The Fascinators Read online

  “I do know that’s what you think,” Sam said.

  His mom always made it sound so easy, like it was one more negotiation with a compromise at the end that would work for all involved parties. As Sam had tried to explain to her numerous times over the years, there was nothing to negotiate; he was perfectly happy with his friendship with James as it was. Or as it had been. As it would be again. The funny thing was, Sam hadn’t even told her about what had happened at the bowling alley. She just had a sense for these things. Again: an empath.

  And sure, James had the exact sleepy eyes, messy hair, and slantwise smile that his mom had (correctly) identified as Sam’s “type,” based on his favorite movies. And yes, there had been times when Sam had found himself daydreaming vaguely about cooking a nice meal with a guy who could make him laugh and believed in him unequivocally, the way James could and did. But no, that did not mean that Sam was so desperately in love with James as to sabotage one of his few close friendships.

  Besides, if there ever was going to be some great romance between them, it was still in the ember phase now, and if Sam blew too hard, he would only blow it out before it had a chance to get going. (His mom always countered that his relationship with James was less like a fire and more like Schrödinger’s cat, and Sam was just afraid to open the box to find out whether it was alive or dead.)

  “Well, suit yourself,” his mom said now. “The real reason I stopped by is that your dad and I both have to be at work on the early side tomorrow. Are you going to be okay to wake yourself up on the first day of school?”

  “As long as I can actually fall asleep, yeah.”

  “Right. Cherish those butterflies—it’s your last year to get them.”

  “Why? You don’t think I’ll get into UGA?”

  “It’s different in college. In college, all the days run together, and your first class of the week starts at noon, if you even remember to go.”

  “Wow. Suddenly I see why you put so much effort into keeping me away from parties. You were the biggest partier of all.”

  “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  She shut the door behind her, and Sam started back at the beginning of the incantation, determined to give it one last try before school kicked into gear and everything got in the way.

  Not three words in, his phone buzzed on his desk.

  Sam scrambled over to it, but even before he got there, he had this feeling that it wasn’t going to be a message from James. It was the next best thing, though—a message from Delia.

  You still awake?

  You know it, he replied. What’s up?

  Is it weird that I’m nervous for the first day of school?

  Sam smiled. He could just picture her, her chin-length brown hair falling to either side of her face as she held up her wrist to her mouth, gnawing on the magically reinforced friendship bracelet he’d made her freshman year. She hadn’t taken it off since.

  Not weird, he said. *I’m* nervous, and I’m not trying to get into Pinnacle.

  Thanks. Now I’m even more nervous.

  It hardly mattered that Sam had known her his whole life—it was still hard to read Delia’s tone in text form. In stark contrast to Sam, she never used emojis, even to denote sarcasm, because she wanted her words to speak for themselves. In this case, Sam suspected she was a little bit sarcastic but mostly serious. She really had been working herself ragged these past few years, her heart set on getting as far away from Georgia for college as she could, even though her parents had made it clear that she would have to pay her own way if she was going to pass up the HOPE scholarship covering in-state tuition. If anybody could make it happen, Delia could. It was their guidance counselor, Ms. Berry, who had suggested in passing that Delia might even have what it takes to be a Keeper one day, and that the Pinnacle School of Magic could help her get there. Their program was generally considered to be the best in the world, because it was free to all accepted students while being rigorous enough to open the door to pretty much any career for its graduates. Delia had once quoted to him and James this unbelievable statistic about how something like seventy percent of Keepers—like, all Keepers, around the entire world—had gone through the Pinnacle program. No surprise, then, that it was mind-numbingly competitive to get in.

  I’m excited for the Fascinators tryout ;) Sam said, changing the subject.

  I hope I make the cut! Delia wrote.

  Good—she was back to joking.

  Delia, James, and Sam were the president, vice president, and treasurer-slash-secretary of their high school’s magic club, respectively. They were also the only three members, and had been since their freshman year.

