The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  Why couldn’t I just be good at this?

  Jing slammed the brakes at the red light, and my seatbelt lashed my stomach. She turned her head to look at me and scowled. Or smiled. Her face was a riddle, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to parse it. “Do you want me to drop you off at home?”

  “She’s sleeping over,” said Yates.

  “I didn’t ask you, Lila,” Jing hissed, but Yates cut her off with a wave of her hand.

  “She’s sleeping over. She’s gotta. She’s protecting me from Daisy, because Daisy’s being a biting weirdo and I wanna make sure I’m safe at night. I am so not in the mood to be cannibalized.” To illustrate her point, she swung her feet up on my lap, as if the presence of her shoes on my thighs staked a claim on me. In the low light, the white Vans almost glowed. Ghost shoes.

  Something twisted under my ribs, knotted tight. Something warm and radiant. I placed a hand across Yates’ ankle and gave it a squeeze. She didn’t recoil, didn’t grimace when my skin touched hers.

  I kept my temple to the glass.

  “My house it is,” said Jing. The light flashed green, and we rolled on.

  FIVE

  FEVERLESS FEVER DREAMS

  The katydids were dead by now, so the four of us sat in total silence out by the pool. We perched on the edge with our legs dangling into the depths, and the stillness was thick in the air. The flamingoes balanced on their skinny plastic legs. My skinless knuckles stiffened in the cold. The only light fell from the deck behind us, and our shadows stretched like fingers over the pale deer down below. We didn’t speak, as though breaking the silence might wake the darkness and solidify it into something that could grab our ankles and yank us off the ledge.

  Daisy rocked her head back and stared at the night. “There’s trash bags in the kitchen. We could stash them inside, carry them up the stairs, and toss them in the back of your car, Jing. Leave them in the woods somewhere.”

  “I don’t want them in my car,” said Jing. “I don’t want them anywhere near anything that belongs to me.”

  “They’d be heavy,” I said. “I could lift them, but it wouldn’t be clean.” I imagined their stomachs bent around my neck, heaved fireman style over my shoulders with their hooves dangling near my hipbones. I wasn’t sure what deadweight felt like. My insides felt hoarfrosted.

  “I want to bury them,” said Yates. She looked greenish out of the corner of my eye, the blood gone from her face. “We can’t just put them in trash bags and dump them somewhere. That feels wrong.”

  “Burying them is harder than leaving them somewhere. They’re just deer. It shouldn’t matter,” said Daisy.

  But it did matter. If Yates said so, it did. So, it did.

  “Sideways,” said Jing. Her voice was hushed. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.” I ran my nails up and down my knees. Tripped the rough edges over ingrown hairs. It stung a little.

  “Do you know how they died?”

  The fawn’s eyes reflected the porchlight. For a second, it looked almost aware, like it was glancing back at me. There wasn’t a single mark on any of them, and the flawlessness spoke of supernatural influence. They were so carefully spaced, so tenderly arrayed, so meticulously aligned with each other and the wall. This was ritualistic. These were magic killings.

  Yates and the real Chett had stepped over me. She’d said my eyes were open.

  I looked at the fawn and forgot how to swallow.

  “No,” I said.

  But that wasn’t what she was asking me.

  “Let’s just go inside,” said Yates. “We’ll scrub the walls tonight and finish this tomorrow. I’d feel better about things that way. I don’t know if I can sleep if we touch them tonight.”

  Jing slumped her shoulders and her hair fell in her face. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go inside, then.”

  We went inside. Yates and I carried washrags and bleach water down the stairs to the basement, but we needn’t have. Jing and Daisy were ghost-faced on the landing. All the chalk glyphs on the walls were gone.

  I was achingly awake. I was bleeding, too. I didn’t know how long I’d been awake, only that the darkness was as thin and milky as a Sleeping Beauty hex; an invisible fishnet of unconsciousness that swathed everyone except myself, the woozy witch in the corner, who was too busy seeping blood and scowling to succumb.

  It was the bleeding that woke me up: the taste in my mouth, the slickness down my throat, the molten crust of drying blood that collected on my pillow. I drifted out of sleep to find the stickiness down my jaw. My heart wrenched and my adrenaline pricked, and I slammed myself upright, patting my face, spitting.

