The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  Chett, ever smiling, stared vaguely toward the door.

  “The four of us bind ourselves together to curse a toxic fuck. Where our hands are clasped, where skin touches skin, power flows through. As long as our fingers are tangled, the entire universe is trapped here between us. We’re naming this doll our poppet. We’ve got some scores to settle.”

  Jing leaned forward with her teeth set on edge. “No one fucks with us. The bastard who did so needs to suffer, and we’re determined to see to it.” Her voice snapped—harsh fricatives, clipped vowels, throaty slides to the tonic. I didn’t have time to be jarred. She was doing this right. She was spitting magic. Those words had charge in them, had darkness. They prickled the hair on my neck. “One of ours was screwed with by a certain fuckboy. We’re going to call this asshole Chett. Chett needs to be made an example, and our clique is henceforth putting a permanent end to this kind of disgustingness. This doll is Chett. He’s going to help modify all that hell Yates had to suffer through.” Jing spoke with brittle straightforwardness. Her voice had edges. This incantation felt different than last night. It felt like a curse now, like ancient, honest vengeance.

  My chest thrummed like a beehive. The tension in me was redistributing. Normally, all the elastic power fizzled in me and me alone, but I felt it radiate out of my fingertips, felt it ooze into the three girls beside me. Every word out of Jing’s mouth took some weight off my shoulders. I didn’t feel like I was tap-dancing on a scythe blade. There was balance, calibration. Breathing was easier.

  “I don’t want anyone else to go through that, not ever. I don’t want him to be capable of it anymore. He needs to simmer in what he did,” Yates said. Her eyes, under inky lashes, drifted back and forth across Chett’s stiff stomach. I held her hand tighter, and she held mine tighter still.

  Daisy let out a high, crooked laugh, like she’d been punched in the stomach. Her eyes stretched to take up half her face. She balled her hand up in a fist around my fingers, and she leaned forward, locked her gaze on the Chett doll’s body. “He’s gonna do more than simmer.”

  “The four of us invite the chaos into our arms and charge it thus: where wrong has been inflicted, the scales have to tip. The four of us have four prongs for Chett. May he feel where we jab him forever,” I breathed, white-knuckled, as I clutched at either girl beside me, “and may he think about exactly what the fuck he’s done.”

  “First prong. Dear Chett,” said Daisy, licking her teeth like a cat with a canary, “Thou Shalt Not Look at Girls with Nasty Intentions. One sick glance in a girl’s direction, and it’ll sting your eyes like a splash of battery acid. Don’t even glance their way with one of your filthy thoughts. Or, better yet, do it. I really hope you do. I want you to find out what happens.” There was a weird cast of puckish delight on Daisy’s features. Every word out of her mouth struck her face like an eerie spotlight: the mocking curve of her smile, the upturn of her nose, the triangle of peach blush that peaked her cheeks. Was she getting off on this? Magic fucks with my perception, so I’m not sure if it was real, but out of the corner of my eye her skirt looked like it was fluttering. Her fringe drifted off her face. Whether she was serious about the spell casting, I didn’t know, but Daisy’s smirking gave the room a strange static. I felt it prickle the follicles on my arms, tease the hair to stand on end.

  “Second.” Jing slammed her brows into a V. She bristled with the sort of determination that I imagined Bonnie and Clyde had, righteously illegal and dripping with love. She rubbed her thumb over Yates’ knuckles. “Thou Shalt Not Touch Unconsenting Girls. I don’t care if it’s innocent. I don’t care if it was the single least harmful thing in the entire world. I don’t care if you bump into a girl at the supermarket. Unless they expressly say so, I want it to shock you like an exposed wire. I want you to feel it in your stomach for hours afterward. Not only that, but I want you to be so sick over what you did, so nauseous with it, that you couldn’t even fathom touching them twice. Not a single fucking finger.”

  “Third.” My words, my voice, my heart spasming at twice its normal rate. Everything was racing faster. My tongue moved too fast behind my teeth. “Thou Shalt Not Be Prideful for Harming Girls. You won’t be cocky or smug, not even for a second. The second something snide or misogynistic comes out of your mouth, it’ll scald your tongue and taste like rot. You’ll choke on it, every single ugly syllable.”

