Page 78 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The city
Back then
Bachelorette parties. That was my new gig. Linh farmed me out to tell fortunes, to read auras and palms, to do spooky little party tricks for drunk girls sipping cosmos through scrotum straws, crowned in glitter dicks.
I thrifted a long white dress someone had probably died in, and before each gig painted on two sinister circles of blush and combed my hair down my back like a Waterhouse print.
“Very Victorian plague child,” Fee said when she saw me. She didn’t fully approve of my crab walk back into magic—or its shady cousin—but she stopped with the eye rolling pretty quickly.
Because the weird thing was, I almost liked the work. I wasn’t bad at it, either. The magic I pretended to wield was socampy,everything I did was with a wink. Sometimes I caught hold of some true insight—the beaming bride with the frigid feet, the maid of honor with poison in her heart—and leaned into the feeling like an ex-smoker coasting off secondhand fumes. Butnothing I touched in those days bore more than a passing resemblance to the scorching white searchlight of true magic.
Working parties turned my nocturnal tendencies into a full-on lifestyle. I ate dinner in the middle of the night and slept the day away with a T-shirt over my eyes. It was good in summer, waking up to the golden hour, but once October hit I never saw the sun. When Linh reminded me the work would be slow for a while, I knew I had to figure out something to get me through until spring. I started filling out applications at places around my neighborhood, the bracing void of the future pressing in.
My last job fell on a strangely warm Friday in November, just after our Halloween mini-rush. Another bachelorette, I was told, but when I got there it just looked like a house party, bottled beers and hummus tubs and people smoking out the windows. Spoon was playing when the bride opened the door. She was a Black woman in her mid-twenties, tank top and overalls and big sexy glasses.
“You’re the reader, right? I love the look.”
She led me through her apartment to a bedroom at the back. The windows were open to the unseasonably warm night, naked ash trees pressing their hands against the screens.
“Okay, so.” The bride lifted a shoulder. “Set yourself up. I’ll bring you some food. Beer or wine?”
“Water. Please.”
When she was gone I looked around the room. Fistfuls of beaded and copper jewelry spilled out of the etched Tibetan singing bowls that lined the dresser top. A jewel-toned abstract hung above a platform bed, indifferently made withMediterranean-blue sheets. I scanned the slanted bookshelves. Ah: academics.
The bride returned with a paper plate wilting beneath smears of dun-colored dips, grain salad, an oily pool of pesto, then left me alone. I sat on the windowsill watching the trees. An hour went by and the music cycled from R&B to new wave to soul to a cheesy radio song that made all the unseen guests goWhoo.I wondered if the bride had remembered to tell her friends I was here. Finally I crossed to the bookshelf and chose something, settling back on the windowsill to read.
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone.
The door opened. An inch, apologetically, then all the way.
For the first time in ages, I had a rare flash of sight: I saw his aura before I saw him. Blue, blue, blue. Fee’s words ghosted by me, from the day we did that very first spell.You look like you’re gift-wrapped in sky.I know I stared at him too long. Until he laughed, and came into focus.
A white guy in his early twenties, probably, lean with a deep farmer’s tan. White T-shirt, Elvis Costello glasses, a dark wedge of rockabilly hair.
“Your aura,” I said without thinking. “It’s the prettiest color I’ve ever seen.”
He laughed again, a little startled. “Is that… a pickup line?”
“No,” I told him. Clipped, gathering myself. You didn’t flirt at these things. For all I knew he was the groom.
He saw the book I was holding and brightened. “I love that poem.”
Through the door a new song came on, bubblegum pop, and a swell of voices sang along. He tipped his chin toward them and began to recite. “‘And the soul of the rose went into my blood, as the music clash’d in the hall.’”
My shoulders went up. “Oh. You don’t have to—please don’t do that.”
“Don’tbe the asshole quoting Tennyson to girls at the party?”
Hanson kept singing, distantly. “Has it ever worked?”
