When the bus stops in front of our house, I walk off slow because I am afraid that Bertie’s body won’t still be in the bathtub. Mother Julia made me go to school today, to keep up appearances, to keep the truancy officers away. The talented girls never have to subject themselves to public school. The Mothers say that my gift isn’t great enough to be like Bertie. How great is her gift though if she is lying dead in a tub?
The pear trees blossoms stink up the air outside and make it smell worse than the hoarded house. The shadow of the bus passes over me. As the air brakes unseal themselves they screech open. One of my foster dads was a mechanic, back when I thought that the Harry Potter shit, someone telling you that you were magic, was supposed to be cool. Fuck Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson. People that do magic are hoarders and deranged, and we hide out in shitty little duplexes in dying out manufacturing towns.
Too quickly, I am inside the cool dark garage, where there’s spools and spools of split wire the Mothers gut for the copper and buckets seeping battery acid out, farming arsenic. Rachel, the quiet girl with dingy purple Converse, is soldering together pieces of a microwave and an alarm clock. She told me this morning that she was going to make a time machine to save Bertie, even though I am the one who’s going to save Bertie.
I shimmy through the screen door to the house, pushing against the piles of newspapers, set aside to gleam omens and portents. Upstairs is for the talented witches the Mothers love, and for dead ones that they put in bathtubs. I sleep in the downstairs of the split level with the other two girls that are magic enough to count, but not magic enough to matter. Terry’s recliner is empty, and I noticed a new plastic bag full of shit pushed under the foot prop. The Mothers are pacing upstairs. It’s distracting.
Tucked deep under the couch, hidden behind two abandoned puzzles of mismatch pieces, is my spell book box. The Mothers would be indignant if they knew, and it gives me a vicious little thrill that this secret is mine. The duplex’s thin walls seep out the secrets of Bertie’s magic lessons whenever the moon is new or full when Bertie gets her lessons in the bathroom they made into an orrery.
I hear everything trickling through the vents and the laundry chute, dripping slowly into my ears, just like the neglected plumbing seeps fetid water. My spell book is plain and functional, nothing like the bougie one Bertie’s made, with leather covers from supple skins of the 4H kid pigs and ink ground from copper wires and shit. At least mine fucking works.
The spells they taught Bertie were simple at the start, and I copied those just fine. I summoned a flame, moved a shadow, and I got the hang of calling insects faster than she did. I flip open the floral print photo box from someone’s dead grandma. The Mothers love rummage sales. Pre-owned shit comes with extra energy, they say.
I stole the white three-ring binder and plastic page protectors from the normies at the public school. College-ruled note paper and black sharpie works for writing down spells and instructions. I flip to the sleeping ritual, and check my notes. Reverently, I lift the squirrel corpse wrapped in paper towels. The bright blue marble, blessed in moonlight and dipped in rose water, sits on top of the paper heart I cut out of yellow construction paper and wrote Bertie’s name on in the hollowed cavity that used to be the squirrel’s organs.
“She should not be dead, Julia!” Mother Isabel’s voice rampages down the vents and the open laundry chute.
“I know!” Mother Julia’s calm is gone. “The coven’s instructions were explicit, and she is certainly not ready. And who else would we send?”
“We must send someone. There must be one of them that would work.”
“They both are afraid,” Mother Julia says.
The upstairs girls, Sammy and Ashley, are afraid. They’re Bertie’s best friends. They’re all three the mean little bitches that pull your hair and trip you in the hallway. They’re the kind of girls that steal food from the foster family cupboards and blame the foster kids.
“What? Are you saying that you went to send…I hardly think that will go over well. It’s barely a week, and none of girls have made a grimoire or communed in the water.”
I turn the page over and see that the sharpie marker has bled through the back and front of another page. I put two pieces of paper in the same page protector, and the ink bled and blurred into a Rorschach test. Shit shit shit.
“They aren’t likely to come back anyway,” Mother Julia says.
“Have you tried using the tears of heaven on her?”
“No, we don’t have enough silver.”
“You sent one of them to get more?”
“Obviously,” Mother Julie says. She groans, and I hear more commotion in the bathroom orrery. She mumbles an incantation.
I close my eyes, and remember holding my body still, and letting my breaths out super slow to hear their instruction to Bertie better. I had been too scared of getting caught to creep to the skeleton of a bathroom where the chute emptied.
I place my hands above the squirrel like a closed gate, and breath out, blowing the hot sticky breath over my hands and between my fingers to bristle the fur. Without taking another inhale, I pluck the marble out and pinch the paper heart.
A scream thunders down the laundry chute as I revive my biggest rival.