A Snicker of Magic

by Natalie Lloyd

  I had to figure out a way to break the Weatherly curse, I knew it. Or we might all be wandering forever.

  Snip

  Snip

  SN

  IP

  I saw the words cut into pieces as Jewell Pickett slid her scissors across my bangs.

  The wet tips of my hair spelled out more words on the floor:

  Toggle

  Hiccup

  Cornucopia

  “My brain’s feeling crazy today,” I sighed.

  “My brain always feels crazy,” Jewell laughed.

  She tilted my face up and looked at my bangs to make sure they were even. Aunt Cleo had trimmed my bangs a few days ago, but she’d used her crafting scissors. Mama was not pleased with the outcome.

  “That is so much better.” Jewell nodded. “Your eyes are too pretty to keep covered up. There’s a whole world of good to see that you might miss hiding behind your hair. And! This way you’ll be able to look everybody in the eye when you duel.”

  “Yep.” I gulped.

  “Jonah says you’re pretty nervous about tomorrow.”

  I looked through the window into Jewell’s mechanic shop, where Jonah was sitting at a long table, helping Harriet Bond clean the tools. I didn’t mind that he’d told his mom how nervous I was. Jewell Pickett would have figured me out anyway. Jonah’d warned me that she could massage the secrets right out of a person’s scalp.

  And sakes alive, was he right.

  When Jewell washed my hair, every secret I knew came spilling out of my mouth. I told her about Stone Weatherly being my balloon-riding, globe-trotting, curse-bearing great-great-grandfather. I told her about how I was cursed to wander, cursed to fail, and most likely cursed to keep on riding around the country in a Pickled Jalapeño that smelled like Frito pies.

  I told her that Mama was packing up to leave Midnight Gulch. I even told her the secret I hadn’t told Jonah yet. “I heard Mama on the phone last night, talking about Seattle like it was some snazzy carnival.”

  Jewell told me everything would work out fine, and her words calmed me down, for about a minute and a half.

  But now tears burned in my eyes all over again. Jewell put down her scissors and rested her hands on my shoulders. Her fingernails were long and coral colored. Her perfume smelled like expensive candy.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” She said it in such a way that the words came spilling out of me again.

  “Mama’s got a wandering heart,” I said. “She can’t stay anyplace for long.”

  I thought back to that first night when Mama stared up at the lonely old moon, the way the light fell across her face. I thought the moon beamed because it was happy to see us. Now I knew the moon had recognized one of its own: bright, beautiful, lonesome.

  Snip

  Snip

  SN

  IP

  Words fell loose around me:

  Hunger

  Safekeep

  Refuge

  “Maybe I’m meant to be like Florentine,” I said. “Maybe I’m meant to keep drifting around to different places.”

  “OH!” Jonah’s mother screeched. I grabbed my hair ’cause I was afraid she’d cut a big hunk out of the back, but my hair was okay.

  “Jonah!” Jewell rapped her long fingernails against the window to the auto shop. “Come in here! I need to tell you and Felicity something extraordinary.

  “Yesterday while y’all were painting the Gallery,” Jewell said, holding the door open so Jonah could wheel inside, “Florentine came in for a trim. As soon as I started washing her hair, she started talking….”

  “We know Florentine’s story,” Jonah said.

  “You don’t know what I know!” Jewell grinned.

  We both knew she was right. Neither one of us could give a proper shampoo.

  Jewell motioned Jonah closer, then leaned in close so nobody else in the shop would hear.

  “You’d already told me where Florentine came from. So I asked her how in the world she ended up here, in Midnight Gulch. I could see in her face that she didn’t want to tell me, that she wanted to keep it a secret. She’d left that bag she’s always toting along over in the waiting chair and she kept glancing at it, then back at me, real nervous-like. Finally, she sighed and told me exactly how she wound up here.”

  Jewell stood back and smiled proudly in the mirror. “She said that her great-grandmother was born and raised here in Midnight Gulch, but that she left town because she wasn’t welcome here anymore. Florentine said her great-grandmother stole some burdens that did not belong to her … but she left a perfect memory in their place.”

