“Probably because I don’t ever reread my books.”
Morgan leans over the counter, eye contact unwavering. “Are you serious?”
“After editing’s wrapped, the book is dead to me. I still consult my series notes and lists of dates, main characters, important beasts, et cetera. But minor background stuff melts away.”
His jaw goes slack. “So you’re telling me—”
He begins to pace.
“That your book”—he points in my direction, truly getting worked up—“arrives in your hands fresh from the printer, smelling all new-book-y, and you don’t immediately sit down to appreciate all the hard work you put in? You don’t devour it cover to cover and go ‘Hoo, yes, that was satisfying. Good job, me’?”
“I did once,” I admit, “but it wasn’t satisfying at all, because I found typos. All I could focus on were the mistakes, things I wanted to edit but couldn’t because it was too late.” I make a face, skin warming with chagrin. “Repetition, consistency errors, somebody I forgot to thank in my acknowledgments. A pop culture reference that didn’t age well.”
“Ahh. Your crooked doors.”
“Where’d you hear that from?” I croak, my mind flying to Grandma Dottie.
His eyes blaze, like he can see the direction of my thoughts. “Right after I started renting desk space in your store, Dottie heard me complaining about the mistakes in one of myarticles, which I wasn’t aware of until after it printed. There was, like, a lettergthat wasn’t printed correctly, dropped lower into the next line. I can’t remember what word it was, but without theg, its meaning changed, and having agin the word underneath where it wasn’t supposed to be changed the meaning ofthatword. Also, my own last name was spelled wrong and I used ‘although’ twice in one sentence. It was an important story, I was so proud of it, and those mistakes completely ruined it for me. Then, Dottie told me that written magic—”
“Likes aberrations,” I finish, a forgotten memory roaring back. My mind arcs through time to first grade, when I wasn’t very good at spelling. While writing stories in composition notebooks, I’d get angry when I didn’t know a correct spelling. “Grandma told me it was okay to leave a few mistakes in, that I was drawing magic’s attention with all my bumpy writing, and it would make me more powerful. With verbal witchcraft, she said, you had to get it precisely right. But with written witchcraft, magic is a bit more mischievous, delighting in discrepancies. Scrambled letters, the same sentence copied twice, a capital letter where there shouldn’t be, a missing apostrophe, random words thrown in. When I told her that I wasn’t making witchcraft, I was only writing stories, she said thateverythinga witch does is some form of witchcraft.”
He nods fervently, a few strands of midnight hair slipping messily across his forehead.
“I started doing it on purpose,” I remember, talking faster. “We called it crooked-dooring, because she said The Magick Happens wouldn’t be quite as interesting if the storeroom door wasn’t crooked—you know how you have to shove it a coupletimes to get it to close all the way?—and other stuff we all liked to complain about, like how you can’t plug in two things at once in the upstairs bathroom or else the circuit breaker pops. Grandma told me she used to wish she could get it all fixed, but then one day she realized—”
“They give the house character, which magic likes,” Morgan supplies. “And a perfect house is boring. She told me to think of my work like that.”
We stare at each other, half smiling, a deep grief rattling my bones. I wish I’d moved home sooner. Wish Grandma hadn’t been stolen away by dementia. When I was in my teens, I stopped purposefully littering my stories with errors, figuring that Grandma had just been trying to put a kindhearted spin on my blunders so that I wouldn’t be so hard on myself. She had a way of doing that for all of her grandchildren, infusing the magical into the everyday. That she chose to share this with Morgan, as well, alters the angle from which I view him.
“I crooked-door every article I write,” he tells me. “I don’t think I’m making witchcraft, sadly, but maybe if I keep doing it, magic will see that I’m trying to get its attention and…I don’t know. Let me in.”
I wonder what Grandma saw in Morgan, for her to tell him about crooked-dooring. If she genuinely thought he’d ever be able to generate real magic for himself, or if she was being nice, or…well, there was the dementia, which certainly started to get much worse two years ago. Maybe she was confused and thought he might be a witch. I still wonder if she made the whole concept up.
We’ll never know, unless we ask her for confirmationthrough Aisling. Which we won’t do, because it doesn’t much matter. Whether every single story Grandma told us is true isn’t what’s important, I’m beginning to think. Maybe what matters most is what we get out of believing.
“Anyway. Speaking of the inexplicable.” Morgan hops onto the rolling ladder, kicking off to make himself glide across a bookcase. “Let’s go to the woods and look for this Falling Rock Triangle thing.”
“Don’t play on ladders. And I can’t.” I check the time on my phone. “I’ve got plans.”
“Break them.”
“Cancel my date with an hour’s notice? That would be rude.”
He draws back in surprise. “A date? At a time like this? You’re going ona date?”
“It’s a Friday night.” I lift his hand, which has unconsciously lunged out to grasp my wrist, and remove it. His eyes are so wide that I can’t help but laugh, and his gaze drops to my mouth, the corners of his own lips tightening. “This is the optimal time for a date.”
Twenty-One
If you see a white flower with an even number of leaves, pluck one to make it odd for luck.
Spells, Charms, and Rituals,
Tempest Family Grimoire
“But what aboutme?” Morgan insists, sounding put out. “I need you to stay romantically available, just in case we don’t find the Black Bear Witch.”
“You are disgusting. And why haven’t you bothered trying to seduce Luna, by the way? Have you forgotten she’s a witch, too? If you need any old witch to fall in love with you, let’s remember I’m not the only single woman here.”
