Category: Lifting Voices

Leo had just enough consciousness left to nod in affirmation.

 

His mouth popped open, desperate for oxygen.

 

Instead of filling with cold rushing water, Leo took in a ragged, gasping, but completely oxygenated, breath.

 

He opened his eyes.

 

He was at the bottom of the pond.

 

A glowing light about the size of a lightbulb illuminated the water around him. Beneath his feet were sand and stones and shells.

 

He was in an air bubble as big as those human hamster balls Leo had been hearing so much about.

 

Just outside the air bubble, small, brown fish swam past.

 

And there was a person floating there looking at him.

 

Except they weren’t a person, not exactly, at least. They had a tail, like an actual fish tail. It was brown-gold and scary and lined with fins, and looked way different from Ariel in the Little Mermaid. It was a lot more… fishy.

 

They had a human torso, but their skin was toned grey-blue, and was just as scaly-shiny as their tail, with gills lining their sides like ribs. Their fingers were webbed, their lips plush, their nose slitted and smooth against their face. Their ears were pointed like Spock’s and had small cilia fluttering off of them in the water current. Their hair moved in one big piece, oily and slick.

 

And their eyes.

 

Their eyes glowed orange, with dark pupils like a cat’s eye.

 

Leo was frozen. He stared at the other person in shock.

 

It was a lot to take in.

 

The fish person lifted a webbed, blue hand and waved it. Their bubble lips pursed in an awkward smile. They hugged their other arm around their sparkly torso. “Um, hi?” the fish person said. It was bubbly and strange, but somehow Leo still heard it, still understood. “Are you Leo?”

 

“Um…” Leo wasn’t sure how to respond. You didn’t really get taught the protocol for this kind of thing in school. “Yes?”

 

“Oh, good, cool,” the mer-person said. “I’m Aristea. We’ve been expecting you.”

 

“Oh… wow,” Leo said, feeling like an idiot. “What pronouns do you use?”

 

Aristea blinked and cocked their head. “What?”

 

“Like how should I refer to you? She spoke, he spoke, they spoke…”

 

Aristea shrugged. “Any of that is cool,” they said. “We don’t really use the same uselessly exclusive social constructs down here.”

Leo disappeared underwater.

 

He closed his mouth to stop the questionable water from getting in. He wasn’t prepared to taste that earthy latte. It was pitch black, blacker than black, with no sign of light. The water got deep enough that his feet couldn’t touch the ground.

 

He came up for air, gasping for breath and treading water.

 

“Leo–” someone called out.

 

And then he dove.

 

Eyes closed, mouth closed, wishing he could close every orifice, Leo swam toward the bottom of the pond. His hands and feet were so cold now that they hurt in little sharp points, like pieces of glass were sticking into him from all sides.

 

More than anything, he wanted to give up, to leave, to swim back to the surface and give his friends an embarrassed and rueful grin.

 

But he didn’t.

 

How many times in his life had other people pulled him back from stepping into water? How many times had he been rescued from zoo enclosures and mall fountains full of wish pennies? Too many times to count. His parents loved bringing it up at family reunions, though he knew that in private they were concerned about him.

 

This was the first time he’d actually done it. He’d actually succeeded in bending to the will of the water, to the urge to bury himself in it.

 

Leo expected to hit the bottom of the pond after six or seven good paddles. He’d been on the swim team in middle school for a hot minute and could really pick up speed.

 

But it didn’t happen. The water seemed to be endless. Leo’s chest grew tight, burning, his hands numb, his paddling weak.

 

Was he going to die here?

 

Was he literally going to die here, in some random pond in the middle of inhabited suburbia in the midwest?

 

The water around him grew warm. A weak, teal-white light started to glow beneath him. He was too tired to move. His eyelids fluttered open, his throat begging to open up.

 

Yep. This must be what dying felt like.

 

He closed his eyes. At the very moment he decided to give up, to breathe in the water, a warm and slippery hand clutched his.

 

“Let us help you,” a wavering, underwater-y voice said, somehow in his head and not. “Will you let us?”

Leo’s plan was met with seven wary expressions and seven sets of bugged out eyes.

 

“Uh. What?” Tinashe asked.

 

“I have to go in the pond,” Leo said. “That’s what the wish was telling me. That’s where the answer is. What my magic is.”

 

Silence followed his proclamation. 

 

“Dude, I think there are, like, pesticides and brain-eating amoebas down there,” Ruby said.

