Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  I shook my head, sucking the burned place where the wooden stick tasted like smoke. “Like they take your blood or something?”

  She laughed and threw a piece of lettuce at me. It hit my shoulder and tumbled down onto the table. “You give somebody a choice for magical powers and then test their personality by what they pick. You say you want to fly, it’s supposed to mean you have a hero complex—like Superman or something. But if you say you want to be invisible, it means you’re all about the villains. Invisible people are up to some nefarious shit.”

  I threw the lettuce back at her. “That’s how you know a dude invented that question.”

  Harmony smiled. She was wearing this dark, shiny eyeshadow, layered on thick, like magic marker. “How so?” She said it softly, like here was the real test.

  “It’s some high-level bullshit, is all. Thinking people only pick the secret one because they want to do bad things.”

  She nodded and leaned closer, and all of a sudden her eyes were big and bright and lit up like planets. “Right? I mean, think about all the ways you could figure out how to do good! How cool would it be to go around messing with the bad guys where no one can see you?”

  That hadn’t been what I meant. All I meant was that sometimes you pick invisibility so some asshole in a snapback and track pants doesn’t scream at you about bjs out the car window when you’re walking to the bus. You pick invisibility because it’s halfway through English and you got dressed in the dark because you still share a room with your sister who sometimes works doubles, and you just realized you wore the leopard bra and now it’s showing through your shirt and you can’t go home to change. You pick it because for your fourteenth birthday, you got a pair of hips—and yeah maybe you wished for that, maybe you even like it. But goddamn it, don’t you sometimes just want to move around in the world without everybody making a big thing about it?

  Harmony was still talking about heroes, about all the good you could do from the shadows. “We should start a secret club, go around and avenge things.”

  “Avenge what?”

  “Whatever you want,” Harmony said. “Pick your grievance.” Like it was a fast-food order or a fan of cards that she was holding out for a magic trick.

  But I didn’t know how to do that. It was impossible to pick a grievance out of all the bad, wrong shit that happened every single day. The big ones are the kind nobody can do a thing about, and the little things seemed too little to get vengeful over. How could I be mad about Jackson Preaker telling me I smelled like cabbage? It was just nothing.

  The real things all belonged to someone else. I could feel it sometimes when the ladies in the butcher shop talked about the Cold War, the discotheques they went to when they were my age, and how they stayed out all night with their friends, listening to Madonna and George Michael on black-market cassette tapes. How the moon was the entire sky and they played the songs so many times the tapes wore out and sounded like they were coming from underwater. Played them until all the singers sounded drowned.

  The crack in their voices makes all the petty bullshit at St. Constantine feel like nothing.

  I wanted to make Harmony understand that. That I was worried anything I’d do or pick would feel small. If I could do righteous magic, I wanted it to be big.

  If I could do righteous magic, I would make it so the Petrova sisters would always have beef heart when they wanted it, and not ever start to cry when they talked about cassette tapes.

  * * *

  The day I stopped rolling my eyes about secret heroes and started believing in them was the day after Wyatt Carlson broke up with Katya R., and then called her a slut all over school even though that’s a two-person activity and it’s not exactly like he just fell in there accidentally.

  But he was going around St. Constantine with his pack of golden grinning wolves anyway, acting like she was a weather event or some piece of really bad luck that just happened to him.

  It was after last period, when all the kids with cars had already gone home and all the raggedy ones were standing around in the municipal lot, waiting for their buses. Wyatt was alone, sitting out on the edge of the big cement planter by the pickup lane, waiting on some of his douchebag friends to finish up with football.

  We were leaning on the bench for the city bus, and Harmony elbowed me and jerked her head in his direction. “Watch.”

  She went and plonked down next to him in that way she had. When he looked up, she gave him a really good smile. Then she scooted closer, and I pretended to be busy with my phone. Sometimes you can do that, even when you’re wearing a vintage spangle disco top and leggings covered in cartoon sharks. Even when you are hard and toothy and silver to the core, sometimes that’s just a second kind of invisible.

  Harmony leaned in and put her hand on his arm, very kind. It looked weird, because no one I knew really wanted to be kind to Wyatt Carlson. He is purely the worst.

  “Hey, Wyatt,” she said, and there was a sweet, steely edge in her voice that made a shudder run up my spine. “We need to have a talk.”

  Wyatt frowned. He looked at Harmony’s sleepy smile. He looked at her hand.

  “The reason no one likes you,” she said, and she said it gently, “is because you’re a piece of shit.”

  Wyatt stared down at her, blank as blank, but a muscle in his jaw was twitching.

  Harmony gave him a floppy little shrug. “And I know you think it doesn’t matter. That you’re going to keep getting everything you want, that everybody’s just going to keep handing it over. But they’re not.” She leaned closer, and now her voice wasn’t gentle at all. “You’re going to graduate, get drunk and old and sad, and you’re going to find out that the girls you conned or bullied into touching your dick in high school won’t want to do it anymore. They’ll be too wise and too smart and like themselves too much to even get near you.”