  Jewell squirted a golf-ball-size dollop of pouf mousse into her hand and worked it through my hair. “Florentine figures if she can find the perfect memory, she’ll be able to lay those burdens down.

  “Now.” Jewell propped her hands on her hips and looked back at Jonah. “You gonna ask me who that great-grandmother was?”

  Yes, yes, yes. My heart pounded so loud I nearly said the word.

  Jewell winked at me in the mirror. “You got it, kids. Florentine’s great-granny was none other than Isabella Thistle.”

  As soon as Jewell finished drying my hair, I shot up out of her chair and ran out of the salon. Jonah was faster than me in his wheelchair. He had to keep slowing down, waiting for me to catch up.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My legs are too short for running.”

  “It’s no problem.” Jonah smiled. “Your hair looks cool, Flea. Messy but in a spindiddly way.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my hair,” I said. “I can see every single thing around me and it’s weird.”

  My hair felt good, though, feather-light and bouncy. I ran faster so I could feel it swoosh into my face.

  Then I tripped over my own sneaker and decided the swooshing probably wasn’t worth falling over.

  “Is she there?” I yelled ahead.

  He shook his head no.

  “What if she already left town?” I said. “What if she’s gone? She could have helped us, I bet. She’s Isabella Thistle’s kin. She’ll know how to break that stupid curse.”

  I waited for Jonah to give his usual speech about Isabella’s curse, but he didn’t. Instead, he nodded and said, “Then we’ll find her.”

  Even Jonah had to face the truth: Our time was almost up.

  And goodness knows we tried; we searched every shop on Main Street, asked everybody we passed if they’d seen her. We called out her name. We searched. We waited. And hoped. We never found her. And nobody knew where she went. By the time night dropped its starry curtain over the mountains, Florentine still hadn’t turned up anywhere. My family was still cursed. As soon as the Duel was over, we’d wander away again.

  “I should ground you for getting home so late and not calling first,” Mama scolded as she set a glass of milk down in front of me.

  “I was trying to find Florentine. I had something I wanted to show her.”

  Plus, I had a curse that I wanted her to undo or fix or whatever a person does to make a curse worthless. My mission failed. Nobody had seen Florentine and no wind-chime wind alerted me to her whereabouts. Now it was too late. The Duel was happening tomorrow. The Gallery was almost finished. We’d be gone before the week was over; I could feel it.

  Mama sat down at the table across from me, clutching a warm mug of tea. She looked so pretty with paint in her hair.

  “Gallery’s looking good,” I said.

  Mama grinned, just barely — her smile resting like a crescent moon behind the rim of her mug. “Something’s still missing. I can’t quite figure out what —”

  “Take all the time you need!” I squealed.

  Mama sighed. Her eyes glossed over in a far-off, faraway stare.

  “That Gallery,” Cleo said around her cigarette, “looks more beautiful than it has ever looked. I’ll bet it didn’t look that good back when Stone Weatherly painted it.”

  “I hope everybody’s pleased with it.” Mama nodded. “It was
nice of them to let me be part of something so special.”

  Was.

  Them.

  Those are distance words. Mama was already past-tensing, already reminiscing about a place we hadn’t even left yet. I settled back in my seat and asked the question we were all afraid to ask. But there was no point holding back any longer. “How soon are we leaving once you get done?”

  Cleo glanced up from her quilt. Boone looked over the couch at us. Frannie Jo was about to snap the last piece into a puzzle, but she stopped and looked at Mama, too. Mama didn’t look at us. She looked at the door. She’d already packed up some grocery bags and laundry baskets full of our stuff.

  “Day after tomorrow.” Mama sipped her tea. “I told them we’d be there by next week.”

  One more day.

  That’s all I had left in Midnight Gulch. Twenty-four measly hours.

  Cleo looked back down at her quilt, but I could see her lip trembling. Boone looked straight ahead again and Frannie Jo picked up her puzzle, piece by piece, and put it back in the box. Her little blue suitcase was propped by the door, too, ready for a new beginning, as Mama liked to say.

  But I was sick of always beginning. I just wanted to be.

