The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  “Right,” said Daisy.

  “Look. Sideways.” Jing struck a pose like she was praying: fingertips pressed together, palms parallel, expression hard as the walls or the floor. Her voice was sweet and buttery. “When I invited you to do your witch thing, I was expecting something small. I was going to let you wiggle your fingers and say something rhymey and weird. Hell. I thought it wouldn’t work, but you’re creepy and I figured just having you here would put people in the Halloween mood. This. I was not expecting all of this.”

  “Is that your way of saying that I’m banned from your house parties?” I leaned against the wall, shoulder to my accidental masterpiece. The stupid, giddy grin was here to stay. My face kind of hurt from smiling this hard. Good.

  Jing looked me in the face, her gaze lasering through my skull. She grinned with teeth. “Are you kidding? I nearly got my scare party trending, and it’s only the third. Everyone is talking about it. Conversation Monday morning will be strictly about the baddest haunted house ever.”

  I cocked a brow. “You’re giving me whiplash, Jing.”

  “Look. I’m pissed because there’s chalk all over my goddamn basement. You’re staying the night and helping me clean up. My parents come home on Tuesday, and it needs to be spotless by then. I’m not pissed because of the magic. I just want to know how you did it. I want in.”

  My mind flashed to Madeline again. My smile slipped a little. If the casting worked, then what had happened with Madeline? I shoved my hands into my pockets and stared at my shoes. There was a crumpled leaf stuck in the laces. The gap from midnight ’til now was starting to leave a strange taste in my mouth. “Did you see Madeline, by any chance?”

  “Madeline? Like, the extra chick on the circle? No.” Jing snaked her hand through her hair. “Why?”

  “She wanted to see how it worked, too. She dragged me upstairs and we sat on the deck, and she was insistent about it. Not that I minded. I like showing off. Something struck me when we were out there, and I felt this sort of zinging queasiness, the sort that always comes with magic. So, I maybe recklessly jumped into it. It was a huge rush, but I blamed the alcohol for that. I didn’t think about it. I mean, it shouldn’t have worked. I drew a five-pointed circle, and Yates broke the circle, so the spell should have died. I don’t know how the two of us could have done all this. I really don’t remember.” I jammed my tongue in my cheek. I tried to rewind the tapes in my head, but it was like there wasn’t a gap at all. Inhale at midnight, exhale at noon.

  “We found you on the deck. Just you, though. Madeline must have left,” Jing said.

  “Do you have her number?”

  Daisy yowled and clapped her hands.

  “Not like that.” I rolled my eyes so hard that they nearly fell out of my head. “I’m just saying that she might know what happened. I’m plenty curious myself, believe it or not.”

  Admittedly, the Daisy line of thought was also appealing. A significant part of me wanted to buy Madeline coffee. All the coffee in the damned world. Even if she had left me on a freezing deck. Wait. Maybe not, then. Goddamn it. I clawed the hair off my forehead and cringed at how stringy it felt.

  “I don’t. I barely know her. She came with someone else.” Jing stood beside me and rocked back against the wall. Her hair, tousled and bleached, fell in a jagged fringe across her forehead, and the way it frayed around her collarbone was the stuff of daydreams. If she told me that she’d spent the morning at the beach, I’d have believed her.

  “Random,” I said mostly to myself, “but your hair looks mega-kickass. Thought you should know.” I scuffed the sole of my boot across the cement. “When I do the messy hair thing, I look like a junkie.”

  “Thanks,” said Jing. She blinked, and something like a smile twitched on her cheeks. “And you always look like a junkie. It just kind of works on you.”

  Right. I took a cursory scan of the room and cleared my throat. “I have no idea what any of these lines mean. Like, any of them. It makes zero sense.”

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but what did the actual spell do? Like, what were you trying to do when we were all holding hands?” Daisy was sizing up the St. Sebastian heart doodle. “Because I’ve seen The Craft like six times, and they never drew hearts on stuff.”

  “I don’t really know what I was trying to do. I just kind of did it. I don’t normally draw hearts and shit, but it doesn’t matter so much what you draw, so long as you believe it. I mean, there’s got to be a circle, but you can scribble like a five-year-old with lipstick on a wall, and it’ll still work as long as your incantation doesn’t suck.”

