Archive of Our Own

There’s something about the downstairs girls’ bathroom that makes it great for spellcasting. 

No teachers ever comes down here, for one, which is why the place usually smells like stale cigarette smoke and all the good gossip is scratched into the bathroom stalls, the types of confessions that you wouldn’t want anyone to actually see. Teachers and janitors have both seemingly abandoned it to the whims of teenage girls, one of whom has recently drawn a heart with lipstick on the mirror. It catches Deena’s eye as she passes, a sigil of its own, indelible on the glass. 

Another reason the bathroom works so well is the window, the way syrupy sunlight always seems to pool just right on the ledge and the scuffed floor tiles. It’s the only bathroom in the entire school with an actual window ledge big enough to sit on, a window that sits low against the grass rather than high enough to discourage hopes of escape. Deena pulls herself onto the ledge, the tiles cool through the fabric of her jeans, and the air hums around her. 

The window has been left propped open by whoever was here before her, one of the many smokers if the butts littering the grass outside are any indication. But Deena can’t smell the lingering smoke, can smell only the grass and earth damp from the last night’s rain, and something deeper too, mineral sharp and familiar. 

She’s supposed to be in third period right now, but spells wait for no woman, apparently. 

Even if she does, waiting for whoever Kate has sent her here to meet, one of their classmates desperate enough to try anything, including bathroom spells from a teenage witch. 

Deena isn’t sure how she feels about that particular moniker, but it hardly matters. It’s been given to her anyway and trying to wipe it away would be about as successful as trying to clean the lipstick heart from the bathroom mirror. There will always be a smudge left behind. 

From her bag, she pulls out the deck of tarot cards, one of the few things of her mother’s that had been left behind a few years before when the woman split. Clearly they weren’t important enough to her to take along, but Deena finds that she can’t seem to go anywhere without them. It feels right, always having them close at hand. Nestled in her bag beside her calculus book or slipped into the pocket of her jacket. She doesn’t usually keep them out where anyone can see them, not the people who come meet her in the bathroom or the always prying eyes of the high school cafeteria, certain that the temptation for curiously grabbing hands would be too much. But right now it’s just her and the smell of earth and Deena shuffles the cards between her palms and the brush the tips of her fingers, warm and reassuring. 

Deena sets the stack on the ledge in front of her, one leg dangling down toward the floor, the other knee pointed toward the window, the sole of her boot resting against her thigh. She cuts the deck before picking the first card from the top and flipping it toward her. Ace of Cups. The card of new beginnings. Deena snorts, rolling her eyes and shuffling the card back into the deck. New beginnings? In Shadyside? 

Sure. 

The bathroom door catches, sticking for a second right before it swings open, giving Deena enough of a heads-up that she’s not going to be stuck waiting around here for much longer and she returns the cards to her bag right as Kate shoulders the door open and comes waltzing in. Behind her is Krissy Wiles, one of the flyers on the Shadyside cheerleading squad, and Deena is pretty sure the two of them have never spoken an entire sentence to each other in all the years they’ve been in school together. 

But it wouldn’t be the first time she’s had someone who barely spares her a glance in the hallway come to ask her for help. 

Or, at least, her version of it. 

“Okay,” Kate says, grinning and ever the diplomat, clasping her hands together as she regards the two of them. “Here she is, as promised.” 

Deena thinks the words are meant for Krissy, seeing as Deena would hardly be disappointed if none of this played out according to Kate’s plan. 

Krissy looks nervously between the two of them, some of the color leeching out of her usually rosy cheeks like she’d just walked into the bathroom and discovered Deena in the midst of dropping a baby into a cauldron. “I…are you sure this is going to work?” 

Kate starts to reply but Deena interjects, “No. I’m not guaranteeing shit.” 

Which is always good to get out of the way first. 

Skeptically, Krissy looks between Deena and Kate and then back again, chewing on her bottom lip and smudging the shiny sheen of gloss. “But you’re like…actually a witch? Like for real for real. No bullshit?” 

This time, Kate manages to jump in before Deena can even think about trying to respond. “The real deal,” she assures her, grinning and squaring her shoulders like she’s the one oozing with magical prowess. “Seriously. Deena is the best.” 

Deena rolls her eyes at the back of Kate’s head. Like there are a lot of competitors for that particular title. 

Krissy still doesn’t look like she’s bought into the entire thing, but she sighs, her shoulders loosening and she shuffles forward, the walk that Deena has seen many times before. Someone who is desperate enough to try anything.

Before Krissy gets any closer, Kate holds out her hand, palm up, an expectant expression on her face. “You’ve got the money, right?” 

Deena glances away, studying the sliver of impossibly green grass visible through the open window instead. She isn’t exactly opposed to this part of the whole arrangement, the reason that she’s doing any of this in the first place. But it’s still hard to see the resentment that flashes there in the eyes of whoever has come to her for help, the brief flicker of anger that suggests that if Deena really cared she would help them out of the goodness of her heart.

But one way tickets out of Shadyside don’t accept goodness as currency. 

With all of that squared away, Kate pockets the money and steps aside as Krissy joins Deena in the window ledge, looking at some fixed point over her head rather than at Deena herself. “Okay.” Deena returns the favor, looking at the peeling paint, the words scratched onto the wood, the dingy grouting inside. “So what do you need?” 

There’s a pause and this is familiar too, that one final moment where whoever has skulked all the way down here has to let go of that last bit of restraint and decide to jump all in. To really believe that whatever problem they have is going to get better because they’ve paid forty bucks to the witch in the girls’ bathroom. 

Krissy sighs and her gaze stays glued to the wall. “I need Brad Anderson to ask me to the homecoming dance.” And, before Deena can ask, she adds, fully embarrassed for the first time, “He goes to Sunnyvale.”

Sunnyvale, right. Why does no one ever come to her to curse those pricks? 

“Okay.” Deena nods, shrugging. “Easy.” 

And it is, about as easy as simple magic like this comes. Not a love spell so much as just an influence, a nagging idea whispering in the back of someone’s brain like song lyrics on loop or that feeling that maybe you didn’t unplug the curling iron. It requires a less cosmic manipulation than the “can you make me pass math?” or “I need my parents to extend my curfew” spells that she gets most of the time. 

Deena reaches for Krissy’s hands and pretends not to notice the way she flinches and remains tense the entire time.

“Why is it always those Sunnyvale assholes?” Deena grumbles as she slips off the window ledge, the sound of her boots on tile echoing around them. “Seriously?” 

Kate scoffs, shaking her head. She’s studying her reflection in the mirror, applying lip gloss with the tip of her pinkie. “I mean, have you seen the guys here?” She pauses, arching an eyebrow at her reflection, though Deena knows the look is meant for her. “I guess not, huh?” 

Deena’s face turns red and she wants to kick Kate’s ankle out from her under her. “Shut up.” 

Kate’s grin only widens and she continues on, unbothered. “But seriously. All guys are the same anyway, whether they’re from Sunnyvale or Shadyside. That’s why we are getting out of here.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Deena mutters, the way she always does when Kate brings up this master plan of hers, this mad escape out of Shadyside side that is destined to happen the minute they have their high school diplomas in hand. The money currently sitting in Kate’s pocket will join the rest of the creased bills hidden under her mattress, desperate money handed over by desperate classmates mingling with the hours of babysitting money and whatever is left from Simon’s paychecks after he helps out his mom. 

Deena has stopped thinking about it, stopped wanting to count what’s inside. The less real it is, the easier it is for her to pretend like this might actually work out the way that Kate says it will. And she needs to believe this, if only to keep from screaming every time someone drags her into the bathroom to beg for a love spell or an A in physics. 

Right as they emerge from the stairwell to the main level of the school, the bell rings and all the classroom doors seem to swing open in unison and clearly she’s not making it to third period. She’s pretty sure that the teacher isn’t going to buy that she was stuck in the nurse’s office with cramps again, though Mr. Burkhart is the type of man who immediately wants to wrap up any conversation involving feminine ailments. 

All her best tricks she’d learned from Kate, who seems to have everything and everyone in Shadyside figured out. Including her magically inclined best friend who can so easily be talked into performing party tricks for forty bucks a pop, lured by the promise of getting the hell out of this place one day. 

At least missing her geography class comes with one advantage: the approach of lunch period. Her stomach is growling, impatient and nothing but teeth, nipping at her insides with sharp reminders that magic leaves her ravenous and empty, like she could eat for days and never be full. There’s a price to all this, she knows, one Deena is sure she’ll have to pay one day because nothing is ever free, especially not to a girl from Shadyside, not even something that feels right and her like she was born for it. And maybe this is all it is, a hunger that never goes away, a clawing need for more. 

It leaves her light-headed and desperate, stomach growling and mouth-watering even for squares of gluey cafeteria pizza. 

They meet Simon toward the front of the cafeteria, Kate leading the way toward the shortest line while Simon immediately picks up on the story he’d started that morning, some rambling tale about something his manager had done the night before at Grab & Bag and Deena only half remembers because she had only been half listening the first time he’d brought it up. Now between the emptiness in her stomach and the thrumming of residual magic, she has no real hope of paying attention. Hopefully by the time lunch is over and she has to go to English, she’ll be at least halfway capable of focusing on what the teacher is saying. Which is about as much effort as she gives to English on her best days. 

High school is nothing if not predictable, with everyone in their usual tables and groups, leaving their usual table toward the back of the cafeteria empty and waiting for them. Kate could sit anywhere, from the table crowded with football players and the cheerleaders that aren’t trying to jump ship to Sunnyvalers, or the other members of student council, or drama club, or, hell, even the yearbook staff. But Kate never seems to give a second thought to sitting anywhere other than next to Deena, Simon in front of them, just like they’ve done since the first day of freshmen year. 

Deena immediately picks up the cardboard adjacent slice of pizza and maybe there’s some kind of spell out there, a magic she can tap into that makes it possible for her to unhinge her jaw like a python and swallow the thing whole. As it is, she has to settle for stuffing half of it into her mouth, barely remembering to chew before swallowing. 

And she loves her friends, really she does, pretty much all the time. But even more in moments like this one, when Kate and Simon both offer up their own slices of pizza without so much as a pause in conversation and if Deena wasn’t so ravenous she thinks she might argue, might even be able to thank them for seeming to know, as always, exactly what she needs. And it’s moments like these that had made it so easy for Deena to tell them, years before, that something strange was going on with her, and while it hadn’t been just the magic that she’d felt taking root inside her chest, it had been equally lifesaving to admit to it all, to say the words and see herself, all the truest parts of her, still reflected back at her in the faces of her friends. It’s why she’d gone along with Kate’s plan, determined that at least one of them would be getting out of Shadyside, even if she had to perform spells until her fingers fell off to get Kate the money she needed. It’s why she whispers soft incantations every time she goes to Simon’s, trying to ease the tension in the household, to strengthen Timothy’s resolve and soothe his mother’s worry. And why she promises neither of these things are a big deal at all, because really, they aren’t, not when she knows that there are two people in the world who would do the same for her if they could. 

“Okay, so, you know that guy Jason? Who has the band?” Kate asks, rolling her eyes even as she says the words, managing to take a bite of her strawberry without messing up her lipgloss. “He wants to know if you can do some kind of spell that makes that lame all-ages club downtown put them on the bill.” 

Deena manages a snort of laughter around the second piece of pizza she’s currently inhaling. “Like make everyone deaf?” 

Kate looks almost like she’s considering the applications of such a thing, which is a little bit terrifying. 

“Yeah,” Deena says, mostly to distract her from her current thoughts, “tell him I can do something.” 

And Kate, surprising no one at all, pulls a planner out of her bag and flips it open to the current week, tapping the end of her pen against her cheek as she considers it. “Maybe tomorrow after study hall…” 

Deena just finishes the rest of her pizza, leaving all the minor details to Kate. The magic is easy. She has Kate for everything else. 

Simon is finally wrapping up his story and Deena is reaching for the last slice of pizza when she notices something out of the corner of her eye, someone approaching their table with a sort of hesitance that Deena hasn’t seen in a while, not since Kate made herself the official go between so that people didn’t have to lurk around their table like they thought Deena might start levitating and grow horns or something. She turns her head, not entirely sure she has to energy to deal with some stupid football player and his dumbass questions, and finds that the person standing there might actually be worse than a jock asking if she has any magical spells to improve his performance in the bedroom.

Sam Fraser. 

Deena knows her, of course she does, in the sense that they haven’t actually spoken to each other ever because Deena is terrified what might actually spring past her lips if she tried, certain somehow that “cool shoes” might transform into “I think I might be in love with you” because that’s just her luck. Realizing she liked girls in the abstract hadn’t been nearly as terrifying as realizing she liked Sam Fraser with the sort of concrete certainty that made it feel like the knowledge would pin her to the river’s bottom until she drowned beneath it. And so she’d made it her mission to ignore this truth for the past four years of high school -longer than that, Deena thinks, if she were ever to allow herself to walk down memory lane long enough to unearth all the things that are best kept hidden- and had kept Sam Fraser as her only secret from the people she’d sworn never to keep secrets from.

And now here she is. Real and whole and tangible for everyone to see, absently twisting and untwisting the bracelet around her wrist with such insistence that Deena thinks the links might break at any moment. “Deena?” 

