“Me?”
He nods. “Tonight—for the reenactment.”
We end up talking to PJ about the whole séance incident for another half-hour or so. Just until Drea comes in.
“I need to talk to you.” She sits down next to me on the bed. Her normally perfectly pouted lips are now more grimaced, and her aura’s a dreary olive color. She stares down at her shoes—melon-peach sneakers to match her scarf—and then peeks at me.
“Okay,” I say, even though I know I don’t have much time.
We move outside, onto the front steps where it’s quiet, and sit there a few moments, just looking out at the lawn.
“I’m sorry about what happened yesterday morning,” she says finally. “You know, when you came in and I was with Chad.”
“What did happen?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing, really.”
“Then why do you need to apologize?”
“Because maybe I wanted something to happen.”
“Oh.”
She turns to face me. “I’m still in love with him, Stacey.”
I clamp my eyes shut and look away, feeling her words burn straight through my heart.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I’ve tried. I’ve told myself that he’s yours, that you’re the one who’s with him now. That I’m over him. But I’m not. I still love him. I think I always will.”
I bite my lip and stare down at my hands, at the chapped skin on my palms. I feel a nest of tears hatch behind my eyes. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Drea and I had this conversation. It’s just . . . I wasn’t prepared for it to happen now, in the middle of everything, when I need more than ever for the constants in my life to stay just that—constant.
“Say something,” she says, looking away.
“What do you want me to say?”
A part of me wants to ask her if Chad feels the same, but I can’t, because I’m not sure I could handle the answer right now.
“Have you told Chad how you feel?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “But I think he knows. I think he’s always known.”
I nod because I know she’s right. Because she does love Chad. Maybe even more than I do. “So what now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Sometimes I feel like he feels the same, you know? But then he sees you and I feel like everything changes.”
I sink back against the step and take a breath, thinking how this whole scene feels so familiar, how it was just last year that I put her through this exact same thing. And then I think how oddly okay I feel I am going to be about it, how maybe I’ve sensed it all along—that Chad and I aren’t meant to be together, not the way the two of them are.
“Just tell me you don’t hate me,” she says.
I manage to look at her neck, at the brownish mole on her chin, and then up into her eyes. She’s crying, too. There’s a trickle of tears running down her cheek. “I don’t hate you,” I say, wiping away the last of my tears.
And I don’t hate her. I can’t. Even though a part of me wants to.
After my talk with Drea, I nurse my wounds as best I can with a few breaths of lavender, a couple dabs of patchouli oil behind my ears and at the front of my neck, and several droplets of rose water at my temples. I tell myself that it’s good that Drea is being honest with me—because maybe it’s forcing me to be honest with myself. This coupled with the aromatherapy recipe I’ve got swimming on my skin, helps center me a bit—helps me refocus on the essential.
I take a deep breath and return one of Jacob’s many phone calls. He tells me he’s reconsidered joining forces to do a spell and wants me to come to his room ASAP. I don’t stop to ask him how he plans to sneak me inside. Instead I just hang up, grab the noose, the letters, and the cassette player, and cram a bunch of random spell supplies—a handful of vanilla beans, sandwich bags full of dried basil and dill, and a tiny bottle of sesame oil—into my backpack.
When I get to his dorm, he’s standing outside, waiting for me. “I’ve got everything ready in my room,” he says. “But you need to wait here until I can get rid of the RD.”
I wait several minutes until Jacob signals to me that it’s safe to go in. He ushers me through the lobby, up a couple flights of stairs, and down a narrow hallway. We end up passing by a few boys along the way—freshmen mostly, I think—who give me weird looks, ogling me extra hard like they’ve never seen a girl before.
Jacob’s room is the last door on the left. He unlocks it and we go in. A typical boys’ room. Posters of classic rock bands line the walls—the Beatles, the Doors, the Police. There are also dirty clothes piled high on the floor, neutral shades of coffee and blue, and the requisite Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar thumbtacked to a bulletin board.
“My roommate’s a slob,” he says, closing the door behind us. “This is mostly all his stuff.”
“Where is he?” I ask, looking toward the spell supplies gathered on what is obviously Jacob’s bed.
“Out. He’s always out. I barely ever even see the guy.”
I nod, taking note of how nervous Jacob seems. He fumbles with his keys, dropping them once before managing them inside his pocket.
“Was it hard to get rid of the RD?” I ask, hoping to lighten the tension.
Without so much as glancing in my direction, he kicks a clear pathway through the piles of clothes on the floor leading to his bed. “Not really. I just told him one of the toilets on the first floor overflowed.”
“Did it?”
He nods. “Thanks to a pair of briefs.”
“Lovely,” I say.
“Tell him that. I just hope he has a pair of galoshes handy.” Jacob folds his arms and looks over the spell supplies sprawled out over a cranberry-colored square of fabric that takes up half the bed.
“I brought some spell stuff of my own,” I say, unzipping the main compartment of my backpack.
