White Is for Magic

  I pluck a potato, courtesy of the cafeteria lady on duty this morning, and a black ballpoint pen from the side pocket of my bag. Into the raw potato skin I carve my questions: WILL I KEEP MY PROMISE? and WHAT MIGHT MY PROMISE BE?

  I place the potato into the mixing bowl and pour the remainder of the clove oil over it, approximately two tablespoons. I roll the potato in the mixture, making sure it gets moistened, that the carved letters fill up with my spirit.

  After several moments of mixing and concentrating, I spread a large sheet of wax paper out on the ground and then pour the mixture onto it, the carved questions facing up toward the moon. I sprinkle some dirt on top, in the form of the letter M, and then roll everything up in the wax paper, securing it with a thick rubber band.

  “I offer you, Moon, pieces of myself—my body, my bone—wrapped in love and spirit, and ask thee in return to help me see more clearly, to increase my natural awareness.”

  Using a spoon, I dig a hole about six inches deep into the patch of soil in front of me, my fingers aching as I struggle to break through the near-frozen earth. I deposit the gift inside, pack the soil back up, and then place the crystal cluster rock over the spot. “Blessed be,” I whisper, looking up toward the moon.

  The spell complete, I feel completely refreshed, as though suddenly more awake, more attuned with myself and nature. I lean back on my elbows and notice the pine tree just to the side of me. I love pine needles—the way they smell, the smooth and brittle texture when I roll them between my fingers, their ability to protect and dispel negativity. I pick up a couple branches from the ground for later use. That’s when I hear a rustling sound coming from a few yards behind me.

  I toss the branches into my bag, along with my spell supplies, and grab the crystal. It’s probably just some kids looking to booze it up before bedtime. I wait a few seconds for more noise, but I don’t hear anything. I switch off my flashlight and stand up. Now I can hear it, the snapping sound of kindling, like someone’s made a campfire.

  I click my flashlight back on, but keep the beam low, and take a couple steps toward the sound. I can see the bright orangey glow in the distance, the tiny sparks that jump up into the wind. But I don’t hear anything else. No voices or laughing. No sounds of beer cans opening or bottles being broken.

  The crystal pressed into my palm, I approach the campfire, just a few yards away. I can see a male figure, sitting in a partial clearing laden with rocks, the left side of his body illuminated by the campfire flame. He reaches into his knapsack and begins gathering whatever lies inside into the crook of his arm. He gets up and spreads the objects out around the perimeter of the fire. Rocks, I think. I do my best to try and keep track of how many he’s setting down, to see if he’s marking all eight directions, north to west. But I can’t be sure. He sits back down, pokes at the fire a couple times with a stick, and then pulls something from the side pocket of his knapsack. A jar. He shakes the contents up a few times and then holds the jar up to view. There’s a powdery, brownish substance inside, like beach sand, highlighted by the lapping flames. He unscrews the top and then pours something into it from a tiny container. A liquidy substance. He mixes it all up with a stick from the ground, dips his fingers inside, and then rubs the mixture down the side of his face and at the back of his neck.

  The whole picture of it, of someone else aside from myself performing some sort of moonlight ritual, completely weirds me out. It’s not because I think I’m the only person on the planet who does stuff like this; it’s just that, aside from my grandmother and some make-believe witches on TV, I’ve never actually seen anybody else do stuff like this. And yet, aside from that weirded-out part, there’s another part that’s intrigued, curious . . . almost hopeful, and I’m not even sure why. I squeeze the crystal, noticing how warm it feels in my hand, how I can’t stop shaking.

  As curious as I am and as much as I’d like to watch him more, I suddenly feel guilty, as though I’m invading his sacred space, as though the moon is watching me do it. I step backward and point the flashlight beam toward the ground to navigate my way out. There’s a group of bushes in front of me. I suck my gut in, hold the slack of my coat, and slip through as cleanly as possible to avoid making any noise. But, on my second step through, I hear a loud, cracking noise. I stop. Look down. It came from the ground. A long, dry branch, cracked in half, my faux Doc Marten pressed down on the broken pieces.

  My heart starts beating so hard I think he must hear that too. I click my flashlight off and do my best to hold my breath.

  I close my eyes and squat as far down into the bushes as my knees will allow.

  “Who’s there?” he calls, taking a step.

  I’m breathing so hard I can barely think straight. I scrunch myself up even further, burrowing my head into my knees, waiting for him to turn around like he’s made some mistake.

  I can hear him moving toward me, his body shifting through the brush, his footsteps snapping fallen twigs—just a few feet away now.

  Still, I don’t move. I envision myself as part of these bushes, blending into them, imagining my arms like thick branches, my back like a stump.

  He takes another step. And then another. I peek out through my fingers, but I can’t see much from this angle; there’s just brush, scratching against my face.

  “I know you’re there,” he says, just inches from me now; I can hear the closeness of his voice.

  I take a deep breath, muster up the courage of the moon, and straighten up. He’s standing right in front of me. I click my flashlight on and shine it toward him. He does the same.

