He waved back, the man who looked familiar but not.
His hands were my father’s hands. Large and slender-fingered. The wave was slow. His face was sad.
Back at the car, Dad’s face was angry. His fingers were fast, tapping on the steering wheel, itching to do something else.
“Who was—” I started. I knew not to ask, but I asked anyway.
“No one,” Dad said.
“He knew my name.”
Dad didn’t reply.
“He knew our secret pond.”
Dad didn’t reply.
“Dad?”
“Rose. There’s nothing to talk about.”
The road ahead stretched on long and empty all the way back to our house. Dad dropped me off when we got there. He didn’t tell me what to tell Mom or help me bring in the equipment. He drove off without a word, when I’d barely even closed the door behind me.
“There was a man—” I started to tell Mom, but she shook her head like she didn’t need to hear any more.
“Your father’s under a lot of pressure,” she said. I nodded, and Mom let me open a jar of magic that helped with sleeping and I took a nap so long it turned the day to night. When I woke Dad was home and dinner was set and no one was talking about the man across the pond or the fishing trip that wasn’t or where Dad had driven off to.
Or the way my arm pounded and how I knew, better than I knew almost anything else, to pretend that it didn’t.
Thirty-Four
“I’m still mad at you,” Zelda says. “I’m still confused, too. But Mom says family is forever, and anyway, I want to see it. I think I need to see it, to understand everything.” She is on my front lawn moments after Mom and Dad and Lyle have gone off to Lyle’s basketball game a few towns away. I wasn’t invited. You’ll cause a commotion, Mom said. You can stay home and practice, Dad said. If you’re there, no one will care about anything else, Lyle said. He still seemed almost jealous of me, which was impossible because everything around me was falling apart.
“See what?” I ask Zelda. She must have known about the basketball game, somehow. She must have been hiding behind a bush, waiting for my parents to leave so that she could see me. I didn’t know how badly I wanted her to be there. I thought I’d ruined everything. I want to throw myself into hugging her or telling her I’m sorry a hundred times, but I get the feeling she doesn’t want that right now.
“I’ve never seen magic,” Zelda says. “I want to see it.”
“You just saw magic yesterday,” I say. “You saw all kinds of magic.”
“I want to see a jar of it,” Zelda says.
“It’s not very interesting,” I say. “I can show you my dad’s, I guess. Those are more—”
“I want to see yours.”
I nod. Zelda lingers outside, though, like she has to take her time looking at our house. I try to see it through her eyes. It’s enormous, compared to where she lives. It’s too big, probably, and too shiny—Dad chose a silvery color for the outside and a shimmery pink for the shutters and a deep reddish-purple for the doors. It isn’t so unusual for Belling Bright, but compared to where Zelda lives it’s really something.
She probably wouldn’t mind exploring the whole house, but I know my dad would freak out, and I’m too scared to let her go anywhere but my bedroom. He’d be mad enough about just that.
“Huh. It doesn’t look like you,” Zelda says when we get there, taking in my bedroom for the first time.
My room is bare-walled and blue-curtained. My dad told me blue is a good color for attracting magic, and I believed him. He said bare walls left space for me to think my own thoughts, and he said that too many blankets on my bed would make me unable to handle the cold and discomfort of New Year’s Day. I believed it all, and now my whole room is exactly the way he wanted it.
“My dad kind of . . .” I trail off because I don’t know how to say the truth of it.
“Your dad’s in charge of a lot of stuff,” Zelda says. It’s not a question.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Well. It’s easy to understand.”
Sometimes I think Zelda might not be twelve like me, but might actually be like, seventy-five or something. At least, I think that’s how many years it must take to sound so sure of everything, to shrug like she does, to say things that might be questions but have them be statements instead.
I pull my one jar from the shelf in my closet. I’m careful with it. I have known my whole life how to handle a jar of magic. Always use both hands. Always move slowly. Always watch your feet. Only take one slow step at a time. Do not let yourself forget, ever, what you are holding.
