All the Birds in the Sky (21 page)

They all just seemed so
nice,
Laurence didn’t mind that they were all talking at once and overflowing his buffers. Probably this was because of the magic thing, and he ought to freak out. But he was too tired to make himself worry about things that didn’t already worry him on their own. Laurence was nervous that he smelled like bacon-wrapped sausage fumes.

The bookstore had no musty “old books” smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.

There was some debate over whether they would go out for dinner—everybody except Ernesto, that is—or just bring in food. “Maybe we could check out that new hipster tapas place,” suggested Patricia.

“Tapas!” Dorothea, the elderly lady, clapped her hands, so her bracelets rang.

The person of unknown gender, whose name rather unhelpfully was Taylor, said perhaps Laurence would be more comfortable on neutral ground.

“Yes, yes, you must go,” Ernesto said in his gravelly voice with a hint of a Latin accent. “Go! Do not worry about me at all.” In the end, Ernesto insisted so loudly that they simply must leave him behind, everybody wound up offering to stay in with him.

Laurence couldn’t help wondering if he’d just witnessed a wizard duel.

Somehow, they managed to catch the Korean taco truck driving from one location to another, and bought a dozen spicy bulgogi and barbecue tofu tacos while it was stopped at a red light. Laurence’s taco had a lot of cilantro and onions, the way he secretly liked it. His anxiety melted away, and he envied Patricia for having such charming friends. If this had been a gathering of Laurence’s tribe, by now someone would already have tried to prove they were the supreme expert on some topic. There would have been dick-measuring. Instead, these people just seemed to accept one another and feed each other tacos.

They all got seats on folding chairs or the handful of actual armchairs in the bookstore. Laurence wound up sitting between Taylor, the young person of indeterminate gender, and Dorothea, the lady of indeterminate age.

Dorothea smiled and leaned over as Laurence chewed his taco. “I once owned a restaurant that had doorways in a dozen cities around the world,” she whispered. “Each entrance wore a different menu, advertising a different cuisine, but we had no kitchen. Just tables, tablecloths, and chairs. We carried the dishes back and forth, between the cities in different lands. So were we a restaurant, or a conduit?” Laurence wasn’t sure if she was telling a real story or just taking the piss, or both. He stared, and all at once her face was full of laugh lines.

After dinner, Ernesto sauntered to a bookcase labeled “Parties That Already Ended,” which was mainly histories of various empires. He removed a
Decline and Fall
with a flourish and the bookcase swung open, revealing a passageway leading to a secret bar, with a neon fairy on the wall and a sign proclaiming it to be the Green Wing. The Green Wing was another oblong, spacious room like Danger Books, but this one was dominated by a circular wooden bar in the center of the room, with a single rack full of absinthe. Art nouveau maidens and crystal dragons and parchment scripts adorned the bottles, which were every size and shape. A few people wearing corsets and poofy skirts were already drinking at a high table in the far corner, but they all waved at Ernesto.

Ernesto climbed inside the bar and started pouring from bottles into shakers. Patricia got next to Laurence long enough to whisper in his ear that he should be careful with any drink made or touched by Ernesto. “Take small sips,” she advised. “If you plan on having a brain tomorrow.”

None of these people seemed to be super-influential, and if they ruled the world they were doing a good job of hiding it. In fact, every other conversation was about how messed up the world was and how they wished things could be different.

Ernesto mixed Laurence something bright green that captured the neon light, and he caught Patricia’s warning gaze before lifting it to his mouth. It smelled so delicious, he had to make a mighty effort to avoid pouring it through his lips. His mouth was full of wonder and joy, and there were so many sharp and sweet and bright flavors that he needed to keep sipping to identify half of them.

Laurence was legless. He stumbled until someone helped him into a brocaded eighteenth-century chair that he could not find his way out of again. He realized that this was a perfect opportunity to ask some questions about magic, since nobody could blame the drunk guy for being nosey. Right? He raised his head and looked into the swarm of blurry shapes and lights, and strained to form a not-too-rude question. He was unable to find a verb to save his life. Or a noun.

