A Snicker of Magic (11 page)

“There’s my word collector.” Mama kneeled down beside me and tugged at my wings. “I hate to interrupt, but will you come with me? There’s a place near here I’d love to show you.”

The way Mama’s eyes sparkled gave me reason enough to tuck the book carefully into my backpack. Mama grabbed my hand and pulled me up tall.

“Hey, Boone,” Mama said, as she slid her thin arms out of her wings. “I want to show Felicity something. Keep an eye on Frannie?”

Boone still had his wings on over his hoodie. He and Frannie looked like thieving fairies, rummaging through Cleo’s snack bag. Cleo was asleep in one of the camping chairs, her feet propped up on a red cooler, her wings pressed sideways and flat behind her. Boone gave Mama a thumbs-up.

Mama helped me shrug out of my wings. Then she winked and said, “Follow me.” She was using her story voice now. I’d follow that voice anywhere.

Mama clutched my hand tightly in hers and we took off in a run. We ran along the shore of Snapdragon Pond, down the hill, and into the woods. Mama didn’t trip or stumble, not even when the ground was covered with moss and brambles. Because I was holding her hand, I didn’t trip, either. Twigs made
pop-snip-snap
sounds underneath the weight of our shoes.

Patches of sunshine streamed down through the forest canopy, falling over us in sudden waterfalls of light. I
watched leaves twirl down from the high places. Words came twirling toward us, too:

Becoming

Unfurling

Bloom up

Bright and fine

Mama pulled me along behind her. Occasionally, she’d glance back, her blond hair swinging across her face, and yell, “You okay, June Bug?”

I nodded. I was breathless and happy. I was better than okay.

Mama slowed down to help me navigate a steep incline. We both laughed when my sneaker made a funny
FWOP
sound as it came down in a clump of mud. Finally, we walked into the shady grove of the tall trees. The shady trees were different from the pine trees; they had long, tangly limbs and thick trunks. They were connected together by strong roots and long shadows. Mama pointed at the tallest tree, the extra-leafy one. “Feel like climbing?”

The truth is that I’ve never cared anything about sports. In PE, I do my best to get hit with the dodgeball on the first throw so I can sit out and read instead of play. I’d rather eat a hot dog at a baseball game than play baseball. I’d rather paint a soccer ball than kick one. I don’t mind running, but only if I’m running toward something wonderful. I don’t see the point in running away from anything, ever. But tree climbing is different. Tree climbing is natural and easy and I’m pretty sure I could climb for hours and never get tired.
Mama says it’s the mountain girl in me. She says mountain girls climb trees and fences and anything else that gets us closer to the stars.

I reached up for the thick, low limb, gripping the scratchy bark tightly between my hands. Mama gave me a boost and I swung my legs up, too. I found my footing, easy. Soon, I heard her climbing up behind me. Together, we made our way up through the limbs.

“How far can I climb?” I breathed. Because with the mountain wind in my lungs and the sun shining down on me, I felt like I could climb to infinity. I could climb past the clouds, to the place where Jack found the giant’s castle. I could climb to the prickliest star in the sky and scratch its back. I could climb past that even, all the way to heaven, and give God a high five for bringing my family together. I could climb to eternity. I could climb to forever.

“That’s far enough,” Mama said. She sounded like her breath was running out. When I looked back at her, her face was a pretty pink color. I steadied my feet and leaned back into the strong branches, reaching for Mama so she could take my hand and come up beside me. She nestled in against me, shoulder to shoulder. I was glad Mama had only brought me. Whenever Frannie Jo climbs a tree, she’ll curl up like a cat on one of the branches and start screeching until I get her down.

“This is the forest that surrounds Midnight Gulch,” Mama breathed. “Keeps the town secret from the rest of the world. Remember me telling you that story?”

I nodded.

“When I was a little girl, I used to play in these woods. This tree was my favorite place to climb. I’d climb as high in these branches as I could go, just so I could see
that
…”

Mama pointed to the tall mountains rippling against the sky, circling us.

