A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic (10 page)

The goat boy grinned when he saw her and said something in Punjabi.

Oh my gosh,
Leila thought.
The goat boy is madly in love with me!

This was a natural thought for someone who had read sixty-seven Dear Sisters novels. Of course he was madly in love with her! What else could it possibly be? Leila did not know how to proceed. How does one inform a goatherd that one is not interested in romance? Neither Elizabeth nor Jennifer Dear had ever encountered this problem.

The boy looked at her expectantly. In her mind, adoringly. He said something else, then looked at Wali.

“He wants the money,” Wali translated.

“What?” Leila was confused. “What money?”

“For the goat,” Wali explained.

That was when Leila registered that the goat boy had brought his white goat, which let out a loud bleat-squawk. Chirragh gestured toward the side of the house, as if he wanted the goat to go there.

“Why would I give him money for the goat?” Leila asked.

Wali began to look worried. “Because you bought
it,” he explained. “You gave him five hundred rupees and promised the rest when he delivered the goat.”

There was a long silence while Leila replayed the scene in her mind. She had given the boy five hundred rupees for a photo. Which was a rip-off. Wait a minute . . .

The goatherd said something sharp.

“He wants to know if the goat doesn't please you,” Wali translated.

“No, it—it's a nice goat. Nice.” Leila gave the thumbs-up sign, and then realized that this was the thumb that got her into all of the trouble in the first place. She yanked it back up her sleeve.

The goatherd's face clouded with anger, and he began to yell, which made Leila feel as if she were shrinking. Leila wished someone would close the door. She didn't want her uncle or aunt to hear this. She glanced at Chirragh, who looked disgusted. She turned to Wali, who seemed about to cry beneath the goatherd's shouts. “He's saying that you're tricking him—trying to get the price down!”

“How much does he want?” Leila asked.

Wali looked miserable. “Two thousand rupees.
Expensive—because of Eid.”

That's two hundred dollars,
Leila calculated.
Two hundred! Two hundred?
That was a ton of money, but she had it. She could just give the goatherd the money, and then he would stop yelling. But then, what would she do with the goat? Customs probably wouldn't let her bring it to the United States, and her parents would have a fit, anyway . . .

“I'm sorry, Leila! I thought you wanted a goat,” Wali wailed.

“Why would I want a goat?” she asked. She wasn't being mean. She was honestly curious.

“I thought—I thought you meant it as an Eid present. For my family,” Wali explained.

Oh. Oh! An Eid present? Right! He mentioned that Eid is coming up!
Eid is a celebration at the end of the thirty days of Ramadan. But Ramadan is on a lunar calendar, and the date changes—it can fall at any time of the year. Leila hadn't noticed anyone fasting. Then again, the Awans weren't particularly religious. True, they had gone to Jumu'ah prayers last Friday, but did not seem to pray five times a day. So maybe they didn't fast, either. Leila's father certainly never
did, and this was his brother's family.

So—the goat could be an Eid present. It wasn't a horrible idea. “But would your family want a goat?” She looked at the goat. It was about the size of a golden retriever. Maybe it
would
make a good pet.

“Of course!” Wali looked shocked at the idea that someone might not want a goat. “It's very traditional.”

An image of her cat, Steve, as a kitten on Christmas morning popped into her mind. “Your parents won't be mad? Are you sure they want a goat?”

“They'd have to buy one themselves, if you don't get it.”

“But they haven't picked one out?”

“Not yet.”

Relief poured through her veins. This was brilliant. Brilliant! Her mom wanted her to get the Awan family a gift, the Awans wanted a goat, and
she had accidentally bought a goat
!

It was almost like fate. Leila thought about the fakir's blessing outside the ice-cream store. He said something about miracles—maybe this was one!
Thanks, magic fakir!
Leila thought. “Okay! Okay, I'll go get the money.”
She hurried upstairs and pulled a stack of rupees from her suitcase. Then she handed it over to the goatherd, who was still sulking, under the impression that Leila had tried to swindle him at the last minute.

Please don't blame him. It had happened before.

