One Jar of Magic Read online

  “Stay together,” she whispered, and I wasn’t sure what she was picturing, but it definitely wasn’t our old Christmas mornings or the way my dad looked at my mom in their wedding album pictures or that afternoon we spent hiking when Mom sprained her ankle and Dad carried her piggyback all the way home and Mom couldn’t stop laughing and we all ate dinner in the living room so that Mom could keep her foot elevated on the couch.

  “It’s not exactly that I just want them to stay together—” I said, but Ginger put her hand on my knee and squeezed.

  “Don’t interrupt the magic,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” But it didn’t feel okay.

  The little dot of sunshine escaped, we felt the tiniest shudder, and that was it. The magic had been let loose, and if all went well, if we’d picked the right jar, there would be no more fighting.

  “I sort of thought I’d open the jar,” I said to Ginger. “I thought maybe I’d try to do the magic.”

  “It was my idea,” Ginger said.

  “It’s my family,” I said. “And I’m—you know—I’m—”

  “Little Luck,” Ginger said. “I know. We all know. You’re going to have a million chances to use all the magic you want. You’re going to be able to do powerful, big stuff. Just this once, can’t I do something that matters?”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything at all. I knew that worked sometimes, when people were mad. And it worked this time, like it worked all the other times.

  Ginger and I were quiet for a while, and soon we were laughing together, then talking again, and it all felt good and familiar and like the way it had always been, except a little different too, because Ginger had used magic on my family and she hadn’t done it the way I wanted and she’d looked at me like maybe being my best friend wasn’t always so great, and like maybe she wished she could use some magic on me, too.

  We stayed up until morning watching movies. By the time my parents found us we were zombie-eyed and humming Christmas carols and asking for cereal and toast and a nap.

  And maybe the magic Ginger used worked, because Mom laughed at our sleepy faces and Dad poured us giant bowls of cereal and they didn’t fight about any of it. They told us we could go back to bed until lunchtime, which we did. We fell asleep to the silence. Mom and Dad weren’t fighting. The house was still. And Mom hasn’t moved into a house in the center of town in the two years since.

  So I guess it worked. They stayed together.

  Except that’s not quite exactly what was wrong to begin with. The thing I’m most scared of in my family was never that they might split up. It’s that they might always stay together like this.

  Fourteen

  I am unmoving, on the top of my hill. I am watching everyone else so that I don’t have to keep rewatching the images in my brain of what happened this morning. I see Ginger capture a few jars of magic and Maddy capture a few more. I see my father running this way and that, gathering up all the magic he possibly can. Mom captures magic in the exact opposite way, sort of wandering back and forth over the same spot until she sees something out of the corner of her eye.

  I don’t know what my method is. I thought it would be like Dad’s, but I guess I’m actually just a girl who sits on the top of a hill and waits for magic to come to her. That’s not exactly the kind of girl I wanted to be, but it seems like that’s the only option left.

  Day turns to evening and evening turns to night. Most people climb into cabins, and I can hear whispers that roll into laughter and laughter that quiets and shushes into whispers. The sounds of late-night friendship that I know well, but that are suddenly out of my reach. I try to listen for Ginger’s laugh or Maddy’s snores or something so that I can almost sort of pretend I’m in there with them and not up here alone.

  Maybe I hear Ginger telling Maddy what to do with her jars of magic. Maybe I hear Maddy untying her shoes, sighing happily at beating me out as Ginger’s best friend at last. I don’t know. Maybe I just hear wind in the trees and Lyle and his friends howling at the moon as if they are wolves even though everyone knows they are not.

  The only thing I don’t hear is magic.

  Night turns to early morning, and time is running out. When the sun is up, that’s it. Magic capturing is over, the New Year will have begun, and I’ll be the only one here without a single jar of magic to my name. No one’s ever caught nothing before. Rose Alice Anders, the girl who was supposed to be the most magical, is actually the least, and now has no friends and maybe no family and might just stay at the top of this hill forever because what in the world else is she supposed to do?

