The Scratch Daughters

Book 2: Scapegracers

by H. A. Clarke

Genres: YA Wizards & Witches; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

Sideways Pike is desperate. It turns out that Madeline Kline didn’t want to make out with her; infinitely worse, she was only flirting to get access to Sideways’ specter. Madeline has ripped the magical soul out of Sideways’ throat, and with it, everything that makes a witch feel whole. Madeline would know: the Chantry boys took hers, and she’s going to use Sideways’ specter to hunt them down and get it back.

Sideways Pike, lesbian witch extraordinaire, isn’t going to let little things like a treacherous crush or a brutal family of creepy witch hunters stop her, even if it means tracking down Madeline without the Scapegracers—her best friends, her coven, the girls she’s come to love ferociously above all else. But Sideways and her trusty bike are in for a bumpy ride . . .

In The Scratch Daughters, indie-bestselling author H. A. Clarke crafts a brilliant sequel to their tender, biting debut The Scapegracers: a raw and roiling tribute to queer lineage, to finding oneself, and to the deep love of chosen family.

Release date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 424

Sample

✴ONE✴

It was hot for December, hotter than Halloween had been, but I guess that’s the Midwest for you. Saturday at nautical twilight. The sky fell around us in a fog. We wore street clothes under kitschy little jackets that read SCAPEGRACERS, each a different color—bruisy lilac for Jing, baby blue for Yates, gunmetal for Daisy, and red 40 for me—to match the marble-sized witch organs that lived in our throats and processed our powers. Their throats, that is. Would be cute if I had my soul, too.

Anyway, dragging boys behind the bowling alley was easy as shit.

Daisy had him by his elbows. She blew a bubblegum bubble so huge it masked her as she lugged him down the alley side, around the corner to the back lot, then backwards up the abandoned school bus steps. Her bubble popped as she reached the top stair. It smelled like fake apples. She smacked her lips, adjusted her hold, and bounced him twice before she dragged him into the dank bus depths, seemingly unmoved by his carp-on-a-line-style thrashing. Usually I did the guy-hauling part, but she’d been in a mood and that energy had to go somewhere. Besides, for a girl as small as her, Daisy had a hell of a grip. We followed her at heel down the slick black school bus aisle. There was a hint of risk, what with us nabbing this guy and forcing him into a bowling-alley-anterior bus husk being theoretically illegal and all, maybe a smidgeon near kidnapping and assault, but we weren’t too worried. This wasn’t the first time we’d done this sort of thing. We hadn’t gotten caught yet. Why would we now?

This was Alexis Nguyen’s ex-boyfriend. Travis something. Beefy corn-faced prick in a letter jacket and expensive showy never-been-worked-in cowboy boots. Kind of an auxiliary friend to Austin Grass and the like, but more belonging to the pseudo-popular youth-group-cum-drug-dealer clique who genuinely thought that Jing and Yates and Daisy had signed their names in the devil’s book by hanging around with me. Gotta love fundy assholes. One wonders how he dated the likes of Alexis in the first place, even as he was, in this instance, correct on technicality. We’ve done a lot of scribbling in and around our devil’s book.

Daisy pushed Travis against the emergency door at the back of the bus. She shoved hard, then down. He skittered onto his tailbone and spat a long string of stupid that I didn’t care to process. What do you think you’re what the fuck are you what is this what fuck. Ugh. Whatever. With a flip of her skirt, Daisy slammed her knee into his solar plexus, pinning him in place, and Travis heaved a cough and kicked so hard one of his boots flew off, banging against a smudged window and clattering to the floor. Smelled like corn chips. Boys are gross.

Jing and Yates stalked ahead of me with Jing in the lead. She had a jumbo roll of duct tape like a bangle on her wrist that she hula hooped around as she strut, shoulders squared, chin out, whistling one of Yates’ favorite pop songs. She stopped just before the kicking prick. Grabbed the end of the tape and pulled. It made a sound like a lightning strike. She got his mouth, then moved lower, taped him to the door in zigzags between FUCK BIO I HATE IT HERE and DONNA + SNAKE 5EVR in a Sharpied arrow heart. His wriggling popped the initial tape ribbons off, but Daisy kept him in place, and Jing made short work of the rest. In a blink, Travis something was affixed. He twitched, wide-eyed. Looked like a fly in a spiderweb. A fly whose primary idols were SoundCloud rappers.

