One Jar of Magic Read online

  “You shouldn’t have—” I started, but Lyle knew I meant thank you for seeing and knowing and protecting me.

  “He’s stressed out,” Lyle said.

  “He hasn’t slept much,” I said.

  “He’ll be better after the capturing.”

  “It was just a cake.”

  “It was kind of funny.”

  “I don’t even like pink,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Lyle said, and that was it; we didn’t have to say anything more.

  We never have to say much, Lyle and I.

  Six

  “Can you help me find someone?”

  The woman who says it is in jeans and brown shoes that look brand-new and expensive. Maybe she magicked them up this morning. Jars with dirt inside sometimes conjure up boots or growth or good health. I’m not sure what kind of magic would make her kind of shoe, what you’d have to whisper to make it fit just right, but I’m sure it exists. It all exists. No two jars are exactly the same; every bit of magic has its own use, and its own personality, too.

  “Like people,” Mom’s always saying, but Dad never agrees.

  “Magic isn’t like people at all,” he says. “Magic is only like magic. Nothing else like it in the whole world. No way to imitate it. No way to capture it except with your own two unmagical hands. No way to create it. The most beautiful thing in our world.”

  The conversation always stops there, but the last time they had it I almost asked why Dad thinks magic is so much better than people, why it would be an insult to think magic and people have anything in common at all.

  But our job isn’t to ask a million questions about why magic is the way it is. Our job is to find the magic, to let it find us, and to study hard to pin down what each jar can be used for. Our job is to trust the magic.

  Sometimes it goes wrong, like when people ask for a meal of fish and vegetables and end up in an aquarium. Or try to magic up a good grade on a French test and end up in France. “Magic knows what we need,” Dad’s always saying, “but we’re not always so good at listening to what it’s telling us.”

  This woman with the maybe magical shoes has a notebook in one hand and an empty jar in the other and she seems decidedly out of place on the school playground, where shoes like that won’t let her run or jump or play foursquare or go down the twisty slide.

  My best friend, Ginger, knows the woman is talking to me, not her, and she lets out one hmph of a laugh, a sound that’s stuck between thinking something’s funny and thinking it’s annoying. We’ve been blowing bubbles, which would be a babyish thing to do if it didn’t involve trying to catch the bubble in a mason jar without popping it. My dad swears by it as the best way to practice capturing magic. I’m especially good at catching the shiny suds in my UnTired state. Ginger is especially not-good at it. She drops jars. She runs into bubbles. She trips over her own feet when she’s trying to move quickly.

  But she can sure jump high, and she does, now. The woman and I watch her impossible leaps together. If we didn’t know better, we’d be wondering if that was some kind of magic, too. But no one’s allowed to use magic to get magic-capturing skills. Not for themselves. Not for their kids, either. That’s why Mom was worried about the UnTired magic helping us too much. But if Dad said it’s fine, it must be fine. Dad knows everything about magic and rules and takes it all very seriously. So I do too.

  “Who are you looking for?” I ask the woman in the brown shoes. I want to pretend she could be looking for someone else entirely: a girl who is known for her basketball skills, or the new girl in town, or a girl who is about to hear terrible, tragic news from a stranger in the middle of the playground. But in reality it’s me; it’s only ever me.

  “Rose Alice Anders,” she says, pronouncing each part of my name with the precision of a tailor or a glassblower or my father once a year when he’s capturing magic. “She’s also known as Little Luck. I don’t know if that’s what you kids call her. Do you know her?”

  “It’s her,” Ginger says, laughing, loosening her shoulders and shaking her head and nudging me. “This is Rose. We don’t call her Little Luck. Only her dad calls her that.”

  “Oh!” The woman adjusts the collar of her shirt and brushes her hands through her hair. “Well. Rose. Rose Alice. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time.”

  There’s only one reason a woman like this would want to talk to a girl like me, and Dad’s been warning me about it for the last few weeks.

