Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
28.1
Leni Zumas
HandfastingWhen the stranger walks into the restaurant, I am still listening to Kasko talk dirty to my sister. I've been listening all morning and hating Kasko and hating my sister for putting up with it. She does more than put up. She leans across the marbled counter, between poached-egg orders, bends close to his big thick face and keeps her lips apart. The spit pools, glittering, in her mouth.
Sarah isn't spending many nights at home. She sleeps at Kasko's trashed apartment between his crusty sheets. My parents allow this because she's out of high school and earns her own money. When the stranger walks in, I am thinking about drawing up a list of Kasko's crimes. My parents might be interested to see it.
"Hello there," says the stranger to Sarah, and leans primly against a stool. His white shirt is wet with blue from the fountain pens sticking out of its pocket. The ink has turned his nipple blue, too. I can tell because he isn't wearing an undershirt. He orders hot water and dry toast and explains he is looking for witches. Yes, he says, it's a strange thing to look for, but we must understand, he is writing a dissertation about them.
"Aren't any here," says Kasko. "Town's full up on bitches though."
"I'm not talking about the broomstick kind," says the stranger. "Witches are not just a matter of the seventeenth century. They are alive among us."
"But not here," Kasko repeats. "Look around you," he says, "there's nothing here."
There is a green square where two streets meet: a bank, a courthouse, a pharmacy. Around the corner is the Vietnamese café where Kasko rinses sauce off dishes and uses their long distance for booking bands that come to play at the VFW for the kids of Wolvercote, old kids, little kids, our fists full of beer.
My sister in her pink uniform with a tiny black star at each breast puts down the toast, the hot water. The stranger dips one of the unbuttered triangles into the cup. "Softens it," he tells her.
She nods and asks, "So what kind are they, if not broomstick?"
"Modern-day witchcraft," he says solemnly, "assumes many guises. You have your run-of-the-mill goth girl. Your senile herb-dicer. Your lesbian bookshop owner. Your California blood-guzzler. Your sober alcoholic in search of a new spirituality. And then there are--the renegades. They don't fit into a category because they're either insurgent or incompetent."
Kasko tells him he is barking up a blind alley. Sarah nods. Davey and the line cook nod. I don't move my head.
"You sure you got the right Wolvercote?" says Kasko.
"This is it," replies the stranger. "There are no other Wolvercotes of interest to me."
How did the stranger know to look in Wolvercote? The witch wasn't here long. She passed through, is gone. Nobody is supposed to talk about her. Kasko says that whoever mentions her name gets a beating. He is full of big talk. But he can, if he wants to, break a boy's bones. He tortures squirrels; he once shot a dog without remorse.
This stranger owns a very nice selection of pens, sleek and heavy, with slanting tips and drippy ink. He asks questions and writes down the answers. I am the youngest person and stay quiet. There aren't any grownups around except Mr. Casement, reading his paper in the corner, and he is deaf anyway. Sarah pours coffee and refills our waters and sneaks doughnuts out of the glass case.
"What does the word 'Wicca' mean to you?" asks the stranger.
"My friend Flicka!" Davey shouts from down the counter, where he and the line cook are playing two-handed spades.
The stranger persists. "Have you heard this term before? Has anyone around here used the term?"
"We're very uneducated," Kasko sneers. "We don't use terms ."
Sarah offers the stranger a doughnut, but he says he can't handle sugar. "I get bloated and lethargic," he says. He touches the back of her hand very lightly where it holds the green flowered plate of crullers. Kasko, noticing, says this interview needs to wrap up and what else does the stranger want to know for God's sake?
"So far you've told me nothing I want to know. You have described some customary social practices that include"--he looks at his notes--"the listening to of extremely marginal music, and the pushing over of cows as they stand in fields. You have intimated that nobody over the age of twelve in this town is a virgin."
"He said virgin ," Davey yells from the cards.
When the lunch rush starts, the stranger says he's off to the Red Roof Inn on the highway to write up his notes. We watch him go. Kasko announces his theory: the guy is on a hunt for tender meat. He has a thing for girls who wear black and use period blood in their potions. "A fetish," he explains. "This research is a front."
Sarah is not persuaded. "He doesn't look dirty," she says, "just kind of pathetic."
"Sex criminals," Kasko says, "never look like sex criminals."
"He was wearing a wedding ring," my sister points out. I didn't notice this. Neither did Kasko. It's the sort of thing girls notice.
