One Jar of Magic Read online

  I hear a lot.

  I do not hear magic.

  “Much closer,” I say anyway, because I am Little Luck and maybe I just don’t understand what magic sounds like; maybe it sounds like knitting needles and my brother’s reading voice and a cricket. Maybe Dad described it wrong. Maybe I am hearing it right now; I must be hearing it right now; I must be.

  When we are done listening, Dad pulls me close to him. The sweater he’s wearing today is blue and has holes in it. His scarf is black and reaches his knees. “Happy birthday,” he whispers even though there’s no reason to be quiet; we are alone. “I’ve been waiting for this day for twelve years.” I can hear his smile. It makes me smile.

  “Me too,” I say. Maybe he can hear my smile, too. I hope so.

  We go back inside and Mom’s laid out plum and tomato salad and a bunch of slices of butter-soaked bread. It’s Dad’s lucky meal, the slapdash thing he put together when he was heading out the door to get Mom to the hospital to have me. They were low on everything because Mom had been ravenous the day before, eating all the sliced meat and bananas and cookies and cheeses they had around. So Dad cut up plums and tomatoes, warmed up some butter on the stove, let it turn to a thick, salty pool, and dipped two big pieces of bread in it. And that’s what they ate on the way to the hospital, Mom taking tiny bites in between yelps and feeding Dad bites as he drove, and now it’s meant to bring me luck.

  Except I’m not supposed to need luck. I am the luck. If Dad says it, it must be true.

  The meal tastes good: familiar and strange, a thing that no one eats but us. Lyle lumbers downstairs in his pajamas and takes a plate of it too, like he always does on my birthday. He doesn’t comment on the taste, he doesn’t comment on the reason for the meal, but he eats the whole thing up.

  This is a lot of what Lyle and I are like with each other. Quiet, but knowing the same things. Not talking but together. Dad says we aren’t alike at all, but he doesn’t have any siblings, or any family at all really, so maybe he doesn’t know what it is to see the same things in the same house and sit in all that knowing together.

  “Big day,” Lyle says when he’s taken his bite, like he needed the food to get the words out. I’m about to make fun of him for wearing pajamas when he knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping, but it feels like a joke someone’s already made, a joke that doesn’t need to be made, so I let it go.

  “Yep,” I say instead. “Big, big day.”

  And it does feel big. Bigger than I thought it would. But I feel small inside it, and that’s the part I wasn’t exactly waiting for.

  Eight

  We are on the bus before dawn.

  As usual, Maddy won’t let even a minute of silence stand between us. I’m on one side of her and Ginger’s on the other, and we’re right up front, just like we planned. Just like Ginger and I planned. I hadn’t imagined Maddy would be with us, but here she is, too chatty with excitement and listing everything she ate this morning. Ginger nods like she cares, so I try to care.

  “Oh, oatmeal, cool,” I say, but even I don’t believe me. “We have a special thing we eat every year—”

  “We know,” Maddy says. “You always have a special thing you do or say or eat.” Maddy talks so fast that I sometimes can’t keep up, can’t tell if she’s said something mean or matter-of-fact or friendly.

  But this time she doesn’t sound very friendly.

  “Happy birthday, by the way,” Ginger says, and that’s when I realize that she didn’t call me yesterday, on my actual birthday. We didn’t eat ice cream in my living room and we didn’t paint our nails with glittery polish and we didn’t convince my father to open up a special birthday jar. We didn’t do any of the things we do every other year, and I hadn’t even thought to miss them.

  But now I do. It’s fast and powerful and I look to see if Ginger is feeling it too—the shock of forgetting, the gasp of missing. She’s looking out the window. Her shoulders are relaxed. She doesn’t remember forgetting to do all the things we’ve always done, and that makes me dizzy.

  I look out the window too. We’re driving through the Belling Bright Woods, which I love, which Dad loves, because they were grown entirely by magic. Magical seeds and magical flowers and magical roots of magical trees. It means some of the growth is unexpected colors and shapes and some of the flowers do strange things like sing or flutter their leaves or smell like bacon. On good days, Dad and I spend hours in these woods, marveling at what we find, adding little bits of magic ourselves.

