Magic Lessons (9 page)

was damp, making the curls cling even tighter to his head. He’d changed clothes, too, but my ammonite was still in his pocket.

Danny was bone-meltingly gorgeous. His brown eyes were huge and almost slanted, with the longest, blackest eyelashes. His hair was cut close to his scalp, leaving lots of tiny little curls. His skin was a gorgeous shade of brown, darker than mine or Jay-Tee’s. It glowed. Looking anywhere other than at him was an effort. So I did an inventory of his furniture: a couch, two comfy chairs, a huge television, and six stools around the kitchen island, one of which I was sitting on. In the giant room, it seemed like no furniture at all. He pulled up one of the stools and sat opposite me.

“So, Reason?” he said. I bit on my tongue to stop myself from blushing or shaking or doing anything that would make him realise that I liked him. I wanted him to realise, but only if he liked me, too, and not just as Jay-Tee’s friend.

“I didn’t get to talk to her, just Tom and Jay-Tee. She was out doing something. They didn’t know much. They said they’d get her to call me back.”

He pulled the ammonite out of his pocket, placed it on the benchtop, where its browns, greys, and blacks almost disappeared into the marble counter. “This is magic, right? How come you gave me this?”

Now I
was
blushing. “I . . . You know when we were at that dancing place?”
“You mean the club, Inferno?”
“I guess. The place where you introduced yourself to me? You know, when you were looking for Jay-Tee?”
He nodded.
“Well, I didn’t know if you . . . You might’ve been like Jason Blake. I know you’re not
now
, but I didn’t then. I gave it to you so I could follow you. Then if you kidnapped Jay-Tee or something, I could find her again.”
“You can follow it even when you can’t see it? So it
is
magic?”
I nodded. “I can always feel where it is. Well, not if it gets too far away, but.”
Danny and I reached for the ammonite at the same time, our fingertips touching briefly. “Sorry,” we both said.
“Take it.”
I did. It was warm. The feel of Danny from it was overwhelming.
“Good to have it back?”
I nodded. It did feel good. I slid it into my pocket but kept it in my hand, between forefinger and thumb.
“How does it work?” Danny asked. “I mean, the whole time I had it with me the stone never felt cold. Very weird.”
I tried to explain about magical objects, how magic rubs off on them. It was hard because it didn’t entirely make sense to me. I could almost hear my mother scoffing at the explanation. I tried to think of it as like the sun’s energy being absorbed by a dark stone, but longer lasting so that instead of staying warm part of the night, it stayed warm forever. I thought about Danny as his heart continued to beat between my fingers. Had part of him rubbed off onto the ammonite? Had he absorbed something of me from having it in his pocket the last few days?
The phone rang. Danny handed it to me. “Your grandmother.”
“Hi, Esmeralda,” I said, glad for once to hear her voice.

I needed to think about what Esmeralda had said. I walked to the sliding glass doors and opened them, stepping out onto the balcony. The wind was bitter, but no snow fell, and the sky was perfectly blue, with tiny pockets of stringy, feather-thin clouds. On the ground, piles of snow lingered. I could see a large body of water, but I couldn’t smell much salt in the air so I figured it must be a lake or a river, not the sea. Close to the shore were sixty-two rotten wooden posts sticking up, looking like a flock of drowning giants only able to get one arm above the water. It must have been an old pier that had rotted away. Seagulls glided by. One hovered for a moment, as if frozen, and then drifted away. The sea must not be far. I wondered why the gulls would stay here in the cold when they could fly to summer.

The door slid open and then shut. I looked at Danny and saw no magic, no rust inside him. He was completely normal. He handed me a big woolly jumper.

