Page 5 of Magic for Nothing

THE SLASHER CHICKS CIRCLED the track like sharks, and, like sharks, we were constantly in motion. To stop moving was to die, or at least to learn the hard way what it feels like when you get hip-checked to the floor by one of your own teammates. We were all wearing our practice uniforms, “bloodstained” tank tops and green running shorts with “CAMP SLASH-A-LOT” blazoned across the butt. It made for a fascinating dash of uniformity in a group that was otherwise intentionally un-uniform. Derby girls are not cast from a single mold, unless tattoos and hair dye are somehow genetic. (For some species of cryptid, they are.)

The other three teams in my home roller derby league—the Concussion Stand, the Block Busters, and the Stunt Troubles—lounged on the bleachers or stretched the kinks out of their legs as they waited for their metaphorical turn at bat. I didn’t spare them much thought. This was a practice run, but even during a practice run, paying attention to the track is key: take your eyes off the prize and you’re eating floor. It didn’t help that the other jammer currently skating was my team captain, the lovely and sarcastic Elmira Street, who knows exactly what I’m capable of when I apply myself.

Of the two of us, I’m more nimble, more innovative, and better at turning momentum into crowd-pleasing tricks—an artifact of my high school cheerleading days. Elmira has an edge on me when it comes to raw speed; the only person on the team who can reliably beat her in a race is Fern, better known as “Meggie Itwasthewind,” and Fern doesn’t jam. She’s a blocker and she’s content to stay that way, despite Elmira’s repeated attempts to get her to change positions.

(Fern is fast and Fern is good and Fern is never going to be a jammer, because a large percentage of Fern’s speed comes from the fact that she’s not human. She’s a Sylph, a humanoid cryptid capable of modifying her own body density, which makes her ultra-fast when she’s ultra-light, and an incredible blocker when she’s ultra-heavy, since people slam into this skinny little slip of a girl, expecting to knock her out of the way, only to discover that they’ve actually run into an immovable object. It’s comedy gold every time. But if someone hit her like that when she was moving at full speed, she’d literally go flying, and that’s the sort of thing we want to avoid if possible.)

“Look alive, Thompson!” shouted Elmira as she lapped me. I wrinkled my nose at her and kept moving. I couldn’t shout back, thanks to my mouth guard: it was one of the heavy-duty ones, intended to keep me from racking up the kind of dental bills that would make my parents weep. Elmira’s mouth guard was equally impressive, when she bothered to use it; as our captain, she has a tendency to take it out during practice, and trust the rest of us not to bounce her head off the track more than strictly necessary.

It’s nice that she has that sort of faith in us. Misplaced and a little stupid, but nice.

Before I became a derby girl, I spent four years as a cheerleader at Lewis and Clark High School. People make a lot of assumptions about cheerleaders, like that we’re all plastic airheads who just want to jump high and look pretty. But it’s sort of like the whole Ginger Rogers thing, where she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. A good competitive cheerleader does everything a gymnast does while wearing a pleated skirt and never letting themselves stop smiling. Cheerleading is the leading—no pun intended—cause of injuries among high school and collegiate athletes, and the fact that no one takes it seriously is part of why people keep getting hurt. When you say cheerleading deserves the safety standards and funding of football, you’re likely to be laughed right off the team.

But cheerleaders have their tricks. I crouched to lower my center of gravity as I approached the inside curve of the track. My team has skated with me long enough to know my go-to moves, and a few blockers tried to get into position to stop me, but they were too slow. I sped up, tensing for what I was about to do.

In flat track roller derby, when a skater touches space outside the lines defining the track itself—whether they skate into the center or get hip-checked into the bleachers—they’re considered “out of bounds,” which is a penalty and annoying and disruptive and can mean losing valuable time. But that’s only if you touch the ground. An apex jump carries a skater over a portion of the inside of the track. As long as no wheels touch the forbidden ground, it’s still clean and there’s no penalty. I jumped, and suddenly I was ahead of the pack, leaving all eight of my own team’s blockers behind me and skating for the fences.

“Cheater!” shouted Elmira amiably.

I held my hands out behind me like a little kid playing bird, and showed her my middle fingers, just in case she missed the point. Her laughter was better than Red Bull when it came to giving me wings, and I skated onward, for freedom, for glory, and for bragging rights. Sometimes those are the only things that matter.