Chirragh took the goat's rope and led it around the side of the house. The red henna flower on the goat's flank was the last thing to disappear behind the wall.

Leila placed a hand on Wali's shoulder. “Happy Eid,” she said.
“Eid Mubarak.”

“Thank you!” Wali said, scampering into the house.

A Good Deed Doer,
Leila thought as she practically floated up the staircase,
that's what I am. A buyer of pets. Mother Christmas. This is going to make an awesome blog post!

She had learned something new about her culture. Honestly, her mother was right about something: her father barely ever mentioned Pakistan, or his culture. He never told her anything. This incident made her feel terribly sophisticated. And it was all because of Wali and that stupid goat.

Leila felt so good that she didn't even bother checking
to see if anything new had been written in
The Exquisite Corpse
. She didn't think about the line she had added about Miss Pickle, or spend a single brain cell on the book at all.

But that doesn't mean that the book stopped thinking about her.

Ralph met Miss Pickle the very next day.

Ralph's crutches chafed beneath his arms as he struggled to make his way out onto the lawn. The doctor had told him that he was lucky.

“A clean break near the top of the fibula, but not at the knee. You can put weight on it fairly soon.” The doctor had a young face and hair that was rapidly disappearing. His pale blue eyes seemed genuinely happy to give Ralph this news. “I've put you in a gypsum dressing—the best thing for this sort of fracture—we can take it off in about four to six weeks.”

Four to six weeks did not sound “soon” to Ralph. “Will I have to stay here for that long?”

“Oh, no. Your plaster should be set in another
twenty-four hours. After that, we'll have to keep you for observation. I'm concerned about the contusion you received on the head. You can probably go home in about ten days.”

It had only been twenty hours since that conversation, but Ralph was tired of waiting. He backed himself against a rear door and pushed and struggled through the opening, barely managing to pull his fat plaster leg through before the heavy wood slammed shut. Outside, the sky slowly purpled as the sun sank behind jagged treetops bordering the wide green lawn. A bush rustled as a small brown rabbit loped, in no particular hurry, beneath the leaves as the sky above her changed as slowly as vapor rising from a lake. Sweet notes from a violin shimmered in the air like heat, pulling Ralph forward.

A girl with dark hair played her bow across the strings at the edge of the wood. Her eyes were closed as Ralph crutched his way toward her. When he reached her, he cleared his throat, so that she would know someone was close. She gave no sign that she heard until she was finished playing. Then her eyes—stormy ocean eyes—opened slowly, taking a moment to focus on his face.

“I know you,” Ralph said.

“No, you don't,” the girl replied.

“Yes—you're Melchisedec Jonas's daughter.”

The girl turned her eyes to the dark woods. “He's not my father. He's my guardian.” The word seemed to make her skin crawl. “I'm Edwina Pickle.”

“I'm Ralph Flabbergast. Your guardian bought my parents' company.”

“Yes . . . Flabbergast's Famous Kraut.” She plucked a few strings. “I've heard all about what a horrible investment it was.”

“You can't make that sauerkraut in a factory,” Ralph said, his neck burning hot. “Small batches only.”

“Don't worry. He's still rich. Besides, I don't mind seeing him furious.”

Her eyes twinkled, like silver fish in a dark wave, and Ralph laughed as he studied her face. “We met once, remember? I showed you a magic trick.”

“Yes . . . ,” she said slowly. “Yes, I think I do remember.”

“Why are you here? Are you sick?”

“It's my lungs,” Edwina replied. “They've always been
weak. I've told Uncle Melchisedec that the air in the factory doesn't suit me, but he insists that I work there. The doctors are hopeful that fresh air will cure me.”

Ralph did not know what to say. She did seem pale, but more from sadness than sickness. Her gaze returned to the woods, and Ralph saw something flutter there. It was pale blue and glowed like the moon. “Do you see that?”

“Celestial Moths,” Edwina said. “They love the crepuscular light.”

Ralph repeated the word: “Crepuscular?”