“You must be freezing.” His words made little puffs of condensation.
I was. I put the jumper on. “Great view. New York City is so big.”
“That’s New Jersey over there.”
“Is that a different city?”
Danny looked at me oddly. “Yes.”
“Huh.” It didn’t look very different. Grey and brown buildings. Hardly any trees. Beside the water, on the New York City side, people rode bicycles and jogged and took their tiny dogs for walks at the end of long leashes that from this distance looked more like kite strings. On the highway beside them, trucks and cars zoomed by. I could hear the rumble of the traffic, punctuated by the sudden squeal of horns and brakes and then by the bit of song that meant Danny’s phone was ringing.
He pulled it out, examined the screen, pressed a button, put it back in his pocket.
“How come you didn’t answer it?”
“Huh? Oh, it was a friend of mine. Don’t feel like talking to them right now.”
“How could you tell who it was?” I asked.
Danny raised an eyebrow—clearly, he thought it was a dumb question. “I can see the name of the person calling.”
“Then how come you didn’t know it was me when I called you? Didn’t my name show up?” I slipped my hands up into the sleeves of the jumper. It was freezing.
“Er, no.” Danny stared at me as if he was trying to figure me out. “That wasn’t your phone, was it?”
“No, of course not. I’ve never owned a phone.”
Danny laughed. “I can tell.”
“What time is it?” I asked, wondering how Tom and Jay-Tee were doing.
“Quarter to two.”
“Huh.”
“Do you know how long you’ll be staying here?”
I shook my head. “I guess it depends on what happens with that old man. I can’t go back to Sydney until he’s gone or lets me past or something.”
“You could always take a plane, you know.”
I hadn’t thought of that. How much would that cost? Plane rides were expensive, weren’t they? I took in Danny’s apartment. So big, such a huge television. He had a
lot
of money now. All of it from his dead magic father. Esmeralda had money, too. I wasn’t used to a life where money
solved
problems; I was used to money—or, rather, not having any—
being
the problem.
Sarafina never had enough. She worked lots of different jobs—barmaid, under-the-counter accountant, fruit picker, maths coach—anything she could find. Sometimes I helped, too. When we didn’t have money we’d make instant noodles go a long way or live off the land, find wild grub. Not something you could do in a big city.
Danny and Esmeralda were both casual about money, as if it was there to pluck from the air. Apparently, it was: I’d seen Jay-Tee make money appear in her hand where there’d been nothing.
“I’d pay for the ticket,” Danny said, as if he were offering to buy me a newspaper.
I shook my head. It wouldn’t make any difference. “He’d still be on the other side of the door trying to get through. We have to figure out what do with him on this side. Maybe there’ll be clues or someone here who knows what to do. It’s a big city—I can’t be the only magic one. Esmeralda had some decent ideas.” I shifted my feet. They were starting to go blue and tingle again.
“Do you like being in Sydney with your grandmother?”
I considered this. “I get to see my mum. And it’s nice being with Jay-Tee and Tom. I don’t trust Esmeralda, but so far it’s been okay. I just have to stay alert. Anyways, it’s warm there. Summer.”
