Page 20 of Witch You Would

Slim palm trees were scattered among flowering plants, some arranged in low rows and others between taller bushes and hedges: beds of five-petaled red pentas, bright yellow lantanas and goldenrod and daisy-like tickseed, pink zinnias and cosmos, on and on and on—colors everywhere I looked.

Orchids sprouted from the limestone walls, and white aquatic milkweed grew on the shores of streams that fell into a peaceful pool, surrounded by ferns and mossy stones and pond apple trees.

And the butterflies. So many butterflies. I wasn’t as familiar with their species as I was with the plants, but I recognized

atalas, with their dark iridescent blue-spotted wings, yellow-striped zebra longwings, and of course, monarchs. Fruit feeding

stations made of tree stumps with sliced mangos on top attracted some of them, like the bug equivalent of bird feeders. The

rest fluttered from plant to plant, resting on flower petals or leaves, dancing in the air like relaxed drunks.

I wandered the stone paths until I came to another of the Everly Bale exhibits. The sculpture was taller than me, made of

hundreds of tendrils of glass woven into a shape like a crocus bulb. Some strands were as thin as my hair, others as thick

as my wrist, all of them different, vibrant colors, turquoise and magenta and dark orange and buttery yellow. They twined

together, sliding past each other like a moving tapestry, shifting into different combinations that had no clear pattern or

purpose even as they all seemed to be moving up toward the bulb’s tip. Organized chaos. A contradiction.

That made sense, for a glass enchantment. Glass was a super-difficult medium to work magic with. It was composed of all four

classical Western elements—earth, fire, water, and air. It was a fluid made solid, fragile yet durable, mutable and immutable.

It reminded me of Leandro. Another contradiction.

Ever since his first video Rosy showed me on her phone, I thought: This guy is ridiculous, with his safety glasses and his curly mustache.

He’s not only making an ass of himself, he’s making it look fun to screw up spells.

Irresponsible! Unsafe! Remembering that burst of fire in the studio, so close to his face, still made me shiver.

But there was more to him. He’d brainstormed with me and come up with good ideas. He was organized and thoughtful. His spellwork

was carefully planned and precisely executed. He brought me coffee, somehow exactly how I liked it. When lightning had struck,

the first thing he’d done was grab me, to keep me safe. None of that seemed to match who he was on his channel. I thought

he was shallow as a muddy puddle, and suddenly he was a lake like the one outside, with turtles and birds and jellyfish sculptures

and who knew what else below the surface.

And that made me think harder about Gil. We’d been emailing for so long, but all our interactions were words on a screen,

emails and comments on blog posts. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I’d thought. Maybe he didn’t know me, either. Maybe

we’d each built up our own versions of Gil and Penelope and were carrying them around like old pictures on our phones. Not

even pictures we had taken; ones we’d found on the internet, that might not even be of us, might be other people who sort

of looked like us. I thought of that unhinged email I’d sent him a couple days ago and wanted to melt into the ground to feed

the plants.

And me? I’d spent so long behind the store counter as some faceless nobody, fake smiling, fixing problems, letting people bitch at me.

Ofelia threw me under the bus whenever it was convenient, even when I did nothing wrong.

Some regular customers at least knew my name and a little about me, were friendly with me, but that was still my store self.

Likewise when I did spell demonstrations.

My friends knew me and liked me for who I was, but I spent so much time being the perfect little retail worker that sometimes it blended into other times and places.

Sometimes, even with friends, I tried to be the me I thought they wanted to hang out with.

Aside from that outburst in the park when I went “reply guy” as my sister called it, I was usually the chill one, the one who wouldn’t bother anyone, wouldn’t cause trouble.

And then I went home, alone, to my tiny illegal efficiency, and turned it all off like a light switch. Like taking off my

bra at the end of the day and relaxing in a T-shirt. But was I most myself when no one else was around? Or was I an empty

chalkboard waiting for someone to write on me?

If I won this competition, I’d have a year in a studio to figure myself out. To find that hopeful, ambitious Penelope who

had stood up to her parents and stayed in Miami for college instead of moving away with them. To reconnect with my abuela

through her spells now that she was... gone.

I sat on a bench and watched the sculpture twist and move. I couldn’t decide whether it was hypnotic or freaky. It made my

stomach weirdly tense, like I was waiting for some resolution that would never happen. What enchantment kept it going in perpetuity?

Did it have to be periodically recast? Was it fed by some energy source? I crouched next to it, checking where it connected

to the ground to see if there were roots or—

“Did you drop something?”

I yelped and fell onto my butt. Leandro leaned over me, a dark shadow against the bright glass ceiling, looking down with

that half grin of his.

“Sneaking up on people is super rude, bro,” I said. “I was checking out the sculpture.”

“Trying to figure out how it works?”

“Yeah, what’s fueling it.”

“Might be something in the soil. Could also be solar?”

True. The glass ceiling let in plenty of light.

He sat down next to me. Hopefully wardrobe had cleaning charms for the dirt we were collecting on our pants. My jeans might

hide it, but Leandro was wearing loose khakis.

“You okay?” Leandro asked softly. “Want me to leave?”