  Because it’s all made from magic, sometimes something vanishes from the woods. Not any of the tall oak trees that were built from very powerful, long-lasting magic. But a bush, a patch of sparkly dirt, a collection of magical flowers. When magic is worn out, it simply stops, and that’s part of what makes it so valuable and important. That’s why it matters, how much we all capture.

  Nothing about this morning is right. I want to start it over, the way it was supposed to be.

  They take us in our regular old school buses, and I’ve always wondered if that’s what they do in other towns traveling to other lakes to capture other jars of magic. We haven’t read about it in our Global Studies class yet.

  Then I think about the towns without magic, and what they do on New Year’s Day. Ms. Flynn told us about noisemakers and sparklers and the things people in those towns have that sort of look and sound like magic but aren’t magic at all.

  I can’t imagine living in a place where a tiny flame on a stick is the most magic you can muster. It’s like trying to imagine a place without daylight or air or love.

  “I want to get ten jars,” Maddy says, continuing a train of thought I haven’t been following. I wish it was Ginger next to me, but Maddy has a way of always getting the right seat at the right time. “I guess nine would be okay. Or eight. Maybe seven. But not six. Six jars is like nothing. Only two people got six jars or less last year, and those two people were Jamie Ollander and Victor Vase. I don’t want to be like Jamie Ollander and Victor Vase. Jamie never washes her hair and Victor can barely speak above a whisper and they’re both—well. I know we’re supposed to focus on everyone’s good parts, but let’s just say that’s really hard when it comes to Jamie Ollander and Victor Vase.” Maddy shrugs. When Maddy shrugs, it means she’s finished her thought and wants you to reply.

  “I like Jamie Ollander,” I say at last. Her younger sister is sitting in the front of the bus and I don’t want her to overhear us. But also, I do like her, and I’ve never noticed her dirty hair, and Maddy’s not exactly perfect, and even when she’s stealing my seat or talking to reporters about me, I still don’t comment on her hair or the sound of her voice. “I thought everyone liked Jamie Ollander.”

  “Not anymore,” Maddy says, like she’s got the most up-to-date version of some book I forgot to read. If I’m being totally honest, I’d rather Jamie Ollander were sitting next to me right now, with her supposedly dirty hair and six jars of magic. “She got new sneakers, as if that will fix everything.”

  Maddy herself is wearing new sneakers, red-and-purple ones. They’re the kind everyone says help you move fast and jump high and capture more magic than you could with regular sneakers. I don’t point Maddy’s sneakers out to her. She knows what’s on her feet, after all.

  I look at my feet. My same old blue sneakers that I’ve had for a year and are a little too small, so my toes always hurt after a day of wearing them.

  I asked Dad about all the special accessories my classmates have. Even Ginger has a pair of gloves with rubbery fingertips, so that not a single whisper of magic could slip away from her. She got her glasses prescription rechecked and her new frames are black and sturdy and come complete with a band that ties around the back of her head to keep them from slipping.

  Other kids have fancy lightweight jars and hats with beams of light attached to help them look in dark spaces, or they drink certain kinds of protein drinks for months before New Year’s Day.

  Dad shook his head at
all of it.

  “You can’t take the magic out of magic,” he said. “They’ve lost sight of how this all works. We find magic, and magic finds us. Magic tells us who we are. Who we are meant to be. You can’t buy your way into that. You and I—we know better. We have our bare feet. Our fast hands. Our big hearts.”

  He put his hand over his heart, so I did the same.

  “You’re meant to capture magic,” he said. “It’s all right here.” He tapped his hand against his shirt, like the beat of his heart had made its way outside his body, into his fingertips. I did the same and he smiled. “My bighearted girl,” he said, his eyes a little teary with pride. I blushed a happy blush. Sometimes, Dad could see me just as clearly as he could see magic, and that was its own kind of magic. The best kind, actually.

  “My ankle hurts,” Ginger says, interrupting all my thoughts.