  Actually, no. It barely ever works, and when it does, it can usually be debunked by killjoy skeptics on the internet, and that’s when I’m following spell book advice to the letter. This was absurd. I didn’t draw any of these on purpose, so there wasn’t any intention to drive them. And it wasn’t like I had a hell of a lot of intention in the first place. I was trying to make the lights flicker. Something simple, flashy, manageable. These sigils shouldn’t have been capable of this.

  I cracked my knuckles, click-click-click, but my left ring finger was stuck un-cracked, and it took a substantial amount of willpower not to snap it trying. My mood rings smudged green. Thinking hurt. “Hey. Jing. Can I see that video you took? There’s gotta be something in there.”

  “Yeah.” Jing pulled the latest iPhone out of nowhere and fluttered her fingertips across the screen. She gave me a tight little smirk and thrust it in my direction.

  The quality, for a shitty phone recording, was remarkable. The bass was distorted, but the laughter and off-key singing sounded genuine. Glow-splotchy bodies writhed in on themselves. Then the chalk drawings rippled into existence, floating like bodies to the brick wall’s surface. The music cut out, then skidded back with an old vinyl crackle. A scream tore through the crowd, and dark shadows, only people-shaped where the neon splatters lit them up, threw themselves on top of each other as they scrambled toward the stairs. Jing’s voice, jagged as glass, carved through the crowd: Bet you losers thought we couldn’t scare you! The angle fell crooked and blacked out.

  I watched it three times.

  “I have no idea what I did,” I said. “But, holy hell, I did a damn good job of it.”

  “I’d say.” Daisy yawned, stretched on relevé. She folded her arms behind her head. “You should come to our parties more often. Jing, I’m inviting Sideways to all our parties. Na-na na na-na. Nothing you can do about it. Sideways Pike at all our parties. Can you imagine?”

  Yikes. Alright. My crooked, stupid smile fell right off, but I crossed my arms, made like I hadn’t heard her. I’d just materialized magic chicken scratch on Jing Gao’s walls without trying to. Daisy would have to rack up a lot more nasty to faze me at this point.

  “Give my phone back.”

  I uncrossed my arms long enough to hand it over and promptly resumed my stance.

  “Right,” said Jing as she pocketed her phone and rocked back on her heels. “Whatever.”

  “Look.” I wasn’t sure what point I was trying to make, but a nagging voice in my head said it was the wrong one. I cleared my throat. “I can try to revamp that spell, reverse engineer it or something. I can show you how I did it in the first place. Us plus Yates and Madeline pack quite the supernatural punch. No way we couldn’t re-create this. Hell, we could make it bigger. I wager we could do a lot more than party tricks. We could do something really cool.”

  Something cool. A horrible, tantalizing fantasy swam up in my mind’s eye: the four of us in a clique, strutting meanly in lockstep in matching jackets, our nails sharp, our lips dark, our heels clacking in tandem with our heartbeats. The unholy trinity alchemizing into a quartet. I imagined us shocking people speechless. They’d look at us like we were teenage Erinyes. Like we were untouchable. I felt ill and giddy imagining it, imagining Yates and Jing and Daisy wanting to be near me, wanting to talk to me and be close to me. Best friends like the movies.


  Jing’s phone exploded. Her phone was at its peak volume, and the ringing was so jarring that I jumped. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and declined the call. “It was just Yates,” she said to Daisy. She flickered her focus back to me. “So. If you think we can do that again, I’m in. Nothing is cool in this town, and that was cool. Bring it. We can—goddamn it,” she spat. Her phone lit up again. The ringer blasted. Jing scowled, swiped, and cradled it to her ear.

  Daisy and I exchanged silent question marks.

  “What the fuck. Slow down. Start over.”

  Someone was sobbing on the other side.

  “I can’t understand you, babe. What’s wrong?”

  The sobbing grew louder.

  “What do you mean, in the pool? You’re talking nonsense. Okay. Okay, I get it. I’ll come see the pool. Hush, I know.”

  “The pool?” Daisy looked ravenous. “Like, as in your pool?”

  Jing shot a seething glance in Daisy’s direction, but she nodded nonetheless.