“It has been a pleasure to meet you, Laurence,” Ernesto said, pulling a stool close to Laurence’s face so that his eyeliner and unpinned long gray hair were in something like focus. He had lowered his voice to a conversational tone, but it still sounded theatrical, every word enunciated like a stage actor’s diction. Ernesto was close enough for Laurence to catch the scent of an entire meadow pollinating coming off him. Close enough that if Laurence toppled forward, he would be touching Patricia’s mentor. Which Patricia had said would be very bad. Ernesto leaned closer and Laurence shrank back.

“I must ask you a question or two,” Ernesto said between sips from a martini glass, “about your intentions toward Patricia. She has confided in you, and we approve because everybody needs a confidant. But you must promise us to tell nobody else about the things she shares with you. Not your lover Serafina, not your friend Isobel, and certainly not your patron Milton. Can you make such a promise?”

“Uh,” Laurence said, “yes. Yes I can.”

“Will you humor me and swear to it? That if you break your promise, you will never speak another word again? To anyone.” Ernesto laughed and waved one hand, as if this were a mere formality, but in the background Laurence saw Patricia shaking her head, her eyes wide with panic.

“Uh, sure,” Laurence said. “I promise. And if I ever say anything about magic to anyone, I hope I lose my voice.”

“Forever.” Ernesto shrugged as if mentioning a minor detail.

“Forever,” said Laurence.

“There’s just one other favor we wanted to ask,” said the Japanese guy, Kawashima, coming into focus next to Ernesto. They were almost touching. “We worry a lot about Patricia, you see. She went through a lot when she was younger. First that Theodolphus douchebag, and then later that regrettable business in Siberia.”

“I hate it when you talk about me in the third person when I’m in the room,” Patricia said. “Not to mention the way you’re railroading my friend here.”

“We want you to help us look out for her,” Kawashima said to Laurence. “We have few rules, but our biggest taboo is against what we call Aggrandizement. Making yourself into a big deal. So we want you to support her and be her friend, in a way that none of us can. And yet also to remind her that she is just a person, just like anyone else, if she gets too high an opinion of herself.”

“Will you do this for her, and for us?” Ernesto said.

Laurence thought for a moment they were going to ask him to agree that his hands would turn into fins if he didn’t help keep Patricia’s ego under control. But for this promise, just a vague “I’ll do my best” seemed to suffice. Kawashima slapped him on the shoulder and everybody repeated a few times how nice it had been to meet him. Laurence felt his gorge rising. Someone guided him to a small toilet in the far corner of the absinthe bar, and he crouched over it for a good fifteen minutes until his stomach was empty.

Taylor and Patricia took Laurence for vegan donuts over on Valencia Street. His head was split in half and he was seeing spots. Taylor whispered something in Laurence’s ear and he felt a bit more even-keel, plus coffee and ibuprofen helped too. “You did good,” Taylor told him. “You were in the frickin lion’s den and you were as cool as cream cheese.”

“It just pisses me off,” Patricia said. “They think I’m some kind of egomaniac, when all I want to do is make croissants and get on with my life. And they can’t just ask Laurence to keep his trap shut, without putting a spell on him?”

The full weight of it hit Laurence then: They’d put a spell on him. A curse, really. If he spoke a word about magic or magicians to anybody, he would
never speak again
. He knew in his sore guts that this was a fact. Of course, there was no way to test, except the hard way. He stared at his thumbs, pivoting on the oaken table. What if he had to text people instead of talking to them, for the rest of his life?

“It’s not like that,” Taylor said to Patricia. “You should be grateful that you have people worrying about you. Ever since you moved here to Sucka Free, you’ve been.… overcompensating. I feel bad about Siberia too, but we have to move on.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “So now I am apparently under a…” He looked around the coffee place twice, trying to figure out if anyone was within earshot. “I am going to be facing certain constraints about what I can say to people who weren’t in that bookstore tonight. So that means you can explain to me, right? You can tell me how this works. I’m just curious, is all.”

“Sounds fair.” Taylor handed him a second donut.

“Yeah, okay,” Patricia said. “But not here. Maybe this weekend, we can go for a walk in the park. I remember how much you like the outdoors.”

Laurence shuddered, which was probably a sign that he was starting to feel like himself again.

