The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  “Fine by me,” said Daisy. She whipped out her own phone and fluttered her fingertips over the keyboard. “Hey, Sideways. Text me your measurements, will you? Across your shoulders, shoulders to ankles, shoulders to wrists, and around the tits.”

  “Uh.” That sounded like a really good way to feel awful.

  “I can measure you,” said Yates. She opened a bag of M&M’s and slid one toward me. “It won’t be a big deal at all. I’ll swipe a measuring tape from my science lab next period and measure you after we practice the spell.”

  “Fine,” I said. I set my jaw for a moment, let myself brood.

  The bell screeched above.

  We all stood up.

  My screen lit up.

  Yeah. Coffee works. I’ll pay.

  SIXTEEN

  IF TEENS DON’T HAVE SPIRIT, THEN WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

  The football field was hypnotically green. It was also probably toxic enough to kill several people. God knows how many different chemicals had been churned into the soil to keep things green and weed-free. Heaven forbid the football players play on slightly yellow grass, right? The field was so luxurious, so money-green, that you nearly forgot that the cafeteria had a roach infestation. And that the choir program had cut all but two sections because they couldn’t afford new music. You know.

  Jing and Yates and I sat in a circle. Yates’ notebook was open to a blank page, and Jing and I took turns etching lines, erasing stray marks, renegotiating boundaries. The shape of the star warped and was replaced. Jing wanted longer lines, I wanted tighter turns. We didn’t argue, but the more we drew, the more the shape felt stilted, overworked, and generally unusable. Yates said it hurt to look at. Earlier, she’d picked a few phlox flowers out of the school garden and tucked them into the loops of her corkscrews. She looked like Persephone. Also, she was right. We turned a page, tried again on a blank slate.

  “The incantation should have a refrain. Is that a thing? Like, we all chant, but there’s one phrase that we all say together to keep things even. I feel like if we give it a rhythm, it’ll flow better, so we don’t choke up and stop talking. That could be a disaster.” Jing streamlined three straight lines into one 3-shaped curve.

  “That makes sense. So long as it isn’t distractingly kitschy, I feel like a refrain would help. That, and if our audience sees us chanting together, it might look really cool. Rehearse until it doesn’t look rehearsed, you know?” Yates looked at Jing’s 3 with her brows drawn together. “A little softer, I think.”

  Jing shrugged, adjusted.

  “The problem is going to be keeping things spontaneous. If too much is planned, then there won’t be that visceral improvisation,” I said. “Like, nothing I ever did on my own worked if I had it completely memorized.”

  “I don’t know. I feel like we could riff off a refrain without too much trouble. Remember when we took Daisy down? We seemed to settle on a few words, and we repeated them over and over, with other phrases tucked in here or there. ‘Come down slow and soft,’ you know?” Yates cocked her head to the side. She spun the page upside down. “You know, I think I’m starting to like this. Like, a lot. Could you draw that arrow again, the one you had on the first design?”

  I pierced an arrow through the 3-curve and brought the ends of it down on either side, puncturing the circle and lacing back around. I leaned back, narrowed my eyes. It really was gorgeous. Cleaner than anything I’d made on my own. Crisper. I nodded, licked my chops. “This looks fucking awesome. And we can make it again, that’s for sure.” Something clicked. “I think I catch your point, Yates. Jing, have you ever done an improv scene?”

  “No,” she said. She erased the smudges around the circle and scrutinized the angles of each line. “But go on.”

  “In an improv scene, the ensemble normally has marks. Cue lines, something like that. They know point A and point Z, but there’s wiggle room in the middle. We could do it that way. One mark can start the levitation, one can hold you still in the air, and the third can bring you back down. The middle casting, the important stuff, that can ride on instinct. But Yates is right. If we start and end with chanting, that’ll make sure that we aren’t drifting apart halfway through. Remember how we broke the circle at the last party and it killed the magic for a while? We don’t want that to happen again. It was cool as all fuck, but it was unpredictable. This time, we need to have control.”

  Jing stood up, took a step away from the notebook. She cocked her head to the side and scanned it up and down. “Is it going to work if Madeline doesn’t chant? It’ll still be cool as fuck without her, but it’s going to be all kinds of heart-snatching if we levitate her, too. How can she resist that? You damn deserve it.”

