“Ora is my mother, and she is very, very real,” Hawthorn says. “She thinks if you get really attached to a single word for someone, that’s not good, because how can a whole person fit inside one word? And then maybe they find one that fits better, or they use more than one, or they never find one that fits — that’s the natural flow of things. But I happen to think that words are important, too. I mean, Ora calls herself a witch, right?” I didn’t know this about Hawthorn’s mom, and it makes me want to ask a mess of questions, but I nod and wait, because Hawthorn doesn’t seem finished. “Yeah, so . . . here are my words: I’m a bisexual Black witch with a pretty strong lean toward masculine folks.”
“They can be ridiculously cute,” I admit.
I find myself back in the tree with Sebastian, except the tree is swaying, creaking, groaning, the winds too high.
“Rush, I think it’s your turn,” I say, trying to steady my voice.
She looks down at her feet, matching one word to each step, intent on the rhythm, in her own little Rush world. “Fat. Queer. White.” Then a skipped step, and she finishes the list off with “Cello player.”
“So, what word fits in a way that makes you happy at this very moment?” June asks me. “Lesbian? Bi? Pan? Queer?”
I grab for that word — and not just because Rush said it. It feels right to me. Less limiting in who I am, who I’m with. No solid lines around the definition. A way of saying different that doesn’t have an apology folded in. “Yeah. Queer.”
I couldn’t imagine saying that in front of anyone before the Grays. Not even Mom. A lack of homophobia is so far ahead of the game where we’re from. I wince, remembering how upset she was when she found out I’d been kissing girls and hadn’t told her, like she’d fallen down on the parental job. I didn’t know how to explain that it was about more than who I was kissing. It was about me, everything about me. And my mom might be okay with gay, but queer would make her cringe.
I’m shaking with the power of it.
I take out my phone and send a quick text.
I’m alive.
Hawthorn brings us to a stop.
We’ve reached a tree that’s no taller but much wider than the ones around it. That’s not the real reason it stands out, though. The tree looks like it’s been burned from the inside, hollowing out a space that reaches about three times as tall as I am. It probably looks like an adorable hollow during the day, but at night it’s a dark scream.
“That’s where the hermit lives?” I ask. “They let him do that to a tree?”
“It’s been that way for at least a hundred years,” Lelia says, making her way around the trunk. “When the pioneer types first got here, they needed a place for their animals, to keep them safe, so like any good conquerors, they found something ancient and beautiful and set it on fire to solve their problems.”
“Why didn’t that kill the tree?” I ask.
“Because redwoods are badasses,” Lelia says.
“They wear their hearts on the outside,” Rush adds, running her blue-polished fingertips down the bark like rain.
“What Rush means is that everything about a redwood that’s alive is in the first few inner inches of xylem and phloem and all that stuff you probably don’t remember from biology class,” Lelia says.
“Lelia is our resident tree expert,” June says, her round cheeks glowing with pride.
“Wait until you see a redwood with a faerie ring around it,” Lelia says. “It starts with this upward growth from the roots — it looks like a dark cloud of twigs and branches — and it creates a full circle around the trunk of a tree. People used to think you could walk through a faerie ring and end up in some kind of enchanted world. You should go in one sometime, Danny. It’s terrifying, by which I mean the best.”
“Lelia knows everything about plants and animals, anything in the natural world,” June says, still in best friend bragging mode, which makes me weirdly jealous. I don’t think anyone has ever talked about me that way.
“No humans or domesticated creatures,” Lelia adds. “I’m sorry, puppies are cute, but they are not magic.”
There’s that word again. “I know we’re on some epic hunt for what I can do, but . . . what do all of you do?”
Hawthorn points at each of them in turn, starting with Lelia and June, then moving on to herself and Rush. “Naturework, athame, scrying, song.” As if those are as solid and possible as lesbian, bi, pan, queer.
I want a word like that.
I want a word that’s mine.
“What about Imogen?” I ask. “What could she do?”