“Travis.” Yates looked at down at him, doe eyes heavy. She clasped her perfect hands together and tucked them against her perfect chest, gold-ringed knuckles sparkling just beneath her candy-charm necklace. Beatific. “You’ve been following Alexis around. You keep texting her and messaging her nonstop, and when she blocks you, you make new accounts and start again. You park outside the store where she works and wait for her shift to end so that you can follow her. Travis, Alexis isn’t into you anymore. You’re freaking her out. How could you lack the basic human decency to respect the dismissal of a girl you claim to care about, or literally anybody for that matter? She came to us scared for what might happen if she couldn’t keep avoiding you. It makes me sick to my stomach. I’m sick, Travis. How could you do this?”

Travis made muffled sounds. His eyebrows jumped together.

Jing and Daisy looked at each other. Girl telepathy. Jing curled her bright red lip. Daisy’s eye twitched. A host of microexpressions too fast to map that made their highlights shimmer, then they simultaneously came to their conclusion, and Daisy ripped off the tape along with a couple of whiskers from Travis’ mouth.

“Ow! Jesus Christ.” Travis kissed his teeth and coughed. “You’re fucking crazy! What the shit, let me out of here, you little—”

“Time to gag him again?” Jing looked to Yates like, Please say yes.

Yates bit her bottom lip. Felt very no.

With a flicker of exasperation, Jing stayed her hand. Crossed her arms to holster her tape bangle.

Spotlight back on Yates, who patted her curls, then adjusted the ruffled hem of her little dress. Minty green, looked nice with her blue. Soothing and frosty. I liked the pearly buttons. “Do you know who we are?”

“Yes, I know who you are, Yates. Fucking, of course I know who you are, we’ve gone to school together since second grade.” He opened his mouth to say more, but then recognition hit him, and his eyes flashed. “Jackets. The fucking jackets. This is Scapegracer shit, isn’t it? No. No no no, count me out. I’m not fucking around, you better let me go, my dad’s a pastor and—”

“Boys don’t treat girls like that in our town,” said Jing, dripping venom. “When they do, that’s Scapegracer shit. You got it right.”

“Don’t kill me,” Travis squeaked. Squeaked! Wasn’t so big and bad in the face of supernatural retribution, now was he? “What do you want? What do you want from me? Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, I didn’t do it, I swear to god.”

“Get a load of this guy,” said Daisy. She sniffed, smiled mirthlessly. “Don’t flatter yourself, ugly. You smell and nobody likes you. I only kill for love. Yates, got the Chett poppet?”

Yates produced the poppet from an inner jacket pocket. One-armed Ken doll. She held it by a buff-toned mono-toed foot and took a breath. “Ready, Sideways?”

Sideways. That was me. Talking to me.

I was here. My body was in this space with the rest of them. I was breathing, my lungs beat when I kept my mouth open like this, sucked air between my teeth and down my throat then out my stuffed-up nose. Blood moved inside my gut. Fingers hummed at the ends of my hands, throbbing numb but still attached. Fucked-up ratty boots below, fucked-up ratty hair above. Solve et coagula. Yuck. My body stood still aside from the occasional absent fidgeting, upright, alive, and I was present. I was on earth. I tasted ink. Our coven’s unbooked devil swam languidly inside me, evidenced from the outside only in the jet stains pooling around my nail beds and the corners of my mouth, and if he had any opinions on the Chett-Travis situation, he didn’t offer them. Around us the bus smelled like hot crayons and trash bags. Old sweat. Fruit snacks. Clammy, clingy scents that recalled being smaller and worse. Jing looked sweat-glossy under her bangs. Yates thumbed at the plastic dip of the poppet’s ankle. A gnat zipped around the hollow bus cavity until it got too close to Daisy, who crushed it twitching with her elbow against a slashed-up vinyl bench. Chettboy whimpered something that sounded like You’re a buncha crazy bitches.

“Ready to start?” Jing was looking at me. I felt her looking at me.

I was still something to see.

I rolled my hands into fists, stubby nails deep into my palm meat, and the dull pain was an anchor that proved to me that I was here. I was right here, right fucking here. I was standing here empty-handed, trying to make myself think about how I was standing here empty-handed.

