The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  “You’re not into this, are you?” Daisy dropped her voice and poked me in the ribs. A smile flickered on her lips.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped.

  “She’s not being creepy, Daze.” Yates sank a little lower into the tub. She rested the back of her neck on the rim of the tub and stared up at the ceiling. “Sideways didn’t climb into that pool to try and get with me.” She rolled her head to the side, gave me a little smile. It was weak, and fleeting, but I felt it like sunlight. “Right?”

  “Yeah.” I rubbed the tiles with my boot.

  Jing leaned forward. The drawstrings on her hoodie swung back and forth like the spindle on a metronome, and she cleared her throat, bit her lip. “I need to know what happened, Lila. I need you to tell me everything.” She didn’t sound unkind, but she was Jing. Everything she said sounded like her left hook, but there was a note of raw softness that I hadn’t heard come out of her before.

  “Right.” Yates splashed her face with pink water, and some of last night’s eyeliner blurred off. She looked at the faucet like she was trying to make something out, but the faucet was still a faucet. Her expression fell. She rubbed her hands over her knees and cleared her throat. “It feels like a fever dream now. Christ. It was after the glow-stick bit. Look, I’ve seen all your stupid horror movies, and I wasn’t about last night. We’re hot girls. I’m a hot black girl. Hot girls at parties who play with ghosts end up dead in horror movies, particularly girls like me. Chopped into ribbons dead. Inviting the local devil worshiper over to your place felt like a particularly stupid idea, Jing, but I thought it was bullshit, so I didn’t say anything. I guess it was harmless enough when it wasn’t going to work. But then it worked. I was like, no thanks. I just wanted to have a good time and not be axe murdered by the devil, so I slipped off to get tipsy and avoid this nonsense like the plague.

  “So, I was on the dance floor and there was this East High boy that I hadn’t seen before. He was angel-faced, but he wasn’t my type. Too preppy, I guess. But preppy felt safe, and I was just trying to distance myself from the weirdness. He was kind of handsy, but I like that. Mind was in dirty places, you know? So, I drag him into that back closet in the basement, the one behind the punch table, and we’d not quite closed the door when the drawings showed up on the wall.

  “Then he . . . switched. It was like Jekyll and Hyde, just like that. His face curled up, and he started screaming about someone named Addie. ‘Where’s Addie, how do you know Addie, Addie, Addie.’ He just kept screaming about it. I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone named Addie in my life. I told him again and again, but he just kept snarling at me. I couldn’t hear him over the music. And the music was wrong. It was this vintage stuff, all staticky and brassy, and it wasn’t on the playlist for the party—I helped Alexis make that playlist. I thought I was losing it.

  “I thought he was going to kill me. There was something wrong with his eyes. They were too big for his face. He said something else, but I still couldn’t hear him. He took me by the shoulders and pulled me out of the closet, and he took me through the crowd and up the stairs, but everyone was too busy freaking out about the chalk drawings to notice anything, or it was too dark, or everyone was stoned past heaven or straight up unconscious. Sideways was out cold on the patio. Her eyes were open. I thought you were dead, Sideways. We stepped over you.”

  I shifted a little. Daisy shot me a look.

  “So, he takes me into the pool. He shoves me against the wall under the diving board, and then he starts acting weird. And I mean weird. He starts talking nonsense, and I can’t understand a word out of his mouth. Something about whoever the hell Addie is, I don’t know. And then he takes a permanent marker out of his pocket and writes something above my knee, and then, nothing. Seriously, nothing. Until I woke up and there were fucking deer in the pool with me, and I was freezing and alone.” Yates paused and splashed more pink water on her face. “Thank God my phone wasn’t dead. I just don’t get it. It was just so freaky. And the deer? What the fuck is that about?”

  “You sure it was a preppy kid? Sounds like some hick jock who thought he was clever,” said Daisy with a snarl. She slid off the counter and bounced on her toes, shifted her weight back and forth like a boxer. “It’s fucking sick. Who the hell puts a girl in an empty pool and arranges deer around her? What even is that? I swear to God, when I find out which miserable douchebag did this, I’m going to slit his throat with a goddamned bobby pin.”

  “Daisy,” Jing said.

