Magic Lessons

by Justine Larbalestier

  He pulled it out, examined the screen, pressed a button, put it back in his pocket.

  “How come you didn’t answer it?”

  “Huh? Oh, it was a friend of mine. Don’t feel like talking to them right now.”

  “How could you tell who it was?” I asked.

  Danny raised an eyebrow—clearly, he thought it was a dumb question. “I can see the name of the person calling.”

  “Then how come you didn’t know it was me when I called you? Didn’t my name show up?” I slipped my hands up into the sleeves of the jumper. It was freezing.

  “Er, no.” Danny stared at me as if he was trying to figure me out. “That wasn’t your phone, was it?”

  “No, of course not. I’ve never owned a phone.”

  Danny laughed. “I can tell.”

  “What time is it?” I asked, wondering how Tom and Jay-Tee were doing.

  “Quarter to two.”

  “Huh.”

  “Do you know how long you’ll be staying here?”

  I shook my head. “I guess it depends on what happens with that old man. I can’t go back to Sydney until he’s gone or lets me past or something.”

  “You could always take a plane, you know.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. How much would that cost? Plane rides were expensive, weren’t they? I took in Danny’s apartment. So big, such a huge television. He had a lot of money now. All of it from his dead magic father. Esmeralda had money, too. I wasn’t used to a life where money solved problems; I was used to money—or, rather, not having any—being the problem.

  Sarafina never had enough. She worked lots of different jobs—barmaid, under-the-counter accountant, fruit picker, maths coach—anything she could find. Sometimes I helped, too. When we didn’t have money we’d make instant noodles go a long way or live off the land, find wild grub. Not something you could do in a big city.

  Danny and Esmeralda were both casual about money, as if it was there to pluck from the air. Apparently, it was: I’d seen Jay-Tee make money appear in her hand where there’d been nothing.

  “I’d pay for the ticket,” Danny said, as if he were offering to buy me a newspaper.

  I shook my head. It wouldn’t make any difference. “He’d still be on the other side of the door trying to get through. We have to figure out what do with him on this side. Maybe there’ll be clues or someone here who knows what to do. It’s a big city—I can’t be the only magic one. Esmeralda had some decent ideas.” I shifted my feet. They were starting to go blue and tingle again.

  “Do you like being in Sydney with your grandmother?”

  I considered this. “I get to see my mum. And it’s nice being with Jay-Tee and Tom. I don’t trust Esmeralda, but so far it’s been okay. I just have to stay alert. Anyways, it’s warm there. Summer.”

  Danny slid the door open. “Come on in, then. No need to freeze if you don’t have to.”

  I followed him in. “Esmeralda wants me to try and track down where the old man comes from.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “With magic.”

  “Okay,” Danny said, as if he understood, which, of course, he didn’t. “What kind of magic?”

  “I can smell him. She wants me to follow his trail.”

  His phone rang. He shrugged in half apology, pulled it out. “This friend I better answer,” he said to me before putting the phone to his ear. “Hi, Sondra. Uh-huh. Oh, sure, me, too.” He went into his room and shut the door.

  I wondered what it was like for your friends and family to be able to get in touch with you whenever they wanted. What it was like to have so many friends that your phone rang several times a day. Strange to think of. Did Danny carry his phone with him wherever he went? Into the dunny even? Did everyone with mobile phones do that? Out bush some people had mobiles, but they hardly ever worked. You had to be in one of the big towns before there was any signal.

  Fifteen minutes later Danny came back out with a large piece of paper in his hand. He didn’t say anything about the phone call. I wondered who Sondra was. How many friends did Danny have? “Okay, you’ll need clothes. Not to mention shoes.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I felt like a der-brain for not having thought of it.

  He put the paper on the floor and knelt beside it, holding it in place. “Put your foot on this.” I did and he pushed the pen around my left foot, his hand brushing past my ankle. “Next foot.” I switched feet. The ghost sensation of his skin on mine lingered. He traced around my right foot, his inner wrist touching the arch of my foot, my ankle. I fought to keep my blush down. “Now,” he said, looking at me, completely unaffected. “What else are you going to need?”

