, and she crushed her empty plastic bottle and thrust it underfoot, leaned in with a swish of caramel-colored pigtail, and ghosted the edge of her thumb around the corner of Jing’s bottom lip. A plummy stain clung to her nail.
“Ugh,” Daisy said. She flashed her teeth, expression so bright it was nearly unhinged. Pupils small, still. It’d take a few minutes. “Just heartbreaking.”
Shiloh examined their nails. They were meeting up with someone, if I understood their vagaries correctly, and they’d dolled up for it, wore a tiny white tank top, perilously low-slung slacks they’d inherited from Julian, a belt chain borrowed from yours truly, oxblood platform clogs they’d found in the shop. Blotted lip stain, a ghost of blush in the apples of their cheeks. Bone-blond hair, long as their jaw now, smoothed behind their ears with crisscrossed bobby pins. My teeth chattered. Leather sucks for windchill. The shirt I wore beneath, hacked free of its sleeves, didn’t help much either. I was cold where my jeans gashed open and cold where my shirt collar dipped. I’d touched up my buzz cut a week ago, and the breeze raked every groove of my skull, pressed on those zigzagged bits where the smaller bones fused together. I sniffed, bounced like a boxer, then pulled my hands out of my pockets and texted them: You look cute jackass
Shiloh’s pocket lit up. They withdrew their phone in a fluid motion a breath later, frowned at it, then over their shoulder at me, and replied: ew ilu
Where’s the guy?
inside already
Is he cool?
hes a vegan trotskyist
Does that mean yes or no
bite me
I felt an odd kick of pride that I knew Shi, and that they’d so quickly grown from an extremely evil libertarian nightmare person into a way less evil communist nightmare person. Happy that they could be in the room with the Scapegracers without Daisy hissing now, too. I thought about us coming to save them two months ago only to find them standing in the dirt road’s delta with a bag in their fist, speechless, rigid, past tears. I mashed the thought down. I grinned and the dry skin on my lower lip promptly split. It puffed, I tasted like pennies. The night air stung when I took a breath. I was unkissable at baseline, I didn’t need the boost. I shoved my phone back in my pocket, then shook my hands out at the wrists, swept one thumb over my opposing palm, and rubbed out some of the tension.
The bouncer said, “Scapegracers?”
Jing said, “That’s right.”
The bouncer made a face. He asked for Daisy’s ID.
Daisy pulled it from thin air and forked it over.
I squeezed my eyes shut, paranoid for a moment that this time, the realfake sigil would flake out on us and we’d be shit out of luck. It was a relatively recent addition to our repertoire. Definitely wouldn’t get you through an airport or anything that intense, but it had held up so far in similar circumstances. Fuck, would it be a bummer if it went belly-up on us now! To stand in the cold for nothing! Being known as Scapegracers wasn’t a guarantee of getting into places, particularly parties we didn’t frequent. This bouncer was a stranger.
He handed back her plastic and waved her through the door.
One by one, my friends melted into the scalding pink darkness. It happened fast. I blinked and suddenly it was just me out here in the cold. Wasn’t sure if they were waiting just beyond, or if they’d dispersed and I’d have to wander aimlessly for one thousand years to find them. Alone, I stepped up to the bouncer, who was annoyingly taller than me, and handed him my legal ID.
I hardly looked like that picture now. It was a year old. That version of me had shaggy curls and muddy eyeliner, looked smaller statured, sourer but softer everywhere. No hair meant I had more jaw. I hadn’t worn makeup in a month and had the eyebags to prove it. I sniffed, glanced between the bouncer’s grip and his screwed-up brow, tried to guess whether he noticed the inconsistencies, or whether he saw through the spell work to my real age, or if he was about to boot me for being the lone non-pretty member of my clique. But then, this was a queer party. Can’t imagine most of us looked like our government papers.
He handed me back my ID.
I took a step inside and the world went hot again.