Zelda watches me watching the magic. She peers into the jar. I wonder if it looks different to her than it does to me.
“Can I touch it?” she asks.
“The jar?” I say. I don’t want to hand it over. I hold it more closely to my chest.
“No, the magic,” she says. “I want to know what it feels like.”
I hold the jar closer still. This was a bad idea. Zelda is a bad idea. Letting her into my house, bringing her to the party, talking to her about magic, ignoring my father’s rules again and again—all bad, bad ideas. I’ve trusted my dad my whole life; why did I stop now, when everything is the most delicate?
Zelda is reaching for the jar like she doesn’t have any idea what could happen if it fell and broke, but I can’t risk it; it was stupid to ever think I could. My heart beats out that she’s my cousin, but the rest of me is practically screaming that I have to do what Dad wants, that that’s the only way things don’t fall apart, and things are so, so close to falling apart.
“You can’t touch it,” I say, a little more loudly than I intended. “I can’t open this jar. This is all I have. If anything happened to it I’d be totally without any magic, which would be even worse than things are right now, which is basically impossible because things are terrible right now. This isn’t—it’s not some joke. It’s not some fun thing to play with. It’s magic. It’s everything. And you don’t get it. You don’t get it, Zelda, you don’t—you’re not—”
There’s a tiny collapse in Zelda’s face. Not as big as what happened at the playground last night, but unmissable anyway. “I’m not meant for it,” Zelda says.
It’s the truth, of course. And it’s not something she hasn’t said before. But this time it sounds different.
“You’re not meant for it,” I repeat, and I turn my back to her to return the jar to the closet. She thinks I’m protecting the jar, or myself, and I guess I am, but I’m protecting her too. She’s Not Meant for Magic. And she’s not meant for Wendell Anders, not even if she’s his niece. No one’s meant for this. But especially not Zelda, and I can’t protect me and I’m not great at protecting Lyle or Mom, but I can protect her.
I hide the jar even farther back in the closet than it was before, behind my second-grade field day trophies and the box of handprint art I made when I was little. I wonder if Zelda made handprint art when she was little. I wish we could have done it together.
My wrist aches and I know it’s about to start raining, so Zelda will have to leave soon, and my heart drops. I don’t want her to leave, I realize. We’ve missed so much together, and we don’t understand everything about each other, but maybe we could understand some very important things, if we really tried. Maybe I can tell Zelda everything I’m thinking about and all the things that don’t make sense anymore and all the things that feel scary and all the secrets I have been hanging on to about what it’s like to live in this magical house in Belling Bright with the most magical man in the world.
After all, I’m not Little Luck anymore. And my father isn’t here. And I have a cousin. And I don’t need this one jar, not really, not anymore, and I’m ready for something else.
So I turn around and step out of the closet to tell Zelda all of it, every last bit of what it is to be Little Luck, to be meant for magic, to have one jar of magic when you were supposed to have
dozens, and how it’s bad but also good but also terrifying.
But Zelda’s already gone.
Thirty-Five
It’s just regular rain. It comes down at a regular pace the next day before school. It’s loud, and it wakes me up, and I guess woke Lyle up too, because when I wander downstairs he’s there. We were up together part of the night, as I told him about Zelda being our cousin and us having an uncle. He didn’t say much but he nodded a lot. It takes Lyle a long time to figure out how he feels about something. I look at his face now. He’s still trying to figure it out, I think. Maybe the rain will help.
It’s the sort of rain Lyle and I used to like to play in. We’d put on boots but no raincoats because we liked the way our shirts felt when they were wet and heavy and clinging to us. There was something about being one person outside—wild and unworried—and another person inside—good and responsible—that felt delicious.
I wonder how Zelda feels about rain.
And I wonder if she is the same person out in the rain as she is inside. Probably she is. Probably Zelda doesn’t care about rain like I do, because she can always just be Zelda—wet, dry, wild, quiet.
