Ritual Magic

cracks for her, would there? No more school. At least she didn’t think so. She was fifty-seven years old, even if her memories were only twelve. They didn’t make fifty-seven-year-old women go to school, did they?
    Someone turned on a radio or a stereo. Music, anyway. It was the classic kind of music her dad liked, so she pretended to like it, too. Not that it seemed to matter to him.
    Why couldn’t it have been him who died, and not Mama?
    Guilt bit hard. She sat up and started to throw back the covers, wanting to run, just run, until she didn’t feel so much of everything. And she saw Fluffy.
    He’d been pink once. Now he was a dingy sort of no- color that just looked old. But the scrap of ribbon around his neck had held on to some of the pink, and his face and the insides of his ears were black—faded, but still black. Someone had left him here for her. Someone had put him on the bed next to her pillow. Julia grabbed the little stuffed lamb and hugged him tight.
    She was way too old for stuffed animals. She didn’t care. Memories were stacked up in him, piled up in layers she could feel, weighty and dense, when she hugged him. She didn’t think,
remember when.
She held that memory, all sorts of memories, in the rough, tactile form of a scruffy stuffed lamb.
    There was a TV table next to the bed. It held a flashlight and a glass of water. The flashlight made her eyes sting. It made her a little bit mad, too. That had to be Mequi’s idea. Mequi was the only one other than Mama who knew she’d slept with a flashlight until she was ten, but she wasn’t ten anymore. Either way you counted up her age, she was too old to need a flashlight to feel safe in the dark. Mequi shouldn’t have told anyone she needed a flashlight, and besides, she didn’t anymore.
    But maybe Mequi didn’t remember exactly when Julia stopped needing a flashlight at bedtime. For her, that was a very long time ago.
    Julia sniffed and scowled and reached for the glass of water because now that she thought about it, she was really thirsty. She drank most of the water and sighed. Now she’d have to find the bathroom.
    She put Fluffy on her pillow and got all the way to the door before she realized she’d almost gone out of the room in her pajamas. In someone’s pajamas, anyway. They were white with little blue flowers, and they weren’t what she’d been wearing when she went to Sam’s lair, which meant someone had put them on her while she was asleep. That creeped her out.
    She bit her lip, then put her ear up against the door, wanting to know who was out there. At first she didn’t hear much, but then someone spoke, and it was him. Mr. Turner. She couldn’t hear very well . . . mumble, mumble,
few more minutes
, mumble. Then someone else spoke. A woman. Her voice was familiar, but even if it hadn’t been, Julia knew who it had to be.
    Miss Yu. Lily Yu. The FBI agent she’d met yesterday . . . no, not yesterday. Two days ago. Sam said he’d spent twenty-six hours fixing her, then she’d slept, and now it was morning. So it was two days since she found herself outside the restroom in the wrong body.
    Miss Yu lived here, too. She was Mr. Turner’s fiancée.
    Julia’s stomach felt sort of clenched and curious at the same time. Miss Yu was living in sin with Mr. Turner. He said people didn’t think of it that way anymore because the sexual revolution had changed things. Well, he hadn’t said those exact words, but she thought that’s what he meant. Julia’s mother had not approved of the sexual revolution. She said it was just a bunch of silly hippies who thought they’d invented sleeping around, when really people had been misbehaving that way for thousands of years only they didn’t talk about it all the time.
    Miss Yu was trying to find the bad guys who’d hurt Julia, which meant Julia ought to like her. But she was going to marry Mr. Turner, which made Julia not like her very much, even though that was silly. Julia was either too old for Mr. Turner or too young, depending on if you went by her body’s age or her real age, so there was no point in being jealous. But that wasn’t what made her straighten away from the door, rubbing her stomach.
    Miss Yu was supposed to be Julia’s daughter.
    This body . . . this too-tall, too-old body . . . had had sex. Had borne children. Three of them, she’d been told. Three daughters. This body knew about those things and Julia didn’t, and when she thought about