“I like the mountains, too,” I said. “From up here, I feel like they’re hugging me.”

Mama smiled. “I’m not talking about the mountains. I never loved them the way you do. I always felt like they hemmed me in.”

Hemmed mountains made me think of Aunt Cleo’s words:

Patch it

Mend it

Stitch it back together

“Look closer.” Mama leaned her scrawny arm across me and pointed. The friendship bracelet I’d made her last summer was still tied to her wrist, barely a bundle of frays now. I’d made one for Frannie Jo, too, three strands for the three of us. “You see that little spark of silver out there on that mountain? If you keep watching, you’ll see another flash of light soon. Look closely.”

“I see it!” I saw
lots
of it, actually, flickers in a steady vertical line down the mountain.

“Those are cars.” Mama smiled. “That’s the interstate winding down the mountain. Isn’t that exciting? When I was a girl, I used to sit up here and dream about where those people were going. Every flash of light up there is a
new adventure. I couldn’t wait to have an adventure of my own.”

My heart sank down into the vicinity of my sneakers. Mama was always thinking of going. Never staying put.

Stop settling in here
, I told my heart. Because it didn’t matter if I bought us two more weeks of time or another month, even. Having extra time here would only make it harder when we finally left. And Pickles always leave. Soon enough, there’d be a new town. A new first day of school. A new cafeteria where apples tasted like sand and
LONELY
creepy-crawled all across the tables and wedged itself in all my books.

I managed to whisper a question I’d been wondering about for a while. “Do you drive sometimes when I’m in school? During the day, before you go to your shift at work, do you go drive around that mountain?”

Mama nodded. “Sometimes. You know how I am.”

I didn’t want my next words to come out, but they did anyway. They were wild words. I couldn’t control them. “You won’t ever drive away without me, will you?”

“Felicity,” Mama sighed. I cringed at the hurt in her voice. “I’d never do that. Look at me.”

Her face was still beautiful, even blurred through the tears I was trying not to cry.

“I won’t go anywhere without you,” she promised.

I asked, “Why did you hate it here so much?”

“I don’t hate it,” Mama said, staring down at her bracelet again. She picked at one of the frays. That bracelet was
falling apart; it’d fall off her wrist someday and she wouldn’t even realize it. “But sometimes I feel like I’ll lose my mind if I don’t keep moving.”

I knew that already. I’ve always known it. When I was a baby, it was a car or a van rocking me to sleep at night, not a rocking chair. We stayed in towns a few months at a time, sometimes a whole year. When I was little bitty, Roger Pickle traveled with us, but I guess he got tired of always adventuring. Or maybe he just got tired of us.

Just thinking about Roger Pickle made my heart feel like somebody’d drop-kicked it. A whole stack of questions — mean questions — tried to work their way out of my mouth.

I wanted to ask Mama outright:
Why don’t you ever talk about him?

Why don’t you paint anymore?

Why can’t you try to stay here?

Why won’t you try?

But I didn’t say those things. Instead, I threaded my fingers through hers. She traced an invisible heart on the back of my hand, connected the freckle-dots. “Life’s always an adventure for us, June Bug. We’ve got rambling hearts. We gotta keep moving, right?”

Mama had a rambling heart. But I wasn’t so sure I did.

My heart wanted to bloom up bright and fine here in Midnight Gulch. I wanted Mama to love it here like I did. I wanted Cleo and Boone and Jonah and Miss Lawson’s history lessons. I wanted a town that smelled like baking cookies all the time. I wanted mountains with magic caught
up inside them. I wanted that stupid Duel about as much as I wanted chicken pox, but I’d do that even, if it meant I could stay.

“June Bug?” Mama sighed.

“We’ve got rambling hearts.” I lied for the second time that day. Because the only thought worse than leaving Midnight Gulch was the thought of Mama leaving without me.

“That’s my girl.” Mama sounded relieved. She set her eyes on the sparkly interstate. I knew she was wishing us somewhere far away.

