The Secret Science of Magic

by Melissa Keil

  I start catching Joshua in these odd fleeting moments, snatched conversations filled with the strangest small talk, irrelevant, but somehow never dull. I see him for a couple of minutes at the lockers before Chemistry class, and bump into him in the hallway a few times between bells. I notice that Joshua rarely seems in much of a hurry to get to class, and that he’s never without his battered notepad and a novel, but only intermittently carries actual school books. Twice after school I clock him perched on the damp park bench near the main gates, and even though I need to catch my bus, my feet linger there for just a few extra minutes, always curious to see what direction our conversations will take.

  Like a nebulous element in the atmosphere that has suddenly become perceptible, there he is. In the background in Biology, frowning as Damien waves something on his phone at him; disappearing behind the Humanities building as Elsie and I hurry across the wet grounds to lunch; hunched in his long jacket and tweed cap as he treks through the carpark, heading who knows where. Whenever I turn around, it feels like he’s hovering just on the edge of my vision, long hair covering most of his expression, half-smile always in place.

  I’m not sure I want to deal with any more surprises. But part of me continues to look over my shoulder. Perhaps I’d just forgotten what it’s like to walk these corridors with any sense of … anticipation? At least, that’s my reasoning for why my eyes are constantly scanning the space around me.

  Friday lunch, and I’m waiting for Elsie near the Careers office. For someone with a solid ten-year plan, my best friend’s sessions with the careers advisor are a mystery to me. I have no idea what she finds so useful amid the motivational posters of soaring eagles and baskets of cats. Elsie doesn’t have anything in her future to stress about. I said as much to her on our way to homeroom this morning, but I’m not sure she appreciated it. In fact – judging from the stiff set of her shoulders and her one-word responses to my questions – I’m guessing she was a bit annoyed with me. I’ve racked my brain, but I still can’t figure out why. And when I mentioned it to Joshua in the thirty seconds we had between bells, his face became kind of odd and scrunchy, and he rushed off down the corridor, leaving his Legal folder balanced on the water fountain.

  I’m huddled against the wall as a tide of lunch-going students presses past. I’m fidgeting with my sandwich bag, to give my hands something to do, when I notice that my watch is missing. I retrace my steps down the corridor, eyes on the floor, then check through my locker and bag, just in case it’s fallen off, but the thin black Swatch with my initials on the back is nowhere to be seen. I know I put it on this morning – right after brushing my teeth but before knotting my tie – because I have put it on at the same time every morning since year seven. It was a birthday present from Elsie, bought with money she’d saved herself, and the leather strap is solid and unbreakable.

  I finally make my way back towards the Careers office, my heart feeling kind of wobbly. I don’t know why. It’s just a stupid watch. It’s generic, and replaceable, not a family heirloom or a priceless relic. But I still feel its empty place on my wrist, heavy in its absence.

  Elsie is standing in front of the office, her arms crossed tight. When she sees me, her face breaks into a smile.

  ‘Rey! Heya!’ She skips towards me. ‘Thanks! I don’t know where you found it, but it’s great. Really.’

  I stare at her blankly. ‘Huh?’

  Elsie reaches into her bag. She emerges with a small, flat tin, roughly the size of her palm. It looks old, the metal worn and dented. The front has a painted picture of a handful of bright peaches, with a banner reading Peppermints from the Peach State. A giant flash in orange font, splashed across the top, reads Georgia.

  Elsie glances down at her feet. ‘I know you haven’t exactly been down with my plans. But this means a lot. You know. That you’re trying to be supportive, in your own way. I just … thanks, Sophia.’

  And then she rolls her eyes and ferrets around in her pocket. ‘Though, you know, the watch inside was a bit much. I get it, though, I think. Sentiment? Suppose it’s as sentimental as you get, huh?’ she says with a grin.

  She holds out her other hand. My black Swatch dangles from her fingertips.

  ‘Elsie, I didn’t … I mean, it wasn’t …’

  I have no idea what is happening. But then I catch a glimpse of her face, more open than I’ve seen it in ages. She is looking at me with nothing but fondness, in a way that I suddenly realise she hasn’t done in a really long time. And I find I can’t finish my sentence.

  ‘Sure. It’s fine. Um, thanks, Els,’ I say as I hastily retrieve my watch from her hand.

