Arcane Wisdome

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Practice is at four. I should be home by six; there’s a late bus at five-thirty for the band and the soccer team." As much as she wanted to pass on what she had found out from the spell — whatever it was — she couldn’t yet try it out on the Gothic Geeks. Band practice would give her the perfect excuse not to stop by Tom Foster’s garage with information they might not accept.

  “You’re wearing your mother’s ring,” said Melinda, sounding surprised.

  “It’s mine now.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s very pretty,” said Melinda.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” her father asked her, removing the next large waffles from the iron.

  “Yes,” said Lucy, her chin coming up as if daring him to object.

  “You don’t want to lose it,” said her father.

  Lucy looked away from him. “I won’t.”

  An uncomfortable silence ensued; Jacob claimed another waffle, and kept himself busy buttering it, then spreading blueberry compote all over it. Jason fidgeted, watching his father tend the waffle iron.

  “Isn’t Ditch Day coming up?" Lucy’s father asked as he poured more waffle batter into the waiting maw of the iron.

  “Jared,” Melinda warned.

  “Friday next week,” said Lucy.

  Lucy’s father paid no attention to the lift in Melinda’s eyebrow, going on with a grin. “You have a date." It wasn’t quite a question.

  “Yes,” said Lucy, and felt herself blush, which was awful.

  Jason broke off buttering his waffle and whistled; Jacob went “Ooooooooo-wooo,” and kissed at the air.

  “You want to tell us who?" her father persisted.

  As much as Lucy had wanted to boast of her invitation two days ago, she now felt uncomfortable. “I have a date. That’s what matters.”

  “She doesn’t want to tell us,” said Jacob.

  “Because she doesn’t have one,” added Jason.

  “Boys,” Melinda said in friendly warning.

  “I have a date,” Lucy repeated, aware that the twins were baiting her but unable to stop from reacting to their rolling eyes and suggestive winks.

  “I’m sure he’s someone nice,” said her father.

  “A nerd,” said Jacob smugly.

  “One of those geeks she hangs with,” Jason agreed.

  Stung, Lucy shoved back from the table. “It’s Nate Evers — okay?" She got up, grabbed her backpack and flute and headed toward the back door.

  “Lucy? Breakfast,” said her father.

  “I’ll get something at Francine’s,” Lucy called back, adding “Ozwokers,” under her breath just before she slammed the door behind her.

  * * *

  “How are things going?" Isadora asked, once Lucy settled down in the rounded, over-stuffed chair opposite her own.

  “Pretty good, I guess,” said Lucy. Since her appointments had been switched to Fridays, she felt as if she were expected to deliver a report on the week. “I haven’t been playing the flute as much as I should.”

  “Why is that?" Isadora asked.

  Lucy shrugged. “I guess I get enough of it playing in band. It kind of bores me." She looked toward the trees beyond the window. “I spent some time with the Geeks, and I’ve been finishing up my second Environmental Science project. I’ve got a Geometry test next Tuesday.”

  “Anything else?"

  Although Lucy knew what Isadora wanted, she pretended she didn’t. “At school? No.”

  “What about Ditch Day?" She showed no trace of approval or disapproval, and to underscore that detachment, added, “If you’re going, we’ll have to reschedule your appointment.”

  “Catherine Browne broke her ankle at cheerleading practice, so Nate Evers asked me,” said Lucy in a rush, the admission causing her both satisfaction and chagrin. “I said I’d go with him.”

  “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?" Isadora asked, her tone completely neutral.

  “Yeah. It was." She bit the inside of her lip. “But not this way. It isn’t the way I wanted it to be.”