The witch's eyes were painted purple and black. Back in April, I'd looked straight into them and asked for a spell. "Cut those two apart," was my request. She followed my pointing finger to Kasko and Sarah, entwined. "I'll see what I can do," she said.
The stranger comes back the next morning. We are waiting. We would be waiting anyhow, because it's July, the heat is wet and terrible, and the Morning Star has central air. My parents' house does not have central air. The movie theater, two towns over, does not open until the afternoon.
He starts asking the same questions as the day before, and Kasko, Sarah, and Davey give the same answers. "Nothing." "Nope." "Never noticed." The stranger is getting frustrated. Keeps asking the same things. Have we seen any girls collecting rainwater in bowls? Wearing milky stones on chains around their necks? Carrying a double-edged blade with runes carved into its handle?
"Don't blame us for the no-witches situation," Kasko says. He's got a satisfied look I can't stand.
I say loudly, "Why don't you talk to Egg Boy?"
"Shut up, Giles," they all say at once.
"Who is Egg Boy?"
"A retarded person who lives under the town bridge," Kasko declares. "Next question?"
The stranger looks at me, hard. "Giles, who is Egg Boy?"
From across the table, Kasko is staring too. He shakes his head just the tiniest bit, and tucks his lips behind his teeth.
"He lives under the bridge and steals eggs from farms," I answer reluctantly. But the stranger is writing it down. He seems excited. He finishes the coffee in his cup and slurps up what spilled into the green saucer. I look over his shoulder at the notebook and read FIND EGG BOY in big bleeding blue letters.
Egg Boy, whose heart was torn to pieces and left in the road, as we all know, now keeps to himself in his apartment above the package store. His bad moods are feared and his grief is respected. People only discuss his plight in whispers, and never with grownups, much less strange ones. I'm not sure if this stranger is a grownup or not. He dresses old--corduroy pants and white button-down shirts and thick brown shoes--but his face is soft and spotted with pimples. He doesn't look much older than Kasko or the other boys who are already done with high school.
I leave the Morning Star while the stranger is still sitting there, before Kasko can hit or lecture me. I take my bike away from town into the meadows, the pine woods, hiding in the heat until supper.
"Do your spells really work?" I'd said to the witch. We were all having beers at the VFW, where the manager doesn't believe in underage drinking laws. "If you're old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, you're old enough to get blinkered," the manager says. I am not old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, but I drink there anyway.
"They work," the witch said vaguely. "Destruction of love bond--it's a common rite But it might take some time."
I wanted her to hurry, before my sister did something stupid like marry him.
On the third morning, the stranger doesn't come. We sit in the cool air eating doughnuts and stirring packets of sugar into burnt coffee. When Kasko gets bored of telling my sister how hard he'll get up in her snatch, he informs me I'm a brainless baby bitch and if I don't learn to keep my mouth shut he will shut it permanently. Kasko never can come up with his own phrases. He just repeats what people say on television. I wait for Sarah to defend me. After he calls me bitch a second time, she goes, "Shut up, Kask," but in a dozy voice, not fierce at all. I sit there hating them both.
At noon, Kasko leaves for his shift at the Vietnamese café. The Morning Star begins to crowd with grownups on lunch break from the bank, the pharmacy, the courthouse. I think of the stranger folding stained white shirts into a suitcase at the Red Roof, digesting his unsatisfying continental breakfast, driving his rental back to the airport. He will not find Egg Boy. The grownups in Wolvercote don't know any Egg Boy. They think his name is Earl.
"Davey," I say, "lemme borrow your truck for a minute."
"How long is a minute?"
"Short. And I'm a good driver."
"You're a good driver," he has to admit. Next year, when I take the learner's permit test, I will surely get a perfect score.
I find the stranger in the Red Roof parking lot, trash bag in hand, picking coffee cups and candy wrappers off his car seats. He is sweating like a hog.
"I was worried you'd've checked out already."
"Checked out? Hardly," he says. "There is more to investigate. This Egg Boy, for instance. There's not a single bridge within a fifteen-mile radius of Wolvercote--hence, he cannot live under one."
"But he could still be retarded," I remind him.
"Is he?"
"No," I say. I look at the stranger's finger, the one with the ring. "He's actually smart as hell," I continue. "He was in Sarah's class at school. She said he wrote English papers that made you want to cry they were so beautiful."
"And he, in his intelligence, might be familiar with witchcraft?"
"Well, maybe not so much the craft as the witch," I say.
The stranger flinches. "Now we are getting somewhere."