  That inaugural year, in the weeks before their first Georgia State Magic Convention (when it was starting to sink in that they had no chance in hell of placing, let alone winning), James had encountered the word fascinator in a book. The word, it turned out, was not only a type of British hat but also an archaic synonym for magicker—to fascinate was to charm, enchant, beguile. Instantly, James had seen the potential for a much-needed in-joke and point of pride for their club. With only three members, they might never put up a good overall finish at convention—that podium would be dominated by the bougie Atlanta schools that had dozens of members and dedicated magic classes, not just extra-curriculars. But sure enough, when the announcers that year were forced to read out James’s and Delia’s names for top-five freshman finishes in their individual events, and in both cases said, “of the Friedman High School . . . Fascinators?” the three of them and their sponsor—again, Ms. Berry—had screamed loud enough that everyone in the giant auditorium had looked at them like they were insane.

  Their club had officially been called the Fascinators ever since.

  Did you print the flyers? Delia wrote.

  Ah, the fliers. Sam’s favorite to-do every year—not even kidding.

  One for every building!

  Cool. Thanks, Sam.

  The conversation might have ended there. The reminder about the fliers was clearly the real reason Delia had messaged him. (Sam’s memory for details was two slices shy of a pizza.) But since he had her . . .

  Have you talked to James lately?

  Not since the bowling alley.

  For a second, Sam thought this was a pointed comment. That she’d somehow heard about what had happened outside—maybe talked to Bethany, or even James himself. This was another case when an emoji would have been extremely helpful—a winky face to mean that she’d heard all about it, no thanks to Sam, or a scratching-chin face to mean that she truly hadn’t talked to James in three weeks, why do you ask? Sam was sorely tempted to come right out and ask her what she knew, though that would make it a little harder to pretend that it hadn’t been a big deal, which he was determined to do, so everything could go back to normal. Mercifully, before he could give himself an aneurysm from this knot of indecision, Delia moved on.

  Did you get your dream spell to work? she said.

  No ☹

  Well, it would have been remarkable if you had. That spell seemed hard as shit.

  It really is! Like, Welsh!

  Welsh! Ok, I’m going to sleep. See you tomorrow, Sam.

  Night.

  She didn’t know.

  Sam exhaled.

  He went back to where his book lay open on the floor. He tried to make of his mind a vessel, and then he recited the Welsh. Then he attempted to go to sleep, crossing his fingers that the spell had worked this time—that when he dreamed tonight, as he assumed he would, he would be present and aware, able to think and see and remember.

  That last part, to Sam, was the most important.

  Sam hadn’t been able to remember any of his dreams. Not one. Not ever.

  As if an out gay magicker in Friedman, Georgia, needed any other reason to feel weird.

  It hardly mattered the next day that the spell still hadn’t worked. As he pulled into the senior parking lot at Friedman High, Sam felt a t
iny but very real spark of hope that this year was going to be different—that it would be the year when everything went his way. It was such a small thing—the senior parking lot was maybe twenty yards closer to the school than the general parking lot was—but Sam didn’t need for his life to be drastically different. Twenty yards’ difference felt like enough.

  Sam had gotten to school early to put up the fliers. He pinned one to the bulletin board in each of the main halls, which at Friedman were divided by subject—English, science, math, etc. Sam’s first-period class this year was economics, so he saved the last flier for the social sciences hall.

  The morning went by in a blur of new teachers and new textbooks, plus all the same classmates Sam had known his whole life. He didn’t have a single class with Delia or James this semester because he was a B-minus human being while they were in Advanced or AP Everything, but the three of them had the same lunch period, and Sam could actually feel his heartbeat speeding up as he entered the noisy, linoleum expanse of the cafeteria.

  James and Delia were already at their usual table, talking away, having clearly made full use of their three-hour head start on senior year to get back in the rhythm of things.

  “Hello, hello,” Sam said brightly, taking a seat across from his friends.

  James turned to greet him, and his face lit up. Sam had to admit it: he had missed that smile.

  “There he is,” James said. “My man Sam.”

  “Happy first lunch of senior year,” Sam said.

  “It truly is the first day of the rest of our lives,” Delia deadpanned.

