Miller’s Grove, like many towns, excelled at secrecy and hidden things. It was the kind of place that served two purposes to the outside world: when hipsters would pass through, they would take pictures, stick a sepia-toned or black-and-white filter on it, and post online about how beautiful old towns used to be (a hollow nostalgia for something that was never their own). When someone who stood to make a profit passed through, they’d talk to newspapers all over the state about how the town could thrive again, if— No one ever stopped to talk to the people of the town, not really, and the general assumption was that the residents weren’t considered interesting enough for conversation. And so this is how, even with the occasional stranger passing through what they considered to be the dull opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz, the mysteries of Miller’s Grove were allowed to remain intact.
The locals themselves were guilty of never looking closely at the strange abundances of the town—the particular sheen of the apples in one of the orchard’s trees, the surplus of sunflowers, the one wheat farm that had been out-performing the others for nearly two years, the thriving bee and butterfly populations. People certainly ignored the unintelligible whispers they heard by the train tracks. Even if they had stopped to notice, no one would have suspected the source of all this good fortune. For their part, the neighbors ignored the existence of the five teenage girls responsible, except to occasionally offer some Christian concern about their health and circumstances. The residents of Miller’s Grove never once thought that it was these young women who kept together the very fabric of their town, and if they ever did catch on, then the glory would prove more trouble than it was worth.
* * *
Sometimes, Madeline Garrison wished she didn’t have such a talent for hiding things. As she stood outside the grand, renovated Colonial, she rolled a sycamore leaf between her fingers, crackling the long-dead piece of tree until it dusted into nothingness that the wind could carry away. Madeline remembered a time when all the leaves of Miller’s Grove looked like this and the wheat and the corn, too, even in the middle of summer, until they figured out a solution to it all. Madeline watched that window, watched, trying to tap into a place in her mind where she might will Camellia Hamilton to come out. But, try as she might, Madeline could never figure out the trick to being seen. She’d never have said this out loud, but she was convinced in the most tucked-away alcoves of her mind that this quality was her most attractive trait to Camellia.
It was then that Madeline saw a blur like sunshine on wheat in the upstairs window. Madeline immediately brushed her hands together, and when that wasn’t enough for the most stubbornly clinging reminders of dead leaf, she scraped her palms against the sides of her jeans. Right now, Camellia would be turning some music on to fill the void of her absence and locking her bedroom door. The routine was always the same, this delicate, meticulous process of keeping things hidden. Once, Camellia’s older sister had tried to open her door while she was out and Camellia had to tell her parents she’d locked the door and fallen asleep. As this failed to convince her parents, they watched her too closely for the next two weeks for Madeline to see her, nonetheless for Camellia to make it out to their place.
Madeline had spent those two weeks with their friends in their disheveled little shack of a cabin, first reading through nine enormous novels about time travel and romance in the Scottish Highlands, then a collection of random magazines from the library that were about anything—from native Kansan birds to unsolved mysteries that were supposedly true.
Madeline tugged at the bottom of her simple gray blouse just to have something to busy her hands. She watched the downstairs windows, but nobody was in the living room or salon. So, when Camellia opened the window and crawled out of it, edging down the shingled slope to then safely hop onto her front lawn, Madeline knew that they would not be caught. With one cautious glance over her shoulder, Camellia bolted across the silent street to the sturdy sycamore where Madeline was always waiting for her. Camellia didn’t even slow down; she grabbed Madeline’s hand and they were running, first in between houses but eventually along the train tracks that seemed to whisper. It was here that Madeline tugged back on Camellia’s hand to slow her down.
When Camellia turned to face Madeline, Camellia’s cheeks were flushed, her long hair swept into her face as she giggled. “Hi,” she finally said.
“Hello,” Madeline replied. She reached forward, combing Camellia’s hair out of her face. Camellia returned the favor for Madeline’s tight black curls. Finally free, the girls moved toward one another, kissing gently, lingering on the softness of it all. When they pulled apart, they continued along the railroad track hand in hand, walking instead of sprinting like they were trying to outpace the wind.