  I close my eyes. Not to hear magic, but just to sleep. I’m exhausted, and the ground isn’t exactly comfortable, but at least this patch of earth is mine for now and no one’s watching me. At least I can hear crickets chirping and at least the moon is still in the sky, getting ready to vanish but not quite yet. If I fall asleep now, by the time I wake up the feast will have begun, and I don’t think I can mess that up.

  But right before I’m about to drift off, there’s a breath on my shoulder and words in my ear.

  “Try,” the voice says.

  I stop resting my eyes and lift myself up to sitting. The voice is my brother.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say. “I don’t see anything. I don’t have it. That’s obvious.”

  “Okay,” Lyle says. “That’s fine. But there’s magic all over. So, fine, maybe you won’t get any with skill. There’s still luck.”

  “Luck?” The word used to be mine, used to be my name, but it isn’t anymore, it can’t possibly be.

  “Give it a try, Rose,” Lyle says. “There’s only a little time left. And a little lucky magic is better than nothing, right?”

  “It is?”

  “Sure,” Lyle says, but he doesn’t sound sure. He sounds nervous, like he knows what happens if I don’t capture any magic at all.

  I shrug and open one of my very empty jars. I lift it into the air and fly it around a little. I set it on the ground and wait. I wave my hands all over, trying to direct magic toward my jar’s opening. Lyle copies me, waving his hands, and soon the two of us are making little gusts of wind in the otherwise still air. It makes me laugh and the laugh surprises me because how can I laugh when I’ve messed everything up? Then Lyle’s laughing too, but we quiet ourselves as the sun rises and the sky turns pink and the earliest risers are exiting their cabins, trying to catch a few more drops of magic before the feast.

  Maybe it’s our waving arms or our laughter or just that I’ve stopped trying, stopped caring, stopped waiting for it.

  Maybe it’s simple, simple luck, Little Luck, just not the way Dad meant it when he gave me that name.

  Maybe it’s just that magic is everywhere by TooBlue Lake and it would be impossible not to catch something.

  But mostly it’s Lyle and his ability to see magic where others might miss it.

  “Oh!” he says. “There!” I follow the tip of his finger and there it is. A blink of light. A tiny spot of sun trapped in glass.

  I lunge for the top and twist it on as fast as I possibly can. And then I have it. One jar of magic. One little light. One speck of something.

  It’s not enough. Not even close. But when I hold the jar up to the rising sun, it’s spectacularly beautiful, a gleam of sunlight that has that early-morning glow. A miniature sliver of warmth.

  “Thank you,” I say, turning to Lyle. But he’s already halfway down the hill, heading back to his friends, his magic. Away from me and everything that’s gone wrong. Away from my tiny dimple of lucky magic. The Little Luck.

  I watch the lake. My dad’s in it now, scooping up the last bits of magic before the sun’s all the way up and the capturing is over. He does it like it’s nothing, like it’s the easiest thing he’s ever done, like he was meant to do it. Which I guess he was.

  And which I guess I was not.

  Fifteen

  Breakfast is beautiful. Better than t
hey described. There are picnic tables, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in the sand, each decorated with flower petals and jars shimmering with magic. And food. Piles of croissants and plums, eggs and pancakes, French toast sprinkled with cinnamon, every kind of cheese I can think of.

  I watch from up high on my hill while Mom and Dad take their place at the head of one of the picnic tables. Dad’s nodding and gesturing to a pile of glass jars by his feet. Mom’s looking around, probably for me. Lyle bounds out of his cabin, followed by a few of his friends, all of them carrying jars in their hands and on their backs, rolling some along with their feet. It looks so easy. I hug my one jar of magic close to my chest and look around for more to catch. But we’ve always been told the magic is gone when the sun rises on January second; that it’s always been that way. When I asked Dad why that was, he smiled. “Magic is special,” he said. “It’s not for just anyone at any time. It means something.”