She showed up last spring, I tell him, at the VFW with an industrial band from downstate. Kasko had booked them at the last minute. Strips of white cotton wrapped tight around their bodies made them moving mummies. Their songs, which came out of a computer, sounded like people getting hit with hammers and violins. The girl was selling their merchandise. She sat at a card table with the tapes and shirts and stickers while they stood on stage pressing the computer buttons. Nobody bought any merchandise, but Egg Boy went over to her and made conversation. He made conversation because she was pissed-looking and pretty in her Egyptian makeup, her see-through net dress, her boots that climbed all the way up her thighs. Egg Boy was pissed-looking, too.
The industrial band left and she stayed. For a week the two of them holed up in his apartment above the packie. When they came down again, he told Kasko, his best friend since seventh grade, that he was going to marry her.
"What name did she go by?" asks the stranger. He looks a little sick. His eyes are blinking very fast.
"Are you really writing a paper on this?"
"What was her goddamn name ?"
"Morrigan," I say.
The stranger nods, rubs his cheek, stares down at the mottled Styrofoam in his hand.
"So you're not writing a paper. Are you even in graduate school?"
I am admiring the guy's ability not to cry when his eyes are so full of tears.
"This Egg Boy," he says slowly, "she was fucking him."
"They got married. What do you think."
He says nothing.
"The majority of couples," I inform him, "keep having sex for at least the first three years of marriage."
"Who told you that lie?"
"My sister. She read it in a magazine."
"Did an actual ceremony occur? Was anyone official presiding? As in someone over the age of twenty-one?"
"No, but it was a real wedding. And they took their clothes off."
"Lovely," he says, all cold.
The ceremony was held at midnight in the back room of the Vietnamese café. Morrigan brought in a bunch of black lace and told me and Sarah to tack it up over all the windows. We didn't have any tacks so we used electrical tape. From the stereo came groaning organ music; from the rented dry-ice machine, fog that smelled like strawberries.
The kids gathered. There were no grownups in sight. Some of the older kids, Kasko's age, were about to turn into grownups; they were almost old enough; they had jobs and goatees and sometimes, by accident, babies. We stood around the room in our fanciest outfits. I wore my father's tuxedo pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt and a long black tie. My hair, stiff with Ivory soap, shot straight into the air. Sarah was in a vinyl dress that crammed her breasts up to her neck, and I tried not to look at them.
Kasko was the priest. He waited under the exit sign, which Morrigan had hidden with a wreath of plastic orchids, in the three-piece suit he wore to his mother's funeral last year. I was thinking he should have worn a cape instead, something not so Christian-looking, but Sarah explained that the suit brought him closer to the Dark Side, where his mother was, and thereby invested him with the powers necessary to preside over the ritual.
Morrigan and Egg Boy came out of the kitchen in bathrobes. Morrigan's midnight-blue hair was tied into clumps with little rubber snakes, and her eyes were painted purple and black in the shape of Cleopatra's. Egg Boy looked like he normally did--bald, angry--except for the bathrobe. They stood in front of Kasko and everybody got quiet.
"Why are they wearing bathrobes?" I whispered to Sarah.
"Because they're doing the ceremony sky-clad," she answered.
The robes dropped. They made terrycloth pools at the feet of the bride and groom. I blinked at the sudden flesh. Morrigan had pointy shoulders and pimples on her back but her butt was plenty--I mean it was beautiful--round, soft, tilted up. I stared at its surging, the high curving slice between her cheeks, the two dents at the bottom of her spine. Her little pale legs were shaking. I pictured my hands on her waist, lightly clamped. I kept my eyes away from Egg Boy, afraid of seeing what a handsome guy's butt looked like. I was sure it would not resemble mine.
I could not see their fronts. Kasko's stupid lizard eyes crawled down, seeing her, looking at what he shouldn't. He saw it on my sister--wasn't that enough? He stared until Egg Boy kicked his suited leg.
Kasko consulted the script Morrigan had written out for him. "There are those in our midst who seek the bond of Handfasting. Let them be named and brought forward." Morrigan and Egg Boy each took a tiny step, but there was not much room to go before they hit Kasko.
"Are you Gwyll?" Kasko said.
"I am," said Egg Boy. Morrigan had told him he needed a name more appropriate to the ceremony.
"What is your desire?"
Egg Boy looked down at his arm, where he had written out his part. "To be made one with Morrigan in the eyes of the Gods and the Wicca."
Kasko said to Morrigan, "Are you Morrigan?"
"I am."
"And what is your desire?"
"To be made one with Gwyll in the eyes of the Gods and the Wicca."