Madeline continued to watch Camellia as her head hung back and her chest swelled with the deepest inhale. Camellia had total faith in Madeline’s ability to lead her along safely. Camellia’s parents never let her go anywhere without a chaperone, usually her brother or sister, and they always knew where she was.
Well, almost always.
As Camellia exhaled, she seemed to hum along with the meadowlarks and warblers and chickadees. The short skirt of Camellia’s yellow dress—speckled with pink flowers and definitely not parent-approved—swung along the middle of her thighs as though Camellia were dancing. “God,” Camellia gasped, watching the whole world around her with big, awe-struck eyes. “How can people listen to birds sing and still think that we’re the only ones who can make art?”
Madeline did her best to fight her own laughter; still, when Camellia turned to her, Camellia detached their hands and clicked her tongue.
“I’m serious!” she said, and the warblers sang back to Camellia in response as she seemed to float along, sprite-like, next to the train tracks. “Do you realize they probably pass these songs down for generations, improving them just a little bit, leaving their own little mark along the way?”
Camellia stopped suddenly, tossing herself down against the ground. For a moment, she became a chameleon, the color of her dress and her hair and her barely sun-kissed skin becoming one with the stiff, straw-colored grass. For a moment, Madeline lost her. But it was, of course, temporary—a trick of the eye. Madeline lowered herself to the ground more carefully, her head resting next to her girlfriend’s. They listened, then, to the ebb and flow of the birds’ songs getting tangled up in one another, first gentle and peaceful, then furious, hungry, and then so soft they were nearly silent.
“You’re a wonder,” Madeline finally said. They grinned at one another, and as they kissed and listened to nothing but their breathing and the birds, Madeline felt their heartbeats sync, felt the turning of the Earth below them, the weightlessness of every feather around them, and it felt like they were chanting a spell together—them, the birds, the Earth—like they did with their friends in their secret place. When they parted, Madeline couldn’t help adding a teasing “My little hippie.”
Camellia playfully rolled her eyes before turning her attention back to the blue-gray sky, so big, so empty, so possible and impossible at the same time. “Tell me about school,” she said, her voice sounding more like an echo than an original; that tone meant that Camellia’s mind had returned to her family. She needed a distraction. “How’d that test go?”
Madeline leaned her cheek against Camellia’s so that she felt every movement of her words: “Did well. Scored higher than average.”
Madeline felt Camellia grin. “You want to retake it for a higher score, don’t you?”
“What?” Madeline said, her voice unusually high-pitched. “I know that I can do better. The admissions people should know that, too.”
“Well, either way,” Camellia said, “they’d be downright stupid not to want you. And throw scholarships at you. And give you a free single dorm room that I can secretly move into.”
Madeline smiled, but only just. For all the many birds that she could hear, she didn’t see a single one up in the sky. She knew they must be hiding in the grass all around them. “Bad family day?” she asked.
“Oh yes.”
Madeline took a deep breath, her exhale sharp. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” Camellia said, but since Madeline was very familiar with Camellia’s tones of voice, she waited. “They had Becca set me up on an arranged date. Again.”
Madeline fought down the first four curses that came to mind, and then the urge to offer to actually curse them with a literal spell. Camellia was a sophomore, Madeline a junior, and Camellia’s older sister, Becca, a senior. But, since Madeline was in all the advanced classes, she shared many of her school hours with Camellia’s sister. Her sister was the kind of person who made fun of the teacher with a cane, who only allowed herself sycophants for friends and who only wore modest pastels. Becca didn’t like that Madeline was smart or the plain way that Madeline dressed, but most of all she couldn’t stand for Madeline’s lack of adoration—that lack of adoration was due to, more than anything, Madeline’s secret insider knowledge of how Camellia’s family treated her.