“Everything,” Rush says.
“Whatever she wanted,” Hawthorn says.
Two different answers, and both impale me with jealousy. Whatever power these Grays think I have, it can’t be as big as that.
“Imogen has an affinity for water,” Lelia says.
“Wait, I thought you did naturework.”
“Overlap is allowed,” Hawthorn says, suppressing an eye roll. “This isn’t a sports team; we’re not taking positions.”
Lelia pulls out a joint and lights it with the metallic snap of a Zippo. This is quickly becoming a normal sight — people here seem to smoke as much as they drank back in Michigan. After a quick inhale, Lelia hands the small bony joint off to Rush and lets out the smoke. “I mostly look for portents in nature, and pieces to use in spells. Rocks, herbs, flowers, bark. Imogen was . . . is a water witch,” Lelia says, fielding a frustrated head shake from June. It’s way too soon for past tense. “Water is in a lot of things, specifically people. I mean, humans are basically waterbeds with feelings.”
“Imogen has a lot of sway with people,” June confirms as she passes to me.
I take the joint and slip the wet paper between my lips, invite the burn into my lungs. I’ve only done this a few times; I’m not an expert. The smoke tastes like someone lit Mom’s spice cabinet on fire, and I let it out with a cough. “I’m sure Imogen’s sway over people had nothing to do with her being this really gorgeous, pale redhead who makes being a witch look cool instead of something that sends people running for the nearest torch.”
I hold the joint out to Hawthorn, my arm extended. The pinprick of red glows fiercely, like it’s trying to burn a hole through the world. The smoke travels from my lungs to my brain, where it clouds my worries, giving them weight.
I shouldn’t have said that.
The Grays want me to find Imogen, not have opinions.
Hawthorn waves off the joint, and I pass it back to Lelia, starting another round.
“Ora said something like that once,” Hawthorn says, pulling her arms tight across her chest even though it’s barely cold out. Of course, cold is all a matter of perspective, and mine was forged in zero-degree winters. “When my mother met Imogen, she said, ‘That girl might have magic in her heart, but never forget how much of her power is handed right to her by other people.’ ”
Rush takes the joint, but she doesn’t smoke. I realize that she’s just been staring at it, quietly, and passing. “Yeah,” she finally says. “People love Imogen.”
“The hermit has his own kind of power, not really magic,” Hawthorn says. “It’s this way of looking at people and seeing what they’re hiding from themselves.”
“Is he going to come out here or . . . ?”
June nods me toward the tree. “He waits for people to come to him.”
I walk through the opening. It’s much cooler inside the tree, as if this place has its own weather. A blunt darkness fills the space, and it takes me a minute to get used to the subtle shades hidden inside of it. When I do, there is nothing but a bike, a set of dirty clothes, and a dampness that won’t leave me alone.
Imogen baked things and brought them to his tree. Lemon bread. Hazelnut cookies. Chocolate praline. He got high on philosophy with June and more traditional substances with Lelia. Sometimes Hawthorn came back from his tree with mussed hair and a Don’t you dare ask look.
Rush aske
d the hermit where home was, the word tasting of slightly burned toast. He gave a rambling backroad of an answer, from an abandoned degree in psychology at UC Santa Cruz to a hometown in Virginia. Rush hummed songs for him, ones that sounded like blue hills at twilight.
On a bright day when they were all in the woods together, he asked, “Do you folks want to see my party trick?”
The Grays looked at one another, silently debating. Imogen stepped forward, having been voted the spokesperson with a round of nods. “As long as that isn’t a southern way of saying your penis.”
The hermit laughed and grabbed June by the waist, spinning her around in an impromptu dance. “I can look you in the eye for ten seconds and tell you something about yourself that nobody else knows. Maybe that you don’t even know.”
“Me first,” Lelia said, cutting in.
He steered her around the clearing, a smooth box step. “You don’t hate everybody half as much as you used to.”
Lelia scowled, but the hermit had already taken some of the sting out of it.