It comes out as a question, this exhale of her name that Deena has thought about before, when she’s been alone in her bedroom and free to imagine all the most embarrassing things possible, like what it might feel like to hold Sam’s hand or have Sam say her name, and now it’s happening and Deena can’t do anything but clamp her teeth tightly around an unswallowed bite of pizza and try to remember how she’s supposed to breathe.

There’s a beat of silence and when it becomes clear that Deena isn’t going to do anything remotely normal, Simon offers Sam a smile and pulls out the chair beside him so that Sam doesn’t have to keep standing there beside their table while the rest of their peers eat and chatter around them. Sam seems to relax somewhat when she’s no longer on full display for anyone who might happen to glance over and take an interest in them, and she gives her bracelet a break, flattening her palms on the table. 

“I…I’m sorry to…” Sam looks between the three of them and then down at her hands, at her clipping nail polish and the bracelet hanging loosely on her wrist, and Deena is used to this, this thing where people don’t seem to know how to look at her now that they all believe that she’s a witch, but it feels different with Sam, not that Deena knows how to put her finger on it. Sam doesn’t seem afraid of her so much as just tired. “I need your help.” 

Deena swallows and remembers how to speak purely so that she can croak out, “Okay” in a volume that isn’t audible only to canines. 

Sam exhales and lifts her head and their eyes meet for just a moment and Deena can feel it, that familiar humming of magic that has always felt deliberate before, like the harp strings of the universe that she has to search for with an intention and now seem to thrum effortlessly across her skin. 

“You know, there’s kinda a system to this whole thing,” Kate says, leaning her elbows on the table and lifting an eyebrow. “If you want to-” 

“It’s fine,” Deena says because it is, it most definitely is, but she doesn’t expect Kate to know this, to understand that she might do anything that Sam Fraser asks because it’s Sam Fraser who’s doing the asking. “I mean…” She looks back toward Sam, smiles, maybe, or something close enough. “It’s fine. What’s up.” 

Kate twists her mouth into an expression of disapproval, glancing toward Simon, who just shrugs and picks at soggy tater tots. 

Sam’s fingers find her bracelet again, brushing across the golden chain with a nervous sort of insistence. “Is it…I mean…it feels silly, asking. But it’s true, right? That you…” She lifts her eyes once more and Deena knows this part, too, the way people look at her and even if they don’t mean it the way it sounds, always fling the word witch with a brusque edge to their voice. “That you can do magic?” 

The way Sam makes it sound, like each of the words feels exactly like their meaning. Magic, sprinkling itself like glitter across Deena’s skin. She almost smiles but she’s too surprised to do anything but nod. 

“I need your help,” Sam says again, slightly more resolute this time, like she’s decided that maybe this isn’t some sort of joke that everyone is in on but her. “A…spell, I guess? Something…like that?” 

Deena nods again and those desperate teeth in her stomach seem to have subsided, leaving her feeling less hollowed out and sharp. “Okay.” 

“It’s…” Sam glances toward Simon and Kate, uncertain suddenly, and Deena can see again in her eyes that weariness that she’s never noticed before, not that she’s ever allowed herself to look at Sam that long. And there, keeping it company, is uncertainty. “I need-” 

“You can tell me later,” Deena says with a shrug, though curiosity is prickling at the top of her skull, eager to know what it is that Sam Fraser wants. 

Success on her math test? A call back for a job interview? A love spell?

Oh shit. What if it is a love spell? What if there’s some Sunnyvale asshole out there she can’t stop thinking about? 

Deena leans back in her chair, chewing the inside of her cheek. She really needs to brush up on her knowledge of curses. 

Sam, at least, seems relieved to hear that she doesn’t have to explain herself now, the secret of her darkest desires her own for the time being. “I have money,” she says and then frowns, uncertain. “Right? That’s how it works? I mean, I can pay, of course, I-” 

Kate nods, planner still at her elbow. “Yeah, it’s-” 

“Ten bucks,” Deena interjects and Kate glares at her but says nothing. “Tomorrow. Before homeroom, in the downstairs girls’ bathroom.” 

“Okay.” Sam smiles like she doesn’t do it often, fleeting like an animal emerging from a den purely to check for danger, only to disappear once more. “I…tomorrow. Thank you.” 

Deena nods and there’s a moment where she thinks Sam might stay and she can’t decide if that’s the best or worst thing that might happen. But then Sam gets up and goes back to wherever it is that she eats lunch when she isn’t trying to hire a witch to cast a spell on her behalf and with her goes that feeling, that humming brush of sugar across Deena’s skin.

“Ten dollars,” Kate says dryly. “Seriously?” 

“Who cares?” Deena picks up the rest of the pizza, though she isn’t as ravenously hungry as she had been before. “I know you overcharged Krissy for that stupid spell.”

“Yeah, well, she deserved it,” Kate says with a roll of her eyes. “But if you start under charging everyone, then how are we going to make any money off of this? We’re so close.” She looks between Simon and Deena, fire crackling behind her eyes. “So close.”

“Ten dollars is still ten dollars,” Simon points out and yeah, Deena loves him, loves them both. Even when Kate has gone all boarding house matron on them. 

“Still ten dollars,” Deena echoes, giving Kate the best shit-eating grin she can possibly manage.

Kate seems unimpressed with her efforts. 

After school, they take Simon to work and Kate announces she has to run in to pick up a few things for her mother and Deena, purely because she can, stays in the car, humming along to Stone Temple Pilots on the radio. She’s got plenty of homework waiting for her in her bag, but it’s not her beat up copy of Wuthering Heights that she reaches for, but her tarot deck, the feeling of the cards in her hand like an exhale, a slow release of pressure. 

Absently, she shuffles through the cards, her wrists moving on their own as she lets her attention wander. Sometimes she shuffles through the deck purely as a way to relax her mind, to give herself the chance to work through a particularly challenging calculus problem, or when she needs to remember how to breathe after an argument with her dad or Josh. But finally, the movement stops, her hands seeming pulled almost by invisible strings, some voice inside her mind telling her that she’s done it enough, that she should pull a card and now and so she does, because Deena knows how this whole thing works, how the card is supposed to pick her and not the other way around.

So Deena flips the card on top of the deck, frowning. Ace of Cups. Again. “Okay. Sure.” Deena slides it back into the deck and starts shuffling again, this time without the intention of pulling another card.

She’s still shuffling purely to give herself something to do when Kate returns, yanking open the passenger side door and dropping into her seat, setting the plastic bags at her. She glances toward the cards as she pulls the door closed. “Will you read for me later? I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it to apply to those out of state places.” 

“Sure.” Deena shuffles once more, cuts the deck, and pulls the card from the second pile. 

Ace of Cups.

“Asshole.” 

The cards don’t seem bothered.

The first time she had felt the magic, it was an accident, a sort of feral energy that had left her curls standing on end and her mirror splintered into pieces despite the fact that she hadn’t touched it with her clenched fists. She had thought about it, had wanted to more than anything, to make her knuckles bleed and some part of her ache that wasn’t the center of her chest, which felt gaping and empty all the time since her mother had left. But the mirror had broken anyway and she’d stared at all the splintered pieces of her reflection in confusion, trying to remember if there had been a moment where she’d struck out and somehow missed it. But there wasn’t a single mark on her skin, nothing but the buzzing feeling of electricity that had seemed to crackle in the room with her, settling into her bones when she remembered how to release the breath she’d been holding. It hadn’t been until later, when she’d started to realize that she could feel it all the time, that buzzing in the air around her that could hum sweetly or clash discordantly depending on how Deena stroked her fingers along it, that she even remembered the broken mirror, the ozone in her teeth, and realized what had surely happened.

In the years since that moment, since learning what she could do if she said the right words, felt the right things, asked in all the right ways, Deena has stopped being nervous. She’s stopped feeling ashamed or afraid of what someone might do if they knew this thing about her. She’s stopped worrying about those looks and starting accepting the fact that it wasn’t some sort of insult to whatever had given her these abilities if she tugged on the strings of the universe to help Ben Howard pass his science test or Chelsea Simmons get the courage to audition for the spring musical, just as long as they slipped her a couple bucks for her trouble. 

But she’s certainly feeling nervous now.

Which is bullshit. 

Deena doesn’t do nervous, especially not here, in a moment like this, when she’s so fully in her element. It seems wholly unfair to be able to feel the very hum of the earth beyond the bathroom window and still feel like her heart is about to jump out of her throat. 

The feeling doesn’t exactly lessen when the door creaks and Sam walks in and there’s no Kate with her, no one to add noise and life to the quiet of the abandoned downstairs bathroom before homeroom. Above them, hundreds of their classmates are going through the usual routines of their mornings: complaining and laughing and frantically trying to finish homework or desperately trying to ignore broken hearts. But here, there’s no proof of that. Nothing but her and Sam and the sound of Sam’s sneakers as she closes the distance between them.

“Hi,” Sam says and it sounds loud, the single syllable seeming to ricochet like a bullet off the pale green tiles. “Thanks for…thanks.” 

Deena nods and swallows and nods again because she isn’t sure that she can trust herself to talk. She just points to the spot on the ledge across from her, the place where she makes everyone sit because it beats standing around or just picking a spot on the floor that likely hasn’t been mopped in ten years. But for some reason, having Sam hop up beside her and maneuver her legs with a careful dexterity that avoids risking getting too close to Deena’s side, it all feels suddenly too intimate, too sheltered and secluded, just the two of them in this spot with the grass and the wind and the morning sunlight humming outside. 

This Deena tries to ignore. Just like she tries to ignore the way Sam draws her knees to her chest or the way one of her shoes is untied, the laces hanging down off the edge of the ledge. “Okay,” she says, relieved she’s able to do that at all, “what do you…I mean…how…” She pauses, considering. “What are you hoping to…do.” 

Not her most elegant sales pitch, but it seems to get the point across. 

Sam nods and worries her already chapped bottom lip between her teeth and the air seems to shimmer around her, vibrating with a nervous energy that is a sharp contrast to the lavenders and gentle pinks that normally dance behind Deena’s eyes when she practices spells in her bedroom or the hood of her car while waiting for Kate to finish cheerleading practice. She isn’t sure she’s ever noticed the ripples with someone else and she has the distinct and terrifying thought that if she were try to reach out a hand to smooth out those ripples that Sam would feel it.

She keeps her hands firmly in her lap. 

“I need help…keeping focus,” Sam says and it’s not the type of thing Deena had expected, not even something she thinks she ever would’ve thought about, but there’s such a seriousness in Sam’s eyes that she doesn’t dare take in the words with anything but silent solemnity. 

At least it’s not a love spell.

“Just something to make it easier to…remember things,” Sam says and she’s back to playing with her bracelet again and Deena can’t help but notice that she’s repainted her nails since yesterday, a blue that seems to pale in comparison to her eyes. “To sharpen my focus.” 

Sam sounds more sure as she adds this last part, fortified in her decision to meet the high school witch in the girls’ bathroom. She looks up at Deena and gives her a little nod, though Deena isn’t sure who she’s trying to convince.

“Okay,” Deena says, turning the thought over in her mind. As always, the words, the idea of the spell, seems to come to her completely unbidden, like opening a book to the exact right page. It isn’t so much words that come to her but the whispers of them, the memory of something older than herself being pressed to her skin, to the tips of her fingers, filling her with a certainty that she never seems to feel at any other time. “Yeah, I think I can do that.” 

Sam exhales, the relief making the air rush out of her like a deflating balloon. “Okay. Thank you. And it’ll…work?” 

It’s not the first time she’s been asked that question, but it’s the first time Deena has wanted so badly to be able to hand over that guarantee that has no business tangling with magic. She doesn’t look at Sam as she says, “I mean…I can’t…say for sure.” But, just as quickly, she adds, “If it doesn’t work the way you want, though, I can try something else. Just let me know.”

Kate will kill her if she finds out.

It seems oddly fortuitous suddenly that Kate has an early morning student government meeting. 

But it’s worth it when Sam smiles almost like she’s going to smile, nodding, shoulders sloping in relief. “Thank you for…just thank you.” 

Deena swallows and nods and she closes her eyes, plucking out the wisps of words dancing in her mind, and tosses in an extra please of her own just in case the universe might be listening. 

It’s not entirely accurate to say that after she and Sam go their separate ways and off to homeroom that she stops thinking about Sam. Because there is a part of her that seems incapable of doing so, a part of her that can’t help but take note of Sam in the hallways or in English class or in the rare moments when their paths might cross in other ways and she feels a twinge of longing as neither of them say anything at all. But she goes back to thinking about Sam in the abstract sort of way, the way she always does, trying to ignore the memory of sitting with her as Deena tugged on the magic between them. 

So it comes as a near perfect surprise when, two days later, Sam is walking over toward their lunch table once more and this time she sits without waiting for Simon to take pity on her. Thankfully Deena hasn’t been doing any magic for the hopeful and the desperate students of Shadyside, so her mind is sharper, her body less painfully hollow, and she feels slightly more capable when Sam sits down in front of her. 

Though there is still a part of her -traitorous and pathetic- that wishes that this was the sort of thing that happened every day. 

“It didn’t work,” Sam says, ignoring the surprised look on Kate’s face or the way Deena is certain she looks like a panicked animal pinned by a pair of blue eyes. “It didn’t…it didn’t help.” 

“It’s magic,” Kate points out, not unkindly. “You can’t always guarantee that it’s going to work. Or that it doesn’t…I don’t know…take time.” She glances toward Deena, lifting an eyebrow. “It could just take time, right?” 

