Anyway.
She’s sitting on the floor, and there are two piles in front of her on a piece of spread-out newspaper. It looks like the classified ads—the paper, not the piles. I lean my head to one side and scrunch a towel through my hair as I watch her work.
She’s holding a vertebra in one hand. There are maybe ten or twelve of them in a pile in front of her left knee. In front of her right knee, on the newspaper, is a pile of white powder.
I don’t ask what she’s doing, because she’s doing magic, and watching Marcelina do magic is just amazing. I mean, everyone looks amazing when they do magic, because it’s magic, but Marcelina is especially cool to watch at it. She lifts the bone to her lips and starts whispering to it, a steady stream of suggestions and secrets. I can’t hear everything she’s saying, but I catch the words “together” and “dark” and “settle.” The vertebra starts to glow blue from within, like a flickering fire is burning in the bone. Marcelina breathes over it, a breath that’s heavy with magic and meaning, and then she’s not holding a bone anymore—she’s holding a handful of white powder. She adds it to the pile and picks up another vertebra.
This is her magic: the magic of quiet moments. Where Iris’s magic is showy and enormous and awe-inspiring, Marcelina’s magic is soft and subtle and works its way into everything. Where Paulie’s magic is experimental, Marcelina’s magic is certain. Watching her work is like watching a time-lapse video of a river’s course changing.
“Do you want help?” I ask softly, not wanting to disturb her. She shakes her head and looks up at me. Her face has gone soft and peaceful, and her lips are tinged with a faint glow, like the magic she’s whispering has left her with a Popsicle stain.
“Okay,” I say, and I sit beside her to watch her work. She raises the bone to eye level and starts whispering to it, and I don’t say another word until after she’s done.
* * *
There are a million stars. It’s one of the nice things about living so far outside the city—we get stars here. I look up at them as often as I can, because when I go to college in the fall, there probably won’t be that many stars.
I try not to think about it too much. I’m going to miss the stars. I’m going to miss a lot of things. But Maryam and Roya and I are all going to State together, so at least I won’t be alone in the dark of the city.
Marcelina is walking in front of me, a teardrop-shaped silhouette against the tree line. The trees rustle a little as she passes them. They don’t bend toward her, but they notice her. I’m carrying a shovel. Handsome—the shaggier of the two farm dogs—lopes along beside me, his nose skimming the ground as he tries to take in every new smell in the grass. He whined when we snuck out, but once I told him that he could come with us, he shut up.
Yeah, I know. I’m a sucker.
Marcelina stops in front of the black oak she touched before. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s the same one—I don’t recognize individual trees the way she does, but there’s a big knot in the trunk that looks familiar. Marcelina confirms my guess when she puts her hand on the trunk and says, “I told you I’d come back.”
She’s holding the sheet of newspaper from her bedroom in one hand. It’s wrapped around the bone dust and twisted at either end, like a huge hard candy. She sets it down next to the tree, then looks back at me and holds her hand out.
“Let me,” I say, and she hesitates for only a moment before nodding.
“Okay,” she replies, “but you have to dig where I tell you to, or you’ll hit her roots.”
I pat Handsome on the butt and tell him to go have fun. He’s off before I finish telling him to come back within an hour, vanished into the trees to chase some sound or smell or dog-adventure that I’m sure he’ll spend the whole morning telling me about.
“You told him to come back, right?” Marcelina asks, peering into the trees.
“Yeah, but he’ll come back anyway,” I answer. “He doesn’t want to sleep outside anymore. His hips are bothering him.”
Marcelina frowns into the trees but doesn’t ask any other questions. She knows that Handsome is getting older, and that I’ll tell her if he has any serious problems. He’s doing okay for now. His hips hurt, and his vision isn’t so good, but he’s old and he’s pretty much all right.
“Here,” she says, pointing at the ground between her feet. “Dig straight down, three feet. Don’t go to either side, though. There’s a root there and a gopher tunnel on this side.”
“Got it,” I say, and she backs away a few feet so I can dig.
It feels good. The night air is warm, and the soil is soft, and there’s something satisfying about the sense that I’m doing work. That I’m fixing something.
When the hole is dug, Marcelina kneels in the soil and pushes the newspaper down into it. With both of her hands in the earth, she tears the paper open. She scoops a few handfuls of soil back into the hole, then kneads the bone dust into it. She hesitates. But not for long. Marcelina never hesitates for long. She pushes her fingers down into the loose mixture, and threads of blue shoot through the soil like an electric current. They disappear into the walls of the hole I dug almost as quickly as they appear.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, but either it’s too quiet for Marcelina to hear or she’s ignoring me. The question is answered within the next heartbeat as tiny tendrils creep out of the soil and brush against her fingertips. Marcelina breathes on them, and they shiver.
She glances up at me with a moon-bright Marcelina-smile and says, “Roots.”
The tendrils dive down into the bone-and-soil combination as Marcelina nudges the rest of the dirt back into the hole. I tamp it down gently with the back of the shovel—there’s a tiny mound left, but Marcelina puts a hand on my arm before I compress it all the way. “Leave some room,” she says. “She’ll need to breathe.”
We sit in the grass and wait for Handsome to come back from the woods. It’s probably one in the morning, and the dew is starting to gather. The seat of my pants gets damp, but I don’t stand up.
“So that’s what you needed it for?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, running her fingers through the grass.
“Why?”
“Minerals,” she says. “She’s been depleted because she’s been sending minerals to her friend. The bone dust should help a little.”
“Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Then: “Should we put the liver in there too?”
“No,” she says. “It would screw up the balance of the soil. We’ll deal with it later. Besides, I kind of think we should do the different parts separately, don’t you? So each one gets our attention? I wouldn’t want to get rid of anything without thinking about it.”
I swallow hard. I know exactly what she means. I don’t want any part of Josh to disappear without me knowing. I don’t want to look away from any part of this, no matter how hard it is for me to see what I’ve done. What we’re doing. “Sure,” I whisper, digging my fingers into my thighs. “Totally. I’ll talk to the other girls about it too, yeah?”