“I have everything,” he says.
“How about the noose and the letters and stuff?” I ask, ready to take them out.
He shakes his head. “We have all we need right here.”
“What are we going to do?” I ask, taking a seat on the corner of his bed.
“I’d like to do a spell that focuses on your past. I’m thinking between your dreams about Maura and the letter, referring to some past promise, that that’s where the answer lies.”
“That’s funny,” I say. “My mother said the same thing.”
He nods, almost like he knows.
“So where do we start?” I ask
Jacob turns to light a stick of incense. That’s when I notice the chunky white candle sitting atop his night table. It looks exactly like mine.
“You have a white candle,” I say.
“You seem surprised.”
“It’s just that it looks like one my grandmother gave me, that’s all.”
He swallows hard and turns around to face me.
“Are you going to light it?” I ask.
“No.”
“Why?” I swallow.
He’s looking at me so purposefully, almost through me, like he can see right into my soul. “Because it’s not time.”
“Then when will be the time?”
“Don’t you know?” he asks. “White is for magic.”
I feel my lower lip quiver, just hearing my grandmother’s words come from his mouth. “How do you know that?”
“What do you mean? Don’t you think so, too?”
“I don’t know. I mean, that’s what my grandmother said it meant.”
He nods like he understands completely, like this comes as no shock at all.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I continue. “I mean, why does there have to be some speci
al time to light a white candle? We do magic all the time. At least I do.”
Jacob smiles like he can sense my frustration. “Magic is more than just spells, don’t you think? We’d be cheating ourselves so much if that’s all we thought it was.”
“No,” I say. “I know there’s more to it.” And I do know there’s more—like the magical elements of spirit and nature; like the moon, casting its light when you need to see. But I still don’t understand what my grandmother was trying to tell me.
“True magic,” he says, “encompasses so much. It encompasses all the wonderful little things that can’t be explained—pure things.”
I nod, still waiting for the light to click on in my head.
“So, maybe your grandmother wanted you to wait until you experienced some specific aspect of magic before you lit that candle.”
“Like what?”
Jacob turns away to arrange a group of rocks on his desk. “Like love,” he says, his voice low, like there’s a part of him that doesn’t want me to hear.
Love? I gulp at the thought.
“At least that’s what my uncle told me to wait for before lighting mine.”
“Your uncle?”
He nods, gathering the rocks up into a clump. “My uncle and I were close growing up. He was really the only one I could relate to.”
“And he’s the one who gave you the candle?”
Jacob turns around to face me again. He nods, his cheeks a little flushed. “On my twelfth birthday.”
I feel myself start to tremble. My heart quickens inside my chest, stirring up my nerves, rattling through my bones. I fold my arms and broaden my stance in an effort to regain composure. I wonder if he can sense it—how shaken I am, how much alike we both are.
“Anyway,” he says, taking a deep breath to change the subject, “before we begin the spell, there needs to be complete trust.”
“Trust?” My head is spinning.
He nods. “In order to combine our energies on any spell, in order for it to work, we have to be able to trust one another completely.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Not okay,” he corrects. “Because I know you don’t trust me completely.”
I open my mouth to object, but I can’t. Because there is this tiny place inside me that’s holding back from trusting him completely. “Trust has always been a tough one for me.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Because I don’t completely trust you either.”
What? I mean, after all this time I’ve spent questioning him and his motives, reasons why he’d pack up his life and move all the way across the country, it just never dawned on me—the possibility that he didn’t trust me.
“If I trusted you completely,” he begins, “I wouldn’t have hesitated when you asked me to do a spell together. I told you spells are private for me. I’ve never shared them with anyone.”
“So what are we even doing here?” I ask. “If you don’t think a collaborative spell will work—”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t work.” Jacob sits down beside me on the bed. “I only said it wouldn’t work if we didn’t trust each other.”
“So how are we supposed to trust each other now?”
He motions to the spell supplies. “That’s what this stuff is for. Before we do a spell that focuses on your past, we need to do one that bonds us together with trust.”
“Spells don’t create trust,” I say, standing up.
“This one will.” He stands up as well, landing smack dab in front of my face—eye-to-eye, lip-to-lip. He smells like coconut oil.
I feel my lip tremble and I think he sees it, too. The corners of his mouth curl slightly upward, as if to smile.
“Maybe we should get started then,” I say, stepping back. I sit back down on the bed and begin fumbling with a squarish jar of some sort. “What do we do first?”
Jacob plugs a hot plate into the wall by his desk. “We’re going to make body paint.”
“Body paint?”
He pulls a tank top from the top drawer of his dresser and tosses it to me. “So you won’t get your clothes dirty.”
“I’m supposed to wear this?”
He nods and pulls another tank top out for himself.
“I don’t think so.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” he says. “You need to trust me.” He takes a step toward me and reaches for my hand. “I have as much to lose in this as you do.”
“Your life isn’t at stake,” I say.