  I’d been dreaming of that incantation I’d cast on the porch. About Madeline. About something she had said. Whatever it was, it evaporated as soon as I opened my eyes, and all at once I was jarringly alone in the darkness in Jing’s basement.

  I clamped my hand across my nose.

  It was a dry October. Nosebleeds just randomly assault people, no questions asked, when the weather withers, and this was that. This was that. I groped in the darkness for the tissue box Jing had brought downstairs until my fingertips found cool cardboard. I audibly hissed a sigh of relief. I ripped a tissue free, and then two more, and shoved them against my gory nose.

  My mouth filled up with blood.

  I was not quite sure how to find the bathroom from here, so I stayed on my sleeping bag and dragged my legs to my chest. Yates and Jing and Daisy were eerily motionless. My eyes adjusted and their stillness tugged at me, and I made myself look away. They were sleeping across where the chalk circle had been.

  Daisy was snoring.

  Thank God for Daisy snoring.

  If she didn’t snore—if the three of them were stiff and still and completely silent under their blankets—my mind would’ve fed me the worst sort of paranoia. They were breathing. All three of them were breathing. They were breathing, and they definitely hadn’t been laid out in neat little rows like the deer had been. They were just sleeping that way by chance. Correlation, not causation.

  My stomach turned sour, and I blamed it on the blood.

  I wasn’t sure if it was morning yet.

  The copper taste was nauseating. I spat more red and grimaced.

  The was a rustling, a whisper of fabric on fabric. It came from beside me and sent a lurching into my gut.

  Hands on my back.

  “Sideways, you okay?”

  I sucked a breath between the gap in my teeth. It was Yates. Yates was not whatever I’d been tensing for. I twisted back toward her and found her tucked neatly at my flank, eyes half mooned and dreamy, her blankets whorled around her waist like some sort of downy nest. She had a sleeping bag, but she hadn’t been sleeping on it. Rather, she had rolled it out on top of her blow-up mattress and used it for extra padding. It crinkled as she shifted.

  “I just have a nosebleed, s’all,” I said, a solid octave lower than I normally would. My throat was all gravel and grossness. I sounded like a grumpy dragon.

  “Come,” she said, and with a silent, catlike motion, she rolled onto her feet. One of her fleece blankets rose with her about her shoulders, which gave her an unintentional likeness to a carnival mystic: silky bonnet, billowing shawl, and a misty disposition. She weaved her way between pillows and extra comforters, and I crawled to my feet and trudged behind her with the tissue box in hand.

  It occurred to my still half-sleeping self that maybe the staircase to Jing’s basement jinxed reality, so that every time you crossed, you were a little less on earth. It must be some kind of thin space: walking through it meant something wicked materialized at the other end. I walked down these stairs and drew that circle. I walked up these stairs and cast that spell. Down again and sigils dripped down walls, up again and deer were dead in the swimming pool. I tiptoed over the top three steps and shut the door behind me.

  “Jesus,” Yates breathed, jumping at the abruptness of the door closing.

  “Sorry.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.

  She shook her head and slipped down the hallway. Her feet, unlike mine, were deathly quiet as they padded over the planked floor. She looked back at me for a moment, tossed me a sleepy smile, and slipped through a door to her left.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the bottomless, human-less hallway, and the dark stretched all the way back. It was a witchy, electric darkness. It was the darkness that had lived on the porch with Madeline, and now it was inside with me. Breathing, willful, impish darkness. Darkness that might slip under the crack in the door and smother Jing and Daisy while they slept, or else trickle in through their mouths and ears and take root in the pink of their brains. Darkness that I might be carrying around in my lungs. It was darkness as vivid and thick as outer space, and now it was here, and all I could do was scramble forward into the half bath and shut the door behind me.

  The bathroom light was scalding. I winced like it was rapture.