Deena’s eyebrows knit together and she presses her tongue to the spot on the side of her cheek she’d started chewing on when Sam came over a few days before. “Yeah, I guess. It depends on the spell, I guess. But that should’ve…it probably wouldn’t be the kind of thing that took a while to work.” 

She hadn’t really asked Sam for details, hadn’t pressed once she’d had the vague idea of what Sam wanted and it hadn’t seemed like Sam was eager to offer up any further explanation of her own. But there’s something in Sam’s face now, a sort of shimmery panic that makes Deena skeptical that she’d just needed the spell for an extra boost in memorizing Spanish conjugations or something. 

“I need it to work,” Sam says softly and the nails that had been so carefully painted days before have seemingly reverted back to their previous state, the polish already chipping and flaked in places. “You said there might be a way to…try something else?” 

Kate cuts her eyes toward Deena, who pretends not to notice. “Yeah. Sure. I can,” she pauses, only because of the brush of magic against the back of her mind, the push of ideas that suddenly seem impatient for her to give life to them, “definitely try something else. There are other spells.” 

Sam nods and swallows and when she leans back in her chair, she crosses her arms over her chest, hugging herself. Simon gives her a smile and the sort of easy, casual shoulder nudge that Deena envies with a startling suddenness. “Don’t worry. Deena’s the best. If anyone can help, she can.” 

Sam glances toward her, seeming to study her closely for the first time since she’d sat at their table, and Deena can feel it again, that gentle brush of magic against the nape of her neck, a reassuring caress. She looks toward Simon instead, since that feels much safer. “You just have to say that, because I’m the only witch you know.”

Simon smirks. “How do you know?” 

“I get it, you know.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

Kate doesn’t stop shuffling the cards in her hand, her movements far from the seamless gesture that feels as effortless as blinking when Deena does it for herself. Still, Kate shuffles the tarot like she does everything else: with a stubborn determination. “Sam. You like her.” 

Deena tightens her jaw and does her best not to go tumbling from the edge of the ledge she’s currently perched on. The sounds of the student parking lot and the football field drift in through the open window, the cacophony of conversations and car engines mingling with coaches’ whistles and buzzers. School has been out for twenty minutes but everyone seems to have effortlessly slipped into the familiar patterns of the afternoon, except for Kate, who is blowing off cheerleading practice to hang around with Deena while she waits for Sam. 

There had been something insistent enough in Sam that Deena hadn’t argued against the idea of trying to spell again that day, though she had at least suggested the afternoon so she didn’t have to drag her way through the last few classes of the day. 

“No. I don’t.” Deena is certain there’s nothing in her clipped answer that makes her words sound believable. Especially to Kate.

Kate stops shuffling the cards and splits the deck into three piles, making sure the stacks don’t slide off the tile ledge. She flips the first card, laying it face up, and then looks at Deena expectantly. Deena glances toward the card and says, “Ten of-” 

“Don’t change the subject.” 

Deena lifts an eyebrow, glancing toward Kate. “I kinda thought this was the subject.” 

Kate waves a hand as though dismissing such a foolish notion. Even though she had been the one who had nudged Deena toward doing a reading. “Seriously. Sam. That’s what’s going on, right? You like her.” 

Deena stares at the card, the Ten of Pentacles, which might as well have Kate’s name emblazoned across the front of it for how often she draws it. “I…” She stops, the words sticking in her throat, leaving her unable to tell whatever half truth she was going to try to come up with it.

It doesn’t matter now. Deena can feel her face getting red, can feel that familiar prick across the top of her scalp and down her spine, the certainty that this will be the moment that makes Kate push her away, the moment where she’s too exposed, too raw, to have anyone see all these parts of her.

Kate looks at her for a moment, eyes softening, before she nods once and flips the second card on the stack. The Sun. Of course.

Deena waits, muscles coiled in the pit of her stomach, but it doesn’t seem like Kate is inclined to elaborate any more on the subject and Deena can’t decide if she’s relieved or annoyed. A part of her never wants to speak Sam’s name again, especially not out loud in this bathroom that smells of magic and years of grime, but there’s a part of her that feels even stronger that is desperate to spill everything out to Kate the way she imagines every other normal teenage girl can do. 

The impulse disappears as quickly as it’s come when the bathroom door opens, sticking for just a moment before swinging all the way open to emit Sam, who looks nervous in a way that Deena is starting to guess has nothing to do with witches and everything to do with just being Sam. “Sorry. Mrs. Grimes wanted to talk to me about my essay and I…I couldn’t figure out how to explain that I didn’t have time because I was supposed to be downstairs doing magic in the bathroom.”

Deena can’t help the laugh that rattles out of her, nervous but genuine, and Kate smiles, leaving her last card forever unturned. Instead, she turns away from the spread, grabbing her bag instead. “Well, you kids have fun. Don’t get too carried away.”

“You aren’t staying?” Deena lifts an eyebrow, looking at Kate rather than at Sam because being left alone with her suddenly feels very different than just being here together. “I thought the whole point of this was-” 

Kate shrugs on her bag, heading for the door. “I’ve got practice. You think Coach Phillips can manage the squad by herself? I don’t think so.” 

Sam gives Kate a half-hearted wave that Kate returns with a jut of her chin and without sparing a backward glance toward Deena. Deena blows out a breath, shaking her head as she starts to collect the cards, shuffling the stacks back together.

Behind her she hears the sound of Sam’s bag settling onto the tiles and then, “What are those?” 

“Oh.” Deena presses her lips together, studying the worn backs of the cards. They’re plain in a way that suggests they always have been, that they were never fancy and faded with time. That maybe they were old even before her mother had them. But still Deena loves them anyway, the way she imagines someone must love a childhood stuffed animal or threadbare blanket. “It’s just tarot cards. It’s…nothing really.” 

“So you can tell the future?”

It isn’t until Deena looks over at Sam that she realizes that it’s a joke, that Sam has the makings of a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye. It tugs at something in Deena’s chest in the same way that Deena often imagines herself pulling at those violin strings of the universe. 

“Sure,” Deena scoffs, giving the deck an absent shuffle before slipping the cards into the front pocket of her bag.

Sam steps closer, hands in the pockets of her jean jacket, shoulders rounded. “How does it work?” 

“It…” Deena waits for the twinge of nervousness, the panic at opening that door to include someone other than Kate and Simon, but it doesn’t come, not beyond the fluttering nervousness that seems to be living inside her chest now, a moth stuck trying to escape a glass jar. “It’s not really telling the future. It’s just…intuitive. It’s all about how to choose to read the cards, I guess. You can really make anything out of them that you want, you just have to know how to read them.” 

There’s more to it, she thinks, that magic element that suddenly sounds embarrassing to admit to even though Sam is literally standing in front of her waiting for Deena to perform a spell. 

“You should start doing that,” Sam says, “you’d probably make a killing.” 

Deena exhales a sort of laugh, shrugging and pushing up the sleeves of her flannel until they bunch around her elbows. “Yeah…I don’t really…read for anyone else.” She doesn’t know how to elaborate and Sam doesn’t ask anyway and so they take their places by the window, the autumn air teasing the curls on the nape of Deena’s neck. 

“Okay, I think maybe the intentions of the spell were too vague the first time,” Deena says, sitting cross legged and letting her elbows rest against her thighs as she leans as close to Sam as she dares. “You want to improve your focus for…” 

Sam inhales but seems to forget there’s a step that comes after that, the breath seeming to knot itself in the tightness of her chest and shoulders and Deena can see the faint creep of color along the base of her neck, the start of collarbones beneath a flowered top. “I…for everything, I guess? I forget things too easily, I can’t seem to remember everything I’m supposed to…” She closes her eyes briefly and when she opens them again, her gaze settles on Deena’s. “It’s not really about school. School is easy. It’s just…I need to be more aware. I need to just…focus on the important stuff.” 

Deena nods slowly, brow furrowing as she feels the nudge of magic, the twinge in her chest. There’s a stilted tone to Sam’s speech that makes Deena wonder if maybe she’s heard all this before or if it’s just the voice inside Sam’s head that has branded these words to the tip of her tongue. 

“Okay, important stuff,” Deena says, nodding again. She shifts as close as she can without letting her knees press against Sam’s. “I think we can work with that. I mean it’s still vague and leaves a lot of stuff up to intention and nuance but…hopefully it’ll be your intention that matters.” 

Sam nods and the breeze through the window teasing at a loose twist of her hair until she reaches up to tuck it behind her ear. “That sounds…complicated.” 

Deena shrugs. “It’s not…I mean it’s not science. It’s magic.” She smiles tentatively, though it blooms into a grin when Sam offers her a smile in response, indulging in her attempt at a joke. “But a lot of it really is about the intention you put out there, so make sure you just keep your end goal as focused in your mind as possible. Think about all the things that are important, all the things you want to focus on. Also…” 

She swallows, trying to sound as normal and composed and absolutely fine and in control as possible, even though her heart is hammering away in her ribs like it wants to break through. “I think if we…” Deena holds out her hands, palms up, and her blood rushes in her ears. “Holding hands might help. It’ll make the connection stronger and it…it just might help.” 

The worst part is that she thinks this is true, thinks that using Sam’s intention and touch as a conduit will only help strengthen the magic. Deena doesn’t often make a habit out of touching any of the other people who seek out her head and normally the spells are enough, the words and incantations and the meaning behind them. But Deena can’t help but feel like it all sounds like bullshit, some sort of sad excuse to hold Sam’s hands even though the thought of it makes her want to just burst into flames right there in the basement bathroom. 

Sam nods, exhaling and reaching out her hands so that her palms rest against Deena’s. A jolt of electricity immediately snaps between them and it’s hard to tell who pulls away first, Deena’s heart jumping in her chest at the surprise of it.

Sam laughs, nervous, and flexes her fingers. “Is that…normal?” 

No, that was definitely not normal. But Deena isn’t sure how to say that out loud. “It…magic can be temperamental sometimes,” she mumbles.

The next time she reaches out her hands and Sam takes them, there’s no snap of electricity, no sudden crackle of lightning through her bones. There’s just the warmth of Sam’s hands in hers, which might actually be worse. 

Throughout English, while letting her gaze wander from the notes on the board toward Sam sitting in the front of the classroom, Deena had let herself think about the magic, about the type of spell Sam might need to increase the effectiveness of her focus. The words, as they always seem to do, had come to her relatively easy, along with the sigil that she traces now on Sam’s palm with the tip of her finger, muttering the words that will hopefully tug all the right strings and weave them into something new, something that eases the tension in Sam’s shoulders and that tired sadness in her eyes. The incantations are usually all she bothers with when she normally casts for the people at school, trying to offer an entreaty to the universe on their behalf. But the sigil and its design hadn’t left her mind since Sam had asked for her help at lunch and it seems important and the tip of her finger seems almost to burn as she finishes tracing the shape and Deena is surprised to find that Sam’s palm is as smooth as it had been seconds before. 

Deena can feel Sam’s gaze on her, watching her with an intensity that is almost startling because it isn’t the way people usually study her, like they don’t know what she’s going to do next. Sam is looking at her like she can’t wait to find out and Deena closes her eyes in hopes that it might make the weight of her gaze easier to ignore, focusing on the words and the meaning behind them and letting everything else fade to a dull hum in the back of her mind. 

There’s no mistaking the crackle of magic, the way it shimmers in the air. How it ripples between them, the color of sunsets and the first wildflowers of spring and Sam’s eyes and the blush at her collarbone. Deena wonders if Sam can feel it too, how it smells like rain and feels like the promise of it, making the air heavy and the hairs along her arms stand at attention.

But when Deena finally opens her eyes, letting the words fade to an echo and then a memory, all she has to do is meet Sam’s gaze to know her answer.

Deena goes home and immediately falls into bed, barely lifting her head from the pillow to mumble to Josh that she’s not coming down to dinner and is asleep again before she hears his response. In her dreams, everything is blues and oranges and purples, everything is the feeling of the air before a storm, and the first drop of rain on hard packed earth, and when she wakes the following morning to the sound of her alarm, she’s ravenous and the tips of her fingers are tingling. 

While she eats breakfast -every Eggo left in the box, barely thawed because she was too impatient to wait- she shuffles the tarot and pulls a card, trying to soothe down the crackling energy that leaves her curls feeling wild and staticky. Ace of Cups.

She nearly throws the deck directly into the trash. 

Thankfully, the first three class periods of the day pass with relative smoothness. No one asking her to perform magic. No static shock when people accidentally brush against her in the hallway. Just high school as it always is…for better or worse, Deena supposes. People tend to just give her a wide berth unless they’re asking her for something and that’s completely fine with her. Sure, she doesn’t mind that sweet getting-the-hell-out-of-Shadyside money but she doesn’t mind people completely ignoring her either. 

Nope, everything is perfectly fine and normal and ordinary. Until she and Kate walk into the cafeteria and find Simon waiting for them with Sam beside him. 

Deena’s first thought is that it somehow makes sense, this moment, these two people together. This idea that Sam might be someplace and waiting for her specifically. 

Her next several thoughts are utter blinding panic and betrayal, but she can only hope those don’t show on her face. 

Simon, for his part, doesn’t seem to sense than anything is amiss. Kate glances toward Sam with an arched eyebrow and Simon only shrugs. “She was trying to escape to the library, so I decided to make her come eat with us.” 

“Maybe she likes going to the library,” Deena mumbles because talking around Sam is most definitely easier than talking to her. 