  “Stacey?” he says. “What are you doing here?” He stares at me hard, his eyes wide, almost glinting. The color is visible in my flashlight beam, caught somewhere between gray and the lightest blue.

  “How do you know me?” I ask, the flashlight shaking in my grip.

  There’s a mark on his face. From the spell, I presume. A thick and shimmering line down his cheek.

  “We’ve met,” he says.

  My voice cracks. “Where?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  I tighten my grip on the flashlight to steady the shake and clench down on my jaw, conjuring up the other night in the boiler room. The guy chasing after me, up the stairs, calling out my name.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it meeting,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Breaking into the boiler room of a girls’ dorm in the middle of the night and scaring me half to death is hardly meeting.”

  “We met before that. Don’t you remember?”

  I study his face a moment—tawny skin, I think; darkish hair, sort of longish on the top. I try to recollect the voice from my nightmare, the one behind the weathered gray door in the basement, to decipher whether it’s the same. But I just can’t tell.

  “We bumped into each other,” he says. “In September, during orientation.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, stepping back.

  “Really,” he says, moving forward. “I was coming out of the bursar’s office. You were hiking up the stairs, two at a time . . .”

  It takes me a couple moments, but then I do begin to remember bumping into someone, some faceless person. The avalanche of textbooks out of my backpack and down the stairs, the spill of pencils and other assorted school supplies. I remember being in such a rush, just scrambling there on the ground, trying to pick everything up and cram it back into my bag. Vaguely, I recall somebody trying his best to help me.

  “Are you the one who sent me that e-mail?” I ask, changing the subject.

  “We need to talk, Stacey,” he says.

  “Are you the one who gave me this?” I hold the crystal out for show.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I wanted you to
have it. I was gonna give it to you myself, you know, instead of just leaving it there at the door. But then I saw your friends coming and didn’t feel like a party. It was that way at the Hangman, too. I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  “So we’re alone now,” I say. And just as soon as I say it, I want to take it all back. I don’t want him to know I’m alone. I tighten my hand around the crystal, making a hardened fist, just in case I need to fight.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Stacey,” he says, as though reading my mind.

  “So, what do you want?”

  “Just like I said; we need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  “Not now. Not here.”

  “Then I’m outta here.” I turn to leave.

  “No, don’t.” He takes another step toward me, his eyes widening.

  I shine my flashlight toward the campus grass, just a few yards away, the tall spotlights beaming over the cement benches in the near distance. If I wanted to, I could yell for help and someone would definitely hear me.

  “Don’t leave,” he says. “I do want to talk to you. I’m just in the middle of something right now.”

  I look over his shoulder at the fire, still alive and kindling, a few stray embers floating up from the heat. “What are you doing?”

  “I think you might already have some idea.” He looks deeply at me, his slate-blue eyes pouring right into my own, so intense I have to look away. “Can we talk tomorrow?” he asks.

  I don’t say anything. Because I want to talk to him. Because I want to find out what he has to say. I just don’t want him to know I do.

  “We could try meeting at the Hangman again,” he says. “After hours. But this time you could come alone?”

  “Why so late?” I ask.

  “Because what I have to say is private. No one else can be around.”

  “What is it about?”

  “You,” he says.

  “What about me?”

  “The crystal I gave you,” he begins. “You know what it means, right?”

  But instead of answering I focus on the glistening stripe down his cheek—a mix of sandalwood and dandelion, maybe.

  “I’ll meet you in the library,” I say. “In the same study room. Eight o’clock. We can keep the door closed.”

  “You promise you’ll be there?”

  “Promise?” I ask, the word so heavy in my mind. “As in, ‘will I keep my promise’?”

  “Yeah,” he says, looking at me funny. “You promise you’ll be there?”

  I nod, trying to figure him out, trying to decide if he’s the one who sent the letter. “But I won’t wait for you. At 8:05, I’m gone.”

  A tiny smile forms on his lips, like he’s relieved and pleased at the same time. He pauses a moment to study my face, my chin, my lips. And then locks eyes with me once more.

  We stand there a moment in awkward silence—me, not knowing whether or not we’re done, if I should leave; him, awaiting my next move. I steal myself from his stare and turn away, back out through the forest, back on relatively safe campus soil. But I can still feel him, his eyes, watching me.

  I follow the moon back around to the front of the dorm. Where I’m alone. Where it’s safe to let out my breath and untwist the binds on my heart. I lean back against the front door, my heart beating freely now, throbbing inside my chest. My whole body’s shaking, the blood stirring inside my veins, over my bones, and beneath the skin. My mind races with questions: What’s wrong with me? Who is this guy? Why didn’t I even ask his name?

  I cover my eyes with my hands in an effort to stop the collision of questions, but that only makes me dizzier. Because all I can picture there, in the dark and dankness of my palms, are his penetrating slate-blue eyes.

