Chapter Twenty
After my talk with Max in the cave, two things are obvious to me:
Austin Taylor is clearly using the ‘no magic’ thing as a cover-up.
What better way to hide that you’re a heinously awful dick who curses people than by outwardly condemning anything that would even remotely give you away?
Doing otherwise would be like Dracula getting a job at a blood bank. Dead giveaway.
He’s also hiding behind MENtal to keep people from knowing how horrible he is. Me, throwing a tantrum over a woman having inconvenient feelings?! But I’m MISTER Feelings! Rich white dudes have been using charities as smoke screens for years. Austin Taylor is nothing new.
The more I think about it, the angrier I feel.
Austin Taylor is still just as calculating as he was the day he met my mom, preying on her fear of raising me alone and offering her the family she’d never had.
And seeing Max worship him – it’s sickening.
That’s why I imagined trying to hold his hand; wanting to comfort someone who’d been so badly fooled by his narcissistic dad was a natural response. Anyone would’ve felt bad.
Though it finally feels like I’m getting somewhere with Max, I can’t deny that this new information about Austin Taylor is mostly useless. It’s time to try a different route, this time with someone who maybe can’t get me close to Austin now, but still might have a story to tell.
I don’t bother knocking on Laura’s front door when I drop by the next night after my shift at F’resh, just use the key she gave me when Elliott and I started walking home from middle school alone.
Our families agreed a long time ago that a lot of effort would be saved if we just acted like our two houses were one.
Laura is in the kitchen wearing the floaty lavender dress my mom has been asking to have back for the last three months, her thick locks of wavy hair piled high on her head.
She bounces between mopping the floor, unloading the dishwasher and monitoring a mustard-yellow teapot whose spout has just started to burble.
The kitchen is neat and modern, all white subway tiles, wooden countertops, a pocket door leading to a pantry and plain white cabinets with little black knobs, after Laura had her aunt’s old seventies kitchen ripped out a few years ago.
‘Mom’s gonna kill you if she sees you in that dress,’ I say from the doorway.
Laura nudges the dishwasher lid closed with her foot as her arms work furiously, mopping at a fleck of something red smeared into the herringbone floors.
The joke has always been that my mom and Laura are essentially the same person – same crunchy, go-with-the-flow Mother Earth type – except Laura is perpetually on fast forward.
‘What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,’ she says, near-breathless. She looks up, nods her chin at something over my shoulder. ‘The records are right there, hon.’
Sitting on the dinner table is a grey plastic crate halfway full of vinyl albums. I mosey over to it, flick through the first few records.
There’s an album by Kate Bush, a couple by Blondie and Annie Lennox.
I feel kind of dumb taking them when I still don’t have a record player at home, but I can’t exactly admit that now.
‘How was volunteering?’ Laura calls.
Thank God for the hoodie I’ve got zipped all the way up to my neck, covering my F’resh polo. ‘It was fine,’ I say, flipping past a fourth Fleetwood Mac album. ‘You sure you don’t want any of these? There’s some good stuff in here.’
‘You take them, sweetheart,’ Laura answers. ‘I don’t have any use for them.’
Me neither.
A shrill whistle shrieks from the kitchen. ‘You want a peppermint tea?’ she asks.
It’s the perfect in, almost like I’d planned it myself. Plus, after standing outside F’resh handing out mango turmeric smoothie shots for three hours today, the warm sharpness of a peppermint tea sounds nice. ‘That’d be amazing, thank you,’ I say back.
Laura joins me at the circular dinner table holding two steaming mugs. She sets both on the brand-new rose quartz coasters I bought for her birthday, their marbled tops perfectly smooth, and slides one towards me.
I trace my finger along the swirling grooves of the table’s wooden surface, bottom lip pinned under my teeth. Here goes nothing.
‘I’m sorry if I ruined your birthday,’ I say quietly.
Two lines form between Laura’s brows. ‘Wh … of course you didn’t,’ she says. ‘How would you have ruined my birthday?’
‘Asking my mom all that stuff about the curse.’
Laura grimaces. ‘Oh.’
‘I just didn’t expect her to get so upset.’
‘Yeah.’ She wraps her hands around her mug. ‘He really did a number on her.’
The steam from my tea wisps up towards my face in delicate curls. I tilt my cheek towards it, savouring the warmth. ‘But that was seventeen years ago,’ I say.