  He kept looking at her, his big, meaty hands opening and closing. I knew it was meant to make her nervous, but even as he did it, there was something in his face, like deep underneath, he was afraid.

  “Wyatt,” she said, looking at him with that certain angelic angle of her head, that smile. “This is the very best things ever get for you.”

  You could see the exact second when something changed inside him. Even if everything she was saying hadn’t been true before, it was true now. I thought he was going to shout at her or hit her and got ready to throw my phone at him, or at least yell for the liaison officer.

  But he didn’t, and after a second she got down off the planter and came back to me.

  The thing about witches is, all the ones in movies and cartoons and stuff are wicked. You learn to recognize them—draw them with their pointy, pointy hats, then paint them green. Know them by their brooms, wands, warts.

  Harmony wasn’t any of that. This was better.

  * * *

  It’s a double-edged thingy, being a butcher girl. This is a fact.

  The other girls all make faces, and boys like to tell you that you smell like cabbage, but you know they’re actually saying something else, because you never wear your kitchen clothes to school. You do your laundry, wash your hair, and if you smell like anything at all, it’s something sweet and sharp and secret. Like spices and dried blood.

  There are good things about being the daughter of a butcher. A good thing is if we’re having a block party or a birthday, everyone always asks us to bring the cabbage rolls, and then we can all rejoice about not having to eat the soggy ones that Katya C.’s mother makes that taste like wet hot dog.

  A bad thing is that even if I’m not in the mood and I didn’t volunteer, I am always in charge of anything nasty.

  The day we had to cut up baby pigs in science lab, everyone at my table looked at me and didn’t say it. They didn’t have to. They just sat and waited for me to pick up the knife.

  The pig was different
from the ones at the shop. The skin was weird and rubbery and wet, and the stuff dripping off it smelled like chemicals. I made a face when I poked it with the blade. I had to press hard to cut the belly open.

  We took notes and studied them, these pale little piggies, digging with our fingers and pinning them like pretty collages with the insides showing, the outside peeled back like a strange kind of flower, and then Lucas Hayes threw up.

  He did it quietly, over the side of his lab table, but there is really no good way to be the boy who throws up in science in front of everybody. That’s just the rule, and even if you didn’t know before, everybody knew it after.

  I was sorry for him, but in this whatever way. I figured that at least it was over. The other boys would laugh, and then he could leave and go to the nurse’s. I really thought the fact that it happened would be the worst part.

  But it wasn’t, and the next day, all those big beaming golden boys were following him around making puking noises.

  At Kolbe, the teachers would have called down thunder on something like that. It wouldn’t have been allowed. It wasn’t allowed at St. Constantine, either—they had one of those zero tolerances—but that kind of thing only works when someone knows how to catch you. The anointed douchebags in their halos never got caught at anything.

  It took a week for me to understand that they weren’t going to stop, and that no one who could make them stop was ever going to see. They would keep dishing it and Lucas would keep taking it, they would just keep looking golden. And that to me was almost worse than that they did it in the first place.

  The way they thought it was so funny was sort of normal—people are assholes, that’s not a secret. The thing that made me bite my pencil and wish for a metal spine was that they could do it, and keep on doing it forever.

  And Lucas was basically nobody, right? Already half a ghost. He was one of those skinny, worried boys with dirty hair who never really looked at you. I didn’t know him, is what I mean. But he was nice. I had two classes with him, and the first week I was at St. Constantine, he waited and held the door for me when I was carrying a War of the Roses diorama. I know that sounds like such a little thing, but Lucas Hayes held the door for me. No one else did.

  He still came to class, because he was the kind of person who always came to class, and the other boys still followed him around, because for them, nothing ever got boring. And Tyler Strauss was always the one who started it.

  Lucas sat with his head down and his neck red and didn’t say anything, while Tyler pretended to stick his fingers down his throat until the rest of them joined in, and Hailey Clarke and Riley Whitley howled. Then Tyler would look at me across the table in science, leaning on his elbow and making this face that I don’t know how to explain—one part satisfied and two parts hungry.

  “You shouldn’t be so mean to him,” I said, when it had been nine days and the jackass circus had been going on so long my ears were starting to feel hot. “It’s not like he could help it.”

  Tyler grinned his big TV grin, the kind that always seemed to be nudging you to go along with it. “That’s what makes it funny. Anyway, come on, it’s not like it matters. It’s just Lucas.”

  I stared back at him and tried to think what Harmony would have done. She would have told him it was cruel to laugh at someone for what they couldn’t help and that no one is just anyone. That he better get ready, because one day something bad or embarrassing would happen, and everyone would see him the way he really is, small and weak and pitiful, and then they’d make mean, stupid fun of him when it would have taken less effort to be kind, but he was so backward and messed-up that kindness might actually feel worse.

  Harmony would have had some kind of truth to curse him with, but all my words were wrong.

  The only truth I had in me was You’ll be sorry.

  * * *

  “I know my grievance,” I said to Harmony. We were eating lunch together by the trophy cases, under the student government banner, because she asked me to and none of my friends from Kolbe had second lunch. Also, I was still thinking about how she’d handled Wyatt. Also, I really did like her.