  “Okay, Captain Cynical,” Sam said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Sorry I am feeling an actual emotion because I have an actual heart.”

  “Thanks for soldiering on and putting up the fliers,” she said without missing a beat.

  “How was Mike’s party?” Sam said to James.

  “Oh, yeah. It was fine. A little weird. But fine. How was Gulf Shores?”

  “It was great,” Sam said.

  “You’re such a liar,” Delia said. “I saw your v-clips. It looked like it rained half the time you were there.”

  “But it was sunny the other half,” Sam said. “Plus, when it rained, I stayed inside and caught up on TV. Did y’all see the finale of Last Keeper Standing? No? Well, the woman who won had to do this spell to lift a car over a pit full of spiders, while her brother and sister were inside the car. It was wild.”

  “Sounds wild,” Delia agreed.

  James laughed, maybe a half-second too late to be real. Now that Sam was looking for it, it seemed like James was a little tired, distant. Or maybe Sam was looking too hard for any sign of residual weirdness; maybe things had just gone back to normal, no further discussion required.

  Sam said, “I was planning to stop by Ms. Berry’s office before the tryout, to check if she’s going to be there today or not.”

  “She never comes,” Delia said.

  “She came freshman year,” Sam replied.

  “Yeah, but that was the first one. We didn’t know what we were doing then.”

  “Wait, we know what we’re doing now?” Sam said.

  Delia laughed, and then a moment later, James did, too. Like he’d been waiting for the translation.

  “Everything cool?” Sam asked him.

  “What? Oh, yeah. Everything’s fine. Sorry, just have a lot on my mind.”

  “On the first day of school?” Sam said with a smile, aiming for low-key.

  “Yeah, I guess.” James smiled back. It didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Do you want to talk—” Sam started, but he didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence.

  A girl had walked up behind James, and she was tapping him on the shoulder. Sam knew the girl to be Amber Williams—a junior this year, and a varsity athlete. Amber had dark brown skin and black hair that she’d worn in a ponytail for as long as Sam had known her, which meant since second grade for him, first grade for her, when she’d told some boys who were making fun of Sam’s purple backpack that they should mind their own business. These days, she played soccer and hung out mostly with other soccer players, including the ones in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. How she knew James was anyone’s guess.

  Amber held a crumpled-up brown paper bag in her hand, like she’d already finished eating and had been en route to throw away the trash.

  “Hey, James,” she said.

  “Oh! Amber! Hey! Amber, this is Sam and Delia. Y’all, this is Amber.”

  “I know,” Sam said.

  “Hey, Amber,” Delia said.

  “Amber goes to my church,” James explained.

  “That’s funny,” Amber said. “I didn’t realize it was your church. I thought it belonged to everybody.”

  This was apparently very funny to James—not delayed-reaction funny but whole-body-clouds-have-broken-laugh funny. James was all sunshine now.

  “You know what I mean,” he said. To Sam and Delia: “We both helped out at Vacation Bible School a few weeks ago. We had to feed, like, fifty kids a day. We were in charge of snack time.”

  “Yeah. Snack time,” Amber echoed.

  What fresh hell was this? Sam had gotten the impression from James’s texts that he was miserable having to do Vacation Bible School; certainly, he hadn’t mentioned living it up with Amber Williams. Not that Sam expected James to tell him everything he did when they weren’t together, but something about this effusive, stumbling introduction made it sound like “snack time” had been a significant omission.

  “Is this seat taken?” Amber said.

  “It’s all yours,” James replied smoothly.

  Amber sat down. She said, “Don’t let me interrupt. Feel free to talk about whatever y’all were talking about.”

  “What were we talking about?” Sam said to James.

  “You were just saying—about the tryout? And Ms. Berry?” James prompted.

  “Well, that was it,” Sam said. “That was the whole story.”

  “Is this the tryout for the magic club you told me about?” Amber said.

  “Yup. The one and only.”

  “You thinking of joining?” Delia said, her tone unreadable.