  Daisy scowled and crossed her arms over her chest.

  I shoved my fists in my pockets. “He drew something on your leg, right?”

  “Yeah.” Yates frowned, and she stuck her sudsy leg out of the bath. She pressed her pointer finger against a smudge above her kneecap. “It was here.”

  I coughed. “Can I see it?”

  She let go of a breath and gave me a nod. I crouched by the side of the tub.

  The mark was faded now. It was quick, sketchy, blurred past the point of distinction, but I thought I saw switchbacks and spirals in the lines. “It’s a sigil.” No question about that much. “Not sure what it means, though.”

  “Oh.” Yates’ face fell, but I shook my head, cut off the apology before it came out of her mouth.

  “There isn’t an inscription. I wouldn’t know even if you hadn’t washed it off. I guess he knew a thing or two, whoever he was.” I didn’t like that. It conjured a sour taste.

  I’d never met someone else who could draw sigils. I’d been under the impression that I was the only one around these parts. It was undeniably a sigil, though, and whoever had drawn it on her was good enough to skip the chants. That wasn’t supposed to be a thing.

  Yates reached out of the bath and caught one of my hands, gave it a squeeze. My heart cartwheeled. I jerked my gaze away. Her thumb rubbed circles around my knuckles, and it ached, but I didn’t tell her not to. She didn’t ask about the bruising. I felt the question hang in the air, but I wasn’t in the mood to answer.

  “Sideways.” It was Jing’s voice behind me. Raked a shiver down my spine.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you curse people?”

  Something constricted in my chest.

  “I mean. Theoretically, yeah. Never tried before,” I sounded out. It was true. I hadn’t. When I had a problem with someone, I usually explained it to them with the backs of my hands.

  “Let’s curse him, then. Magic works. You can do it. I want him to suffer for this.” Jing’s voice was cool, but I felt her seethe without even looking. It pulsated in the air. “Tonight, that’s what we’re going to do. Chalk be damned—I’ll deal with that in the morning. I want to curse this prick so severely he never even ponders touching a girl again.” Then, softer: “Would you like that, Lila?”

  Yates frowned. She gave my hand a squeeze. “I think so.”

  “Badass,” said Daisy. “I’ll order pizza.”

  Daisy did not order pizza. Pizza is singular. She ordered pizzas. Three pizzas with every combination of sauce and topping the pizzeria could supply, with the addition of salad and buffalo wings and two two-liter bottles of orange soda. She put it all on a heavy-looking credit card without asking what it cost.

  We sat on Jing’s bedroom floor, the four of us in a circle. Daisy had eaten most of a pizza by herself. The sauce on her cheek looked like a war wound. Yates had her curls wrapped up in a sky-colored scarf, and she sat with her knees to her chest, absently toying with the furry carpet. Jing sat across from me. She hadn’t touched the food, hadn’t looked away from my face. She stared at me so intensely I felt like she was fiddling with my synapses.

  My guts felt hollow. I took a second slice.

  “So,” I said. “Yates. Do you know his name? It helps if you do.”

  I didn’t have my spell book at hand, but there wasn’t much of it I didn’t know by heart. The curse section of my Vade Mecvm Magici was brief and vague, but that was how it was about everything. It wouldn’t help me here.
The name would, though. Might aim this thing properly.

  “I don’t think I asked.” She shrugged, squeezed fistfuls of fluffy carpet. “I don’t think I cared. He was an East High loser. He wasn’t exactly interesting.”

  “His name was probably Chett. Every other guy at East High is named Chett. Douchebag name.” Daisy opened the second box of pizza, which had a few toppings I didn’t recognize. I didn’t ask. I’d eat it regardless.

  “Yeah. He looked like he could’ve been a Chett.” Yates picked at the pizza without much interest. “That works, I guess.”

  “That might work. I don’t know. Do you remember what his face looked like?” I dropped the crust on one of Jing’s porcelain plates and crossed my legs.

  Yates nodded. “Don’t think I could forget.”

  “Can you focus on that while we do this? We’re going to need a poppet. A poppet . . . like, a symbol for Chett. An idol. It could be a spoon, a hairbrush, doesn’t matter. Something that we can pass around while we work.”