  She nodded, tipping her head back and smiling her sweet smile at the ceiling. “I knew you’d have one eventually. This place is full of them.”

  In truth, though, I didn’t have just one. The grievance was bigger than a single person. I made a whole goddamn list.

  There were three kinds of names on it. The ones who did the following and the puking sounds, the ones who did the laughing, and the ones who laughed and pretended not to.

  Back when I made Maya’s hair fall out, it had been a stupid, angry thing, half an accident almost.

  Well, okay not really.

  Maybe it was more that I was tired. I was over it, and I wished she would be punished for calling me a pizda, not because I was even so mad at her, specifically—it was a popular word at Kolbe that year, because it meant the same thing in like nine different languages—I was just mad. Mad at Maya, and mad that the meanest, most hateful thing that someone could say was just another way of pointing out that you were a girl.

  This time, the magic was cool and slow. I was a poison night-flower blooming on black, not righteous, but vengeful.

  I was so much angrier.

  * * *

  Here is what I did.

  I wrote their names on a piece of butcher paper that I tore off from the big roll at the shop. There were fifteen people, printed in red felt pen, and Tyler was at the top.

  At the bottom, I made a circle, because the oldest deepest magic is a story, and all the best stories are a circle. I folded the paper nine times, then poured out some pork blood from the jug for pudding and dipped my fingers in to seal it.

  Because if I’m any kind of witch at all, this is the kind I’ll be. Tough but fair, monstrous but just. No enchanted spindles or poison apples, only names and blood. A witch with the power to fly through the night in the bowl of a mortar, a house that walks on chicken feet, a fence of bones, a skull with magic fire shining out its eyes.

  My witch is furious and ferocious. She doesn’t grant wishes. But if you do what she says and treat her right, she just might help you. In the stories, there’s always a catch, though, right? The catch is this—her way of helping is her way. Sometimes the way she helps you is by raining fire on all your enemies.

  On the outside of the paper, I wrote this sentence, this sacred mystery—not a prayer, but a promise:

  The moon is full, and even the stars are scared of me.

  * * *

  Some of them noticed the smell before they looked. Some were smart enough not to open their lockers. But not very many. Most people will always want to see what’s inside, even when they shouldn’t.

  The way butchery works is, not every part is valuable. You have the expensive cuts, roasts and chops and loin. Those go in the glass case in front, lined up for the customers in tidy rows like a meat garden. Then you have the tougher cuts for stew or sausage. And after that, you have the cheap parts. Leftover bits for various nefarious things.

  Feet, hearts, livers. Tongues and lungs and kidneys. There are a lot of bits.

  Everyone got the honeycomb tripe and the livers. Webby, lumpy clusters of beef kidneys. The tongues were for the ones who laughed the loudest, the maws were for the snickerers. All the things these gleaming hoodlums in their haloes wouldn’t even touch—sheep’s eyes and pigs’ feet.

  Jackson Preaker got snouts and lungs, the better to tell girls they smelled like cabbage.

  Since Tyler Strauss did the most and the worst of everything, he got the head.

  The fruit of my work did not look good. It was slippery and oozing, buzzing with flies.

  But the smell was even more spectacular. After all night in the school with the furnace on, the junior hall was pretty ripe. Riley Whitley, who was on varsity debate and could te
xt in class without getting in trouble and who always shrieked in pretend horror and actual delight whenever someone made fun of Lucas, got some of the gooshy stuff on her sneakers, which had started the day white. I stood on the steps by the soda machines and laughed, while Riley screamed and screamed. I kind of wished it was like those explosions you see in movies, all billowing and gold, so I could walk away from it. The screaming was aces, though. It was pretty good.

  The vice principal called me in. After all, I was the butcher girl. But you could tell she didn’t know how to talk about organ meat, or even ask the right questions. They were never going to prove it.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, not like she was talking to me, though, just shaking her head. She was still stuck on how someone got fifty pounds of sticky, bloody parts into the school. Got all those parts through fifteen combination-locked doors.

  But it wasn’t that hard. Not when you have steel in the blood.

  Harmony does her magic in the soft white space between what is and what could be, but my punishments are never done in whispers. And I believe in the hallowed saints of science, sure—Newton and Copernicus and Tesla. Saint the Hubble Telescope. But I believe in magic, too. The really big stuff that mostly happens when I get mad.

  Harmony waited outside the office. When I finally came out, she grabbed me. Her fingers pinched too hard, and I looked at her hand until she dropped it. I wondered if we were going to have a problem.

  “You’re supposed to be invisible,” she said. “You’re supposed to be the hand moving behind the curtain.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t laugh at her, but come on.

  I was wearing this really slick pair of jeans—metallic silver like a space robot or a gallant knight—and my hair was loose and long and very thick, even though it was always getting tangled on purses and seat belts and most of the girls from my neighborhood had cut theirs short in middle school because they said it looked old-fashioned. And maybe Harmony was sweet and sly and secret, but that’s just not my style.