“It’s okay.” Sam shrugs and her hands are in her jacket pockets again, a bit of color in her cheeks. “Gotta mix it up sometimes I guess.” 

Deena looks at her and it is like magic, like that feeling that she can sink her fingers into the earth and have it whisper all its secrets to her. But strangely, Sam here beside her now loosens something in her chest rather than leaving her feeling all knotted up and breathless. It’s easier to return that tentative smile on Sam’s face, easier to remember how to breathe.

The four of them slip into the line and Deena is grateful for the residual hunger that wasn’t banished completely by half a box of waffles because it makes even the most mysterious of lunch offerings seem completely appetizing.

“Sam and I are partners for the biology lab,” Simon remarks seemingly apropos of nothing at all as they start toward their usual table. “Lucky me.”

Kate scoffs. “Let me guess, another decision you roped her into.” She rolls her eyes, mostly for Sam’s benefit as they share a look. “He’s like a barnacle. He’ll never leave you alone now.” 

Sam smiles and shrugs. “I mean…could be worse I guess. Right?” 

This, Deena thinks, might be directed at her. But she can’t quite seem to bring herself to meet Sam’s eyes to confirm.  

“Nah, Sam doesn’t mind.” Simon brushes Kate’s words aside absently, tearing his grilled cheese in half and dipping one end in ketchup. “She’s good people.” 

Deena thinks this might be for her benefit too. 

It’s strange, leaving the cafeteria with Sam and walking toward English class together, rather than Deena finding her seat and trying to pretend like she isn’t waiting for Sam to arrive. Kate and Simon disappear in the opposite direction and Deena tightens one hand around the strap of her backpack and tries not to act like this even registers. Oh her and Sam alone together? Again? She hadn’t even noticed.

Sure. 

“So,” Deena says as they head toward the staircase that will take them to the second floor and room 204, “is the…I mean have you noticed any difference yet? Like with the spell? Is it helping?” 

There’s a crease between Sam’s eyebrows, the faintest wrinkle at the corner of her mouth as she clearly tries not to let the frown settle into place. It’s an answer, even as Deena can see her trying to school her features. “Maybe? I’m not sure yet. I guess I don’t…really know what it’s supposed to be like? I don’t know what I’m hoping for.” 

“It can be like that sometimes,” Deena admits. “Magic has of a mind of it’s own sometimes…I mean it sounds kinda crazy talking about it I guess.” 

Which is probably why she never does it, not even with Kate and Simon unless the topic comes up. Deena isn’t sure she always has the words anyway, can’t explain what it feels like when she senses the magic around her, when she can feel it seeping into her skin or the roots of her hair or beneath her fingernails. How she seems to understand it and how it understands her. 

But she also can’t explain why there’s a part of her that suddenly wants to tell Sam everything.

“I don’t think it sounds crazy,” Sam says and she seems to mean the words, a genuineness in her eyes that makes Deena feel almost the way the magic does, how it hums like honey down her ribs. “It’s…weirdly comforting to think about the fact that stuff like that is real. That it’s not just in books and…” She shrugs as they walk into class, the chatter from the dozens of conversations already taking place swirling around them. “And you can do something that no one else can. That’s amazing.” 

Deena blushes because the way Sam says it, it sounds like you’re amazing and she thinks she might catch fire right there, immolating like witches of old. 

Wishful thinking, sure. But she’s spent plenty of time dealing with other people’s wishes, so Deena figures there’s no harm indulging a few of her own. 

“That’s…probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said,” Deena admits before she can talk herself out of it. 

Sam lifts her eyebrows. “Really? I have no idea why you aren’t the coolest person in Shadyside.”

Deena scoffs and rolls her eyes. “I mean…I guess a witch is still a witch. Even if she does make Kyle from calculus fall in love with you.” Another eye roll, just for good measure.

Sam laughs and it’s like magic too, a sound like that, twinkling bells and summer crickets. “Can you do that? Really?”

“Nah. I mean…kinda? It’s more of like an influence than an actual spell…free will is still involved and all that. I just convince the universe to give some persistent nudges.” 

They’re standing beside Sam’s desk, completely obvious to the people around them as they come in to find their own seats or chat with their friends, and it comes a surprise when the bell rings and the room and the teacher and everything else comes back into focus, all the things that had been blurred by Sam in front of her. Deena blinks, feeling a strange stab of disappointment. 

“Maybe I just need to be a little more persistent too,” Sam says with a shrug, lowering her voice so as not to call attention to the both of them as the teacher starts to call the class to attention. “So that your spell can really start working.”

Deena grins and nods and somehow manages to make herself walk across the room toward her desk in the back. And she blames the disappointment she feels on the fact that the spell she’s cast for Sam clearly isn’t working the way it should.

The following day, Simon is already at the lunch table by the time Deena makes it there, Kate trailing behind her, both of them late thanks to an impromptu spell of sorts when Mackenzie Harrow cornered her in the hallway and begged for “anything, literally anything” that might help her pass the French test she’d forgotten she was about to have to take and because she had offered to pay fifty bucks it had seemed like a decent idea. So Deena is hungry and distracted enough that it feels perfectly normal to sit down across from Sam and that feels dangerous, this taking root in her chest when she wants it so badly. 

“Magic stuff?” Simon guesses when Deena practically inhales an enchilada.

Deena nods as Kate says, “Seemed like a relatively easy spell though” and doesn’t seem to notice when Deena cuts a glare in her direction. 

Sam tilts her head. “Wait…you can…do magic too?” 

“No,” Deena mumbles around a mouthful of food and Kate beams proudly, cutting Deena off before she can think to add anything more: “I’m her manager.” 

Sam laughs, tearing the crust off the sandwich she’d brought from home. “All of this is more complicated than I thought.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Kate,” Deena says, like she could possibly be bothered by any of this. “She has to make everything into some kind of scheme.”

“Uh, yeah. You’re welcome.” 

Deena glances at Sam, pulling a face for her benefit, and the way Sam smiles in response, her nose scrunching in a way that makes her eyes crinkle up too so that she’s smiling with her entire face and for just a moment there’s a spark in her eyes as bright as the one that had passed between them the day before. 

She wonders if Sam can still feel it tingling through her fingers the way she can.

Not that she’s going to ask or anything. 

The conversation for the rest of lunch shifts away from magic toward the more typical topics of a lunchtime spent with Kate and Simon -grumbles about classes, Simon’s complaints about his manager at the Grab & Bag, and Kate’s various activities and projects that seemingly need constant coordination- and it feels in so many ways like Sam has always been there, like they had been keeping that spot open for her all along. 

Or, at least, that’s how it feels to Deena, but that could just be the wishful thinking again. 

As she walks toward English with Sam, Deena asks again, “Any luck with the spell? Like are things happening the way you want them to?” 

Sam presses her lips together rather than offer an answer right away and she swallows, the movement of her throat entrancing in a way Deena never even realized something like that could be. “It’s…magic, right?” 

It doesn’t seem like an answer, at least not the one Deena was hoping for. She sighs, fidgeting with the sleeves of her flannel as they step into the classroom. “Yeah, it can have a mind of its own sometimes I guess.” 

They both take up their normal positions in the room: Sam toward the front and Deena in the back, though she figures that most of the people who sit around her do so to avoid the teacher’s attention and to spend the majority of class time staring out the window and watching the world pass by without them. Deena thinks she’s perfected the art of watching Sam from this vantage point and pretending like she’s staring at anything else. Though the past few days have given her a few new things to notice, like the way Sam only seems to stop fiddling with her bracelet during English class, that pinch between her eyebrows smoothed out for fifty-five minutes. Now that Deena can conjure up the memory of her smile, the crinkles at the corners of Sam’s eyes, it’s easier to notice the absence of it, how tightly coiled Sam is most of the time. How she had begged for some sort of magical help focusing when to Deena it seems like all Sam ever does is pay attention to the world around her. 

Most of the time English passes in a blur of lectures about various types of literary elements of the symbolism in books that are so old Deena thinks they should be taken out back to pasture and put out of their misery, which means Deena can mostly coast by on pretending to stare at the board -has she mentioned yet that she really appreciates Sam’s seat choice? Because she really does- and doodle sigils and snippets of whispered thoughts in the margins of her notebooks. But every so often, the teacher seems to grow tired of her own rambling and splits them off into groups to read some strangely disturbing short story or another, though Deena hadn’t really minded the story that involved townspeople throwing rocks at each other. 

As expected, most people tend to give the class witch a wide berth during partner work in the same way you might a bear digging through your trash: exciting to see but from a safe distance. So Deena is flipping through her text book to page 325 in preparation for acting like she’s working for the rest of class time when someone says, “Do you want to work together?” and it seems like having Sam join them for lunch for the past few days is not actually the best thing that has ever happened to Deena.

This is. 

Deena clears her throat and nods. “Uh. Sure.” 

Sam sits, pushing the desk closer to Deena’s and Deena is grateful that her arms aren’t bare so that Sam can’t see the way the hairs on her arms suddenly stand at attention, shivering at Sam’s closeness. It’s more than that tingly brush of magic that seems to swirl around constantly, twining itself through Deena’s hair like a spring breeze. This is all Sam, all on her own. 

“I really love this story,” Sam says, her book already open to the right page, the notebook paper she’s brought with her already neatly labeled with her name and the title of the story. “It’s sad though, when you think about it.”

Deena lifts her eyebrows. “Of course you’ve already read it.” 

But she says it like it’s a compliment and Sam smiles like she knows it is and when she offers to read it out loud all Deena can do is nod because she doesn’t trust herself to do anything else. And because she knows the promise of an incantation when she hears one. 

And really, it feels like the perfect day, the most perfect day she’s probably ever had since she first reached out and realized there was something there waiting for her touch, until the teacher comes around to hand back the essays that Deena had kinda sorta mostly written about Wuthering Heights and then Deena finds that her efforts had not entirely been rewarded. 

She folds the pages in half, though she’s pretty sure there’s no way that Sam could’ve missed all that glaring red and just shrugs as she tucks it beneath her textbook. “English is definitely not my thing,” Deena says with a dismissive hitch of her shoulder. “And apparently it’s not that easy to try and use magic to channel Emily Bronte to give you all the answers.” 

Sam laughs like she isn’t entirely sure that Deena is kidding, though of course she is. She would never use magic to try and summon the ghost of a long-dead author for help on her English class.

Mostly because it’s never occurred to her until now. 

And really, Deena doesn’t expend another thought on the essay, mostly because there are plenty of other thoughts crowding into her mind that are much more worth the energy given them. Like thoughts of Sam and that constant tug of magic, or the rambling conversations with Kate and Simon, or constantly bickering with Josh. All things far more important than homework.

Until, the following day when she’s walking with Sam to class after lunch, Sam says, “I was thinking…I didn’t know if you wanted to come over sometime and…we could do homework? I know we have another essay coming up and-” 

Deena is grateful that she manages to lift her eyebrows and smirk at Sam when really all she wants to do is pinch herself until she wakes up from whatever dream this is. “Oh, feeling bad for me, huh? I see how it is.” 

“No!” Sam shakes her head, looking so horrified that Deena almost regrets that that was the first thing she’d managed to say, even though it was probably better than no because I might never leave again which probably would’ve resulted in similar expressions of horror. “No, that’s not…I was just thinking-” 

“I’m kidding,” Deena says quickly and now they’re both blushing and witches in TV shows and movies are cool and she is most definitely not cool and why is she standing in the hallway with her skin burning and all her secrets surely stamped right on her forehead. “Totally kidding.” 

Sam nods, seems to relax enough to offer Deena a crooked sort of smile like she’d known this all along. “Well, it’s like what Kate was saying yesterday, about how there needed to be a kind of trade-off for doing magic. And I have a feeling that I did not pay you enough.” 

Deena tries to sputter out an argument of some kind, trying to wave the suggestion away as they walk into English. “Yeah, no, it’s not that big a deal.” Not exactly the resounding denial she had hoped for. 

“So you should let me…I mean I can help with homework…if you ever…I mean not that you need my help.” Sam twists her mouth, exhaling. “I just mean-”

“Sure,” Deena says because there’s a moment where she imagines the next thing Sam says is actually never mind I don’t ever want to see you again and that sounds more awful than actually going to Sam’s house and spending time with her like a normal person. She nods and feels more confident in the idea when she says, “Yeah, that sounds good. Essays are…clearly not my forte.” 

Sam shrugs but she looks more relaxed than she had moments before, standing a little straighter. “I guess you don’t really need that to be your forte when you can do literal magic.” 

“Still working on that speaking to the ghosts of dead authors thing though.”

Sam’s smile widens. “Let me know when you figure it out. I’ve got a few bones to pick.” 

Deena nods and there’s a thrill in her chest, taking root like wildflowers. Because of Sam’s smile and the crackle of promise there between them and the brush of the universe against the nape of her neck. “I’ll definitely keep you updated on any progress.” 

“That’s all I ask.” Sam pauses and then, with a bit more timidity says, “So tomorrow?” 

“Yeah. Definitely. Tomorrow.” 

And she even manages to sound like she does this sort of thing every day. Like going to a pretty girl’s house is as easy as magic.

When Deena had mentioned that she wouldn’t be able to pick Kate up from cheerleading practice because she was going to Sam’s to study, Kate had been surprisingly reserved in her reaction, offering a simple shrug and a “okay Jennifer can take me” while fixing her ponytail like it was the no big deal, this idea of Deena just casually going to Sam’s to hang out after school and maybe coax herself into actually getting some work done.