  Jing clucked her tongue. “Hold on.” There was a horrible, anticipatory beat while she looked at me dead on, said something vicious with her eyes, and then fell backward and rolled onto her stomach. She shimmied under her bed, movements low and lizard-like, and clawed around for something out of my line of sight. A breath later, she emerged with a battered Rubbermaid container in her hands. She sat up, popped the lid, flipped the container over. A hail of naked Barbies clattered to the floor.

  These were not virile Barbies. They were half headless, limbless, tattooed with Magic Marker and floral stickers. Hair hacked to bits. A few faces had been scrubbed off and redrawn. They looked like Jack the Ripper victims. The Ken dolls were in equally rough shape, if not worse. Those were the dolls Jing was sorting through now. She pulled all the buff-colored plastic boyfriends out and laid them in a row, shoulder to shoulder, and tapped her nails over each of their abdomens with a frown. “These oughta work, yeah?”

  “Christ, Jing, I didn’t know you still had these.” Daisy clapped one of her hands over her heart and snatched up a Ken doll with the other. She pinched its ankle between her fingers and held it at arm’s length, eyeballed it from head to toe. This was a blond Ken. Its left eye was worn away, but its perpetual smile was untouched. If Toy Story was right, and toys were sentient beings capable of suffering, this Ken was one unlucky bastard, indeed. Daisy pressed it to her sternum and fanned her fingers over its back. “I haven’t seen these since second grade. Do you remember their names? I feel like this one was Eric. My first boyfriend. It’s so sweet I could die.”

  “Pick a Chett,” Jing said with a leer. She looked at me for a long minute, like I might say something to contradict her, but there was nothing to say. She was right. Barbies would work damn well. Curse dolls were a trope for a reason.

  Yates ran her fingertips over every battered doll boy. She pressed her prints into the notches between neck and chin, danced over their nipple-less plastic pecs, prodded hollow faces until they squished. Yates bit her bottom lip, scrunched up her brows, pondered every plastic body with equal consideration. Her eyes moved from left to right and left again, textbook-reading style, until they froze mid-motion.

  Her gaze drifted up an inch at a time.

  It settled on the doll in Daisy’s fists.

  Daisy scoffed. “Really? Yates, this is my boyfriend, Eric. He’d never put anyone in a pool. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Yates turned that gaze on me and fluttered her lashes.

  Damn.

  I ripped my hand through my hair. “Yates called it. Eric is moonlighting as Chett tonight. Sorry, Daisy.”

  “Ugh. Screw you guys.” Daisy, pouting, tossed Eric/Chett onto the faux fur carpet and crossed her arms over her chest.

  Yates delicately picked it up, placed it on her lap. She squeezed its head between her thumb and forefinger. “How did you even manage to smudge its eye? I thought the paint on these things was immortal. I’ve never seen a smeared one before.”

  “Bug spray,” said Jing. She wagged her eyebrows. “Melts the paint right off.”

  “Alright.” I cleared my throat. “Do we know what we’re doing to him? Have you decided for sure, Yates?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to put him in the hospital or anything.”

  “I want to put him in the hospital,” said Jing and Daisy in unison.

  “It’d look really bad to colleges if we killed the guy, so I’m drawing a hard line with anything that could fuck up and result in murder. Besides, that’s a tad complicated. Let’s go with something easier to pull off. Mental anguish, something like that,” I said. I ran my thumbnail over a chicken bone on my plate. There was a cold, queasy feeling in my gut. I tried to ignore it. My palms clammed up anyway.

  Jing considered for a moment and gave us a nod. “I could work with mental anguish.”

  “I mean. I want to implode his gonads,” Daisy said, “but I could settle for psychological torture, if y’all are going to be boring about it. You game, Yatesy?”

  Yates sucked in her cheeks, and after a long pause, she set the doll on the floor. “I’m game.”

  “Alright.” I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We need a piece of paper to draw our sigils on, and a cup or some such to trace a circle with. Don’t overthink it. We’re all going to lay down a few curse lines, Thou Shalt Nots—actions you want to stop and their consequences. It doesn’t matter what they are, so long as they feel right in your gut, alright? Just, again: zero murder. We’re going with mind games. Then we draw shapes over the lines to lash them in place. The shapes can be literally anything. You guys saw the basement. Seriously. Anything genuine goes. Questions?”