Every roller derby league has a theme of some kind, even if it’s just “we robbed a Hot Topic and this is what we came up with.” The league I belong to, the Silver Screams, has a cinema theme. Consequently, there’s usually a movie playing during practice, for the teams that have finished their time on the track to enjoy and snark at. It’s a nice social thing. It would be an awesome social thing if there were, say, showers anywhere in the building. Since there aren’t, the enjoyment of the movie must be measured against the agony of sitting that close to a bunch of sweat-drenched derby girls.

Today’s film was Night of the Creeps. A classic, but one I’d seen before. I settled for sitting at a safe distance and unpacking my lunch. We’d be doing league speed trials after the Concussion Stand and Block Busters finished their track passes, and I needed to keep my strength up. Also, I had cookies.

“Hi, Annie,” said a sweet, wispy voice as soon as I had my mouth full.

I grunted a greeting, turning to offer Fern a nod. I didn’t chew any faster. Fern’s my friend, but my mom’s cookies are amazing.

Like the rest of us, she was still in her practice gear: there was no point in changing when she’d have to put her nasty, sweaty shorts back on in an hour. She’d removed her helmet and mouth guard, at least, revealing a face just as angelic as her voice.

“You skated real good today,” she said, glancing around. Apparently satisfied that we were alone, she lowered her voice, and asked, “Has there been any movement from the you-know-who?”

I swallowed. “No, Fern,” I said. “Just like there wasn’t any movement last week, or the week before. I promised I’d call you as soon as something changed, and I will. Right now, nothing’s changing. Thank God.”

She crinkled her nose in a way that would have been adorable, if not for the obvious concern in her eyes. “Is that good? Maybe it’s taking so long because they’re going to do something really big and awful and we’re all going to die.”

“Don’t get yourself too worked up, please.” I put down my second cookie and leaned over to touch her elbow. For me, that was a big deal. I am not the most physically demonstrative person in the world. “You know Elmira will notice, and then we’ll have to explain why you’re upset, and I’m getting tired of lying to her.”

Elmira knows not all the girls in the league are strictly human. She calls them “skaters with diffabilities,” and tries not to ask too many questions. Amusingly, I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m one of them, since I’m right in the middle of things every time something goes wrong. She’s sort of right. Most people can’t light a match by thinking about it really hard. She’s also sort of wrong, because I’m not a cryptid. I’m a cryptozoologist.

Just like my stupid sister, Verity, who had the incredible bad judgment to go on national TV—live national TV—and declare war on the Covenant of St. George, aka, “that global organization of zealous monster hunters.” When we were younger, she liked to say that cheerleading would rot my brain. Guess she was projecting. The most cheer ever caused me to do was spend a lot of money on spirit ribbons. She, on the other hand, took up ballroom dance, and it caused her to fight a snake god on the air. Yeah. I’m definitely the one with the brain rot.

Fern kept looking at me anxiously. “I’m scared, Annie,” she said. “What if they come here? What if they come here and hurt me?”

“That isn’t going to happen, okay?” I offered her my hands. After a moment’s hesitation, she took them. Her fingers were squishy; she was so nervous she was dialing back her density. I squeezed, and they firmed up as she remembered what the human norm felt like. “I am not going to let that happen. You’re my friend. Everyone here is my friend.”

“Even Carlotta?”

“Maybe not Carlotta.” Carlotta is the captain of the Concussion Stand. She’s also my cousin Elsie’s ex-girlfriend, and a definite security risk. She’s not a member of the Covenant. She is aware of the identity of half the cryptids in the league, and that worried me. If someone came around promising to get rid of the “monsters” . . .

We’d cross that bridge when we came to it. For the time being, I focused on Fern, trying to look as encouraging as possible.

“Verity did what she did because she didn’t have a choice,” I said. That was the official family line, and maybe it was true. Once you’ve battled a titanic snake live on television, it’s pretty hard to maintain anything resembling a cover. The fact that she didn’t have to go on TV in the first place seemed to have missed everyone but me. Verity’s selfish. She always has been, she always will be, and she should never have been on that show. Still, I kept smiling. Fern didn’t need to know about my personal problems. “Maybe she scared the Covenant away. I mean, they did see her take down a snake god almost single handedly. So maybe they’re not coming. If they are coming, maybe they’re not going to come here. The show was filmed in Los Angeles. The cryptids down there are very good at hiding. I don’t think you have anything to be worried about.”

“Thompson!”

That’s not my name, but I’ve been answering to it for long enough that I turned automatically. Elmira was standing by the track, hands on hips, frowning. I let go of Fern.