High ceiling, heavy fog, bodies knotted and throbbing to an alien, trilling house beat. There was that smell, the dark tart one that seemed to radiate off LEDs, and it hit the back of my throat and I felt emotional all of a sudden, very in my body, very human and awake. The music pressed on me. Pink mist seethed against my skin, glitter splashed me where dancing melted into moshing. People kissed each other. People drank and looked up at the ceiling, looked through the ceiling and through every tier of stratosphere past heaven with their eyes half shut, their lashes thick and tangled, dripping beads of black mascara. I could feel, I felt, there was sensation in my body all around me. My fingertips tingled. My head slightly hurt. I felt good, with strobe lights on the back of my neck I felt like my whole horrible self again, and feeling good made me dizzy. Parties are pocket utopias. Took a while to learn that, but fuck if it wasn’t one of the only things I believed with certainty these days. I shook myself. People eddied around me. I nodded to the beat.
Where were my girls? Where’d they wandered off to now?
In my looking I let myself get caught in a current and was swept deeper into the warehouse. I lacked the right vantage to see the far wall from here, assuming that there was a far wall at all and this room didn’t yawn on forever, so I wasn’t sure contextually how deep into the room I’d gone. A circuit boy in a pup harness smiled at me. A molly-eyed redhead in fishnets jerked a nod my way as they passed. Someone offered me a tab I didn’t take, and a flask, and a sticker. The beat changed, felt slower and haughtier, and I followed a girl I thought was Daisy for a while before the girl who absolutely wasn’t Daisy vanished and I was suddenly at the edge of a makeshift bar. Radioactive green lanterns swung from hanging chains. People smoked and dripped off each other. The bartender wore a backless dress, and they sported corset piercings down either side of their spine that they’d strung through with bright white shoelaces. I pressed my hip against the bar and focused on breathing. Breathing felt nice. There weren’t any open stools, but I didn’t particularly need one. I glanced out over the crowd, scanned for Jing’s platinum hair, or Yates’ ruffled gingham dress, or Daisy’s sugarcoated Looney Tunes violence energy signature. Far away from me, twisting between throngs of dancers, I thought I spotted Shiloh’s arms around a narrow waist, their cheek leaned on a bony shoulder. I gnawed my bottom lip, squeezed my eyes shut for a second. They were overworked. Too much to see. The bartender asked so I got myself water and a sour. I put a twenty on the counter. It must’ve been enough.
Vision unfocused, I clasped my fist around the cold, wet tin and murmured something like Thank you you’re the best sick piercings uhuh thanks. I flipped the lid with my thumb. It opened with a hiss. I brought it to my mouth and the taste hurt my teeth. I took a hearty swallow, shut my eyes again.
“Scapegracer?”
I opened one eye just a sliver, peeked between my lashes.
It was a girl. I didn’t know her. She was shorter than me even with platforms. She had a curly bob and wore heart-shaped gems below her eyes. I lowered my drink and inclined my head, leaned so I could hear her over the screaming treble, meanwhile swept my free hand over my breast pocket, felt around the place where I’d stashed a few gnarly Polly Pockets for commission hexing purposes. I was rarely without at least one these days. Didn’t like to be caught without supplies. I pressed the pad of my index finger over a plastic ankle, barely thicker than a toothpick, and cleared my throat. Both eyes open now, mostly focused, unclouded again. I peered around the crowd over her shoulder. Eyeballed anyone who eyeballed back. “Is he here?”
“No,” she said, and then smiled and added something I couldn’t hear over the music.
“Speak up,” I said. I leaned down a little lower, tip of my nose just above the strap of her dress. It was a milky shimmery bodycon, looked holographic under the flashing lights, soft like a corn snake’s belly. Hypnotic. I tongued my gums.
“Do you want to dance?” She smiled at me. One of her hands drifted up and she brushed fingers over my leather lapel, hooked the edge with the zipper teeth. She gave me a little tug.
I took an impassioned swig of my drink then abandoned the rest of it, hoped it hadn’t made my hand too cold to the touch. I tried for a smile and faltered, feeling dumb and a little stiff. My head buzzed. My brain was a beehive. My teeth could rattle out of my gums. Whatever face I’d made must’ve been good enough for her, though. She walked backwards with a fistful of my jacket, and I let her lead me to another corner of the warehouse, nearer to the DJ, a place where there was so much glitter underfoot that it crunched like sand beneath my boots. It was murkier here, saltier. Lots of overlong wrists drifting loosely through the dark.
