One Jar of Magic Read online

  Dedication

  To everyone who thought they had to be someone

  better, stronger, faster, more.

  To everyone who helped them understand

  they were enough, just as they were.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Corey Ann Haydu

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  The best jar, I think, is the one filled with a thin layer of gray fuzz. It’s the sort of thing that would get caught in the dryer, not caught in a mason jar, but I like how it looks alive, like it belongs in the sea attached to a rock or on the moon, nestled deep into one of its crevices. It looks like something you don’t care about or wish wasn’t around or has to be disposed of.

  But actually, it’s magic.

  “What do you think it does?” I ask Lyle when we pull it from the closet. We were looking for one of Dad’s scarves—the orange one that looks like someone made autumn into yarn and stitched it right up. Dad has an enormous collection of scarves, all of them hanging in different closets around the house, as if there’s nothing else one might put in a closet. Our coats live on the living room couch and coffee table and TV stand, and our rain boots live on the porch and even our clothes only ever live in dressers and on top of the washing machine.

  Closets are for scarves and jars.

  I’ve drawn pictures of our living room, and no one believes that’s how it really is. Maybe they think it’s weird or ugly, but I’ve never lived anywhere without coats on bookcases and coffee tables, jackets hung on the backs of every chair, three or four at a time, our whole life in piles, right there for the taking. It’s how my father has to live, so it’s how we have to live. Sometimes I wish we could eat dinner at the dining room table or sit comfortably on the couch, to have a life that looked like Ginger’s or even Maddy’s. But then I wouldn’t have my father. And the trade-off seems pretty fair. An extra-magical life for the low price of having to look at parkas and fleece jackets and down vests all over the living room.

  The jar in my hands now is one I haven’t seen before. There are a lot of jars in our cramped, messy home here in Belling Bright that have been hiding my whole life. When I find one, I want to know everything about it, like it’s a family member I’m just learning exists, someone I might grow to love.

  Lyle doesn’t feel the same way. Not about this jar, but not about any other jars either.

  “Maybe it’s to make things dirty?” Lyle says. He’s turning the jar around and around in his hands, but it looks the same from every side. Lyle’s a lot like Mom. He’s been around magic his whole life, and he’s captured a normal number of jars of the stuff, but he doesn’t have a feel for it.

  “Maybe it’s for dreaming,” I say. I feel like the spidery gray could look like the gray clouds that come in at night, that the hazy way it’s floating in the jar is a lot like the way dreams are blurry and hard to explain.

  “I don’t know,” Lyle says. “I guess you’d know better than me.” He says it with a shrug, as if he doesn’t care, but I think maybe he does, because the shrug is a little too long and his gaze meets the floor when he does it.

  “Dad would know,” I say. It goes without saying, though. Dad knows everything about magic. Or if he doesn’t know everything, he knows more than anyone else, and maybe that’s the same as knowing everything.

  One thing Dad knows is that I am like him. I have whatever special thing he has; I am extra-magical the way he is. I think I know it too. Sometimes my toes tingle or my breath catches or my head rushes and I think, Yes, there it is, my magic, my bit of something special. Just like Dad said I would have.

  “Show me the last jar that you captured,” I say to Lyle. He doesn’t have the something special that Dad and I have. But he captures a few jars of magic every year, and he still has one left from last New Year’s Day.

  He lumbers back to the closet and pulls out a jar with a green shine to it. “I’ve been thinking of using it before we head to the lake this year,” he says. “Not sure what it does. Turn something radioactive, maybe. Can magic do that?” I don’t reply. I don’t think he’s really expecting an answer, and besides, the answer is that magic can do almost anything, if you capture the right bit of it and save it for the right moment. If you know how to use it. “No need to hang on to it when we’re about to get a whole bunch more,” Lyle goes on. He smiles at the way the green glows and how the strange sharpness of the light turns his hands green too.

  “You really think we will?” I ask.

  “I think you will,” Lyle says. “You’re Little Luck. You were built for this.”

  I wait for the tingling, catching, rushing. The promise of who I am meant to be. I think it’s there. Maybe in the tips of my fingers.

  “Well, that’s what Dad says at least,” I say, but inside, I’m smiling.

  “Guess we better believe him,” Lyle says, and maybe it was supposed to be funny, but the words drop and clunk and clatter. They sound heavy. Lately, everything Lyle says has more weight than it used to. I wish I could ask him why. But we don’t ask each other why.

  “Time to practice some more, Little Luck!” Dad calls from the top of the stairs, as if he’s heard us talking about him and doesn’t want too much more to come out of us. Then he’s here, in the room with us, and he’s taking up most of it, which he always does. It’s what we love about him, the way he is always so here, when Mom is so often a little bit not here. She likes to talk about other places, other towns, even showing us pictures of places without magic. But Dad is here and now and always and urgent.

  He has the striped scarf on today, and his oatmeal sweater, my favorite to borrow, and he’s carrying his own jar of magic. He’s barefoot. He is always barefoot.

