Euphoria Kids

by Alison Evans

  He frowns a little but doesn’t bug me about it. I wave goodbye as he goes into the classroom, and he sits alone up the front. I watch him for a sec as the teacher talks to him. He nods and smiles politely. I could go hang out in Eaglefern, but maybe I shouldn’t leave him alone. He was all alone in science, too. I sigh, then open the door. No one notices me walk in, and the teacher doesn’t notice as I sit down. The boy looks around. ‘Are you invisible?’ he asks as he leans towards me.

  I nod. ‘Sometimes. It’s hard to explain. I was cursed by a witch.’

  ‘Huh.’ He takes it in. ‘My dad did say we’d have an interesting time here.’

  ‘It’s an interesting town.’

  ‘Does the witch who cursed you live here?’

  ‘Some do. Not this one. I can’t find her, though sometimes I try.’

  ‘To lift the curse?’

  I nod.

  ‘How come the teacher doesn’t notice when I’m talking to you?’

  ‘Not sure. The curse seems to like, cover people I’m in contact with. And it’s like, I’m never marked as absent from class. And even if they can’t see me during a test, they’ll take my finished paper when I offer it to them. I don’t get it.’

  The teacher asks us to do problems from the textbook. I don’t really understand graphs much. I can do anything else. But graphs confuse me. And I never have anyone to ask, really. Iris is in a different maths class, not learning this stuff.

  I watch the boy as he gets out his ruler and starts to draw the axes. ‘How do you do that?’ I ask, and he shows me with steady hands how to figure out where the dots go, how to connect them with a line. I still don’t quite understand by the end of class, but then the bell rings for lunch and I disappear from him. ‘Boy?’ I ask, and I can see his confusion, the way he looks right through me. The way he can’t see my pencil case or books on the table anymore. ‘I’m still here,’ I say, though I know he can’t hear me. ‘You should go sit with Iris. They’re lovely. They’ll love you.’

  He packs up his things and with a last look at where I was sitting, he heads out the door. I sit in the classroom till it’s empty.

  I bring my arms up onto the desk and rest my forehead on them. I wish the witch had never found me, I wish I could be seen all the time. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on being solid, being seen. But I know it doesn’t work, somehow. I feel like a fog, like fairy floss, like I’m not quite real. A shadow, made of static.

  I breathe in as much as I can, exhale all at once. Get up, Babs. When I try the door, it’s locked. ‘Come on!’ I yell, twisting the doorknob, but it won’t budge. It hasn’t not even got a little snib that I can turn to unlock it, which seems hugely unsafe.

  I roll my eyes and think through all the spells I know. Any for unlocking? Mum’s probably taught me heaps. But then she says the most important part is intention. I press my hand to the door and focus really hard, trying to imagine it unlocked, me walking through it.

  I try the handle again. Damn.

  The window’s open a tiny crack, though, and there’s a big branchy tree outside. It takes a bit to push the window, an old heavy thing, open all the way. There’s a staircase underneath, concrete and bricks. If I fall, it’s not going to be soft.

  I go back to grab my books and pencil case, then drop them out the window. They splay out over the ground. I take a deep breath and grab the closest branch, tugging on it gently to make sure it can bear my weight.

  With both hands, I grip. Tight, release, tight, release. I can do this.

  I let myself drop off the windowsill. My arms protest as I shimmy down the branch until my feet can reach the bigger one underneath, closer to the ground. The tree groans.

  ‘Oh!’ I stop moving.

  The tree brings a few branches closer to me, and at first it looks like it’s going to flick me off like an unwanted fly. But the branches pause, and I reach out, and then they form steps to help me get down.

  When my feet hit the concrete, I realise I’m shaking. ‘Thank you,’ I say, touching the trunk. That would have taken a lot of energy. A couple of leaves fall off the branches.

  I sit with the tree for the rest of lunch, breathing next to it, hoping to transfer some of my energy back. I trace sigils on its trunk.