  “Daisy wasn’t chanting when we brought her down.” Daisy also wasn’t chanting when she floated herself twenty feet in the air. Without a circle or a sigil. Or anyone casting. But whatever. “I think we can make it work. We’ll just clue her in on the steps and see how that goes.”

  “I’m thinking we should do this as a coven. Like, introduce ourselves that way. With the robes and the circle and all these sigils, we’re going to look the part, that’s for sure. I’m sick of people being horrible to you, Sideways.” Yates tangled her fingers in the grass. “You’re with us, now. You’re part of the clique. If we all come out and say we’re a coven, people are going to have to deal with that.”

  “Yeah, agreed,” Jing said. “You’re not going to be Sideways the Satanist loner lesbian anymore. You’re gonna be with us. You are with us, and we’re with you. The world can suck our collective dick.”

  My vision blurred. Throat felt bee-stung. I looked at the sigil, buried my hands in my pockets and took a few slow, deep breaths. Jesus, Sideways. I shook it off, nodded. My voice barely crackled when I spoke. “Are we gonna have a sick coven name? I feel like covens should.”

  “I’d say we should call ourselves the Ghastly girls, seeing as we’re going to do the costumes and everything, but that feels too trendy.” Yates made a face. “Plus, they were terrifying villains. I don’t want that to be me. Can I read your texts with Madeline, Sideways? I’m curious.”

  “Yeah.” I pulled my phone from my pocket, unlocked it, and tossed it over.

  Jing crossed her arms. “On the name thing. You remember what Mr. Scratch said to us? It called us scapegracers. I like that.”

  “Scapegracers,” I repeated.

  “It’s a bit archaic, I know. Means you’ve escaped the grace of God. It was up there with rascal for a while. Implied a particularly nasty kid. I like it.” After a long pause, she held up her hands in defense. “I’m a fucking English nerd. Sue me.”

  I bunched my sleeves up around my elbows and rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles. There was something on my wrist. My eyes fixed on it. Tiny lettering, like I’d written a phrase there with pen, but I hadn’t. I recognized the handwriting, though.

  I’m so flattered. Scapegracers is a lovely name.

  Oh boy. Oh fuck.

  “Oh my God,” said Yates. I snapped my head up, yanked my sleeve down, ignored the ringing in my ears. She clasped my phone to her chest like it was a bouquet of roses. “Sideways. You two are so perfect. I wish boys texted like that. The last three boys I’ve texted have asked me if I was a virgin. This is love. It has to be.”

  “You are so melodramatic,” said Jing. She crinkled up her nose like a rabbit, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. Her grimace was barely a grimace. “Give me a rundown. I don’t want a play-by-play, but I want the outline.”

  “We talked about astrology and a true crime podcast we both like.” I shrugged, felt my cheeks heat up, and tried to shove the whole things writing themselves autonomously and without my permission on my wrist thing to the brig of my brain. “Wasn’t anything huge, you know? The conversation just sorta rolled. Like, we talked about going to roller derby sometime, and how we both really like Halloween. It’s, whatever.”

  “It’s not whatever.” Jing stretched her arms above h
er head so far that her shirt rose over her midriff. “It’s fucking fantastic. Now. Yates. Ready to float?”

  There was a strange reverence in watching Daisy cheer. Not the pom-pom jittering, or the sporadic twitchy chants, but in the pure gladiator thrill of it. Watching girls hoist themselves onto shoulders, piling girl on top of girl into a breathing monument. It was kind of terrifying. Hairless legs, pleated skirts, iron cores, and sugary nail polish. Weren’t they supposed to be flaky? I’d always coupled cheer with bitchery, and bitchery with weakness. Maybe I’d gotten it wrong. This wasn’t even the real thing, and I still got the shivers. Daisy was the flyer, said Jing. She was the one at the top of the pyramid who they tossed in the air and usually caught at the bottom. She’d explained this dryly, like I’d asked her how to use a remote.