20

PATRICIA FELT JITTERY
about throwing her first ever dinner party, because part of her clung to the fantasy of being someone who gathered cool people around her. A doyenne, someone who held witty salons. She cleaned the apartment for hours, made a playlist, and baked bread and bundt cake. Her roommates Deedee and Racheline made their famous “passive-aggressive lasagna,” and Taylor showed up with shiny pants and a bowl of mixed greens. Kevin arrived in a deep cerulean waistcoat that matched the ribbon tying back his dreads, and he had brought weird cheeses. Patricia’s bread filled the marigold kitchenette with a yeasty warmth, and she took a deep breath. She was a grown-up. She had this.

While Patricia served the salad, Kevin told Deedee and Racheline about the psychology of dog walking. (Some of the times Kevin had tried to sneak out after sleeping with Patricia, he’d run into her roommates, still half-awake on the couch. They’d started calling him Mr. No-Overnight, although not to his face.)

Deedee was talking about her ska band’s latest gig, in which as usual the blue-haired, wiry singer exuded so much raw Kathleen Hanna-esque sexuality, nobody would ever guess that she identified as asexual.

Just as Patricia was fetching the bread, Taylor glanced around and said this was a nice apartment. Too bad Patricia might have to move to Portland soon.

“What?” Patricia dropped her mitt on the floor. She was standing by the open oven, so she felt frozen on one side and red hot on the other.

“Oh,” Taylor leaned back, hands raised. “I thought you knew. They’re thinking of sending you to Portland.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Kevin blinked.

“Forget I said anything. I was talking out of school.” Taylor’s smile had vanished, replaced with wide eyes and a clenched jaw. This was so like Taylor: They were so closed off you could barely tell what they were thinking most of the time, but then they would toss out these bombs just to see everyone jump.

Patricia seized the bread with her bare hands. Let it burn her. “This is bullshit. They can’t make me move to Portland.” In Portland, all the young witches lived in one group house, with a curfew, and a few older witches supervised them.

“When were you going to tell me you were moving to Portland?” Kevin said.

“I’m not,” Patricia said, choking and coughing.

“Who’s making you move?” Deedee asked from the sofa, pierced eyebrows raised. “I don’t get it.”

“Please forget I said anything.” Taylor was squirming now. “Let’s just eat.”

Everybody stared at their plates and each other, but nobody said anything. Until Racheline broke the silence.

“Actually, I think you had better explain,” said Racheline, who was older than everyone else and the master tenant on the apartment. “Who are these people, and why are they forcing Patricia to move?” Racheline was a quiet woman, a perennial grad student with wild red hair and a placid round face, but when she decided to assert herself everybody snapped to attention.

Everybody stared at Taylor, including Patricia. “I’m not allowed to say,” Taylor stammered. “Let’s just say Patricia and I both have the same … the same caseworker. And everybody worries about her. Like, she goes off on her own for days. She tries to take everything on herself, and she doesn’t let anyone help her. She needs to let other people in.”

“I let people in.” Patricia felt bloodless. Her ears were ringing. “Right now, this moment, I am interacting with people.” She should have known.

“It’s true, though,” Deedee said. “Patricia, we never see you. You live here, but you’re never home. You never want to tell us anything about your life. You’ve been here nearly a year, but I feel like I don’t know you at all.”

Patricia tried to catch Kevin’s eye, but it was like lassoing a hummingbird. She was still holding the bread, and it was burning her hands. “I’m really trying. Look at me trying
right this moment
. I’m having a party.” She heard her timbre rising, until she sounded like her mother. Red haze, blinding her. “Why did you have to ruin this for me?” She threw chunks of bread at Taylor, who covered their face. “Do you want some bread? Do you want some bread? Have some
fucking bread
!” Now she sounded exactly like her mom.

She threw away the rest of the bread and bailed out of there, crying and spitting on the dry sidewalk.

Patricia had fallen in love with Danger Bookstore on her first ever visit, and whenever she climbed the wooden staircase, she usually felt a little of the packing tape around her soul unwind. But this time, she just felt the stabbing in her neck get worse as she reached the top floor with its unsafe railing and threadbare purple carpet.