  “I told you not to play soccer this year,” Maddy says. “Not your first year capturing. Not any year, probably. Soccer is for little kids who can’t capture magic. We have responsibilities now.” Maddy sounds like her mother, like dozens of mothers and fathers who we know but try to ignore. There are two kinds of families, and Maddy’s family is the first kind. The kind that thinks they can outsmart the rest of us and get magic that way. By quitting soccer and buying fancy shoes and thinking about nothing else. Maybe that’s how it was in their old town. But not in Belling Bright. “It’s magic,” Maddy says. “I mean. Magic. You have to do everything you can to get as much as you possibly can. You have to try.”

  I shake my head. Maddy doesn’t get it. She can try as hard as she wants—magic knows who she is, what’s in her heart, what kind of person she is. Magic knew my dad was special. It will know whether Maddy is.

  It will know whether I am, too.

  Sometimes I wonder why magic chose my dad. Then I think about his booming voice and wide smile and how it feels when the whole of him is focused on me. He’s a fire—the closer you are to him, the warmer you feel. The brighter he becomes.

  The more powerful.

  I try to feel like a fire, too. Or even a flame. I’d settle for a non-magical New Year’s Eve sparkler.

  I’m not sure I can burn so bright. But I’ll try. “Soccer is really important to Ginger. Plus, she’s amazing at it,” I say.

  I look at Ginger and wait for her to weigh in. But she doesn’t, so I look at her even more closely. It’s more than her new glasses, more than her fancy gloves. Her jaw is set a particular way that I don’t recognize. She’s tapping her feet on the bus’s floor, and when I look down at the busy beat I see it’s footwork she’s practicing. In brand-new red-and-purple sneakers. The kind that are supposed to make you run fast and jump high. The kind that Maddy’s wearing. Ginger sees me seeing them and tucks them under the seat in front of her.

  “Anyway,” I say, “Ginger would never quit.”

  Maddy raises her eyebrows and we both wait for Ginger to reply. She should be agreeing with me swiftly, easily. Ginger wants to be a soccer star when she grows up, and it’s possible. She’s better than anyone in our grade, better than my brother, Lyle, better than any of his friends—I swear she’s even better than some of the people she makes me watch on TV after school when I’d rather be drawing pictures of the kids in our class, the things we ate for lunch, the toys strewn all over Ginger’s house.

  It’s a long, long time before Ginger replies. And when she does, I barely recognize her. “I could give up soccer,” she says. “You know, if I had to.”

  “Told you,” Maddy says. She’s never looked prouder. She flips hair that isn’t there behind her shoulder, forgetting that the whole perfect blond bunch of it is all tied up in elaborate braids.

  “If you had to?” I say. “Why in the world would you have to?”

  “We’re not all like you, Rose,” Ginger says. “You’ve got natural—it’s going to be easy for you. My family really needs more magic. With all of us kids. And my dad gone. And—yeah. We need to try. I know what your dad says. That there’s no trying, that it’s all—that some people are just meant for more magic than other people. But not everyone agrees with every single thing your dad says about magic.”

  “Or anything else,” Maddy says, and she shrugs and half smiles and I guess it’s possible to know something and not know it at the same time, because I don’t know what she’s trying to say right now. But I also sort of do.

  “You don’t know anything about my dad,” I say, but they both pretend not to hear me.

  “I need to get at least ten jars, like Maddy,” Ginger says. “I—I don’t want to be like Jamie and Victor either. And soccer isn’t—it’s just kicking a ball around. It’s not important. Magic is what’s important.”

  “Ginger—” I start, but I don’t know where I’m going, so I stop. “You love soccer,” I say at last.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We talk about everything. If you had some whole new brain you should have told me.”

  “I tried.”

  I don’t know what she means by that. I see Ginger every day. We have a sleepover every weekend. If she had something to tell me, it would be easy. She could just tell me. She wouldn’t need to try to tell me.

  “We can talk now,” I say.