  “They’ll ask you questions. They’ll want to know about me. About Mom. About Lyle, even. They’ll want to know your tricks and your feelings and what you are afraid of and what you hope for. They’ll make you guess how many jars you’re going to capture. They’ll ask if I’m hard on you, if you like being Little Luck, if you think you’re special.” Dad said it just like that, all in one enormous breath, and when he got to the end he looked at me extra hard to make sure I’d heard. I had. “Don’t answer their questions. Don’t let them in,” he said to me over ice cream sundaes, and used his gentle voice. Sometimes Dad’s advice felt like a hug—warm and safe. I wished he could be there every time something confusing or hard happened, but he always tried to help me be prepared for when he wasn’t there.

  I adjust the scarf of his that’s around my neck now. His red one, which is sleepy-soft and rail-thin. I bet she’d like to know it’s his. I wiggle my toes and try to guess how many jars of magic she caught last year. Not many. Maybe eleven or twelve. Probably nothing very powerful or interesting. Her shoes are too pointy and her hair is too straight and she’s too nervous to be good at the things Dad and I are good at. She tells me again how long she’s been waiting to talk to me.

  “I’ve never really wanted to talk to you,” I say. It comes out sort of mean. I know because Ginger stiffens and the lady frowns and my heart does a dip-dive-twist that it does when I know I’ve messed up. “I mean, I don’t know you. But I don’t like to talk to strangers. I’m not allowed.” This is much better, and I watch Ginger and the lady both relax. They nod. I nod back.

  “I’m a reporter,” the lady says. “Do you know what that is?”

  “I’m turning twelve tomorrow,” I say. “Twelve.” This is probably a little mean too. But I’m basically twelve, and I don’t like the way her voice is singsongy and how she bends her knees when she talks to me, like she’s making sure I know how tiny I am.

  “Of course you are!” she says. “That’s why I’m here. To see how you’re feeling about New Year’s Day. About your first year. About everything ahead for you.”

  I can’t help but smile. Dad said to be careful around reporters, and my own smart heart says this woman isn’t my friend, but I love thinking about New Year’s Day and what’s to come. I love imagining January 2 and January 3, when I will be lining up jars of magic in our windows and everyone will know they are mine. Then I’ll finally be the person everyone’s been waiting for me to be.

  I am ready to be that person, instead of this person, who holds her arms a little funny at her sides and doesn’t ever know the right thing to say and thinks her best friend might be wanting to have a new best friend.

  “No comment,” Ginger says, saving me from accidentally telling this lady some little bit about my hopes and dreams. Ginger knows better than anyone how to keep things like that locked up tight and far away from people in fancy shoes and silly voices.

  The lady lingers, but we stay still, like we’re playing a game of freeze tag that she doesn’t know we’re playing. Eventually it works and she seems so uncomfortable that she leaves us be.

  “Little Luck,” Ginger says. “When will they stop with all that?”

  It’s not quite the same question I have, but close enough, so I shrug.

  “I bet she’ll try to interview you next time,” I say, even though we both know that’s not true. I think Ginger’s amazing, but she doesn’t have a special nickname or a whole story built around the day she was born. She doesn’t have a kind-of-famous dad. She
doesn’t have a dad at all, anymore. My heart always squeezes at that fact even though it’s been almost a year.

  “There’s a reporter!” someone says, sprinting up to us, and that someone is Maddy, and she, as usual, doesn’t know that we’ve already decided how we feel about things. She’s never on the right page with us, and usually Ginger and I laugh about it a little behind her back, but today Ginger just changes the subject to what the prettiest kind of magic is.

  We all agree that it’s the kind of magic that you almost can’t see aside from the way it glows. Like moonlight in a jar. Even Maddy, with her neon yellow shirt and fourteen sparkly bracelets and hair in a high-high-high ponytail knows that with magic, it’s best to be a little hard to pin down, a little unknowable.

  “I hope you didn’t tell her anything, Maddy,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” Maddy asks.

  “We don’t talk to reporters,” Ginger says.

  “We don’t?” Maddy says.

  “Reporters always want to know about Rose,” Ginger says.

