by Phoebe Barr

When we were in fourth grade, Audrey and I spent recess in the muddy patch of grass just outside the cafeteria, making potions. We gathered up old leaves and gravel and cicada shells and sidewalk chalk dust, mixed them in the divot of a rock that sat by the chain-link fence, and then drank them out of acorn caps, recording their effects in Audrey’s dollar-store composition book.

Half the contents of a cafeteria water bottle, one pinch of purple chalk dust and one of pink, a crushed pillbug, two twigs stripped of their bark, and a flat, triangular pebble: a potion for good luck finding change in the parking lot. Useful if you had no money for lunch.

A handful of grass, two dried-out sycamore seeds, shavings from the purple eraser I got for my birthday, and rainwater: a potion to calm the nerves before a test. Useful because we were both terrified of breaking our lifelong hundred-percent streaks.

Three cigarette stubs, rainwater, and five precious drops of Audrey’s apple juice: a potion that, for thirty seconds, allowed you to see ghosts. Useful because we were desperate for proof of the afterlife theories we’d been working on.

The results were mixed until October, when we hit on our first major success. Audrey and I were starting to have trouble breathing in the school building. Black spots of mold had been gathering around the vents all year, and the air in our little classroom seemed clogged up, too aggressive for our lungs. But a single drop of our potion rendered breathing easy for twenty-four hours.

Audrey was the one who came up with the winning formula. It started with adding dirt to water a little at a time until you’d created a mud broth, viscous but not too thick. You stirred it clockwise with papery sycamore bark. Then you added one brown leaf and one green, the insides of an acorn, pocket lint, a drop of your own blood, and the final flourish, Audrey’s stroke of genius, a dollop of honey that came from an individually wrapped plastic packet we found in the lunchroom.

“It’s perfect,” I told Audrey as we drank. Even after the first sip I could feel my airways relaxing, soothed and revitalized at once. “How did you think of it?”

“It just came to me, you know, like an inspiration.” Audrey wiped her nose on her sleeve, which was already dirty and snot-crusted. She’d been wearing the same shirt all week.

I set my acorn cap down. “You should call it Ultimate Truth.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded sagely. “Like in Divorce. ‘You can taste truth like honey.’” She’d learned from me that intellectuals didn’t say the full titles of the books they were referencing.

• • •

We’d discovered the works of C. S. Lewis the previous summer. An old, out-of-use bathroom at the back of my parents’ apartment was crammed full of grubby cardboard boxes, mementos of their past lives as academics. I opened one up on an afternoon when my mother was out, cleared aside some books in French, and there was Lewis – a bundle of fraying ‘80s paperbacks held together with rubber bands. I hauled them over to my bedroom. From then on, whenever Audrey came over, we read aloud pages at a time of little black text, thrilling at the strange worlds and questions he conjured, looking up words we didn’t know in my pocket dictionary.

The Great Divorce was our favorite. Audrey loved the lizard-killing scene; the moral plight of the ghost in that sequence was lost on us, but the lizard itself, crushed to death in the hands of an angel and thrown away, only to rise up transformed into a brilliant white stallion, that had Audrey in its thrall. Audrey loved horses. Summer afternoons out on the sidewalk by the grocery store, Audrey would play the lizard and I’d play the angel: I’d grab her around the waist and squeeze, squeeze, until she went limp and collapsed to the ground, and then I’d shout the lizard is dead! and she’d leap to her feet, whinnying, prancing up the street and back.

I, meanwhile, was captivated by the scene where the narrator learns he came from a speck in the ground. I used to crawl with Audrey over the asphalt of a nearby driveway, black pavement burning our hands, examining tiny cracks and wondering if a microscopic Hell seethed within one of them.

“Why do you think he makes Hell so small?” Audrey asked me one day, while we sat on the grocery store steps, waiting for her parents to come out. “Is he saying goodness is always stronger than evil?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Little things can still be strong, right? Like germs. You can’t even see them, but they can kill a whole person.”

“Did they have germs when Lewis was writing?”

“I don’t know. He was writing during the Nazis. I think Lewis is trying to say evil can hurt goodness, but it can’t understand goodness. Something that small can’t understand something that big.”

