The third time, she didn’t protest going, although her mother seemed conflicted. Still, Charlie had looked up historical facts, and between those and Alonso’s probable ignorance about things like antibiotics and gravity, she thought she could push through one more time.
More important, Charlie had remembered what worked on her mother. Charlie didn’t need to convince them of anything.
She needed to make them want to believe.
And so instead of answering their questions, she spun a jagged-edged fantasy. She knew all her mother’s friends well enough to guess who hoped her sculptures would be featured in a magazine, who wanted love, who wanted her children to move closer.
Alonso told them what they wanted to hear, with a kick in the ass.
You have already met the man you are destined to be with and you know who he is and why you’re not together.
Your children will be at their happiest near a lake, but they will resist this knowledge.
Your work will be celebrated after your death.
And then Alonso told them he had fulfilled his purpose, and that he would finally be allowed to move on. After solemn and tearful goodbyes, Charlie let her whole body go limp. She fell to the floor and pretended unconsciousness for a full minute—until she worried they were going to call an ambulance.
Even her mother’s most skeptical friend plied her with cookies and herbal tea after that.
She never had another “visitation.”
Sometimes her mom looked at her strangely, but Charlie tried not to notice. And Posey, jealous of the attention Charlie had gotten, started reading tarot cards and cultivating a thousand-yard stare.
While Charlie felt as though she had been left with only the least interesting parts of herself and lost the rest.
4
MORE COFFEE
Bright morning light flooded the kitchen. Lucipurrr was in the sink, paws balanced on a dirty plate, licking the leaky faucet.
Charlie poured coffee, noting the shine of Posey’s bloodshot eyes and the restless way her leg moved under the table. She was still in the pajamas she’d been wearing the night before, adding unicorn-shaped slippers, their fur a stained gray.
“Did you stay up all night?” Charlie asked, although the answer was obvious.
“I found a new channel to follow.” Posey’s tone suggested she expected Charlie to argue with her. On the message boards Posey frequented and in the videos she sought out, dangerous advice was passed around on quickening one’s shadow, the first step to becoming a gloamist.
Most of the mainstream articles written about shadow magic were about alterations—clickbait like Is Magic the New 1%? Hollywood Actress Starts New Shadow Trend. Rip Out Cravings for Junk Food at the Root. Most Useful Shadow Alterations for New Moms. Is Removing Desire the New Lobotomy? In those stories, gloamists were the providers. The dealers. The grocery stores of magic. The Old Saint Nicks of magic.
Celebrities had their shadows altered more frequently now that the trend had caught on, changing them like other people might change their haircuts, dressing up for the Met Ball with shadows in the shapes of dragons or swans or large hunting cats. They had their emotions triggered to better prepare for roles, or to be able to write more evocative songs.
And if a few people starved to death, or threw themselves off bridges, or had so much of themselves removed that they seemed to float through their days, that was a small price to pay. When shadows withered or burned up or failed to graft, the wealthy could always buy new ones.
But dig a little deeper into the morass of links and articles, past the gloss of general interest, and you got to theories about how people became gloamists. Legitimate sources weighed in with a measured manner. A scientist from the Helmholtz Research Centres was quoted in a now-viral interview in The New Yorker as saying “Shadows are like the shades of the dead in Homer, needing blood to quicken them.” But it seemed as though every wellness influencer and would-be wizard had a hunch to sell. YouTube and TikTok became crammed with bogus tutorials. How I Woke My Shadow with Pain, Shadow Quickening After Fistfight, Magic Ability Discovered After Drowning, Safe Asphyxiation Techniques with Plastic Bag—Guaranteed Results. And in the depths of 8kun, the ideas were much weirder and much worse.
Charlie could remember before, when actual magic had seemed impossible. And then the confusion when no one seemed to be sure what was real and what wasn’t. But Posey had gone from a childhood belief in magic into an adulthood where magic was real—just denied to her.
Charlie vividly recalled coming home to a bathtub half filled with melted ice and her sister sitting on the floor, wrapped in a towel, her lips blue with cold. “I should have stayed in longer,” Posey had told her, teeth chattering. Charlie begged her not to try anything like that again.
Instead, Posey had gotten a piece of fishing line to tie to a tongue piercing and begin the slow and painful-looking process of splitting her tongue. Apparently once you got used to using the muscles on both sides simultaneously, it trained your brain to a “bifurcated consciousness.” The second thing every gloamist needed, after a quickened shadow.
As far as Charlie could tell, all Posey got out of it was a slight lisp.
Charlie yawned and checked the messages on both her phones. On her real phone, there was an invitation to a barbecue from Laura, her closest friend from high school, who these days had three kids and not a lot of time. A plea to bartend at another friend’s backyard wedding. Spam from a shop with a sale on onyx charms.
She took out her burner and texted Adam, giving things another try:
Can we meet up? Somewhere private. I don’t want us to be spotted together.
This was the tricky bit, getting him to bite. Once he told her where he was, he was screwed.
Then Doreen could go scream at him and drag him home.
If only it could be that easy for Charlie to fix things for Posey. But there was no con or heist, no scam she could think of that would help.
Tomorrow?
With her car out of commission, that was going to be tight. Sure, Charlie typed. I can come over in the morning, before class.
No mornings.
She ground her teeth in frustration. If she didn’t know when he was going to be there, then she’d have to stake out the place. And since she was pretending to be Amber the gloamist, it made no sense for her to even have some other job. Charlie decided to go for vague. I have a thing until midnight. I can meet you after.
He sent her a thumbs-up and a winking emoji. When he followed up with the number of his hotel room at the MGM in Springfield, she felt a little guilty, as though she was scheduling a rendezvous.
You’re not doing anything wrong, she told herself.
Okay, she was doing something wrong, just not what it looked like.
“Have you been paying attention to what I said at all?” Posey demanded.
“Definitely,” Charlie lied.
Posey rolled her eyes and kicked the leg of Charlie’s chair with a slippered foot. “There’s this video where people take ayahuasca and are guided through waking their shadows. Everyone on the message boards are flipping out over it. I know someone with a lake house over by Lake Quinsigamond, and he wants a bunch of us to re-create it—if someone can get the DMT.”
Charlie raised her eyebrows. “That’s the stuff that makes you vomit all night. And grosser stuff.”
Posey shrugged. “Can you get it?”
“DMT?” Charlie said, trying to decide how bad an idea it really was. “I don’t know. Ask around Hampshire College. If someone is dealing it locally, they’re dealing it there. Or maybe when you start at UMass you can see if someone can synthesize you some in the bio lab.”