  I nodded, thinking at the time that I understood, but now I hate that rule. I’m ready for capturing today. Yesterday I was out of sorts from the way Ginger was acting and all the pressure from my father and the mistake with the lake and remembering the night before Lyle’s first capturing. Today I could do it. I know I could. I scrunch my toes, then stretch them. I open up one of my empty jars now and swish it through the air. I jump up as high as I can, then bend low and bury the jar into the dirt. It’s pointless. There’s nothing magical about today. The dirt is dirt. The air is air. I’m Rose Alice Anders, and I’m nothing special either.

  Ginger and Maddy make their way to the beach. They hook arms. They walk in perfect sync, then realize they are walking in sync and collapse into giggles. They try to replicate that rhythm, but it’s not there when they try for it. It’s the sort of harmony that only emerges accidentally, something you can’t coax out of nothing, its own sort of magic.

  More and more people come out of their cabins, gasp at the breakfast spread, hurry to sit at a table or to a dock with a doughnut or to a patch of grass with a pile of bread and cheese on a paper plate. I stay on the hill. I count jars. It’s easy—everyone’s showing them off, lifting them to the sky, pointing at a glimmer or glint or speck of something.

  There’s so much. Hundreds of jars. Maybe even thousands. It sort of seems like we are drowning in magic. It looks so easy, all tucked away behind glass. How could anyone not catch at least a little?

  I lift my one jar up again. It looks like a sunbeam is stuck in there, and it’s basically nothing, but it’s all I have.

  “Rose! Rose Alice!” I hear my mother’s voice, and she’s looking absolutely everywhere, so she’ll look here soon enough. I could wait for her, but there’s no point—there’s nowhere to hide, and eventually I have to leave the hill next to TooBlue Lake and go back home and be this girl, this Anders kid who was supposed to follow in her father’s enormous magical footsteps but instead made a fool of herself.

  I might as well be that girl now. I am that girl, whether I’m up on the hill or down there eating pancakes.

  And I’d rather be eating pancakes.

  “Mom!” I call back, as loudly as I can, but it’s not loud enough to drift up and over the voices clamoring to tell the tale of how they caught their first and fifth and eleventh and thirtieth jars. “Mom!” I call again, running down the hill. My speed picks up and the hill is steeper than I thought and I’m more tired than I knew, and the hill gets the best of me; my feet lose their way and I tumble. At first it’s just a bit of lost footing, but then my feet get all tangled up and my body can’t find any sort of balance, and the trip becomes a topple, which becomes a spectacle of me sliding down a hill, hanging on tight to my jar and a few blades of grass I’d hoped would slow me down.

  By the time I’m at the bottom of the hill, I am covered in grass stains and humiliation.

  “Look who it is,” Maddy says.

  “Are you okay?” Ginger asks.

  Mom rubs her hands together and searches for what to say.

  Dad looks out at the lake and pretends I didn’t just show up.

  “What do you have there, Rose?” Mom asks when I’ve straightened myself up and smoothed down some hair.

  “I caught a little something,” I say.

  “How much?” Mom asks.

  “This,” I say, and hold out my jar. “One.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s okay.”

  “I tried.”

  “And that’s what matters,” Mom says, but the words are tight and Dad’s silence is much louder than Mom’s forced okay-ness.

  “It’s a good one,” Lyle says.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Mom says.

  “It was a hard one to catch,” he says. “Took a lot of work.”

  “Sounds very tough.”

  “Probably no one else could have gotten that one there.”

  “Well. Congratulations.” Mom puts an arm around me and squeezes. She looks at the jar. The sunbeam of magic is in there, and it looked sort of spectacular up at the top of the hill, but down here it’s nothing; it’s not as brilliant as the sunshine in Maddy’s jars or the lake water in Dad’s. It’s not even as shiny as Lyle’s silvery magic. Ginger has a jar that’s sort of smoky and strange—something like that would have made a much better impression. Even a bit of cloud or feather or flower or sand would be better than this glint of nothing.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “In a town with no magic,” Mom says, “they’d think this was incredible.” She sounds a little sad to say it, and I don’t know what she means by it. I think of that clock tower we saw in class, how strange it was, to think of it ticking and tocking from something other than magic.