  Daisy looked lupine. She grabbed me by the wrist and bounced from foot to foot. “Come on, Sideways. If it’s gremlins, you can witch them to death.” She dragged me back toward the stairs.

  Daisy held my hand differently than Madeline had. Tighter grip, almond nails poised to prick. Her hands were softer. Even so, the similarity made me roil. Cold sweat on the back of my neck. I let her pull me across the threshold. I heard Jing, still whispering into her phone, at our heels.

  We trekked through the party ruins, through the black balloons, through the deck door, past the place where my skull had smacked, down the rickety stairs. We crossed the lawn and weaved between flamingos.

  We stopped precariously close to the edge of the pool, toes on the rim, and peered over the edge at the cavernous turquoise hole below. It went down and down and down.

  My stomach flipped.

  There were bodies at the bottom.

  Four slender bodies, two does and a fawn, lay dead in the deep end of the pool. Necks stretched. Eyes dull. Their legs stuck out at stiff angles. There were no bullet holes or cherry splatters. Their insides were not out. It was just the stillness, the inexplicable sickening stillness. Their bodies were arranged in neat rows. The bottom doe, the bigger of the two, had her head to the left and her tail to the right, and the middle doe was arranged in the opposite fashion. The fawn, still milky-speckled, was stretched like the first doe, left to right.

  The fourth body, curled up right next to the fawn, was Yates, her phone cradled to her cheek.

  TWO

  WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM?

  Yates whispered to herself. She shuddered, ghosted her fingertips across her sides and her arms. Her mascara was horror-flick thick under her eyes and her curls were still peppered with flowers from last night, but the petals were limper now, shrunken. Her feet were a shade bluer than the pool’s belly beneath her feet. Her left knee was bruised like a Jawbreaker.

  “Yates. Baby girl. Talk to us.”

  “What happened?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, does she look like she’s okay?”

  “If someone laid a single finger on you, I’ll chainsaw massacre them. I’ll carve their guts out. I’ll feed them to your dog.”

  Daisy squeezed my hand so tight I could hardly stand it. My bones were threatening to crack. She’d cut off circulation at this rate, but I couldn’t bring myself to jerk my hand away, couldn’t pry my eyes off Yates for that long.

  A sob tore out of her, a seam-splitting sob. It set my jaw on edge.

  Jing’s expression flickered and her mouth opened, but the sound caught somewhere in her throat. She dropped, hoisted herself over the ledge of the pool, and jumped down into the cavern. Her feet hit the ground with a smack. Her mouth was pulled taut. Jing maneuvered around the deer in an arc, and she fell to a crouch when she reached Yates. She wrapped her arms around Yates’ shoulders and whispered something in her ear. I couldn’t make out the words, only the harsh, low raggedness of Jing’s voice. Yates hid her face in her knees.

  “Hey, Sideways,” said Daisy. She sank her nails into my skin. “How’d the deer die?”

  “No idea. I didn’t do it.” My tongue felt brittle. I shook my head, curled my lip, tried to make my heart beat slower, beat at a human pace, but it just got harder. I pulled my arm back, but Daisy’s grip was inescapable. “I don’t know how they died. I really don’t.”

  “If you did this to Yates,” Daisy said, “they won’t find your fucking body, Sideways.”

  Jing’s gaze cut away from Yates. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I blistered where her eyes met mine, and I shook my head, opened my mouth. My voice box wasn’t working.

  Three little deer, all laid in a row. Acid lurched up the back of my throat. There weren’t any wounds on them. There should be gory bullet holes or arrows jutting from their stomachs, or knife wounds, gashes, lesions. But the bodies were pristine. If their eyes were shut, they could have been sleeping, but they weren’t. The whole thing smacked of magic.

  Jing moved her mouth against Yates’ temple. Her lips moved. She kept looking at me, her gaze fixed on my face. Yates shook her head. She moved her head to murmur something into Jing’s hair, then tossed her arms around Jing’s shoulders and collapsed against her. Jing pulled her tight, furrowed her brow, tore her gaze away from me. She kissed her forehead. “It wasn’t Sideways,” she said.

  It felt like a sip of cold water. Daisy loosened her grip and I pulled myself free, shook off the sting with a hiss. Angry red welts bloomed up where her fist had been.

