I start looping the rope around my head, like a cowboy. I focus in on this action, trying to correctly visualize what the rope would feel like if it were a proper lasso. How heavy it would be.
In the river I am lassoing, but on the bathroom floor I am knotting, knotting, knotting. Staring at the photo. Knotting. Knotting. Knotting.
Back in the Beg, my arms are starting to ache and I’m growing weak. I’m too far away from her. A few times, I throw the rope and it splashes next to her, flecks of water landing on her face. She doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
C’mon, c’mon, I urge. Get the rope around her. Get it around her.
Why is this so hard? It’s my imagination, after all. I can do whatever I want with it. I could get a drone to fly in and bring Lily right to me. But for some reason I can’t do it. I can’t get the rope around her in a way that feels convincing or real. When I try to force it, my concentration just breaks and I’m too aware of myself. Too aware of being a sixteen-year-old girl on my parents’ bathroom floor.
I push through.
Just make the rope go around her feet, Maeve! It’s not that hard! It’s your fecking brain!
I do it.
The rope loops around her ankle, and I pull her in.
But it doesn’t feel real. The Beg at dawn falls away and it’s a cardboard scenery version of it. The more I pull, the more the reality disappears.
A sound of a car alarm outside. A dog barking somewhere far away.
It’s gone. My concentration is broken, and there’s no room left to knot.
The candle has burned out.
I know the spell hasn’t worked before I even go to bed, but I can’t figure out why. I tie the silken knots around my wrist like a bracelet. Lily and I never went through a friendship bracelet phase, strangely enough. It seemed redundant: we were the only friend the other one had, so making a bracelet seemed beside the point. I wish I had given her one. I think she would have liked it.
Before I drift off to sleep, I remember the Divination shopkeeper again.
“You have to give big to get big.”
I flex my hand, looking at the delicate scar where the keys had cut into my palm. Of course. Blood was the sacrifice that turned an old shower-gel bottle, toiletries and a bathtub of junk into a real spell.
I need to figure out a way to give bigger.
I feel awkward with Fiona in school the next day. Luckily, Fiona is impervious to awkwardness. She plonks herself at the edge of my desk and looks me right in the eye.
“Why didn’t you text me back yesterday?”
“Uh…”
“I tried to invite you over.”
“Sorry, my phone was out of battery.”
“Yeah, I thought that was it. When did it come back on?”
“I don’t know. Eight?”
“But you didn’t text back?”
“I thought the party would have been over.”
“It was, but we still could have…” She breaks off, as if she is presuming too much about our friendship. After all, we haven’t known one another very long.
“I thought that maybe …” I say bashfully, “you wouldn’t want to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because of Roe.”
She scrunches her face. “I mean, I know he’s not happy with you at the moment, but it’s, like, a lover’s tiff, right?”
“Did he tell you what the tiff was about?”
“He mentioned the lie,” she says, screwing her mouth to one side. “But as I said to him, how were you to know? I mean, sure, in hindsight, maybe don’t freak out at someone and wish them dead while the Housekeeper is present. Grand. We know that now. But how on earth were you supposed to know that then?”
“I guess,” I say, the beginnings of a smile on a face.
“I mean, imagine if I was held accountable every time I wished Jos would disappear so I didn’t have to babysit him. I’d be in prison, Maeve.”
I laugh. She’s right. Roe is entitled to hate me, but she’s still right.
“Thanks,” I say, laughing. “I’m glad I have you on my side, at least.”
“You’re my friend. I wasn’t going to let him talk shit about you. But I wanted to make sure you were OK, because he seemed pretty depressed.”
“Really?” I say, eagerly.
“Yeah. I mean. He was sound, like, same as he always is, but he didn’t stay long. I kept waiting for you to text me back so we could sort it all out. But you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I say lamely. And then I remember the spell.
I grab her arm. “I need to tell you something.”
Her face lights up.
“Not here, though,” I mutter. “Art room? Lunch?”
She nods and rushes back to her seat as class begins.
At lunchtime, I tell her everything. Well, almost. I tell her about the spell that broke the cold snap, the cogs that cut me in the river, the failed spell last night.
“And so, I think, the issue is,” I finish, practically frothing, “I think I have to find a bigger sacrifice? Like, maybe a little bit of blood? I could reopen the old wound? Do you think that might help?”
Fiona looks at me blankly. “You want to cut yourself?”
“What? No! I don’t want to cut myself. I just think, like the lady said, you need to give big to get big, y’know? Sacrifice. It worked when I cut my hand in the river.”
She does her little thinking pose again – the prayer hands in front of her mouth, a little Hollywood ‘namaste’-type gesture she obviously picked up from watching Inside the Actors Studio. She closes her eyes for a second.
“Maeve. I love you.”
“Oh. OK,” I reply, slightly startled by the response. “I love … you?”
“I love you, and I’m telling you this because … you’re worrying