“But goodness can understand evil?”

“Right.”

Audrey stared across the street. I heard her stomach rumble. I wondered what was keeping her parents; usually they went on their break together at noon, came out to give Audrey an employee-discounted turkey sandwich, then slumped down to the corner cafe to spend twenty minutes seated before they had to be back at work. That sandwich was lunch for both of us.

“I don’t really understand it at all,” she said at last. “I mean, I don’t understand why people shoot up schools and movie theaters and stuff. Or why rich people get to kick poor people out of their houses. Or slavery, what about slavery?”

“We’ll probably understand that when we’re older,” I said.

• • •

I brought in a plastic Tupperware container from home, and we filled it with a new batch of our potion for later use. We had to scoop it from the rock divot with our acorn caps, and we lost more of it than we retained, but we were persistent.

We were debating the existence of the aliens from the Space Trilogy – I was certain they were real, Audrey was unconvinced – when Curtis, his green hoodie pulled low over his face, wandered up to us.

“What are you guys making?” he asked.

Curtis and Audrey and I used to play rabbits together back in kindergarten. We didn’t talk much these days; he didn’t talk much to anyone. He spent most of recess seated on the other side of the chain-link fence, playing with a Rubik’s cube so well-handled the colors were barely distinguishable.

“We’re making Ultimate Truth,” I said, scooping another capful of mud into our Tupperware.

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“In Abolition, Lewis calls it the Tao,” said Audrey. She pronounced it “tay-oh”.

“That’s stupid,” said Curtis.

“Be nice and we’ll let you have some,” I said. “It makes breathing in the classroom easy for twenty-four hours.”

“I don’t want your stupid potion.”

“What do you want, then?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Audrey and I waited in silence. His face was pale and his eyes red-rimmed, as though he’d been crying, and as he stood frozen above us I wondered if he was going to start crying again. He seemed to struggle desperately for words which wouldn’t make the trek up his throat.

Finally he said, “I can solve this Rubik’s cube in fifteen seconds.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Relief broke over his face like a tsunami. “It’s true, I’ll prove it!”

“Hey,” said a new voice, “what’s that?”

We turned to find six girls in blue pleated skirts standing on our other side. They were thin, spindly, hair pulled back into six high bouncy ponytails, faces all identical. They stood in a vaguely casual, vaguely threatening formation, hands on their hips, leaning on one leg or the other.

“Hi,” said Audrey. “Do you want to try our potion?”

The girls looked down at the muddy rock soup. Their eyes were all vivid, electric blue. Were they wearing makeup, I wondered? Was that how makeup made you look? Maybe it was magic.

“What’s in it?” asked the first girl who had spoken.

“Leaves and honey,” I said. “It’s called Ultimate Truth and you can taste it like honey.”

“It looks like mud and trash,” said another girl.

“They feed us trash in the cafeteria, too, you know,” said a third. “You ought to hear how they make the meat they put in our sandwiches. It’s just chicken guts and wax.”

“I swore off meat,” said the first girl. “I kept getting stomachaches every day after lunch. I think I’ll just eat fruits and vegetables for the rest of my life.”

“You’d die if you did that.”

“Not as soon as I’d die eating mud and trash.”

I glanced backward; Curtis had retreated, his green-hoodie silhouette just visible melting back against the chain-link fence. I felt a nauseous twist in the pit of my stomach and wondered if the chicken guts were catching up to me, too.

The first girl crouched down to meet our eyes.

“Hey, listen,” she said, voice lowered. “From one girl to another, you should be careful around that boy. Isabel said he had problems.”

“Curtis?”

“Yeah. She said he had a screaming fit last week and hit a teacher. She said he hit a girl in the grade below us, too. Like right in the stomach. She had to go to the nurse.”

Audrey and I turned our gazes back toward him as the girl hopped up, and the six identical pleated skirts and ponytails bounced away, back toward the slide. He was just a greenish mound now, curled in on himself, like a clump of wet leaves fallen from the tree too soon.

“Maybe he went crazy because he couldn’t breathe right,” said Audrey.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe he’s an orphan or something.”