  Jing hauled Yates upright. She went boneless, crumpled against Jing’s sternum, and Jing braced herself against the wall with a sharp inhale. Yates wrapped one arm around Jing’s waist and the other around her shoulders and patted her arm, looking up at us beseechingly.

  My throat tied itself up in knots.

  I stepped off the ledge. It was a six-foot drop, maybe seven, and the impact threw me. My boots skidded on the cement. The impact wrenched the breath out of me, and I sucked in a hard breath, tossed an arm around my stomach. I took a step forward and froze, recoiled. A wave of nausea struck me. The toe of my right boot was an inch from the first doe’s nose. My ankle was reflected in its glossy black eye.

  My palms dewed up.

  I shifted my weight to the balls of my feet. My steps were lighter, quicker than felt natural, but stomping felt inappropriate. What if I woke them up? I shivered. Gritted my teeth. Yates was under the diving board, at the deep end’s deepest point, and the ground sloped under my feet, drew me down to where she sat. I stopped beside the two of them and shoved my hands in my pockets. Words didn’t come. I wasn’t good at helping people. I wasn’t good at any of that. I swallowed, gave Jing a tight little nod.

  Yates threw herself at my chest. The impact rocked me. Her arms looped around my neck and she shuddered, heaved a ragged breath into my hair. Her cheek felt wet on my collarbone. My mouth popped open. I looked at Jing, eyes wide, but she didn’t look up to tell me how to deal with this. Her eyes were on Yates’ back. I swallowed, awkwardly placed my hand between her shoulder blades, and patted her spine.

  “The way you were laying there, I thought you were dead.”

  I looked down. Yates’ eyes were enormous. They consumed my entire line of sight. Deer eyes, living deer eyes. Her lids were magenta and raw.

  “Lila. Hey.” Jing rocked toward us, jammed her tongue in her cheek. “Hey. Let’s go. Sideways and I are going to walk you over to the stairs over there, okay?” She shot me a glance. I nodded, shifting so that Jing could slide her arm around Yates’ shoulders. We braced her between us. I gnawed my bottom lip.

  Lila. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Yates called by her first name before. Lila Yates.

  One of the flowers slipped from her temple and fell to the concrete floor.

  Daisy edged around the pool, displacing mounds of blackened leaves as she went. She stopped
by the shallow end’s staircase and sat on the topmost step. She reached out a hand, wiggled her fingertips. The snarl from earlier melted off her face and she softened, gave Yates a strange, crooked smile. “Come on, Baby Yates. Come inside.”

  We led Yates forward. She wasn’t walking, but she let herself be whisked. Between Jing and me, she felt like air. Her breathing was easier, still raw, but measured. I tried not to look at the deer as we went around them, but the fawn’s eyes followed us as we went.

  When we drew close enough, Yates reached out and took Daisy’s hand. Daisy pulled her away from us, guided her up the stairs. She kept her fingers twined with Yates’.

  Jing closed the French doors behind us.

  We brought Yates to the bathtub.

  Jing had drawn the water steaming hot. She dropped a little asteroid into the water, which bubbled violet and pink, and we all sat on the countertop and watched the water rise. The bath bomb smelled like blackberries and something ambiguously sugary. The mirror clouded. Water droplets beaded on the lilac wall tiles.

  “Did someone attack you?” Jing stuffed her hands in her pockets. Her face looked vaguely green.

  “Not like that,” said Yates. She raked the fabric of her dress off her back, lifted it over her shoulders. It crumpled on the floor in a yellow heap. “It wasn’t like that.”

  Jing crossed her arms, gave her a curt nod. “In you go, then.”

  Yates blew out slow, shivered once, and stepped into the tub. Her calves disappeared into red-violet bubbles and she lowered herself into the steaming water, drew her knees to her chest. “I love you guys.”

  A bizarre prickling sensation bubbled up in my chest, and I rubbed my thumb across my collarbone, the salty spot where she’d cried on me. Guys, plural. She didn’t know me, so she didn’t mean me, but the phrase stabbed between my fourth and fifth ribs and burrowed deep, took root. My face felt hot. I forced my gaze down, stared at the dress on the floor.