“Why would I want you to be anything except you?” I ask.
He smiles, his face shining with that spark that draws me in like a sucker moth. “Do you know how many people have told me to cheer up this week? Or changed the subject when Riley or June or Dayton comes up? It’s like living in a glass box. Everyone’s afraid that if I breathe wrong, the whole thing will break. Or they want me to break down so they can watch.”
“You feel like you’re removed from everyone,” I say, thinking of my family eating meals without me, my parents sending messages to me through text or my sisters. “Like they think your sadness is contagious.”
“Yes,” he says on a sigh. “But if you smile through it, they think you’re not processing it enough.”
“Like Dr. Miller.”
“Exactly like Dr. Miller. She’s still stalking me. She came and observed me at lunch yesterday.”
“Are you sure she isn’t just into you?” I ask.
“God, I hope not. I don’t want to be anyone’s sad-guy fetish.”
I have bad news for you, Alexander . . .
We cross the street and round the corner where the Cross Creek Cinema is. The noise rises to a chaotic level. Laughing. Haggling. Shouting. A game of tag. I’m shocked at how crowded it is. It feels like everyone in town—minus the Flores family—is here, clamoring for some hella fresh produce.
I’m hit with the smell of a hundred different foods—overripe persimmons and roasting meats and cupcakes and herbs. I actually didn’t think it was possible to be more overwhelmed tonight. Three different people brush me as they walk by with overflowing official Cross Creek Farmers’ Market tote bags. The kids playing tag squeeze between Xander and me to run, full speed, toward the stage erected in the park.
Fuck. Downtown dead-ends at Aldridge Park. Where June and Dayton died. Why didn’t I think of that before? What if Xander freaks out when he realizes where we are?
“This is way busier than I imagined,” I say.
“You’ve never been here?” he asks. Lies spin through my head, but he interrupts my thoughts. “I guess you wouldn’t have. I can’t really picture my sister volunteering to hang out in a giant crowd like this.”
Up ahead, I see Aniyah Dorsey at a booth. She has that too-interested look on her face that makes it seem like she’s memorizing everything to write down later. A little kid with white-blond hair is handing her a pamphlet and pointing up at the sign on their canopy, which reads Creekside Community Church. There are a couple of other kids passing out pamphlets near the booth, none as blond as the one talking to Aniyah. They all have round elfin faces with easy smiles.
Why is Aniyah talking to the Nesseths? Does she have a sudden interest in evangelism, or is she sniffing out information on their dead sister?
Xander stops and turns, snagging something from the stall closest to us. He flourishes it to me, and I see that it’s a chunk of apple on a toothpick.
“Are you still doing magic?” he asks.
“Are you asking because of the apple?” I ask, popping the piece into my mouth. “Because I’m really not a poison-apple, heart-in-a-box kind of witch.”
“Trust me, I know,” he says as we walk away from the apple seller. “I’ve sat through a lot of Wiccan rants. No poison apples, no flying monkeys, no pointy hats, no crystal balls.”
“But you know that crystal balls exist? I just don’t own one. Riley was more of the crystals-and-essential-oils one. Big stuff for big results.”
Riley never had the patience for minute details. She wanted to string every bead at once, slap on a coat of paint, and call it done. I had the patience to gather and dry herbs for brushes. She could pull flowers, I could press them in wax paper. She preferred to buy spell ingredients, but I was always poorer and happier to hunt for them in the woods or neighbors’ gardens.
Except now that job has been outsourced to June and Dayton.
“So, you don’t care if you get big results?” he asks, shoving his hands in his pockets. “How will you know if it works?”
“It depends on the spell,” I say carefully. “Not everything can have a definitive result. Most of witchcraft is just being present.”
“And grateful?” he asks. “Riley said it was about being grateful for everything.”
“Right,” I say. I love that he gets it. That he already knows. “Present and grateful.”
He leans over and bumps our elbows together, his face alight with mischief. “Do you think you could do some magic for me sometime?”
“It depends on what kind of magic you need,” I say. My whole arm tingles where he touched it, and I have to actively restrain myself from pressing against him again. “I’m better at the crafty parts. Like making flower crowns or pentagrams out of sticks.”
He smooths the hair out of his face, his lips pursed in momentary seriousness. I wonder if he was thinking of big magic—easing his grief or pulling lottery numbers out of thin air or even trying to bring Riley back. But instead he twitches a shrug. “Anything. Dumb stuff. Riley never wanted me around when she was doing spells. Do you think you could remove a zit with magic?”
I laugh. “Your skin is basically perfect. I’d have to find a spell to give you a zit before I could try to get rid of it.”
“Okay, then whatever kind of magic you want. Just let me know if you need someone to hold a sage brush for you. It’s the only thing Riley ever taught me to do.”
“I’ll consider it,” I say, knowing that it’ll be a while before I have a spell to do that isn’t life or death.
We wind through the crowd, Xander occasionally stopping to say hi to someone from school. Most of them I don’t know by name. None of them would know me as anything except the fat witch of the junior class. Yearbooks will be opened. Facebook stalked. People will tell the story with confusion and shock: Camila Flores, a Fairmont Academy junior, member of zero clubs, haver of no superlatives, was at the farmers’ market with her dead best friend’s brother, Xander Greenway. They were seen sniffing vegan soaps and guiltily taking business cards from shopkeepers.
Or maybe the only person who will tell the story is me, to myself every night before I go to sleep, because it might as well be a dream.
“Look,” Xander says, pointing ahead of us. “Isn’t that . . .”
I flinch as he trails off, terrified that he’s pointing to the reanimated corpse of his sister or his friends, even though I’d know if they were close. But instead I see a table draped in black velvet with no fancy tent over it like the other booths. Toby is sitting behind a collection of charm bags and cheap stone necklaces. Her motorcycle is parked behind her, shining as silver as a razor blade. She sees me and smiles with her teeth but not her eyes.
“Mila, good to see you,” she says as Xander pulls me toward the table. She tilts her face toward Xander. The movement flexes a muscle in her chest, making the snake tattoo on her boob seem to slither against her burnt skin. “And Riley’s brother. It’s been a while.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Xander says. We may be Californians, but Xander was taught to be Retail Southern. There’s something about courtly manners and a slight drawl that charms the mourners and makes them buy bigger caskets. “The girls stopped needing me to drive them around once Mila got her own car.”
“I’m glad to see you two have found each other in this terrible time,” Toby says, seemingly unswayed by Xander’s ma’am. She gestures at her wares with a sweeping motion. “See anything you need? I’ll give you the student discount. Luck bags for that next big test? A money charm? I have a beautiful iron rose hematite. They form themselves, you know, under high pressure . . .”
The muscles in my back turn to stone. The iron rose isn’t on the table. It’s in Riley’s grave with the rest of the ingredients for the Lazarus spell.
Oh fuck. She knows I stole it.
“We’re fine,” I say, already starting to pull Xander away. “Thanks, Toby! See you later.”