  I jerk awake to the bell. Scrambling to pick up my things, I say goodbye to the tree and run off to art. It’s always the hardest to stay visible in this class, but hopefully I’ll get to see Iris.

  I take a seat next to them and they hug me.

  ‘Sometimes I still can’t believe you can see me,’ I say as we get out our sketchpads. ‘I’m so scared you’ll stop altogether one day and I’ll be alone again.’ I pull out a red pencil and start to draw little squiggles, a network of them, feeding into each other.

  ‘We can still talk through the phone,’ they say.

  ‘Did a boy come and sit with you at lunch, by the way?’

  Iris raises their eyebrows. ‘No? What boy?’

  ‘The new one from science. I said he could sit with us, but then I disappeared. Oh –’ I wave at the boy as he enters the room. ‘You’re in the same class! Sit with us.’

  He sits opposite me and Iris, runs a hand through his hair. ‘Hey.’

  ‘This is Iris. And Iris, this is the boy. He doesn’t have a name yet.’

  Miranda starts talking so we don’t say anything else, but Iris sneaks a couple of glances at him. I think they’ve picked up, like I have, that he’s not sure what he’s made of. I’m fire, they’re plants, but he doesn’t know. He’s new, like a bright dawn.

  We’re supposed to start using whatever material we want to create something that describes our last birthday party, which I don’t really see the point of. The thing about art class, I guess, is that I don’t really see the point in general. This is the lead-up to our big project at the end of term, exploring ourselves and our feelings. Whenever Miranda mentions it, tiny sparks flicker and grow in my stomach.

  The boy is staring at his brand-new sketchpad – he looks lost. I want to tie a rope to his leg because I feel like he might float away. ‘Are you okay?’

  He has a new tin of the pencils we’re supposed to buy for school next to him. The plastic is still on them. I’ve got a bunch of pencils from the two-dollar shop, held together by an old hair tie.

  ‘I, uh, my last birthday party was –’

  ‘For someone who wasn’t exactly you?’ I ask.

  He nods. ‘Kinda, yeah.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a birthday party,’ Iris says. ‘Except for when I was a baby. But then I guess that was more for my parents, instead of me.’

  I laugh. ‘My last birthday was when I was still trying to convince myself I was a boy.’

  ‘I think we could just imagine what our like, ideal birthday party would be. And draw those. Otherwise we’re just gonna be sad.’

  ‘That does sound like more fun,’ the boy says. With a finger­nail he slices open the plastic covering his pencils, then he picks up the green. He draws an oval and starts filling it in.

  I tap my pencil against the table. ‘I don’t know what mine would be.’

  ‘Do you have a favourite cake? Or like, kind of dessert?’ Iris asks.

  I shrug. ‘I guess like, just butter cake. It’s so nice. Or maybe . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I really love lemon meringue. But it’s so expensive.’

  ‘Clover, one of my mums, can make a really nice lemon meringue,’ says Iris. ‘It’s Moss’s – my other mum’s – favourite, so their recipe is perfect. Just say, at this party, I’d gift you a lemon meringue.’

  I beam at Iris. ‘That’s really cute.’

  The boy’s page is full of green balloons.

  Chapter Seven

  The Faerie Bond

&nb
sp; The bell that means the end of school sounds and I grab my things, heading to my locker right before the rush of everyone else trying to get their bags out first. It’s so busy and crowded that I don’t wait for Babs and just start walking down the hill, away from school, then up the main road.

  The op shop has a boxload of free books out the front, so I take a look. I can hear something humming, and so I keep digging through the books. There’s a lot of science fiction and romance. The humming seems to be coming from deeper than the box goes, and I keep sticking my hand in further and further.

  I gasp as a shock of static electricity runs up my arm. By now, I’m more than elbow deep into a box that looks like it’s only maybe twenty centimetres tall. My hand grasps the cover of a book; it feels clothbound and like it’s falling to pieces, and I pull it up through everything else. Its cover is faded, and the gold lettering says something in another language. There is a toadstool on the front. The binding is definitely coming apart, and the pages are all mottled with water damage on the sides. It doesn’t stop humming in my hands.

