The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  Madeline walked with a tired sort of swagger. She squared her shoulders, slid through the mess with a cool stride in her step, and the crowd just oozed apart for her. No shoulder checking, no getting clotheslined by random flailing limbs. The people she passed didn’t even look up, didn’t react; they just gravitated away. Their backs made a tunnel and she eased through the space with me tailing behind her like a leather kite. She didn’t look behind her when she reached the stairs, simply pulled me up with her, and I let myself stagger behind her two steps at a time. The music dulled as we got higher. She opened the door and I flinched.

  Upstairs and downstairs were different dimensions, because in a past life, Jing’s house just might have been a yacht. It was a chrome-and-cream magazine photoshoot, all brocade drapes and matching pillows. Black-and-white balloons polka-dotted the Persian rug. A strung-out redhead was spinning in the corner, singing a song that was popular when we were little. It wasn’t the song playing downstairs. A couple across from her smoked weed and hacked like consumption victims, and, as we passed, they stopped their story swapping to look up at her and clap. Normally I’d stick around for a little while to eavesdrop. Stoner hearsay is usually true.

  Madeline didn’t seem keen on stopping for hearsay.

  Her sneakers stopped in front of a set of French doors that served as the living room’s back wall. These doors were the only barrier of separation between the inside’s warmth and the outside’s frigidness. She coiled her fingers around the gilded knob and twisted. The night air blew inward, ruffled her braids, and the two of us stepped into the dark.

  The night was clean and dark and scalpel sharp. It cut deep, slid through my jacket and my scissor-cropped t-shirt to my stomach. As soon as both of my feet landed on the deck, the doors closed tight behind me and clicked. I zipped up my jacket and mouthed a cussy prayer that my vegan leather might suddenly be warmer than it was, but it wasn’t, because of course it fucking wasn’t. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried not to shiver like a fucking baby.

  The seafoam corpse of Jing’s pool was eerie in the moonlight. It was long, vaguely elliptical, about twenty feet back from the deck. The pool lights were on, but without thousands of gallons of water to coat them, they looked as harsh and bleak as surgical lamps. Dead leaves heaped like plague bodies along the pool’s edge. A family of pale deer grazed between a set of lemony lawn chairs and odd jutting pink plastic flamingos. I rocked back and sucked on my teeth.

  “So. How did you do it? Explain it to me.” Madeline didn’t look cold. On the contrary, the way she leaned her forearms against the deck railing looked as breezy as a June afternoon. Not a single shiver in sight. Her basketball jacket remained unzipped and drifted like a flag around her waist. The moonlight washed her out, made her corpsey. She looked at me unblinking and drummed her fingers on the rail.

  Christ.

  “You saw how I did it. You were there.” My tongue was clumsy in my mouth. Lips moved oddly. I didn’t mean to sound snide, but I did, because I guess I can’t even scrape the bitter off my tone for a cute girl. My insides felt gooey and raw. The chill was weirdly abrasive after party heat. I wrapped my arms around my rib cage and tried to hold my body together with my fists, because I had caved and was now shivering so hard I thought bits of me might shake off and fly over the deck. “I don’t know how to explain it in shorthand. It’s complicated.” I jammed my stupid tongue in my stupid cheek. I mean, that wasn’t a lie, by any stretch. It was genuinely hard to explain. It was like explaining how to fall in love with something: There wasn’t a way to do it that didn’t sound like flowery bullshit, and even if you half managed it, the explanation wouldn’t make it any easier to do. It wasn’t a checklist sort of affair. My spell book was good, but brief, it was not.

  “Can you show me?” Madeline slipped her fingers through the frets of her braid and poked them out the other side. The knuckles caught inside the braid vanished for a moment, like she’d dipped her hand through dark water. Her fingertips were hypnotic. I scratched at my jacket seams and chewed on my tongue. Madeline watching me was a physical thing. I felt it like an X-ray, like she was mapping my skull for craters.