• • •

One Saturday a month, my mother took a break from her endless job hunting and we went out to breakfast at a cheap little diner that looked to me like a palace. She let me order anything I wanted: huge, brick-heavy pancakes with syrupy canned peaches piled on top, thick strips of bacon, hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream. When we were finished, she took me down to a concrete building with linoleum hallways and fluorescent lights to visit my father.

Back in kindergarten, my father had gained me some amount of playground-credit. My classmates probably imagined some seven-foot, tattooed criminal who was liable to break out and go on a murder spree if anyone wronged his daughter. To me, the thought of my timid, narrow-chested, bespectacled father ever hurting anyone was beyond ridiculous, but I could never figure out how to dispel the idea.

On our October visit, I sat atop three phone books on a folding chair and spoke to him through a pane of glass. A burly, bored-looking police officer stood off to the side, arms folded, glaring lazily at us.

“How are you?” I asked.

My father spoke softly and clearly. “I’m just fine. I recently finished a class on urban planning.”

“Did you write anything?”

“Yes, a paper about the disparity of subway access in three American cities.”

I considered the word disparity. I spoke slowly, selecting my words with care and placing them in order. “You mean the cities all had different amounts of subway access, or the cities all had different subway access in different parts?”

“Good question. The latter. What have you been up to?”

“I just finished reading The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.”

“Oh, interesting.” His eyes gleamed. “One of his lesser-known works, but it’s had quite an enduring cultural impact. What did you think of it?”

“Well, I …” I struggled for a moment. “I liked it okay, but I thought he said all the same things better in The Great Divorce.”

“Really? Abolition is so clean, so simple and complete. He sets out to prove the existence of universal morality and reason and he follows that thread straight to the end.”

“But it’s not real,” I tried to explain. I’d been working on this thesis since I’d finished the book, painstakingly untangling my feelings. “It’s all just, just thoughts in his head. When I get on the bus in the morning it’s like Divorce is real. Like I’m down a little hole in the ground when I get in, but when I get out, I could be somewhere else, actually, not just in my imagination.”

My father tilted his head to one side, a tiny smile on his face. “But the bus ride to Heaven in Divorce isn’t even real within the confines of the novel. It’s just a dream the narrator is having. What could be more imaginary?”

“It doesn’t feel imaginary, though. I mean …” I was lost for words. As often happened when Audrey and I reached a particularly difficult passage, I felt concepts slipping from my grasp, revelations just at the edge of my consciousness that I didn’t have the skill or the fortitude to pin down. Frustration heated my cheeks, and I looked at my lap. “I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel imaginary.”

“What you’re experiencing,” he said, “is the power of fiction, of narrative. Lots of well-educated adults don’t appreciate that power. The sensory specificity of the narrator’s visions in Divorce forces you to take philosophical concepts and apply them to everyday human experiences. It’s the same technique Dante uses in his Comedy, incidentally, which was clearly a heavy inspiration for Lewis.”

I didn’t know anything about Dante, but the words sparked something in my mind; a brief excitement flared up, until I raised my eyes to my father’s and caught the look on his face. There was something in the quality of that small smile. I couldn’t have explained it, but it occurred to me all at once that he was trying to impress me.

We stared at each other, not speaking. Gradually his face fell. He must have realized that I knew.

After a moment I passed the corded phone to my mother, sliding out of the chair and away from the sight of him.

“Hey,” my mother said.

“Hi, sweetie. How’s the job search?”

“The economy’s in shambles.”

“What a surprise. If we were in different company, maybe I’d prophesize some kind of proletarian revolution.”

My mother chuckled wearily. “I’m sure.”

My father was in prison for dealing drugs. He and my mother had been arrested over a dozen times for acts of civil disobedience, back in their PhD days, but they’d never served any time for those arrests. It was unemployment, financial despair, that changed our family’s fortunes irrevocably when I was too young to remember. I was only vaguely aware of all this, but the history was all there in those grubby cardboard boxes: all there in the philosophers and theologians and authors struggling to explain society, to confront infamy, to plumb the depths of what the desperate would attempt in order to rescue themselves.

