CW: Implied sexual violence, homophobia, misogyny, offscreen animal violence.
Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah.
“Jonah!” you would call out. “Jonah, it’s me! Let me in!”
But he’d never let you in. Before you turned ten, the inside of Jonah’s room remained as opaque as the inside of his thoughts.
And he would always, always make you wait. You’d stand there, bouncing on your toes, hands stuffed into your pockets, wondering how long it would take this time. You never dreamed of going back down to his parents. You never dreamed of doing anything except waiting for Jonah.
He always emerged with a weird excuse:
“I was trying to catch the sun in my mirror.”
“I was teaching the cat how to sneeze.”
“I was staring at a bird that looked kinda like a fairy.”
The last time you asked him why he made you wait so long, he gave you a strange look and said, “because I knew you would.” You never asked again after that.
Jonah was the most magnetic person around, even back then. When he turned on his personality—when his head tilted just so, when the corners of his mouth curved ever so slightly, those large, brown eyes somehow wider—he had you. No one was safe—not other kids, not parents, not even teachers. His hands could be bloodied with guilty red paint and everyone would still believe that no, despite Farhan’s sobs, Jonah would never leave red handprints on his bag, how could anyone ever accuse him of that?
Jonah liked to hold court. There was a big date palm in the middle of the playground, ringed with an octagonal wooden bench. He would stand on the bench, leaning against the knobbly trunk, heels poised right at the tip of the octagon. The other kids would sit on the gravel—cross-legged so as to not skin their knees—and offer him their rapt attention.
Jonah would tell stories. It was often salacious stuff: what he’d caught his older sister doing with her boyfriend; how he’d snuck a chocolate bar out of the corner store without anyone noticing; where his parents actually took the family after they told the neighbors they were off to church. But what Jonah really enjoyed telling were fairy tales.
“Fairy tales are for babies!” Khalid Attar bravely said once.
Jonah crooked his head and gave him The Look. Khalid gulped.
“Babies?” Jonah asked. “So you don’t want to hear about how the queen in Snow White was forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she fell dead?”
“That’s not true!” Khalid stammered, his defiance wobbling. “That’s not how the story really goes!”
“Isn’t it?” Jonah asked and didn’t look at Khalid again, not then, not later. No one did, now that you think back. Khalid changed schools a few months later, after everyone stopped talking to him.
• • • •
At twelve, Jonah won second place at a local writing contest for kids. The head judge, some fancy professor all the way from England, lauded Jonah’s “mature voice” and “precocious vision.” He also strongly hinted that the only reason Jonah didn’t win was that your school principal—another judge, and the only adult you’d met who seemed immune to Jonah’s charms—had considered the story to be “inappropriate.” Personally, you had to force yourself to keep reading past the part where Cinderella dismembered a horde of rats and sewed their skins into a furry ball gown using their sinews and whiskers as thread.
“There’s something to them,” Jonah said, toying with a glass jar. There was a lizard he’d found at school trapped inside. It had leaped onto Jasmine Chaudhary during recess, and he’d caught it in his lunch box in exchange for a kiss on the cheek behind the chrysanthemum trellis. He’d transferred it to one of his father’s pickling jars at home.
“To lizards?” you asked, watching as Jonah turned the jar this way and that.
Jonah rolled his eyes. “To fairy tales.”
“Oh.”
“I’m reading that book my uncle got me. By Joseph Campbell. It’s got a lot to say about fairy tales, myths, and old stories.”
The lizard scrambled around, eyes wide, as though permanently startled. Its little feet scrabbled ineffectually at the glass.
“Aren’t you afraid the others will make fun of you?” you asked, even though you knew they wouldn’t. No one made fun of Jonah.
Jonah shrugged, as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him, as though it didn’t matter, as though it slid off him like water droplets off the new blue bathing suit he’d received as a birthday present, the one you couldn’t help admiring at the beach last weekend.
“What if—” you began, but hesitated because you never knew how Jonah would react to confessions of weakness. “What if they make fun of me?”
Jonah lifted the glass up to his face and squinted at the lizard. It turned away, as though it too feared meeting his gaze. “I’ll protect you,” he said absently. “You’re my best friend.”
Something clenched in your stomach, something pressed against your heart, forcing it to thud thud thud against your chest like a lizard trapped in a glass jar.
Jonah held the jar above his head, considering the lizard, thought lines creasing his pale face. He’d let his hair grow out, and it was a mass of ringlets. The school would ask his parents to get it cut soon. You liked it long.
“I like your hair like this,” you wanted to say, but the words caught, trapped in their own glass prison.
Jonah tapped one finger against the jar. The lizard swiveled. “Want to come to the back garden? I want to light a fire under this.”
• • • •
“Jonah . . .”
You followed that with an extremely embarrassing, staccato burst of moans. You were never that loud when it was just you and your right hand. You were feverishly happy that Jonah’s parents weren’t home right then.
Jonah’s curls popped up onto the pillow next to you. He wiped drool off his mouth with the back of his hand. “That was messy,” he announced. “Next time, I’ll try it with less spit.”
“Next time . . . ?” you echoed, still somewhat dazed. At sixteen, you’d never been with a girl—been with anyone—like this.