I was also panting in the woods with a handle in my grip. Jackknife. I’d pilfered it from my ex. He’d used it to cut open little animals, so he told me, because it’s easy to find witches if you dig around in their fresh wet insides. Lungs burning because I ran here, I ran here in kicks that weren’t made for running in the woods and I haven’t run drills in months. My hair hung in my eyes and stuck to my cheeks and my shoulders and dipped in between my lips. Straight hair, soft and heavy, blue-black, thick. I had the knife in one hand and had the other hand pushed up against a broad tree trunk. Rough bark, felt like her leather. Grip tightened on the handle, I crushed it as close to my bones as my skin would allow. I pressed down on the bark with the knife. My body thrummed all over, alive with a pulse like ants swarming on a dropped ice-cream cone. I was crawling with it, with the manic rush of magic. Bad-batch-ecstasy rancid-maggot magic. It felt like doing donuts in a stolen sports car. I felt sick and it wasn’t mine. It couldn’t be mine. It felt good. I drove the knife tip into the tree and sawed down. Sap oozed down the knife and gummed around my knuckles. I carved faster. Long lines, jaggedy, overexaggerated. Her handwriting is so tacky. It’s too big and damn near illegible. So be it. I can see you. I can see everything you do now. Extra eyes to watch my back.

Her handwriting?

Right. My handwriting. Sideways’ handwriting. I am Sideways. I’m on a bus.

Ten points of soft pressure on either side of my neck, five on each side. Gentle touch. Little shaking, just enough to rustle the curls. “Sideways. Hey. What’s up?” I blinked, and there was Yates. She had me by the shoulders, dark fingers soft on the red satin, and she looked at me with a dimple between her eyebrows. She smelled like honey. “Are you okay? Talk to me.”

“Some bitch ripped her soul out,” Daisy sneered. “Duh, she’s not okay.”

“I’m talking to Sideways, Daze.”

“I’m fine.” My tongue felt weird in my mouth in a different way than it usually did whenever Yates was touching me. Like it wasn’t attached. I couldn’t remember how to make it move like I wanted. It was a big dumb clumsy slug that was super bad at language.

You’re not fine. Mr. Scratch purred in the seams of my skull. His voice was overinflected, unctuous and slithery, unplaceably accented. Just left of mid-Atlantic. He stretched a tendril down the top knobs of my spine and coiled it under the flat bone of a shoulder blade, swished it to and fro in a bizarrely comforting gesture, like he was giving me a pat from the inside. It was a weird chilly, wet feeling. Kinda ticklish. Does lying make it better?

“Sure it does,” I hissed under my breath with my eyes squeezed shut. My hands scrubbed up my face and over my head, skimmed the greasy tangles as they went. Cracked-up mucky nails snagged the edge of knots. Split split split. How long had it been since I’d had a proper shower? “They don’t need to deal with it right now. Just help me do this, okay?”

Yates adjusted her hold on me. Whispered, “I don’t know what he said, but we’re not dealing with this. We’re doing this. There’s a difference.”

Daisy sucked in her cheeks.

Jing grinned and mouthed, Tell Scratchy I say hi.

We were all getting used to my whole I have a weird fucking roommate inside my brain who jacks up our magic and is keeping me alive, but the thing is, he is literally a chatty little wet boneless demon freak and being around me means overhearing half of our conversations on a semi-regular basis thing in our own ways.

Mr. Scratch, who had access to my optic nerves so plainly saw Jing’s lips move, went, Hello to Jing! I love you.

Okay. How about no. I jumped over Yates’ kindness and mumbled, “He says hi yourself.”

Yates looked genuinely worried but like she didn’t want me to worry about her being worried. Offered me the curse doll.

I swayed out of her touch and palmed it.

Here we are. A hex for my girlies. Scratch gushed down my shoulders, down the gristle of my arms and into my wide wrists, where he split himself into ribbons and twined himself around my individual carpal bones. Full-body brain freeze. It felt like diving out of a mosh pit into fresh snow. Mr. Scratch made himself like a liquid magnet in my palm. He hummed in the poppet’s direction, tugged me from the inside. I followed the pull and grabbed the Ken doll by its head. Its nose inverted under my trigger finger. Mr. Scratch soaked into my voice box, and together we said, “We the Scapegracers call upon our power to hex Travis forever.”

“Us Scapegracers forever,” went Jing and Yates and Daisy in unison.

We’d gotten pretty good at this.