  “And she doesn’t like anyone to know stuff about her?” Maddy asks. They’re talking about me like I’m not right here. I wave, to remind them that I am. Maddy sees, and finally speaks to me directly. “I said we’re friends. And that you are just like your dad and everyone knows it.”

  “That’s . . . that’s okay, right, Rose?” Ginger asks, but her face is worried and she knows it’s really sort of not okay at all.

  “I’m not just like my dad,” I say. I was born with his blue eyes and brown curly hair and long lashes. We both have loud laughs and shoulders that don’t know how to shrug and we like thick sweaters and long scarves and the way it feels to try for something but not let anyone know how hard you’re trying.

  Still, sometimes when people tell me I’m just like him my stomach turns. I told Ginger about the sort of sick feeling and she said it’s probably nerves. But it’s something else too, something I don’t quite know how to put words to because the other thing my father and I have in common is that we aren’t very good at remembering the words to explain the way we feel.

  “I thought you’d like me saying that,” Maddy says. “I thought you were like, obsessed with your dad. Everyone’s obsessed with your dad. I figured it was a big compliment.” Maddy gets this look on her face—a deep frown accompanied by big eyes. Ginger and I used to call it her Please Like Me Face, but the last time I tried to use that phrase with Ginger she got all funny, rolling her eyes like she wasn’t the one who made it up in the first place, like she hadn’t said it a hundred times before.

  “It’s a lot of pressure,” Ginger says, talking to Maddy in the same nice voice she uses with me when I’m feeling sad or scared or mad about something that I can’t quite put my finger on. “Rose’s dad gets mad if we say too much. And we don’t like to get Rose’s dad mad.”

  All of a sudden I feel flushed and my eyelashes are bothering my face.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I just don’t like people to know every single thing about me. And I thought that was sort of obvious, but maybe not. Anyway, it’s complicated and you guys probably wouldn’t really get it.”

  “Help us get it,” Maddy says, and she leans forward like she really means it. I try to tell myself that Maddy is my friend too. That she’s maybe even my second-best friend and that it’s nice to have more than one best friend. Maybe what Dad says is wrong. I don’t have to be lonely to be special. So I try.

  “My dad—” I start. I pull his sweater more tightly around me. It’s soft in some parts and scratchy in others and I hope he never asks for it back. “It matters,” I say, “to be good with magic.”

  “Everyone knows that,” Maddy says with a shake of her head that tells me she doesn’t get it at all, just like I knew she wouldn’t.

  “I’m about to be very magical,” I say. “So we have to be careful.”

  “Maybe I’ll be very magical too,” Maddy says. She shrugs. “Maybe I’ve worked hard enough, maybe you’re just Rose Alice Anders, and not Little Luck, and that’s the story that reporter’s going to write.” When Maddy’s done talking, she looks up at the sky before looking back at me. She raises her eyebrows, which I guess means she wants a response, but there’s no response to what she’s said. Maddy turns to Ginger with an expectant look, her mouth a little open, her eyes blinking a few extra times.

  That look again. That, and a tiny movement she makes with her head. A jut or a jerk or a something, and I don’t understand anything at all except for one really big thing, which is that Ginger and Maddy have talked about this before, have talked about me before, and I wouldn’t really like what they’ve been saying.

  I wait for Ginger to disagree with Maddy or to stand up for me or to somehow undo that jut of Maddy’s head, that code that isn’t a code at all, that thing that’s right in front of me.

  Ginger sort of shuffles her feet. She clears her throat. It almost seems like she’s going to say something, but then she just . . . doesn’t.

  And I don’t either. Because there isn’t really anything to say.

  I’m Rose Alice Anders, Little Luck, the girl who’s destined to be magical, who everyone knows is going capture more magic than any other new twelve-year-old capturer. I don’t know what Ginger and Maddy have been saying about me, but that’s the truest true thing, and nothing they say can change that.

  “We’ll all get the magic we’re meant to get,” I say. I reach for my dad’s words. And his confidence. “I know magic is hard to understand, but you’ll see when you’re there. You’ll understand. What’s supposed to happen happens, because magic says so.”