And maybe it isn’t. A big deal. Assuming it is honestly involves a lot of assuming about Sam and Deena is well versed in the idea that the world is often full of disappointments and analyzing every one of Sam’s smiles and the way her ears seem to turn pink whenever they’re together doesn’t actually mean anything. As badly as she might want it to. 

So this is the refrain she’s repeating to herself while she waits at her locker -no big deal, totally no big deal- for Sam to show up and when Krissy Wiles makes a beeline across the crowded hallway in her direction instead, it takes Deena minute to remember what spell she had even done for Krissy in the first place. Clearly it had been a success, given that Krissy is grinning widely and doesn’t look like she’s about to throw a soda or something at her the way Daniel Huth had done when they were sophomores and she’d helped his ex-girlfriend with a spell to give her the courage to dump his ass.

Which, for the record…is a decision Deena completely understood. 

“It worked!” Krissy practically shouts the words at her and a few heads turn in their direction, curious. “It absolutely worked! I can’t believe it!” 

“Uh. Great. That’s awesome.” Deena isn’t entirely sure she should be celebrating someone’s deliberate interactions with a Sunnyvale prick but clearly Krissy is a big fan.

Krissy’s grin seems to widen and she nods and adds, “He asked me to the dance!” like Deena might need to reminder in order to adjust her excitement accordingly. “You’re amazing. I can’t believe that witch shit worked.” 

Deena snorts out a laugh, nodding. “Yeah…gotta love that witchy shit, huh?” 

Krissy doesn’t seem to notice the hint of sarcasm, nodding instead. “Thank you. Seriously. You’re the best.” Her gaze shifts to a spot behind Deena and she says, “Seriously, she’s the best. She can do anything you want.” 

Deena glances over her shoulder to see that Sam has joined them and the sight of her just standing there -waiting for her- makes Deena’s heart jump into her throat, startling in its very existence. Sam gives Krissy a tentative smile and then glances toward Deena. “Anything, huh?” 

Deena thinks she should get credit for managing not to combust on the spot. 

“I just wanted to say thanks,” Krissy says, as though Sam hasn’t said anything at all and Deena’s grip on reality isn’t suddenly so tenuous, so Deena figures she must look normal enough. “Seriously. You’re the best. I can’t believe it worked!” This she squeals out all in a rush and for one horrible moment Deena thinks Krissy is going to start hugging her but thankfully she leaves it at just squeaking out her gratitude, giving them both a final grin before hurrying down the hall once more. 

When she’s gone, Sam looks at her, amused. “Must’ve been some spell.” 

“I guess so,” Deena mumbles. “Though I might need a policy against helping people hook up with guys from Sunnyvale. Seems like it should be against some cosmic rule or something…” 

Sam grimaces. “Yeah, they might actually be the worst. Though,” she says, pausing to consider, “I’m not sure the guys here are much better.” 

Deena nod and tries not to wonder if that ruins her no big deal mantra. 

They manage to make it to the parking lot and to Deena’s car without meeting up with anyone else expressing their gratitude or begging her to work some kind of literal magic on their behalf. Sam gets into the passenger seat like she’s always been there, like she belongs there, and somewhere Deena thinks that maybe there’s a world out there where she does, where she gets to have this moment forever. There’s a hum in the back of Deena’s mind, the insistent shimmer of magic that seems all the more pronounced when Sam is around, making Deena feel like she could do anything in that moment…except maybe the thing she wants to do most. 

Deena turns on the radio and Dolly Parton comes on the radio and Sam brightens and says “oh, I love this song!” before Deena can roll her eyes and make some sort of comment about the sorry state of the radio most days. Not that Dolly is that bad or anything.

Just like it isn’t that bad to be driving with the windows half down and Dolly Parton on the radio with Sam humming along, even though Deena can’t help but feel like the universe is trying to push all her buttons all at once. All you gotta do is smile that smile and there go all my defenses… Thanks a lot Dolly. 

The driveway is empty when they pull up along side Sam’s house but Sam suggests she just park on the street, so Deena figures it’s not worth pointing out that no one else seems to be home. Especially since some of the usual nervous energy that Sam seems to constantly radiate has returned and not asking too many questions seems like the better idea. Sam’s house is somehow the exact type of place Deena would’ve pictured if she had let herself think about Sam’s house and her bedroom and…just all of it. The clear surfaces, the neutral colors, the way everything looks like it could be straight out of a catalog…impersonal in all the ways that the Sam that Deena is starting to know is not. Somehow, it makes sense. It adds some pieces to the puzzle in Deena’s mind that she hadn’t even been aware she was trying to assemble. 

They leave their shoes at the door and jackets on the hook and head up to Sam’s room and it’s no big deal, it’s not, totally fine. She is totally fine. A cool, calm, badass witch working on homework with…Sam Fraser. 

No big deal.

Sam’s room seems to wrap itself around Deena in the same way being around Sam herself always seems to do, like her very presence is soothing the discordant chime of the universe. There are bookshelves stuffed to the bursting, and clothes folded neatly on the surface of a desk that is clear aside from a lamp and a ticket stub that is too smudged for Deena to read from her spot by the door. The bed is perfectly made and there’s a stuffed cat sitting on the pillows and she and Sam both seem to notice it at the same time, judging by the way Sam steps forward suddenly to pick it up, looking like she’s about to stash it under the bed. “That’s Shy Baby,” Sam says, only to grimace immediately like she isn’t sure that makes anything better.

Deena smiles and there’s a hum of magic in her teeth, vibrating in her bones, and she worries if she isn’t careful she’ll just keep grinning until she looks like she’s absolutely lost it. “Cute.” 

Sam must think she’s teasing her -which seems almost like a blessing- because she rolls her eyes and says, “I was, like, three when I named her” and sets the cat back on the bed. 

“Hey, it is cute,” Deena protests gamely, setting her bag on the floor by the door and doing a quick circuit around the room as she tries not to look as nosy as she feels. This is the kind of place she thinks she could spend her time in and be perfectly content with every passing minute, curled up on the soft carpet, the echoing memory of Sam humming along to Dolly Parton in her ears, the gentle reassurance of the space and the person who fills it. Different from the rest of the house, definitely. 

They sit on the floor which seems safer than sitting anywhere else and even though their school things get unpacked and set out with a distinct intention, neither of them seem to make a move to actually start on any homework. Instead Sam splays her fingers out across the cream colored carpet and looks at them instead of Deena as she says, “How did you figure out you could do magic anyway?” 

No one has ever really asked her this. She had told Kate and Simon and no one else has been interested enough in getting to the bottom of things, taking the fact that their classmate is a witch at total face value when they figured out they could use it to their advantage. 

“It was…an accident, I guess.” The bathroom, the broken mirror, the anger that had snapped off her body like lightning. “Little things are first. Then I realized I could just…feel it. Like it was always there the whole time and I never noticed.”

Sam closes her eyes, breathing in slowly, like maybe if she tries hard enough she can feel it too. Deena wishes she could, wants that for her, wishes she could feel the magic dance across her skin so that it might make her smile. 

Sam opens her eyes again and there’s no way for Deena to pretend like she wasn’t staring at her. “Is it scary?” 

The question doesn’t seem to make sense because her first response is yes, definitely but it occurs to Deena that Sam isn’t asking about this moment and the way it feels to be here. “The magic?” Sam nods and Deena almost scoffs at the idea. “No…not it’s not…it feels like it’s just part of me? But, like, some friendlier, softer version of me.” 

Sam tilts her head, studying her with the corner of her mouth upturned in the type of smile that manages both to look sad and set Deena’s heart racing at the same time. “You make it sound like you’re scary or something.” 

Deena scoffs and leans back, the wings of her shoulder blades pressing against the side of Sam’s bedframe. “Some people definitely seem to think so. Most people just ignore me, I guess.” 

Sam shrugs, nodding. “Yeah, me too. People know who you are, at least. No one ever sees me.” 

Part of Deena is absolutely certain Sam is not talking about school at all, that maybe the heart of her need to focus isn’t about her after all. I do, Deena wants to say but what she manages instead is, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Another soft, subtle up turn of her lips. “I don’t think you’re scary.” 

Deena nods and smiles down at the hands knitted in her lap.

They’re in the living room with a bowl of popcorn between them and music videos on the TV when the lock on the front door clicks and it looks to Deena like all the color drains immediately from Sam’s face. The woman who walks in seems intimidatingly perfect with her hair expertly coifed and lipstick that looks like it wouldn’t dare think about smudging. The expert sharpness in her clothes seems to extend to her eyes as well, which darken with flinty keenness as she glances into the living room and sees them sitting there. 

Deena thinks about saying something, greeting the woman or maybe introducing herself, but there’s something in Sam’s sudden silence that keeps her silent as well. They’d just been laughing at some Aerosmith music video and now Sam looks sickeningly panicked in a way that almost gives Deena whiplash, though she figures she hasn’t really missed anything, not when she fits all those pieces together in her mind. 

Sam’s mother glances between the two of them and the television and then toward Sam once more, lips pressed together. “Samantha, can I speak to you in the kitchen, please?” 

The please is purely ornamental.

Sam gets to her feet and follows her mother in the kitchen and Deena tries not to listen, really, she does, but there’s a brusque annoyance to Ms. Fraser’s voice that makes it impossible to miss, regardless of how hard Deena stares at Salt N’ Peppa on the TV. Her jaw aches, listening to the gruff conversation, to Sam’s quieter responses, and she feels it again, just like that first time, the magic at its purest form. She’s spent years understanding it so that she could keep it tethered and under control but there are moments when Deena wants to let it run wild, moments where she is reminded that magic was never meant to be tamed anyway, never meant to be used to help high schoolers get dates or cheat on Spanish tests. It’s feral and she wants, more than anything, to give into the biting press of it, the reminder that sometimes anger feels the best of all.

But then she hears Ms. Fraser’s sharp scoff, hears the way she says, “Samantha, I keep telling you that you need to focus. That you need to focus on what’s truly important and stop wasting your time on the things that don’t matter” and all that anger rushes out of her so suddenly it’s like it was almost never there at all. Sadness takes root instead, as grounding and solid as the earth humming beneath her, and just as full of understanding. 

Finally Sam returns and Deena keeps her focus on the TV like that might somehow make it seem like she hasn’t just heard anything that just happened. Sam sighs and Deena’s eyes jump toward her and there’s a determined blankness on Sam’s face as she says, “It’s getting late, I think you should probably go.” 

There’s no point in arguing and Deena knows from enough family arguments -both her own and others, ones that manage to hurt worse than her own fights with her father- that trying to protest would only make things worse anyway. So she just goes with Sam up to her room to get the school stuff they hadn’t even bothered to start on over the past few hours. 

“Sorry,” Sam says, when the door is safely closed and it’s just the two of them for the moment. “I wasn’t expecting her to be home this early.”

Deena shrugs, repacking her bag. “It’s cool.” It’s not, but not for the reason Sam might thing. She straightens up, shouldering her bag. “Though, I think we might’ve been casting the wrong spell. I don’t think that was the right one at all.” 

Sam swallows but doesn’t argue, saying only, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

“Yeah. Of course.” 

Downstairs, Ms. Fraser is switching off the television and retrieving the mostly empty popcorn bowl with a pinched expression on her face, as though the visual confirmation of her daughter enjoying her afternoon is too much to stand. Deena flashes her a smile that’s all teeth and says, “Great to meet you” while she’s letting her mind wander, tugging on those vibrating strings that seem almost impatient to be played.

There are spells of all kinds, for things that the students of Shadyside High couldn’t bring themselves to imagine. She’s set rules for herself, ways to keep the scales as balanced as possible given the fact that she’s been given this ability in the first place and has no idea how to pay it back. But Deena can’t help herself, figures she’ll deal with whatever the consequences might be, though surely there can’t be that many…surely the universe would understand if she put just the tiniest of binding spells on Ms. Fraser. If just for a little while. Coaxing her into silence where she might otherwise feel compelled to say far too much. 

There are other things, sure. Other spells. But Deena contents herself with this one for now, trying not to smile more sincerely at the flutter of confusion that crosses the woman’s face when she starts to respond but then trails off, settling on silence instead. 

There’s a pleasant hum against her skin, like maybe the universe doesn’t mind this little spell so much. 

Even though it feels slightly painful to admit, Deena forces herself to say the words the following morning when she meets Kate at her locker: “I need your advice.” 

Kate plucks her calculus book from the perfect organization that is the inside of her locker before bumping the door closed with her hip and turning to look at Deena with a beatific smile. “I knew this day would come. It’s about Sam, right?” 

Deena wills the color not to rise to her cheeks. “Kinda? It’s about Sam’s mom.” 

“Oh, interesting.” Kate waggles her eyebrows, smirking. “Not exactly what I was expecting but…” 

“You’re the worst person I know.” 

“And yet here you are, asking me for advice. Interesting.” 

Deena rolls her eyes and tries to ignore Kate’s grin. “So Sam’s mom is pretty much the worst person of all time. That means it’s totally okay for me to use like really terrible magic to curse her, right?” 

Kate laughs, only to pause, frowning and furrowing her brow slightly. “Wait. You’re being serious.” 

Deena shrugs, defensive. “I mean! She’s absolutely curse worthy.” 