  It wasn’t all that unlike magic, was it? I mean, they weren’t spontaneously shouting power stanzas at the universe, but they were all shouting, and that was part of it. They shouted, threw their bodies, and the crowd went wild. Maybe that was the spell. This chant plus these lines plus these contortions equaled spectacle. I couldn’t tolerate sports, and I was allergic to school spirit, but something told me that neither of those things served as motivation for Daisy Brink. This was about being a starlet. Everyone would look on and cheer. Death-defying feats of ridiculous acrobatics on chemical grass wasn’t all that far removed from her floating stunt at Delacroix.

  There she was. She’d pulled her hair into a high pony and sauntered toward the triangle of girls like she was about to eat them, and when she hit her mark, someone counted off. On one, they grabbed her wrists. On two, they bounced her between the two girls on shoulders, who balanced her shoes on their thighs. On three, they tossed her in the air, where she soared high, flipped twice, and then dove into an arm cradle far below.

  To my right, Yates clapped her hands and hollered Daisy’s name at the top of her lungs. Jing and I did not. The two of us exchanged glances and chanted a little faster, gave a little punch to our words. Our lips weren’t synchronized, but we were saying the same thing in rounds, switching words here and there, fluttering around syllables for extra emphasis. I felt like we were thicker than thieves.

  Yates was hovering about five inches off the bench. She had been for the past ten minutes. She hadn’t touched the ground in a solid half hour. The flowers in her hair looked even bluer in the afternoon sunlight.

  Cheer was coming to a close. The girls all dismounted and huddled close for discussion. The coach, looking leathery, said something that sounded both encouraging and terrifying. The girls mostly didn’t listen. A few of them were on their phones. Daisy, being Daisy, just cartwheeled back and forth behind the coach, blatantly ignoring every word out of her mouth. One of the other varsity girls, a pyramid base, filmed her flipping. The coach clapped her hands and the group disbanded, each wandering in slightly different directions. Daisy made a break for the bleachers, and she jumped up the benches like they were overgrown stairs. She was outside the stadium in a matter of seconds, looking glowy and slightly pinkish.

  “Did you see that last one? I felt like a damn bird. That stunt is, like, three inches from being illegal, and I love it so much.” She wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her wrist. “Why are you two whispering? Do we speak in tongues now? Why are you . . .” Daisy trailed off, looking between the three of us. Her eyes flicked from face to face, and then up at Yates, whose eyes were well above where they usually were. She broke into a smile. “No. Fucking. Way.”

  “You can put me down now, ladies,” said Yates, who patted the side of her afro affectionately. “Like the flowers, Daze? Oh, and by the by, you looked like a shooting star up there. Just so you know.”

  Jing and I elbowed each other, nodded our heads, and changed up the words, barely speaking aloud. “Come down slow. Come down soft.” Yates descended, landing gracefully on the titanium bleacher, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

  Jing rubbed her cheeks, flicked her fingers. “God, that’s itchy. It’s like static electricity, you know? Man.” She stood up and kicked the bleacher in front of her. “Daisy. We’re coming out as a coven next party, right? Right. I say we call ourselves the Scapegracers.”

  “What, are we in a band, now? Do we need a name?” Daisy sneered, but she leaned forward, nonetheless. “If we’re in a band, I call dibs on being the drummer.”

  “You just want to be the drummer so that you can hit stuff,” said Yates.

  Daisy shrugged.

  “That wouldn’t be our band name.” I shook my hands through my hair and finger-combed it until it stood up. The wind was making it deflate. Can’t have that. “If we were in a band, we’d totally call ourselves The Dental Damned. And I’d be the drummer. You give me more of a lead guitar vibe, Daze.” Daze. Was I allowed to call her that yet?

  If she noticed, she didn’t care. “What the hell does that mean?”

  I blinked. “Really?”

  Jing screwed up her face. “Why the fuck would we call ourselves The Dental Damned?”

  I looked at her with bewilderment. “Wait. Seriously, Jing? Like. Google dental dam.”

  Sure enough, she pulled out her phone and typed away. Her face turned slightly red. Slowly, she closed her browser and slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Sideways. I need training on how to be gay. I’m missing key details.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said with a snort. “That’s fixable, though. I should take you to Dorothy’s sometime. It’s the gay bar outside of town. You can be with your own kind and learn how this whole not-straight thing works in practice. And, you know. Dorothy’s is sick as hell.”