  I stuff the book into my bag and get to Eaglefern. I sit down before ordering, then bring out the old book and lay it on the table. I carefully open it; the first few pages are blank. I keep flicking through. They’re all blank. It smells like old book, it looks worn and loved, so why isn’t there anything in it? I frown, close the book again. It must’ve been humming for a reason.

  I shove it back into my bag when I hear Livia coming towards the table. She brings over a hot chocolate, says it’s for free again. ‘I read up,’ she adds. ‘I didn’t realise it was so important. I like your new hair.’

  ‘Now you know,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’ There aren’t any hard feelings here, and I’m glad I didn’t just write it off. I think sometimes it’s important to, but Babs knows this woman, and respects her, so trying wasn’t wasted.

  With Clover and Moss, it was easy: they both understood straight away. I didn’t even have to explain, it just clicked. Maybe because I was a plant baby.

  The hot chocolate is fizzy good, as Babs would say, warming me up right to the ends of my fingers.

  When Babs arrives, she’s soaked; it’s started to rain. She grins at me, though, and we sit and drink before heading to the bus. When we get to her place, our uniforms are dripping because neither of us thought to take an umbrella. Wendy brings us some towels, and then when we’re dry enough we go to Babs’s room to get some dry clothes.

  She lets me have the first shower. When I step in, that burst of warm water feels better than anything else. I close my eyes and put my head under the stream. The water rushes past and warms me right to my shivering bones. I get out before I use up all the hot water, then dry myself off with the towel Wendy gave me. It’s fluffy like one from a hotel in a movie, and warm from sitting under the heating light.

  I feel new, fresh, like those two first leaves I was when I poked through the soil.

  I pull on the clothes Babs lent me, then I leave the bathroom and she has her shower. I sit in the kitchen, and her mum has just put on the kettle. ‘Would you like a tea?’ Wendy asks, getting out a second cup for me.

  ‘Please.’

  She fills the pot with steaming water and brings everything over to the table. ‘I’m glad Babs met you,’ she says after she sits down. ‘She’s never really been able to keep friends, because of how she disappears.’

  ‘I can imagine. I’m glad she told me, otherwise I guess I would have thought she’d kept flaking out on me. And it’s nice that she trusted me enough.’

  ‘She could tell you were a good person,’ Wendy says. She rotates the teapot three times clockwise before pouring out the tea. She pushes the milk jug towards me and opens the honey jar. ‘We’ve got sugar as well, if you prefer. But this honey is from our own bees.’

  ‘What? Babs didn’t tell me you had bees!’

  I’m actually more surprised that Saltkin didn’t tell me; he loves bees.

  ‘I don’t know if I can teach you magic,’ she says unprompted, so I guess Babs must’ve told her. ‘The way I learned was by feeling my way through everything. There’s no one right way to be magical. I’m not sure if anything that works for me will work for you.’

  ‘How did you learn?’

  ‘When I was a teenager, I was in the hospital a lot. I read a lot of books – this was before the internet. There was only daytime telly, which wasn’t great. One day another patient was released, and they left behind a book. It was about magic, about plants and what they can mean. I love working with herbs. I feel as though you’ll like crystals.’ She nods to the rose quartz dangling around my neck. ‘That’s a pretty rope you’ve got.’

  I wonder if I should tell her that Saltkin made it. Although I feel like she knows.

  ‘Maybe if you help me make dinner,’ she says, ‘that’s a good place to start.’

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Not sure. Something with lentils.’ She opens a cupboard and takes me through all the ingredients, deciding that she’s going to make a vegetarian bolognese. ‘I’m not a vegetarian exactly,’ she says, cutting up some vegetables, ‘but I try to eat less meat. We really only have it when we go out. Which isn’t a lot.’

  I hear Babs’s shower stop, and some clattering around in the bathroom.

  ‘She likes to take her time,’ Wendy says. ‘Sometimes she’ll be in there for hours. Which is only a slight exaggeration.’ Wendy’s laugh is like a waterfall, just like Babs. ‘Can you fill the pot with water so it covers these by a couple centimetres?’ she says, putting the vegetables and lentils in the pot.