“I don’t know that you should…wait can you really do that? Curse people?” Kate tilts her head, considering Deena. “I kinda always thought of you as this harmonious good witch but…I mean this could’ve been a lot more interesting.” 

“Can you focus, please?” Deena elbows Kate, perhaps a bit too sharply, to emphasize her point. Though, she does have to admit, Kate isn’t entirely wrong in thinking it might be a little bit more fun to throw out some curses instead of just continuingly helping her peers cheat on their chemistry tests. 

Kate winces, rubbing at her ribs. “Okay, Jesus. You seriously want to know what I think?” 

Deena lifts her eyebrows, gesturing for Kate to continue. 

“Don’t worry about Sam’s mom,” Kate says with a shrug, and before Deena can protest the uselessness of this advice, she adds, “Focus on Sam instead.” 

Rolling her eyes, Deena exhales. “That’s not-” 

“I mean help her.” Kate jabs her ribs in retaliation, a total cheap shot that Deena doesn’t see coming. “Use your good witch magic or something.” 

Deena opens her mouth to argue with this advice, to complain about Kate’s uselessness, but damn it. It is good advice. Because as gratifying as it be would to make Ms. Fraser burst into flames any time she wanted to critique her daughter about something, whatever universal benevolence had given her these abilities in the first place probably wouldn’t like that very much. There’s a reason bad witches always melt and stuff, right? 

Kate grins, no doubt watching this entire realization cross Deena’s face. “You’re welcome.” 

“I’m going to practice my curses on you.” 

“I’d like to see you try.”

“So I was thinking…” Deena clears her throat like that might dislodge the words more successfully. “I told Kate I would drive her home from cheer today if you wanted to…I don’t know…we could hang around here and work on homework if you wanted.” 

Is there a spell for not sounding like an idiot? Can she cast spells on herself? Why is there not some kind of witchy instruction manual hanging around out there or something? 

Sam smiles and there’s a flicker of relief that crosses her face, like Deena had managed to solve some problem she hadn’t even given voice to yet. She nods and reaching up to tame a twist of hair back into place. “Sure. I mean, I could use some help with trig…” 

Deena grins and maybe Kate is on to something after all because this probably is better than trying to curse Sam’s mom.

Maybe. 

Not that Deena isn’t going to keep that possibility in the back of her mind.

Or continue thinking about things she could do for Sam, especially considering that she understands more of the motivation behind the spell she had been so desperate for. There has to be more intentional things she can do, something that actually makes all this magic stuff worth it. And maybe the universe agrees, because it whispers in her ear during English class. It hums against her skin throughout calculus. It crackles in her bones when she’s supposed to be learning a new arrangement in band. In fact, she thinks Heather Watkins is about to take her drum sticks and shove them down her throat for how distracted she is the entire time, thinking about spells and magic and Sam instead of the sheet music in front of her. 

By the end of the day, Deena is practically bursting at the seams and it’s a relief to be able to blame her impatience at getting to see Sam again on the magic thrumming in her veins. Rather than on the fact that, you know, she gets to see Sam again. 

Sam has thrown her hair into a messy bun, a few untameable tresses having slipped loose to brush the nape of her neck and the pair of freckles that Deena can see there and who knew that would be all it took to make all the magic she’d been so focused on for hours go rushing out of her brain like it was never there at all. 

The smile and wave she gets as she walks over to join Sam don’t really help either.

But the weather is nice, the type of autumn day that makes it feel like anything is possible, and the sun is warm against Deena’s face as she and Sam head up to the top of the bleachers that overlook the football field. The air smells like the smoke from someone’s backyard fire and the changing of the leaves and Deena is certain that if she closed her eyes and tried hard enough she could feel it all, the turning of the Earth, and slow and steady shifting of the world around them. 

They work on Sam’s math homework for a bit, purely because it requires them to sit side by side with Sam’s notebook resting on their thighs and Deena’s heart thudding in her chest while she tries to make sense of the numbers on the page in front of her. The air around them seems to ripple, shimmering with the blues of Sam’s eyes, and Deena can feel it humming in her chest too, that same contentment. 

“Thanks,” Sam says, once they’ve worked through the problem set and she tucks her pencil between the pages of her notebook. “It makes way more sense when you’re explaining it.” 

Deena tries to temper her grin. “Yeah. It’s like I’m…magic.”  

There’s an easiness to Sam’s smile that certainly hadn’t been there yesterday, so it makes sense that Deena would feel tempted to bring up a topic that would surely make Sam want to do the opposite of smile in the sunshine. “Are you…okay? I mean yesterday…with…” 

Predictably, Sam’s smile falters somewhat and she shrugs. “Yeah. Sorry about…all that.” Another shrug and she glances toward the field, watching the football team run drills and the cheerleaders practice a routine that will likely fail to inspire their comically horrible team. “My mom is…”

Deena waits, the silence settling between them, but Sam doesn’t fill in the rest of her sentence, doesn’t give voice to whatever is surely running through her mind. Instead, she says, “She wasn’t so bad after you left” and thankfully doesn’t seem to notice Deena struggling not to smile. 

There’s plenty she could say to Sam. So many things, in fact, and plenty of them words she’s been trying to figure out how to say for a while, even before yesterday and meeting her mother. But those words are best spoken in the darkness of her room when no one else can hear them, whispered into her pillow like their very own kind of spell. So Deena settles instead for the one thing that seems safe enough to say here in the bright daylight. “I was thinking about your spell. I have a few ideas about how we can make it stronger, more intentional.” 

Sam looks at her, surprised, but there’s no mistaking the hopeful glint in her eyes. “Really? I figured you wouldn’t…want to keep trying with it.” 

Deena doesn’t ask for clarification, doesn’t ask Sam to explain whether that’s because she figures Deena has put all the pieces together or if there’s a two strikes and you’re out sort of rule that applies with magic. Either way, it hardly matters. “I just have one more thing I want to try,” she says and it’s true even if it isn’t the whole truth. 

Maybe there’s some sort of rule against manipulating the intentions of a spell without being completely transparent about it but Deena figures it’s worth the risk. Especially since there’s still that hopeful shine in Sam’s eyes, a dimple in her cheek. “Okay. Sure.” 

Deena turns so that she’s facing Sam, straddling the metal bleacher and Sam does the same, keeping one foot planted for balance and the other tucked beneath her. Deena reaches into her bag for a pen, taking the cap off with her teeth and clearing her throat. “Uh, do you mind if I…” She holds up the pen like that’s its own sort of explanation. “Sometimes using sigils can just make the magic stronger…it can just give the magic more focus. I thought it might help.” 

Sam pushes up her sleeves, scooting closer to Deena and holding out her arms and when Deena leans in closer, Sam copies her posture until it feels like the world has shrunk down to just the two of them, foreheads nearly touching. Sam’s skin is warm beneath her touch and the tips of her fingers start to buzz but thankfully the ink doesn’t sizzle or explode when Deena starts drawing the sigil quarter-sized on her wrist so she considers that to be a good sign. She draws them as she sees them in her mind, murmuring softly as she goes, feeling the steady relief of the magic that has been built up inside her chest for hours starting to ease, to move through her and lessen the pressure but leave her empty too. 

Sam watches without comment as Deena gently inks the sigils across her forearm and Deena can hear the steady sound of her breathing, can feel the warmth of her breath against her cheek as Sam stays still beneath her touch. Sam smells like lilacs, like the spring, different from the way the magic usually smells, all earth and burnt cedar, and she focuses on that as she draws the final sigil in the soft crook of Sam’s elbow, the one that she’d made just for Sam and she exhales, relieved and satisfied. 

When she finally lifts her head, Sam’s face is millimeters away from hers and Deena feels lightheaded and off balance. Sam’s lips are slightly parted, eyes a darker shade of blue, and she looks for a moment like she might say something but she just clears her throat instead, her eyes dropping back down toward her arms and the symbols there. “Thank you,” Sam says softly, letting her finger tips brush against her skin. “And this is…supposed to help with…the spell from earlier?” 

In a way, Deena thinks it will. Or that it might at least achieve the results that Sam had been hoping for when she’d first asked Deena for her help. The sigils are more for protection, to repel and shield against negative energy, to ward against whatever might want to do her harm. Deena wants to give Ms. Fraser the benefit of the doubt but…

“Yeah,” Deena says, nodding and clearing her throat. “Like I said, it should just strengthen your intentions and…” She shrugs, relieved her voice sounds more like her own now, steady. “It’s worth a try.” 

Sam smiles and pulls the sleeve of her shirt back down, hiding the markings from view. Deena’s heart flutters, imagining them there beneath the fabric of Sam’s shirt, proof of herself there against Sam’s skin. 

“Should you do the other side?” Sam asks. “Just to make sure it’s even?” 

There’s a spark of amusement in her eyes, a challenge maybe too, and Deena feels the tug of a smile. “Yeah. Maybe. Just in case.” 

Saturday nights have been spent at Kate’s for as long as Deena can remember, the three of them sprawling out in Kate’s basement with a stack of videos from Blockbuster and frozen pizza and ice cream, unless they feel like cracking open the shoebox of help-me-get-a-date-to-this-weekend’s-party money and splurging on ordering actual pizza from the place down the street. 

This Saturday it’s buy-one-get-one pizzas from the Grab & Bag and boxes of cookies from the bakery that were in danger of expiring -a half dozen of which Deena has already inhaled before they’ve even made their first pizza and started arguing about what movie to watch. Kate has her feet in Simon’s lap as he works on painting her toenails a garish shade of yellow that Deena knows Kate will wipe off as soon as she realizes what Simon has done, and is flipping through one of those teen magazines where everyone talks about how awesome butterfly clips and crushes on boys named Kyle are. Deena, for her part, is shuffling through her cards in preparation for doing a five card spread for herself, because there’s nothing wrong with reaching out to see what the universe has to tell her.

Especially when nothing feels as certain as it did a few weeks before. 

Deena picks her cards, laying them out and flipping the first face up. The High Priestess, which seems an odd card to pull when answering the question of her current situation. The guardian of inner knowledge, the mediator between worlds, the answer to all deep unknowns. Deena narrows her eyes slightly, considering the card for a second before setting it aside and reaching for the next one, the card that is supposed to represent her response to whatever her current situation happens to be.

Which, for the record, Deena still doesn’t know, given the less than clear first card. 

Ace of Cups. 

Of course. 

A new start. A new beginning. Or anything else that might be new and on the horizon…

Deena smiles faintly before she can put her walls back into place, letting herself indulge, for just a moment, the idea that maybe the cards are answering her questions after all…which is of course the moment Kate tosses her magazine across the room and hits Deena squarely in the shoulder.

“Dude! What the hell?” Deena’s head whips in her direction, unsurprised to see a smug smile on Kate’s face. “What is wrong with you?” 

“I see that look on your face,” Kate remarks, absolutely unbothered by chucking reading material at her oldest and dearest friend. “If you’re doing a tarot reading about Sam right now, I am going to poke my eyes out.” 

Simon chuckles, returning the lid to the nail polish bottle. “Seems counterproductive.”

“Right.” Kate nods. “I’m poking you eyes out.” 

Deena rolls her eyes, though she can feel the flush of embarrassment creeping up the base of her neck. “I’m not-” 

“You could just ask her, you know,” Simon points out in a tone that suggests that he has no investment in the outcome of this conversation whatsoever. “Instead of asking the cards.” 

Deena opens her mouth to retort but then pauses, exhaling. Sure. Trying to talk to Sam makes way more sense than trying to figure out what divine messages the cards are trying to send her. She groans, laying on her back and throwing an arm over her eyes. “But that’s so much scarier,” she grumbles. 

Unfortunately, neither of her friends have any insight to offer on that observation, just silent commiseration. 

Until the silence is broken by Kate: “Wait…is that yellow?” 

Monday morning, Deena is surprised to see that Sam is waiting beside her locker, so surprised that she barely manages to remember how to return the smile Sam gives her. Her surprise only grows when the first words out of Sam’s mouth are, “What are you doing after school?” 

“Um.” And then, in a moment of rare articulation: “Nothing.” 

Sam nods, stepping out of the way of the locker Deena knows she’s going to struggle to remember the combination to. “I thought we might go get coffee. My treat. As a…I don’t know, a thank you? Only if you want! If you feel up to it, or if you aren’t-” 

“Yeah, sure,” Deena says and miraculously her locker swings open like she’s got everything together and all of this is no big deal. “Sounds fun.” 

Sam’s smile is supernova bright and just as warm. “Awesome. Great. I…okay.” 

Deena smiles and nods and thinks there might be a real danger of getting lost in those blue eyes looking back at her. “Okay.” 

If not for the bell urging them toward their homerooms, Deena thinks they might’ve stayed there all morning. 

Which, she has to admit, might have been preferable, considering her homeroom is unfortunately without Sam Fraser and her dimpled smile. 

Throughout lunch and after, Sam gives no hint that they have afternoon plans, that coffee is in their future. Together. And Deena can’t figure out of this means that, much like going over to do homework at Sam’s, this is also no big deal and is just the type of thing that people do. But there’s something about being around Sam, especially without Kate and Simon, that is starting to feel like it’s a big deal after all. 

Which, like most things in life she’s coming to understand, is equal parts terrifying and painfully exhilarating. 

Abruptly, what had felt like an endless day suddenly comes to its inevitable conclusion and Sam is waiting by her locker again and Deena could really get used to this. Plans with Sam. Sam hanging around. Sam. 

