Magnetite Tonight (pt 6).

You find yourself in the kitchen; Jay is on a stool next to Victoria who is bent over with her elbows resting on the high counter, hands folded; she straightens, coming to you, dropping her hands on your shoulders. Are you all right?

You push her off. I’m leaving, you say. You guys are playing a joke or something.

Victoria clucks her tongue and guides you to another stool and looks in the refrigerator covered with Bewitched magnets until she finds a soda can, popping it open and setting it down in front of you. Jay is picking his fingernail skin to smithereens.

My daughter is young and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, Victoria says. She thinks everything she knows is for fun and games. Be careful.

My dad says the Liars are just grifters, you say, looking from her to Jay. They break into your house but they’re not magic.

Victoria piles her hair and lets it fall in perfect imitation of Katrina, and she pokes Jay. Where’d you get this guy? she says to him, and Jay mutters something and she laughs. He’s a Liar, she says, kissing her nephew’s cheek. So’s his mom and me and our dad and Katrina, too. Yes, it’s not real . . . unless you want it to be and then you’re fucked.

Stop, Jay says. You’re making it worse.

Victoria sighs and starts to say something when three black women burst into the room, screaming with laughter and hanging off of one another, each ten years older than the other; they beg her to come with them and on their way out they grab bowls, pitchers of water, lemons, and the parakeet and its cage.

Jay doesn’t want to be here anymore so he pulls you with him outside, cleaving through the people (and it seems like there’s twice as many in here now, going through drawers and cabinets and crawling under furniture); once you’re outside the silence is startling, broken only by the mews of kittens and cats prowling the yard; Jay tells you that Victoria keeps twenty four of them, always that number and only that, because she’s in a fight with someone who’s trying to kill her. Every time a cat dies, Jay says, she knows she has to defend herself.

You walk out into the yard, the tall grass rustling around your ankles while flashing cat eyes blink at you from just beyond the light in the trees and along the back fence. It’s not cool, Jay calls. That’s what people think and they have all these questions and they think all these things, and I don’t want any of it. This is what happens, I make a friend and they fuck it up. He’s ripping the hair out of his head. I hate magic, I do, I fucking hate it. It’s not even our thing, it’s their thing, it’s what Katrina and her mom do because they just like messing with people. They bend the laws but they can’t break them.

His face is a resentful mask. They can’t break them. They can’t do that.

Later that night, after you’ve calmed Jay and walked him home, you share this with your dad because you tell him everything, and though you never learn of it in your whole life, that is the moment that ignites the flood that nearly kills Rain City one month later.