“Try to stay within a hundred steps!” I call after her.
“I’ll go track down the charcoal,” Riley says. “And maybe some matches? The spell will move faster if we have more than one way to light shit on fire.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I say.
I look at June, waiting for her to come up with her own reason to wander freely, but she sticks by my side. Lucky me.
The meat counter wraps around most of the right wall of the store. Beef takes up most of the middle of the counter. Ground, steak, sides, flanks, tongues, all marked with small yellow signs. I read Spanish much better than I speak it, although the mercado’s signage is all in Spanish and English, so it’s not really a true test of my skills.
“?Cómo puedo ayudarle?” asks the man behind the counter.
I swallow. I get so nervous speaking Spanish to non–family members. I only ever really use it to talk to my grandparents or eavesdrop on my parents’ phone calls.
“Un corazón de res, por favor,” I say, quiet and uncertain.
The man nods, not showing any sign that he thinks the order is weird or that my conversational skills are about as refined as a three-year-old native speaker’s. I wipe my sweating palms on my hips.
The man behind the counter peels what is unmistakably a heart out of the display case and slaps it onto the scale. June and I both flinch.
“Was Caleb wearing my necklace today?” June asks.
I nod. “It was tucked into his shirt, but I could make out the outline of the lock.”
It’s pretty ballsy—if actively psychotic—to wear a token of the girl you murdered to school. But seeing the heart-shaped lump under the collar of Caleb’s shirt made me more resolved to cast today’s spell.
The man behind the counter hands me the heart neatly wrapped in brown paper and asks if I need anything else. I shake my head.
“?Muchas gracias por su ayuda!” June says to him brightly. I must look shocked, because she rolls her eyes at me and says, “I’m in AP Spanish.”
Of course she is. Was. Whatever. Even racist white girls speak Spanish more naturally than I do.
“Any news on you and Xander?” June asks as we walk past the fish counter. Even the dead cod packed in ice look more comfortable than I feel right now.
“There is no me and Xander,” I say.
“Why not?” She blinks at me like this is a rational question. “I’m dead. There’s nothing standing in your way now.”
“Gee, thanks,” I say. “Except he’s still Xander and I’m still me.”
I don’t tell her that he sent me a text message after the Celebration of Life on Monday to see if I was feeling better. You know, since I almost puked on him. It was the sweetest thing that has ever embarrassed me to my very core. I told him that I must have been poisoned by a Dayton Nesseth Memorial Tree Fund cookie.
“Look, Mila,” June says with an obnoxiously forced maturity. “You’re not doing yourself any favors by secretly pining. You can either want people who want you, too, or you can move on. You’re wasting your life with all this unrequited love. Why would you like someone who doesn’t like you back?”
“That’s not how crushes work,” I snap. I’m holding the heart package too tightly. The paper crinkles loudly. I loosen my grip so that I don’t damage the meat. “It’s all hormones and feelings and illogical shit. I can’t stop liking Xander because he doesn’t like me.”
“You don’t know if he likes you. If you really knew that he didn’t, if he looked you in the face and was like, ‘Ew, no thanks,’ you’d be too ashamed to keep lusting after him.”
“What the hell, June? Are you trying to make me cry?”
“No! I’m trying to help! Because he hasn’t said that. And I don’t remember him ever saying anything like that in front of me. Not that he would have told me if he was into someone else. He’s way too polite. You should ask him if he’s into you. You never know!”
I sigh. It’s not like June and I are two different species. It is possible that Xander could like us both.
“Maybe I don’t want to know the answer,” I say tightly.
“No. You don’t want to know if the answer is no. Of course you’d want to know if it was yes.”
I would. But I won’t give June the satisfaction of saying so. She’s already too high on her own assumptions.
We find Dayton and Riley in the party-supplies aisle. The top shelf is lined with pi?atas of famous cartoon characters—SpongeBob, Dora, Elsa from Frozen—along with the more traditional star and donkey shapes.
Dayton’s arms are laden with a container of assorted pan dulce and more bottles of Gatorade. Riley hugs a small bag of charcoal briquettes, a box of matches, and a new container of salt, which she shakes at me.
“Can never have too much salt on hand,” she says.
“Can’t you?” June asks.
“It’s a witch thing,” Riley says. I’m almost ashamed at how happy it makes me to hear her say it. “Please tell Dayton we don’t need a pi?ata or confetti.”
“I know we don’t need them,” Dayton says, juggling the items in her arms. The pan dulce rattle against their plastic container. “But I think it would liven up the house. It’s so gloomy in there.”
“I’m not paying for a pi?ata,” I say. “You guys are bleeding me dry as it is. And you can’t fit a pi?ata in your pockets, so I’m gonna guess you can’t steal one either.”
“Fine,” Dayton says, her lips stuck out in a pout. She pushes the pan dulce into my arms. “Here.”
“While I check out, you can go to the taquería and pick out whatever you want for dinner.”
“We had burritos yesterday,” June says.
“Chipotle is burrito-like,” I say. “This is the real deal. Trust me.”
Riley hands me the bag of charcoal. “Do you want me to order you some pupusas? That’s your order here, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I nod, incredulity making my heart—the one in my chest, not in my hands—weightless.
She grins at me, showing all her teeth. “Coming right up.”
* * *
We return to Yarrow House with our stomachs filled to bursting. Even June couldn’t find anything shitty to say about our dinner at Mercado del Valle. The drive home was full of satisfied sighs and June playing DJ with the music downloaded to my phone. Apparently everyone likes pupusas and Bruno Mars.
It turns out that the basement under Yarrow House is actually the most well-preserved room. The stairs creak under my weight, but no more so than the front porch does, and the handrail is in place and doesn’t even wobble, although the wood is rough and splintery. The walls are made of unpainted cinder blocks, and the floor is cracked cement. Only one corner has any mold, so the smell is negligible. Mostly, the room smells like the sagebrush Riley burned to cleanse the space for spellwork.
Last night, one of the girls pulled the board off the single small window that faces the woods. Now that there’s real live daylight slanting in through the unbroken glass, we don’t need as many candles as we expected.
The sheets and blankets I brought from home earlier in the week are spread out like sleeping bags at a slumber party. Dayton said that the girls moved down here because it was less likely that the floor would cave in under them, unlike the top floor, where the boards are all rotted and water damaged.
The room is colder since we’re underground, but I seem to be the only one in need of a jacket. The others busy themselves with gathering supplies, scurrying up and down the stairs to grab everything. I can tell that they worked all night after I left them yesterday: Riley has already patched together a few truth spells in the notebook I gave her, the ingredients we had on hand are stacked on one side of the room, and the red grimoire is propped on a rickety wooden chair, open to the page with the Draw the Rot instructions.