  “Huh.” I looked out over the yard and tried to seem significantly cooler than I am. It’s cool when people give the yard a casual, devil-may-care surveying gaze because eye contact freaks them out, yeah? The dizziness from the spell getting yanked earlier still tasted sour in the back of my throat. Or maybe that was the jungle juice. Probably equal parts spell and juice. Madeline was curious. She was genuinely curious and had pulled us somewhere we could be alone, and opportunities like this don’t just happen. If I’m attention-starved enough to show off my magic at a fucking Jing/Daisy/Yates party, surely I’m thirsty enough to show a gorgeous stranger something killer. She wanted some magic. I had magic. I fought the urge to retch. “I could potentially show you a trick or two, yeah.”

  “No tricks. I want the real magic, flesh-and-blood magic, like you did down there. They said you’re legit, and you are. What you did down there, there’s no way you could have faked that,” she said. She pulled her hand out of her hair, shoved herself off the deck rail and tossed that hand in my direction. “I’m Madeline Kline. Let’s start with that. East High. I’m a senior. Your name is Sideways? ”

  “They call me that, yeah. Sideways Pike. West High. Also a senior.” I reached for her hand and clapped it. It shocked me, like jumping the wrong kind of fence. Pain zapped down my fingers toward my palm and I jumped, jerked back, shook my hand at the wrist.

  “What happened? You alright?” Madeline scrunched her brows into a V. She looked between my hand and my face and back again.

  “Fine. You just shocked me. I’ll live.” A thin, nervous cackle creaked out of me. I pressed my hand up against my stomach under my shirt. My fingertips throbbed, but the throbbing simmered down to a tingling. My palm itched.

  My heartbeat crashed faster. The tingling washed up my arm and into my chest, and the dead energy zapped back to life in my gut. Every single synapse twinged at once. Lightning marrow deep. I hitched a breath and swayed against the railing, braced myself with my free hand. My vision bruised. Madeline gripped my shoulder, sank her nails into my jacket to keep me from falling off the rail. Her touch was fire. It shocked through the fake leather, through vinyl and cotton and sinew, and I felt it soak into my bloodstream like a drug. My ribs contracted, and every breath was bigger than the last. The world was seizing up on me. The night was speckled red.

  I was so happy I could sing.

  “Sideways? What’s up?” One of Madeline’s braids swung forward and dangled by my cheek. Her voice was low, measured. Moderately concerned. The hand on my shoulder moved to my back, just below my neck. I wasn’t cold anymore. I was starting to sweat. Something was blooming in my throat, and if I didn’t open my mouth, it might strangle me from the inside out.

  “You want to see some magic?” I panted. I eyeballed her with a little twitch at the corners of my mouth. It felt like telling the most spectacular secret. My mind blazed. I wanted to scream.

  She dimpled when she smiled.

  I took her by the wrists and yanked her downward until we were both kneeling, shins on the cold, crispy deck. Wind picked up and tossed our hair, and it felt like celestial validation, like the entire night was primed for whatever I was going to do. Wreak havoc, said Nature. Raise hell. Our hands vibrated where they touched. This didn’t feel like a liquor-dusted parlor trick; this was ancient, opulent, invincible. It was the realest thing in the world. I clawed around my memory for the circle in the basement, but I didn’t need to dig for long. The image floated to mind. Long chalk lines, glow splattered but still unbreakably looped. I pictured it so vividly that the circle superimposed itself in our laps, not tangibly, but in a way that was undeniably real, and the words summoned themselves up to finish it off. “I call the chill in the air. I call down the lightning, the star fire, the dead summer sun. I call down the screaming cosmos and I cry for chaos
. We want something impossible. We want something the papers can’t explain, something so wild and gorgeous that nothing could doubt it, not ever. Douse our revelry with magic. Change the way we are.”

  The wind swept circles around us. Leaves whipped around our waists. A strange, desperate smile flooded Madeline’s face. She opened her mouth to laugh, but there were only straight teeth and blackness stretching all the way down. No sound. Her hair pulled free of its braids and tumbled loose around her jaw. Something glistened in my ribs. My pulse hurtled forward. I squeezed her wrists so hard my knuckles popped.

  “Give us decadence!” I threw back my head and addressed the stars directly, heartbeat heavy in my ears. A laugh broke out of me, gutted me from throat to belt, and I couldn’t stop to swallow, couldn’t stop to breathe. I was practically screaming. The words flew out of their own accord. “Give us something obscene! Give us something to sink our teeth into! We demand magic! Fuck you, reality! Tonight is a dream!”

