Chapter 52: Mitch

On my best days, I consider myself a man of science, and through my own, personal research, I’ve concluded that evil is not a condition or a disease; it’s nothing you can diagnose and it’s not tangible. You can’t see or touch evil, you can only sense it, and everyone knows that senses are subjective and easily fooled.

That said, while Magda was not pure evil, there was something off about her. I was trying to determine what, exactly, it was.

“When are you coming back to Florida with me?” she asked.

We were on a walk, wearing snow boots and stomping through forested land that was part of the city’s park service. I had Bijou in the snugly, bundled up close to my chest. My baby was wide awake due to the crisp mountain air.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I like it here. I’m thinking I can teach ski school and maybe Skylar’s dad can get me a job at the preschool during the off-season.”

“But you’ll make peanuts!” Magda passed under a low-hanging branch. A clump of snow fell and landed in her dark hair. She shook it out. “Don’t you want to finish your degree? You’re too smart to work daycare.”

“I like watching the little kids learn. Their choices and reactions as they process sensory input are fascinating.”

“Oh Mitch, you’re so sweet.” She’d been walking ahead of me, but she stepped back, and though the path was a little too narrow for us to walk side by side, she took my hand and we continued down the trail together.

“You know I’m not that sweet,” I told her. “You understand me better than anyone, actually.”

“Of course I do. I know all your secrets, Mitch.”

For better or for worse, that was true.

Years ago, after the whole Amanda Butler debacle, I’d kept to myself, scared that if I became involved with another girl it would end in a natural disaster. The police never even questioned me about Amanda; hours after she’d been declared missing, her body washed up onto shore and the autopsy found she’d drowned at approximately 10:00 p.m. the previous night. Nobody had known I was meeting her, and even I wasn’t sure what had happened. The police believed me when I’d told them I knew nothing and they let me go. After that I stayed quiet, studied hard, and after school I would skateboard up and down the streets of my neighborhood.

There was a skate park about half a mile from the apartment complex where my dad and I lived. One morning I was practicing my ollies and backslides, feeling at peace as the sunrise turned everything pink. Then a dark-haired girl in a bright red t-shirt showed up. It seemed as if her board was just a natural extension of her feet, the way she glided over pavement, up and down the concrete slopes and inclines. After a while I forgot about my own skating and I just stood watching her. She went down the largest ramp fast as a lightning bolt and then skidded to a halt right in front of me.

“Hi, Mitch,” she said.

My jaw dropped. “You know me?”

Her laugh was like jingle bells. “Duh. We sit next to each other in math.” She started to skate away, but glancing back she said, “Shame about what happened to Amanda Butler.”

“Um, yeah.”

Sweat formed at the back of my neck and under my arms. My heart began to pound. Did she know? Did this girl somehow understand my culpability? I skated towards her, but she was so fast that she just became a bright red blur. But the bright red wasn’t simply from the fabric that covered her; she had this dusty aura, a crimson cloud that followed her everywhere, settling over her head and behind her back like lethal butterfly wings.

We skated for a while and then went our separate ways, but I thought about her all weekend. On Monday morning in math class I sat down next to her, marveling at how I’d never noticed her before.

“Hi,” I said, squinting to see her face, which was blurred by scarlet. I guessed the aura was a permanent thing for her. “I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Magda,” she replied.

“I’m Mitch.”

There was her jingle bell laugh again. “I know.”

Looking into her eyes, I sensed that she knew a lot, but if any information was new, she’d probably still understand. “Did you know that your aura is like, bright red?”

Magda raised her eyebrows. “Tell me more.”

Then Mrs. Palmer came in and class started, so my explanation of the impossible would have to wait. Yet over time, through school lunches where we sat at the last table by the cafeteria’s exit, on lazy walks home, or on breaks at the skate park, I told Magda what I saw and how I’d come to believe that sensory perception was as subjective as people's’ taste in music or food.

“Just because you experience the world one way and I experience it another, that doesn’t make either of us right or wrong, or sane or crazy,” I explained.

She always acted like she agreed, so I confessed, told her about Amanda Butler, and as the years passed, I also told her about other disturbing incidents that I couldn’t rationalize to anyone else but Magda.

Now here we were, again at an impasse as we walked through the snowy forest.

She squeezed my hand. “Mitch, whatever reservations you have, whatever potential guilt you might be feeling—it will all go away soon enough.”

But if something like guilt existed, how could it just magically go away?

“Magda,” I said, “Do you remember how, back in Middle School science class, we learned that everything in life is formed by atoms, and that matter is just atoms hugging each other because their electrons compel them to?”

“I guess.”

“But I never agreed with that theory, because what about the stuff in life that isn’t formed by matter? What about your red cloud, or Amanda’s tidal wave, or Jo Beth’s ghost?”

Magda stopped walking and released my hand. “You’ve seen Jo Beth’s ghost?”

I hesitated telling her only for a moment. “I see Jo Beth all the time and I don’t think she’s going away. It’s like her atoms are hugging my atoms, because our electrons won’t accept that death kills, or that guilt can be dissolved.”

Magda raised up on her toes, ballerina-like, so close that her red aura surrounded the three of us. She leaned in, smooshed Bijou against my chest, and kissed me on the mouth. I swooned, not with desire like a heroine from one of Skylar’s favorite novels, but because my head felt so light I thought it might float away. My dizziness was back in full force and I had to grab Magda’s shoulder to steady myself.

“What was the kiss for?” I asked.

“For being honest.”

“If I can’t be honest with you, I can’t be honest with anyone.”

“Exactly.”