It seems like they aren’t the only ones with this exact same idea, because by the time they make it to the coffee shop that Sam suggests, there are plenty of other Shadyside High students hanging around, chattering like they hadn’t just spent all day together, dragging over chairs and rearranging tables like they’re oblivious to the weary-eyed baristas watching silently from behind the counter. And maybe it’s all these familiar faces or the cacophony of noise swirling around that leaves her feeling anything but alone with Sam, but when they finally get their drinks, Deena clears her throat and says, “Did you want to hang around here? Or we could…I dunno go for a drive or something?”

There’s something about Sam’s smile that leaves Deena feeling all tangled up inside, molten sugar and breathless anticipation. “Sure. That sounds great.”

Deena loves when the weather is like this, when everything in Shadyside seems like it sucks a little bit less, if just for a little while. The sun on her skin, the brilliant blaze of changing leaves, a breeze that seems like a whisper rather than the impatient shove that comes with the chill and snow of winter. It’s as close to the feeling of magic that Deena could possibly describe to anyone else, the promise and reassurance of the days that always seem to end a little bit too soon. 

There’s a spot she goes sometimes with Kate and Simon, when they just want to leave everything behind for just a little while and pretend like the world doesn’t exist outside the three of them, where being together makes anything feel like it might be possible just because they can say the words out loud without fear of being overheard. This is the place Deena takes them now, because if there is anyone she wants to share the spot with, it’s Sam. She has a feeling that Sam would understand more than anyone the draw of a place that keeps the outside world at bay. 

They head further from the heart of Shadyside, past where they’ve built the new mall and toward the town line, though Deena turns off the main road before they get remotely close to Sunnyvale territory and the confusion on Sam’s face clears up once they pass a sign that says Shadyside Downs: Your Home Sweet Home! Coming soon! 

Soon, Deena supposes, is a relative term. Considering how weathered and graffitied the sign is and how there appears to be the remains of a bird nest on top of the once white sign post, “soon” failed to materialize years ago.

“Oh, I remember when they were trying to build these,” Sam remarks, turning her attention toward the window to watch the forever unfinished houses as Deena drives through the neighborhood. “They seemed like they were going to be so nice in the pictures.” 

“Yeah,” Deena scoffs, parking the car at the point of a cul-de-sac and popping her seatbelt. “Too bad nothing in Shadyside can ever actually be nice.”

Sam arches her eyebrows, unimpressed. “Says the person who can do actual magic.” 

Deena opens her mouth, only to find that she doesn’t actually have a response to that. Because okay, fair. She is a Shadyside girl. She has Shadyside in her blood…and room for magic there too apparently. 

The cul-de-sac, Deena assumes, would’ve been nice if they actually had the money to finish it. As it is, only the skeleton of one of the houses stands, most of the useful or expensive pieces having been stripped long ago and sold off, leaving just the rotted frame behind. The point of the curve is empty, providing an unobstructed view of the woods beyond and if you can avoid turning your head to look at the rest of the unfinished neighborhood, then it’s actually a pretty nice view. 

They sit on the hood of Deena’s car, the windshield warm against her back as Deena leans back, cradling her coffee between her palms and glancing upward. The sky is still a brilliant blue, sunset still far enough away that it feels bright and the hours rich with possibility. The clouds drift lazily overhead, stretched cotton ball wisps that curl and twist but refuse to take on any sort of substantial shape. 

Sam mimics her posture, stretching out her long legs and closing her eyes, and Deena allows herself just a moment to study Sam, to allow herself the chance to look at her the way she always wishes she could, unabashed and unashamed, without worry that anyone will notice. Just a moment, which definitely keeps it from being too creepy. Sam is beautiful in a way that makes her teeth ache, in the way that makes her feel like she does after she’s performed a spell: satisfied but ravenous. Desperate. 

Sam turns her head and opens her eyes and there’s no way to pretend like she hasn’t just been staring, but strangely Deena doesn’t feel a rush of panic or the need to explain herself. She just looks back at Sam and feels the sensation of eyes on her take root in her chest.

“You come out here a lot, I’m guessing,” Sam says, seeming unbothered by the fact that she’s just busted Deena staring at her so openly. She closes her eyes again and tips her face toward the sun overhead once more and some of the tightness in Deena’s chest loosens. 

“Yeah. Or, sometimes, I guess. With Kate and Simon.” 

Sam smiles, sitting up and pulling her knees toward her chest instead, balancing her cup between them. “I bet it’s great, having friends like that.” There’s a wistful sort of longing in Sam’s voice that Deena recognizes easily, a companion to the relief that had seemed to settle over her when she realized that no one was going to argue when she kept showing up at their table for lunch each day. 

“Yeah, they’re great,” Deena says because it seems impossible to be anything but genuine when talking about them. She pauses, forcing herself to add before that voice in her head can tell her not to, “It’s been nice having you around too. I mean, you know, eating lunch with us…or…whatever…” 

Well, maybe she should’ve listened to that voice after all. 

But Sam smiles and the color that spreads across her cheeks is rosy and she rests her chin on her knee, seemingly content. “Yeah. It’s been nice.” 

Deena is glad that the silence that settles between them feels comfortable because she’s not sure she could be responsible for what comes out of her mouth next. Something stupid or brave or stupid brave and even though a part of her wants to see what might happen next, there’s an even stronger part of her that wants to stay just like this, forever. 

So Deena just smiles and takes a sip of her coffee and the warmth spreads all the way down to her toes. Where Sam’s sleeves have ridden up just a bit, she can see the fading smudges of the sigils she’d left on Sam’s skin and even though she hadn’t expected Sam to immediately go home and scrub them off, it still feels like it means something that she’s tried to keep them there. 

As though sensing her thoughts, Sam brushes her thumb along the sigil against her wrist and says, “I think the spell is working now. That’s part of why I wanted to…I feel like I owe you a lot more than coffee.” 

“It’s fine,” Deena says with a shrug and the idea of accepting money from Sam the way she does from everyone else in school who happens to approach her makes her want to curl up and die on the hood of this car. “Seriously. I’m glad it’s…finally working.” 

No point in suggesting the reason Sam is seeing results now is because they’ve fine-tuned the magic. No point in suggesting that the problem was never with Sam’s focus at all. 

Still, it warms her, the same way the coffee does, to think about her protective wards working and making it easier for Sam to breathe, to smile, to loosen the tightness between her shoulders. 

“Yeah, it’s…been different. Weird, but a good weird.” Sam furrows her brow, considering. “Pretty much all weekend my mom just seemed to ignore me, which is kind of an improvement on her usual approach to things.” 

Deena isn’t sure how she’s supposed to feel, hearing that this is what the success of her spell looks like. But there’s no denying that Sam certainly seems happier, like a weight has been taken off her chest, so maybe it was the right thing after all. “I’m sorry that’s…how things are with you guys.” 

Sam shakes her head, exhaling. Her gaze shifts toward the tree line instead, the overgrown fields that will likely never be someone’s yard. “It’s fine. I mean…it’s…just the way it is between us, I guess.” She glances back toward Deena, resting her cheek against her knee as she studies her. “Besides, I would rather not bore you with talking about my mom anyway.” 

“You wouldn’t,” Deena assures her but she doesn’t push because she knows what it sounds like to try to tactfully avoid a subject. She’s used the same approach plenty of times. “But I’m glad it’s helping.”

Sam smiles, nodding. “Me too. Thank you.” 

“Yeah.” Deena swallows and staring at the powerlines seems safer than staring at Sam. “Of course.” 

She watches as a crow lands along the powerlines, ruffling its inky feathers and croaking, studying them with interest. Sam smirks, watching the bird. “Friend of yours?” 

“Ha. Funny.” Deena rolls her eyes but isn’t sure she’s doing a great job of actually looking annoyed.

Sam sets her coffee aside, continuing to watch the crow that is still studying them with interest. “So you can’t talk to animals or anything?” 

Now Deena really does laugh, leaning back on her elbows. “Uh, no. Sorry to disappoint.” She frowns. “Well…I guess I’ve never tried…” 

And clearly she’s not going to get her chance now, because the crow gives one final impatient screech and, finding them lacking, takes flight once more. Sam shrugs, feigning disappointment. “Too bad. I was kinda hoping you might discover a new ability or something.” 

“Yeah, I doubt it. But…” Deena sits up, crossing her knees as she turns to face Sam. “Here. Maybe I can still impress you.” 

Thankfully Sam doesn’t ask why she would bother trying to impress her. Maybe the answer is already clear enough. 

Instead, she just shifts so that their knees are touching and when Deena takes Sam’s hands, the magic thrums through her, like she’s the string rather than the other way around. The heat spreads through her until she’s more fire than girl and she can taste the magic on her tongue, sweet and earthy and brilliant blue. “Okay, this was one of the first things I learned to do,” Deena says, trying to focus on the words and how they taste like ozone in her mouth. “Before I figured out how to do the spells and everything. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen Kate speechless.” 

After the mirror, there had been other things too, a voice in her dreams, a rock dressed in red, the promise that if she learned to listen there would be so much more to understand. But it had still been more confusing than intuitive, that confusion and her resistance making things brusque and harsh. More destructive than the gentle magic she knows now. It hadn’t been until she’d coaxed to life one of the many dead plants on their front porch that it had started to occur to Deena that she could do something over than break things and she’d felt like she could finally tell Kate, that she could explain at least this jagged and terrifyingly confusing part of her. 

Anticipation lightens Sam’s eyes and there’s something about her excitement that only makes Deena all the more eager and she can’t stop herself from lacing her fingers with Sam’s even though it’s not really necessary. Sam presses their palms together and it feels like a weight is being pressed directly over her heart, like Sam is touching her there instead, and Deena pulls in a shuddery breath and tries to remember what she’s supposed to be doing. 

Not that she really needs to concentrate all that much. It’s childish magic, party tricks, like when they’d gone to a party freshmen year and Deena had levitated a coffee table and then blown out every lightbulb in the living room because it had occurred to her suddenly what the hell she was doing and the panic of being on full display had outweighed everything else. But still, easy. The type of magic that looks cool, rather than actually doing anything.

Deena can feel the rush of electricity pass through her body and into Sam’s and Sam’s eyes widen, her expression only growing more surprised when she realizes that her hair is lifting, sticking upright and staticky like she’s rubbed a balloon across the top of her head. It’s silly, pointless magic, the same trick Deena had tried when Kate had said with a shrug “okay, show me something then” when they were twelve in the basement of her house. But Sam is grinning anyway and the sound of her laugh snaps across Deena like static electricity. Sam’s hair twists, the strands looping themselves together in lazily braids before Deena slowly pulls her hands away and back into her lap and the hum dims and slows and the loose plaits settle themselves back down between Sam’s shoulder blades.

Sam’s lips are parted, eyes wide and cheeks dotted with color and she reaches back to brush her fingers along the braid, which comes slightly undone at her touch. “I…wow.” 

Deena shrugs, looking down at her hands in her lap. “I mean it’s not…it’s just for show, you know? Not real magic.” 

She startles when Sam reaches between them, her fingers brushing against Deena’s wrist. She looks up, surprised, and Sam’s smile is soft. “It is magic.” 

Deena isn’t sure which of them moves first, isn’t even aware that the thought enters her brain at all. All she knows is that suddenly she’s leaning in closer to Sam and her heart is in her throat but she couldn’t stop herself if she wanted to, and she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to stop. She wants to be this close to Sam always, wants to kiss her, wants to do it over and over. She can feel Sam’s breath against her skin, her closeness, the overwhelming certainty that Sam wants to kiss her too. 

Their lips just barely brush and just as suddenly they’re jerking back again, electricity crackling across Deena’s lips. “Ow. Shit.” She presses her fingers there, surprised when the electricity doesn’t jump again.

Sam looks equally as stunned, eyes wide in surprise as she brushes the tips of her fingers against the bow of her lips. Clearly the magic hadn’t dissipated entirely. 

“Shit, sorry.” Deena winces and suddenly her heart is thumping wildly for an entirely difference reason. She chances a glance toward Sam. “Are you okay? I didn’t…” 

“Yeah, fine,” Sam says, nodding, and she grins, the gesture both mischievous and reassuring. “Is that…normal?” 

The same words she’d spoken the first time something like this had happened, when the very brush of their fingers together had sent Deena’s skin to buzzing. “I’m starting to think with us, yeah.” 

It seems safer than admitting that she has no idea, because she doesn’t exactly have a lot of experience when it comes to kissing pretty girls. 

It also seems much safer than offering to try again, just to see if it happens twice.

Sam laughs, stretching out her legs again and leaning back against the windshield. She exhales, closing her eyes, her expression content, dreamy. “Wow.”  

Deena grins in spite of herself, the disappointment she feels in her chest at not actually getting to kiss Sam fading somewhat. Sam had clearly wanted to kiss her…right? Honestly that’s almost as good to actually getting to kiss her.

Almost.

Still…definitely counts for something.

So Deena lets that smile stretch across her face and she nods. “Yeah.” 

Simon brings up that he’s invited Sam to the Saturday sleepover and judging by the way Kate offers no comment or argument on this fact makes it easy for Deena to imagine that they’ve talked about this behind her back. Talked about her. 

“Wait, seriously?” Deena looks between the both of them, narrowing her eyes. “Why?” 

“Because she’s nice,” Simon says, shrugging and not pausing in her efforts to uncover his homework from the bottom of his bag. “And I think it would be fun.” 