After taking one more look at her tits, Kasko reached behind him for the plastic sword that had been borrowed from Davey's uncle, who did seasonal work at the Delaware Historical Society acting out the Revolutionary War. He raised up the sword then handed it to Morrigan and Egg Boy, who grasped it between them.
"Here before you," Kasko boomed, "stand two of your folk. Witness, now, that which they have to declare."
In my version for the stranger, I don't mention looking at their butts. I don't tell about seeing Kasko, after the whiskey toasts, put a finger on my sister's nose and softly say, "What about a handfasting for us ?" Sarah laughed and shook her head so his finger slipped off. "Not for us," she said.
"Let's get in the car, Giles," the stranger says. "This heat's not fit for man nor beast." We climb in and he turns the key; the air conditioning comes blasting. His eyes are wet but they still aren't dripping. I wait for him to say something. What he says finally is, "I'm John. We haven't been properly introduced."
"Can I smoke in this car?"
"You may. The ceremony you describe is a Wiccan marriage rite. I've come across it in my research."
"What's the research for, if you're not writing anything?"
"The bride," he goes on, "happens to be someone quite, that is to say, extremely, dear to me. Her name is Abby." From his shirt pocket he takes a postcard, creased and soft. The postcard is a picture of the Wolvercote courthouse in the fall with the leaves piled red on the square. On the back it says: Everything in this town reminds me of falling down . And that is all.
"How do you know she wrote it?" I ask.
"It's in her hand. She has a very accomplished, a very graceful hand."
The letters are spidery, slanted, curled--the writing of a person who wants people to think she is mysterious.
He gets something else out of his pocket. It's a photograph of a girl standing on a lawn in a light green thin-strapped dress with yellow flowers stamped all over it. She seems embarrassed and is not smiling. This girl looks like your average girl, maybe a little prettier than your average girl. Her hair is dark blond. Her lipstick is pink. If this is Morrigan, she's deep undercover.
"That's her? She looks all normal and shit."
"This is her-- before ," says John. I ask before what, and he says before she got the idea in her head that college and hamburgers and having sex in the missionary position were going to destroy her soul. "And this was her sunsuit," he says, "that I bought for her two summers ago. She called it a dress, but it was more of a sunsuit."
"She definitely wasn't wearing that when she came to Wolvercote."
"I imagine not. She burned it shortly before she left me. I got home from class one night and she had this little bonfire going in the kitchen sink. The sunsuit was in flames; so was the phone bill, a letter from her mother, and our marriage certificate."
"That sucks," I say.
"Her witch phase had been going on for a few months by that time. The books, the herbs, the amulets--but mostly the new wardrobe. She jacked hell out of our credit card. Started doing a kind of Halloween-on-the-banks-of-the-Nile makeup routine. Made a witchy friend at the New Age bookstore. She thought about joining a coven, but the nearest one was an hour's drive."
"She needed a change," I conclude.
John taps a pen against his lips and says, "What confuses me is why your fellow members of the pastoral underground are so secretive about her having been here. Is it from boredom? The need to build drama where there is actually rather little?"
"Kasko is his best friend," I explain. "He won't let him be disgraced any further. He says Morrigan was a fatal gash in the vein of Egg Boy's manhood."
"The vein of his manhood?"
"The chick ditched him. Made a fool of him. It amounts to a castration."
"So says Kasko?"
I shrug. I don't like talking about Kasko. His name brings up pictures of Sarah without any clothes on, eyes shut, writhing on a gritty sheet and making noises like the girls on the videos Davey keeps in a cooler in his parents' garage. But I want John to understand his terribleness. "Did you know he tortures squirrels?" I say. "He rigs traps where they strangle slowly until he lets them go. They make horrible little coughing sounds, after. And he shot a dog once in the foot, and bragged about it. And his name sounds like a gas station."
"That's awful," John says, but he isn't paying much attention. "Will you take me to see him?"
"Who?"
"Humpty Dumpty. He of the manly vein."
"He's not really into visitors," I mumble. "But okay."
After the witch had agreed to cast a spell for me, I'd looked hard for evidence of success. If my sister slept at home for two nights running, I thought Morrigan had triumphed. If I detected a grain of irritation in Sarah's throat when she said Kasko's name, I silently congratulated the Dark Side. But nothing, really, when it came down to it, was changing. I still caught them kissing behind the counter when I stopped at the Morning Star after school. I still heard him whisper, in public earshot, about sticking it in her.