  “Isn’t Dorothy’s the place out past Pine Street?” Daisy pulled the band out of her hair and shook it loose. She smacked her lips. “That’s on the way to Aunt Chelsea’s rehab center. I was planning on taking her fabric shopping, for the costumes and all. I could give you two a ride. You couldn’t stay long, only an hour or two, but still. Enough time to pump some pride into Jing, am I right?”

  “I could kiss you,” I said. “That sounds fantastic.”

  “I’d let you.” She winked.

  Sigh.

  “Oh, can I come with you and Aunt Chelsea? I love Aunt Chelsea. And I want to help pick out costume supplies.” Yates uncrossed her ankles and sprang to her feet. “Besides. If the three of you all go somewhere without me, I’d be so lonely. It’d be terrible. I might have to, you know, hibernate for the next thousand years.”

  “Ain’t we only going for, like, three hours, tops?” I stopped finger-combing long enough to stick my tongue out at her. She brushed it off.

  “If you’re only going to be gone for three hours, that’s a shame. Three hours of fun for an eternity without Lila Yates. It’d be tragic.”

  Dorothy’s, looking like a bit like a drive-in diner or a ritzy fifties laundromat, wasn’t typically busy at this time of day. Uneven coats of lavender paint rippled down the brick walls, and the sign, looking shabby, was rimmed with golden lights. Not that the lights were on when we pulled up. The OPEN sign flashed in the window, alongside a neon HAUNTED sign, and a sign that said NOT A STRAIGHT ESTABLISHMENT. The lot was seldom full (aside from the notorious drag nights), and Daisy had no problem pulling directly up to the door. Even with the door closed, I could hear the tinny sound of British Invasion pop music, which made the place seem even gayer than it already was. Boris and Julian drank themselves silly every few weeks at Dorothy’s bar, but tonight was a work night, so the chances of meeting them there were relatively slim. I wasn’t worried.

  “We’re gonna be back in two-ish hours. Hook up with as many people as humanly possible. Like it’s a race.” Daisy looked back at us with a devilish expression. She tapped the side of her nose. “Hope you brought your fakes.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a nod. I climbed out of Daisy’s car with Jing. Daisy barely took the time to flip us off before she wheeled away. As her baby-blue car zoomed off, people in either lane beside her audibly cussed and sh
ook their fists, because she drove nearly twice the speed limit and her music made the air shake. I snorted a laugh and shoved my hands in my pockets. “She and Yates are so getting pulled over.”

  “Doubtful,” said Jing. She took a step in the direction of the bar, and I followed suit. “Daisy and I have been drag-racing and hill hopping since we had licenses. Daisy’s badder than I am. She’ll do donuts at three a.m. with her music blasting loud enough for satellites to hear her. She’s done it before. That’s her third car. She totaled her first two. But never has any cop ever had the guts to give her a ticket. Seriously. Last night was the first time I was ever pulled over, and that wasn’t even for speeding. Cops round here don’t care about that kind of nonsense. I mean, freshman year, Alexis had a bag of weed in her purse, and a dog found it during one of those drug sweeps. The cop just took it. Didn’t get her in trouble or anything.” She shrugged.

  I blinked. Wasn’t quite the response I expected. It didn’t seem out of place, though. Doing donuts in the dark sounded exceedingly Daisy-ish, and so did getting away with it. She and Jing and Yates were immortals. No one was stupid enough to screw with them, not in this town. Some people were just innately powerful.

  “For the record, don’t buy anything alcoholic. My dads hang out here, so, like, the bartenders know how old I am, and they’ll guess you’re in school with me,” I said as I held open the door for her. “It’s chill, though. Their virgin margaritas taste like the real thing, sans the hangover.”

  Inside, the air was saturated with violet lights. Only a smattering of people sat around the bar, and there was an open space toward the far end. I took a seat on one of the precariously tall barstools, and Jing sat down elegantly beside me, crossing her feet at the ankles. She twisted her hair around her fingertips, and her bleach-blond locks looked bluish under the lights as she eyed the place. When the bartender sidled over to us, Jing waved a hand and said, “I’ll have what she’s having.”