  “Can you tell me what you mean? What makes you unhappy about his invitation? What would you want it to be?" Her manner was interested without being intrusive, a talent she had that Lucy was beginning to respect. “Lucy? What makes you — ”

  Lucy interrupted Isadora’s kindly prodding. “Oh, you know, people saying that the only reason he asked me is so he wouldn’t have to go alone." She bit her lip. “Feeling sorry for me because the most uber-guy in school asks me to Ditch Day, and being so ... so smug about it." She shook her head, not certain if she was angry or just sulking.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  Lucy stared up at the photo of the owl that hung over Isadora. “I think they’re probably right. He did ask me because everyone knows I’m no competition for Catherine.”

  “But you’re still going to go with him?”

  “Yeah." She tapped her toe several times. “I guess.”

  “If this isn’t what you want, you don’t have to go, you know,” said Isadora.

  Lucy frowned. “Yes, I do. I said so in front of half the school. I’d look pathetic if I said no now.”

  Isadora considered this. “Well, I hope you can find a way to enjoy yourself without feeling slighted.”

  “Me, too." She paused. “Niki Martinu talked to me at lunch yesterday.”

  “Is that unusual?"

  “Yeah. And she said some weird stuff about boys and her ice skating. I think she was trying to tell me to pay no attention to what the rest of the school is saying about sympathy dates. Maybe." She bit her lower lip. “She wanted to talk about sex — what I knew about it.”

  “Do you know why she wanted to find out?" Isadora didn’t look flustered.

  “No. She didn’t say." In order to change the subject Lucy held up her hand, showing the moonstone ring. “What do you think of this? It was my mom’s.”

  If the abrupt shift in topic bothered Isadora she gave no sign of it. “Is that a silver or a white gold setting?” she asked after she had examined the art nouveau beauty.

  “White gold,” said Lucy. “Mom got it from her grandmother. So it’s kind of a family heirloom." She glanced at the picture of the owl. “I got it after mom died, as one of those memento mori things." She was proud that she could remember the Latin words her Grandmother Doris had used when she gave the ring to Lucy, three days after her mother’s funeral.

  “It’s lovely,” said Isadora.

  “Dad doesn’t like me to wear it. He’s afraid I’ll lose it.”

  “It’s probably pretty valuable,” said Isadora.

  “I’d never lose it, never,” Lucy declared, striking the marshmallow-soft arm of her chair for emphasis.

  “Because it’s your mother’s?”

  “Yeah. And it’s a little tight on me; I had to use soap to get it on my finger." This revelation was enough to make her laugh. “I’ll have to use soap to get it off, too.”

  Isadora chuckled. “That should reassure your father."

  “No one in school thinks it’s real. They think I got it at Crystal Annie’s." Lucy shook her head. “They’re dazed.”

  “You might tell your father." She glanced at Lucy. “You want to show him he doesn’t have to worry, don’t you?”

  “I want to, I do want to,” Lucy murmured, lowering her eyes; it bothered her when her dad reprimanded her, especially when she wanted to assume he knew her better than that.

  “Try looking at it this way,” said Isadora, “he isn’t doing this to embarrass you — he knows how much it would distress you to lose that ring, and he’s trying to show you he cares how you — ”

  “He might mean that, but it sure didn’t sound like it." Lucy gave an angry little cough. “And don’t tell me I’m being too sensitive.”

  Isadora nodded. “I won’t.”

  “Don’t think it either,” Lucy challenged, adding darkly, “I am not overreacting.”

  “No." Isadora paused. “But perhaps
you’re reacting to more than your father’s remark this morning? Do you think you might not want anyone doubting how much you value your mother? Do you think that perhaps you don’t think he knows how much you miss her?”

  “He should know,” Lucy sulked, and knew how unreasonable she sounded.

  “He misses her, too.”

  “Sure.”

  “Getting married again doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss your mother, it means that he has accepted that he can’t get your mother back again." She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Don’t you think that he’s had a hard time without her? You said yourself that he depended on you a lot until he remarried.”

  “And he did,” Lucy said staunchly.

  “Perhaps it isn’t just your mother that worries you — do you think you might miss being depended upon?"