  “It’s spooky up here, isn’t it? Ugh, be glad you weren’t friends with us when Jing and Daisy started their slasher phase. They were obsessed. We were thirteen, I think. Some of those films were so atrociously bad that they didn’t bother me, but every once in a while, there’d be some movie—usually one that Jing found out about on some forum—that was just petrifying to me. It was always the ones where they don’t show the creep, you know? If we saw the creep, then I knew it was just an ugly weirdo, and I could cover my ears and not worry too much. But when you couldn’t see the threat, it could be anything. I wouldn’t see it coming. I would wait until Jing and Daisy fell asleep and I’d hide up here with the lights on until I calmed down.” Yates closed the toilet and perched on the lid, knees to chest, and scratched the side of her cheek with one of her polished nails.

  “I used to do that sort of thing.” I leaned against a wall and skimmed my gums with my tongue. My reflection was cringeworthy. I was a damn horrorshow. When I lifted the tissues, there were red ochre splotches smudged down my lips, down my chin, down my throat. They painted my teeth pink and clumped in my hair. Globs speckled my cleavage. “My dad—Boris, that is—is a pulp-horror junkie. He collects these old paperback novels, has all these first editions and signed prints. Splatterpunk, psycho thrillers, classic horror, he has it all. Whenever he finished a new one, my other dad would try to read it, and half the time he’d put it down because it was just too much for him. Those were the ones I’d read. I think it helped that I read them under the bed. Made the whole thing more atmospheric,” I said as I vice-gripped a new tissue over my nose. I tossed the old ones in the little waste bin, which, like the rest of the room, was almost surgically white. Polar-white walls, polar-white tiles, polar-white lights that cast anemic shadows under my cheek and brow bones.

  “God, why’d you read them under the bed? That’s horrific all by itself,” Yates said, folding a hand over her mouth. “You probably could’ve read them like a normal person, you know.”

  “Ha. I thought I’d get caught. I wasn’t supposed to read them at all. Julian would panic that I’d have nightmares or some such rot, so I had to sneak them from Boris’ bookshelf and smuggle them into my room under my shirt. In retrospect, I think you’re probably right—my dads weren’t exactly going to psychically sense that I’d been reading forbidden horror novels, and they probably wouldn’t have stopped me even if they did catch me. So I totally could have read them like a normal person. I just didn’t. Besides, it was harder to scare myself under the covers, and I wanted to be scared. Everything is safer under the blankets, you know? And what kind of fourteen-year-old wants to feel safe?”

  “I did.” Yates rubbed her eyes with her forefingers and yawned, which made me yawn in turn. She traced her hand down the back of her neck with a sigh. “So, you’re in that Drama Club, right? You an actress?”

  I doubted she really cared—this was the sort of getting-to-know-you stuff that I usually tried to dodge at Boris’ folks’ house and things like that—but it was better than silence, so I obliged. Besides. Talking about myself isn’t all bad. “Ah, no,” I said. “I’m head of crew. I build the sets and do all the heavy lifting. I got to be Lady Mac for one night last semester, but that was only because Ashleigh Smith caught mono and flaked out on us two days before open, and her understudy broke her foot in a parkour accident. I wasn’t about it. I’m not a good actress, and playing straight isn’t easy for me. But I got to do the Unsex Me speech, so. There’s that.”

  “Excuse me, the what?” Yates stifled a laugh. Her eyes popped wide and she splayed her fingers across her heart. The sparkles on her nails gleamed green.

  I gave her a half shrug. “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. It’s a prayer, really. Or a spell. She’s invoking magic to fill her and make her something other than what she is. Girls are supposed to be nice. Nice and soft and nurturing. She couldn’t stay that way if she was going to get what she wanted. She needed to be genderless and limitless.”

  “Can girls not be soft and still be powerful?”

  “Girls can. Girls are. Just not her, I think.” The blood felt like it was slowing down. I pulled the tissue away from my nose and a clot stretched between my skin and the paper. “Not me, either.”

  “Oh,” said Yates. “I see.”

  “It’s, whatever.”

  Yates folded her hands neatly in her lap, instantly as dainty as a primrose. I licked the blood off my teeth. What kind of divine creature was she, looking lovely at three in the fucking morning? I looked like a gargoyle, and that wasn’t even self-deprecating. She was a heavenly being. It felt like a privilege just to breathe her air.