She tightened her fist, yanked me down a touch, snaked her free arm around the back of my neck. I felt the crook of her elbow against my nape. My gut wrenched like spell work. She moved her hips and I followed her, the bassline went jammy in my bone marrow and made my body feel hollow and when she swayed against my chest I felt a fuse bust in my brain, there were bright lights then nothing. Some central cognitive superego control panel went dark. I grinned like an idiot, then my grin slid off, my eyes shut again. Her temple was warm where it pressed beside my jugular. She said something I didn’t quite hear.
I opened my mouth to ask her to repeat it, but instead I went, “What’s your name?”
“Lina.” (Or Mina? Nina? Sheena? Karina? What?) Then, once again, told me something that did not register in my brain as language. This music was too deep in me. I couldn’t hear for shit.
“What was that, sweetheart?”
“I love masculine lesbians.”
I fell out of sync with the music for a second. My vision stalled. My throat clapped.
Fingers closed around my hips. I was being pulled backwards, away from this girl, and I blinked and she was gone, swallowed by the ever-churning knot of human people. I whipped my head around but whoever had me was shorter than me, all I could see was red fog. I looked down at the hands on my belt loops then, saw how they were long-fingered, slim-knuckled, with neat sharp nails and maroon papercuts. Gold rings on every knuckle. Jing.
I found it in me to turn around.
She somehow kept her grip on me during my half rotation. She crooked her indexes, hooked them in the loops above my hipbones. The lights bounced off her hair; I couldn’t see her eyes beneath her bangs except in flashes. She leaned up on tiptoe, pressed her cheek against mine.
“Where’d you go?” I felt watery and I smiled more earnestly than I hoped she’d catch. I pressed my cheekbone above her ear. No way she could see evidence of goofiness, or any lingering weird. “I was looking for you.”
“Daisy’s got a hex patron.” Jing smiled, I heard it in her tone. “Except she’s rolling so I think she’ll need backup. Are you game?”
“Yeah,” I said. My chest thrummed where she leaned on it. “Where is she?”
“Further back,” she said against the hinge of my jaw.
Almost like dancing, her leaning on me this way. She swayed against me. This song felt nice in the soles of my boots.
I felt her lashes. She must’ve blinked. “Did I spoil your fun?”
“Nah,” I said firmly. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
“You let girls drag you anywhere.” She pressed her nose against me. For a stupid second I thought she might bite me. “She was cute. Did you get her number?”
“Didn’t ask for it.” A pulse in my throat just above the place where my specter lived, or at least where I imagined it. My soul ached. I curled my lip, flattened a hand against the small of her back, paused for response. I’d yank it back if she so much as twitched. I’d stuff them in my pockets. I’d gnaw them off, whatever whatever whatever, maybe I was a touch drunker than planned. Should’ve pregamed less. “Daisy?”
Jing put her weight on me. She wore a candy choker and the little sugar beads rolled against my collarbone, powder pink and blue. I hadn’t worn candy jewelry since I was a kid. I remembered it having a cloying bright taste and getting my wrist sloppy with spit. She strained on tiptoe, brought her mouth beside my daith and said, “Where’s the fire? She’ll be fine for a second.”
Well. Daisy could get into a lot of absolutely ridiculous bullshit in three milliseconds given the chance, and if she needed the two of us it was wild to me that we weren’t already across the floor, by her heels, doing whatever was necessary to the point of excess. Jing released my belt. She lifted her hands. They ghosted up the sides of me, waist and ribs and shoulders, up the ridges of my throat, my jawbone, the domes of my temples, the crest of my hairline. She skittered her nails over my crown. Little taps, like a spider’s footsteps. They crept down my nape, then traced little zigzags over the one knobby vertebra where neck flowed into back. Like she was spelling something. “You’re a fucking dummy, Sideways.”
I sucked in a hard breath. “Yes, I am.”
“Do you know why?”
What a question.
The hand closed over the back of my neck and she yanked down hard, pulled me until our foreheads flushed together. She was all I could see. “I’m trying to dance with you.”
“But Daze—”
“Can wait for like five fucking seconds. As I said.” She snorted, rolled her eyes up in her head. Her smirk vanished. She was inscrutable. Also, she was right: there was not a single electrical impulse in the whole of my brain. “Your little e-girl looked like she was having fun. I want a turn. Do I get a turn?”