  “Um,” I said, trying to focus my brain on something other than his hands against my feet. “Socks. I’ll need socks.”

  He nodded. “Socks, shoes, winter coat, a hat, gloves. Shirts, jeans.” He wrote them down beside the outline of my feet, then held his hand out palm first. “Put your hand against mine.”

  I did. His hands were warm and dry. Smooth. I felt my cheeks grow hot again. My hand was only a little bigger than his palm.

  “Okay. Itty-bitty hands. I’ll get you a scarf, too.” He wrote it down. “That should be enough.”

  “Um, I’ll need knickers, too,” I said, embarrassed. Sarafina would not think much of my embarrassment. She didn’t approve of people being embarrassed by everyday things like knickers or menstruation or anything, really. You should only be embarrassed by your own bad behaviour, like lying. Yet she had lied to me about magic. I was going to die young because of her lies.

  “What?” Danny asked, looking confused.

  “Undies.”

  “Undies?”

  “You know? I’ll need a bra and—”

  “Panties. Oh, yeah. I gotcha. Sorry.”

  I told him my sizes. He had no idea if they would translate or not.

  “What’s your favourite colour?”

  Red, I thought, the browny-red of the ground up north. Then I realised that I was in New York City, so it wasn’t north at all. Dizzying.

  I thought about Jay-Tee. Red-brown was the colour of the rust throughout her, the colour of the smell and taste that meant she didn’t have long to live. Neither of us did.

  “Blue,” I said. “Deep blue.”

  11

  Fading

  “It’s not moving,” Mere said. Jay-Tee hadn’t heard her coming into the kitchen, but she managed not to jump. Unsurprisingly, Tom almost leapt halfway across the room. At least he managed not to knock anything over. Mere put the box she was carrying down on the counter.

  “No,” Tom said, trying to sound calm. “It stopped about…” He looked at the stove clock. “Ten minutes ago.”

  “Thirteen,” Jay-Tee said, glancing down at the pad. She’d been sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the door ever since Reason’d hung up, noting down changes, almost—but not quite—letting herself fall into a trance. Both Esmeralda and Reason seemed to think it was important. They both knew numbers. Tom was annoying her so much she now greeted his endless comments and questions with grunts or with silence. His words were wearing her down, making her even tireder than she already was.

  “Here,” Mere said, reaching out for the pad. Jay-Tee handed it to her. She leafed through a few pages. “Good work. Thank you.”

  “Reason rang,” Tom said. “She wanted to talk to you.”

  Mere nodded.

  “Did you find anything next door?” Jay-Tee asked, eyeing the box. She wondered what was in it. More feathers? Bones?

  Mere nodded. “One or two things. I have some ideas.”

  “Like, for example?” Jay-Tee asked.

  “You two must be a bit sick of sitting here guarding the door.”

  “Too right!” Tom said.

  Jay-Tee said, “Yeah!” even louder. No way was he as sick of her as she was of him.

  “Why don’t you both take a break?” Mere looked at her watch. “Come back in an hour and I’ll tell you—�
��

  Jay-Tee didn’t wait to hear the rest. Suddenly she was jumping out of her skin with the need to be moving, to run, to be out of there and looking at anything in the world but that damn door. She exploded out of the kitchen, bolted out the front door, jumped the front gate, went sprinting down the narrow, uneven sidewalk, past trees, some with such low-lying branches that—short though she was—she had to duck to avoid being clobbered. Houses flickered by, squat and low, pressed together closer than teeth, leaning in on the street as if they wanted to consume it. She felt her mother’s leather against her wrist, the vibration of the animal tooth in her pocket.

  She didn’t pause at the end of the block, just lifted up her knees and ran harder. The only cars were parked and still, metal guardians of a road so narrow that in New York it would have barely qualified as an alley. For the length of the next block a flock of red-green-blue chirruping birds kept pace before disappearing into a shaggy tree covered with shaggy red flowers. The air was utterly still, but it didn’t matter—Jay-Tee ran so fast, she created her own wind.