“For the crimes this boy committed, we pronounce him Chett.” I scowled down at the doll. Projected complete dominion upon it. The thrumming wormed in my breastbone. Magic rattled with a sound like old-TV static in my head, or maybe that was just Scratch’s breathing, and at once my body ached and rang, which was how it should be, but I didn’t feel it right. My body wasn’t right. I was all hollow pieces and no joints. My skeleton was a series of cheap plastic pony beads on an elastic string. That string was Scratch. He kept me strung together, but if he went slack or snapped, I’d fall to pieces. I’d become a spill of beads for people to slip on. Magic kept my circulatory system going like coffee or nicotine in place of automatic vitality, but it wasn’t my magic, and as much as I was obsessed with it, it also sucked. It sucked. I’d been having palpitations for a month. Shouldn’t magic feel good? When it felt bad in the old way, that felt so good.

“Us Scapegracers forever, we deem him Chett,” my girls said.

“Chett,” I said, and devil ink oozed through the cracks in my hands and wriggled in fronds across the doll’s body, flowered around his throat into little hatch marks of my handwriting. I tongued my inky gums, then passed the doll to Yates.

“Chett,” said Yates, and her handwriting unfurled along the doll’s body beside mine, her old THOU SHALT NOT in pretty cursive. She passed it on to Jing, who said her hex and passed it on to Daisy.

When Daisy’s handwriting sprawled around the little plastic body, her handwriting latched onto Jing’s, whose amalgamated half-Daisy handwriting latched on Yates’, which then flowed upwards into mine. Styles smeared. Our own chimeric communal voice, janky and perfect, marked the doll forever. Daisy held the poppet out, and we all reached forward, pressed a finger somewhere against the organless body. I got around where his belly button should be. Daisy spat out her gum and with it, the incantation’s end. “Travis Meijer is Chett forever, enforceable by us Scapegracers. No reprieve and no relent. So be it.”

“So be it,” said Yates and Jing.

“So be it,” I said.

So be it.

The doll’s joints snapped with a waft of burning plastic.

Travis let out a yelp. I let myself glance over, and sure as morning, a thick black stripe had bloomed around his throat. Literally permanent marker. It recalled the velvet choker Daisy had stolen from the Delacroix archives, the one that’d belonged to her dead mom.

Daisy tugged the doll out of our collective grip and turned to peer down at Travis like he was some kind of fucked-up bug. She waved the doll around as she spoke. Gesticulated with it. “So, here’s how this works. You don’t look at girls unless your thoughts are pure. That means no thinking about hurting girls or using them or deceiving them, any shit like that. You don’t talk about girls with malice, you don’t follow them around, you so don’t touch them without permission, or else you’re going to be in a world of pain that medicine won’t fix! Nothing fixes it. You don’t snitch on us. If you snitch, it gets worse. Lucky for you, if you’re not a terrible person, if you stop and never do creepy predator bullshit again, you’ll be fine. If you’re bad, it’ll get bad. That’s easy math. Clear enough for you?”

Travis opened and shut his mouth a bunch, like a fish.

Daisy spoke slowly, sweetly, like she was explaining something to a snotty kid. “Do you get me, Travis?”

“You’re the devil,” he whispered.

“You’re thinking of Sideways.” Jing wagged her brows. “Daisy’s just like that.”

The devil adjusted his perch inside my jawbone, and he felt too wriggly, so I swatted at him and bade him hold still.

Daisy was done. She reached for the red emergency handle just above Travis’ head, and with a yank and a heave, the door swung backwards. It took Travis with it. His torso swept out with the door, and his legs dragged behind him, slung their way off the bus. Then, gravity! The duct tape that’d held him in place gave way, and he dropped off the door, fell with cartoonish slowness into a heap on the dead grass below. Said oof and everything. Then came a moan, a string of cussy nothings, and the snap of brittle yellow weeds as Travis found his feet. I could hear him the whole time he hauled ass into the woods, long after he was out of sight. He breathed like a hot computer.

Now, it was just us in the bus. The magic hangovers I used to get didn’t really happen anymore, not since Mr. Scratch set up shop inside me, but there was a release of tension, a turning down of the dials. I felt less. I hated feeling less. Jing thumbed through her phone and Yates zipped up her jacket, smoothed the fabric against her chest. Daisy stared at the hole Travis had left in his wake. I yearned for a migraine. I looked at my hands.

“Daze,” said Yates. She walked down the aisle and stopped by Daisy’s side, placed a hand between her shoulder blades. She rubbed in little diamond shapes. “Are you alright?”

Jing’s attention snapped from her screen to the pair of them.