  “Yeah,” said Jing. “What if we just wrote it all on the doll? I want them sticking to him forever. We can make it like we’re tattooing our grievances on him. Make it count.”

  Shit. That was clever, and would totally work. I nodded, shoved my hands under my armpits. A nasty, cloying thought writhed around in my stomach like a long, icy centipede, squirming, twisting, and I felt it threaten to clamber up my esophagus and batter itself through my teeth. It was the urge to fuck up this whole thing and say something like the truth: If Jing was as good at magic as I was, would that be the end of whatever this was? If they didn’t need me, why keep me around? This, the four of us, was hardly anything, but I felt attached to it now. I set my teeth in a hard line and forced it back down. “Yeah.” I swiped my tongue over my teeth. “I guess that’ll work, too.”

  Daisy fetched a Sharpie from Jing’s bedside table.

  Jing picked up the Chett poppet and flipped it over a few times in her hands. “He’s fucking small. Where do we draw the circle?”

  “Around his neck,” I breathed. I reached for another slice of pizza. The cheese was approaching room temperature, but the litany of mismatched toppings smelled bizarrely delicious. I sank my teeth in and tried to steel my nerves. Chew. Swallow. Take comfort in the fact that it tastes fantastic. “If you draw it around the doll’s neck, then everything we draw on the body is technically inside of the circle. There isn’t enough room on his chest to draw a decent circle, even if we crammed our writing as small as we could.”

  “Cool,” said Jing. She passed the Sharpie from Daisy to Yates.

  Yates, looking pensive, uncapped the pen. Pop goes the toxic Sharpie smell. Nausea lurched in my gut. Yates drew a skinny black ring around his neck. It resembled a nineties choker. She shook her head and put him down, pulled her knees to her chest. “Someone else write first.”

  “I’ll do the honors,” Daisy said. She gingerly plucked up the doll and the marker and laid them both innocently across her lap. She lofted the Sharpie, poised as Marie Antoinette with a teacup, and tattooed where the doll’s clavicle should be. “Thou Shalt Not Look at Girls with Nasty Intentions.” She took the Thou Shalt Not thing literally, I suppose. Works. She used hearts to dot her i’s. “If you do, you’ll go blind looking at them.”

>   Jing took the doll out of Daisy’s hands and flipped him over, poised the Sharpie between his plastic shoulder blades. “Thou Shalt Not Lay Hands on Unconsenting Girls. So much as an accidental brush in the hallway, and it’ll trigger more panic than a cavity kid at a dentist.”

  Yates nodded at me.

  The doll and the marker were placed in my hands.

  I hovered the Sharpie over its abdomen. “Thou Shalt Not Be Prideful for Harming Girls. Any happiness gleaned from harming girls will rebound threefold as shame.”

  Yates flashed me a nervous smile.

  I handed Chett over.

  “Thou Shalt Not Stalk. That Addie chick included. If you even think about stalking a girl again, you’ll feel double the paranoia you inflict,” said Yates, who wrote across the doll’s plastic thighs.

  “Alright, then.” I drew my knees to my chest, reached for another wing, and gnawed on it. “Yates, you can draw the sigils. First thing that comes to mind, draw that.”

  She drew daisies and butterflies across his Four Commandments.

  Yates, when she’d finished girlying up the lyrics to our curse, set Chett on the floor between the four of us. His shiny body caught the light and glared. Daisy smoothed his hair and repositioned him, spread his arms and his legs so that he looked like a store-brand Vitruvian Man.

  I hacked into my sleeve and cast down my chicken bone like a gauntlet, seized the hands on either side of me. “Time for the invocation.”

  I squeezed them tight. Forty fingers tangled together, heartline to heartline, and magic knocked me up the backside of my head. My eyes swelled in their sockets. Sinews stiffened. Blood welled up in my ribs. The circle on Chett’s neck thrummed with a livid, liquid power, and it charred its way through my bones, lacerated tissue, and seeped into marrow. The words bubbled up in my stomach, and I felt the incantation vibrate in my teeth.