  I follow her to our lunch spot, bewildered and disorientated. Elsie seems back to her normal, chatty self; meanwhile, the wheels in my brain spin and spin. It’s tougher than trying to comprehend the Meisner technique in Drama, as incomprehensible as the self-actualisation exercises the school counsellor once made me do.

  I fasten the watch tightly around my wrist, and for a brief instant I’m convinced I can feel the memory of the ghost of a hand there. I can’t for the life of me decide if it’s welcome.

  Another Friday night, and Elsie and I have come back to her place. This decision was made after we arrived at my house to find Mum and two of my aunties giggling over glasses of ginger wine in the lounge, and Toby scowling down the hallway. He’d managed to cover the entire hall runner in a carpet of notes, a loose-leaf flow chart of cramped writing. Toby was perched on one of the breakfast bar stools, overseeing his handiwork like a sullen lifeguard.

  Elsie dissolved into guffaws. Toby gave her a sneer. I tried to intervene, asking him some innocuous questions, but my stock of fake cheer seemed to have finally been exhausted. Not that I think it would have made any difference. Toby’s reaction was to lock his jaw and shove his glasses even further up his nose, at which point Elsie wedged herself in front of me and asked Toby if the green-eyed gnome who lived up his butt was making him constipated. Toby’s response was to ask Elsie if her fingers were getting sore from hanging on so hard, to which Elsie replied, ‘my day was great, thanks, and oh, by the way, I’m still in the top percentile, wow it’s nice not hovering in the middle of the road’. Their laser-eyed stares were enough to give me a stomach cramp, so I quickly changed out of my uniform and rushed us both out of the house again.

  We’re side-by-side on her bedroom floor now, having spent a couple of hours on our books, sporadically chatting, and watching romantic dance movie compilations that Elsie has saved on YouTube. Elsie’s brothers are blasting Xbox from the rec room, and the sounds of explosions reverberate through the walls. Strangely, the noise at the Nayers’ doesn’t actually bother me. Maybe I have become habituated, but the shouts and body slams rarely make me cringe anymore.

  Eventually Elsie and I head into in the rec room, slumping on the couch with a tin of Pringles. Raj sprawls on the floor, reaching up occasionally to steal a chip. Elsie and Raj are absorbed in the third season of Gilmore Girls, while I am giving one of their dogs a belly rub and contemplating whether Perelman ever had to deal with the intricacies of Alexandrov spaces while simultaneously navigating a weird new … acquaintance? Friendship? Is that even what this is?

  I wonder if Perelman would be any more adept at this interpersonal stuff than me? I think about the perfect, unembellished writing in the first part of his Poincaré proof, The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications. I think about his out-of-control beard, and his apparent obsession with bread. Somehow, I think interpersonal stuff might be low on his list of priorities.

  The Nayers’ dog, Chuck, rolls onto my lap. He’s a giant ball of scruff with no regard for personal space, yet nothing about the crushing warmth of him makes me anxious. Not even when he shoves his face into my belly and pokes me in the eye with a paw.

  Elsie’s house is the best; a menagerie of strays from her mum’s veterinary clinic, some of which have found their way to the Nayers’ fur-covered couches and never left. S
o many cats have passed through that Elsie and her brothers now bestow only generic names upon them: a stream of Whiskers and Snowys and Mittens. Battles for naming rights are reserved for the dogs. Elsie, always science obsessed, and Raj, who likes obscure fantasy references, have owned a beagle named Elizabeth Blackwell and a Shih Tzu called Orm Embar. Colin sticks to movie action stars, and their eldest brother, Ryan, in a period of cultural pride, once named a litter of abandoned Rottweiler puppies after members of the Indian cricket team, until he got accepted into medical school and decided he was too cool to care about dog names anymore.

  The upshot is, Elsie’s house currently hosts an incontinent pug named Isabeau, an ageing Rottie named Sunil Gavaskar, and a springer spaniel, presently drooling on my lap, called Chuck Norris.

  When I was little, I was desperate for a tiny piece of the Nayers’ life. There’s something nice about being around animals; they convey only the most basic of information, and they demand nothing but food and belly rubs.

  ‘Yo, whadup Pinky?’ Colin calls out as he wanders in from the kitchen, teetering plate of food in hand. ‘How’s life?’

  ‘Hey, Colin,’ I say with a wave. ‘Whatcha doing home?’