  She sailed over a pile of dog poop, sprinted across the next narrow road, and ran down the next block, where the trees were so out of control that their roots turned the sidewalk into a broken-down earthquake survivor. To keep from tripping she stepped lighter, lifted her knees higher, but she didn’t slow her pace, so it wasn’t until she hit the end of the street and zoomed left to avoid the heavily trafficked road that she realized how good the shade had been, how strong the sun now was, how overheated she was.

  Her black hair radiated more heat than tar on a city roof in the middle of August. She streamed water, salt stung her eyes. Up ahead she saw tall trees shading a low brick wall in front of an ugly block of orange brick apartments. She slowed and sank down onto the bricks, scorching despite the shade. Jay-Tee didn’t care. She slipped her hands under her thighs and leaned forward, breathing deeply.

  She felt dizzy, empty. If she was shaken maybe she would rattle; maybe she would break. But after being stuck in the house all morning staring at the stupid door, everything looked so good. She grinned, sat up, still breathing hard. In the distance where the road disappeared, shimmering heat danced over the line of cars and trucks waiting for the lights to change. She glanced up at the blue, blue, blue sky, but it was too sharply, vibrantly light for her to look at it long. She shielded her eyes with her hand. “Wow.”

  Jay-Tee had never seen light so intense before. Despite the traffic fumes, everything had such sharp, clear lines, as if the cars, the trees, the old chewing gum stuck to the sidewalk had been freshly cut from glass with a laser. Another flock of the red-blue-green chirrupers zoomed by. Each one of them dazzling: greener greens, bluer blues, redder reds than she’d ever seen.

  “Wow,” Jay-Tee said again. Somehow she’d managed to forget she was in a whole other city, a whole other country. She’d never been farther away from New York than Jersey City. Never been some place where every single person spoke completely different than her, where the cars drove on opposite sides of the road, where the light was so bright it cut her eyes.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—I’m in Australia! She crossed herself, thanked God that she’d gotten to see a little more of the world before she died. She hoped she’d get to go into the outback like Reason had promised, finally see some kangaroos. How cool would that be?

  Jay-Tee glanced at her watch. “Wow.” It was only eightthirty. Morning still. She’d thought it was like noon or something. How could it be this hot so early in the morning? The thought made her dizzier. Time had totally slowed down. She wondered if it was a jet-lag thing. Or a staringat-the-stupid-door thing.

  “Jay-Tee!”

  She turned. It was Tom, wearing a dorky hat and clutching his sides. He sat down beside her.

  “Bugger, you can run fast.”

  “Yup. You make dresses, and I can run faster than a jet plane.”

  “You think it’s magic?” Tom asked once he got his breath back.

  “Oh, sure. I went even faster with the extra talisman Esmeralda gave me.” She reached into her pocket to feel the tooth. It was almost as hot as the bitumen road. “I kind of know where I am all the time.”

  Tom gave her a look. “Um, yeah, Jay-Tee, me, too. Right now we’re in Newtown—”

  “No, no, not like that. I meant in space. I know where I am compared to everything else around me.” Tom still looked confused. “I never bump into things, Tom. Not ever. I’m like the total opposite of clumsy. ’Cause I just know—I mean, my body just knows—where everything is, especially people. Someone jumps out suddenly, I can get out of the way. ’Less they’re faster than me, of course.” She thought of her father, and then of him and felt momentarily chilled. “Anyway, that’s what helps me go so fast. I think I’d still be a fast runner without magic, but not that fast.”

  “Cool.”

  “Ain’t it?”

  Tom nodded. “Your brother knows about magic and everything, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh,” Tom said.

  “Why?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jay-Tee shrugged. “Your country sure is bright.”

  “You taking the piss?”

  Jay-Tee giggled. “You talk funny. Is there somewhere we can get some water? I’m so thirsty I’m about ready to faint.”

  “Sure. Corner shop just around the corner.”

  That struck Jay-Tee as funny, too, and she giggled again.