No thoughts, no thoughts, no thoughts. A weird lick of doubt but I didn’t give it language. I would’ve nodded but couldn’t like this, and I couldn’t blink either, and the eye contact was cracking some unseen emotional dam and I didn’t have any bubblegum to spackle it over. I stepped backwards, unsteadily. The bass barely caught me.
Jing let go of my neck. She spun herself around, tucked her spine against my sternum, reached for my wrists, and crossed them above her navel. She swayed and I folded over her. She was right: I let girls drag me anywhere. I’d let her drag me anywhere. She wouldn’t have to drag me, I’d just go.
She pulled her hair to one side and I pressed my nose into the crook of her neck. She rocked on her heels, tucked herself against my chest, thrummed like she was purring. Maybe that was me? Curse dolls folded like Swiss Army knives in my pockets, limbs distending, jostled like clock hands every time Jing moved. I shook a thought off as one arose. I opened my mouth. I saw spots. I bit down on a bead beneath her ear. The snap echoed in my skull. Artificial cherry smacked behind my eyes and against the back of my throat and it occurred to me, hilariously, that this thing tasted vile. I swallowed, scraped my tongue with my teeth. Jing snickered. She cocked her head to the side, stretched her neck. Dracula and Mina. Or Carmilla and Laura?
I gnawed off a second bead.
Something, someone, pulled my gaze up.
Jelly platform sandals and warm brown ankles, ruffled hem, pleats and folds and there was Yates. Yates stood across from us, eyes enormous, fawn lashes batting. Her brows shot up. Her mouth formed a little O. She looked at the two of us like: Sideways is eating the choker off Jing’s throat, okay cool, cute that we do that now, hi ladies, it’s me Lila Yates, love you two, do y’all need me to leave you a second, or . . . ?
I saw her hand hover over her pocket.
If she took a picture I’d put a temporary moratorium on my policy of being mean to most people except for her, hard stop. There would be an exception. Five minutes of awful. She moved her mouth—her jaw dropped, then her lips spread. Sounded out: Day-zee.
What about her?
Oh. Right. Daisy was hexing. Jing had come over here to fetch me as backup.
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them wide, like that’d manually adjust my inability to focus on anything more concrete than feeling Jing’s heartbeat through her little dress and get me up to par. I moved to pull my hands back, but Jing put her nails in my wrists and I froze. She held me still. She took a step toward Yates and pulled me with her, and I felt a bit like a cape, or a big evil backpack.
Yates reached through the fog.
Jing mirrored her, linked pinkies with her.
Yates pulled us, both of us, across the floor.
People looked at us. It felt like plunging frozen hands under a hot faucet. People stared at me when I was just moving through space, at school or in public, with open and unwatered contempt. They stared like they stare at bugs under rocks. But here, in this room, people looked at us because they liked what they saw. I liked the weight of their looking.
Jing felt warm. Her pulse sang against my cheek. I had to remind myself not to get my feet tangled in hers, but my gait was wider, she could lead and I’d keep stepping outside her stride and it’d work forever. Yates held her linked pinkie at eye level, and it looked like she and Jing were making some promise. I wondered if I was implicated in the promise on proximity alone. I wondered if Jing and I looked like an Aristophanes monster like this.
Holy shit. I was gonna kill Daisy Brink for making me know the word “Aristophanes.” Where was Daisy Brink?
There, in the darkness, in midair.
Her toes dangled in space, pink platforms drifting like she was treading water. Beaming, dreamy, ecstatic with owl eyes and a grin too wide for her face. Trick of the light but I could’ve sworn that she looked holographic, like light broke around her head and refracted as a halo. She’d pulled the skinny ribbon from her brow and knotted it around a little doll’s ankle. She tilted her head back, dangled it over her open mouth like a bushel of grapes. She whispered against its plastic head with quick flashes of teeth. Her lipstick marred its cheek.
