“I’m pretty?”
“Sure, you’re pretty, Reason, but you’re a kid. You didn’t even know that Manhattan is an island.”
“I do now.”
“Reason, that’s not the point. You’re just a baby!”
“No, I’m not. I’m an old woman. For a magic-wielder I’m old. I could die tomorrow. I don’t want to die without ever having kissed anyone.”
“You’ve never been kissed?”
I shook my head. “Not ever. I’m fifteen and I could be dead tomorrow and you smell good and I want to kiss you.”
Danny laughed. “You smell pretty nice, too, but I can’t. You’re Julieta’s friend. It’d be too weird.”
I leaned closer to him. He was rejecting me, but I leaned closer. My body was doing it, not me—my brain had lost all control. I felt my nervous animal responses: pulse rate, sweat, my eyelids fluttering, an uneven twitch in one of the muscles of my left cheek. Just like any other animal, Sarafina had told me when she explained the facts of life. I didn’t feel like any other animal. I felt like me.
“I can’t kiss—”
I put my lips against his, gently this time. Neither of us moved a muscle. His lips were warm, soft, dry. I was terrified he’d move away, terrified that he wouldn’t. What was I doing? The old man’s pins and needles shifted inside me, pushing me closer to Danny.
His mouth opened; so did mine. I felt his tongue on mine. It felt good, not gross at all. I hoped I wouldn’t forget to breathe. His hands slid over my cheeks, so big they covered my entire face. He pulled me closer to him. All my senses were focused on the connection between our two mouths. There wasn’t anything else. I didn’t know if my eyes were opened or shut. I swivelled around onto my knees to reach him more easily, put my hands on his shoulders. They were hard with muscle, smooth and warm. My fingers glided across, onto his back. His hands slid from my face onto my back, the two of them almost covering it entirely. There was so much of him, so much more of him than me.
Still, we kissed. Sharp pins and needles danced throughout my body, pushed me closer to him.
Danny pulled away. “Are you sure?” he said. His voice sounded odd, throaty. It made me want to kiss him more, touch him more. There was a sweet smell filling the air in between us.
“You smell like limes,” I said. “You smell good.” It wasn’t just him: everything smelled of limes, of lightly toasted bread, of cinnamon.
He slipped an arm under my knees, gathered me to him, went up onto his knees, grunted a little, and then stood. “Are you sure?” he asked again.
Sure of what? I wondered. I was sure I wanted to kiss him a lot, touch him, and I wanted him to touch me. “Yes.”
He carried me into the bedroom, stumbling in the darkness before he laid me on the bed, leaned over me, kissing me again and again and again. Finding each other by touch, by taste. “We shouldn’t,” he said, his mouth so close to me I was stealing his breath. “I shouldn’t. Tell me no.”
I kissed his mouth. The smell had come with us. The room was full of sweet limes, of something fresh and newly baked. The smell was so familiar, so good. I felt Danny’s hand moving up my waist as he pulled my T-shirt over my head. I heard him pulling at his pyjamas. “Are you sure?” he asked again, his voice beside my ear.
Every cell of my body wanted to touch every cell of his body. Had to. “I want to bury myself in you,” I said.
“Oh, God,” Danny said. “I have to bury myself in you.” But he pulled away, took a deep, noisy breath, said something fast in a language I didn’t know.
I couldn’t see him in the dark, so I let my eyes blur, to see what was there beneath his skin, what he looked like right down in his cells. He was so clean he glowed. There was no magic there, none at all.
I moved across the bed to the sound of his breathing. Reached out my hands, touched his chest, ran my fingers along his body till I found his chin, his lips. I kissed him again. He groaned and returned my kisses. We leaned back onto the bed. Sheets against my back, his hot skin against my front. We rolled, sheets and skin wrapped around each other.
“I’ll try not to hurt you,” he said.
I couldn’t imagine how he could.
21
Family Secrets
“Tom! Tom! Wake up. It’s morning.”
Someone with giant hands and sharp teeth covered in feathers was shaking him.
“Tom!”
“Nyahunh?” Tom said, trying to open his gluey eyes. “Don’hur’m’.”
