Page 47 of Witch You Would
Leandro used a piece of bread to push fish onto his fork. “So what’s your favorite kind of cake?”
“Does it have to be cake cake, or can it be cake adjacent?”
“Either? Both?”
“If it’s just regular cake, then chocolate with chocolate frosting. Cake adjacent? Tiramisu. What about you?”
“Chocolate lava cake, for sure.”
“Ooh, lava cake. With ice cream.” I had a brief cake fantasy as I stared at the wiggly jellyfish sculpture. When was the lasttime I’d even had cake? One of my million cousins’ kids’ birthday parties? Most of the time I missed them because they happenedon weekends, while I was working.
How depressing was that? I had so much family here in Miami, and I never even saw them. How had my life gotten to this place?
Sitting here suddenly felt weird, like my thoughts were smothering me. I put my fork down and stood up.
“Bio break?” Leandro asked.
“I just... need to walk a little.”
I couldn’t be gone for too long; we’d be doing confessionals after lunch. If I got lost, they’d send a PA search party afterme. A map nearby suggested a few options: an orchard, an orchid walk, or even just a path circling the lake. I decided onthe butterfly conservatory.
The building had greenhouse vibes: a combination of stone, metal, and glass tall enough for whole trees to grow inside. Ihad to pass through two sets of doors to get in, the first leading to a foyer-slash-greeting room, where a cheerful lepidopteristexplained how I shouldn’t touch any plants, and to be careful where I stepped or sat, and to please not try to catch any ofthe butterflies and moths. No food or drinks allowed, either, which was fine since I hadn’t brought any. I didn’t even havea wallet, just my crew pass and a huge bucket of anxiety.
The second door had an air curtain, which blew down on my hair as I stepped through. I stood there blinking for I don’t knowhow long, totally in awe. Had it always been this magical in here?
Slim palm trees were scattered among flowering plants, somearranged 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 recognizedatalas, with their dark iridescent blue-spotted wings, yellow-striped zebra longwings, and of course, monarchs. Fruit feedingstations made of tree stumps with sliced mangos on top attracted some of them, like the bug equivalent of bird feeders. Therest 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 ofhundreds of tendrils of glass woven into a shape like a crocus bulb. Some strands were as thin as my hair, others as thickas my wrist, all of them different, vibrant colors, turquoise and magenta and dark orange and buttery yellow. They twinedtogether, sliding past each other like a moving tapestry, shifting into different combinations that had no clear pattern orpurpose 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 fourclassical 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 spellworkwas 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 thoughthe was shallow as a muddy puddle, and suddenly he was a lake like the one outside, with turtles and birds and jellyfish sculpturesand 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. Maybewe’d each built up our own versions of Gil and Penelope and were carrying them around like old pictures on our phones. Noteven pictures we had taken; ones we’d found on the internet, that might not even be of us, might be other people who sortof 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 feedthe 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, butthat 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 mybra 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 emptychalkboard 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 whohad stood up to her parents and stayed in Miami for college instead of moving away with them. To reconnect with my abuelathrough 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 mystomach 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 connectedto 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 withthat 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.”