• • •

After Audrey and I had perfected our first potion, our ambitions grew. December encroached, and the school’s heating had been out of commission for weeks, so we got to work on a potion that would keep us warm in class.

Winter reduced our options for natural ingredients – the green leaves were all gone, the grass was dead, and the acorns had all been snatched up by squirrels – but when we came back from Thanksgiving break, we had a stroke of luck. The art teacher came to our classroom one morning to let us know we could come to his room during recess and pick out a few art supplies we wanted.

“Art classes are being cut this spring,” he explained, “but I don’t want to take any of the supplies away with me. I bought them for the school.”

Audrey and I rushed there immediately after lunch. The teacher was at his desk, on his computer, half-watching us to ensure we didn’t go for the scissors. We paced the paint-splattered tables and overcrowded shelves with manic eyes. I collected a dusty, half-used box of watercolors, a dried-out cube of brown clay, six orange-tan oil pastel crayon stubs, two glue sticks, and a little plastic container of purple and blue beads. Audrey took three paintbrushes, a rainbow bundle of pipe cleaners, a stack of popsicle sticks, and a handful of shiny mosaic tiles. We debated taking a shallow hand-thrown bowl that had once contained yarn.

“We could take our potions to the next level with this,” I said.

“But we’ve always used the rock,” said Audrey. “What if the magic only works because of the rock?”

“Well, the bowl could be an experiment.”

“Or it could be selling out.”

I didn’t follow this argument entirely, but it struck me as profound, a soulful insight. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”

“What are you girls up to?” asked the art teacher, looking up from his computer.

“Looking for potion ingredients,” I said.

“Oh, of course.”

“Are you going to go work at a different school?” Audrey asked him.

“I hope so. I’m looking for a job around here.”

“Good luck,” I said. “The economy’s in shambles.”

He let out a loud snort, then turned his face away from us, pressing a fist over his mouth in a poor attempt to contain his laughter. I stood still and waited for an explanation. He didn’t look back at us. Finally, I returned to Audrey’s side, helping her stuff all our new supplies into our backpacks. He was still laughing when we left the art room for the last time.

A light snow fell outside. That recess, brewing in our old rock divot, we combined snow, oil pastels, beads, pipe cleaner fuzz, and a gluey clump of dead leaves scraped from the oak tree’s roots. We used popsicle sticks to eat it, having run out of acorn caps. I felt the warmth immediately when it landed in my stomach. It started at two points, in my chest and deep at the back of my brain, and it spread outward like spilled hot chocolate, to the tips of my ears and my fingers.

We pulled off our hats and gloves. Audrey plunged her bare hands into a pile of snow and it dissolved in a puff of steam. We grinned at each other, triumphant.

That afternoon, our classmates had coats and scarves wrapped tight around them as the temperature continued to drop, but Audrey and I stripped down to our long-sleeved T-shirts and relaxed against our chairs. During the final half-hour of the day, reserved for quiet reading, we sprawled out on our bellies on the glue-stained carpet and perused the school’s copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Curtis sidled up to us, his fingers folded into his green hoodie’s sleeves.

“How come you aren’t cold?” he asked.

“Shh,” said Audrey. “We’re supposed to be quiet.”

“I’m being quiet.”

“We don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“I just want to know. Is it because of the potions?”

I met Audrey’s eyes. We discussed it wordlessly; we’d been warned to stay away from Curtis, but we had plenty of the potion left outside in the rock divot. And he was cold, shivering without a coat over his hoodie. There was no way of knowing if he didn’t have a coat at all or if he was just too embarrassed to wear it because he was a boy.

“Yeah,” said Audrey at last. “Come outside after school and we’ll show it to you.”

When the final bell rang, in the fifteen minutes before the bus came to take us home, we took Curtis out to the recess field to try the potion. It had congealed in the cold air. Curtis took a lump on a popsicle stick and swallowed it.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said.

“Try another bite,” I said.

He did. He swallowed with difficulty and made a face. “You guys are lying. You’re making fun of me.”

Three of the pleated skirts sidled up to us, their chests puffed out, their electric-blue eyes glaring.