Danny slid the door open. “Come on in, then. No need to freeze if you don’t have to.”
I followed him in. “Esmeralda wants me to try and track down where the old man comes from.”
“How, exactly?”
“With magic.”
“Okay,” Danny said, as if he understood, which, of course, he didn’t. “What kind of magic?”
“I can smell him. She wants me to follow his trail.”
His phone rang. He shrugged in half apology, pulled it out. “This friend I better answer,” he said to me before putting the phone to his ear. “Hi, Sondra. Uh-huh. Oh, sure, me, too.” He went into his room and shut the door.
I wondered what it was like for your friends and family to be able to get in touch with you whenever they wanted. What it was like to have so many friends that your phone rang several times a day. Strange to think of. Did Danny carry his phone with him wherever he went? Into the dunny even? Did everyone with mobile phones do that? Out bush some people had mobiles, but they hardly ever worked. You had to be in one of the big towns before there was any signal.
Fifteen minutes later Danny came back out with a large piece of paper in his hand. He didn’t say anything about the phone call. I wondered who Sondra was. How many friends did Danny have? “Okay, you’ll need clothes. Not to mention shoes.”
“Oh, yeah.” I felt like a der-brain for not having thought of it.
He put the paper on the floor and knelt beside it, holding it in place. “Put your foot on this.” I did and he pushed the pen around my left foot, his hand brushing past my ankle. “Next foot.” I switched feet. The ghost sensation of his skin on mine lingered. He traced around my right foot, his inner wrist touching the arch of my foot, my ankle. I fought to keep my blush down. “Now,” he said, looking at me, completely unaffected. “What else are you going to need?”
“Um,” I said, trying to focus my brain on something other than his hands against my feet. “Socks. I’ll need socks.”
He nodded. “Socks, shoes, winter coat, a hat, gloves. Shirts, jeans.” He wrote them down beside the outline of my feet, then held his hand out palm first. “Put your hand against mine.”
I did. His hands were warm and dry. Smooth. I felt my cheeks grow hot again. My hand was only a little bigger than his palm.
“Okay. Itty-bitty hands. I’ll get you a scarf, too.” He wrote it down. “That should be enough.”
“Um, I’ll need knickers, too,” I said, embarrassed. Sarafina would not think much of my embarrassment. She didn’t approve of people being embarrassed by everyday things like knickers or menstruation or anything, really. You should only be embarrassed by your own bad behaviour, like lying. Yet she had lied to me about magic. I was going to die young because of her lies.
“What?” Danny asked, looking confused.
“Undies.”
“Undies?”
“You know? I’ll need a bra and—”
“Panties. Oh, yeah. I gotcha. Sorry.”
I told him my sizes. He had no idea if they would translate or not.
“What’s your favourite colour?”
Red,
I thought,
the browny-red of the ground up north.
Then I realised that I was in New York City, so it wasn’t north at all. Dizzying.
I thought about Jay-Tee. Red-brown was the colour of the rust throughout her, the colour of the smell and taste that meant she didn’t have long to live. Neither of us did.
“Blue,” I said. “Deep blue.”