  I fumble with my keys at the door of our dorm, trying my hardest to get my fingers to work right, to put the mind-scrambling events of the last twenty minutes far, far behind me. What I need right now is to talk to Chad, to tell him we were stupid to fight on the phone, to recommend that we spend some serious make-up time together.

  So what that he didn’t call earlier? He was probably busy with his teammates. Maybe he was even thinking that I needed space. I probably did. I just hope he didn’t call while I was out because I’m not so sure I can handle lying again tonight, especially to him.

  After several attempts, the lock finally clicks and I’m in. I charge my way through the lobby and into the common room. And there he is, sitting on the vinyl couch, a bouquet of wildflowers clenched in his hand, like the perfect boyfriend that he is.

  “Look who decided to drop by,” he says, standing up.

  But instead of saying anything I just run into his arms, melodramatic-style, like right out of one of those old black-and-white movies, the kind where they play lots of orchestral music and the girls wear long, sweepy dresses. Chad hugs me back; his arms encircle my waist, the plastic wrap on the bouquet crinkles against my back.

  I peer over his shoulder at Drea, sitting on the edge of the couch, the corners of her mouth turned slightly downward.

  “Hi, Dray.” I take a slight step back from Chad, but still keep a hand pressed against his shoulder.

  She smiles a hello, but then looks away.

  “So, where have you been?” He hands me the bouquet of wildflowers. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Oh, really?” I ask, looking at Drea, wondering just how long he’s been waiting, how long he and Drea have spent together.

  “Yeah,” Chad says. “But it’s no big deal. Me and Drea were just talking about old times.” He laughs and looks at Drea, who shares his smile.

  “Old times? Like stuff that happened last year?” I ask.

  “God, no,” Drea says. “Good old times. Like stuff from grade school—funny stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Chad says. He proceeds to tell me some story about a middle-school field trip to the zoo and how an elephant squirted Drea with a trunkfull of water. Apparently the water got all over her chest and she was only wearing a thin pink T-shirt. And so their ever-ready teacher pulled this old-lady blouse from her bag of emergency supplies—a blouse with a giant seventies collar, ruffles at the wrists, and pastel zoo animals patterned across the polyester fabric. She made a mortified pre-teen, fashion-savvy Drea wear it for the remainder of the trip.

  Drea and Chad laugh at the story like it’s the funniest thing ever, but all I’m thinking is how it really isn’t that funny at all.

  “Well, I’m sorry you had to wait all this time,” I say to Chad, putting a blunt end to their ugly-blouse story. “We didn’t have plans tonight, did we?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s no big deal. I just thought I’d catch you. You’re usually in your room by now.”

  I look at the clock—11:10. After dorm curfew. “Oh my god, where’s Keegan?”

  “Relax,” Drea says.

  “Where is she?”

  “Sleeping.” Drea gets up and pulls at the length of her flannel pajama-shorts—hiked up, I imagine, for Chad’s benefit; pulled back down, I’m sure, for mine. “She had a headache and went to bed early.”

  I’m starting to feel a smidge of a headache coming over me as well. I rub at the ache in my temples and notice how dirty my fingers are from the spell. I wipe them as discretely as possible on my pants, keeping an eye on Drea’s nauseatingly perfect Coppertone legs as she walks back to our room and closes the door behind her.

  “Were you at the library tonight?” Chad turns to me.

  “I was just out walking,” I say, tucking my hair behind my ears so he doesn’t notice the missing chunk.

  “Walking?”

  “Yeah. I went to look at the moon.”

  “Alone?” he asks.

  I nod. I did, after all, go there by myself. “What’s the big deal?” r />
  “No big deal,” he says. “I guess I’m just surprised, that’s all. You’ve been sort of acting on edge lately. I’d think you’d be leery to go anywhere alone.”

  “Weren’t you the one who said I needed to put the past behind me and get on with my life?” I feel myself getting peeved all over again, and I can hear it in my voice.

  “I didn’t say it like that, Stacey. And if that’s the way it sounded, I’m sorry. I was just worried about you.”

  “I know,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Can we just start over?”

  “From where?” he asks.

  “The hug.” I hold out my arms and Chad wraps me up, relieved, I think, that I’m choosing to keep things in the Land of the Light—where relationships are easy and uncomplicated, where the grave and serious don’t have a place.

  “Much better.” He leans slightly back and moves in for a kiss. And so do I, except I end up tilting my head the wrong way and the kiss lands beside my left nostril.

  Chad smiles and squeezes me tighter. I suppose he’s right about keeping things simple. This feels so much better, so much easier, the way relationships are supposed to be—all wildflowers and cuddly hugs. Maybe that’s what I need right now.

  “I hate to go,” Chad says, breaking the embrace, “but I probably should. Just in case Keegan gets up.”

  “We should make plans for tomorrow night,” I say. “Something fun. Maybe we could get something to eat off campus. Or go to a movie.”

  “Definitely,” he says. “I’ll call you?”

  “No,” I say. “Let’s make definite plans. No more waiting around for phone calls.”