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You were four, and you cut yourself on your mother’s vase.
It was the vase’s fault, really. It just wouldn’t want to float. Or change colour. Or transform into a worm (that you could have chased. You would have liked chasing worms at four, but your mother always forbade it). A spider, even. It wouldn’t fill up with apple juice, either. You concentrated so very, very hard until your head ached with it, but nothing happened. All your glaring, shouting, whispering or even begging was no use. It was strange, so very strange; you held your hands outstretched the entire time, but there was no spark or sound inside you, no telltale tickling of warmth in your fingertips and chest.
You think it is understandable, then, that you got angry after three hours of this.
So angry, in fact, that you almost cried. But you knew your mother would be upset if you cried—she always cried when you did—so you tried to channel your emotions into your hands, wanting something to happen, because the dreams told you so. You were magic. You knew it. You felt it. You needed something to happen.
But nothing did.
Which just made you angrier.
Now you know it wasn’t magic what happened, but loss of control. Externalised desperation. There was a black hole beneath you, and so much sound that it drowned out the headache in your head. When you came back to yourself, you sat on the ground, soaked in water and flower stalks, smiling down at the colourful petals all over your legs. It was a pretty sight, the red and blue and yellow, glistening from the water, and looked almost like the fairy dust of Tinkerbell.
But fairy dust wasn’t what made your mother scream when she saw you.
It were your hands, painted all over with an interesting shade of red. Much darker than the ketchup you liked. Less thick. But thicker like water. There were pieces of white, too, sticking out from your palms and forearms like they were glued to your skin. In those places, the red came out the strongest.
Look, mama, you wanted to say. My magic’s broken the vase and painted all the red.
You never got around to saying so, because after you thought your thought, you lay on the ground, unconscious, smiling.
At four, there was just magic for you, and not the pain of having sliced your skin like an unskilled butcher.
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At six, you stopped eating.
There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. You didn’t do it to make your mama angry, like the old man in the quiet room said. You loved your mama. You wanted to make her smile, and not cry or yell. It was why you hadn’t stopped trying to make the flies bothering her at night into butterflies, because she liked butterflies. They were pretty and didn’t bite. You didn’t mean to cry when they wouldn’t change, but you just did, because you were upset. You should be able to do it. You were magic. But you couldn’t. Your mama said you were wrong. The old man said so. But they didn’t understand. You weren’t wrong; you were right. You were just a little broken. Like the door in the kitchen that squeaked so awfully because no one oiled it. Or the chair on which no one could sit anymore because a leg was broken.
But the old man in the quiet room said you were angry at your mama because your papa had left you, and you didn’t understand. Of course you were sad that papa had left you. But if you were angry with anyone, it was papa, not mama, because he made her cry. That was another reason why you kept trying to make the flies into butterflies. Your mama laughed when she saw butterflies. She didn’t laugh when she saw you, but butterflies, you thought, would work.
But the old man in the quiet room said you were ungrateful, looking for attention. Mostly he said you were wrong. Sometimes he said you were wrong in the head. But that was okay, he said, because he could make you better. He asked you if you liked colourful things, and you said yes, because it reminded you of fairy dust.
He gave you little round things you were supposed to swallow, every morning, and your mama made sure you ate them. But they made you feel strange, and it scared you, because when you woke up that Sunday morning you didn’t want to go to your mama’s room to make the flies into butterflies, like you always did on Sundays. They made you feel bad, sleepy, forgetful. Ungrateful, like the old man in the quiet room said. Because you stopped trying to make your mama smile, and you didn’t understand why you didn’t want to anymore, because at six, it was all you wanted.
You didn’t hate your mama. You loved her. You wanted her to smile. You could do it, too: if someone would fix what you were missing, then you could make the flies into butterflies, and she would smile.
You refused your breakfast, because mama would make you eat the round things at breakfast. Then she tried at lunch. You refused lunch too. Then at dinner. You refused dinner too. And even though you really, really liked chocolate pudding, you refused chocolate pudding because you’d seen her put the round things in there. When she tried to hold you down and make you eat, you started screaming.
You stopped eating and kept screaming until they stopped giving you the round things.
Your mama cried when you didn’t eat the things anymore, but you felt better, because you were trying to make the flies into butterflies again.
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At eight, the teacher sent you home in the middle of the day.
You were upset at first, but then you were glad he did it. School wasn’t much fun, anyway. All the other kids looked at you like you were one of the ugly insects they would burn in the sun under the magnifying glass because you practised doing magic during lunch break. You knew your mama didn’t like you doing magic at home or outside or at all, really, but you thought the other kids would understand, and that maybe some of them would even try it out too. They didn’t; they asked you if you had watched Harry Potter for too long, and even when you tried to explain them that you didn’t use Harry’s spells but your own—because they were only for you—they wouldn’t listen. They laughed, instead. And then they shoved you around or tripped you or said nasty things. It was when you were starting to become really afraid to leave the house.
Normally, you did okay in school. You learnt that if you kept to yourself things were okay. And when you said your spells under your breath, they sometimes left you alone.
But when you were starting with swim practice, it got really, really bad.
You’d never liked water much. There was always so much of it. It was like when you were drinking too much of it, you couldn’t breathe anymore. It was what had happened with your only friend, the one from your dreams. Well, almost. But the water took him away from you when he was lying on a boat, and you couldn’t help him. He was your secret friend, because you thought that if you told mama about him, mama would start crying again. So you never told her.
You were even more scared of water than you were scared of the other children.
The teacher wanted you to go into the water, but you didn’t want to. You shook your head and kept sitting on the benches. The other children were all in the water. You were shaking—you wanted to yell at them to get out of the water, that they would drown and never come back out again, even if they were always so mean. The teacher said you were disruptive, whatever that meant, and he wanted you to go into the water. He took a step towards you. Held out his hand. You didn’t like it when people stretched their hands out to you, because the other children shoved you around when they did. You shrank back from him. He saw that you didn’t want to, really, really didn’t want to, and then left you alone.
The other children didn’t. When your teacher left for five minutes, some of them came out of the water and stretched their hands out towards you. They gripped you. Laughed, when they saw you shake. Mocked you, when you started to cry.
Then they shoved you into the pool.
There was another black hole there, this time, only much, much larger. It took up the entire room. There was no air left. Only water everywhere. Your friend in the boat couldn’t help you, because the water kept you down, and him trapped. Water. Water, everywhere.
When you came to yourself, you were at home. And then you thought that your friend on the boat must feel like this all the time with all the water around him, and you cried and cried and cried.
You were such a bad friend, because you couldn’t do anything to help him.
You were still broken, still without magic, and you didn’t know what to do.