“Tom, Tom, it’s just me. Wake up! Are you sick?” Tom felt a hand on his forehead. “You don’t feel hot.”
“Nahmk,” Tom said. In his head it had been, No, I’m okay.
“Are you sick, Tom?”
“I’m okay,” he said, more clearly (he hoped). Through the gunk in his eyes everything was blurry.
“You’ve been asleep a whole day.”
Tom’s eyes opened. He wiped sleep away, sat up a little. There were no monstrous hands, no feral teeth, and no feathers. “Hey, Da.”
“Hey, yourself.” His dad leaned forward and sniffed his breath. “You weren’t drinking, were you?”
“Dad!” Tom sat up and glared at his father.
“Well, what am I supposed to think? I get back from getting the groceries yesterday at eleven in the morning and you’re out cold, and I keep checking on you throughout the day and you’re still off in the land of Nod. And it’s the next morning and you still haven’t woken up!”
“I have now.” Tom yawned. “Sort of.”
“You weren’t drinking? You didn’t take any other kind of—”
“Dad!!”
“You’re telling me you were just very tired. Twenty-fourhours-of-sleep tired?”
“It was a magic thing.”
His father’s mouth closed, his lips went thin, and he got that tight expression he always wore when Tom said the word magic.
“Well, come on, Da, what d’you reckon? I mean I only just slept this long once before—exactly like this—in New York. You’re the one who lied to Cath about it and told her I have…whatever illness it was…”
“Thomas Sebastian Yarbro!” His father was looking at him with an expression Tom had never seen before, halfway between gobsmacked and killing rage. Right now Tom didn’t care, though he had a feeling he would later.
“How dense can you be, Da?” Tom had never spoken to his father like this before. He wasn’t sure what had gotten into him, except that he was really, really, really ropeable, and his dad’d accused him of being a drug addict, when what’d really happened was that he was…was that he, Tom Yarbro, was the drug. “Didn’t it occur to you to connect the two? Big sleep in New York, magic thing; big sleep a few days later in Sydney, possibly also a magic thing?”
The expression on his dad’s face faded. “There’s a stack of phone messages. Mostly Niki, Ron, and Scooter. You can’t just dump your old friends when you get new ones. You need to call them back. Oh, and Jessica Chan rang.”
“You what?”
“Something about another dress. Apparently it’s an emergency.”
“Da, you can’t not talk about—”
“Tom, I can’t.” His father stopped, took a deep breath, looked right at Tom, into his eyes, but as if he didn’t quite recognise him. “I just can’t. I don’t understand any of”—he waved his arm in the general direction of Mere’s house—“that. I just don’t. All I know is that you were…you were becoming like your mother, and now you’re not. You’re happy—well, mostly—and Mere had a lot to do with it, and I’m grateful. But that stuff scares me. I guess I’d rather you had been drinking, because that I’d understand.”
Tom stared back at his father—his turn to be gobsmacked.
“I accept that it’s real, but it doesn’t mean that I like that it’s real. How am I supposed to deal with knowing that I’ll most likely outlive you? Or that the only way you can live much past forty is if you go mad like your mother?”
“Cheer up, maybe you’ll have an
accident and die first.”
His dad sighed. “Very droll. Parents shouldn’t outlive their kids.”
“Actually, Lien says—”
“Your old history teacher?”
“Yeah. She says in the olden days parents mostly outlived their kids.”
“Indeed. Infant mortality’s still disgracefully high amongst Australia’s indigenous population.” Tom’s father taught sociology at Sydney Uni and had lots of books with tedious titles like Archaeology of the Meaning of the City or The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge, which were written by people with names like Habermas, who Tom privately thought of as Mighty Mouse, and Foucault, who Tom thought of as…well, something pretty rude.
“I don’t have anyone to talk about it with, Da.”
“What about Mere? Or her granddaughter? Or that American girl?”
“I just met them, Da, and Esmeralda’s…” Tom wanted to tell his dad what she’d done to him, but he didn’t know how. “They’re not family. I want to talk to you, to Cathy.”
“Cathy doesn’t know anything about—”
“I want to tell her.”