I went by the apartment above the packie. I wanted to ask her why the spell wasn't working. She might need different herbs, or a frog to grind up. (I would offer to catch one.) In the stairwell I heard screaming.
"What're you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about?"
"HOW CAN YOU BE SO MORONIC YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT?"
I waited on the landing until the screaming stopped. It stopped and I kept waiting and then Morrigan came gunning out the door, black dress afloat. "Oh," she said, "it's you," but did not stop. I followed her down two flights into the bright wash of beer light.
"Can you please do that spell again?" I said. "It's not working."
" What ? Fuck, I have no cigarettes."
"Here." I held out my pack. "The anti-love spell, remember? For my sister and the asshole."
She filled her chest with smoke and said: "Look."
With that one word, I understood.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm just not a very good witch."
"You're a fake witch," I corrected.
Morrigan glared back at me, then turned to squint up the block. There was nothing to see. "Will you get your parents' car," she said, "and take me to the nearest train?"
On the highway, John drives slowly and keeps readjusting the rear-view mirror. Davey is going to be mad that I abandoned his truck at the Red Roof. But I'm not afraid of Davey. He's too little to break anyone's bones.
"She was a waitress," John says, as if answering a question, "at the diner down the street from my apartment. I had breakfast there twice weekly before my sociology class. I was very shy. You've seen her, so you understand my reasons for shyness. She noticed my books on the table. She was in college too, a psych major. She had never heard Brazilian music. I took her to hear it."
"This is before," I say, "she got all dark and shit?"
"This is when her favorite meal was cole slaw and hamburgers. When she enjoyed her sitcoms."
"And when you were fucking her," I add, relishing the chance to say this word without lowering my voice.
John snaps, "I would really appreciate your not using that phrase."
"But you said--"
"Stop it!" His upper lip is twitching. Red spots jump in his cheeks. "Have some goddamn respect."
"Sorry," I say, and I am. He is doing pretty poorly, this John. He does not seem well. His face has the same quivery, fish-skinned look my mother's gets right before she refills her Klonopin prescription.
He parks in front of the neon beer signs. Two floors up, we stop at Egg Boy's door. The door is hung with a huge poster for a record called Enemy of the Sun . The band who made this record is a band Kasko has been trying to book for years, but they are too good to come here. The ones that come have no place better to play. John looks disapprovingly at the screaming corpse on the door, its bony hands raised in pleading.
Egg Boy opens at our knock. He is shirtless, in black sweatpants, and obviously hasn't bothered to shave his head in several days. Soft shoots of gold are growing in. His chest, which I've always envied for its hardness, does not look so hard. The belly swells out from under the ribs.
"Giles," he nods.
"Can we come in for a second?"
Egg Boy shrugs, stands back. The room, painted a dark streaky red, with black plastic sheets tacked over the windows, smells like toe-lint. The only places to sit are bed and floor; we all stand.
"How you been keeping?" Egg Boy asks me.
"Fine," I say, and look at John, because I can't think of a way to introduce the topic. The smell in the room is making me breathe through my mouth.
"John," says John and reaches to shake Egg Boy's hand. "I'd like, if I may, to ask you about Morrigan."
Egg Boy raises his chin. I remember how he clocked a boy once in the grocery store parking lot, a clean, quick smash, and the boy didn't get up for half an hour. "That little cunt? What about her?"
John coughs. "She's my wife."
"She's my wife. My cunty wife."
I think of my bike leaned up against a bench on the square, under the maples, where I left it this morning. I want to be on it, riding. I want not to see the skin under Egg Boy's eyes sagging.
"Are you the college motherfucker she used to live with? She told me about you. I pictured you with little granny glasses."
John reaches to dab sweat off the sides of his nose. "She didn't tell you we were married."
"Um, no ."
"Ah," says John. He sounds very tired. "She left me in February, and I have been looking for her. I just want to know what happened. I want to tell her she can always come back."
The "coming back" part changes Egg Boy's face. A shudder unclenches his jaw. "You would take her?" he says. "After she dicked you so royally?"
"I can't hate her. I've tried. I can't."
"It's easy," said Egg Boy. "Just think of how she put her head on your stomach at night and said This is so much better than anything and how she talked about the kids you'd have, how you would dress those kids in tiny Black Sabbath T-shirts and the kids would have your sexy blue eyes. Think of how she said We'll go to Scotland where they have castles . Think of how pretty she was."
"She was pretty," John agrees.
Egg Boy sits down on the bed. John kneels to the floor, leans back against the mini-refrigerator. I feel stupid standing. "I'm gonna take off," I tell John.