  I lug it over to the sink and do as she says, then place it on the stovetop.

  ‘Now, the fun part.’

  On the wall, a vertical herb garden has been grown in jars. She plucks some leaves from a couple of plants, and places them on the table. Then she picks up a jar from the cluster of ingredients on the bench. She takes out two bay leaves and sits at the table, gesturing for me to do the same. ‘You can use these for wishes,’ she says, holding them out.

  I sit up a bit straighter.

  ‘You can write a wish on a bay leaf. Sometimes people burn them, but I like to let them sit in the food, and then the whole meal is a kind of spell. Do you have anything you want to wish for?’

  My mind runs blank. I’ve already wished for friends. There are probably a million things I would wish for, like to do okay at school. But I don’t know what to choose right now.

  ‘It’s okay. We can leave it more general for today,’ she says and gets out a safety pin that was tucked away somewhere in her outfit. She hands it and a bay leaf to me. ‘Just write something like, This meal will be fulfilling.’

  I scratch out the letters, lightly enough that they make a mark but not so hard that they tear a hole in the leaf. This meal will be fulfilling, I write, stumbling over the curves in the s and the m.

  ‘Pop it into the pot,’ she says.

  When I do, the water sparkles the tiniest bit. It definitely wasn’t a trick of the light: it was like diamond dust sprinkled out from under my fingers, rippling through the water as the leaf hit. Wendy wasn’t looking, she was picking some thyme off the stem, so I can’t ask if she saw it too.

  ‘And then these are just a few herbs,’ she says, showing me the ones she picked from the wall garden. ‘Basically, all plants have some kind of meaning. Some meanings won’t make sense to you, so if you think they’re different to what I tell you, then that’s okay.’ She tears the basil leaves off the stalk she picks, then tears them into a few pieces. The smell hits me and I breathe deeply. ‘Basil is for protection.’

  I know that makes sense.

  Thyme she uses for stability; oregano is also for protection. ‘I’m big on protection spells,’ she says, sprinkling the herbs into the pot. ‘Mostly customers want love spells, or to help cure a sickness.’ She stirs
the pot with a wooden spoon. ‘I like to start with seven clockwise stirs, just to get things rolling.’

  We sit back down, and she produces more tea – though I didn’t see her put on the kettle or make a new pot.

  ‘Love spells are a tricky thing. I can make a spell to help someone create a new space in their life to welcome someone else in, but I could never trick someone into falling in love. And with healing spells, they should never replace medicine. They can help things along, but my advice to you is never say that magic will make everything better.’

  ‘I guess that would be too much to hope for.’

  She nods. ‘People want easy solutions a lot of the time when they come to me. But magic is very subtle, it’s like a tiny nudge in the right direction. It’s more about getting someone to think about what choices and actions they need to make, for the thing they want happen. Sometimes the action that spurs them into gear is just wanting to see a witch. By the time my spell gets to them, they’ve already started doing what they need to do. Then the spell is inconsequential.’

  ‘Okay. So basically . . . it’s about realising what you want. Or what other people want.’

  She nods.

  Babs appears, fresh out of the shower. Her hair is tied up in a bun on her head, wet strands sticking out of it. She’s got a matching set of clothes to me, blue jeans and grey jumpers. Hers has a slogan, This must be my dream, in a plain black font. ‘Learning?’ she asks, sitting down and pouring herself a cup of tea. She spoons in honey but doesn’t have any milk. I can smell it’s an Earl Grey this time.

  ‘Trying.’

  Wendy stands up. ‘You’re doing. I’ll get you some books.’ She rummages through the shelves and gives me two slim volumes. One is about spellcraft, the other, crystals. I think of the book I found in the op-shop box, tucked in my bag. ‘You can keep the crystal one,’ she says. ‘I don’t like them but I think they’ll be good for you.’

  The rose quartz vibrates against my chest when I touch the book. ‘Thank you so much.’