“Hey,” said one. “Leave them alone, Curtis.”

“They tried to poison me,” Curtis said, his face going red.

“They’re just a couple of weirdos. You’re a sicko.”

Curtis stood up, then froze again, as he had the first time he’d tried to speak to us. His breath came fast and shallow. The pleated skirts didn’t move, arms folded over their chests. His eyes bugged. They watched coldly as he doubled over and vomited.

“There you go,” said the one in the middle. “Probably the chicken guts.”

The one to her right marched up to him as he sank to the ground. She kicked him in the chest.

“Sicko,” she said.

What happened next was so sudden I could only remember it in still images, flashing by me one at a time. I saw Curtis’s face, still dead-leaf red, his eyes too white within it, staring speechlessly up at the girl. Then I saw him on his feet, hands freed all at once from his sleeves, and he was carrying something other than his Rubik’s cube, something red and silver and shiny and dull. Dread plunged into my stomach even before I realized what the something was. Then I heard gasps, one-two-three in quick succession, and a ripping noise, and a scream.

And then, as though by magic, I saw the girl several feet away, her face splayed open in shock, her ponytail dangling half-severed from her head.

“You freak!” she wailed.

Then the other pleated skirts started screaming, too. Teachers came running from somewhere, swarming over the grassless mud. Curtis flailed against two pairs of restraining hands. He shouted hoarse nonsense, his cheap little pocketknife waving. Audrey and I sat crouched over our rock, hearts not beating, feeling the cold for the first time since recess.

I was thinking about kindergarten, when Audrey and Curtis and I had traded fruit snacks on the naptime rug. I was remembering how one day he’d gotten one stuck in his nose, how he’d laughed and laughed. The kindergarten classrooms were in the basement and yet I remembered that rug as full of sunlight.

• • •

The school had an anti-bullying assembly in January. We crowded into the low-ceilinged yellow gymnasium to hear it, fifth-graders and teachers seated in folding chairs, the rest of us cross-legged in lines on the cold linoleum floor. Curtis wasn’t there. The girl whose ponytail he’d severed sat among her identical friends, standing out with her limp, short hair, head hung low.

A man in a gray suit mounted a stage at the front. He had a projector which displayed an image of a teenage girl staring pensively out a window.

“Bullying is a serious problem,” he said. “This school needs to wake up and figure out its priorities. The more bullies there are at a school, the fewer scholars. How many scholars do you think there are here?”

The next slide on his projector was a set of graphs to the effect that our school district had the lowest standardized test scores in the city.

“Take a good look,” he said. “Think about what this means. Think about how many of you here will never make it to college or make anything of yourselves. The majority of you – and I’m just stating facts – will wind up as janitors, fast-food workers, and drug dealers.”

Some of the teachers were fidgeting. Others nodded along, glaring down at us from their chairs.

“It’s no surprise this kind of environment fosters bullying,” the man said. “But you out there, it’s your duty to try to rise above. You’re surrounded by dangerous people. How will you respond? Think about your studies.”

It was a short presentation, over before we would have had our first class change. At the end we lined up to return to the chilly, sour-smelling classroom, unsure what advice we were supposed to have received.

“We’re lucky no one’s ever tried to bully us,” said Audrey.

“There were the boys in second grade who stole our shoes,” I reminded her.

“Oh, right. But that doesn’t count, does it? I mean, that wasn’t dangerous.”

“Maybe not.”

We used beads, snow, and clay for a potion to make ourselves invisible to bullies. By that point, our powers had grown to an astonishing height: when the teachers called for the end of recess, we didn’t follow the rest of our class inside, and no one even noticed our absence. We weren’t bothered by anyone all afternoon. We sat by our rock for hours, perfectly warm despite the freezing air, and we resumed our discussion of the Space Trilogy, wondering why, if the whole thing was made up, C. S. Lewis himself was a character in book two.

• • •

There was one book of Lewis’s that we never spoke about. It was slimmer than any of the others, and more well-handled; the cover and title page had fallen off, so we never learned what it was called. All we saw at the top of the pile of pages was CHAPTER ONE, and beneath it the words No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. That opening sentence was underlined in smudgy green ink.