Deena looks toward Kate, whose shrug matches Simon’s. “I mean, I guess she is nice. And that’s coming from me.” 

Groaning, Deena just rolls her eyes and shakes her head. She hasn’t mentioned to either of them about the other day, about almost kissing Sam, and how she’d thought maybe, as she’d pulled up outside Sam’s house to drop her off, that maybe they were going to try again, that they could do it right this time. But Sam’s mom’s car had already been in the driveway and there had been no ignoring that nervous energy that had hummed as noticeable in the car as the magic and so that moment had passed too, Sam just letting her hand briefly rest on Deena’s knee before she’d gotten out of the car and headed across the yard. And since then, they haven’t had the chance to be alone and so Deena had mostly tried to forget about it, about the kiss that almost was and how badly she still wants to kiss Sam. 

Though maybe her efforts have all been for nothing seeing as her friends have been conspiring against her to ruin her life all this time anyway. 

“Fine,” Deena grumbles, giving Kate a pointed look. “But we are definitely ordering real pizza, so save the we-need-this-money-to-get-out-of-Shadyside guilt trip, okay?”

Kate smirks, not bothering to hide her amusement. “Yes ma’am.” 

It’s the least they can do, Deena reasons. Especially if she wants Sam to keep wanting to hang out with them.

Which she does. 

She most definitely does. 

Deena just isn’t always convinced she wants Kate and Simon to be there too. 

For so long, it had felt like Saturday would never arrive, that the rest of the week would continue to tick by with an aching slowness that made every minute feel like years, like time was personally chiding Deena for even bothering to get excited about anything at all. 

But time marches on, and all that, and suddenly Deena is showing up at Kate’s Saturday in the same way that she’s done just about every Saturday since she was ten years old, only this time she feels like she’s going to combust into a million pieces all over the living room. She lets herself inside right as Kate comes downstairs carrying a stack of pillows and blankets and there must be something showing on her face because Kate snorts out a laugh and rolls her eyes. “She’s not even here yet. So relax.” 

“Shut up,” Deena grumbles, following Kate down into the finished basement that feels more like home sometimes than her own house. “I can’t believe you invited her.” 

Simon doesn’t even glance away from the TV showing some nature documentary about people chumming the waters. “Stop complaining. You know you like Sam.”

Deena takes one of the pillows off Kate’s stack and throws it at Simon. “That’s exactly why I’m complaining, idiot.”

Simon blinks like such a thing has honestly not occurred to him before. 

The doorbell rings upstairs and Kate rolls her eyes at the both of them before handing over the pillows and blankets and heading back up the stairs to let Sam inside. The sight of Sam following after Kate with her overnight bag hanging off her shoulder and her hair in a loose ponytail is enough to fill Deena with a sudden sensation of calm, like after all this anticipation she finally has exactly what she’s been hoping for for days.

Of course, there’s also blinding panic too, just to maintain the status quo.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Sam says, stilted and prim in her nervousness, and for a beat they all look at each other like kids thrown together at a playdate for the first time. There’s plenty Deena wants to say, though none of it she wants to blurt out in front of her best friends.

Then Kate says, “Okay, I’m going to order the pizza. Simon, why don’t you and Sam pick a movie for later?” and the moment passes quickly enough and it’s just like how it’s been lately at the lunch tables and in English class: easy and natural and like it’s always meant to have been that way. 

Sam drops her bag by the couch and goes to contemplate the movie options with Simon, leaving Deena an anxious ball of nerves off all by herself. Which, granted, might be a good thing. She retrieves her tarot cards, starting to shuffle through them in hopes of calming herself the fuck down, or to give herself something to think about other than almost kissing Sam and how being here with her now is making that almost feel like a bigger and bigger tragedy with each passing second. 

Deena shuffles through the cards, laying out a five card spread that she doesn’t actually intend on reading, mostly because she’s a little bit terrified of what the cards would tell her based on the nervous energy racing through her mind right now. 

She’s laying out the last card when Sam comes down to sit across from her, offering Deena a tentative smile. “Hey.” 

Deena feels like all the breath leaves her lungs in a whoosh and her voice is barely more than a croak as she says, “Hi” like she hasn’t been thinking about Sam every moment of every day since…an embarrassingly amount of time. 

“I didn’t mean to interrupt or…” Sam gestures toward the cards, eyeing them with interest. “Distract you or whatever.”

“No, it’s fine,” Deena says, sweeping the cards back into the deck and shuffling them absently. “I wasn’t really…” She shrugs, setting the deck between them. “Do you want me to…I mean…I could do a reading for you, if you wanted.” 

She’s never read for anyone other than Simon or Kate, never even considered it. But the sudden spark of eagerness in Sam’s face is more than enough to convince her that this is a good idea. “Sure. How…how does it work?” 

Deena gives the deck another shuffle for good measure, and to give herself something to do. “So, you need a question-” 

Sam’s burrow furrows immediately and Deena adds, “You don’t have to say it out loud if you don’t want to. You can just think it.”

“I don’t have to say it out loud?” Sam repeats, skeptical. “How does that work?” 

“It’s…” Deena shrugs. “Magic, right? Intuition. Intention. The cards just know…hell I have no idea. It’s not like any of this actually came with an instruction manual or anything.” 

Sam grins and nods and says, “Okay, think of a question. Got it.” 

Deena hands over the cards and Sam takes them carefully and Deena can’t help but notice the way the curiosity makes itself plain across her features, mixing with the eagerness there too. “Shuffle the deck and then split it into three piles.” 

“Equal piles?” 

“No, just…three piles.” Deena shrugs. “Just…whatever feels right. Think of your question and just…make the piles.”

Sam presses her lips together, lifting her eyebrows. “Not a lot of instructions here.”

Deena grins, wiggling her fingers with a magician’s flourish. “Magic.” 

Sam shakes her head but the corners of her mouth are quirked up in that subtle smile of hers that Deena has grown to long for. She shuffles the deck twice before abruptly splitting cards into three piles that seem so precisely equal that Deena isn’t sure that she couldn’t done that if she’d tried. 

“It didn’t have to be equal piles,” Deena points out.

“You said what felt right!” Sam protests with a laugh and Deena tries to hold onto the sound, to keep it warming the center of her chest. 

“Okay, okay, fine.” Deena furrows her brow, studying the cards in front of her. “I’ll tell you what the cards mean and you can figure out how it answers your question.” She shrugs, reaching up absently to push the shoulder of flannel back in place. “It’s not always…sometimes you gotta think about it.”

Sam nods, the same focused intensity on her face that Deena has seen her wear during every quiz and essay in English class. “Got it.”

Deena absently pushes the sleeves of her flannel up to her elbows before she reaches forward to flip the first card. Shit. Is she somehow influencing the reading? Her own energy clashing with Sam’s so that the cards are picking up on her thoughts, because there’s that stupid Ace of Cups again. 

“Um…it’s…” Deena isn’t sure if she should offer to try again, to have Sam shuffle through the cards, or if she should just do the reading as normal and hope for the best. “New beginnings basically. The start of something new and big happening in your life.”

Sam nods, studying the card while working her thumbnail absently between her teeth. “Okay.” 

Deena clears her throat and flips the second card, stomach sinking down to her feet when she sees it. The Lovers. Clearly the cards are picking up on her energy, confusing it with Sam’s, and just generally fucking everything up because of course it is and when Deena looks up at Sam, clearing her throat to explain herself, Sam’s face is a vibrant shade of red and…oh. Okay. 

Maybe the cards aren’t getting it entirely wrong.

Deena exhales. “It’s…” 

Sam nods again, cheeks still red as she looks up at Deena. “Yeah, I think I get that one.” 

The last card is the Knight of Cups, harbinger of new ideas and opportunities. And, of course, love and partnership. As much of a romantic as a deck of cards could possibly have. Not that Deena is sure how to explain any of these to Sam. She fidgets with her sleeves, studying the trio of cards in between them. “It’s another romance card,” she says finally, though there’s plenty more she could add about it. Normally she does a better job of all of this. “I don’t know if that helps with your question, or if…” 

“Yeah, I guess…” Sam’s cheeks redden again and when their gazes meet again, they slide away quickly, as though shocked apart. “I think so.” 

“Yeah. Cool.” Deena reaches for the cards, shuffling them all back together. “Awesome.” 

The pizza is absolutely worth however many stupid spells Deena had to cast for them to be able to afford it and she definitely eats way too much and can’t bring herself to care because it’s pizza and she’s with her friends and Sam Fraser is beside her and their shoulders brush together every time Sam laughs. 

Eventually, the boxes are empty of everything except a few half eaten pizzas of crust and the grease lining the bottom and somehow Simon manages to sound completely sincere when he looks at them and says, “Okay but we still need popcorn, right? For the movie?” 

Kate groans but doesn’t exactly protest and Sam leans forward to collect the boxes of pizza, stacking them on top of each other. “I can go start it,” she offers, taking the boxes with her as she heads for the stairs. 

Deena waits for a minute, trying to grit her teeth around the idea, but it’s impossible to shake loose. Without looking at either of her friends, she grumbles, “I’ll just…help her find where everything is.” 

There’s no way Kate misses the blush in her cheeks, but Deena can absolutely pretend, right? 

When Deena steps into the kitchen, Sam is opening one of the cabinet doors, poking around inside for bowls, presumably, and when the floor creaks underneath Deena’s feet, she whirls around, smiling. “Oh. Hey.”

“Thought you might need some help.” Deena walks toward the opposite side of the kitchen, opening one of the lower cabinets and pulling out a large glass bowl. She taps her fingers against the sides for a moment before sighing and setting it on the counter, turning back toward Sam. “I’m…glad that you’re here.” 

The smile she gets in response makes Deena feel like she’s just said something so perfectly profound, like she’s just confessed every thought rattling around in her mind. Maybe she doesn’t need to. Maybe Sam already knows them.

“Come on,” Sam says, tipping her chin to a spot over her shoulder. “Let’s go outside.”

Deena’s eyes widen and she says, “Wait, why?” like she wouldn’t agree to follow Sam anywhere. 

“Come on,” Sam says again and she turns, starting for the sliding door that opens onto the Schmidts’ porch and the door slides easily as Sam pushes it open. 

The temperature has fallen with the setting sun, not too cold just yet but chilly enough that the Deena’s skin immediately prickles with goosebumps. Somewhere someone is burning leaves, the air sharp with the smell of smoke, a smell that reminds her of magic and all the good things about Shadyside and maybe even the things she might miss whenever she finally leaves this place. 

Sam walks to the other side of the deck, putting her elbows on the railing and looking up and Deena joins her, pretending to search the darkening sky for whatever has captivated Sam when really she’s just trying to study Sam out of the corner of her eye, trying to memorize the feeling of Sam beside her, the contented look on her face. 

“I do this sometimes at home. Just…come outside and look at the stars. Think about what it would be like to be somewhere else.” 

Deena doesn’t hide it as much now, how she turns her head to study Sam, tracing the slope of her nose, the curve of her lashes. “Yeah. I…sometimes I think about being somewhere else too. A lot of the time, actually,” Deena admits. “It’s gotta be better, right? Somewhere else.” 

Sam smiles softly, their eyes meeting. “I guess it’s not always so bad.” 

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” 

Deena lets her hand rest over Sam’s on the railing, her fingers brushing against her knuckles and toward her wrist and Sam turns her hand, allowing Deena’s fingers to trace the creases in her palm before brushing against the nearly faded lines of the sigil she’d inked there nearly a week before. When the pad of her thumb brushes the mark, it darkens, standing out in sharp relief on Sam’s skin like it had the day she’d first drawn it. 

She looks at Sam in surprise, half tempted to slip her fingers beneath the fabric of Sam’s sleeve to see if it would work again and again, until she gets to the crook in Sam’s elbow, where Deena thinks she might be even more tempted to try with the faint brush of her lips instead. Sam looks back at her but there’s no surprise in her face, nothing but an understanding that somehow seems worth much more. “Magic,” she says, and Deena isn’t sure she’s talking about the darkening sigil. 

Sam lets her fingers curl around Deena’s, the tip of her nose red. “I…I’ve been thinking about kissing you.” 

“Really?” The word cracks as it leaves Deena’s mouth but still she says it out loud and that means something. 

It means that she gets to see Sam nod, her cheeks pinkening. It means that she gets to feel Sam’s grip on her tighten. It means that Sam says, “Yeah. Since the other day. Well…before that, really.” 

Deena steps closer, reaching forward gently, tentative, half expecting the crackle of electricity. But her hands frame Sam’s face, the skin warm beneath her palms, and Sam smiles and closes her eyes and leans into her touch. Deena brushes her lips against Sam’s forehead, letting them linger there. No jolt of magic, no startling spark of heat between them. Just Sam’s body close to hers, the brush of Sam’s fingers over the hand cradling her face. 

Deena exhales, closing her eyes and she’s going to kiss Sam, she is, she can feel this certainty thrumming in her heart with a resonate echoing. And this will be the last before moment, the last moment where she has wonder what it will be like to kiss Sam, where she doesn’t have to worry if she might do something wrong, or fuck this up somehow, or-

Sam lifts her face just enough that her mouth finds Deena’s and Deena is really, really glad that she’s done with that before moment because all she wants to do is live in this moment now, the one where she’s kissing Sam and Sam is kissing her and it feels like…

Well. 

Of course it feels like magic. 

But Deena figures that goes without saying.