Solving for X
by L. Inman
When she was a girl her mother often let her play with her jewelry box. Tara understood the significance of some of the things, like the necklaces and the rings—remembered her mother receiving some of them, as gifts—but not of others. Like the two mercury dimes taped together, the cellophane tape ancient and shiny, slick to the touch, the winged heads frosted with the adhesive—what did they stand for, to her mother?
Tara and her mother would pretend that she played with the box to be useful, to untangle the necklace chains (which seemed always miraculously to gather knots while shut in the box) and rearrange the rings. When no one else was around Tara wound up the music box and danced to the tinny plaintive melody of 'Love Story', usually ending by smirking deprecatingly at herself in the mirror.
Her mother left her the jewelry box when she died. She also left something else: little gifts, here and there, tangible and intangible, all of which added up to a large knot Tara had to unravel, made of many chains—anger at her mother for dying (and was that the same chain as her buried anger at her father?), her sense of herself as different (and were they all one difference, or were there many?), the hollow feeling of gratitude that guided her submission, and the disturbing counterpoint of resentment that marred it.
There was only one clear tail to the knot, an anchor, an opening, an opportunity. Tara seized on it.
She went to college.
So many shiny-haired girls with shiny cars and loud laughs. Everything about them smooth, svelte, effortless—from the swing of their tanned and boldly exposed legs to the toss of their heads. Boys, full of awkward angles and sly looks and careless, aggressive jokes. And she, not svelte, not stylish, but nevertheless...free. She tried her hair in different styles whether it worked or not. Found herself drawn to clothes with almost Eastern, almost liturgical outlandishness: tassels and embroidered-in mirrors, warm, earthy colors like a sunset in a volcanic desert, and mixed them in with what she'd brought from home. Luxuriated in her coveted single dorm room.
And she did magic, still hiding behind closed doors with it, still doing spells piecemeal and one at a time, conscious of the parallel between her sleek coed counterparts with their wholehearted plunge into the party scene and her own tantalizing headrush of freedom. She bought magic books with her pocket money and pored over them, gathering power to herself with no hurry: working at the knots, working at them, trying one tangled glutted end and then another of the morass in her mind.
She spoke little and worked much. Kept her head down, glanced up at the world strictly for navigation.
She figured out one new thing early on, however. If she was going to have a new life in the real world (the world in which people did things and had lovers and created rhythm), she would have to come out of her shell a bit. So she looked around for an activity to get into. This was college, people got into activities. She could go to the activity, dip her toe in the waters, then go home and do a spell to center herself. It would be fine; it would work.
The Wicca group seemed a natural choice. She joined. It was boring. The other group members were no less sleek than the sorority girls, and the two groups even overlapped. Tara waited patiently for someone to say something that would show they understood what was going on beneath the surface here, that they too were impelled by an urge to build something lovely with their magicks, a bulwark against not misfortune or negativethink, but against real evil. But no one ever did. It was discouraging.
Perhaps she was the kind of different they had said she was back home. Perhaps it was all one difference after all.
But simple as that solution seemed, it somehow failed to make the knots fall loose and unravel. Tara felt the old stubbornness uncoil within her, and this time, for the first time, she decided to go with it. She kept going to the Wicca group. Eventually she would get a word in edgewise and eventually she would either get it through those shiny heads that witchcraft was craft, not arts-and-crafts; or—well, something would happen.
Something would give.
Something did give, but not quite the something she thought, the last time she ever attended the Wicca group. Out of the patter of what Tara had come to think of as Positivetalk, someone said something about a spell.
Tara looked, and saw: a pixie. A redheaded pixie, with hair styled in a flip and endearingly mismatched clothing. A disgruntled pixie, frowning at the glossy-haired leader of the pack and her talk of empowering bake sales.
Tara opened her mouth to help, but as usual the sentences turned amorphous on her and refused to pick themselves up and go. With a sense of relief, she finally just gave up; and a bit of the knot fell free. The group was ridiculous; she wasn't crazy; her difference wasn't absolute; her hunch about herself had been right.
And, of course, beyond this constant journey homeward to habitual self—there was the pixie. The next clue toward solution in what Tara felt to be a sort of cosmic scavenger hunt.
The meeting broke up in a flurry of books and chatter, but Tara hardly noticed the debris of her earlier efforts to connect as it cleared away. With one part great courage and one part surefooted certainty, she went to talk to the pixie.
Her name was Willow.
Finis
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