Audrey read aloud the first few pages of that book before I asked her to stop. She did, relieved. I felt uneasy and unbalanced for hours afterward. My head swam with confused visions of a winged, haloed giant slumped against a chain-link fence, eyes hollow and red-rimmed, wings wrapped around itself as if trying to hide.

That book sat in the far corner of my bedroom for weeks, heavy like a black hole, making my stomach lurch whenever my eyes passed over it. Audrey and I moved on to The Screwtape Letters.

• • •

In April came devastating news. A fly infestation had rendered the cafeteria completely unusable, and since the whole facility was outrageously old, the school had received money to rebuild it. They’d be tearing up our field, chopping down the oak tree and the two sycamores, to make room for an expanded and improved lunchroom.

“We can’t let this happen,” I said furiously, as we sat on the floor of my bedroom on Sunday afternoon. My mother was out and we had the apartment to ourselves.

“They didn’t ask us if we wanted a new lunchroom,” said Audrey. “We’d have told them about the magic. Why don’t they ever ask us what we want?”

“Because they don’t know what we know. They don’t even know that magic is real. We have to do something, Audrey.”

“Do what?”

I flopped onto my back and stared at the ceiling, heart thundering in my ears. Rage was making me reckless. I had no clear sense of what my parents had done to get arrested in their former lives, but I had vague images of them sitting in chairs, blocking doors, refusing to move when people threatened them. “What if we lie down on the field when they come in with the machines? So they’d have to run over us if they wanted to dig it up?”

“Really?” Audrey lay down with me. “Would that work?”

“Students always do it in the movements.”

“Wouldn’t we get in trouble?”

“Sure, that’s how we show we’re serious.” I sat up again, unable to lie still. “That’s how we show how important the field is.”

“Right.” Audrey spoke slowly, thinking. “Right, and plus, we could make a bunch of good-luck potions while we’re out there.”

“Yes, yes, that’s perfect.” The picture was solidifying in my head now. The clearing of the field was supposed to take place in a week; we could spend that time planning, deciding what we’d need, maybe asking my mother sly questions about her days of civil disobedience.

“Do you think Lewis would do something like this?” Audrey asked.

“Definitely. He’s always talking about courage and stuff. Plus, he fought the Nazis, remember?”

“He fought them?”

“Well, he fought someone, anyway.” I couldn’t remember the details. “He was in a war.”

From then until Friday, Audrey and I spent every moment we could together. Anticipation replaced our anger as we pictured the commotion we would cause. We imagined ourselves as immovable angels, or maybe lions, standing in defense of our magic. We collected things we’d lifted from home: scraps of rosemary and grains of rice from kitchen counters, hanging threads snipped from old coats in the closet. We went through all the potions, successes and failures, that we’d recorded in Audrey’s notebook. We asked our parents’ permission to sleep over at each other’s houses on Friday night.

On Wednesday, I remembered that protesters carried signs. There was no more art room, so I brought in a piece of ragged-edged cardboard I’d pulled from the trash and Audrey brought Sharpies from the principal’s office, and we spent recess painstakingly writing out DON’T TEAR UP THE FIELD in block letters. We hid the sign in my backpack.

“I saw a newspaper picture of some people with signs like this,” said Audrey. “Do you think we’ll be in the newspaper?”

“Maybe,” I said, an unfamiliar thrill going through me. “Yeah, maybe.”

On Friday it rained all morning. The field, poorly kept and overgrown with weeds as well as grass, had turned to a thick black-green soup by midday. Audrey and I watched it nervously at recess. By the time the final bell rang, the rain had turned to mist, giving the field a strange, unearthly look, everything around it fading into pale gray when we sat by our rock. The air was warm by now, but I still shivered.

“How long do we have before someone notices our protest?” Audrey asked.

“Maybe a few hours,” I said. Bulldozers were supposed to arrive tonight.