Weirdly, I didn’t. I shook my head.

“What are you thinking?”

A tiny yellow butterfly landed on an orange milkweed flower across the path from the sculpture. I watched it for a bit, then

exhaled loudly.

“I used to come here when I was younger,” I said. “With school, and my abuela. I don’t have time to anymore, or money, and,

like... I’m not the same person I was then, either, I guess. But I have a lot of nice memories, and it’s still really beautiful.”

“It is. I came here, too, growing up.”

“You’re from here?” Why had I thought he wasn’t?

“Yeah.” He hesitated, like he wasn’t sure how much more he should say. “I’ve done some demonstrations here, too. For kids

on field trips.”

More depths to the lake. “On the bus you said you liked casting with kids.”

“Kids are great,” he said. The more he talked, the more cheerful he got. “Especially the little ones. They’re so hyped to see magic, and they love to correct you and tell you what to do. The teenagers sometimes are trying to be cool, you know? I have to work harder to impress them.”

“Sounds like you do this a lot.”

“Mostly through the charity I’m competing for. Have you ever heard of Alan Kazam’s Schools Are Magic?”

“Are they still around?” I asked. “They came to my school in third grade. I used to see commercials on TV, and before movies.”

He looked up at the sculpture. “Yeah, they can’t afford ads anymore. I need that prize money to keep them going.”

“That sucks.” I could tell he cared about this a lot. I wanted to win Cast Judgment for selfish reasons, and here he was, trying to save a struggling charity.

Now who was the shallow, muddy puddle.

He stared at the shifting glass like he wasn’t really seeing it, like he’d gone to a dark place inside his own head again.

I didn’t like it. I wanted to pull him back out, here, into the butterfly garden with me.

“What kinds of spells do you show the kids?” I asked.

Leandro grinned, and for a second, it was like seeing myself put on my customer service smile.

“Simple, flashy stuff,” he said. “Jumping water tricks, basic circle work to make feathers levitate, animating popsicle-stick

dolls and robots... usually I’ll do some silly finale like trying to make a giant indestructible bubble dog, and instead

I make enough little bubble puppies for them to chase around and bring back to me.”

Okay, that was adorable. “They don’t freak out when the puppies pop?”

“I spin a whole story about summoning them from Bubble Land and sending them back. They don’t pop, they go home.”

“Nice. That must be really fun.” Did I sound jealous? Maybe a little.

“You could always volunteer. We provide the spells and reagents, you just have to show up.”

“I wish I had time...” I sighed and hung my head. “I guess I do have time now that I don’t have a job. I should probably

focus on getting a new one when this is over, though.”

“No way.” He poked my arm. “We’re going to win, and then you’re going to spend a year making awesome stuff, and some Charlotte

Sharp–alike is going to hire you.”

“Hopefully the universe is listening. My friend Rosy—the one who was at the park with me—always says I need to stop catastrophizing

and”—I made a rainbow shape with my hands—“maaanifest.”

“Well, the first step to”—he made the same shape—“maaanifesting is to have a goal, so she’s not totally wrong. We have a goal:

win.”

“Right, there are just a lot of question mark steps between step one: manifest and step whatever: win.”

He shifted to one butt cheek, pulling a deck of cards out of his pocket. God, dude pockets were so usable.

“Let’s try some luck magic,” he said.

“Seriously?” Luck spells were sketchy. It was pretty much impossible to tell whether a thing might have gone better or worse

without the magic.

The cards flew between Leandro’s fingers like a manifestation rainbow. “You’re going to pick a card, and if it’s the queen

of hearts, that means we’re going to win.”

I squinted at him. “No illusions?”

“No illusions.” He leaned closer and dropped his voice. “Honestly, I’m not great at those. My visualization skills aren’t

strong enough.”

“I had a friend in school with aphantasia,” I said.

“Sometimes they had to do alternate spell lessons.” Illusions required really good mental picture-making abilities.

You could do a basic copy il lusion if you stared hard enough at a picture, but for anything more complex, you had to build it in your mind. Lots of people weren’t good at it.

“See? You understand.” Leandro fanned the cards out in front of his face, and one of them stuck up a little higher than the

rest. He raised his eyebrows a few times as he looked at me over the top of the deck. “Pick a card, then flip it over on three.”

I was so not taking that sticky-uppy one. I grabbed a random card from the left side.

His grin didn’t change. Did I get the queen?

“One.”

A striped butterfly drifted past, oblivious.

“Two.”

The sculpture colors shifted and squirmed.

“Three!”

I turned the card around and stared.

The queen of hearts. No way.

“Presto!” Leandro said. “Impressed?”

“How did you do that?” I asked. “Let me see that deck.”

“A magician never reveals his—hey!” He fell sideways as I tried to grab the deck out of his hand.

“You used a trick deck!”

Leandro dodged and held the cards up where I couldn’t reach them, but he was laughing too hard to really fight me off. I tackled

him and used both hands to crawl up his outstretched arm, prying the deck from his fingers. With a triumphant yell, I raised

the cards into the air, grinning at him.

And then I realized I was sitting in his lap, and his face was inches from mine.