 

“Not to mention you can’t breathe underwater,” Juan said with a frown. “Are you planning on retrieving the stone? What are you going to do when you’re in there?”

 

Well. Those were a bouquet of annoyingly good points. Still. Leo doubled down.

 

“The water is calling to me. It will show me the way.”

 

“If you feel that strongly,” Ash said with a shrug.

 

Yasmin stepped forward. “I’ll warm you up when you come back,” she said. “No hypothermia for Leo.”

 

Leo smiled. “Thanks.”

 

He stepped towards the edge of the water.

 

The weirdest part was that it did call to him.

 

Ever since Leo was a toddler, he’d been drawn to bodies of water, stepping in fountains and veering off bridges before his parents could snatch him back to safety.

 

The call of the void was back. He wanted to go in the water. Even if it was gross and full of goose poop.

 

He thought of the people behind him, the rag-tag group of witches that would help him if he needed it. He really hoped he wouldn’t need it. He hoped he wasn’t being absolutely insane right now.

 

No time like the present.

 

Leo took a deep breath. He leaned down, dipping his fingers in the pond. The water was cold, really cold, but it didn’t feel goopy or sticky or oily like he’d feared. It just felt like water.

 

Without glancing back at his new coven, Leo took his shoes off. Then his socks. Then everything except his boxer briefs. He covered his chest with his arms, shivering in the cold.

 

“You got this, Leo!” Tinashe shouted.

 

Leo sure hoped she was right.

 

Despite the way all of his muscles were screaming at him not to, Leo walked into the water. Step by step, it grew colder, choking him in a vice, making his movements stiff. He stumbled, but he kept going, the water slowly rising around his feet, his calves, his thighs, his hips, his chest, his neck, and finally, his head.

Ash cleared their throat, brushing a navy blue strand of their rainbow hair out of their face. “So, um, yeah, that’s cool that you get it now, but we still have to figure out… this,” they said, gesturing toward the pond.

 

Yasmin called her moon back into her hand, some of the gentle light leaving the glade. The bonfire was burning lower, too, leaving things in a red-orange darkness.

 

“For me, I just had to trust,” Ji-fu spoke up. “And the truth came to me.”

 

“I’m not… much of a truster,” Leo hedged. “I don’t know if I can just believe hard enough and make it happen.”

 

“It’s not about belief,” Juan said. “It’s healthy to question things, to have doubts and worries. It’s about trust. Trusting yourself and trusting us to make sure nothing bad will happen to you.”

 

“Wait a minute. Something bad could happen to me?”

 

Juan’s eyes went big. “No, I mean, well, not recently–“

 

“Not recently?” Leo squeaked.

 

“Alright, alright,” Ruby spoke up, her loud voice echoing through the glade and making some small creature skitter off through the trees. “Leo, what do you think it means?”

 

“I-I don’t know. I don’t really have a manual for this kind of thing.”

 

“This ain’t DND, we don’t need no stinking manual!” Ruby barked out. “Trust in me, dude. Trust in Yasmin’s crazy magic. What could it mean?”

 

“The wish had to do with me, who I want to be,” Leo said tentatively. Juan smiled at him, encouraging him to go on. “And the stone shot out of the fire and into the water. So maybe it has something to do with… water?”

 

Tinashe nodded. “Good start, but I didn’t figure out my public speaking abilities by saying that it maybe had something to do with my vocal chords.”

 

Leo flushed. “I don’t like fire, I do like water,” he continued, scrambling for some kind of connection. “Maybe I need to change who I am to be more like water, to be more fluid. More accepting.”

 

Onyx giggled, face still neutral. Leo had never seen anything like it.

 

“What Onyx means is, while that’s good therapy, L, it doesn’t really have to do with magic,” Ash said. “What kind of magic do you have?”

 

Leo didn’t know. He didn’t have any clue.

 

Maybe that was the clue.

 

“I know where I’ll find out,” Leo declared with a confidence he didn’t actually feel. “In the pond.”

Leo froze, eyes wide.

 

The stone had moved like it had a life of its own.

 

That definitely wasn’t normal.

 

It didn’t make sense. He tried to think of some logical explanation, some rational reason why the fire would spit the stone into the lake. But he came up empty-handed.

 

“So, uh, I’ve never seen that before,” Ash spoke up. “I honestly have no idea what that means.”