“Do you think that’s fair?” his father asked. It was not what Tom was expecting; usually his father stuck to repeating all Esmeralda’s arguments for secrecy.
“How d’you mean, ‘fair’?”
His father stood up, walked to Tom’s balcony, treading on the fabrics underfoot. Tom winced. His dad looked out at Esmeralda’s huge fig tree, Filomena. In the bright sunlight the leaves glowed. It was a cloudless day, but it didn’t feel as hot as the last few days. Tom wondered what time it was. He sat up, realised that he was still wearing his clothes from yesterday. No wonder Da’d thought he’d been drinking.
Tom’s father turned to him. “I think your sister’s better off not knowing. I wish I didn’t know.”
“I hate having secrets from her. It’s not fair to me or her.”
“How’s your sister going to feel when she discovers that you don’t have long—”
“If I had a disease that was killing me, would you keep it a secret from her?”
His father didn’t answer for a long time. “Okay, yes, I would tell her. But a disease is different. It’s within the bounds of what one can expect from life. This, this isn’t.”
“Cath’s suspicious, Dad. For the past year she’s felt left out. Is that fair? Every time I talk to her she begs me to tell her what’s going on, and I really, really, really want to. ’Cause it’s all scary and weird and I need to talk to someone.” Tom felt his eyes getting damp. He blinked. His dad looked away nervously.
“All right.”
“You mean I can tell her?”
“Yes, tell her.”
8
First his father made them both a huge fry-up breakfast. Sausages, eggs, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese—even the bread was fried. All of it dripped grease and yumminess. Tom squeezed a tonne of oranges to make them as much juice as they needed to wash it all down. One of his few memories of his mother before she went crazy was that she only ever squeezed enough oranges to fill four small glasses. Tom was always left wanting more.
“It’s fantastic, Da,” he said, enjoying the not-quite-burnt onions. “Perfect.”
“Isn’t it?” said his dad. “Your mother would never let me make a real breakfast. She was against butter—too much cholesterol—and if you let anything get even vaguely brown, she’d get all upset about carcinogens.”
Tom had never heard his father say anything negative about his mother before. He wondered if he’d somehow put the thought in his head, remembering about the tiny glasses of orange juice.
“Was that before she went mad?”
“Sometimes, Tom, I think she was born crazy. I met your mother when we were fourteen, and she was always obsessed with something or other: eating right, her motorbike—”
“Mum had a motorbike!”
“Oh, yeah. She used to be wild, your mum.” His dad smiled softly, in a way that made Tom uncomfortable. He really hoped his dad wouldn’t tell him what he was remembering. “Very wild. Her craziness was mostly good. Fun. Until she really lost it.”
His father didn’t need to say anything else. Tom remembered vividly the day his mother had attacked him and Cathy. He would never forget it.
“So, how are you enjoying having two new girlfriends?”
Tom blushed hot and prickling from head to toe. “They’re not my girlfriends!”
His dad cracked up and Tom knew he’d been had.
“Bastard.”
His dad kept grinning. “They’re nice-looking girls.”
Tom was torn between hotly retorting that Reason was way better than “nice-looking” and trying to ignore him. “I hadn’t really noticed.”
His dad laughed again.
“Dad!”
“Though it must be good for you to have kids your own age who have the, ah…”
“Who are magic-wielders, too?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“It’s all right.” Tom thought about Jay-Tee dying, drinking magic from him; Reason off in New York City with tall, dark, handsome, and very poxy Danny. “Yeah, it’s great. After breakfast I’ll go over and see how they’re doing.”
“You’re not going to call your sister?”
“I think I need to talk to Esmeralda first.”
“Fair enough. Tell Mere hi from me.”
Tom half nodded. He had a lot he wanted to say to Esmeralda; none of it involved passing on greetings.
8
Tom decided to see Jay-Tee first. He climbed from his dad’s balcony to the front balcony of Esmeralda’s. First he pressed his face against the glass of Reason’s door, hoping she’d come home. But her room was empty, her bed unslept in.