“Which guy is it this time?” Madeline asked instead, because it was always a guy. Madeline had a theory that Camellia’s family was panicked about her lack of red-blooded American interest in men by age sixteen and this was why they had her brother and sister arrange these dates.
“Trevor Carraway.”
Madeline shot up. When she sat with rigid back and bent knees, she heard nothing but the crows cawing and the slight pumping of blood in her ears. “But last year, Alisa Miller said—”
“I know,” Camellia replied. Her fingers fidgeted together like she was playing a version of “Itsy, Bitsy Spider” where it got caught in a web and couldn’t go anywhere. The light and wonder had completely gone from her face, her lips now pale pink and so tightly wrought that they wrinkled.
“You can’t go,” Madeline said. When Camellia didn’t respond, she pushed. “It’s not safe.” Madeline hadn’t expected her voice to break. What was the point in all of them helping the town to thrive when she couldn’t even keep her girlfriend safe?
“I have to,” Camellia said. Her voice was so small that it was barely audible over the rustling of the dry yellow grass. “You know I do.”
Madeline wanted to argue with her, but they had a similar fight so many times before that she knew how it’d turn out. Camellia got a special pressure from her parents to do whatever it took to make them happy and, as she’d told Madeline, her average grades already made her a failure in the school department. Some days, Camellia had confided in her, her parents’ frowns and lectures and disapproving glares made her feel like they regretted adopting her, and they never dispelled that fear when she brought it up to them, instead insisting that she “do better.” So, even though Camellia was not bi like Madeline and had less than zero interest in boys, she entertained the dates to satisfy her parents’ demands for “normalcy.” Madeline never understood that whole dynamic, not really. Madeline’s mom and dad never pressured her to date, and they tried to get her to take breaks from studying. The worst thing that Madeline and her mother ever fought about was whether or not she’d try on some pink clothes at the store.
A black and blue butterfly flitted past right then, seeming to appear out of nowhere and head toward their hidden place.
“Come on,” Camellia said, forcing herself to stand and then brushing off the back of her dress. “I think that’s Mary’s way of saying that we’re late.” She reached out a hand, helping Madeline to her feet.
Madeline kissed Camellia’s forehead. They walked, hand-in-hand, along the railroad tracks once more. Camellia rested her cheek on Madeline’s shoulder, and Madeline could feel the weight of every little sigh. Though they continued in silence, Madeline’s mind buzzed the entire way, devising spell after spell that might protect Camellia. Even if her girlfriend refused it, Madeline decided she could manage it with Talitha in secret. After all, no one owed Camellia more than Talitha did.
* * *
The house had grown so silent in the absence of her mother’s signing that Evaleigh Yates could hear the bees for miles. She tugged on the ties at the ends of her two thick dark braids before bounding down the steps, the thundering weight of her boots crashing against each stair until she reached the bottom. Her father came in from the other room, eyebrows raised.
Evaleigh shrugged. “If you didn’t want a horse-girl for a daughter, then you should’ve been more specific with the stork.”
Her father’s blue eyes crinkled with his laughter. Evaleigh couldn’t take credit, though—she’d heard the joke in her mother’s voice among the sunflowers the other day. It was a memory, a haunting, a vision. Those were frequent among the sunflowers.
“Heading out?” her father asked.
“Yeah, if that’s alright,” Evaleigh said as she started to button her green plaid shirt from the bottom up. She stopped about halfway, leaving her tank top exposed. “I was just gonna go for a walk.”
“Be safe?”
Evaleigh laid a hand on his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “Always.”
And, with that, she was out the door. The sun was too bright from the south, and Evaleigh had to cup a hand over her eyes against it. She turned right, stopping first at her mother’s old sunflower garden, which had been one of her mother’s conditions for moving out here and letting her father take over his family’s wheat farm. If the sunflowers were in her periphery, Evaleigh would swear that she could see her mother’s figure slipping between the stems—her close-cropped hair against the rich brown of her skin, the humming so vivid that Evaleigh wasn’t convinced that she was imagining things. She reached her hand out under a sunflower, held a breath until she could feel something like a heartbeat inside of it, and, as she exhaled, all of its seeds spit into her palm. She tucked them into the pocket of her jeans for later, for Mary’s butterflies.
