“Whatever you want to call him, he’s the reason I started masturbating.”
“That’s wrong on so many levels,” says Sophie.
Joey fakes a smile, but I see her wince from the pain in her hand. I want to tell her that I’m sorry I’ve been absent. I’ve just been…busy. And I have. But I can’t tell her with what. I want to tell her I know thefeeling—that I recognize the helpless frustration of watching a parent disappear and not being able to do anything. It sucks.
“Also, you know he’d never look at any of us that way.”
Elena presses her boobs together and makes a pouty face as she looks Sophie up and down. “You’re right. He doesn’t like nice girls.”
I see the clearing between the trees and hurry my steps. A ring of rocks at the center marks the spell circle. I feel a pull toward it, though I’m not sure if it’s the magic itself or my desire to be near it. Stepping into the clearing feels like entering a private room walled in by glinting, shuddering aspens, whose leaves always seem to be in motion. I read recently that, after a fire, at certain elevations, aspen trees like to root in the charred earth where other trees recently burned. They thrive in the aftermath.
“He’s our teacher,” Sophie is saying.
“Well, ourteachertold me he wants to put his tongue on my—”
“Okay,” I say. The usual banter, the back-and-forth that is typical when we’re all together—it’s grating my nerves. “Let’s just put Joey here, and I’ll grab the book.”
“Joey can put herself here,” Joey says, and she finds her way to her spot at the other side of the circle. I watch her, assessing her mood. She’s not looking at me, and her hair is uncharacteristically messy, covering her face on one side. The T-shirt she has wrapped around her hand is soaked in blood, and she holds it above her head. She sits clumsily on the ground, looking pale. Any other friends would have forced her to go to the hospital. She almost certainly should get stitches. Possibly surgery. It’s a deep gash right through the center of her palm. She says she can’t feel anything around it, which actually sounds worse, and the bleeding has slowed but not stopped.
“I don’t think we should wait much longer,” I say, taking charge as I tend to do, and I can see the mix of emotions on Joey’s face.
Last night she and I smoked a joint together because her momwasn’t home, and then we ate pizza, and it felt so normal. Until she asked me why I haven’t been around lately. I told her I’ve been spending tons of time with River, and she seemed satisfied with that, or at least she didn’t ask any follow-up questions. That wasn’t the whole story, not even close, but I just wanted things to be okay between us. And they were. We ate too much and listened to Lady Gaga and sprawled out on her living room floor.
When, around nine o’clock, we heard voices outside, Joey became immediately serious. I turned down the music as the voices grew louder and more alarming until, without warning, Joey’s mom burst through the front door. There was no time for me to understand what was going on. Joey just ushered me out through the back door as quickly as she could and said I should go and she’d call me later. She was stoic, practiced almost. She locked the door behind me. And I was—this sounds horrible, I know—but I was relieved. Confused too, but also relieved. I did what she asked and left without a word, deep down, happy to have the rest of my evening freed up for something else. Someone else. As I left, I watched her mom’s boyfriend hop into his black pickup and slam his palms against the steering wheel.
It was 6:16 a.m. when my house phone rang. My mom answered quickly. There was a beat of silence and then she said, “Joey?” I could hear the urgency in her voice, even through my bedroom door, and I stumbled out of bed. My mom wrapped herself in a coat and stepped into her sneakers. Then, she was gone. Guilt at letting Joey push me out last night because I wanted to be somewhere else anyway—it chewed at me. My heart thundered for the whole chilly walk to her house. When I got there, the first thing I noticed was that the boyfriend’s pickup was gone. And I knew what it was. Another breakup.
The front door was cracked open, and my mom was in the bathroom at the back of the house. I could hear her speaking slowly, asking questions about which pills she took and saying something about sleepingit off. All the while she opened and closed drawers and made sounds like she was cleaning up. I walked into the kitchen, and there was Joey, standing in front of the stainless-steel sink with one hand wrapped in a bulky gray shirt. With the other hand, she was rinsing a knife under the tap. I said her name, tried to get her attention, but she didn’t even look up. It was like she couldn’t hear me. She just kept rinsing and rinsing. I pieced it together eventually. The boyfriend left, and Joey’s mom had an episode. Joey had to wrestle a knife from her mom before she could harm herself—and got a huge gash in the process.
Now, in the woods, Joey does the honors. I hand her the book, and she places it on the ground where she runs a gentle finger across the cover and then the spine, sits back on her haunches, and hugs her injured hand close to her chest. She nods and closes her eyes.
As if it’s a call and response, I nod and close my eyes too. We all do.
The magic starts as a trickle, but it builds. It’s flowing quickly now, a slipstream inside me, and I know it’s going to burst free soon. I can’t hear anything, just a ringing in my ears growing louder with every passing second. We’ve talked about it before. We all experience the same sounds, the same heat moving through us. The magic is like liquid power flooding our inner thoughts, the essence of us, the very blood in our veins and then spitting out as ink on the page. When we read aloud, that’s when it becomes real. The person leading the spell focuses their thoughts on what they want the magic to do, with as much specificity as they can manage. It’s that focus that calls the spell to appear on the otherwise blank pages of the book.
And then it’s time. The magic spills over. The book flips open, and words appear on the page splayed in front of us. Joey reads quickly to try to catch them all.
Sometimes the words are plain English, the spell complex but readable. Sometimes they are in an old near-English that takes some effort to pronounce. And sometimes they’re not words, not really. They’remore like sounds strung together. This spell is one of those. The spell before us now is in an ancient language, we were told when we were initiated, from old Germanic paganism. Unintelligible.
“Sose benrenki, sose bluotrenki, sose lidirenki—” Joey reads, unfaltering, even though I know she’s in pain. The words continue to spill onto the page, and she reads and reads. Until there are no more words, and the ink dries up and the page is empty once again.
We sit in the wake of the spell, just as we’ve done so many times before, stealing looks at one another, still in awe that this is how we get to spend our Saturday morning. Joey unwraps the T-shirt. She pulls a water bottle out of her bag and douses her hand, shaking pink drops into the dirt. We all wait with our breaths held. When the blood is washed away, her hand is there, clean, dripping, and completely healed. She wipes her palm on her pants and wiggles her fingers, one by one.
“Good,” she says.
“Joey.” Something like bravery takes control of my voice.
She looks at me and blinks, as if she forgot I was here.
I inhale, and then I ask the question that has been worming around inside my head since I found her this morning. “What if we did a healing spell for your mom?” I see a flicker of confusion, and I take advantage of the pause. “If the magic can heal a physical wound, maybe it can heal…a mental one.”
“It won’t work,” she says abruptly.
“But what if it could?”
She leans forward and studies me, as if she’s never seen me before. “We’ve tried before. There is no mind-healing spell. What’s going on with you?”
I look away, feeling like she’s trying to read something in my eyes. But then she just takes the book in her hand and flips to the inside of the front cover. There is a thin piece of paper there, taped onto the book.There are scratches and tears and remnants of old tape, reinforcement from over the years.