coming into the kitchen, but she managed not to jump. Unsurprisingly, Tom almost leapt halfway across the room. At least he managed not to knock anything over. Mere put the box she was carrying down on the counter.

He looked at the stove clock. “Ten minutes ago.”
“Thirteen,” Jay-Tee said, glancing down at the pad. She’d
been sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the door ever since
Reason’d hung up, noting down changes, almost—but not
quite—letting herself fall into a trance. Both Esmeralda and
Reason seemed to think it was important. They both knew
numbers. Tom was annoying her so much she now greeted his
endless comments and questions with grunts or with silence.
His words were wearing her down, making her even tireder
than she already was.
“Here,” Mere said, reaching out for the pad. Jay-Tee
handed it to her. She leafed through a few pages. “Good work.
Thank you.”
“Reason rang,” Tom said. “She wanted to talk to you.” Mere nodded.
“Did you find anything next door?” Jay-Tee asked, eyeing
the box. She wondered what was in it. More feathers? Bones? Mere nodded. “One or two things. I have some ideas.” “Like, for example?” Jay-Tee asked.
“You two must be a bit sick of sitting here guarding the
door.”
“Too right!” Tom said.
Jay-Tee said, “Yeah!” even louder. No way was he as sick of
her as she was of him.
“Why don’t you both take a break?” Mere looked at her
watch. “Come back in an hour and I’ll tell you—”
Jay-Tee didn’t wait to hear the rest. Suddenly she was jumping out of her skin with the need to be moving, to run, to be out
of there and looking at anything in the world but that damn
door. She exploded out of the kitchen, bolted out the front door,
jumped the front gate, went sprinting down the narrow, uneven
sidewalk, past trees, some with such low-lying branches that—
short though she was—she had to duck to avoid being clobbered. Houses flickered by, squat and low, pressed together
closer than teeth, leaning in on the street as if they wanted to
consume it. She felt her mother’s leather against her wrist, the
vibration of the animal tooth in her pocket.
She didn’t pause at the end of the block, just lifted up her
knees and ran harder. The only cars were parked and still,
metal guardians of a road so narrow that in New York it would
have barely qualified as an alley. For the length of the next block a flock of red-green-blue chirruping birds kept pace before disappearing into a shaggy tree covered with shaggy red flowers. The air was utterly still, but it didn’t matter—Jay-Tee
ran so fast, she created her own wind.
She sailed over a pile of dog poop, sprinted across the next
narrow road, and ran down the next block, where the trees
were so out of control that their roots turned the sidewalk into
a broken-down earthquake survivor. To keep from tripping she
stepped lighter, lifted her knees higher, but she didn’t slow her
pace, so it wasn’t until she hit the end of the street and
zoomed left to avoid the heavily trafficked road that she realized how good the shade had been, how strong the sun now
was, how overheated she was.
Her black hair radiated more heat than tar on a city roof in
the middle of August. She streamed water, salt stung her eyes.
Up ahead she saw tall trees shading a low brick wall in front of
an ugly block of orange brick apartments. She slowed and sank
down onto the bricks, scorching despite the shade. Jay-Tee
didn’t care. She slipped her hands under her thighs and leaned
forward, breathing deeply.
She felt dizzy, empty. If she was shaken maybe she would
rattle; maybe she would break. But after being stuck in the
house all morning staring at the stupid door, everything looked
so
good. She grinned, sat up, still breathing hard. In the distance where the road disappeared, shimmering heat danced
over the line of cars and trucks waiting for the lights to
change. She glanced up at the blue, blue, blue sky, but it was too sharply, vibrantly light for her to look at it long. She
shielded her eyes with her hand. “Wow.”
Jay-Tee had never seen light so intense before. Despite the
traffic fumes, everything had such sharp, clear lines, as if the
cars, the trees, the old chewing gum stuck to the sidewalk had
been freshly cut from glass with a laser. Another flock of the
red-blue-green chirrupers zoomed by. Each one of them dazzling: greener greens, bluer blues, redder reds than she’d ever
seen.
“Wow,” Jay-Tee said again. Somehow she’d managed to forget she was in a whole other city, a whole other country. She’d
never been farther away from New York than Jersey City.
Never been some place where every single person spoke completely different than her, where the cars drove on opposite
sides of the road, where the light was so bright it cut her eyes.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—I’m in Australia!
She crossed herself,
thanked God that she’d gotten to see a little more of the world
before she died. She hoped she’d get to go into the outback
like Reason had promised, finally see some kangaroos. How
cool would that be?
Jay-Tee glanced at her watch. “Wow.” It was only eightthirty. Morning still. She’d thought it was like noon or
something. How could it be this hot so early in the morning? The thought made her dizzier. Time had totally slowed
down. She wondered if it was a jet-lag thing. Or a staringat-the-stupid-door thing.