I remembered, vaguely, stories that’d gone around about some ex of Daisy’s. That he was an asshole of note. That he and Daisy got into it after homecoming last year, and that she’d locked herself in the girls’ locker room and cried for hours. Daisy crying over, or because of, a boy was hard to imagine. I didn’t think I could fathom Daisy shedding actual human tears. Anyway, the guy doesn’t go here anymore. He got into a really bad wreck a few days after the homecoming incident, fell a semester behind in the hospital, and moved away to live with some Indianan cousin or something so that he could retake junior year. As for the rumors, well. The rumor was that Jing poured canola oil on the guy’s windshield. He’d turned the wipers on, and the whole windshield blurred over, and he drove blind into a telephone pole on Fourth Street.

But there were lots of rumors about Jing and Yates and Daisy that weren’t true.

“I’m fine,” Daisy snapped. Her voice brought me back into it. She didn’t quite look it—she was smiling but her eyes were hard—but her tone didn’t leave room for argument. She shot her eyes at me. “Are you?”

“Yeah.”

“Liar.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement of fact. She snorted and looked away from us, and after a pause, she patted her eyelids with her fingertips until she found the edge of one of her falsies. She peeled off the right strip, then the left, and I thought for a second about feathers being plucked. Her eyes looked smaller, older without them. She pressed the strips together, ran the edges against her bottom lip. Sounded hoarse. “I know that look. You were in her head again, weren’t you? What’s she doing? She daydreaming about sucking bruises on your hipbones again?”

That was once. Shouldn’t have told her about that. I scuffed the toe of my boot against the floor, watched the shitty black leather scuff the shitty black aisle. I blended in. “She’s hexing something,” I said. I thought about the knife in my hand, my hand on the tree, my knife in the tree, my soul in my teeth. Thief. “I don’t know why.”

“The fucking nerve.” She crossed her arms. The poppet jutted out from the crook of her left elbow like a broken bone. “I’m skinning her once we catch her. Make you a nice new jacket. Your old leather one is trash anyway. Let’s get out of here. It smells like middle school. Yates, are we still good for your place?”

“Mhm. My dad is making dinner.” She gently pulled the poppet out of Daisy’s grip and tucked it back in her inside pocket. One little flipper foot stuck out. “We should get going.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Jing said. She stood up, stretched like a cat, and sauntered in my direction. She’d retoned her hair recently, and it was the palest shade of blond I’d ever seen on a person. Star-glow bright. She hooked an arm around my waist and whisked me down the aisle, and I let myself be brought along.

Feelings were harder without my specter inside of me. Emotions filtered like a song through another room. Hazier. Seldom a high note, but a bulk of the low. Jing’s arm on my waist still felt like something, though. Something for sure.

I didn’t dwell. We were friends. We were friends.

“I got the dye in the car,” she said. “Provided you’re still up for it.”

Dye. Right. God, I was bad at thinking.

We had thrown around the idea of dyeing my hair recently and I’d said yes without much thought. I mean, I would let Jing tattoo her name on my forehead if she asked in the right way. Hair? Hair grows back. Yeah. Yes. Up for anything.

I just nodded.

Jing released me in front of the bus stairs, leaped down them in one giant step. Flipped her hair back. It flashed in the air around her head. She turned to face me, locked eyes with me. She put one foot in front of the other, gave me a neat little grin, and bowed with a flourish that’d make Kit Marlowe jealous. Then one hand came up. An offer. “May I ease you to the chariot, handsome lady?”

Daisy snickered somewhere behind my head.

I tried to swallow. Input was failing. I looked over my shoulder at Yates, the angel to whom this clearly oughta be offered, but she smiled behind her baby-blue nails and shook her head. Curls bounced everywhere in slow motion with cartoon sparkles.

I really was a potoo in the company of flamingoes, huh.

I looked back down at Jing, still holding her pose with a mean little smirk, and gnawed my bottom lip. I took her hand, held it as I clomped down the steps and landed in the dry mud below. She didn’t drop her smile, didn’t drop the bow. She brought my hand to her mouth. My pulse sped up so fast that it shoved Mr. Scratch from his perch in my ribs, sent him spiraling around inside me. Jing’s eyes burned. She wouldn’t blink. She rubbed circles on my palm with her thumb, and her lips ghosted just above my knuckles. Almost a kiss. Then she jammed out her tongue and licked me.

I recoiled so fast that I lost balance, smacked against the side of the bus. My fingers glistened with spit. “What gives?”

Jing, who’d just stood up straight, bent over again with laughter. Her cackle spooked birds from the trees. Daisy joined in, sounding hollow, and Yates sighed something about Jing being nasty. They climbed down the steps and headed for Jing’s cherry-colored convertible, and Jing lingered behind, still laughing, while I regathered my nerve and my chill.