  “I think I’ve talked myself around about magic.” Yates’ hands shifted a little, refolded. “I wasn’t comfortable with it, but I’ve been mulling a few things over.”

  “Yeah?” A bit of blood slipped down my throat. “Things like what?”

  “The ambiguity of it almost makes sense.” Her gaze softened. She looked toward me, but not at me. “I don’t know. We’re at an ambiguous age and we’re ambiguously nice and there’s a lot about us that’s sort of gray or weird, I think. Our bodies in Sycamore Gorge. The kinds of relationships we have.”

  I looked at her for a moment. There was a ringing I didn’t care to name in my stomach. “Relationships?”

  “I mean.” Earnest uncertainty. She looked at her wrists. “The friendships we have. Other things, maybe. I think I’m maybe queer. I’ve talked to Akeem about it, but I don’t think my friends need to know, not right now. Or at least, I don’t think I want to have a conversation about it. There’s a lot of things in my life that are tricky, and being queer isn’t the most pressing of those things. It just sort of is. But I’m not sure. Anyway, my point is that there’s always been things about me that rub edges with everything else, and I know that Jing and Daisy are the same way.

  “I guess my point is that teenage girls aren’t supposed to be powerful, you know? Everybody hates teenage girls. They hate our bodies and hate us if we want to change them. They hate the things we’re supposed to like but hate it when we like other things even more, because that means we’re ruining their things. We’re somehow this great corrupting influence, even though we’ve barely got legal agency of our own. But the three of us—the four of us, counting you—we’re powerful. Maybe not in the ways that people are supposed to be, maybe in ways that people think are scary or hard to understand, but we are. Magic is ambiguous. It’s scary and flashy and everybody wants it and it really freaks people out. I guess it fits with the rest.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it. My whole body thrummed like it’d been plucked. I couldn’t find words to string together a definition for the haziness in my head. It was a warm, whirling feeling. It was like swing rides in carnivals. Slow flight, rocking and easy and far off the ground. I’m ambiguous, I wanted to say. I’m like you. Am I allowed to be like you?

  “They like you, you know.” Her change in topic snapped my focus back. “Jing and Daisy? They can be ha
rd to read, I know that. But they do. Jing has told me as much, and it’s implied with Daisy.”

  “Implied.”

  “I mean, she hasn’t done anything too Daisy-ish to you, which means she probably likes you. If she didn’t, you’d know.” She waved her hands to insinuate exactly what she meant by Daisy-ish. I caught her meaning quick. I’d heard the stories. Everyone knew about Daisy tossing drunk boys into the pool, Daisy smearing toothpaste on the inside of Oreos and doling them out to rude teachers, Daisy pouring ice water down the back of someone’s shirt for flirting with someone who wasn’t their girlfriend, Daisy taking a wrench to someone’s bike for tripping Jing, Daisy intentionally calling boys by their best friend’s name while she was making out with them—the stories were endless, and by mass alone, at least half of them had to be true.

  Huh.

  Yates pursed her lips and quirked an eyebrow, and then she hmphed and rose to her feet. “Sit,” she said, dimples blooming on her cheeks. She gestured at the toilet seat with Vanna White levels of enthusiasm. “Seriously. Sit.”

  I sat.

  Yates knelt before the sink and opened the cabinet beneath, eyes swiveling, and reached inside and plucked a washrag from some unseen bin. She closed the cabinet, stood up, doused the rag with water, and wrung it out. She turned to me with her tongue in her cheek. “May I?”

  I tugged a lock of my hair. “You planning on de-Dracula-ing my face?”

  “Bet your life,” she said. “You need it. The Carrie look needs to go.”

  Despite myself, I leaned back my head, waited for the washcloth onslaught. My eyes fell half-shut as Yates descended on my cheek. The rag was deliciously warm, warmer than I expected, and she swept it over every stitch of my expression. The rough texture was good. Vaguely hypnotic. She scrubbed the blood out of my smile lines. She dabbed the blood off my chin. She washed away spots that I hadn’t even noticed, and my skin felt smoother in her wake.