  Colin shoves a steaming pakora into his mouth. ‘Ran out of food,’ he says around crunches. ‘Share-housing sucks, man. Gonna invest in a lock box for the kitchen, army-style.’ He flops onto the floor beside Raj and hands him the plate. Colin has adopted another new hairstyle this week, shorn at the sides and swept up on top in a buoyant, swooping curve. His broad shoulders and giant gym-arms make Rajesh look like a strange deflated twin beside him, but Raj and Colin are actually a lot more alike than their stoic eldest brother, Ryan.

  Elsie throws a Pringle at him. ‘You have to actually buy food for someone to steal it, dumbarse. Why don’t you just hoard mee goreng under your bed like a normal student?’

  Colin collects the Pringle from the floor and shoves it into his mouth. He stretches out his long legs. ‘Aw, but then I’d never get to see your sundar face, Elsie-bean. I’m using it as inspiration for my next short film. I’m gonna call it The Attack of the Crabby Five-Foot Brown Woman.’

  ‘Shut your face-hole, Colin,’ Elsie says, reaching over and grabbing a pakora. She doesn’t give me one. I can handle my dad’s milky curries just fine, but Doctor Nayer’s volcanic creations are way out of my league. ‘Be nice,’ Elsie says through a mouthful of food. ‘One day when you’re serving fries and wondering what happened to your life, I’ll be the sibling who lets you sleep in my pool house.’

  Raj laughs, and Colin clips him across the head. He peers over his shoulder at me. ‘See what I have to deal with, Pinky? Can you believe I emerged from the same uterus as these losers? I don’t even know why I bother coming home.’

  Elsie grins. ‘It’s the open fridge and stellar company.’

  To the boys of the Nayer clan, I have always been known as Pinky. It’s a legacy from the time Ryan referred to me as ‘The Brain’, and Elsie immediately took offence. I don’t understand why it’s so amusing – I’ve seen the cartoon, and it seemed kind of silly. Elsie has told me that they mean it with nothing but affection, but still, Pinky is as much as she will tolerate. I’ve never understood the Nayers’ dynamic, all the teasing that never slips into actual fights. But part of me has always been just a little bit grateful to be included.

  Eventually, the boys wander off. Colin heads home laden with Tupperware, and Raj heads upstairs to do whatever it is Raj does for hours on his computer.

  Elsie scrolls through the Netflix menu. ‘Want to watch a movie? Rajesh’ll drive you whenever you want to go. I’m guessing you’re not in any rush, though?’

  I shrug. ‘Toby should be in bed by now, so maybe it’s safe.’

  Elsie sighs. ‘Yeah, god forbid he gets less than the regulation eight hours,’ she mutters. ‘I’d say sleep deprivation couldn’t make his personality any crapper, but I think we both know that’d be a lie.’

  I watch as Elsie selects The Real Housewives of Atlanta. ‘I don’t think Toby’s personality is the problem. He just doesn’t like me, Elsie.’ This is hardly news, so it shouldn’t be cause for the ripple of hurt in my chest.

  Elsie sighs. ‘You know your brother is a giant a-hole, right? A giant, jealous, self-involved a-hole?’

  ‘Toby isn’t jealous,’ I say incredulously, as a gaggle of women on TV shriek about something. ‘Not everyone is going to like everyone. It’s statistically impossible. Even if we did emerge from the same uterus.’

  Elsie’s eyes remain on the screen. Her jaw twitches. ‘Your brother is a pest, Rey,’ she says eventually. ‘I’m the last person in the world who’d defend him, but maybe … you shouldn’t just write him off like that. You don’t know everything that’s going on with him. Not everyone has it as easy as you do.’

  I keep my face averted. ‘You think I have it easy,’ I say flatly. I grimace at the irritation in my voice, but I can’t seem to wind it back. ‘What exactly about your life is hard, Elsie?’

  Elsie turns with a sharp bark of laughter-that-doesn’t-sound-like-laughter. ‘Oh yeah. You’re right. Everything’s just cruisy, Sophia. Well, it’s not like you’re even interested. Are you.’

  I give Chuck a rough scratch. On the TV, a lady with a tiny backpack throws a stiletto at a waiter’s head. ‘Interested in what? I know what your plans are. You’ve spent years talking about them. Eidetic memory, remember? What else do you want me to say?’

  Elsie grabs a fistful of Pringles. ‘Nothing. Never mind,’ she says, shoving the chips into her mouth. ‘Let’s just watch TV.’