  The words feel good to me, but I don’t see Maddy’s face change.

  “Right, Ginger?” I say. She’s heard my dad say it almost as often as I have. She gives a little nod. “Right?” I say again, because I know she agrees, and I know she shouldn’t side with Maddy over me, especially not right now, at the most important moment of our lives.

  “Sure, Rose,” Ginger says.

  “Sure, Rose,” Maddy parrots. I try not to hear the particular tone they’re using.

  “We should keep practicing with the bubbles,” I say, even though I’m not really in the mood anymore.

  “I’m tired,” Ginger says.

  “Me too,” Maddy says.

  “Come on,” I say, “it’s about to be my birthday. And then it’s about to be the most important day of my life.”

  “All our lives, I thought,” Ginger says.

  “Yes, right, of course, all our lives,” I say. And part of me even wants it to be true. Because if all of our lives change, then Dad will be wrong and I won’t have to be special and magical and lonely and like him.

  I try to unthink the thought, but thoughts don’t work that way. Even if I had magic, I’d be stuck with it. Because even very powerful magic, the kind my dad can capture but almost no one else ever gets ahold of, can get rid of some memories, but none of it can change thoughts or feelings.

  I sometimes wish it could.

  Seven

  I turn twelve at 11:57 p.m. on December 31. We stay up for it every year and drink warm apple cider and talk about how the night I was born Dad had to leave the hospital in a hurry to get to TooBlue Lake. He made it out to his car when he remembered that an Anders baby, especially one born on New Year’s Eve, should see some magic her first day on earth, so he drove home in a hurry and grabbed a jar Lyle had liked playing with because inside there was one strand of yellow light that looked a little like a laser, if you thought about it hard enough. Lyle was three at the time, and liked lasers, and jars, and lights, and playing with things that no one else thought he was supposed to be playing with.

  Dad ran that jar all the way back to our little room at the hospital and opened it up. It opened easily, he said, and the beam of light sort of danced out and broke apart as magic always does. It was a silly magic, not the sort of thing he would have chosen for my first taste of magic if he’d thought about it, but he ha
dn’t had time to think. So instead he’d chosen Lyle’s favorite jar, which just happened to hold a magic that made everyone levitate one and a half inches off the ground for exactly three hours. It was a precise and absurd magic, which the bright, single beams of magic often are.

  So I spent the first few hours of my life being held by my floating mother and worried over by floating nurses who had been close enough to breathe in a bit of the magic.

  Dad had a good laugh on his drive to TooBlue Lake, wishing he’d chosen a more serious, deliberate magic, but also happy he’d chosen that exact one.

  Then he caught his one hundred sixty-one jars of magic.

  When Mom and Dad finish telling the story tonight, it’s past midnight, which means it’s New Year’s Day, which means it’s about time I got ready for my first magic capturing. I am still UnTired, so I won’t be sleeping. None of us will. Dad says the UnTired will last until we are home from the capturing, and then we’ll all sleep a nice, proud, contented sleep. I wonder again how it isn’t breaking the rules, to be UnTired for the capturing, but I know better than to ask Dad about it.

  He doesn’t like being asked those kinds of questions.

  I think instead of his instructions about what to do and when and how and the promise that Dad keeps repeating that I’ll be fine, no, better than fine, wonderful, the best ever, better than him.

  We watch an old movie about love and we play three rounds of Uno.

  At four in the morning, I do one more round of firefly catching, one more lap around the house, one more session of sitting on the ground and listening to magic.

  Correction: trying very hard to hear magic.

  “It’s even closer tonight, right, Rose?” Dad says. He breathes in really hard from his nose like he can smell it, too.

  I listen. I listen and listen and listen and listen. I hear crickets and Lyle reading to himself in his room above us and Mom’s knitting needles clickety-clacking against each other. I hear cars driving around on a highway outside of town and things rustling in the leaves of the Belling Bright Woods, which surround us on all sides.