  “Fourth and final.” Yates let out a breath, closed her eyes. “Thou Shalt Not Stalk. Leave Addie the hell alone, and leave everyone else alone, too. Don’t look for me, or you’ll only get lost. And if you look for me or Addie or anyone else, you’ll feel awful for it, worse than I do right now. Three times the paranoia. It’ll be like the walls have eyes just for you.”

  “This is our hex,” I said. “You earned every inch.”

  A pungent, acidic smell split the air. Something like burning plastic. I looked down and my throat closed. The doll had moved, and not in a way it could’ve. The arms had snapped in half. The place where its elbows should be were cleanly broken, and thin, Sharpied filaments held the forearms to the upper arms. Its fuse-fingered hands rested over its face, covered its melty eyes. The sigil, the inscription, and the doodles had seeped into the plastic itself. They looked like a molded feature, like he’d come this way.

  The tension melted away. Now there was just the afterlights, the magic embers. I let go of Yates and Daisy.

  We all exhaled in unison.

  There was a bottomless moment where we couldn’t speak. We stared at each other, at the doll, at our hands. There was something impossible between us. It was thin and invisible and honeyed raw, and it had an unspeakable gravity. There were hooks in it and it had put hooks in me. We’d torched the world for a second there. Reality was still flickering in its wake.

  This wasn’t what magic was ever like. Magic before had been like lying on my back and clawing at the sky, trying for a fistful of stars and ending up with the occasional lightning bug. Even following my spell book by the letter, the most I could do was burn paper, unbreak dishes, make scrapes and cuts scab faster. What the four of us could do was something else. I felt seasick and disgustingly in love with it, with them.

  Jing put her hands over her mouth. She stared at the doll, which didn’t feel like a doll anymore, and put on a meticulously neutral expression. “So.” She slipped her hand inside her sleeve and picked the doll up slowly, delicately, like it might spring to life and bite her. It might. I wasn’t sure. “What do we do with it?”

  “I want to burn it.” Daisy looked at the poppet like it was a reliquary. Her face broke into a grin, and she tossed her arms around her stomach, dug her nails into her sides. “Can we burn it, Sideways?”

  “Absolutely not.” I skittered my fingertips up and down my thighs. “I wouldn’t want to breathe the smoke. Besides, whatever we put in there, I don’t want it getting out. We need to keep an eye on it. Put it someplace safe.”

  “Define safe,” said Jing. She held it closer to her face, eyes sharp on its makeshift elbows. A vein twitched in her cheek. “God. It made little tendons. They’re bunched and notched and everything.”

  I cracked my neck. “Safe like a jar filled with nails.”

  “Nails. We can do that.” Jing sucked her teeth. “Daze. The bat. It’s in my closet.”

  Daisy lit up and sprung to her feet. She sidestepped Jing and half skipped to the sliding closet door, yanked it open, and dove her hands into some unseen back corner. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, screwed up her face in concentration, and then eased into a smile. She pulled the bat out slowly. Jing’s clothes slid to either side like curtains.

  It was a Louisiana Slugger. It was a Louisiana Slugger peppered with twenty-something railroad spikes. Daisy leaned on it, crossed her toe behind her ankle. She waggled her brows.

  My mouth popped open like a codfish. “What the fuck? ”

  “I get bored.” Jing shrugged. She set down the poppet, shoved the spare Barbi
es back in the Rubbermaid container, and slithered back under the bed with it, reemerged with a ribbon-handled hammer. “Does it matter if the jar’s been used for anything before?”

  “Nah,” I said. My tongue felt dry.

  Was it appropriate here to ask her if she was straight?

  “Dope,” she said. She tucked the hammer under her arm and strode over to her desk, where she picked up a mason jar that’d been holding pens, dumped the pens out, and then sat back on the floor. She put down the jar, took up her hammer, and reached for the Slugger with her free hand. “This spell thing is more convenient than I thought it’d be.”

  Yates had been silent. She didn’t look at the doll. She looked at the rug instead, knotting her hands in tufts of purple fur like it’d anchor her in place. “Hey, Sideways,” she breathed. “Can you come here for a second?”

  I sucked my teeth, shoved my hands in my pockets, and gave her a stiff nod. I mean, I was already beside her. I’d listen, though, if that’s what she meant.