  “June Bug.” Mama’s voice broke the silence. “Do you want me to help you with the rest of your poems for the Duel?”

  I shook my head. “I think I need to do that part on my own. Thanks, though.”

  “Are you still feeling good about it?” Mama reached to touch the fringe of my brand-new bangs.

  Before I could answer, we all heard the music. Not wind-chime music. Banjo music. And it wasn’t coming from Boone. The banjo music was coming from outside in the parking lot.

  “What in the … ?” Cleo asked.

  Boone was already opening the door onto Cleo’s tiny patio, the one Mama never let us step on because she was afraid it would crumble.

  “That’s Day Grissom!” Boone yelled.

  “Oh, no,” Cleo groaned.

  “Cleopatra Glorietta Harness!” Day yelled at the top of his lungs. “I wrote a song for you, and I’m about to play it. Right here. Right now.”

  “Somebody shut that man up before the police come!” Cleo threw down her quilt pieces. “Or before every dog in Midnight Gulch starts howling.” She stomped out onto the patio and yelled, “Or before everybody in this complex realizes some drunk old idiot is singing in the parking lot!”

  “Hey there, Cleo!” Day hollered from down below.

  We all ran for the patio and crammed out onto the little porch beside my aunt. She groaned, pulled the cigarette out of her mouth, and stared down at my gnarly-bearded bus driver.

  Day Grissom cleared his throat and sang:

  “Well, the stars don’t shine

  And the moon don’t glow,

  That I don’t think about a girl I know.

  Cleo-pa-tra … Cleo-pa-tra …

  I love her pretty blue eyes

  And her sweet ol’ smile

  And she loves me, too,

  But she’s the queen of de-Nile….”

  “Day Grissom.” She hissed through clenched teeth. And then she shouted out a string of unsavory words that caused Boone to laugh and Mama to clamp her hands down over Frannie Jo’s ears. “Get outta my parking lot!”

  “Then you get outta my heart!” Day yelled back. He clutched his banjo across his chest the same way I’d seen Boone do, like that plunky instrument might keep his heart safe from harm.

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?” Cleo asked.

  “I only mean that …” Day shuffled nervously back and forth. “I came to tell you …”

  “Spit it out, you old geezer,” Cleo said.

  “I came to tell you” — Day stood up straight and looked right up at the balcony — “that I’m sorry.”

  That shut Cleo up. Whatever she was about to shout back got stuck in her mouth. She took a long draw on her cigarette instead.

  “You should have told me that twenty years ago,” Cleo said in a curl of smoke.

  Patch it

  Mend it

  Stitch it back together

  “You’re right,” Day said.

  “And I ain’t the same girl I was twenty years ago,” Cleo said. “And you definitely ain’t the same man. Look at how you’ve let yourself go! Showing up here looking like some Cracker Barrel Santa Claus.”

  Cleo was trying to talk mean, but she didn’t sound very convincing. Day Grissom could tell it, too. “I should have married you, Cleo Harness. I’d marry you right now if you’d have me.”

  “The way we fought?” Cleo laughed. “Mercy! I’d have pushed you off the bridge by now if we were married. That’s a fact!”

  “If I was married to you,” Day hollered back, “I would have jumped off that bridge by now. Shoot, I’d let you push me.” He grinned big and goofy up at the balcony again. “I’d fall for you, Cleopatra. Get it?”

  “What I got,” Cleo said, “is age and insight.”

  “Hindsight,” Mama whispered.

  “Hindsight, hind end, whatever!” Cleo smashed out her cigarette on the rail. “We’re too old, Day. We’ve made too many mistakes now.”

  “I still love you,” Day said. “The way I figure it, that should cover every single mistake from here on out.”

  Cleo let out a ragged breath. She wiped the sweat off her forehead.

  “Maybe you should come down and hear what I have to say? And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can mosey back up to that apartment and I’ll never bother you again.”

  “You might as well go down, Cleo,” Mama said. “He’s a persistent man.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Cleo sneered. Day Grissom howled out another song as we shut the patio door and crowded back into the living room. Cleo mumbled unsavory words as she slid on her flip-flops and stomped to the door. She flung the door open. Instead of walking out, she shut the door and sighed.