Evaleigh took just a moment to admire the explosion of yellow petals, towering over her, reaching toward the sun. It was almost harvest and Evaleigh knew that this year it would be at least as bountiful as last; she had personally made sure of that. She turned around to pass by the wheat farm on her way out. Things with her father had not always been this easy. He felt a lot of pressure, her mother used to tell her, to provide for them, so he hadn’t played with Evaleigh as much as she would’ve liked. Then, just as her mother got sick, the crops started to fail. It was happening all over town. Some blamed the loss of bees, others the overabundance of rainstorms, and those who listened to public radio pointed to the overall effects of climate change. Whatever the cause, when her mother died among the withering crops and her father had fewer resources to pay off the medical bills, he and Evaleigh could hardly be in the same room without fighting about something or another.
Then her father had started talking about selling the farm. That night, Evaleigh had run outside, kneeled in the dirt of her mother’s languishing sunflowers, and cried the hardest that she had ever cried. The soil soaked with it. Then something—deep, like an instinct—guided her to touch a flower, just one. As Evaleigh breathed, it was as though she was breathing life right into it. Its browning holey petals brightened, the decay falling away and making room for new life. The stalk, which had been soft and bowed in places, seemed filled with the will to stand again, taller than before. Even as Evaleigh thought it all a dream, she repeated this again with each flower. When she woke up in the garden the next morning, new sunflowers had even sprouted around her as she slept. She heard buzzing from the wheat fields; Evaleigh knew this was where she needed to direct her green thumb next, and when she finished a week later, she followed the bees to an old cabin in a bare, unremarkable field. This was how she had met Mary.
Evaleigh had the shortest walk out to the cabin out of any of them and, of course, Camellia and Talitha always had a hell of a time getting out. Evaleigh wondered, sometimes, how they managed it, always thanking whatever stars in the universe that prevented her from being a part of that family. Even having so many siblings sounded daunting. Holding out a single finger after passing the wheat, a fuzzy bumblebee landed on it, humming against her skin and making Evaleigh smile. She continued the whole way to the cabin with her little travel companion. She found herself nostalgic as she watched the sun dip low over the yellowed grass.
It was hard to say who started this little group. Camellia had discovered her talent with her healing apples, which she made exclusively for Talitha to help her cousin manage her illness, but they needed somewhere to hide the apples after they picked them. Madeline had heard of an abandoned little shack not too far from the train tracks, but when she and Camellia arrived, Mary was already there. Madeline kept their place hidden, and Talitha knew how to bottle the essence of their secrets. Evaleigh did know one thing: her talent with plants was the last piece of the puzzle. Magic healing apples were more invisible in an otherwise thriving orchard; a well-fed town didn’t have the willpower to be suspicious, either. And Evaleigh’s talents matched Mary’s so well that their friendship, and their work together, seemed inevitable.
The bee left Evaleigh’s fingertip as she found their hidden little sanctuary. It was a pile of warped and weathered wood in the heart of a flat, plain field and, to outsiders, it looked like even less than that. No one, outside the five of them, had bothered looking deeper.
* * *
They called Mary Alvarez “The Butterfly Girl.” She would have been surprised if a dozen people in Miller’s Grove knew her real name. When her parents first moved to Miller’s Grove a decade earlier, before either of her brothers were born, Mary had attended the local elementary school. That was when the rumors started. Rumors were like secrets in reverse—un-truths widely shared. No one had bothered to ask Mary herself why she didn’t talk; instead, they guessed that she was too stupid, or that she couldn’t speak English, or that her parents were abusive—none of which were true, in line with the grand tradition of rumors.