He turned back to June. He looked into her mossy-brown-green eyes, one finger beneath her chin. “You tell your parents that you believe in God, and you tell your friends you don’t, but you haven’t decided yet.” June thumbed the hollow at her neck, where a small gold cross was supposed to live. Her very devout Filipino Catholic mother would worry if it wasn’t there, which was why June put it back on every day before heading home. Her parents didn’t seem to mind the Grays, or June’s room filling up with crystals and herbs, as long as June joined them at church every Sunday. June lived in fear of the day when they noticed she wasn’t really singing along with the hymns. She was too busy trying to figure out if the magic she felt when she was out in the woods with the Grays was the same as the magic her mother felt in that big, dark room filled with shuffling people and the smell of incense.
Hawthorn was running away from the hermit’s tree, hell-bent on leaving before he got to her. “You are as lovely as twenty sunsets put together!” he yelled at her fast-retreating back.
She turned, dark eyebrows rising above the silver frames of her glasses. “You said it would be something people don’t know.”
“You’re as sad as twenty birds in a tiny cage,” he added.
“You said it would be something I don’t know.”
Hawthorn walked away before the hermit could really figure her out.
Rush was sitting on the ground, ankles crossed. She looked up at the hermit, letting him gaze down into her blue eyes as if he was trying to do a trick dive.
“You’re a little bit in love,” he said, the words dipped in apology.
“With who?” Imogen asked, but Rush didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.
“Your turn,” the hermit said to Imogen, shaking her off the subject.
Imogen met the hermit in the middle of the clearing. Instead of staring back at him, she looked at the trees. The ground. The tiny patterns in the skin on the backs of her hands, the ones you had to squint for, the ones that looked like shattered glass.
“You’re afraid of your own shadow,” the hermit said.
Idon’t think the hermit’s coming,” I say. But it’s more than that. This place feels emptied out, scraped.
“We have to wait,” Hawthorn says. “He’s coming back.”
“He should already be back,” June says.
Lelia is looking around inside the tree, as if the hermit might be hiding somewhere. Everyone else stands outside, waiting uncomfortably as she kneels and checks the little pile of clothes, dampness gnawing its way up her jeans. She puts both palms flat against the ground. “I don’t like this water.”
“Why?” Hawthorn asks.
I can hear how hard she’s working to keep her voice steady.
“It doesn’t belong.” Lelia lifts her fingers to her lips, licks them. “It’s . . . it’s salt water.”
“Please don’t mess with me right now,” June whispers. “We saw a dead body the other night. This is not the right time, okay?”
“I’m not making anything up!” Lelia snaps. “I’m paying attention, being present. That’s what witches are supposed to do, right?” She glances at Hawthorn for backup, but Hawthorn has turned away from the rest of us, her hands snagged in her hair, the muscles of her back clenched like she can’t find a way to breathe out.
It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t have gone back to the woods with the people who were there when Sebastian died. I don’t know what’s happening, but I know that the Grays are afraid.
I text my mom.
I’m alive.
She drops the exclamation points. She starts to question.
When will you be home?
Are you still with those friends?
And then the question marks fall off a cliff, and it’s just
Come home soon
“I can’t stay out here forever,” I admit.
The Grays look at one another with a sort of tremble. I feel my guts tighten, as if their collective worry has reached into me and taken hold.
“All right,” Hawthorn says. “We’ll have to do this fast. We can’t wait weeks or months for your power to show itself. There’s a ritual,” she tells me, and I already don’t like it.
“The fog dance is a rite we came up with a long time ago. We’ve all done it,” June reassures me.
“So what’s the problem?” I ask, because they’re all looking cagey.
Lelia steps up. She is, among other things, the bad-news bearer of the group. She doesn’t seem to take any glee in it — it’s more like it’s a chore that she’s the best at. She claps a hand on my shoulder. “There’s a small chance that you’ll get lost in the woods and you won’t find your way out.”