“The gloaming,” Edwina explained. “The sunset. They also love the red flowers that grow at the edge of the woods.” She smiled slowly at him. “Perhaps I can show you a magic trick,” she said.

“There aren't many I don't know.”

“Hm.” She lifted the bow back to the strings and began to play a strange new tune. Her dark hair captured the warm light of the sunset as the moth made its crooked way toward them, hovering near the violin. It settled on the scroll, and seemed content to rest there. A smile curved at the corners of Edwina's lips as she played.

“You can make them come to you?” Ralph studied the
fat, furry insect. Antennae fanned, fernlike, at either side of its head, quivering above its vibrant blue body. On each wing was a spot, like an eye with a yellow iris, over a curlicue question mark.

“They like the music,” Edwina replied. She stopped. The moth sat there for another moment, and then fluttered away.

“That really is magic.” Ralph gazed at her in wonder. “Real magic, not the kind I do.” He did not say that it was the kind he had been looking for his entire life, but he thought it.

Edwina seemed to understand completely. “Yes,” she replied. “I know.”

K
AI STOOD IN FRONT
of the closed door, unsure how to proceed. She had pressed the doorbell, but the way it dangled treacherously from a wire made her suspect that it wasn't working. She had knocked, but perhaps not loudly enough. And she didn't want to bang on the door, in case the doorbell
was
working and Doodle had heard the knocks, and maybe just hadn't had time to answer the door yet.

There are a great many details that go into planning even the smallest thing, as Kai's mother had taught her.

She had just decided to try knocking again, when she heard something—a rustling, scraping sound. It was coming from the side of the house.

Kai walked down the two concrete steps (one corner
had fallen from the top step and lay, like a shark's tooth, beneath the unevenly hung mailbox). Waist-high cornflowers, awkward on their leafy stems, clustered thickly against the edge of the house. Clumps of tall red-crowned bee balm punctuated a few clouds of black-eyed Susans. The grass was high and patchy, and the flowers seemed to have the run of the yard. They were wild, untamed things, planted without a plan. The result was colorful anarchy, a beautiful disaster.

When Kai rounded the corner, she found Doodle digging up a section of dirt beneath a bedroom window.

“What's up?” Kai asked.

Doodle looked up, her eyes taking a moment to focus on Kai, as if they had been looking down into the hole at the bottom of her shovel, seeing a new world down there. (They had.) “Hey. Just digging.”

“What's that?” Kai nodded at a flower that lay on its side in an exhausted heap near Doodle's feet. The tiny flowers formed a purple cone, such a deep color that they looked like velvet.

“Butterfly bush,” Doodle replied, waving at a tall shrub farther along the vinyl siding. “We've got a white one.”

“That isn't white,” Kai said. The bush was only partially white. More orange.

Doodle just lifted her eyebrows and walked over to the six-foot-tall bush. She gave it a shake, and the orange flowers lifted up, fluttering into a cloud and then dispersing. The bush was left with white blooms.

Kai cried out a single, incomprehensible syllable at the sight of all of those butterflies.

Doodle hushed her. “My dad's asleep in there,” she said, motioning to the window.

“That's your dad's bedroom?” Kai asked.

“Yeah. He likes butterflies, too. I thought I'd plant this for him.”

A harsh, rasping cough rattled the window, and Doodle froze. She watched the window with large eyes as the coughing went on for twenty-three seconds. Finally, it stopped. When it had been silent for more than a minute, her eyes lost their frightened look. “He's sick a lot,” she said finally, not looking at Kai. “Sometimes, it gets really bad. Then he can't work. And when he can't work, he doesn't get paid.”

“What does he do?” Kai asked.

Doodle nudged the dirt with the edge of her sneaker. “He makes coffins.”

“Oh, right,” Kai said, and Doodle looked at her sharply. “Lavinia mentioned it.” Kai wanted to ask questions, but she sensed that Doodle didn't want to talk about it.
Maybe that's why Doodle holds back,
Kai thought,
because some things are too hard.
Kai decided to change the subject. “And is that little purple flower bush going to get as big as the white one?”

Doodle nodded. “They grow fast. So—what've you got?”

