Across the Thorntons’ lawn, over the fence, and past an ancient oak tree, the playground sits like it always has. Now, three police officers stand by the carousel.
Zap and I used to sit in the center of that carousel. I’d wrap my legs around the red-painted pole and flatten my back against the bumpy metal surface. We’d start slow. Zap’s sneakers would slap against mulch and the sky would swirl, a ceiling fan of blue and white. When we gained enough speed, Zap would jump on beside me—he didn’t like to lie down. He would lean against the middle bar, his scarecrow arms stretched out to the sides, captain of his own spinning ship.
Ollie peers up at me with a saliva-slick jumbo Lego in her hand, finally calm. Her brown eyes bulge, wet and cowlike, feather eyelashes protruding from their lids.
Go on, I think. Tell them how awful I am.
She opens her gummy mouth and lets out another screech.
Around the time everything started to fall apart with Zap—over a year ago—I found a book called Modern Witchcraft: A Guide for Mortals. It’s based in the history of pagan witchcraft, compiled by a group of reputable researchers. Now, I can’t set foot in the Broomsville Public Library because the book has racked up hundreds of dollars in overdue fines. I don’t have any intention of returning it.
It happened in May. Lucinda was the whole reason I had to take the hotel job, the reason the Thorntons stopped calling me to babysit. This was almost a year after everything went to shit—and still, I spent my nights combing through childhood photos, drawing Sharpie moustaches on me and Zap so I wouldn’t get so sad. It was useless, I know. You can’t change people. You can’t stop them from growing. You can’t make them look how they used to: like a gangly kid with bottle-thick glasses and an idiotic bowl cut.
The week I checked out the book, I was supposed to babysit. A ten-hour shift, and Eve Thornton was going to pay me a hundred dollars—she rarely coordinated babysitting, but she would be out of the hospital for a few days and could use the extra hands. I was happy to spend a Saturday out of the house, where Ma was on a tirade about the electricity bill. That morning, she’d shattered a plate against the mantel.
While I was walking to the Thorntons’, the family cell phone Ma lets me use for work buzzed. A text message from Eve Thornton: “NVRMND. DOUBLE BKED. U DONT NEED 2 COME 2DAY. THX.”
As I turned to leave, I crossed Lucinda coming up the Thorntons’ driveway. She smiled as we passed each other, all straight teeth. Lucinda had one dimple, on the left side of her face. Even when her smile was fake, it dotted her cheek. A button. Of course the Thorntons preferred Lucinda Hayes—she probably knew how to put Ollie to sleep without a fit. I bet she was certified in CPR.
“Hey,” she said, the way you talk to an old acquaintance you know you should remember but don’t.
The air she floated through smelled like strawberry shampoo. I rounded the corner, stomach rolling like I’d eaten something bad. It was like that night all over again, like I was standing in that narrow hallway, listening to fireworks pop over the lake and letting Lucinda Hayes take everything from me.
Later that night, I set the whole thing up, just like it said in “The Art of the Ritual,” the sixth chapter of Modern Witchcraft: A Guide for Mortals. Step by step. The candles, the herbs, the altar.
I don’t regret the ritual, not even now that Lucinda is actually dead.
I wished her away.
Mr. Thornton pays me in cash, a fat wad with two extra twenties thick at the heart of it. This is probably accidental—the only thing I’ve done tonight is put Ollie to sleep and eat the raw cookie dough from his refrigerator. I couldn’t find the leash to walk Puddles, so I carried her to the corner of the back fence and stood guard while she peed, ready to scoop her up if she tried to make a break for it. I leave before Mr. Thornton notices the overpayment.
When I get home, the house is quiet. 10:19 p.m.
Usually after babysitting I’d go to see Howie—the homeless guy who lives behind the library. But tonight, I’m too curious. I change into a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a clean Crucibles T-shirt. Roll my plastic desk chair to the window. I turn off the lights and use my pink lighter to ignite the chamomile candle on the nightstand. Ma says it’s a fire hazard because my room is so cluttered. I’m not allowed to light candles until I get rid of all the useless junk, but I’m terrible at knowing what’s irrelevant.
I pull a CD from the middle of my stack, which wavers at the foot of my bed. They’re homemade mixes, burned to fit different moods—this one is titled Night Walks, which is scrawled messily across its matte-finish face. The track list: Misfits, Green Day, Bad Religion, the Crucibles, and Blink-182. “Letters to God” by Box Car Racer comes on, and when the nasally singer starts to whine, I allow myself just a twinge of satisfaction.
I sit at my window like always, but I know Cameron won’t come tonight. The hood of his sweat shirt always gives him away, distinguishing him from the shadows—the white drawstring across his chest is illuminated in the moonlight. Lucinda’s back lawn slopes upward from where her house sits at the bottom of the small suburban hill; from where Cameron stands by the fence we can both see into her bedroom.
It’s been almost twenty-four hours since Lucinda Hayes disappeared and tonight, the grass is still. A police car idles with its lights off, whirring sneakily by the side of the house. The Hayeses are in their living room, but from my desk chair, looking down across the short alley of grass between our houses, their faces are visible only in passing. They have relatives visiting already—grandparents, aunts, uncles—who shuffle in and out of the kitchen with steaming cups of tea and food that no one touches. A steady rotation. Lex sits on the floor with her back against the legs of the couch; she looks like her younger self, like Amy’s twin princess-sister in their game of pretend. Except now, she is wearing a pair of rhinestone-spattered jeans and crying quietly as their grandmother braids her hair.
I search for the white of Cameron’s sneakers and instead I find the roots of the bushes that line the back fence, ropes uncoiling across a midnight lawn. For an ignorant moment, I’m afraid I’ll get sucked into that endless dusk.
Lucinda is gone. Cameron will have no one to watch. No one to make his hands shake. No one to think about before he falls asleep, as he watches the cracks in the ceiling or counts Orion’s elbows.
How Zap used to look at me:
With eyes open wide, like someone surprised by a camera. Often quickly. In passing. In longer moments, which stretched beyond their appropriate span. What? one of us would say. What do you mean, ‘what’?
Nothing.
You’re looking at me funny.
I’m not.
What are you thinking?
Did you know Mars takes six hundred eighty-six days to orbit the sun?
That’s not really what you’re thinking.
Prove it.
Shut up.
Russ