  My skull hit the deck with a smack.

  Something had me by the wrists.

  I don’t know who was dragging me, not specifically. But whoever they were, they clamped hard and their palms were warm, and they dragged me over something that scraped against my spine, something blunt and metallic. Something like a door track. It hurt like a mother. I squirmed myself awake.

  A ceiling rolled above me. There was a wooden fan that spun in slow, psychedelic circles, and everything was scaldingly bright. I winced, scrunched up my face. Daylight slapped me like I was goddamned Dracula.

  Morning. Daylight meant it was morning. How the hell? Discordant birdsong hammered at my temples. I heaved in a breath and wheezed.

  “God, she’s awake!” It was a feminine voice, a familiar one.

  My arms hit the floor with a thud.

  I spat, swore, and lugged myself into a sitting position. Every isolated muscle twitch weighed one billion pounds. I shrunk in on myself, winced away from lights and sounds and everything within ten feet. Covered my head with my arms. My entire body felt like a gigantic bruise. My skin was probably purple. All of it. I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was a human welt. I curled my knees to my chest.

  “Sideways. Sideways Pike, I swear to God.” A different voice. Also a girl’s. Also familiar. Why wasn’t I connecting names to voices? I splayed my fingers across my face and peeked between them. There, looking supremely pissed, was Jing. Or her knees, anyway. I was eye level with her knees, and something told me that looking up was going to be a bad idea, because I didn’t need to look up to understand the level of pissed she was. It radiated off her in waves. She was the Chernobyl of being pissed.

  I furrowed my brows. “What the fuck? ” Speaking felt slimy. I licked the inside of my shirt to scrape the sleep-film off my tongue.

  “Good question.” Jing tapped her foot. “Care to explain what the hell you did?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I groaned, scowling into my sleeve. I was way too tired for tact. Besides. Fuck ’em for dragging me. Bastards.

  “Cute. Sorry, no. You’re explaining now, and I mean now,” hissed Jing as she knelt in front of my face. She lowered her cheek until it rested on the cherrywood floors, angling herself so that I couldn’t avoid eye contact. Her gaze locked on mine. I could just make out my scraggly reflection across her blackboard irises.

  “By the way, Sideways, I don’t know how you pulled all that off, but color me impressed.” It was the first voice. Daisy. I had zero doubts. Only Daisy would be so smug in overriding Jing’s authority like that. Also, her voice was way more nasal than Yates’, who was the only other member of the Jing triumvirate I could think of in my state of groggy semiconsciousness. Wait, “triumvirate” meant three. That was all three of them. So yeah, definitely Daisy. What the fuck.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples and swore.

  “Listen. I swear to God. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you put in that punch, Daisy, but whatever it was really beat the ever-loving shit out of me. I must have been blitzed. I don’t remember anything post hanging with that East High girl.” Madeline. Where was Madeline? What had happened there? I silently prayed that drunk Sideways didn’t screw everything up for me. It wouldn’t

  “Damn it,” said Jing. She looked me over, scowled, and stood up. “Goddamn it. You really don’t remember.”

  “Where’s Yates?” I rubbed my temples and looked over at Daisy, who had tossed herself across a studded leather armchair and was currently scrolling some blog on her phone. Her pleated Creamsicle was creased in odd places and her hair, which currently resembled a tumbleweed, was twisted into a ratty bun. One sock on, the other sock in the void, probably.

  Daisy wrinkled her nose and huffed. “God, I’m not Yates’ babysitter. She left. I don’t know where. She’s a big girl now.” There was a waver in her voice that suggested she wasn’t entirely sober yet.

  That was how she normally sounded.

  “You freaked her out. She went home,” Jing corrected. She clicked her tongue. “Okay. Up. If you don’t remember, I’ll give you a little tour of the disaster zone. See if that clears some of those cobwebs.” Jing didn’t wait for me to stand on my own. Her hands found my shoulders, gripped fistfuls of faux cow hide, and jerked me to my feet.

  “Jesus, ease up on me, alright?” I rubbed my left shoulder with a scowl.