One day, when Mary felt herself about to cry, she slipped out of the kindergarten room and out to the playground. The teacher found her an hour later, playing with a yellow butterfly that didn’t seem afraid of her. Mary’s teacher suggested she wasn’t ready for school yet and her parents took care of her education ever since.
Now, Mary sat on the floor of their ramshackle little cabin, her legs folded like a pretzel. Some of the butterflies gathered at her knees, sitting prettily on her white dress, but most of them adorned her hair and flitted around her yellow shawl, their yellow and brown wings finding a kind of camouflage. Mary knew that Evaleigh was on the way when an orange and black Chlosyne gorgone landed on the page of her open book. Mary’s parents did whatever they could to encourage Mary to learn; for years, this had meant finding every etymology book for her that they could manage. Mary’s inclination toward butterflies was rooted more deeply than knowledge, but still she delighted in knowing all their Latin names and their favored flowers as they fluttered around her.
The door opened, and Evaleigh walked in, her smile bright and beaming and peaceful. Mary swore that her best friend was the most well adjusted of any of them. Mary waved.
“Am I the first one here?” Evaleigh asked.
Mary nodded. Evaleigh walked around the one-room shack, placing a hand on each potted plant she passed by, little green shrubby things that had no flowers to attract Mary’s butterflies. The place likely would’ve horrified their parents. When Mary had first started coming here, she’d needed to replace some of the molded wooden planks, and she didn’t do a perfect job of it, leaving gaps here and there. Whoever the former resident had been, they’d left behind their entire life in this place—painted ceramic vases, old wool shawls and throw blankets dyed with different patterns, walking sticks with all sorts of knots in their wood. Once, Mary had even found a taxidermied skunk that she later buried in the woods. When Camellia first found this place, there was only one space on the floor to sit and Mary had been occupying it.
Camellia’s arrival was when Mary first started hearing the bees. Her friends all thought it was another aspect of Mary’s innate talents, but she remained unconvinced. As each member of their group found this place, as they all performed their magics to keep this town alive, Mary heard the buzzing get louder and louder, and her legion of butterflies swelled in numbers, but it wasn’t until Evaleigh showed up, the final piece of their puzzle, that the bees actually seemed to manifest, to be able to do good in the world.
When Evaleigh’s tour of the plants in the room came to its conclusion, she sat on the little woven rug across from Mary, legs crossed in the same way. The orange and black butterfly on Mary’s book did not move. Evaleigh’s face scrunched up as she leaned to her side, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. When she opened her palm, it was overflowing with sunflower seeds. Evaleigh split them between both hands, which she held palms-up in front of her. When Mary leaned forward and fitted her hands under Evaleigh’s, the Chlosyne gorgone lifted itself from the book, flitting between the two girls. The buzzing of the bees became so loud that they would not hear anything else until they were done. The rest of Mary’s butterflies swarmed all around them, creating a protective shield that Mary could see if she squinted hard enough.
Then, one by one, the sunflower seeds began to transform. One would take on a strange iridescence and then, when it almost glowed, it would evaporate. This happened again and again, the movement of the butterfly’s orange wings growing only more urgent with each seed’s disappearance. When the last seed vanished, the Chlosyne gorgone became a blur of orange, darting out of the cabin more quickly than seemed physically possible. The other butterflies calmed, returning to their perches on Mary’s knees and to the dark waves of Mary’s hair.
“Thank you,” Evaleigh said. Her smile after one of these rituals was always some strange blend of relief and disbelief, like at any moment Mary would revoke her part in helping to keep the Yates family farm alive.
Mary simply squeezed Evaleigh’s hand. The fields of Miller’s Grove would continue to prosper.
It was then that Madeline and Camellia walked through the door, bringing with them a tension so strong that the bees were silenced to a barely audible hum.
