So, what, slouch?
Sit like someone who knows she had sex with a little girl in braces.
Show me what that looks like.
Will you be funny like that in maximum with girls who shot people?
• • •
Anneke had been unable to properly display remorse, because the truth was she felt none.
She wished she had had someone to light her way through the purgatory of a homosexual adolescence in west-central New York, and saw her willingness to do the same for Shelly as an act of personal valor.
Anneke had also been drinking a bottle and a half of wine a night and self-medicating, both with cocaine and with antidepressants she got online from India, so her ability to discern between empowerment and exploitation was . . .
Suspect.
• • •
When they’re showing the braces pictures, are they going to show any of the sculptures Shelly made in class?
Why?
Because they’re not bad. She really started . . . growing. Artistically.
What, because she was having sex with you?
. . .
Actually, yes.
7
Andrew takes her home.
The grass is growing high now that summer has settled in for keeps, and the stars are an opera out here.
He walks around to her side and opens the door for her. The car is a ’68 Ford Mustang, so the door is heavy and squeaks on its hinge. She lets him let her out; it is her act of chivalry toward him.
“The stars,” he says.
“Yep.”
“I have something for you. It’s in the trunk.”
“Is it a puppy?”
“Well. Actually it’s a basilisk, so don’t look it in the eye.”
“What’s a basilisk?”
“Something you shouldn’t look in the eye.”
She goes to light a cigarette.
“Don’t yet.”
It hangs from her lip as he opens his trunk and pulls out something book-sized in oriental paper from the card shop in Oswego.
“You wrap like shit.”
“I only try when I care.”
She likes this.
She pulls a folding knife from her pocket and slits the paper, cigarette jutting upright Franklin Delano Roosevelt–style because she’s grinning like a little girl. Because nobody gives presents like Andrew Ranulf Blankenship.
Making Stone Move:
Including Revivification of Living Matter Made Mineral
Michael Rudnick (1990)
Orville Hephaestus Yeats (1867)
The book has a red cover and black print, cheaply glued bindings. Somebody did this at home, or maybe with the help of a FedEx Office. She thumbs through it, squinting in the starlight. The text is two thirds photocopied hand script from the 1800s, one third badly typed Smith-Corona, impossible to read in this dim light, but probably no easy task under a lamp.
“A spell book.”
“The originals are more powerful, of course, but that’s why they’re priceless. With study and practice you may be able to get a few tricks out of this, especially Rudnick’s stuff. He started as a potter, too. Working with clay and stone as much as you do should give you that sweet-spot intuition.”
“Can you do the things in here?”
“Not easily. Nor well. But I never tried very hard at these arts. Not my specialty.”
“How did you get this one?”
“With my specialty.”
She knows the answer even as she asks it. They rarely buy anything. They barter. They are a community unto themselves, spread out across the globe, known to each other by reputation and now, thanks to the Internet, able to communicate in real time with science’s answer to (and improvement upon) the crystal ball. No doubt Andrew performed some act of film necromancy (speaking with the dead via film media captured while they lived) for another of his kind who rewarded him with this book.
His kind.
A wizard.
But he hates that word.
8
“Thanks for the book, great wizard.”
“I hate that word. It sounds like something cold-blooded.”
“It is.”
He pantomimes punching her arm.
“So what do I call you?”
“There’s no good word for it. Most of us say user. But that sounds like a smackhead.”
“Magic user?”
“That’s Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Oh. I never played.”
“I did.”
“No shit, a dork like you. But what do I call you?”
He thinks. Plays with his samurai bun.
“I like magus.”
“Sounds pretentious.”
“I know. But it’s better than wizard. Magician’s a guy with a top hat who fakes it. Brujo isn’t bad, but Chancho makes a face when he says it. Male witch. Going to hell. Communes with demons.”
“Don’t you?”
“What? No!”
“What’s that thing by the train tracks?”