  Lucy did her best not to squirm, but she had to admit that Isadora’s questions struck a chord with her.”Could be,” she said grudgingly.

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “Not now,” said Lucy. “Maybe later.”

  Isadora did not protest. “Okay. Later it is.”

  12

  A couple of hours after midnight, when everyone else was asleep, Lucy succumbed to the urge that had been niggling at her all day; she climbed up into the attic, a flashlight tucked under her arm, and went to unload another box of her mother’s books. She chose the one that contained a lot of her mother’s texts from Social Anthropology—her mother had had a Master’s degree in it — and began to look through the stack of hardcovers: Myth and Manners in Medieval Europe; Peoples of the New Guinea Highlands; Marginalized: the Role of the Outsider in Societal Identity; Youth Gangs in World Culture; Rites of Passage in the Age of the Internet: a sociological analysis of computer games; Changes in Art, Religion, and Esthetics in India: 1100-1840; The Transitions of the Concept of Grace from the Sacred to the Secular; The Boundaries of Magic and Science: Western Thought from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment; Mathematics and Mysticism—Lucy seized the last two books and put the rest back in the box, then scrambled down the ladder, swung it back into position and closed the door.

  Once in her room, she began to read the first ponderous tome. She found the dense, academic language slow going, but as she became used to it, she began to pick up speed, moving through the text without stumbling. The point of view of the authors was not terribly original, but it was carefully and thoroughly documented, showing that the line between science and magic had been really fuzzy for almost a thousand years after the Roman Empire collapsed, and since the re-emergence of the beginnings of science as something different from religion. In the Renaissance, science, as the study of the nature of the world, had been making significant inroads on what had at one time been regarded as magical, or supernatural.

  Shortly before she fell asleep, she came to a chapter on Islamic culture during the European Dark Ages, and the flowering of knowledge in places like Baghdad and Damascus. One paragraph struck her:

  Among the Arabs, and to a lesser extent, the Persians, as we have noted above, numbers were, and to some extent still are, viewed, beyond having word equivalents, as possessing magical properties beyond their calculating potentials; magical ramifications created an intellectual paradigm, possessing both quantitative and qualitative properties that turned every equation into a magical structure which was intended to influence everything from the individual to the cosmos, manifesting as what would be called spells in the Western tradition of occult disciplines. All numbers, singly or in groups, were interpreted as more than computation and measurement, they could be interpreted as words, and represented moral and religious values of good and evil ...

  * * *

  In the morning, Lucy returned to this page and began to search for more on the theory of the magical properties of numbers, trying to establish a base from which she could inquire further. Maybe, she told herself, the answer to the Geek’s number-clusters could be found in those pages. Since it was Saturday, she would have time to explore more about magical numbers on the Internet once she had finished her weekend chores and got to some belated flute practice.

  She dressed in jeans and a sloppy old cotton sweater, went downstairs, made herself breakfast before her brothers got up, and put her dishes in the sink. Then she went back upstairs and stripped her bed, put on clean sheets, remade it, took the sheets down to the laundry and let herself out to work in the vegetable garden Melinda had planted in April. For the next three hours, Lucy hoed and pruned, sprayed organic fertilizer and plucked away insects and snails, all the while considering the idea of casting spells with numbers. By the time she was done with her stint in the garden, she put her tools away and went across the deck, bound for the backdoor. She was sweating a little and her hunger had returned.

  “There are about a dozen new blossoms on the zucchini,” she reported as she came back into the kitchen. “The kholrabi is doing okay. Dad should put some beer out to keep the snails away.”

  Melinda looked up from her washing the floor. She was in sweatpants and a long-sleeved tee, and there were shadows around her eyes. “Would you like some zucchini blossoms stuffed with cheese at dinner?”

  Lucy shrugged. “Sure." She’d had that before, and even though she thought eating flowers was a little weird, she liked the dish.

  “Will you pick the blossoms for me?" Melinda asked, stretching slowly as if to work kinks out of her back.