  “What?”

  “Corner shop around the corner.”

  Tom sighed and stood up. “You know, I’m getting a bit jack of you always—”

  Jay-Tee started to stand, felt dizzy, and sat back down again.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded, though there were dots in front of her eyes and her fingertips tingled. Light-headed, that’s how she felt, like her head was hollow, except it wasn’t only her head; her whole body was lighter than it should be.

  “You sure? You don’t look good.” Tom squatted in front of her and stared into her eyes; for a moment he was so far away it was like seeing through a telescope. Then he was so close she could count every freckle on his skin; some of them were gold. There were so many of them, they made her dizzy all over again. She wobbled. Tom put a hand on her knee to steady her and just like that Jay-Tee knew what was wrong.

  She was dying. Right-here-and-now dying. Magic-used-up dying. She knew it because she could feel Tom’s magic pulsing in his hand on her skin; she could feel her cells screaming at her that she needed it, that she had to take it. She was too weak to tear it from him.

  This was it. So much sooner than she had ever expected. Jay-Tee’s head tumbled with all the things she should have done, or rather shouldn’t have done. If only she hadn’t helped with the protection spell or run crazy fast. She’d thought having two talismans would make her magic last longer. If only…She should have listened to her father. Be careful. Don’t use magic unless you have to. Don’t conjure money out of air. Don’t dance too hard, run too fast. Don’t, don’t, don’t. But she’d done everything she wasn’t supposed to.

  I’m too young for this. In front of her eyes the world was narrowing. The hazy distances, the cars, the road, the strange trees and birds—all disappearing.

  Jay-Tee had never really believed she would die. Not now. Not her. But here she was, and her energy, her life, whatever it was that made her who she was—was vanishing, run down into almost nothing. Jay-Tee didn’t want to die.

  “I need your magic, Tom.”

  His eyes, opened wide, were all whites. “What?”

  “I’m dying. I can feel it. I need you to give me some of your magic. I won’t take it from you. I wouldn’t do that to you.” Jay-Tee was lying. She couldn’t do that to him. “I don’t think I have much longer.” She was fading, getting smaller and smaller. She wondered if her skin was shriveling like a mummy’s or like a vampire in the sun. She shouldn’t have run like that. It was the running that had pushed her
over. She shouldn’t have—

  “How much will you need?”

  “I don’t know.” All of it. “But you control how much you give me, Tom. When you can’t spare any more, you stop.”

  He looked afraid; the patchy crimson flush of his cheeks had all but vanished as if they weren’t sitting outside in hundreddegree heat. It was true, then: Esmeralda really hadn’t ever drunk from him.

  “What do I do?” he asked, his voice even softer than hers.

  “You let me touch you and you say yes.” She could barely see him. “You let me take your magic. It won’t feel good. It’ll be horrible—you’ll want to hurl. You’ll hate it. I hated it. Will you do it for me, Tom? You have so much.” Her voice was breaking, her eyes leaking. “I don’t want to die. Not this soon.”

  Tom moved his head. She couldn’t see whether he was nodding or not. She reached forward, felt for his hand, and put hers on top. “Pull away, say no as soon as you need to.” It was getting harder and harder to get the words out. “I’m weak, Tom, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop this myself. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Tom whispered, so faint she could barely hear. As if he were the one dying, not her.

  “Will you give me some of your magic?”

  “Yes.”

  His magic streamed into her, clean, strong, alive.

  12

  Smelling Magic

  Before Danny went out to buy me clothes, he showed me how his television worked. His phone rang again, but he didn’t answer it. I’d never been around anyone who got so many phone calls. But I hadn’t been around many people who had mobile phones before. Maybe it was normal.

  I sat on the big couch, waiting for him to come back, pressing the remote control to change the images on the huge screen. Going faster and faster, watching a kaleidoscope of images zipping by, startling and strange. I glimpsed a person flying, not in a plane but like a bird. Magic flying. Except it wasn’t real, just how the rest of the world imagined magic would be: careless and easy. Fun.