  Yates scooted closer and positioned herself in front of me. She leaned back. Her spine aligned with my sternum, and she let herself melt, went soft against my chest. She pressed her cheek against my neck. I forgot how to swallow. “Thank you.” There was a tickling, mothy sensation at my jawline, and I nearly jerked away until I realized it was her lashes, blinking slow. “I needed that,” she said. “I seriously needed that.”

  Thank me. Thank me for what? I didn’t ask her, just nodded and said, “No problem.” My voice sounded weird and raw, like it wasn’t mine. My entire body felt grimy—it had all morning, but now it was hitting me how disgusting I was. There was a twig in my hair. Probably dead crickets, too. Yates felt too clean, too soft to be on me. My arms fit funny in my sleeves. I didn’t pull my hands out of my pockets and I didn’t wrap them around her, because I wasn’t sure I’d do it right. I’d fuck it up somehow. I awkwardly leaned my cheek against her forehead, just barely, just enough that she’d feel it.

  Yates made a sound in the back of her throat. She shifted a little, made herself comfortable, and wiggled her toes in the faux purple fur. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is Sideways mean? I mean, I know why they call you that. I don’t want to be like that. I could call you Eloise instead.”

  “Well, damn.” I felt my face contort. “No. I like Sideways. I picked it myself and it just kind of stuck. No one calls me Eloise. My dads don’t call me Eloise.” Then, with a hesitant little cough, “Thanks for asking, though.”

  Jing jerked her head up. She was halfway through the process of yanking the spikes out of her Slugger, and the hammer slipped out of her hand and banged against the side of her bed. The noise made Daisy jump. “Jesus fucking Christ, Sideways, your name is Eloise?”

  THREE

  LIKE BLOOD AND WATER

  Seeing Jing’s room, now that I properly had time to see Jing’s room, screwed with my expectations of who she was. Jing at school was slick and nonchalant, dismissive, authoritative, slacking in classrooms but commanding social office, slim as a whippet and twice as quick. There was little room for adoration in her public image. That wasn’t the case up close. Under her electric chandelier was a poster of Eartha Kitt, and a stack of battered paperbacks—Ariel, The Woman Warrior, Alias Grace—sat dog-eared and unsuspecting atop her bedside table. A pair of sneakers dangled by the laces from a blade of her ceiling fan, unworn, stuffed with lavender springs, and swung in lazy circles as the fan blade made its rounds. There was a whiteboard adhered to the closet door labeled PEOPLE I’M IN LOVE WITH, and all the entries had been scratched out save three names: Daisy, Yates, and Rico Nasty. There were tally marks etched in her footboard and a crack in her TV screen.

  The four of us sat on the rug again. Daisy and I had taken showers, but unlike Daisy, I’d crept back into yesterday’s crusty clothes. Not like I’d brought a spare set. We were watching a movie, but I hadn’t been paying enough attention to know which movie it was. A teenage girl was about to be hacked to pieces on-screen, and Jing was bad-mouthing her for locking herself in a cabinet instead of running out the front door. Yates was texting someone and elbowing Jing from time to time, but Jing didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or she was too invested in coaching the slasher victim through How Not to Be Slashed to acknowledge whatever was going on with Yates’ phone.

  My mind was elsewhere. Nowhere in particular, but somewhere else, somewhere in a vague, hazy plane of existence at the periphery of our own.

  Daisy Brink was braiding my hair.

  “Hey, Sideways,” said Yates, who looked up from her phone and over her shoulder at me. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Can you?” I snorted, but I couldn’t muster anything cleverer than that. Daisy’s nails against my scalp were mesmerizing. The easy, repetitive motion wrung out my nerves. I felt on the verge of hysteria, and I couldn’t place why. Maybe it was just the attention. I’m not used to attention. This was the first time in a while I didn’t feel angry, not even a little. “Yeah, sure.”

  “The legendary West High Fight Club. I heard it was coordinated by the Drama kids before it was broken up. You’re a Drama kid. Is all that true? Please say it’s true.” She said this politely, though her tone was overshadowed by Daisy’s snickering above my head.

  “Those rumors were wildly exaggerated.” I grimaced, and Daisy gave my hair a little tug, which I ignored. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Exactly. See, I’d heard you were a militant vegan/cannibal who favored human farming over cattle husbandry,” said Jing, pausing long enough in her horror rapture to shoot me a glance. “And that was clearly bull.”