 

Leo turned around to face them all, feeling kind of faint. “So… when you said magic…”

 

Tinashe snorted at the look on his face. “We didn’t mean making mud pies and wearing crystals,” she said. “We meant real, actual magic.”

 

“But magic isn’t real.”

 

“No offense, dude, but like, isn’t it obvious?” Ruby said. “Didn’t you just witness it yourself?”

 

“But it can’t be.”

 

“When I did my initiation, we got attacked by a bunch of pigeons,” Onyx murmured evenly. “They pooped on the ground in the shape of a perfect eye. That’s how I discovered my prophetic visions.”

 

“You can’t just say that like it’s something people say,” Leo said, feeling dizzy.

 

Ash came forward, laying a hand on Leo’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Leo,” they said. “Breathe.”

 

Leo took a breath. Then another, and another.

 

Ash smiled. “Do you feel better?”

 

Leo shook his head. “No.”

 

“Well, uh, don’t worry,” Ash said. “We’ll figure out what this means for you.”

 

“I can prove it,” Yasmin said. It was the first time Leo had heard her speak. At the look on his face, she added, “I can prove magic is real.”

 

“Yasmin…” Ash warned.

 

She held a hand up to Ash. Ash went quiet. She looked Leo in the eye. “So?”

 

Leo nodded, unable to find his words. He gestured for her to go ahead.

 

Yasmin smiled. The wind picked up, whipping her curly black hair around her face.

 

She held her hands together in front of her face. She lifted her hands up toward the sky, still clasped.

 

“Illuminate,” she whispered. Bright spears of white light escaped the spaces between her fingers, turning her skin an almost translucent orange with how bright the captured light was. She opened her hands, and a miniature moon floated out from between them, lighting up the glade in a soft light.

 

“Oh, my god,” Leo croaked. “Oh my god. It’s real.”

 

“Oh, thank god,” Juan said. “It took us two weeks to convince Tinashe.”

 

Tinashe hit Juan on the elbow. “Did not!”

 

“I know it’s a lot,” Juan said, ignoring Tinashe’s glare and fighting a grin, “but it’s awesome, I promise.”

 

Leo let himself smile. So, maybe his world had just been completely upended, and everything he knew about reality was now cast into doubt, but Juan was right.

 

It was pretty awesome.

 

Leo stood in front of the crackling flames all by himself.

 

Ruby shuffled forward, tossing a log that was as big as her onto the flames with a furious vigor. She looked up at Leo with a small smile. “Good luck,” she whispered, before slinking back into the shadows.

 

The rest of the witches were all behind Leo, watching him like an audience watching a stage performer.

 

“Think about yourself as you are now, what you look like and how you feel,” Ash called out, adopting their Gandalf voice.

 

Leo closed his eyes. He pictured his cobbled-together costume, his lanky shoulders and androgynously moppy hair. He felt the stress of the last day–the last month, the last year–and the increasing expectations being placed on him by his parents. He felt his exhaustion.

 

“Now think about where you want to be in the future. What you look like and how you feel.”

 

Leo stood up straighter. He saw himself as he saw himself. A brighter smile, broader shoulders. For some reason he was fixated with his arm hair. He’d always wanted to have hairy arms like his dad. He also wanted better glasses, glasses like Daniel Radcliffe wears. He saw himself as a well-meaning theater boy, someone sensitive and serious. Someone who felt confident, secure in their skin. Someone who was happy with where they were and had hope for where they’d be next. Not all of this confusion and uncertainty he felt now.

 

Ji-fu appeared by his side. He felt her presence more than saw it, blinking his eyes open and startling at her presence. “Jesus, you scared me!” Leo exclaimed.

 

She handed him a smooth, flat stone and walked away.

 

“Make a wish, and breathe that wish into the stone,” Ash said. “Then throw your wish into the flames.”

 

The little hairs on the back of Leo’s neck stood up, making him shiver. Okay, maybe he could get into the whole witch thing. The vibes here tonight were off the charts.

 

Leo cupped the cool stone in his hands, holding it up to his lips. He closed his eyes and whispered, “I want to be myself. I want to be accepted. I want to be happy. I want to be strong.”

 

He opened his eyes. He gripped the stone tightly in his sweaty palms and launched it into the flames.

 

He let out a breath. That felt good, really good. There was a kind of therapy to it. He felt more centered, more present in his body.

 

A loud pop emanated from the flames. A beat later, the stone launched itself out of the flames, arching across the sky, hot and molten orange. It fell into the pond with a steamy hiss and a muted splash.