“Hi, guys,” Evaleigh said. As she got to her feet, she seemed not to notice the shift in the atmosphere of the room at all. “Madeline, I heard you did really well on that test.”
Both Madeline and Camellia spoke at once:
“From who?”
“I knew it.”
The two of them looked at one another, standing side-by-side, and things were easy again for a moment. As Camellia turned to Evaleigh, a frown carved onto Madeline’s face, her eyebrows low and worried. Mary was the only one who seemed to notice. She could sense something in Madeline, too, something that went deeper than the surface expressions of her displeasure. It was like watching a bird fly backwards inside of her—she, who was so good at hiding things, needed to bring something into the open. Mary would offer to help, but she was almost certain that there was only one of them who could. Mary turned her attention back to the conversation.
“Speaking of cousins,” Camellia said, “has anyone seen or heard from mine?”
Mary and Evaleigh shook their heads as Madeline’s eyes wandered toward the door. Mary took this as confirmation that, whatever she needed a secret exposed for, Talitha was the woman for the job. Madeline watched Camellia as she moved around the room, absently searching through the accumulated odds and ends while very actively avoiding any sort of physical or eye contact with Madeline. Evaleigh moved toward one of her shrubs, the power snapping off of her like the morning when she’d first found their place, after she’d first blessed the sunflower garden and wheat fields with life. Evaleigh found a ball of gauzy teal fabric under a hanging shrub and picked it up. When she walked over to Camellia, she finally looked up. Evaleigh draped the fabric—a scarf—around the back of Camellia’s neck, trapping her dark blond hair with it.
“For your collection,” Evaleigh teased.
Camellia had been doing this for a long while—salvaging vintage pieces buried in this place. Evaleigh grabbed Camellia by the hands, then, swinging her hips and leading her in a momentary, giggly dance. Camellia eventually got into it. Even Madeline, who leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest as she thought deeply, couldn’t help but smile; Mary found herself doing the same. As her friends continued to chatter, Mary held out her left hand. When she breathed deeply, a bee landed on each finger. Mary twitched, one-by-one, from thumb to pinky, sending each bee off to mask the noise that Talitha made as she tried to escape her home. Mary could feel their buzzing in the depths of her ribs.
For the most part, they passed the time until sunset in a comfortable silence. It was dark by the time Talitha walked in. Talitha shrugged off her father’s old army jacket, tossing it onto a pile of junk on the floor. Underneath, she was dressed in a long, frilly blue dress. Her long dark hair, stark against her pale skin, was tied up halfway in a blue bow. Her jaw was set hard, her cheeks tight.
“Well that outfit’s a big ol’ ‘yikes,’” Camellia said before anyone else could even greet her.
“Freaking tell me about it,” Talitha said.
First, she yanked the ribbon from her hair. Then, without a word, Camellia moved to her cousin’s back, unbuttoning the dress until Talitha could toss it to the floor, where it fell with the shuffling, crumpling sound of some fancy fabric like taffeta. Underneath, Talitha wore a slick black jumpsuit too cold for their unheated cabin, so she picked up the army jacket again and slipped it on. Evaleigh handed Talitha a spare hair tie, which she used for a ponytail.
“Parents being dicks again?” Camellia asked.
“Always,” Talitha said. Her lips seemed suddenly paler, and her stance unsteadied. “They decided I was in no condition for our fake Bible study group. So I had to wait until they went to their stupid church fundraiser.”
Mary stood, walking toward a half-disintegrating wicker chair, clearing her and Madeline’s books from it. She sent one of her yellow butterflies into Talitha’s line of vision and, once she had her attention, motioned toward the seat. Talitha complied, the old wicker creaking under her as she sank into it. She pulled an apple from her pocket, red with a special iridescence to it. As Talitha bit into the apple, the entire cabin seemed to be filled with the heavy crunching sounds of her bites. Camellia watched her cousin eat, a wrinkle deepening just above her nose. Then Camellia looked around the room at each of them, searching. Her gaze lingered on Mary the longest, but when she caught a glimpse of Evaleigh tending to a plant, Camellia touched Evaleigh’s forearm to get her attention.