  “I’ll say. If I’m a militant vegan, then I really screwed myself with those chicken wings, man.” My eyes rolled back in my head. Daisy had her own kind of sorcery, and this was it.

  “Those rumors are always so vicious. God, I hate this town sometimes. We’re all so bored that we just pick at each other for entertainment, and that doesn’t do anything for me. It’s like eating bubblegum for dinner.” Yates set her phone on her lap. “And the teachers all wonder why this is such a party town. What else is there to do?”

  “Suffer.” Jing slammed her hands on the floor, eyes stretched wide. “Run the other way, asshole, the other way! Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like you’re asking him to knife you. The door is on the left, the left!”

  “Yates, ask my boyfriend if he misses me at college.” Daisy punctuated her sentence by tapping the crown of my head. She sounded smug. I missed the joke.

  Yates put her face in her hands. “Akeem isn’t going to date you, Daze. He still thinks you’re, like, twelve.”

  “He’s my true love,” said Daisy. I heard the smirk in her voice. “Only man I could ever love at all, I think.”

  “He’s literally engaged, Daze.” Yates sighed, glanced at me through her fingers. “Akeem is my older brother. He’s graduating from Yale this spring.”

  “Yale?” Damn. I was hoping to get into the artsy private school Julian had attended. It was nice and all, but it sure as hell wasn’t Yale.

  “Yeah. It’s kind of a thing. Both my parents are alumni. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be going, too. Akeem is a total dork and wants me to recreate all the stupid pictures he took as a freshmen.” Yates said this matter-of-factly, but a wave of palpable stress rolled off her and dissipated into the air like smoke. She waved a hand at the phone in her lap. “He and his roommate have just illegally snuck a rabbit into their strictly anti-pet apartment. He’s been asking me for ‘cool’ name suggestions. That’s the level of dork he is.”

  “I voted for Abunninable,” said Jing. She leaned closer to the screen just as the slasher plunged his cleaver into a frat boy’s shoulder. “But apparently, Akeem doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  “It’s hard to say and isn’t cute.” Yates screwed her face up. “I feel like a rabbit needs a name that you can baby talk. You can’t baby talk Abu
nninable.”

  “It’s punny.” Jing scowled. “Puns are cute.”

  “You’re cute,” Daisy said.

  “Fuck you,” Jing replied.

  “Cute is in the eye of the beholder. I like Abunninable.” I scratched at my shins, and Daisy kneed me in the back, presumably because I kept squirming. I stilled up. “Makes it sound mysterious. Like a jackalope.”

  “She gets me.” Jing jerked a thumb in my direction. “Sideways gets me.”

  “I vote Bunnicula,” said Daisy.

  Yates shrugged, pulled her phone up and danced her fingers over the screen. A moment later, she gave Daisy a nod. “He says that Bunnicula works.”

  “See? Soulmates.”

  Yates stuck out her tongue. She set her phone aside, produced a vial of nail polish from seemingly nowhere, and swished the brush over her forefinger.

  I wrapped my arms around my chest. My ribs felt weirdly honeyed, and my stomach fluttered, purred with something next to happiness. This wasn’t what I thought these three were like. I didn’t think they were much like anything. In school, they were dangerous angels, sugar-coated rattlesnakes, the kind of girls who everybody adored, who sucked up said adoration without giving any in turn. The triumvirate’s power was unparalleled. Rules had exclusion clauses for them. If they wore something too short, or cut too deep, no one batted a lash. If there was an election for student council, for prom, for extracurricular leadership, they won as soon as they wrote their name on the ballot. Outside of that, though, they vanished. They had these parties, sure, but I’d never been to one before last night. In the iron-clad West High social pyramid, they were on the thrones up top and I was skulking near the bottom, lurking behind bleachers, doing magic tricks for bottles of Coke. I wasn’t supposed to fit in their paradigm. I wasn’t fit for friendship.

  “So. Sideways. Where did the witch thing come from? Tell me,” Daisy commanded as she weaved the hair at the nape of my neck. I think she was going for twin braids, the style she’d been wearing the night before. That meant I had another fifteen minutes or so of paradise. I made myself comfortable. “Made a deal with the devil?”