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Pillow up again. “I know,” she said, the words muffled.
“You’d better start at the beginning,” I said, and recalled Petra saying nearly the same thing to Patience. Had that been only a few nights ago?
“So, I guess the beginning isn’t very interesting. When I was little, I tried to use the magic my mom promised me I had. We tried tricks, charms, potions. Alchemy. This one that uses hand movements.” She extended her hands, clapped them together, and then did intricate movements with her fingers, like she wasweaving a cat’s cradle without the string. “I couldn’t make any of it work.”
“How old were you?”
“She started me at five. She didn’t want me to stumble into my magic like she did. But I wasn’t able to repeat the things she showed me how to do. They—my parents—were convinced I was just a late bloomer since mom didn’t know she had magic until she was in her twenties.”
I had no idea about any of this. “I just thought you weren’t interested in it?”
“I mean, I wasn’t. I’d gotten used to the idea that I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t, like, stoked about that, but it was what it was. And my parents believed I’d come around eventually and didn’t want to pressure me.” She exhaled. “And then came Carrie Witshield’s fourteenth birthday party.”
“That wasn’t the twist I expected,” I said.
Carrie was one of the few humans we spent time with as kids; we operated on wildly different schedules than humans. Slumber parties—where we were all expected to stay up all night—evened the odds.
“We’d kind of paired off at the party, and Julie what’s-her-name was being bitchy to that Meyer girl. I forget her name.”
“Natalie, I think?”
“Sure. They were doing that stupid prank where you put someone’s bra in the freezer.”
“Cool boobs are happy boobs.”
“Agree to disagree. As did Julie what’s-her-name. She threw a total fit, threw hands at Natalie. Ended up gouging the crap out of Natalie’s arm.”
“I remember. Julie drew blood.” And I looked at Lulu, and understanding dawned. “She drew blood,” I repeated. “And you felt something.”
“Julie’s reaction was over the top, and it was the final straw. Iwas already mad, and I was sitting next to Natalie when it happened. It... kindled something in me. Like magic that had been waiting around finally got the green light. I could feel the spark in my hand, and that scared the shit out of me. There’s noAre You There God? It’s Me, Margaretfor newly onboarded sorcerers. I was afraid I’d hurt someone, or worse. So I made a joke of it and went outside and jumped in the pool.”
“I remember. We thought you were the wild, artistic one. But you’d been cooling off. Literally.”
Lulu nodded. “I convinced myself I’d imagined it. But then, a couple of years later, we readMacbethin English class. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’ ” she recited, “ ‘something wicked this way comes.’ I was curious and braver than I had been. So I pulled a thumbtack from my corkboard, pricked my finger. And everything went... floaty.”
“You felt dizzy?”
She looked up, her smile wry. “No, I mean literally. The spark appeared again. Instead of extinguishing it, I let it live. And everything went floaty. Comp, screen, notebooks, books.” She wiggled her fingers. “Those little plastic people they gave away at Saul’s Pizza for a while? I had like forty of those in a box.”
“I remember,” I said with a smile.
My parents loved Saul’s, and they had a basket of plastic trinkets that kids waiting on pizzas could choose from. Lulu always took the figurines; I took the temporary pizza tattoos.
Tears welled at the memory of my mom, and I brushed them away.
“At first, I thought the city was under attack or my mom had done something magical downstairs. But then I pricked my finger again. And all the spells I hadn’t been able to do, all the charms that hadn’t worked just... did.” She looked down, frowned, as if revisiting those memories. “I sat there for a long time, once I’d figured out what I’d done. And not entirely sure what I was goingto do about it. I was, like, crazy relieved that I could do something. That I wasn’t just a family aberration. But I also felt... abnormal.”
That word—so full of meaning—was a vise around my heart. Because I knew exactly how she felt. I’d felt that way, too.
“They were both good witches, right? And I was... not.”
“You told your mother?”
“Didn’t have to,” Lulu said, taking a drink. “She felt me doing it in the house. Dark magic has its own kind of shadow about it. Something you can feel. She guessed what I’d done, and then I showed her.”
“Did she freak out?”
“She was actually really cool about the whole thing. But you could see there was a part of her that wanted to dive into it—to start using again. And part of her—I guess recovery—was to learn to sit with those feelings. Acknowledge them and experience them until they passed. So we sat with it. We just, I don’t know, felt our emotions about it. Sometimes we talked about it. Mostly we didn’t. We just—tried to adjust. And then the job opportunity came up in Oregon, and they thought it was best to put more space between us, and I agreed.”