Kai looked down at the book in her hands. She had momentarily forgotten what had brought her across the street.

It was
The Exquisite Corpse
. She had tumbled out of bed and onto the floor, jolted out of a dream of music with the notes still lingering in the air. Her eyes snapped open to face the spine of the book. When she opened it, she read that Ralph had followed the music, too, and had met Miss Pickle. And then, there was another sentence. “There are those who long to know magic's secrets.”

Somehow, Kai had felt that this was meant for her.

“Are you the kind of person who believes in . . . weird stuff?”

Doodle thought it over. “Like aliens?”

“No. More like magic.”

Doodle sat down on the grass. Then she lay on her back, looking up at the sky. To Kai, it seemed as if a long time passed. The clouds twisted into new shapes, and Doodle stared up at them. At last, she sat up. “Everything is magic,” she said. “The sky, the stars, the whole world. It's miraculous, when you think about it.”

Kai shrugged. “Some things are more magic than others.”

“Like what?”

Kai considered the question. “Well, like nursing shoes aren't magic. Checkbooks. Moths.”

“Moths are extremely magical!” Doodle huffed.

“Okay, but, like, mud is not ma— Look, actually, I don't want to get into an argument about this.” This was the thing that frustrated Kai about people. It was hard to know if they could ever understand you. Like the kids at school who thought she was “weird” just because she wasn't interested in hearing about who was currently
crushing on whom. “I want to know if you believe in magic. Not the everyday kind of magic. I'm talking about, like, unusual magic.
Highly
unusual magic.”

“I won't laugh,” Doodle said then, unexpectedly.

Kai gaped. “W-what?”

“If you're worrying that I'll laugh at you about something, you can stop. I won't.”

That was enough. Kai sat down on a patch of brown grass and handed the book to Doodle, who flipped through it.

“Isn't this your diary?” She cocked her head. “No—it isn't, is it? It looks old.”

“Yeah—it's . . .” Kai took a deep breath. “I wrote in it, and it wrote me back. Now it's just gone off, writing its own story. I add to it, sometimes, and then it takes what I've written and makes it into a story. Sometimes, the handwriting even changes. Like—I don't know—like someone else is adding little pieces, too. And other times, it'll just go off and add more by itself, and I don't know why. Or how. It's, um . . . it's magic. A magic book.”

“Wow.” Doodle's gaze lingered on Kai's face, and then dipped back to the pages.

“Do you think I'm insane?”

Doodle looked up and held her gaze. “Not in this particular way.”

“Do you think maybe I'm making it up?”

“Why would you make it up? I mean, I assume that you thought of all of the logical explanations, right? That someone is messing with you—”

“Right. Not possible. Sometimes, words appear if I close the book and just open it again. Almost instantly. So there isn't time for someone else to be writing in it.”

“Whoa.” Doodle held out the book. “Can you make it happen now?”

“It doesn't always work that way.” But Kai leaned back to fish around in the pocket of her jean shorts. She came up with a ballpoint. Doodle handed her the book, but when Kai flipped it open, Doodle said, “No—don't.”

Kai's hand hovered over the page. “Why not?”

“It's just—I believe you. Don't ruin it. Don't put something dumb in there.”

“It'll just make it into part of the story.”

“But if it's a
magic book
, Kai, you can't just—I mean, it's like drawing a mustache on the
Mona Lisa
.”

Kai smoothed her hand over the golden lettering on the cover. She was overwhelmed with sadness, although she wasn't sure why. She had not yet learned that sometimes finding a true friend can make you feel even more acutely the loneliness of your life before that moment.

“The thing is, the newest part of the story was about a girl who played the violin. And a moth—it sounded like a Celestial Moth—came and landed on her bow. And I started thinking about those drawings in the lepidoptery journal . . . the ones that looked like music—”

“Maybe they are music.” Doodle tugged a piece of grass and stared off into the distance, her mind miles away. “Moth music . . .”

“What should I do?” Kai asked.

Doodle looked up at the clouds. One of them had slowly formed into a shape that looked like a feathery wing. “Why don't you tell me the story?” Doodle suggested.