Camellia whispered something to Evaleigh; Mary only caught the words “orchard” and “help.” Evaleigh whispered back, “Of course.”
“Guys,” Camellia said to the group, “we’re going to go for a quick walk. Check up on things.”
The harvest would be soon. Talitha would need to make the apples from Camellia’s tree last all winter, and into spring, too, even if they could spell the tree into budding early. Mary waved to the pair of them.
“Have fun,” Talitha said, her cheeks beginning to soften and a light pink returning to her lips. Still, she remained seated.
Madeline walked to Camellia, kissing her on the lips before saying, “Be safe. Please.” Those three words were loaded with meaning.
“I love you,” was Camellia’s only reply. Then she and Evaleigh were out the door.
Madeline waited, her head tilted as she listened. It was only when their voices vanished, when nothing but crickets and crunching and flapping filled the void, that Madeline moved toward Talitha. Madeline squatted down, elbows on her knees, and looked Talitha in the eye.
“I need your help,” Madeline said. “Camellia needs your help.”
“Who do I have to kill?” Talitha said, studying her apple’s core as she feigned nonchalance, her voice full of daggers at the same time.
“Becca set her up with Trevor Carraway.”
The revelation made the air feel solid. Mary had no context for what was happening, but the bees’ hum intensified, and the butterflies flapped their wings around her head as though they expected something to eat them alive at any moment. So, while Mary didn’t know exactly what was happening, she trusted the emotion of the room.
“But she can’t.” Talitha was sitting forward in the seat now, the angles of her body harsh. She clenched her apple core so hard that its healing juices seeped down the sides of her hand.
“I know.”
“You don’t understand,” Talitha said, her voice high with panic. The core fell away from her. “The number of secrets I’ve collected that—”
“I know.” Madeline sat back on her haunches. “We need to do something.”
“Like what?” Talitha asked, and suddenly she and Madeline looked up at Mary for an answer. Mary looked at the floor of their cabin first, their sacred hidden place, then up to the ceiling. She thought of all those whispers by the train tracks.
“I’ll try,” Talitha said, sensing the direction of Mary’s idea before Mary had even fully formulated it. “I can’t guarantee anything. I’ve never done it before.”
“I know,” Madeline said. “If I could do it myself, I would.” She rose to her feet, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. “Hiding things is much easier than revealing them. Believe me, I get it.”
Talitha chewed her lip, taking shallow breaths as she stared down at her feet. “I think I can do it,” Talitha said. She held out her hands, cupped as though she might gather water from a river. “Mary, can I borrow one of your friends?”
Mary nodded. She coaxed the Papilio glaucus from her shoulder to her finger, and then from her finger to the heart of Talitha’s joined hands. The butterfly sat there, contented, its wide yellow wings with black edges unmoving.
“I promise I’ll be gentle,” Talitha said, getting to her feet as smoothly as possible. Starting at the Papilio glaucus, Talitha added to Madeline, “And I’ll try to be back before they are.”
“Don’t rush it,” Madeline said. She swiped a hand over her curly hair. “It’s more important to make sure that it’s done right.”
Talitha nodded. Without another word, she headed slowly for the door; Mary knew she was trying to keep her promise about the butterfly. When the door closed behind her, a shudder shot through Madeline’s body. Mary guided her butterflies with a nod of her head to fly up above them, making their own swirling patterns in the limited sky that they were granted. Mary wrapped an arm around Madeline’s back, resting her cheek on Madeline’s shoulder. She felt Madeline rest her head on Mary’s in return, letting herself rest, letting herself be vulnerable, while no one but the butterflies were watching.