We gathered up all the evidence of springtime we could: dandelions, both white and yellow; petals dropped from the trees; little vines that clung to the chain-link fence, their stems full of fragrant whitish goop; the wings of fallen ladybugs. Grass-flecked mud caked our sneakers and the cuffs of our jeans. When we had our ingredients together, with nothing else to do, we propped our slightly soggy cardboard sign up on the rock and then sat cross-legged in front of it. We ignored the wetness beneath us.

Our final potion: five ladybug wings, the entire contents of our two kitchen counters, the rest of our clay and oil pastels, all the vine-goop we could squeeze out into the divot, ten yellow dandelion heads, one head of dandelion fluff, a whole stick of glue, purple beads, and mud. By the time we’d finished it, sunset was lighting the mist on fire from the direction of the playground. In the other direction blackness encroached.

“This is powerful,” Audrey murmured. “I can feel it.”

The school around us was eerily silent. Cars had all departed; there were no more distant shouts from either the playground or the parking lot. The trees above us whispered invisibly. The mud on the ground felt cold beneath my fingers.

“The bulldozers could be here any minute,” I said. “We’d better drink.”

We used our last two popsicle sticks to slurp the potion from the divot. My anticipation had reached its peak. I felt larger than I ever had in my life, felt I could swell to the size of a building and look down at my tiny physical self like a puppeteer. I watched myself swallow.

We waited. The sunset dimmed, leaving us in black-gray mist.

“Is it working?” Audrey whispered.

I breathed in deep. Then I began to hear a ringing in my ears, high and repeating like a train whistle. It blotted out the sound of the trees. Somehow it sounded like a growing bright light.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. I clasped my hands together, skin buzzing. The mud beneath me was starting to feel hot. I struggled to my feet, gripping the chain-link fence for balance; I sensed something was approaching us. I wondered if amid the clamor was the roar of bulldozers or the squeal of police sirens. Maybe they’d come to do battle.

“Hello?” I called out.

Garbled against the merciless ringing, I heard Audrey’s voice echo mine. “Hello?”

The noise only grew in response.

I stumbled forward, slipping and sliding on the hot mud. The mist made me feel like I was floating through a formless void. My breath came too fast. My lungs felt clogged, clusters of mold catching up to me again. I strained my eyes to see the playground – or the parking lot, I couldn’t remember which way I was facing.

The ringing was reaching a fevered volume. I pressed my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. This whole place smelled like a teeming riverbank, like fish and frogs and waterbugs. The potion was like fire in my veins, and everything was slipping away from me, including words.

Then came the flash of light. My eyes flew open at the same moment the ringing stopped, leaving me in dead silence.

I stared up at something impossible.

It was the stallion, the great white stallion that Audrey had evoked in front of the grocery store in summer, but it was so huge that it filled the sky. Like a bank of towering cumulonimbus clouds. Its head dipped down so its snout was only yards away from me, and its eyes, big as police cars and red as sirens, glared down into mine. The rest of it emitted an unpleasant sterile glow. That white pulsed to the frantic beating of my heart, intermittently illuminating the world around it.

The world it showed was one of geometric shapes in harsh black and white. The shapes were unnaturally still, so still they made me feel like I was spinning. They seemed to repeat forever backward, in larger and larger versions, until they vanished into the surrounding dark.

My mouth opened. I wanted to ask what are you? but the question stuck in my throat. I felt like Curtis, unable to speak or even breathe.

Yet I think the horse understood me, because a moment later its own colossal mouth opened and the ringing returned, this time a deafening peal. It reverberated into my brain and deposited an answer there without words. I knew the name it was telling me without having to hear it; I’d heard it a hundred times, I felt its shape in my bone marrow.

Ultimate Truth.

I was ten years old, I’d been in a prison and a derelict, mold-riddled, fly-infested school, I’d watched an old friend attack a girl with a knife, I’d eaten chicken guts and wax for years, but I’d never felt anything like the terror that gripped me then.

The thing floated toward me without moving. I scrambled away, fell backward into the mud. I rose, filthy and dripping, and ran.

“Audrey!” I screamed. “Audrey!”

Her hands were on my shoulders. She was standing, too, panting as though she’d run a mile.

“Is that you?” she gasped.

