Page 39 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The city
Back then
Sharon turned theCLOSEDsign over and led us into the shop’s back room. Boxes were stacked against one wall, bookshelves lined another. There was a hot plate and an electric kettle and aLost Boysposter pinned up on the whitewash. Beside it hung a molting bulletin board layered in postcards and flyers and a few bright oddities: dried flowers, lengths of woven thread, a plait of hair so shiny it had to be synthetic.
In the room’s center was a chipped mint Formica table. An East Asian girl in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt sat in one of its two chairs looking at Sharon with the hungriest eyes I’d ever seen. A wooden ruler and a piece of knotted rope lay on the tabletop in front of her. When she saw me looking she swept both into her lap.
“Who are they?” she demanded, her voice a deep-dish wedge of South Side.
Sharon smiled at her perfunctorily. “Sweet Jane. This is Marion and her friends.” We didn’t rate names, apparently. “Honey,would you run out and grab us some sandwiches? Four, make ’em turkey.”
“I’m not hungry,” Marion said colorlessly.
“Right. You’re fasting. Three, then.”
Jane looked at her unhappily. “I’m hungry.”
Sharon squeezed her shoulder, kissed her cheek. It was motherly, I was pretty sure. “Just three, okay?”
Jane avoided looking at us as she tucked her ruler and her rope into a purple JanSport. Watching her reminded me we’d be back in school soon, surrounded by girls her age.Ourage. But it was sundown in summer and I was standing in a head shop’s back room, my temples aching with last night’s magic. High school couldn’t have felt further away.
Sharon pulled limp greenery from her mini-fridge and stuffed it into a plug-in kettle. Soon the room smelled like hot cilantro. When she handed me a mug I noticed, among the silver and the topaz and the black ink, a ring of pale hair on her right middle finger.
“Mourning ring,” she said, catching me looking. “I cut it from my half-brother’s head when he was lying in his casket. I spent most of my teens on a compound out in Arizona. He saved me when nobody else could be fucked to try.”
“Compound?” Fee said.
“Cult. Went in when I was fifteen, came out again at twenty. I’ve got lots of souvenirs, though.” She shook her bracelets away to reveal a row of pale hatch scars, the marks of someone counting off the days on a prison wall. “These are mine. Not these, though.” Three circular burn scars clustered in the hollow of her elbow. “The C-section scar is even better. I should’ve died. Butthe midwife snuck me off the ranch and got me to a hospital. The ranch—that’s what we called his compound.”
Just like that, Sharon clicked into focus. She was one of those people who wielded her own history like a knife. Spend enough time with career alcoholics and you can spot this kind from an avenue block away: threading their conversation with terrible, intimate revelations, designed to make you believe they’re telling you their secrets. Making you think you had to pay them back in kind. Sharon was magically gifted, but I’d bet her true talent was an eye for damage.
Well, mine wasn’t the right kind. I glared at her. Freshly sixteen, a virgin in an X T-shirt and combat boots. “Why are you telling us this?”
“Because it’s not a costume.” Her smoked voice hardened and she planted her legs wide, daring us to look at her. The Robert Smith hair, the jailhouse tattoos. “My body is abattery.I will never burn through everything that’s been done to me. Where does your power come from? WatchingThe Craft?”
My eyelid spasmed. Last night my dad couldn’t sleep for the grinding agony in his back. Last night he found the pain-relief charm I’d kicked under his bed and made me flush it.What hairball voodoo shit are you onto.His words damp with vomit because pills make a bad mixer. Fee came over and we stayed up until dawn cobbling together something to numb him, something to make him quiet, and I must’ve brewed my resentment into it too, because all morning I was fragile with blowback.
“There it is,” Sharon said softly. “Let your blood up, honey, it’s good for you. Anger is good for you. Hurt lets you work. Can we work together? I want to.”
“What about me?” Fee said. “I’m here, too.”
Fee was prettier than me. Taller, thicker. But even across those messed-up months there was a bedrock solidity to her that I never had. It allowed people to feel safe enough to look away.
With a finger hovering just shy of touch Sharon traced a lowercasetover Fee’s shirt, above the place where its fabric hid her cross-shaped scar. “Lost faith is a powerful engine. Frustrated faith is even better. I want to work with you, too.”
Marion just sat there sipping her tea, the cat with the cream.
I took a swig from my cup. It had been sitting a while but it was still wicked hot. “What’s the spell?”
Marion’s real smiles had become rare. Nothing with her seemed spontaneous anymore, you could always see herthinking,sense the ticking behind her eyes. But she smiled now, bright and tremulous. “It’s a power-up.”
“A what?”
“Listen to this.” Marion pinned the page with her finger and read aloud. “‘A blessing of power, for those bold enough to take it. That my gifts may not stagnate. That I may not die but live in you. A spell for eight hands.’” Her cheeks were flushed, her voice unsteady. “Increased magical force.That’sthe spell.”
“‘For those bold enough,’” I repeated. “It sounds like a dare. Like she’s calling us chicken.”