  “No,” Ginger says. “We can’t.” She points at the view in front of us. TooBlue Lake, bigger than I remembered, bluer too. Surrounded by tall trees and dotted with glints of sunlight. I remember what my father told me about those glints. That they’re the best kind of magic to capture, the most beautiful, the most rare.

  He told me that only the very best capturers can trap those bits of sunlight in their jars.

  He told me I could do it. So I will.

  Nine

  Our bus is the first to arrive. They give the new twelve-year-olds the most time by the lake. A head start. But only barely. In a few minutes, everyone else will arrive. But for right now, Maddy, Ginger, and I stand with our twenty-two classmates and take in the size of the lake, the feel of the ground underfoot, the temperature, the scope of what we are meant to do.

  I close my eyes like my father taught me. And I listen.

  There are the easy sounds: Ginger’s breathing next to me. She has a tiny wheeze in her breath from years of asthma, and I love how it marks her as herself, how I could follow something as simple as her breath to find her. I hear Maddy tapping her fingers on her thigh, counting glints on the lake or leaves in the trees or blades of grass. Anything could be magic, and she knows it.

  Dad says that while capturing magic, some people scoop up everything they can get their hands on and see what it is later. “They come back with who knows what,” he told me during one of our recent late nights trying to distinguish stars from planets in the sky, since an attention to detail is part of capturing magic successfully. “Old pennies. Dirt. Toilet water. The kind of dust you find on the highest shelf of a bookcase. These people. They come in with jars of junk and ask if it’s magic. No instincts.”

  He said no instincts the same way he said these people and junk. Words that tasted all kinds of lemon-sour, coffee-bitter, undesirable.

  “It’s a good thing people like that don’t get much magic. Don’t get powerful magic. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. They’d try for a sunny day and open a magic that turned them invisible. They’d want to cure their cold and end up using magic that lengthens minutes into hours. Magic wouldn’t let that happen. Magic goes where it’s meant to go, to people who know what to do with it.”

  “So why do we have to practice looking at the planets?” I asked. “Why do we practice with the fireflies? And the running?” It’s a question I had thought a hundred times over the years. If everything is the way my dad says, why practice at all? Why study? Why not just trust the magic will come?

  “We’re showing magic we’re ready for it. We’re making ourselves open to it. The magic can’t do all the work. We have to show up and let it know we’re prepared.” Dad whispered the words. It fel
t like a secret, something he was only sharing with me. He was so calm and so sure and he made it all sound so beautiful. I leaned against him a little and he wrapped an arm around my shoulder.

  “Oh,” I said, wanting to understand everything as clearly as he did. “I get it.”

  “I knew you would, Little Luck,” Dad said, and my heart was so bright from the way he saw me. The way he believed in me.

  Now it’s New Year’s Day, so I listen as hard as I can for magic, for answers, for my destiny. I have to do better than hearing Ginger’s and Maddy’s breaths and hearts and wiggling fingers and nervous toes. I hear those things all the time.

  Beyond their breathing and tapping there’s the sound of little lake waves hitting the shore and the breeze running through the branches. But those sounds are easy too. Anyone could hear them.

  I think I hear the scuttle of a small animal digging and the door of one of the cabins way up the hill opening, then closing. It’s possible another bus is getting close. Maybe I can hear tires on a dirt road a mile away.

  But none of that is magic.

  When I open my eyes again, Maddy is polishing her glass jars and Ginger is looking around and taking notes.

  I don’t have a notebook. And I don’t have anything to polish jars with. Dad said I wouldn’t need anything like that.

  “When do we start?” I ask.

  “I think we already have,” Ginger says.

  I should have heard it but didn’t. The sound of a few of our classmates—mostly boys, mostly strong-shouldered, mostly the kind who talk back to teachers and ask why I don’t ever wear dresses—have already sprinted off to the hills. They’re picking cabins and planning trails and charting treetops to get a sense of where the best magic might be.

  “Don’t bother with a cabin,” Dad told me last night when I asked if the mattresses were comfortable, if people wore pajamas or slept in their clothes. “You won’t be sleeping.”