He turned the door handle. Not locked. He opened the door slowly, peering through the door. No one there. He checked the toilet and then tiptoed out into the hallway, pausing to listen for any movement. He didn’t want to see Esmeralda until he was ready. He heard only birds outside, a car driving by—nothing from within the house. No noise from the kitchen, no noise from the door.
Tom crept along the hallway to Jay-Tee’s room, stopped outside the door listening. Nothing. He knocked as quietly as he could. If Jay-Tee was there, he wanted her to hear, but not anyone (Esmeralda) downstairs.
“Jay-Tee?” No response.
He opened the door slowly, peeking his head around. Jay-Tee was in bed. He crept closer. There was a giant bruise on her cheekbone.
“Jay-Tee? Are you okay?”
He sat down on the bed beside her. “Jay-Tee?” She didn’t stir or do any of the things a sleeping person should be doing. Tom could feel his heart beating faster.
He stared at her eyes. Her eyelids didn’t even flicker. He held his hand up to her mouth. His hand shook; seconds went by. He felt nothing. He held his hand closer, bare millimetres away from her lips. This couldn’t be real. Why wasn’t she moving? Why wasn’t she breathing?
“Please, Jay-Tee, breathe. Please.”
Then he felt it, the slightest featherweight of warm air. Her breath on his hand. She was alive. Unconscious but alive. What had happened to her? He could think of an explanation. He hoped he was wrong.
What had Esmeralda done to her?
Tom sped out of the room, took the stairs three at a time, jumping the last six so that he landed in the downstairs hallway with a thud, and ran into the kitchen. Esmeralda jumped up, dropping paper and pen to the floor. She looked like she’d never done anything wrong in her entire life. Her scrubbed, fresh-looking face, her young-girl ponytail. Even in a faded T-shirt and jeans, she looked good. Her looks were a lie.
“Tom! Are you all right? You startled me.”
Good, thought Tom.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
As if you didn’t know! Tom found that he was shaking too much to get his mouth open. The room was shifting as if he were viewing it through a kaleidoscope. He couldn’t see anything but true shapes: tri
angles, squares, hexagons, rhombuses, and trapezoids.
“What did you do to Jay-Tee?” he shouted at the mass of geometric shapes that had been Esmeralda. “Did you drink her dry? I know you lied to me, I know you drank from me. Have you done it to her now? Is Jay-Tee going to die today? I’ll kill you if she dies. I’ll kill you.” Tom’s voice was tight, as if his vocal cords were ready to snap.
“Tom, I—”
“Lied to me, lied to Jay-Tee, lied to Reason. Her mum was right to run away from you. You’re evil. You’re worse than Jason Blake. How could you do that to me? If you needed magic, I’d’ve given you some of mine. Like I did for Jay-Tee. Why’d you just take it from me?”
“I didn’t—”
“You know what? I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. What are you going to do? Tell me more lies? It’s pointless. I’m going to go upstairs and give Jay-Tee some more magic—”
“Tom!” Esmeralda took a step forward, reached out a hand to touch him with her trapezoidal fingers. Tom pulled the shapes towards him, twisting them into acute triangles, sharp and broken.
Esmeralda cascaded into a shower of jagged shapes. She screamed. “No!”
Tom fell, the kitchen falling apart as he descended. A dog’s breakfast of triangles, rhombuses, and trapezoids. When he hit the floor, his eyes snapped shut. Tom watched dodecahedrons form and crumble on the backs of his eyelids. Darkness threatened to draw him down, but he forced his eyes open and the shapes trickled away from him. The room lost its true shapes, became Esmeralda’s kitchen again.
“Tom,” Esmeralda said, leaning over him. “You lost your temper. You know you can’t ever lose—”
“I know.” It had felt so good, though. Like something his body had always wanted to do, needed to do. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
“You broke three of my fingers.”
“I hope it hurts.” Tom had never felt as calm as he did lying on the cool tiles of Esmeralda’s kitchen floor. “Did you drink from Jay-Tee?”
“No.”
“Then what happened to her?”
“Tom, sit up. We need to talk.”
“We are talking. I’m asking you questions. Why did you drink from me without asking?”
Magic Lessons Page 15
