Page 82 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Traditions,” Esther repeated. “Like... religion?”

Nicholas shook his head. “Overtly religious traditions rarely work. I’m talking about creating a ceremonial context that feels powerful to you personally. And we’re making this ink to break a silencing spell, so think perhaps about... volume? A tradition of being loud, or a tradition of being quiet. Telling secrets. Sharing truth. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t, quite. Esther put her mind to it anyway. She had never been given to spirituality, though she had gone through a short, exploratory religious phase as a preteen. Cecily and Abe, while both technically Jewish, were hardly practicing. However, Esther had done enough research into her biological maternal roots to know that most Mexicans were Catholic, so at twelve she’d convinced her parents to take her to Mass the next town over. The church was lovely, mossy stone with dramatic stained-glass windows, and behind the pulpit, Jesus stared down from an enormous crucifix. Esther had gazed up at his mournfully heroic face, his chest and thighs muscled and bare, his ankles slender, and believed she felt the faith of her people coursing through her veins, holy and tingling.

But the mass itself had been so boring that even her fantasies of rescuing Jesus and giving him a tender, thorough sponge bath couldn’t keep her awake. By the end of her twelfth year Esther had lost her zeal for religion and was channeling it into a zeal for Kurt Cobain’s delicate, tragic eyes, instead.

Esther relayed all this to Nicholas and was met with a sigh of poorly hidden frustration.

“You’re still hung up on theology,” he said. “That isn’t what I—”

“The truck,” said Joanna.

The three of them—Esther, Nicholas, Joanna—were sitting around the kitchen table, Sir Kiwi at Nicholas’s feet. Collins was nowhere to be seen (according to Nicholas, he always made himself scarce for this part) and until now, Joanna had been mostly quiet. Esther turned to her.

“Dad’s truck?” said Esther. She’d seen it in the drive when they pulled up, worn and red and as familiar as the house itself.

“Yes,” said Joanna. “Nicholas said to think about volume, didn’t he? About secrets.”

“Is the truck very loud?” Nicholas said, furrowing his brow. He was clearly not following Joanna’s logic... but Esther was. She could almost feel the soft leather of the steering wheel beneath her hands, the rattle and shake of the pounding speakers as she cranked her music as loud as it would go and screamed the lyrics out the open windows, turning now and then to grin at Joanna’s pained expression in the passenger seat beside her. They’d had their best conversations in that truck. The truck was where Esther had first admitted aloud, both to Joanna and to herself, that she had a crush on a girl; and the truck was the only place Joanna would ever let herself complain about the books, the only place she’d admit to feeling resentful of the pressure.

“Genius,” said Esther. Obviously, Joanna was a natural at this. She turned to Nicholas. “Can we do the ceremony outside, in the truck?”

Nicholas pressed his lips together, considering. “Yes,” he said, though the word was drawn out, doubtful. Then, with more confidence, “Yes. I can work with that.”

The setup took the better part of an hour, Nicholas consulting with Joanna now and then on the availability of certain tools and conscripting Esther to carry armloads of supplies out to the truck. Nicholas clearly had an aesthetic vision, and though Esther was initially skeptical, she had toadmit that by the time he’d finished, the cab of the truck no longer looked quite so much like a truck; or anyway, it did, but a truck in which someone might make magic. Layers of gauzy red fabric darkened all the windows against the winter light and filled the cab with an eerie glow, while colorful cushions and blankets hid the lines of the seats, and a multitude of tea candles flickered on the dashboard. Still, despite the changes, the truck felt as familiar to Esther as her own heartbeat. She gripped the steering wheel with one hand and put the other on the gear shift, feeling herself settle into the space, all the old ease and comfort coming back to her body. She felt, for the first time in days, safe—a feeling that was in and of itself magical, and which no candles or gauzy fabric could approximate. Nicholas sat next to her in the front seat and Joanna squeezed into the back, all of them bundled to their ears against the chilly air, though Esther could feel the warmth of the many candles caressing her cheeks.

“Are you ready?” said Nicholas.

Esther did not know how to answer that, exactly. Was she ready to let him stick her with a needle and fill a bag with her blood? Sure. Was she ready to possibly reassess everything she’d thought she’d known about herself and her relationship to power and to her family and to the world in general?

Was anyone, ever?

“Ready,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “Sing.”

Esther said, “Now?”

“Now.”

She didn’t know any meaningful prayers or chants but Nicholas had promised this didn’t matter. Religion was beside the point, he’d said; it wasconnectionthat mattered. So Esther cleared her throat, put both hands on the wheel, and channeled her devotion as best she could.

Very quickly it became clear that “Smells Like Teen Spirit”was not made to be sung a capella.

She saw Nicholas wince before he schooled his face into an encouraging smile. He and Joanna nodded along as she sang the first verse, though their nods became more infrequent as she moved into the section that was entirely comprised of the word “hello” over and over. She tried to remember how it had felt to drive the back roads as a teenager, blasting her music and scream-singing at the top of her lungs, not worrying about how she sounded because it was the volume that mattered, the power of her own voice... but she couldn’t quite get there.

She completed the chorus and the second verse, added some guitar-riff noises, then paused. “Should I... like... feel anything? If this is working?”

“I don’t know what you’ll feel,” said Nicholas. “For me it’s... it’s as if there’s a length of ribbon coiled in my chest and someone’s unspooling it. Plus bees.”

“Bees?”

“Or honey. Same thing.”

Esther couldn’t let that one go: “With due respect, no they’re not.”

“Joanna?” Nicholas said.

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