“The story in the book?”

“The whole story. What you wrote. What it wrote. Everything.”

And so Kai did.

That evening, Doodle burst into Kai's bedroom with her usual uncoordinated cacophony. She carried the iPad in one arm, wiping the sweat from her forehead and into her hair with another. “Oh, man,” she said, breathing hard, “I ran into Pettyfer on the way over here!”

“Blech,” Kai said. “What was he doing?”

“He had something in a jar that he
said
was an Anna's Eighty-eight, which would be really rare around here, and he was all, ‘I'ma Plastomount it!' and I was all, ‘The hell you say!' but when I tried to grab it, he ran off and I chased him a while, but I couldn't catch up and I was afraid I'd drop my dad's iPad and I didn't want to miss sundown, so I came over here.”

She flopped onto Kai's bed. “Man, it's hot today. That made me tired.”

“All the running, or all the talking?” Kai asked drily.

Doodle just inhaled and exhaled for a few moments. “Can you believe he would kill something as rare as that?” she said to the ceiling.

Kai thought about how some people seemed to be missing something soft and human—something that allowed
them to
feel things
for other people—and at that moment Melchisedec Jonas's name whispered in her mind.

“Yes,” she said.

Doodle breathed a bit more, and then rolled onto her side. “That thing is looking lumpy,” she said, eyeing the white cocoon/blob that sat in a jar at Kai's bedside.

Kai frowned. “It's been so hot. I think the resin is melting a bit.”

Doodle sat up suddenly. “Are you ready?” She started scrolling through the images until she came to the page with the weird lines and numbers. “Here.”

Kai looked at it. “I think it's a form of tablature. It's a really old way of writing music. Instead of writing the note, you write down a number to indicate the finger you're using, and the string. Guitar players still use a form of it.” She had already pulled the black violin case from its temporary place in her closet. The black case was worn at the edges, and scratched. Kai had always handled it carefully; after all, it had been her father's. But anything that is used every single day for ten years will show wear. The silver clasps sprung open beneath her fingers, and she pulled the bow from its place. She tightened and ran rosin
over the bow. Its weight was as familiar to her as her own arm as she tuned up the strings. Picking up her violin, she tested a few notes. The melody was eerily similar to the one she had been playing for the insects a few nights before. The one that had just . . . appeared on her fingertips. She was relieved that she still seemed to remember how to play. Before that night of the Insect Symphony, it had been four months without the violin.

“Every day, you make a choice,” her mother always said. “To get better, or to get worse. What's it going to be?”

Every day, for almost ten years, Kai had chosen to get better, until the day—four months ago—she was told that no matter how much better she got, she wouldn't be the best. And if she couldn't be the best, the whole thing was a waste. She might as well quit.

Now, her fingers felt fat and stiff, like sausage stuffed into casing. She
had
gotten worse, but they still knew their places.

Beyond her window, the night chirped and hummed. She lifted the sash, letting in the song of the darkness.

“Do you think they'll come?” Doodle asked, her voice
hushed as if she were in a church. She sounded so hopeful that it made Kai's heart ache.

“We don't even know if they're out there. But maybe something will. . . .” Kai placed the violin beneath her chin and lifted the bow. She glanced once at Doodle—
four months since she'd had an audience.
She swallowed, then slowly drew the bow across the D string, pressing down her ring finger until she matched the note she heard outside. Then she hacked a quick series of chopping notes, over to the A . . .

Kai played according to the tabulature and the sounds it nestled in with the music of the night, at times joining the melody, at times adding a high harmony. She felt the notes lift from her violin, actually felt them rise, like something with weight, and join with the notes beyond the wall. She felt them braid together, becoming something heavy and large. Her eyes had no trouble reading the tablature—it was as if she knew the notes already, as if her muscles remembered them from long ago. She had almost forgotten that this was what it meant to play the violin: to become a part of something so deeply that you became almost invisible. She had disappeared, and there
was only the music, the sound, the beauty, the reaching beyond yourself and becoming part of the fabric that knits everything together.