“Jay-Tee!”
She turned. It was Tom, wearing a dorky hat and clutching
his sides. He sat down beside her.
“Bugger, you can run fast.”
“Yup. You make dresses, and I can run faster than a jet
plane.”
“You think it’s magic?” Tom asked once he got his breath
back.
“Oh, sure. I went even faster with the extra talisman
Esmeralda gave me.” She reached into her pocket to feel the
tooth. It was almost as hot as the bitumen road. “I kind of
know where I am all the time.”
Tom gave her a look. “Um, yeah, Jay-Tee, me, too. Right
now we’re in Newtown—”
“No, no, not like that. I meant in space. I know where I am
compared to everything else around me.” Tom still looked confused. “I never bump into things, Tom. Not ever. I’m like the
total opposite of clumsy. ’Cause I just know—I mean, my body
just knows—where everything is, especially people. Someone
jumps out suddenly, I can get out of the way. ’Less they’re
faster than me, of course.” She thought of her father, and then
of
him
and felt momentarily chilled. “Anyway,
that’s
what helps
me go so fast. I think I’d still be a fast runner without magic,
but not that fast.”
“Cool.”
“Ain’t it?”
Tom nodded. “Your brother knows about magic and everything, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” Tom said.
“Why?”
“Nothing.”
Jay-Tee shrugged. “Your country sure is bright.”
“You taking the piss?”
Jay-Tee giggled. “You talk funny. Is there somewhere we can
get some water? I’m so thirsty I’m about ready to faint.” “Sure. Corner shop just around the corner.”
That struck Jay-Tee as funny, too, and she giggled again. “What?”
“Corner shop around the corner.”
Tom sighed and stood up. “You know, I’m getting a bit jack
of you always—”
Jay-Tee started to stand, felt dizzy, and sat back down again. “You okay?”
She nodded, though there were dots in front of her eyes
and her fingertips tingled. Light-headed, that’s how she felt,
like her head was hollow, except it wasn’t only her head; her
whole body was lighter than it should be.
“You sure? You don’t look good.” Tom squatted in front of
her and stared into her eyes; for a moment he was so far away
it was like seeing through a telescope. Then he was so close
she could count every freckle on his skin; some of them were
gold. There were so many of them, they made her dizzy all
over again. She wobbled. Tom put a hand on her knee to steady
her and just like that Jay-Tee knew what was wrong. She was dying. Right-here-and-now dying. Magic-used-up
dying. She knew it because she could feel Tom’s magic pulsing
in his hand on her skin; she could feel her cells screaming at
her that she needed it, that she had to take it. She was too
weak to tear it from him.
This was it. So much sooner than she had ever expected.
Jay-Tee’s head tumbled with all the things she should have
done, or rather
shouldn’t
have done. If only she hadn’t helped
with the protection spell or run crazy fast. She’d thought having two talismans would make her magic last longer. If only . . .
She should have listened to her father.
Be careful. Don’t use magic
unless you have to. Don’t conjure money out of air. Don’t dance too hard,
run too fast.
Don’t, don’t, don’t. But she’d done everything she
wasn’t supposed to.
I’m too young for this
. In front of her eyes the world was narrowing. The hazy distances, the cars, the road, the strange
trees and birds—all disappearing.
Jay-Tee had never really believed she would die. Not now.
Not her. But here she was, and her energy, her life, whatever it
was that made her who she was—was vanishing, run down into
almost nothing. Jay-Tee didn’t want to die.
“I need your magic, Tom.”
His eyes, opened wide, were all whites. “What?” “I’m dying. I can feel it. I need you to give me some of your
magic. I won’t take it from you. I wouldn’t do that to you.” JayTee was lying. She
couldn’t
do that to him. “I don’t think I have
much longer.” She was fading, getting smaller and smaller. She wondered if her skin was shriveling like a mummy’s or like a vampire in the sun. She shouldn’t have run like that. It was the
running that had pushed her over. She shouldn’t have— “How much will you need?”
“I don’t know.”
All of it.
“But you control how much you give
me, Tom. When you can’t spare any more, you stop.” He looked afraid; the patchy crimson flush of his cheeks had
all but vanished as if they weren’t sitting outside in hundreddegree heat. It was true, then: Esmeralda really hadn’t ever
drunk from him.
“What do I do?” he asked, his voice even softer than hers. “You let me touch you and you say yes.” She could barely
see him. “You let me take your magic. It won’t feel good. It’ll
be horrible—you’ll want to hurl. You’ll hate it. I hated it. Will
you do it for me, Tom? You have so much.” Her voice was
breaking, her eyes leaking. “I don’t want to die. Not this soon.” Tom moved his head. She couldn’t see whether he was nodding or not. She reached forward, felt for his hand, and put
hers on top. “Pull away, say no as soon as you need to.” It was
getting harder and harder to get the words out. “I’m weak,
Tom, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop this myself. Okay?” “Okay,” Tom whispered, so faint she could barely hear. As if
he were the one dying, not her.
“Will you give me some of your magic?”
“Yes.”
His magic streamed into her, clean, strong, alive.