"You mind running by the Star to get us some sandwiches?" says Egg Boy. "Tell your sister to put them on my tab. Turkey club, no lettuce."
"Ham and swiss, please," John says. I notice he has quit sweating.
The lunch rush is over and my sister is reading the newspaper. The line cook sits smoking. Davey isn't around. "Can you make me a couple of sandwiches?"
"You going on a picnic?" Sarah asks.
"It's for me and the guy doing witch research."
"I thought he left town."
"Turkey club, no lettuce, and a ham and swiss."
She gives the order to the line cook, who nods but stays where he is, smoking.
"You be home for supper tonight?" I ask. "They're showing the original Dracula on the sci-fi channel."
"I don't think so," she says. "I have to meet up--"
"--with him after his shift. I know. What, are you guys engaged or something? He tortures squirrels."
"He does not torture squirrels," she says.
"Oh yes he fucking does. I saw him. And he shot that dog in the leg."
"Which was an accident. Look, baby bear, we'll watch a movie tomorrow night. We can rent if there's nothing good on. And I'm not engaged. Most definitely not engaged."
But I see them on the sheets, his huge body pressing the air out of her small one, sauce and dirt from under his fingernails smeared across her stomach. I hear him making fast high grunts like the gigantically hung actors on Davey's videos. Lunging, stabbing, shoveling, so rough she starts to cry. She is crying and then it's not Kasko on her, it's John, scrawnier and gentler, but he holds her wrists against the wall so she can't leave. Let me go , my sister whispers. I'm late for supper .
She asks do I want any potato chips. I shake my head and she goes back to reading the paper. It's a long time before the line cook gets up to make the sandwiches. In the wait, I try to clean the pictures out of my head. I want my head empty of bodies on beds, of stabbing bodies, of Kasko's voice telling my sister he's going to lick his fingers and slide them up her gash until she begs.
Back at Egg Boy's, the husbands are drinking from forty-ounce Star Wars cups and their faces have gotten redder. A record is playing of a guy singing sadly in French. I lay the sandwiches, wrapped in butcher paper, in the middle of the floor.
"Think of how," John mumbles, "she dumped her nonpareils into her popcorn at the movies, because chocolate and corn are delicious together."
"We never went to the movies," Egg Boy says. "But think of how she threw you up against the sink in the Burger King men's room and took off your belt and wrapped it around your neck and put the buckle in her mouth before she--"
"Think of how ticklish she was at the backs of her knees."
"How sweet she looked in crotchless panties."
John helps himself to the bottle of brown liquor on the floor. "How sweet she looked in her sunsuit, standing in our backyard. It was my job to mow the grass."
"Hit me up," says Egg Boy, holding out his cup. John pours. Egg Boy turns to me, blinks his sagging eyes. "Love is a joke," he announces.
"Indeed," says John. "A farce. A folly ."
"Yeah?" I say.
"Show him the thing," John suggests.
Egg Boy reaches under the bed and takes out a postcard with an aerial view of adobe houses clustered on red desert sand. It's postmarked Proctor, Arizona. Travel keeps me from falling down , she wrote. And that was all.
"She just goes along her merry way," shouts John. His voice knocks against the walls of the tiny room.
When I'd pulled up in front of the train station, the witch had asked for one more smoke. We smoked quietly in the dark. "I did try, you know," she said at the end of her cigarette. "I looked it up in my book. I spoke the incantations. I put water and fire in every corner of the room."
"Maybe your book is fake," I said.
"It was written by an expert practitioner."
"Which train are you taking?" I asked.
"The first one that comes," Morrigan said. It was the kind of thing the characters would say in the 1950s road trip novel we read last spring for English. All the kids in my class loved that book. A few of them even said they were going to quit school and hop trains. But nobody did.
"Good luck," I told her.
"Thanks. And don't worry. Sarah will make it out of here soon enough."
John is waving the bottle at me. "Giles, partake with us."
"Yeah, man," says Egg Boy, "you need some practice. Want a cup?"
"No, thank you," I say.
"Straight from the jug, then!"
"No, thank you."
My bike is still chained to the bench. I want to be riding. These boys have clamped their hands at a girl's waist, felt her heels on their spines. But they are just sitting here now. The girl is traveling. The girl has gone. Until today I felt guilty for helping her go, angry her spell didn't work. Now I'm looking at the boys she left and seeing the boy my sister will leave. I am wanting her away from the green square and pink uniform and scabby sheets under moving skin. I am wanting her on trains, with me.