I couldn’t see. I reached out and clutched at her arms. I felt tears on my face, though I wasn’t crying; I was too stricken to cry.

“I don’t like this,” Audrey whimpered. “I want to go home. Can we go home now?”

“How?”

She was speechless. Neither of us knew.

I could still feel that thing behind me. I didn’t dare turn around to see it, but I knew it was there, waiting to be noticed; I knew it was waiting for the chance to show us more. I knew, too, that the only way to banish it was to let the potion run through our systems.

“Talk to me, Audrey,” I said. “Can you talk to me?”

“What should I say?”

I didn’t know. I was just desperate to hear her voice. “Remember the day we met?”

“Yeah …” She held my hands tight, still struggling to steady her own breathing. “Yeah, I remember. Kindergarten.”

“When we both had peanut butter sandwiches, so we had to sit at the allergy-free table.”

“I remember.”

“And we started making up a story together.”

“About the caterpillars who turned into frogs instead of butterflies.”

“That was a good story.” I shut my eyes and made myself see her, in kindergarten lying on the impossible sunlit carpet, in second grade retrieving our shoes from maybe-bullies, this summer sitting beside me on the shady steps of the grocery store.

“You’re never going to go anywhere, are you?” Audrey asked.

“What?”

“I mean, you’ll never move away to another school or anything?”

“No, no, I won’t.” I hugged her. My arms must have left mud-stains on her shirt. “We’re going to be best friends for the rest of our lives.”

Audrey hugged me back. Her head buried itself in my shoulder. Her presence was solid, safe, a comfort to stave off the fear in my chest.

We didn’t leave that embrace until the police found us.

It all ended in a mess a little after midnight. I don’t think anyone ever saw our sign, and we certainly weren’t coherent enough to explain what we were doing there. I think when the police officer – I saw him as the same burly, glaring man who’d stood to the side while I talked to my father, though it might not have been – stuck his flashlight in my face, I squeaked out something about a white horse and ultimate truth. We were delivered, muddy and shaking, into the arms of our anxious parents without fanfare. I don’t remember if the bulldozers ever arrived. They probably didn’t, because of the rain.

My mother spoke sternly to me on the drive home, but she must have had sympathy for my shaken state, because she didn’t propose any punishment. Anyway, she was excited. She’d found a job, an evening shift at a local library, and she couldn’t resist telling me before I went to bed that things were about to get better.

• • •

Audrey and I stayed away from the field all the following week. When the recess bell rang, we hid in the bathroom. Audrey was never able to describe to me what she’d seen that night, but I didn’t think I could glimpse those trees and that rock again without seeing the glowing horse and the terrible world it illuminated. We were relieved for the chance to forget about the whole thing.

Still, at the end of the month, when at last we ventured outside again, we couldn’t refrain from sitting by the remaining piece of fence and staring at the construction site. The towering oak and sycamore trees were gone. The grass and vines and dandelions and mud had been ripped out, replaced with clean white cement. Construction had only just begun, but already it looked just like the rest of the school, just like the square office buildings that surrounded it.

Concepts were slipping from my grasp again, moving beyond words. There was something indescribably small and ugly and pitiful about the scene. In fact, the whole world around it, the whole world I knew seemed small and ugly and pitiful. I felt like I’d never really looked at it before. My eyes burned with inexplicable tears.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Audrey.

“Me neither,” I said.

“I think,” she said slowly, “I think grief feels like fear.”

I nodded. It was an insight that had occurred to me, as well.

• • •

That afternoon we boarded the bus home together. We talked about my mother’s new job and the possibility of finding a magic portal in the library if we went there late at night. We found two seats together near the back of the bus, where the smell of cigarettes was irreversibly saturated into the frayed cushions, and we sat with our pink backpacks between our knees as the engine shuddered to life.

Audrey told me to close my eyes. I did, and as we started moving, we imagined together in whispers: imagined that the bus was going to lift off the street, expand into the sky, leave this world behind like a speck in the ground and take us to a radiant green valley. There we’d find the leaves solid enough to cut our fingers on, the mountains far enough to journey through forever, and everything in the whole universe just as it should be.