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Alonso

EVERY NIGHT, ALONSO LOCKS HIS BEDROOM DOOR AND DRAWS THE curtains. It’s risky doing magic while his mom and aunts are asleep on the floors below, but he has to practice sometime, and he’s too lazy to sneak out. Plus, some of the spells require heat, and Alonso can’t build a fire to save his life, so he needs a place to plug in his hot plate.

Alonso sits on the floor, a lumpy pillow under his butt. The Misfits play from his old speakers, the rumble of the guitar enough to disguise any noise. Nimble is curled up on Alonso’s rickety desk, watching him through narrowed eyes, sensing that he’s up to something risky.

“Stop judging me,” Alonso says.

First, he picks up The Magic of the Every-Day. He originally set out with the intention of doing every spell in the book to build his foundation, but some of them are boring. He’s not going to exert a bunch of magical energy to clean some dishes or mend a hole in the crotch of his old jeans. Instead, he’s practicing spells that are interesting or melodramatic or both. Today, he opens the book to a spell on glamours.

“Fuck, yeah,” he says, rolling up his sleeves.

But the instructions aren’t for big glamours. It’s basically magical makeup—covering pimples or gray hairs. It’s better than housekeeping spells. He settles on a target: There’s a scar on his pinkie finger, one he got from a bicycle accident when he was five.

Most physical spells require an emollient, or something of the sort, to concentrate the magical energy when the spell is in progress. For the glamour, Alonso smears the scar with rose hip oil that he stole from his mom’s bathroom. He places his other hand directly above the scar, clears his throat, and reads from the book.

“Sunrise to moonrise,

take from my mind this disguise,

make it visible to every open eye.”

As he speaks, there’s a tugging in Alonso’s chest, and his magic moves up through his throat to coat his words. If he were good at this, he’d only have to say the spell once for it to work. But he’s an amateur, so he says it three times before he feels any heat in his scar. His eyes are bleary as he removes his hand.

Straight on, the scar is completely invisible. But when he moves his hand to the left, it becomes visible again. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope.

Alonso looks up at Nimble. “Why is this so hard? When I brought you back to life, I only got the flu. Now I do a tiny spell and I want to take a nap right away.”

Nimble’s tail swishes.

Alonso sighs. “Maybe I’m not holding the image in my head the way I should?” He gears up and does the spell again, this time on his pinkie nail, which has chipped black polish on it. As he says the words, he focuses on the image of a perfectly polished fingernail, the clean lines, the even color. But then he never paints his nails perfectly and he doesn’t really care to, so in his mind he adds a small dot of black paint on his skin.

And when he takes his spell-casting hand away, the nail looks exactly as it did in his mind. Tiny mistake and all.

“Whoa!” Alonso says, launching to his feet and gaping at his nail. “I did it! Nimble, look!”

Nimble yawns, unimpressed. But nothing can ruin Alonso’s mood, and he scoops his familiar into his arms and holds her up like Simba, spinning her around.

“I’m a witch!” he whispers. “A real live witch, bitch!”

He collapses onto his bed, finally letting Nimble go free. She hisses at him, but she still curls up on the pillow next to his head. Alonso laughs, scratching her head. This isn’t the first spell he’s done successfully, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s never been truly good at anything in his life. He gets As and Bs in school, but nothing has ever felt natural. Not like magic. Alonso gets it now—why his family feels so lost without it, even if he’s afraid of what will happen if he loses control.

“And to think I could’ve been doing this for a decade,” he says, and Nimble purrs.

Alonso is too wired to go to sleep, so he grabs another one of the spell books he’s been hiding under his bed.

The Light.

Alonso told Corey he wouldn’t subject Dylan to his magic. But Corey is too soft; there’s no way he’s going to confront Dylan about her family secretly being a coven. By giving Dylan a truth serum, Alonso is basically doing Corey a favor.

But behind Alonso’s confidence is fear. Because magic hurts people. Isn’t that why he’s avoided it for so many years?

He can’t let that fear hold him back anymore. What if he can prove that it wasn’t the De Lucas who cursed the Barrions after all? He lets himself imagine his mother’s face. This fantasy is exaggerated—her pride in him, the tears in her eyes—but it’s enough to make Alonso open the book of spells to the recipe for a truth serum.

Alonso cracks his knuckles. “Sorry, Corey. But if anyone is going to be a guinea pig, it should be Dylan.”