“No,” he says. “But yours is.” His slate-blue eyes penetrate mine so deeply I have to look away. “I’ll turn around and you can change over there.” He nods toward the corner of the room.
As soon as he turns around, I move in that direction, just to the right of the door, thinking how if I wanted to, I could just walk out.
But of course I don’t.
I pull my sweater over my head and slip the tank top on over my bra, reminding myself that I still have a boyfriend, that I shouldn’t be feeling this way, that there are far more pressing things to concern myself with at the moment.
The tank hangs down mid-thigh and smells like him, like coconut oil and lemongrass incense. It droops a bit low under my arms, revealing the sides of my bra. I tuck the fabric of the tanktop into the spandex and turn to glance at myself in the mirror—at my long, dark hair, at my golden-brown eyes and angular cheeks. The tank top hugs a bit at the chest and hips and makes my skin look lighter in color, almost creamy. And for some inexplicable reason, standing here on a mound of sweatpants mixed with T-shirts, in his clothes, in his room, under these conditions, I couldn’t feel more . . . beautiful.
“Okay,” I say, almost eager for him to see me, to see this part of me. But instead he just pulls off his shirt and changes into a tank as well.
I look away, feeling a swell of heat move down the length of my spine, thinking how Chad used to make me feel this way, how that seems so long ago, now.
“Okay,” he says. “All set.” The tank hugs just slightly around his chest, showing off the tops of his arms, like balls of muscle beneath the skin. I allow him to look at me as well; I wonder how he sees me, what I look like to him—a friend, a girl with a boyfriend, a puzzle he has yet to solve.
“Let’s get started,” he says, ever respectful, keeping focused on my eyes. He takes the ceramic pot from the center of the scarf and holds it out to me. There’s an olive-green powder inside, like colored flour, but it smells more like hay. “Have you ever used henna before?”
I shake my head.
“It’s perfect for body paint.” He pours a small pitcher of liquid into the pot. “Rainwater,” he explains. And then he adds in a couple tablespoons of instant coffee, a few squeezes of a lemon, eucalyptus oil, honey, cardamom, and a cinnamon stick.
He mixes it all up with a wooden spoon and then sets the pot on the hot plate. “It’ll only be a few minutes,” he says. “Heating it up this way just allows the paint to darken.”
I look inside the pot as he stirs, watching the liquid swallow up the greenish powder. The ingredients fold into the mix like watered-down cake batter, turning everything a darkish-brown. “It almost looks good enough to eat,” I say.
“That means it’s ready.” He takes the pot by the handle and sets it on a ceramic dish.
“What are we going to do?” I ask, like it isn’t obvious.
“First,” he says, “we need to focus on what we already know about the impending danger, and then we need to ask ourselves what we’d like to know.”
“The what-we’d-like-to-know part seems pretty obvious,” I say.
“Is it really, though?” He continues to mix the body paint with the wooden spoon and then dips his finger into the center. “Just right.”
“Of course it??
?s obvious,” I say, getting back to the subject. “I want to know who’s been sending me stuff, who’s watching me, and what’s going to happen to me exactly.”
“I’ll bet you already know the answers to some of those questions.” He holds up his index finger, an ample helping of thick, brown body paint on the tip. “Are you ready?”
“For what?” I ask, leaning back.
“If we’re going to build trust, we need to paint on each other. We need to physically show one another what we know, what we desire to know . . . We need to be vulnerable to one another.”
“You’re kidding, right? Since when will painting on another person’s body parts make one vulnerable to anything?”
Jacob looks a bit dejected by my response, which makes me feel like a megabitch. I don’t know what is wrong with me sometimes. I’ve had Amber and Drea engage in plenty of seemingly bizarre spell stunts. Plus, wasn’t it me who buried a potato just the other day? Who made a wax doll and slept with him under my pillow? So why should I have a problem with this?
With his muddied finger, Jacob draws a spiral in the center of his palm—one with five layers and that extends toward his wrist.
I dip my finger into the body paint as well and draw a spiral that matches his. I hold my palm out to him as a peace offering. “Shall we start over?”
Jacob hesitates but then places his palm up against mine, the heat from his hand penetrating right into my own. “There’s just one rule,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“Henna stains big time, so you have to be sure about the images that you draw—purposeful about them.”
“Deal.”
I pull up my hair in a rubber band, and we spend the next several minutes drawing down each other’s arms, at the back of each other’s necks, and, pulling up the tanktops, on each other’s backs. I draw the noose on his forearm; the letter M where the back of his neck meets his shoulders; the words I’M WATCHING YOU down his left bicep; and the weathered gray basement door from my nightmares on his back, just above his waist.
Jacob does the same on me. I can feel lines and swirls being formed along my shoulders and at the nape of my neck as he parts my hair. Triangular shapes and checkered patterns under my arms, tickling me, giving me goosebumps. I wonder if he can see my bra, if he notices the heat I’m sure is visible all over my face.