  ‘Elsie –’

  Elsie waves a hand. ‘No problem, Sophia. When I have everything all sorted, I’ll be sure to let you know.’

  I hug one of the Nayers’ couch cushions to my chest. Chuck’s drool pools on my kneecap, and he whines, possibly also burnt by the heat of Elsie’s annoyance.

  ‘Well, okay,’ I say, deflating. I know immediately that I’ve said all the wrong things, because Elsie’s entire body is stiff, and she’s chewing salt-and-vinegar chips like she’s offended by Pringles themselves. I want to say the right things, but I have no idea where to find the words she seems to want from me. I feel like I’ve been stuck on this track for months, and I can’t seem to change course.

  So I sink into the couch, feeling every uncomfortable lump and knot. On the screen, a woman in a dress hurls a vase at another woman in a bikini, and then both of them burst into tears. In the darkest corner of my mind, mismatched thoughts crawl, restless and conflicting. I glance at Elsie’s mum’s collection of Royal Doulton animal figurines on the side table. I wonder if it would help if I just gave up on my fractious mind and hurled something instead. Ms Heller would probably be thrilled.

  I sneak a glimpse of my best friend. Her body is stiff, but her face betrays nothing that I can read. Elsie’s silences are pointed, but rarely aimed in my direction – not since the legendary ‘why-can’t-we-go-to-the-formal?’ fight of year eight. And it goes without saying that I am useless at conflict.

  No vase-hurling for us, then. But I wish I knew how to bridge this divide that seems to be widening between us with each day that passes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Caught in the difficulty of mystifying, magicians often forget that the first role of the artist is to communicate a beautiful idea.

  – TELLER

  I pry open an eye as a fuzzy tail thumps against my face. Ginormous blue eyes, ringed with goopy black stuff, are hovering above me, squinting with a familiar combo of edginess and angst.

  ‘Argh, Gillian – if you’re gonna murder me, can you at least have the courtesy to let me sleep through it?’ I croak, tugging the blankets over my head.

  Gilly yanks my doona down again. With a scowl that contains no small measure of panic, her tiny hands form two fists and unleash a flurry of thuds onto my forehead. She’s kneeling on top of me in her school skirt and tights, still paired with her Bikini Kill pyjama T-shirt, her cropped
hair smushed into a structure like a piece of abstract art. She’s reminding me more and more of a punky pixie, or an evil sprite from one of those confusing Japanese horror movies. Narda turns in a few circles on my pillow before flopping down with a huff, fluffy arse in my face.

  I haul Narda down beside me. My cat yowls plaintively, and my sister makes a sound that’s almost the same. I close my eyes with a moan, but sleep is obviously not going to be returning anytime soon. With my eyes still closed I pat Gillian on the head. Her crunchy hair clumps under my fingers. ‘Why do you even bother with this stuff?’ I say with a yawn. ‘Y’know Mum’s just gonna make you wash it out.’

  Gilly pulls her legs beneath her, sitting cross-legged on top of me. ‘Yeah, well, unless she’s planning to use the garden hose, not much she can do about it, innit?’ She crosses her arms. ‘Pretty sure enforced showers aren’t legal. It’s in the Geneva Convention. Ratified by the United Nations and everything.’

  I can’t help but laugh. ‘And somewhere, Mum is ruing the day she introduced you to TED talks.’

  Gilly gives me a grin, part sweet-fourteen-year-old, part obnoxious-demon-child. ‘She did say she wanted me to “focus my intellect onto less destructive channels”. Knowledge is power, Joshie.’

  I chuckle, and yawn again, scrubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I fumble behind me for the glasses on my shelf and blink myself properly awake before peering up at my sister. ‘Lemme guess. You and Mum have already gone three rounds, and now you want me to run interference?’

  Her eyes slide sideways. ‘Nah. Not yet anyway.’ She fidgets with the hem of her skirt. Minuscule Sharpie writing, song lyrics chock full of curse words, weave between the tartan. ‘See, there’s this party on Friday, and I know Mum’s gonna freak if I ask …’

  I shove my hands under my neck. ‘Our mum? The person who’s been trying to get you to socialise since you made your last playdate cry so hard he vomited?’ I narrow my eyes suspiciously. ‘Why would she freak, Gillian? And since when have you even been interested in parties? I thought year eight was, and I quote, “a soul-sucking vortex spewed from the depths of Hades”, unquote.’