  She checked her reflection in the mirror. Her hand was shaking as she fluffed her hair. “I ain’t the same girl I was,” Cleo mumbled. “I ain’t pretty like I was back then. He’s forgot. But he’ll remember when he sees me up close.”

  “You definitely aren’t pretty like you were back then,” Boone said. He put his arm around Cleo and kissed her cheek. “You’re beautiful now. A person has to work hard to be your kind of beautiful, Cleo.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Boone.” Cleo waved him off, but I could see her real answer shining in her eyes. Boone’s words meant the world to her. Better yet, I could see in her eyes that she knew Boone’s words were true.

  “I mean it,” Boone said. “Don’t make this too easy for Day Grissom.”

  Cleo nodded, her lip trembling again. Then she sighed, held her chin up high, and stomped out the door.

  I wrote to the sound of the banjo’s plink and the clock’s ticktock.

  I thought Cleo’s wall clock was spindiddly when I first saw it, but now it only made me sad. The clock sounded like a fake heartbeat, every tick-tick-tick a steady reminder that my time was almost up.

  I heard Boone and Mama talking about Aunt Cleo, and Frannie Jo talking to Biscuit, and the weatherman talking about seasons changing. The whole world seemed to be yammering away while I tried to work. Only the midnight moon stayed silent as it peeked through Cleo’s window, checking on my progress. The bone-white light shimmered over my words and made me feel like I held the finest magic, words worth spinning, stories worth telling.

  “Okay!” I hollered. “I’m ready to practice!”

  I ran to the center of Cleo’s living room. Boone muted the newsman, then he and Mama and Frannie Jo and Biscuit all crammed close together on the couch, watching me. I clutched my blue book tight as I read my first poem, but the words didn’t feel right. I barely got through two full stanzas before I was tongue-tied. “Boone?” I said, glancing up.

  “You’re doing great!” He nodded back.

  “I wasn’t in need of affirmation,” I sighed. “I was wondering …
if you’d play your banjo while I talk? Maybe the music will get my words where they need to go.”

  Boone pulled his banjo up into his lap and strummed softly. And I dueled once, then twice, then a third time. The first time was a mess. The second time was less messy but still clunky.

  But the third time? The third time was spindiddly, if I do say so myself.

  I slammed the refrigerator door shut when I heard Cleo’s key turn in the lock. I thought about trying to duck down, real sneaky, so she wouldn’t see me in the kitchen. But then I thought about how she’d probably get after me with her broom, so I said, “I’m here, Cleo.”

  Cleo startled. She leaned down and stared into the dark, looking for me. “Felicity? You still awake?”

  I opened the refrigerator door again so she could see my face. “I was hungry,” I said.

  “At midnight?” Cleo walked over to the kitchen and propped her hand on the door. “What are you hungry for at midnight?”

  “Ice cream.” I smiled.

  Cleo nodded. “That’s my girl. Hand me a carton, too. You finish your Duel stuff?”

  “Yep,” I said. I passed Cleo a pint of Chocolate Chip Pork Rind. “You marrying Day Grissom?”

  “Ha,” Cleo clucked. She shuffled out of the kitchen. “You go to sleep now. You gotta be top-notch for the Duel tomorrow. I got a big surprise for you in the morning.” I could hear a smile in Cleo’s voice when she turned back and said, “I sure am proud of you, no matter how it turns out. I don’t want you to ever forget how proud I am of you, no matter where you wander off to.”

  “I never will,” I promised.

  Cleo walked on down the hall to her bedroom. I heard Boone yell OOOF! when Cleo accidentally kicked him. But then I heard Cleo chuckle and realized it probably wasn’t an accident at all. After that, the whole apartment got quiet again.

  I opened the freezer and took out the pint of Blackberry Sunrise.

  SWEET

  AMENDS

  If there was something in that ice cream that would help me break Isabella’s curse … I needed to face it. Mama was packed and ready to roll. Even if we left town, I wanted to be able to look back and say that I tried.