‘Honey,’ Laura says gently. ‘What Austin did to your mom – it went beyond just the curse, which was bad enough.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All Austin wanted was to be the centre of your mom’s world,’ Laura says. ‘And when he wasn’t, he’d punish her.’
At that dark word, I sit up a little straighter. ‘Punish?’ I say, my voice suddenly strangled. ‘Like—’
‘With his moods,’ Laura clarifies, and I can feel the muscles in my back relax, if only slightly.
‘He’d use them to control her. If something was wrong in Austin’s life, he made sure something was wrong in hers.
And he could switch on a dime – I watched him do it.
He’d be happy, charming Austin for everyone else, and this dark, mopey man-child for your mom.
I always knew when he was punishing her.
Her whole world was greyer when he was unhappy. ’
Fury, hot and sharp, spikes through me. So, Austin Taylor has not only kept my mom from being happy in any other relationship, but didn’t even want her to be happy in theirs?
‘And the curse,’ I say, swallowing the rage that’s hollowing out my throat. ‘No one could figure out how to break it?’
‘I told you, sweetheart,’ Laura says as she lifts her mug to her lips and takes a sip. ‘Magic is complicated, and more importantly, it’s personal. You’d need to know the ins and outs of the curse itself to break it.’
I clench my fingers around my own mug, fighting a flinch as the heat pierces my skin through the china. ‘But what does that even mean?’
‘Okay, think of it like this.’ Laura hunches, as though she’s about to confide a secret. ‘If one of Donnie’s BMWs breaks down—’
‘Wh … Donnie?’ I say.
Laura sighs. ‘Clown Guy.’
‘Ah.’
‘If one of Donnie’s BMWs breaks down, but he only has the instructions for repairing a Porsche—’
‘Sorry, but are you genuinely making a car metaphor right now?’
‘—he’s not going to be able to do it the right way, because he doesn’t have the specific outline for a BMW. They might both be cars, but they’re very different.’
Though everything in me wants to roll my eyes right now, Laura’s point makes sense. Not all spells – no matter how similar – are going to be created equal.
I lift my mug to my mouth and take a small drink of the greenish-brown tea. ‘Do you know the name of the spell Austin Taylor used?’ I say. ‘Or even just the name of his spell book?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
Disappointment throbs in my chest. ‘But, couldn’t someone have looked into it?’
Laura smiles at me sadly. ‘Believe me, honey, we tried to find out,’ she says.
‘But there was no getting back in with Austin at that point. He used a different spell book to the one Terrence demanded we all have.’ She narrows her eyes at the mention of Terrence, their coven’s pseudo cult leader.
‘After a while, your mom decided it would just be easier to accept it and move on.’
‘Do you still have your spell book?’
Even though it’s different to Austin’s, it could still be useful, seeing how spell books actually work.
‘I used to,’ Laura says. ‘But it was lost somewhere to the chaos that is currently my attic.’ Her mug freezes mid-air just as she lifts the cup to her lips again, as though she’s realised something. ‘Why are you asking this all of a sudden?’
I look away quickly. ‘I – I don’t know,’ I stammer, my brain scrambling for yet another lie. ‘I just – seeing how happy you are with Clown G – Donnie – I feel bad knowing my mom’ll never get that. It just made me wonder if anyone had actually tried breaking the curse before.’
Laura presses her lips into a tight smile as she lays a hand on top of mine.
‘I know, it’s an impossible situation. Men like Austin, they think they rule the world, because most of the time, they do.
They’re relentless. Even after your dad left, Austin was still sending your mom letters, trying to get to her. ’
‘He sent letters? What did they say?’
‘Only a couple,’ she says. ‘Your mom didn’t read them.
She knew it’d just be more of the same, him trying to manipulate her into coming back.
That’s why she could never break the curse – she had no way to get back to Austin without taking some unthinkable risks.
It was easier for her to try and move on.
She had more important things in her life. ’
More important than being in love?
I nod, just a slow, painful bob of my head. Footsteps pound from the hallway outside the living room and then Elliott is here, asking what’s for dinner. When he smiles at me, I turn away, my stomach twisting in knots.
Because even though she doesn’t say it, I know exactly what Laura’s words about my mom mean. The risks not worth taking, the love she had with my dad, sacrificed – my mom did it all for me.