  “Okay." She went to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of strawberry-kiwi juice. “When’s lunch?”

  “As soon as Jared and the twins get back from Costco,” said Melinda. “They’re picking up more supplies for the garden."

  “When do you expect them?”

  “An hour, maybe a little more. The floor’ll be dry by then.” Melinda finished the last of her mopping. “What’s on your agenda this afternoon?”

  “I have a project for school. Computer stuff,” she added, so that her fib would be a little less of an untruth, since she would be working on something for computers. “I’ve got research to do.”

  “Okay,” said Melinda. “Can you pick blossoms this afternoon?”

  “Probably around four. I’ll need a break.”

  “That’d be fine,” said Melinda, pulling off the mop-head and taking it to the laundry.

  Lucy watched her shove the mop-head into the washer. “So I’m going to take a bath and then go work until lunch is ready." She was surprised at how normal they both sounded, and how close she was coming to liking Melinda. A stab of guilt went through her and she took a step back from her stepmother.

  “Good idea,” said Melinda. “How does chicken-and-spinach sausage with a salad sound for lunch?”

  “Fine,” said Lucy, putting her empty glass in the sink and heading upstairs, tugging her old sweater over her head as she went.

  * * *

  After lunch, Lucy went back to her room and her mother’s books; she started making notes, beginning with the one on Magic and Science, then looking into Mathematics and Mysticism, taking time to compare the two texts and keeping track with stick-it notes of when their information coincided. After about ninety minutes of reading and notes, she went to her computer to begin her search, trying a dozen sites before she came upon a few about numbers, letters, and magic. The work was engrossing, and she hardly noticed the passage of time, and only when she heard her brothers slam through the house calling for lunch did she leave her studies, only to return to them when lunch was over. By four she had enough information to put enough of it together to present to the Geeks. She knocked off to go pick zucchini blossoms, then went back to her room and her computer, logging onto her home page.

  She checked her addresses, selected one and formulated her message:

  Hi, Ben.

  I found some information on using numbers for casting spells. A couple of my mom’s textbooks say that this was done a lot by Arabs and Persians in the past. Unless you’ve found something in your game-theory researc
h, would you mind looking over what I’ve got? The files are attached in RTF.

  Lucy

  She glanced through her other messages, sent a response to Indra Chalabar who had missed school the day before and wanted to know how much more of Frankenstein she had to read. Lucy was about to log off when she noticed that she had an answer from Ben.

  Hi, Lucy,

  I’d be glad to see anything. Those number sequences have me dazed. I’ll look your file over and get back to you.

  Ben

  Lucy took a deep breath, and typed in a response: Thanks — L

  Then, before anything else could claim her attention, she closed the screen down and went back to the pages on numbers as occult tools in Mathematics and Mysticism. Just holding the book was comforting, a way to connect with her mother, if only at a distance. She turned down a lot of page corners as she read, not wanting to intrude on the notes her mother had written in the margins. There were descriptions of numbers, their areas of influences, their magical properties, whether they were beneficial or malign, how they functioned in sequences ... The more she read the more she began to believe that the streams of single and clustered numbers plaguing the Gothic Geeks were spells. “And that’s just ozwonked. We’re in the twenty-first century, not the tenth,” she said aloud as she emphatically closed the book and went back to her computer.

  * * *

  It was after eight, almost dark, as Lucy and Ben met at Francine’s in the full glare of their outside lighting. The evening had turned chilly so most of the patrons were inside, clustered around the small tables off to the side of the display cases, surrounded by seductive odors of baking, chocolate, coffee, and vanilla.

  Lucy and Ben decided to sit outside — though it was on the sidewalk, it was more private than the cramped interior — and indulge in something extravagant. They ended up sharing wedge of St. Honoré’s Cake and a dish of Francine’s justly famous Crème Brûlée with raspberries and dark chocolate. Each of them had a cappuccino to wash down the lovely desserts.