  Inside the jar there’s a sticky blue magic, a texture and color I haven’t seen before. “Is it for the weather?” I ask. “It looks like weathery magic.”

  “It looks—could it be some kind of friendship thing? Unity? It looks like it stretches. Isn’t stretchy magic for bringing people together?” Lyle asks. He’s trying. He doesn’t want anyone to know, but he’s been reading all about magic in his room in the early mornings and late at night. I know because he has a habit of reading out loud when he’s on his own. He says it’s ea
sier for him than trying to read inside his own head. Because of that, my whole life I’ve always known what Lyle’s reading. I listen through the walls. I don’t even have to try very hard. We hear a lot, in this house of ours. Thin walls and loud voices and maybe the magic makes sound travel; maybe it bounces off the jars.

  Whatever the reason, I like knowing what Lyle’s reading. Sometimes I think that knowing what someone is reading is almost exactly the same as knowing what they’re thinking, or at least knowing what they care about. So when Lyle seems far away and annoyed with me and ready to up and leave and join some other family without a famous father and a sister who everyone’s sure is going to be all kinds of special, I listen extra hard at the wall our bedrooms share, and it makes me feel close to him again.

  “Can we show Mom?” I ask. Dad’s not telling us what this jar of magic is for, and he doesn’t seem to be gearing up to anytime soon.

  “Be my guest,” Dad says. “But she won’t know.”

  He’s right, of course. We show it to Mom and she holds it up to the light, the way Dad taught us all to do. “Dishwashing detergent?” she says. I think maybe it’s a joke, so I start to laugh, but she doesn’t laugh, so I stop.

  “It’s magic,” I say, which she should know, which she does know, but sometimes Mom is so spacey I can’t tell if she remembers even the simplest facts of our world: we live in a magic-filled town called Belling Bright. I am her daughter, Rose. I will capture magic for the first time in five days. It is starting to snow.

  “Maybe it’s dishwashing magic,” Mom says, and Lyle’s the one laughing now, and for a second it’s precarious, like it might make Mom cry. Mom is quick to cry. But she’s quick to laugh too, and that’s what she does this time. She laughs with Lyle and it lets me know I can laugh too, so I do, hard.

  “Who in the world would need dishwashing magic?” I ask through my giggles.

  “Someone who really hates washing dishes,” Lyle says.

  “It wouldn’t be the worst kind of magic to have,” Mom says, and I think she means it, I think she’d like to get her hands on some chore-doing magic. It exists, but it’s mostly for beginners. Twelve-year-olds usually capture only the safest kinds of magic. The ability to get rid of bugbites. Magic for painting your nails without using nail polish. Magic to help you win your soccer game.

  Some people never get any magic bigger than that, no matter how old they are. Some people only ever capture the simple and safe and silly magics. No one will ever tell us why. But we sort of know why, anyway. Dad says he knows why. He says you capture what you’re meant for, what you’re ready for, what you deserve.

  We bring the jar back to Dad.

  “We give up,” I say.

  “What is it?” Lyle asks.

  “Can we take a night off from magic?” Mom asks. Mom can capture more than nail-painting magic, but not by much. She usually captures twenty jars of mild magic. And if Dad’s right, then I guess that means Mom’s meant for things that are gentle and easy. Sometimes she’ll get a jar or two of something more—magic that can turn a blizzard into a flurry. Magic that can turn the flu into sniffles. Dad calls it de-escalating magic, which makes it sound especially boring and unimpressive. But it’s respectable. And Mom doesn’t seem to want more than that anyway.

  Dad pretends not to hear her. Sometimes I wish Dad would be more like other people’s fathers, thinking about things aside from magic and how to get it and what to do with it once you have it.

  But then he wouldn’t be Wendell Anders, and I wouldn’t be Little Luck, and we wouldn’t be surrounded by all this magic to begin with. Dad’s famous here in Belling Bright—for his bare feet and his closets full of scarves and messy house and big booming voice and of course his way with magic. Other towns have magic, too. Most of the world captures magic on New Year’s Day. But nowhere has as much as Belling Bright, and that’s at least a little because of my dad.

  Which means he’s famous, and I’m a little bit famous too, for him thinking I’m someone special.

  “Let’s find out what we have here,” Dad says. He twists the lid off the jar. It’s a hard one to open, and he grunts.

  When the magic comes out it breaks apart, the sticky blue hitting the air and disintegrating. I wait to see something. Or feel something.

  And finally I hear something, but that something is Mom, and she’s saying, “Oh, Wendell. Oh no.”

  “It’s fine, Melissa,” Dad says, but I have a feeling it isn’t really. “It’s for Rose’s own good. She needs more practice.”

  Mom shakes her head. She looks at me and at Lyle with this well, I can’t save you now look. “I should have remembered,” she says. “I’ve seen it before. We’ve used it before. Back in college. Sticky and blue. UnTired magic.”

  “UnTired?” I ask.