* * *
Talitha Campbell was not the china doll her family thought she was; in fact, she was most at home like this—as a woman on a mission. Mary’s yellow butterfly had taken off, flying in front of Talitha toward the train tracks. She was sprinting now, away from her friends, away from their hidden place. Night had settled, cold and humid, and Talitha felt like she could drink the stars. She hardly ever ran anymore, hadn’t in years for the most part, but with Camellia’s apple in her system she felt untouchable.
As much as Talitha tried to keep the memories of home locked away, they surfaced like flashes in her mind’s eye: her six older sisters going out to teach Bible classes, to take ballet, to meet up with friends. Talitha had to fight her parents not to be homeschooled. She’d started showing symptoms when she was fourteen—weakness, paleness, dizziness, fainting. They’d taken her to doctor after doctor, but no diagnosis helped.
Talitha pushed her legs harder, chasing the little yellow glow in front of her even as her mouth began to taste of blood. Talitha’s mother and Camellia’s mother were sisters who ruled with iron fists; Camellia’s mother had leaned into secular strictness, where Talitha’s had turned to religion more than ever, their whole family praying over Talitha for her recovery like she was a cracked porcelain doll to be fixed. They didn’t take the time to learn who she was, to learn who she was becoming, and if they knew what she was capable of, they would’ve called in the minister for an exorcism so quickly that Talitha wouldn’t have even had a chance to tell them that she was helping people.
And she was helping people. The butterfly stopped and so did Talitha, collapsing to her knees. She could feel it in the soil—feel them in the soil—the secrets seeping through her clothes, her skin, finding a way into her bloodstream and beyond. It had started small—Talitha would scribble her own secrets on scraps of paper and bury them here, in the soft rich soil next to the rusted train tracks. Then she was keeping Camellia’s secrets, and Madeline’s. And, as though the secrets had taken on a life of their own, people would come to Talitha, asking her to lift the burdens of the unspoken. Talitha took a deep, slow breath to steady herself. Everyone thought they were special, that they were the only ones to come to her. Talitha never told them otherwise. Holding her hands out, Talitha let the yellow and black butterfly float down to her palms like a gossamer strand of spider’s web giving in to the wind.
There was power here—the power of secrets. Talitha had been collecting secrets for so long, burying them on the town’s edge marked by out-of-use train tracks, letting the people who needed it feel some relief. It was fulfilling work, natural. But what Madeline expected her to do…
Talitha took another breath. The butterfly’s wings stilled as it sat poised, waiting. She felt like this sometimes—frozen where she’d stopped to take a rest, at the mercy of inertia, at the mercy of the pity of others. Breath in—she could hear them, the secrets, talking all at once, whispering, desperate, afraid, so afraid. Breath out—the secrets’ voices wove together slowly, transmuting into one thick thread that Talitha could pluck for her own purposes.
Talitha knew the secrets about Trevor Carraway, and she would not let her cousin bear the burden of such a secret herself. She channeled the power of the secrets, careful to protect their integrity so that there would be no consequences for those who had confided in her. Instead, their hidden power became fuel, energy to convert, and Talitha did convert it. The power of the secrets made the butterfly glow brighter, a brilliant gold in the darkness.
This was a spell for the truth to be known.
When Talitha was done, the butterfly left her. It flew straight up, unevenly at first, weighted by its temporary magical addition. But still it flew, and it took the truth with it, ready to make itself known to the world.
Talitha leaned her head back, watching, imagining the freedom of flight. One of her first secrets was still buried here, the desire to leave this place. It was before she’d met Madeline and Mary and Evaleigh, before their joint services to help the town thrive, but that secret was still buried deep inside. Talitha wondered, as the light of truth finally flew so high that it became one among the stars, how many of their group would leave this place in search of somewhere less suffocating. She wondered, too, if anyone would ever make the connection between the absence of these young women and the town’s sudden and steep deterioration. But, of course, she knew the answer as well as she knew every chirp and rustle of this field: no one ever suspected young women of power.
Audrey T. Carroll (she/her) is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies.
She can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.