The words in the woods hung like fat apples from the branches:

Becoming

Unfurling

Bloom up

Bright and fine

I gathered those words in my heart. Then I set my eyes on the mountains and wished they’d never let us go.
Keep us safe. Keep us here. Hold us tight.

Mama and I walked back out of the woods just in time to hear Frannie squeal, “I want to stay here forever!”

“Fine by me.” Cleo smiled. She opened up her little red cooler and sloshed through the ice. She pulled out an orange soda bottle and passed it to my sister. “We can stay here all day, at least.”

“Cleo Harness?” yelled a familiar, husky voice from the edge of the woods. “Is that you?”

“Pack up!” Cleo hollered. “We’re leaving!” She kicked the cooler lid shut and stood up so fast that her camping chair stayed stuck to her behind.

Boone lifted his plastic sword toward the sky and waved his other hand in greeting. “Day Grissom?” he yelled. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”

Aunt Cleo looped the cooler over her arm like a purse and said, “C’mon. We’re leaving. Now.”

Frannie’s smile fell into a frown. “You said we’d stay forever.”

“I changed my mind,” Cleo yelled as she stomped toward the path.

I ruffled Frannie’s hair and promised to catch her a poem on the way home and she sighed okay.

With our fairy wings secured, we grabbed our chairs, and Boone got the snack bag and we marched back toward the path.

“I can help y’all carry something,” Day said as he walked up beside Cleo.

“Don’t need help,” Cleo mumbled. She never looked at Day, just stomped on past him. He didn’t seem surprised.

“I’m telling the truth, Cleo,” Day said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “You look just like an angel right now.”

Cleo’s wings were bent, turned sideways against her back. With her hair piled haystack-high on her head and
her black sunglasses covering half her face, she looked to me more like an angry bumblebee than an angel. Cleo didn’t respond to Day’s compliment. She kept on walking.

I waved at Day when we passed him. When he waved back, I thought I saw a sad smile hiding under his beard.

Boone stayed back to talk to him for a few minutes. When he caught up to us, he gave Cleo a playful punch on the shoulder and said, “What happened to all those new beginnings you were talking about?”

“Hush, Boone.” Cleo tucked a cigarette into her teeth. “Mind your own business.”

Mama chuckled. Boone winked down at me and started whistling. Frannie Jo slid her hand into mine and held on tight.

Someday, when I got brave enough to taste Blackberry Sunrise, I hoped that exact memory is the first one I’d think of: The sunset colors stretched across the sky. Tiny red leaves twirled down around us along the wooded path. I wanted to remember Boone’s lonesome whistle and the way Cleo’s cigarette smoke curled so elegantly, so gracefully up toward the sky. I wanted to remember the way Mama kept looking up toward the clouds, smiling at the birds swooping through the treetops. I never wanted to forget all the ways we were connected that day: By our shadows and sunlight. By pounding hearts and a starry maybe.

By the nearly silent flutter of our broken wings.

“Poets and paupers,” Jonah said. He was glancing down at the words I’d just penciled in the blue book.

Day Grissom’s bus had dropped us off on Main Street at Dr. Zook’s Dreamery Creamery, the only ice-cream shop in the world that had all of Dr. Zook’s 45 Mysterious Flavors. Jonah said Zook’s was the most swankified place to get some work done. His Beedle work consisted of (1) scheming up nice things to do for people and (2) helping me plan for the Duel. Which he was still convinced was my key to convincing Mama we should stay in Midnight Gulch.

My work was to get inspired enough to write my poems for dueling day. Also, my work was figuring out how to deliver that talent without barfing all over the stage.

“That’s why I brought you here,” Jonah said. “Because ice cream is wholly inspirational.”

But I thought he meant Holy Inspirational.

So I said, “Amen!”

And Jonah shrugged his shoulders and said, “Hallelujah!”

And he bought two pints for us to split.

“Poets and paupers.” I nodded toward the window. I reached for the pint of Uncle Duane’s Sublime Key Lime Pie. “Those are the words I see across the street at the pie shop.”