I slid off Jing. I felt like I’d been standing by a bonfire. I moved to her side, Yates found my hand and Jing the other, and we stood around with our knees touching, Daisy suspended between us. Our mouths moved. Muscle memory. Magic stirred and I flushed like it’d kissed me, it rasped over me and snagged me and slipped its hooks deep. I lost sight of Daisy. My body throbbed like it’d been struck. My specter stone pulsed once hard in the well of my throat. It wriggled sometimes, casting like this. I wasn’t sure if it’d ever melt into the rest of me, be fully integrated and seamless inside me again. Still: I tasted that salty red taste when I said “Chett” with Jing and Yates, and cold pressure shocked around me like I’d plunged underwater, and my eyes worked, they fixed themselves on Daisy up above me.
She curled her lip and bit the doll.
Its body jerked with phantom life then bloomed with sketchy sigils.
Post-spell exhaustion clapped me. I felt raw and brittle, like the wet had been scraped off my long bones. My lungs flagged. My kneecaps fizzled. The ache struck me and I swayed but didn’t fall, because the ache was in my friends, too, and we had just enough left in us to hold each other up. In the back of my head there was hot-pink static, like a sugar high. My sinuses rang. I couldn’t focus. Without Scratch in my body, the afterwards was like the old days. It was a good hurt.
Around us there was clapping. There was always clapping, there was always somehow a crowd for this, just rings upon rings of people facing us with their teeth out and their eyes gooey. Two months ago I’d nearly fainted after we’d done six in a row and that crowd had caught me—it was at Dorothy’s, maybe, I couldn’t quite remember. It felt gorgeous, it was heartbreaking. I felt sick with it. Attention! I would never take cash for magic again, not when magic was caring for people, not when everybody gazed at me and smiled at me, at us, like this in exchange. Christ. Daisy came back to earth and squeezed the curse poppet so tight in her fist I thought it’d pop. Jing leaned in and Yates and I followed her, we all leaned into Daisy, who was laughing, who made me laugh in a fit of sympathetic giddiness. People around us said “Scapegracers, Scapegracers,” and I squeezed my eyes shut and burned where their hands touched my back. This felt good, was good. I was good! I was alive right now, and here, and whole, or maybe broken in a way I could work with. My friends were here with me, they were devastating and unstoppable and I loved them. God, I loved them. I adore them, even still. We had a few months left before the end. I’d quit thinking for the rest of the night.
My pocket vibrated. Yates threw her arms around Jing’s neck and bit her necklace. Daisy took down her hair and buried her hands in it. I wondered idly about Shiloh and I reached for my phone, still vibrating, and glanced at the lit-up screen. My gut flipped. I turned away from my girls, I swiped my thumb across the screen to accept the call and cradled my phone to my cheek but the music was too loud, I shouldered through the crowd and pushed toward an illuminated exit, where beauties smoked in the freezing cold. Long legs in shredded fishnets, glossy platforms, sprays of dead yellow grass. I stepped outside and marched across the cracked asphalt, cigarette smoke curled through the air around me, the sky was purple and orange from factory fumes, my head was pounding and about to burst.
I ground my molars and put her on speaker.
Madeline Kline said, “Sideways?”
White noise in my head. Screeching, crunchy, no thoughts, no words. I sniffed.
“I’ve got no right to talk to you.” She sounded hushed, harsh. “I don’t have time to make excuses. They caught me. The Corbies, my old coven, they caught me. They’re going to present me at the flocking tomorrow. Decide what’s to be done with me.”
Breath caught in my teeth. I hissed out slowly. Managed, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Sideways, you were right. I should’ve asked for your help the first time. I didn’t, I hurt you instead, I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry. Look, they’ll kill me. My coven will propose something dire, they’re wrathful, and I don’t have allies here. I need your help. I need the Scapegracers. They’re talking about you four, how high-profile you’ve become, how you’re notorious for just—just helping people. Little anarchy altruists. I need the Scapegracers to save me. Fuck my pride, I need you. I don’t know where they’ll be keeping me, but I’ll be in the Delacroix, and when my phone dies I’m not going to be able to contact you again, and I don’t have any good fucking reason why you should pity me. I’m sorry. Sideways, I’m sorry. Please.”
I considered throwing up. I looked out into the woods, the distant cherry lights on a cell-phone tower. I rasped, “Tomorrow?”
“Yes. Sunset at the Delacroix. Can I count on you?”
A family of deer grazed near the edge of the woods. I watched the smallest one bend.
“I hate you,” I said. “Yeah. You can count on us.”
The world was ending. It sounded like, CLANG CL. . .
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