I think about the slippery spaces between redwoods, how they all start to look the same. The miles and miles of nameless streams and endless groves. “Don’t they have rangers to keep people safe?”
“The Lost Coast covers hundreds of square miles,” Lelia says. “Even with a few rangers, it’s mostly non-human territory.”
I think about what it would mean to get lost in a place like that. Freedom, at first. Then a slow trickle of fear.
Hawthorn slips a notebook out of her dress pocket. I didn’t even know her dress had pockets. The leather looks so soft that it reminds me what leather really is: skin. There are stones sewn into the cover, worked into braided leather inlays.
“What’s that?” I ask. “A . . . ?”
“Don’t you dare say spellbook,” Hawthorn says with a pen in her mouth. She’s talking around it as she whips the cap off. “This is our chronicle.” In handwriting as spiky as thornbushes, she writes Danny’s Fog Dance.
“Spellbooks tell you how people have done magic in the past,” June explains. “They’re . . . pre-made. Magic is like love. You see how other people do it, you have the stories and instructions they leave behind, but then you have to figure out how you do it. It’s not one-size-fits-all.”
“We won’t be far,” Hawthorn says, scrawling as she speaks. “Just stay with the fog until it spits you out.”
I don’t ask what to do if something goes wrong, because I want to be braver than I am. I want to be whatever Imogen was to them before she got lost. The kind of person they’d go to any lengths to get back.
Rush is there at my side. I didn’t even know she’d moved from her spot by the opening of the tree. “The fog can get a person lost,” she says, “but sometimes lost is where you need to be for a while.”
“Wandering off into nowhere is one of the few things I’m good at,” I admit to her.
“You’re not going nowhere,” Hawthorn corrects. “You’re heading toward a truth that you can’t see when the normal world is clouding things. It can get in the way of you seeing your magic.”
“I’m walking into a literal cloud to get unclouded?” I ask.
“One more thing,” Hawthorn says, her words dripping with I know you’re going to hate this. “It’s a skyclad sp
ell.”
I look around at the rest of the group, inviting them to help me out. The Grays look at each other instead of me. Not a good sign. I pull out my phone. I’m getting a solitary bar of service, but it’s just enough for me to look up this word. Skyclad means, literally enough, clad in nothing but sky.
As in naked.
“You’re kidding,” I say. “I thought this wasn’t an elaborate hazing of the new girl, and you pull this?”
“It’s important,” Rush says.
“Necessary,” Hawthorn amends. “Clothes are part of the everyday world. They’re getting in your way.”
“Don’t worry.” June points behind me at the open entrance of the tree. “There’s a dressing room.”
“An undressing room,” Lelia says with a snort.
Hawthorn cuts her off with a single slashing hand gesture.
The night pries at my worries, and I slip my shoes off, shake my short stubby ponytail out. The wind gives my hair a quick finger comb. If I was feeling a little bit stoned from Lelia’s joint, the dull sweetness leaves as I step back into the maw of the enormous tree.
The world outside shrinks to a whisper.
The world inside grows and grows, until I hear every scratch of air against bark, and I feel the tree lurch.
I shrug out of my T-shirt and work my skirt down. I’m naked in the dark sway of this place, shaking hard. I can only remember shaking like this once. It’s definitely how a first time feels.
I run out of the tree, into an empty forest under a star-pinned sky. The Grays are gone, but the parts of me that are usually hidden are still grateful for darkness. I don’t feel that twitchy need to cover myself with my hands. I slow to a walk, the trees shifting my body taller, quietly reshaping me. Soon I’m stretching my arms high. Running again to test the bite of wind on my skin.
And then I see the fog seeping between the trees, breathing toward me, a low constant sigh.
It’s around my ankles, pulling me in.
It’s around my entire body, cloaking me.
I can’t see myself anymore. The distraction of my skin is gone, and I’m melting away. Whatever I thought of as Danny is suspended in droplets. Still there but loose, different.
The Lost Coast Page 5