“No way!” Jonah’s green eyes glittered sparkly wild. “That’s what that building used to be called. Way back before it was Ponder’s Pie Shop, it was a pub called The Poet & Pauper. That’s one of the oldest buildings in the whole state.”

Jonah leaned across the table toward me. He had a secret-telling look on his face. So I leaned in real close to listen. I liked keeping his secrets.

“You’ve met Ponder, who owns the pie shop? Well, she’s kin to the Smiths. And the Smith magic had to do with cooking.”

“How so?” I took a last bite of key lime deliciousness and pushed the pint across the table to Jonah.

“Back during the Civil War,” Jonah began, as he nudged his pint of Erin’s Peach Pecan across the table to me, “Nancy Smith worked at that shop making spy pies. Soldiers would walk in there and tell Nancy certain secret information. And, somehow, Nancy Smith could bake that information into the pie. There were no slips of paper. No number codes. No tangible pieces of evidence. It was the secret she baked in. Soldiers could taste those pies and know all sorts
of important things. The whole war might have turned out different if it hadn’t been for Nancy Smith.”

“Spindiddly!” I said.

Jonah grinned as he leaned back in his seat. “People claim Ponder’s pies still have a snicker of magic.”

“A snicker?”

“That’s magic leftover,” Jonah explained. “Not good for much, not as fancy as it used to be — but enough to make it special.”

I leaned across the table and whispered, “Do you think your know-how is a snicker of magic?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. And then he cocked his head at me. “I think your word collecting is a snicker of magic.”

“Word collecting’s not magic,” I argued. “It’s just a quirk, just how I am.”

Jonah twirled his pen through his fingers. “The Brothers Threadbare probably thought that way. Until the day they saw what their music did to people, how it made them dance. Made them happy.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, the Brothers Threadbare wrecked this town.”

“Not at first,” Jonah countered.

Oliver’s story of the Threadbare curse had stuck with me. I’d written the words in my blue book, but I might as well have written them inside my head and inside my heart and in the air all around me. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about them. And I didn’t know why.

The Brothers Threadbare were dead and gone.

They had nothing to do with me.

And anyway, the only magic I was interested in was the kind that would make Mama stay put. I’d give anything to find a snicker of magic like that. I looked back across the street at the words
poets and paupers
still fluttering over Ponder’s door. “Is there a snicker of magic in Ponder’s pies?”

Jonah shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. She doesn’t bake secret spy stuff anymore, of course. But they say her blackberry pie makes people fall in love. And her apple pie makes people feel brave. All I know for sure is that she makes pies that are spindiddly delicious.”

“What does that guy do?” I pointed to the scrawny man dancing down the sidewalk across the street. Since Jonah and I had arrived at Dr. Zook’s, I’d watched the man set up a huge radio near Ponder’s Pie Shop. Then he plugged a microphone into the radio. And now he was singing so loud and hard his face was red. Explosive red. “Does he have a snicker of magic?”

“That’s Elvis Phillips,” Jonah said. “He stands on Main Street and sings songs by Elvis Presley. No magic there. He figures since his name is Elvis, he’s got a similar calling as the King.”

“Is he crazy?” I asked.

Elvis Phillips closed his eyes and leaned back. Then he clinched his fist, kicked his scrawny leg out, and howled the final lyric of “Jailhouse Rock.”

“He’s no crazier than anybody else in Midnight Gulch.” Jonah smiled.

“This Duel’s making
me
crazy.” I looked down at the mostly empty page of my blue book. “I could use a slice of Brave Apple Pie. A gargantuan slice.”

Jonah asked me exactly how many poems I’d written for the Duel, and I told him the truth, that I’d written exactly zero-zilch-nothing-nada.

“Flea!” Jonah hollered. “We have less than one week left!”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’d be easier to break that stupid curse than compete in the Duel.”

Jonah shook his head. “Something good is going to happen at the Duel.”

“You said that already.”

“Then start believing me!” He leaned closer to me and whispered, “Beedle intuition is always spot-on.”

“No matter how many words I write, they’re still just words. Words aren’t the same as talent.”

