Lulu nodded. “I convinced myself I’d imagined it. But then, a couple of years later, we read Macbeth in English class. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’ ” she recited, “ ‘something wicked this way comes.’ I was curious and braver than I had been. So I pulled a thumbtack from my corkboard, pricked my finger. And everything went . . . floaty.”

“You felt dizzy?”

She looked up, her smile wry. “No, I mean literally. The spark appeared again. Instead of extinguishing it, I let it live. And everything went floaty. Comp, screen, notebooks, books.” She wiggled her fingers. “Those little plastic people they gave away at Saul’s Pizza for a while? I had like forty of those in a box.”

“I remember,” I said with a smile.

My parents loved Saul’s, and they had a basket of plastic trinkets that kids waiting on pizzas could choose from. Lulu always took the figurines; I took the temporary pizza tattoos.

Tears welled at the memory of my mom, and I brushed them away.

“At first, I thought the city was under attack or my mom had done something magical downstairs. But then I pricked my finger again. And all the spells I hadn’t been able to do, all the charms that hadn’t worked just . . . did.” She looked down, frowned, as if revisiting those memories. “I sat there for a long time, once I’d figured out what I’d done. And not entirely sure what I was going to do about it. I was, like, crazy relieved that I could do something. That I wasn’t just a family aberration. But I also felt . . . abnormal.”

That word—so full of meaning—was a vise around my heart. Because I knew exactly how she felt. I’d felt that way, too.

“They were both good witches, right? And I was . . . not.”

“You told your mother?”

“Didn’t have to,” Lulu said, taking a drink. “She felt me doing it in the house. Dark magic has its own kind of shadow about it. Something you can feel. She guessed what I’d done, and then I showed her.”

“Did she freak out?”

“She was actually really cool about the whole thing. But you could see there was a part of her that wanted to dive into it—to start using again. And part of her—I guess recovery—was to learn to sit with those feelings. Acknowledge them and experience them until they passed. So we sat with it. We just, I don’t know, felt our emotions about it. Sometimes we talked about it. Mostly we didn’t. We just—tried to adjust. And then the job opportunity came up in Oregon, and they thought it was best to put more space between us, and I agreed.”

“That was a really adult decision.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m serious, Lulu. I mean, not just avoiding magic altogether—the teetotaler’s approach—but putting space between you and your mother. The easy thing would have been ignoring the risk—pretending everything was fine. Instead, you did something hard in order to protect yourselves and everyone else.”