Page 107 of Big Little Spells

Cat comfort is bracing, but it works.

It gets me up and on my feet and I even spend a few minutes I don’t have rubbing Smudge’s sulky face and kissing her on her furry forehead.

Emerson and I eat a tense breakfast with our parents, which is also tradition. We reenact all those mornings before high school together, compressed into the most fraught morning of them all. My father says nothing, his cold eyes communicating his distaste for the daughters his own mother promised would elevate the Wilde name. And Grandma isn’t here to shame him into better behavior, so my mother is left to fill the gap. She tries to make conversation, but it all turns into her imparting advice.

To her two grown-ass daughters who raised themselves in her absence.

Emerson is making a show of taking dutiful notes, but I’m sitting next to her and can see that actually, she’s working on her own to-do list. Double check spells for German Heritage Festival cleanup. Foment rebellion. Save world—yet again. If live through night, pick up dry cleaning. I almost laugh out loud, something that would only irritate my father more. I wonder if Emerson was always putting on more of a show than I thought she was. I wonder if it was little sister stuff that made me think everything was so easy and perfect for her and that just happened to be true, no effort from her required.

Maybe that’s why I realize, for the first time in my life, that my mother’s high-handed advice is how she expresses her own anxiety. She can’t help herself from trying to control outcomes, trying to control us. She wants everything to be perfect—herself, her life, us, and it never has been.

And sure, I wish she could have learned that nothing is ever perfect, the way I had to a long time ago. But today I feel a rush of sympathy as I consider the possibility that maybe she’s incapable of that kind of understanding. Or this is her version of understanding. After all, I don’t know what it’s like to give your whole life over to a man like my dad, who takes up all the space in every room he’s in, looks down on everything, and even disapproved of Zelda’s choice to “marry down” into the Rivers clan so intensely that I can’t recall the last time Mom and Zelda spent time together.

Clearly Elspeth Wilde hasn’t been lucky enough to have someone she loves and lost sit with her in a cemetery and help her deal with her trauma.

I almost want to give her a hug, but that would likely terrify the poor woman. Especially today.

After breakfast, I go find Georgie—whose residency in Wilde House apparently doesn’t require she show up at tense family breakfasts—and we hole up with the book in a last-ditch effort to make sure we haven’t missed anything. The feeling of incompleteness hounds me as the hours tick by, too long and too short, until Emerson finds me and insists we go over the pubertatum one last time.

“It’s not going to be the same as what we practice, no matter what we practice,” I tell her as we walk past Georgie’s library—a room packed so full of books it’s impossible to get in without turning sideways. Reliably, the sight of that much mess makes my sister shudder. “They’re going to make sure we fail. Spectacularly.”

“Thank you, Rebekah,” she replies dryly as we hit the stairs. I make a face at her and she smiles, but her voice is serious as we walk down a floor. “I don’t think the goal here is to convince the Joywood of anything. We know their mind is made up. But I have to think that if we’re prepared for the way they twist things, we should be able to show the audience that we can perform the necessary magic to pass the test. And that means we can argue our case, which is more than we got last time.”

She has a point there. We go into my room and stand together in the late afternoon light that pours into the room, lighting up the Wheel of the Year so it casts it shadows over us in blues and reds and greens.

We face each other and she nods. Together, we begin.

I conjure the light like Nicholas taught me. Then whisper the dark into life in perfect balance. Across from me, Emerson does the same.

Without discussing it, the balls of light are the same size, like mirror images of each other. The same, yet different.

Like us.

Then, as we stand there, murmuring the words to keep our magical balance, our little balls of light combine. Without having to communicate the next step, we look at each other, then meld our dark to even it out.

Over the balls we hold in the air between us, light and dark, Emerson and I smile.

My first of year. My last of year. My two sides of the same coin. Grandma’s voice wraps around us. The scent of her is in my head. I feel her, even though I can’t see her. It’s like she’s standing just at the edge of my vision and if I turn my head—

But I don’t. I breathe her in.

I look at Emerson, tears in my eyes, to see the tears in hers. “Together,” I whisper. “Maybe the trick is together.”

Emerson nods, full of all that marvelous certainty that makes her her and makes me feel safe. “I know it is.”

We end the ritual together, our voices a perfect harmony as we combine all the balls before us and then turn them into light. And when they’re gone, we fall into each other. Laughing, maybe. Crying, definitely. But holding each other tight the whole time.

And I know Emerson has welcomed me home from day one, but this feels as if, finally, I’ve arrived. Like I can finally see exactly where I’ve been standing this whole time, and better still, who’s always been standing right here beside me. Waiting for me to catch up.

To want to stay.

A mix of all that laughter and all our tears clings to us as we head downstairs. Our last practice took a while, and that means our friends will come over soon to meet us. We’ll walk to the confluence together to face the fate the Joywood have prepared for us.

That twists in me uneasily, but I take Emerson’s words to heart. This isn’t about proving anything to people who hate us. It’s showing the people who don’t that they’ve been lied to about who we are.

Once we do that, maybe we can live through this. And once we do that, we can work on doing something about the dark scourge that is our ruling coven. So no big deal, then, I tell myself as we all gather in the Wilde House kitchen. And I try not to laugh, because I’m afraid it will come out sounding maniacal.

We’re not required to wear anything in particular tonight, so we’ve all come dressed as slightly more formal versions of ourselves. Georgie and Ellowyn are also wearing their traditional amulets—necklaces given to a witch by their parents the morning of Litha to ease their passage into full adult witchhood. If you fail your pubertatum, they’re destroyed. If you pass, your designation is engraved in the back.

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