With a carton of ice cream in one hand and a spoon clutched tight in the other, Jonah looked as determined as I’d ever seen him. “Your words are talent. And I’m going to help you see it.”

“I’m grateful for all the ways you’re helping me,” I sighed. “But when the Duel’s over, it won’t matter if I win or lose. It won’t matter if I say something smart or stupid. In the end, I still have to leave.”

Jonah must have seen the panic in my face, because his voice drifted back to peaceful-easy as he said, “Don’t worry about your poems yet.” He reached across the table and
turned to a blank page in the blue book. “Just make a list of random facts. That’ll get your pen moving and your imagination running.”

Jonah opened his newspaper and started circling and plotting and planning good deeds. I glanced all around me, trying to find some inspiration. I saw an old couple with matching sun visors. They were eating ice-cream cones full of rainbow-colored scoops. I watched a girl with red hair hold a novel in one hand and a waffle cone in the other. She was mumbling the words of her story, so happy to be reading that she didn’t notice the pink dollop of ice cream on her chin. I watched little kids stand on their tiptoes and stare at all the bright flavors kept safe behind the glass.

I wondered if any of those people had blue books, too. Did anybody else in the world see words the same way I did? Was word collecting a kind of magic, like singing at the clouds and baking spy pies? Maybe my words were only a snicker of magic. Maybe they were nothing. But they were still mine.

I concentrated on my blue book again. I decided I might as well write about myself.

I glanced across the table at Jonah. I looked back down at my book. I wrote:

The only perk of my impending Dueldom was spending more time with Jonah. Hanging out with my family was fabulous, but my time with Jonah was a different kind of
wonderful. Jonah Pickett was like snow days, field trips, candy stores, and Christmas Eve all blended into one big
swoosh
of a feeling.

“Felicity,” Jonah drawled.

My face tingled red because I realized I’d been staring at him for way too long.

I shifted my eyes back to the blue book and cleared my throat. “Yep?”

“Is Boone staying at Cleo’s apartment, too?”

I nodded. “Cleo says we’re packed in tight as sardines. Me and Frannie Jo and Biscuit sleep in the craft room. Mama sleeps on the couch. Uncle Boone sleeps in a sleeping bag in front of the laundry closet.

“Last night, Aunt Cleo forgot he was there and she tripped and fell over him. And her lit cigarette caught the edge of his sleeping bag on fire. Cleo tried to beat out the fire with her house slipper while Boone tried to wriggle out of the sleeping bag, but the zipper was stuck. I don’t know if it was the hollering or the smell of smoke that woke up Mama, but she got the fire extinguisher. Then she barreled down the hall, spraying the fire extinguisher like a wild woman. Ruined Cleo’s carpet.”

Jonah laughed. “We gotta figure out something really good to do for Cleo.”

He scribbled a few notes in the corner of the newspaper. Then he reached down into his backpack.

“I picked these up for your uncle.”

Jonah passed me a box of new banjo strings.

“Spindiddly!” I said. “But how are you going to get them to him? Boone barely leaves the apartment. He’s too sad over the Nashville floozy.”

Jonah pulled a roll of red ribbon from his backpack and tossed that across the table, too.

“I figured you could do it.” He smiled at me. “Just write something clever on the box and sign it …” Jonah mouthed
the Beedle
.

My heart felt heavy in a good way, holding me steady in a moment I needed to be sure and remember.

I leaned across the table and whispered, “
I
get to be … pumpernickel?”

“Is that all right? I was thinking the other day, when Oliver talked about Eldee Mae helping him out all those years, that it’d be nice to have an accomplice. Only if you want to, of course.”

“I want to!”

“Spindiddly.” Jonah smiled. And we both looked out the window just in time to see Elvis Phillips do the split.

The wind-chime wind chose that exact moment to make its way down Main Street. And this time, the wind brought a creepy-cold feeling along with it. At first, I pushed the ice-cream carton away from me because I figured the cold was a delayed case of brain freeze.

But then I heard the chimes: soft, quiet, caught in the wrinkles of the autumn air. I hated that sound.