“Wanna go out in it?” I ask Lyle over oranges and toast at the breakfast table. “We have a little time before school.”
“In the rain?” he asks.
“Just for a little,” I say. “Like we used to.” There’s a list of things we used to do and used to be. We used to go for picnics. We used to laugh at old movies. We used to help Dad open jars of magic. We used to not worry about Mom. We used to think our family was perfect.
“I have plans,” Lyle says. He looks out the window, though, like maybe he’s thinking about it. Then he shakes his head.
“To do what?” I ask. No one has plans before school starts. It’s not even possible.
“Nothing.”
“You have plans to do nothing?”
“I guess.”
“Magic,” I say.
“Yeah.” He says the word like it’s an apology. He shouldn’t have to apologize. I never apologized for all the time Dad spent teaching me about magic, all the time he spent pretty much ignoring Lyle. I never apologized for being the magical one, so he shouldn’t either.
“It’s fine,” I say, but it’s not really. “What are you using it for?”
Lyle shakes his head.
“Just tell me,” I say.
Lyle sighs. “Come on, Rose,” he says. “Eat your orange.”
“Why aren’t you telling me?”
He rubs his face. He’s doing all the Lyle things he does, all in a row. “We’re meeting early at school. We’re going to try for a rainbow,” he says. His shoulders fall and his head dips and even his voice drops down, down, down.
“Oh.”
We stand there, Lyle and I, remembering the story of the rainbow that Dad told us a few years ago but also in another lifetime. We had talked about it from time to time over the years. When Lyle got his first magic, he made me a tiny rainbow charm on a bracelet. It wasn’t his best magic, so the bracelet was too tight and turned my skin green, but it was a promise that I kept in the top drawer of my bedside table until the magic wore off and it vanished. It was a promise that one day we’d make a rainbow just like Dad’s.
“I thought—” I start.
“Mom’s been sad,” Lyle says, before I can finish what he knows is coming. “I saw her crying. So I thought maybe a rainbow— I’d rather do it with you. You know that. But—”
“But I don’t have any magic,” I say.
“It’s just a rainbow,” Lyle says. “It’s just something to try.”
And I nod, like it’s fine. But it’s not fine and it’s not nothing and it was supposed to be mine. The rainbow. The jars. The magic.
Thirty-Six
By the time I get to school, it’s there. The rainbow. And it’s all anyone can talk about. We talk about it in math and in science, and in art class we all draw rainbows, but they don’t look as good as what’s in the sky. The rainbow Lyle and his friends made is blindingly bright and has a little sparkle to it. It’s so beautiful I bet even Zelda and her family like it.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe even the most beautiful rainbow is ugly to them, if it’s magical. Maybe Zelda’s dad was there the day my dad made his rainbow. I wonder if he liked it then. If he noticed his mom crying. If he knew why she was so upset. If he was jealous of how beautiful he’d made the world, for that moment.
I know a little about being jealous. I am jealous of Lyle’s rainbow and also of Ginger and Maddy, sitting in the cafeteria, whispering. They’re at our old table and I’m at a table by myself, the one by the trash can that no one ever sits at because it smells like old food and gets splattered with mashed potatoes and refried beans when people throw their lunches away.
Every so often, someone magics it clean and sparkly and smelling like lemons. But it just gets dirty again, because even magic can’t fix everything.
I try to think of what I would have done, if I had more than one jar of magic. Given myself an extra Saturday. Grown an extra inch. Tried to understand complicated math. Gotten better at drawing faces.
I guess that would be nice. But there would still be so many other things I couldn’t fix. And even the things I could would be temporary and flimsy and, like Zelda’s family—who apparently are my family—says, fake.
Maybe, I think, with an uneasy leap of my heart, I never really believed in magic at all.
“Weirdo,” Layla says, interrupting my thoughts, which must have been written on my face, because she sees how I’m thinking weird things that no one else is ever thinking.
“You wanna draw a picture of me?” Westin asks, making poses at the table next to mine like he’s some model.