“Hey.” She crossed her arms over her chest, smile gone.

I rubbed my hand on my jeans and glanced her way in response.

“We’re going to get your specter back. It’s going to happen.”

We’d been saying that for the past month.

My gross wet hand was dry, far away, wrapped tight around a knife. My skin was unbroken but somewhere else it was heavy with long splinters. Somewhere else I was doing magic. I cut and I wanted to sob and spit and smile until my cheeks split. I felt a thrill without any pleasure in it. It wasn’t pleasure. I didn’t like this, the carving. The rush wasn’t in the destruction and the creation, it was in something else.

I made myself look at my hand, at the fact that there wasn’t a knife in it, and then I made myself look at Jing. She’d stepped closer. A gust of wind caught her hair and streamed it by my cheek, stripes of moonlight. “I was just trying to wig you out. That’s all. I wanted to make you smile. You hardly do that anymore. What’s up, Sideways? What’s happening in your head?”

“Nothing,” I said. Jing was looking at me and I wanted her to know, I wanted her to know everything I’d ever thought about anything, but there weren’t words that existed for that. Not the right ones. Not right now. I looked at her, and the weight of all my bullshit slammed down against my sternum so hard I thought it would rip me. Padlock dropped in a thin plastic bag. My mouth opened again, and I couldn’t miraculously figure out how to say anything that would fish out words. I lied to her. Said, “Nothing at all. It’s a void up here.”

Jing looked at me for a second. Just looked. She wasn’t like Daisy. She wouldn’t call me on dishonesty where my crazy was concerned. But she said it without saying it, and when she hooked her arm around my shoulder and steered me toward her car, I wasn’t sure if she was getting fed up with me. I imagined it was hard being friends with somebody whose soul is somewhere else, particularly when you hadn’t been friends for long before that. She’d known me longer as a zombie than she had as a normal lez. My equivalent of normal. Jing’s an angel, that’s the point. She’d been more patient with me than I deserve. All of them have been.

“Jing,” I said when we got closer to the car, where Daisy was reapplying her shimmery nude lipstick in the rearview mirror and Yates was paging through a meticulously organized and photo-op-ready notebook. One of them had turned on metallic citric acid pop, and it played just loud enough that I thought they maybe wouldn’t hear me if I spoke low. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” she said. “Anything you want.”

“That guy Daisy used to date.”

Jing made a sound in her throat. “You’re gonna have to specify that further, Jesus Christ. There’ve been a lot. What do you want to know?”

“The football player.” Lots of them were football players. I couldn’t think of his name for the life of me. I could think of the shape of him, though. He and Daisy at the front of the gym in glitzy plastic crowns, wearing sashes, speckled by the disco ball strung in the rafters overhead. My lonely ass in an ill-fitting tux half-watching from the risers, feeling glum, drinking straight from a handle I’d snuck in my sleeve. “The linebacker. Last year’s homecoming king.”

Jing stopped walking. She straightened her back. Breathed through her teeth, moved her mouth as though she was smiling and said, “Don’t talk about him.” Then, she seized me above my elbow and yanked me close, breathed just under my ear: “What do you need to know? We can’t Chett him, he moved to Indianapolis to live with his dad over the summer. He isn’t worth the trip.”

“I just.” I chewed the words before I spoke them. Bubblegum words. Daisy’s bubble popping. Jing held me so hard it hurt. “Is the rumor true about what you did? People say all sorts of things about the three of you. I heard all sorts of stuff before we were close. I get it if it’s fake, I mean, I—”

“I tried to kill him,” she said. She released me and tore her hand over her skull, and I watched her knot her fingers in all that platinum blond. Her knuckles moved like she was strangling something. The green veins twitched in the back of her hand. “We tried the cops and took him to court and everything. Good lawyers, too, what with all Daze’s money. Nothing. We got nothing. Not even a restraining order. No evidence and most of it wasn’t strictly illegal. Her word against his and all that.”

A baby-fist-sized lump lodged in my throat.

“Nobody fucks with my friends.” Jing set her jaw. She seemed incredibly alive, more alive than she’d been before—power strobed through her and I felt with newfound surety that she’d been magic way before me, even if she hadn’t known the language for it. She vibrated with a particular vigor, an intensity. She focused it all on me. Scalded me with it. Leaned against me and I could not think for a moment about anything else but her gravity, the intensity of her presence. “Believe me when I say this, Sideways Pike. We’re go. . .