  I look at Mom’s face, to try to understand what she’s telling me. It’s a blurry mix of sadness and wonder that I’ve seen sometimes late at night after she’s fought with Dad and she doesn’t know I’m watching her sit on the couch alone, hugging a mug of tea with both hands, sticking her nose in the steam.

  She has that tea-hugging, steam-smelling look on her face now.

  “You can sit with us,” Ginger says. She scoots over on the picnic bench she and Maddy have claimed. She’s got three pieces of French toast and a scoop of blueberries and a glass of orange juice that almost looks too orange.

  Maddy clears her throat like Ginger’s said something wrong, and I wonder what they talked about last night. They have matching T-shirts—blue and white stripes—and I know it’s not an accident because nothing’s really ever an accident. I don’t want to be the odd one out, the obvious third wheel in a non-striped, not-blue shirt and bare feet.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I’m not even hungry.”

  I’m starving of course, and I’ve been waiting for this meal for my entire life, but nothing will taste good right now. Especially if I have to watch Ginger and Maddy become magical best friends without me.

  “Mom? When are we heading home?” I ask.

  The bus ride home is another tradition I’ve been hearing about since I was a baby. Everyone tells the story of their hardest capture and shares one thing they hope their magic does. Some of the kids make a joke out of it, and some take it very seriously, talking about world peace and curing cancer, as if maybe they got some sort of extra-strength magic and not just garden-variety pass-the-math-test/make-the-roses-grow-faster/make-my-broccoli-taste-like-chocolate-for-one-night magic.

  What Magic You Got Your First Year is a story people ask you to tell all the time. People like to talk about where they were when a certain president was elected, or what their wedding was like, or the most embarrassing thing they did when they were a kid. It’s a fact about a person, a thing you’re never too far away from. Hair color, eye color, profession, how many jars you caught last year, how many jars you caught your first year.

  I try to take in that this will be a fact about me forever, and it’s too hard to think about, it hurts too much, so I try to think about nothing at all. That doesn’t work either, not with the lake lapping and Dad refusing to look a
t me and Ginger looking at me too closely.

  I know one thing for sure. I cannot go on that bus.

  “I’m done with breakfast now,” I say. “I think we should head home.”

  Mom has a piece of sourdough bread with strawberry-apple jam in one hand and a slice of bacon in the other. “I see,” she says.

  “I’m done too,” Lyle says. He shoves the remainder of a maple scone into his mouth.

  “You are,” Mom says.

  “We should really get going,” I say. “Dad? I’m ready to go home now.” I need him to look at me. I need to know I’m still here, even if I only have this one jar, even if I’m not exactly who he thought I would be.

  His face is hard. But it finally turns my way. “You go,” he says. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Catch up?” Mom asks. None of what is happening was supposed to happen, and Mom can’t seem to keep up with all the changes in the script.

  “I’ll catch up,” Dad says again, gruffer this time. He looks back at TooBlue Lake. It really is too blue. Bluer than any lake needs to be.

  Mom puts down the toast. Eats the bacon. Gathers up her jars and puts the ones she can fit in her backpack. There’s not room for all of them, and Dad’s not moving to help her carry them to the car the way he usually would. Lyle doesn’t have any free arms either.

  “Rose?” Mom says, trying to whisper, but it’s pointless because everyone could hear a cricket chirp right now, that’s how quiet it is. “Can you help me?”

  “Sure,” I say, and I pack the rest of my mom’s jars into my empty backpack. I try not to look at them as I put them away, but they’re beautiful, a blue glow in one, something purple and shiny in another, ones with dirt and grass and one that looks like it’s vibrating.

  I wish they were mine.

  Sixteen

  A Story I’m Thinking About As We Drive Away, About Why Magic Matters and What Is So Beautiful About It and How It Can Change Everything, If You Have It, Which I Don’t