  She gave me a once-over and spun on her heel, and for some godforsaken reason, I followed her. There was a snicker from my left, so Daisy must have tagged along. Man. Something about this was making my flesh crawl, and it was too early for anything as uncomfortable as that.

  The house, all things considered, wasn’t in terrible shape. A few crushed cups, some popped balloons, a disembodied bra, and trampled confetti, but nothing impossible to clean up before the folks came home. The yachty living room still looked yachty. There was no vomit on the floor, which was a step above most party venues come morning. Jing picked up her pace and so did I. She stopped at the threshold between the hallway and the staircase to hell, aka the basement door.

  Something flickered in Jing’s expression, something that made Daisy stiffen behind me. I couldn’t parse it. Jing flared her nostrils, pushed the door wide, and descended the staircase two steps at a time, and Daisy and I followed suit.

  The walls were dripping with chalk.

  Matrixes of spindly lines crisscrossed the floor, the ceiling, every inch of concrete in sight. Sigils, spirals, all varieties of rune and glyph. Sketchy symbols tattooed overtop of posters and streamers. None of them matched. Every mark had a different size, different shape, different level of intricacy. In the upper right corner of the room, there was something vaguely like an esoteric alchemical array, only it didn’t match any array I’d ever read about. Across from it was a distinctly Crowley-ish set of stars, which bordered a random smattering of Enochian letters and something that looked like stupid failed cuneiform. And then there were the scribbles. Jagged, careless scribbles, the sort of absent doodling a loser goth might give their homework margins. Layered Xs, eyeballs, flowers. A heart punctured by twenty-something arrows.

  The only commonality to the sigils was their orientation, the slight slanting they all had toward the center of the room. They were pointing toward the circle. The circle was pristine.

  “It was about midnight, maybe after. I was damn sure you’d gone upstairs. It was after the glow-stick thing,” said Jing. She put her hands on her hips. “We were screwing around, having fun. I’ll give you this, the glow-stick thing was rad. Everyone was majorly impressed. But then the chalk started. No one drew the shapes. They appeared on their own. I’m not screwing with you. All the drawings just showed up under our feet. Then the music got louder. Painfully loud. I had Alexis DJ for us, and it busted her speakers, it was so loud. It wasn’t her music, either. It switched mid-song. It was this freaky retro doo-wop. It was damned weird, Sideways.”

  “I think it was the Chordettes,” said D
aisy.

  “It was not the Chordettes,” said Jing. “So, we’re all wincing and cussing, and the lights cut out. All of them. But it wasn’t the power, because the music kept playing and there was light under the door upstairs.”

  “You could only see people’s hands. The broken glow bracelets, you know? It was wicked cool. Hands down, best scare party ever. I can’t wait until next weekend. Costumes won’t be tacky by then.” Daisy, impervious to Jing’s acid glare, looked monstrously pleased with herself. “The chalk drawings glowed, too. It was spooky as hell. I’m sure that Austin Grass pissed himself, he was so scared. Serves the bastard right for dumping Alexis like that.”

  “I filmed it.” Jing flared her nostrils. Last night’s mascara had flaked under her eyes, and the smudges reminded me of kiddy skeleton face paint. She pursed her lips. “People are still posting about it. It’s a pretty big deal. Speculation abounds. You’d be surprised how many people are trying to write it off as some trick you learned in Drama, Sideways. As if the ragtag Drama Club could pull off a stunt like this.”

  “Watch it. That’s my ragtag Drama Club you’re talking about,” I grumbled into the back of my wrist. The Sycamore Gorge West High Drama Club was the most the school had to offer, thanks. I loved it even if it was shitty and poorly directed and none of the folks involved were talking to me anymore. I scratched the back of my neck and took a step closer to the wall. A chalk drawing comprised of Vs and Cs loomed inches from my nose. Lines drawn on thick. Angles sharp. Curves heavy. “Holy hell. This is my handwriting.”

  “Yeah. I figured.” Jing crossed her arms. “Explain how the hell you did it.”

  “I don’t know.” A smile broke over my face. My heartbeat rammed faster. I reached out and brushed the marks with my fingertips, brushed them as softly as I might stroke a cat. The swirling line work felt cool against my fingertips. Lovely, delicate lines, tangled and stretched tight atop the bricks. “God, this is so cool. I did this. I am so cool.”