One Jar of Magic by Corey Ann Haydu

Author:Corey Ann Haydu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Published: 2020-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Four

The snow is gone by Friday. Some jar of magic has turned the season into spring. I would have liked a few more weeks of sweaters and mittens and hot chocolate. Maybe seasons stay as long as they’re meant to stay and we shouldn’t mess with them. Maybe magic isn’t the only thing that happens for a reason.

Ginger, Maddy, and another girl named Layla all have the same bright pink streaks in their hair. Ginger has a new gray dress that looks like it’s made of something soft and special. I want to touch it. Maddy’s skin looks shinier. Or rosier. Or something-er. They all get A’s on their math homework. I’m pretty sure they even all smell the same, like apples and vanilla, and that they are, somehow, the same height.

“You grew,” I say to Ginger after we get our math homework back. I’m not talking to Ginger, but the words come out anyway. I try to say them in my head, but I’m not very good at keeping things in my head. It would have been a good thing to use magic for. Magic to make my mouth slow down, to make me more careful. Maybe if I had that kind of magic, Ginger and I could be ourselves again.

Maybe, with that kind of magic, my family would be okay.

“I never would have used magic to make me taller,” I say, because I’m not about to say all the other things.

“I didn’t,” Ginger says, but I know she’s lying because she whispers it, and she always whispers when she’s lying. Ginger hates lying, so she does it really quietly.

“Come on,” I say.

“You can’t control what kind of magic you get in your jars,” Ginger says, which isn’t exactly her saying she did in fact use magic to grow, but it kind of really is her saying that.

“You did your hair too.”

It’s common for the youngest capturers to get the silliest magic. That’s how it works. That’s what we’re meant for, I guess.

Then I remember I don’t even have the silliness, I only have my one jar of practically nothing.

That’s all I was meant for, I think. I deserve less than the silliest, smallest things. I am almost worthless.

“We always said we’d do our hair,” Ginger says. “If we got the right kind of magic.”

“Right,” I say. “But I didn’t do it.” I try to make my back as straight as I can, in case Ginger can somehow see all the things I’m thinking. There is magic that helps you know what someone is feeling. It doesn’t usually find someone as young as us, but Ginger is looking at me with a strange new look on her face, so who knows.

“Well, yeah. I mean, I figured you can’t. Unless you think that’s the kind of magic that’s in your jar?”

“Yeah. I mean, I just wouldn’t.”

“So. Right. I have more than one jar. So I can try—”

“You can do anything you want, I guess,” I say.

It seems like a hundred years ago that Ginger and I made our list of the top one hundred things to do with our magic.

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