“No wonder you didn’t get any magic,” Brent says. “You’re not meant for it.” Brent didn’t used to be mean. When we were six he taught me how to tie my shoes. When we were nine he stayed with me and held my hand after I took a big fall off my bike. But all that niceness seems to be gone. I guess you don’t need to be nice, if you’re magical.
“My mom told me that boy-crazy girls don’t catch magic,” Maddy says. She shrugs.
“I’m not boy-crazy,” I say. “And that’s a lie anyway.”
“Only boy-crazy girls would draw pictures like that,” Maddy says with another pointed shrug. Maddy takes her time tilting her head to the side and smiling. Brent and Westin laugh like weasels and Layla has a nervous giggle and more kids gather around to listen to Maddy tell me who I am, even though she has no idea. “You weren’t ever serious about magic,” she goes on. “You thought you could just get whatever you wanted by being Rose Alice Anders. You probably thought you’d get Evan Dell, too. But you were wrong, because you’re some boy-crazy, silly, unpracticed, Not-Meant-for-Magic failure.”
Eyebrows raise. Mouths open. But no one defends me.
Not Ginger.
Not even me.
But I don’t run away from the moment. I stay. And the staying feels okay. This is my school. This is my town. I’m not Little Luck, but I am still Rose Alice Anders, and I don’t know what I’m meant for, exactly, but I’m not meant for this.
“You won,” I say to Maddy, because she did. She has all the magic and she has Ginger and she has extra-long hair with pink streaks in it and she has a dozen new outfits and she’s going to get great grades and not have anyone thinking she’s obsessed with Evan Dell.
I look at Ginger. She’s been so quiet I could forget she’s here. Except I can’t, because some part of me is still waiting for her to be my old best friend.
Maybe magic does some really beautiful things. But it turns out it also breaks people apart. Ginger over there and me over here. Zelda on one edge of town and me on the other. My whole family in one house but also sometimes in our own universes.
I don’t like it. And I don’t think I need it. I take a big breath.
“Can I have my drawing back?” I ask. I make sure my back is
straight when I say it. I make sure everyone can hear me.
Ginger’s eyebrows raise right off her head.
“You know,” I say. “The drawing. Of Evan Dell. Can I have it back? It’s a really good drawing. That’s why everyone knows it’s him, right?”
“Right,” Ginger says. She blushes, which is funny because I’m the one who should be embarrassed. “Um, Evan? Do you have that picture?” Evan Dell is sitting at the table next to Ginger’s, and he shakes his head like he wants everyone to forget he’s there, which is exactly what I’ve been doing, and it’s weird, how Evan Dell and I have nothing in common but we somehow both want to disappear right now. Maybe Ginger does too. Maybe even Maddy and Layla and Brent want to be invisible sometimes. Maybe we’re all hoping for jars of magic that can hide us when we’re uncomfortable, can give us an escape from the moments that feel sticky and awkward and like they’re going to last forever.
But the moments don’t last forever. Not even this one. So if we can be a little patient and a little brave, we don’t really need the magic at all.
“I don’t have it with me,” Evan Dell mumbles, and I have no idea if it’s true or he wants it to be true, and it doesn’t really matter, because I said what I needed to say and I’m not the one who wants to hide anymore.
“Well, whenever you think of it, get it back to me, okay?” I smile the biggest, brightest smile I have. I love that it is not magical at all. That it’s just mine—the smile, the way I was brave, this moment where I am figuring out who Rose Alice Anders even is.
“Uh, okay,” Evan Dell says.
“Cool, thanks,” I say. And I don’t walk out of the cafeteria. I stay at my trash can table and finish my lunch. I even go back for seconds.
Thirty-Seven
A Story About When I Was the Mean One
When Maddy came to school two years ago, she said too much. She said too much and she wore clothes that were big and small in all the wrong places and she had this way of raising her hand and waving it around when the teacher clearly didn’t want to call on her.
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