  “One hundred percent no,” Amber said. “James did make it sound pretty great, but we actually start training for soccer way before the season begins. Three days a week practicing magic is a lot. No offense.”

  “Yeah, we take it pretty seriously,” Sam said.

  “Do we?” James said.

  “I do,” Delia said.

  “That’s true—you do,” James conceded.

  And, okay, was Sam understanding this correctly? Had James actually tried to convince someone new to join the Fascinators? Someone from church? Sam thought James hated going to church. That he only went because his parents made him.

  With one quick glance, James seemed to register that Sam was upset. His eyes widened by the tiniest fraction of an inch; they reflected a trace of something like guilt. Sam had collected a lot of these looks over the years. They were often his best indication that he and James were, if not on the same page, at least reading the same book.

  “I hear you want to go to Pinnacle?” Amber asked Delia.

  “That’s step one,” Delia said. “Though since the academics suck so hard at this school, my magic convention results are basically the only thing I can put on my application to give me a shot at getting in. I don’t think Pinnacle takes many applicants who work at Chili’s four days a week. Not to worry, I’ve got my backup plans ready.”

  “Pinnacle doesn’t care if you have a perfect résumé,” James said, an oft-repeated reassurance to an oft-repeated insecurity. “They just want people who made the most out of what was available to them. They know not everyone is on the same playing field.”

  “From your lips to the dean of admissions’ ears.”

  The bell rang then, as if to ratify Delia’s hope. Sam’s lapse into moody silence went unacknowledged. His friends weren’t ones to
indulge him in his sullen moods, and Sam supposed that was for the best. If they asked him what was wrong, he wasn’t even sure what he’d say.

  As they picked up their trays to take to the trash can, Amber turned to James.

  “By the way,” she said, “what ended up happening with those guys from Mike’s party?”

  Sam’s ears perked up.

  “Uh, which guys?” James said, not stopping in his steps.

  “You know, those guys by the cooler? The jerks with the pipe? Farah said she saw you get in the car with them, so I figured you went to that other party.”

  “Oh, uh. Nah, those guys weren’t so bad. We talked it out after you left.”

  Delia caught Sam’s eye and raised her eyebrow, which at least reassured him that he wasn’t the only one picking up on the weird vibes here. But now they’d reached the fork outside the cafeteria, where Sam would have to go left to Trig while his friends went right to Calculus. He wasn’t sure which direction Amber would go.

  “Well, okay then,” she said, shrugging it off. “Glad you sorted it out.”

  “So, see y’all in the gym at three forty-five?” Sam said, as if he were oblivious to whatever was happening here. “First practice of senior year?”

  Delia gave him a two-finger salute, and James flashed him his best smile—nothing to see here. Which—fair enough.

  But their group dynamic did feel twenty yards different today. It was just twenty yards in the wrong direction.

  Chapter 2

  THE THING ABOUT PRACTICING MAGIC IN FRIEDMAN, Georgia, was that you never knew who was going to hate you for it.

  The closer you got to Atlanta—and for sure, the closer you got to the North—the more you encountered people who saw magic for its progressive and artistic possibilities. Down here, in the Deep South, you were still more likely to get an I-saw-Goody-Proctor-with-the-devil.

  It was no secret to Sam’s classmates that he was a practicing magicker. Most of them also figured he was gay, tipped off by his careful pronunciation and penchant for fitted jeans, or else by the bumper sticker on his car (an unsubtle rainbow, just in case they didn’t know that “Q-Atl” stood for Queer Atlanta, a monthly support group on the south side for kids, teens, and parents). But there was an unspoken understanding between Sam and his classmates that the key to his peaceful existence at school was to keep himself to himself. Save for his parents and a small handful of teachers and friends, which included James and Delia, Sam was never sure when he was talking to a Friedmanite if that person was actually okay with him or if they were just being polite, waiting until he was out of sight to cross themselves and pray for his immortal soul. Sometimes they didn’t wait. Who could forget the time sophomore year when some seniors in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes had taken offense to his existence and launched a brief but intense campaign to try to defund and disband the Fascinators?