  “You won’t need sleep,” Mom says. “None of us will, I guess. Is that allowed, Wendell? Can you use UnTired right before the capturing?” It’s funny, the name of the magic we just let out is UnTired, but Mom sounds downright exhausted.

  “It’s fine,” Dad says. “It’s to help us practice. Not cheating. Just more time to work on things before the big day.” Mom tilts her head and scrunches her eyebrows. “We need as much time as we can get. Our Little Luck is gonna blow them all away. Capture more jars of magic than I did my first year, I’ll bet you anything.”

  Lyle and I are quiet. We still don’t know what the jar with the gray lint does. Or what the green light in Lyle’s jar does. But we know what kind of magic we are swept up in right now—a strange sticky one that we didn’t quite ask for and probably don’t want. But when Dad’s the one in charge, you don’t say no.

  You don’t even really want to.

  Two

  There are places without magic. We don’t know exactly how many, or at least they won’t tell us exactly how many, but maybe it’s a dozen or maybe it’s a hundred or maybe it’s even more because the world is very big and Belling Bright is very small and very few of us have gone much farther away than TooBlue Lake.

  Mom’s been farther. She’s been to a place without magic. I ask her what it was like when we’re both lying down in my bed, closing the book we’ve been reading together. We’re UnTired but doing our bedtime ritual anyway. Mom reads books with me before bed just like she used to when I was too little to read on my own. We read a chapter at a time, passing the book back and forth. Dad’s never able to sit still long enough to read in bed with us, and Lyle likes to read by himself, so this is the one thing that belongs to me and Mom alone.

  “Places without magic are slow,” she says. “Slow but intense. People look at you for a long time. They ask so many questions. They seem unfocused, too. It’s hard to explain.”

  “And they seem sad?” I ask. I picture them as sad. Floating around, looking for something to do or care about. We think about magic all the time. We dream about it. It’s what we do. It’s the thing that decorates our home and it’s how we dress ourselves and it’s how we know what to feel about this person or another. It’s a question we are always asking: Is this because of magic? Is this color real, or did magic make it? What about this taste? Or the way the night sometimes feels so fast and sometimes lasts forever—might that be magic?

  “Not sad, no,” Mom says. “Not exactly. Sleepy, maybe. They seem sleepier than us.”

  “They’re tired?” my UnTired self asks. I’m trying to picture a town of sleepy people, wandering around in their pajamas, their eyes halfway closed, their voices mumbly with dreams.

  “Good sleepy,” Mom says. “Maybe not sleepy at all. It’s hard to explain. It’s different.”

  “Are you practicing up there, Rose?” Dad calls from downstairs. He knows the answer. You can hear everyone and everything in this house. He knows Mom and I are reading, and he doesn’t love when we do anything he doesn’t do. He likes when we are thinking about magic. “You know, I didn’t open the jar so that you and your mother could find out what happens to some princess locked in a castle.
”

  We don’t read books about princesses in castles, but I know better than to say that to Dad. I don’t say anything at all, and neither does Mom. She kisses the top of my head and stops herself from turning my light off.

  I stretch my fingers. Sometimes my wrist aches before bed or when it’s raining, and maybe it’s going to rain tomorrow, because there’s an ache now from the stretch. I look for the hundredth time through Dad’s notebooks about what magic looks like when it’s at the lake, before it’s caught in a jar. I’ve memorized whole paragraphs of his scribbles. He’s promised it will all make sense when I am standing on the shore in a few days, welcoming the new year by capturing my first jar of magic. Being the person he says I’m meant to be.

  Hours into my studies, Lyle knocks on my door. It’s late, but it doesn’t matter when you are UnTired.

  “Maybe she meant calm,” Lyle says.

  “Huh?” I had been lost in thought about jars of magic, hundreds of them lined up, and me, smiling proudly in front of them.

  “Mom. She said people without magic were sleepy, but not tired. Maybe she meant calm. Or peaceful. Maybe—”

  “You were listening through the wall,” I say, but of course Lyle knows he was listening; he doesn’t need me to tell him. I bet he always listens, the way I listen to him.

  Lyle shrugs. “You’re loud,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. We let each other lie sometimes. It’s easier that way. “I bet they’re scared in those other places,” I go on. I’m thinking about last year when I had an allergic reaction to a nut I’d never had before. I’m thinking about how my throat started to close up and my eyes were watering and how I could feel my heart beating all over. For a moment, I forgot about magic. I just felt my body and the way it responded and the terror of not knowing what to do.

  Dad was outside, as always, and I hit the window and he saw me there. He saw my hand on my throat, the color of my face changing from white to blue, and he grabbed one of the twenty teeny-tiny jars of magic he keeps tucked into special folds of his jackets and shirts and pants, little jar-sized pockets that Mom makes especially for him, and he held the jar to my mouth and told me to take a big breath, and he said Let her breathe to the magic, and in no time at all I could breathe and even the fear of it faded. By the time Mom got home, the whole thing felt a little like a memory and a little like a funny story and not at all like something to be scared of.