You’ve wanted to—with Jonah, specifically—for a very long time.
“Jonah, are you—are we—we’re still straight, right?”
Jonah raised an eyebrow. He brought a finger to your mouth. Reflexively, your lips parted. He laughed as he withdrew his hand, the sound cold and hard.
Jonah rolled off the bed, snatching his shirt off the ground. “I’m going to show you something,” he said, as if starting a grand proclamation. “You won’t tell anyone about it, will you?”
Jonah never told you to do anything. He always asked. Politely. And knew that you would obey.
“Of course I won’t, Jonah!” you replied, expecting—hoping for?—further sexual revelations. But no, Jonah began rummaging through his backpack.
What he withdrew made a tingle slice down the contours of your spine. You’re still not sure why the book made you uneasy back then. It was just a book. It would always be just a book, even after everything else that happened.
It was a journal, not even a proper, printed book. The nicks, scratches, and worn spots on the leather cover betrayed its advanced age. Jonas opened it. The paper was thin, beige, and speckled with dark spots. It reminded you of skin stretched over the bones of an old, old woman. Inscribed on the first page, in a hard-to-follow, looping script, was the name “Jeanne.” Below it, smaller but in the same handwriting, was the word “Fées.”
Buttoning up your shorts, you approached him. “It’s about fairies?” you asked, relying on the edges of the French language your high school teachers had forced you to gnaw on.
“I found it in the British Consulate’s rummage sale,” Jonah said, carefully turning a page. “It’s written in a bunch of different languages.”
You could see that. As Jonah continued to turn the pages, you recognized French, Arabic, and maybe German. But there was more. Greek? An Indian language?
Chaos was the book’s reigning design principle. Great flows of unbroken text in multiple scripts and colours had been splattered haphazardly onto the pages, interrupted by sketches, rough, hand-drawn maps, and scatterings of untidy, numbered columns that seemed to belong to recipes. Some of the ink had faded into ghosts of their former sentences, while others bled into messy clots.
“Look at this,” Jonah said, flipping to the last page. There, lovingly detailed in dark ink that had resisted the ravages of age, was a drawing of a fairy. It was the kind you were used to from children’s books: a little person in a dress, with gauzy wings and large, earnest eyes.
Jonah’s eyes, on the other hand, caverned hungrily. “I’m going to translate it myself.”
“We can ask Mme. B. for help with the French—” you began, but Jonah interrupted you by snapping the book shut.
“I’m going to translate it,” he said slowly, “myself.” His gaze gripped you like talons, and made you want to squirm into a ball and shiver.
• • • •
There were two things you and Jonah absolutely did not do after that.
1. You didn’t have sex again.
There was none of the promised “next time.” You gave Jonah meaningful looks and dropped subtle hints. You invited him over when your parents weren’t around. You even went so far as to suggest you watch a gay movie together—a tricky ordeal, given that you would have to bypass the Ministry of Culture’s blocks and bans on all queer content on the internet.
Finally, you broke down and simply asked Jonah if he wanted to hook up again. “I’d do it this time. If you want,” you mewled, eyes locked on your feet. “Blow you, I mean. I’d really like to!”
Jonah pulled your face up by your chin and for one sparkling moment, you thought he was going to kiss you. Instead, he met your gaze and said, “I know you would.”
That weekend, at a party hosted at Faisal Al-Faheem’s mansion at the edge of the desert, Jonah pulled Emma Bax into a guest bedroom. “Guard the door for me?” he asked you, voice dripping with smoky silk. Despite everything, the sound of Emma moaning “Jonah! Jonah!” gripped your groin like a steel trap.
2. You didn’t talk about the book.
You saw it. Glimpses of aged leather when Jonah withdrew notebooks from his bag in class. Snatches of it when he pulled out his lunch. Sometimes, you caught him studying bits of text in other languages that he’d clearly copied out himself, and you spotted him carrying dictionaries for languages he didn’t study at school. Once, during a particularly dry Biology lecture, you noticed his furtive hand reach into his bag. With a slow, rhythmic motion, his hand moved in . . . and out . . . in . . . and out. You knew he was stroking the book. You simultaneously wanted to recoil and to touch yourself.
But he never brought up the book.
Neither did you. You felt too—too—
Well, you didn’t want to bring it up either.
• • • •
Your final year at school was challenging.
It wasn’t just the coursework, though the difficulty had skyrocketed (who could have predicted that the honours track, which you had signed up for because Jonah had, would be that much more work?).
It wasn’t the anxiety of leaving school. College applications were stressful, but you knew that’s what was expected of you. That was a predictable anxiety.
It was that everything seemed a little off.
You saw less of Jonah. He was busy with a girl, with the extra courses he was taking, or, strangely, in the desert. He started spending large blocks of time, entire weekends even, camping in the desert. You didn’t ask why. You knew he wouldn’t tell you.
The time he did spend with you was . . . Well, once, when his parents were out, Jonah said he wanted to sunbathe in the backyard. He stripped nude, waited for you to admire what cricket-team training had done to his physique, then handed you a bottle of suntan lotion without saying a word. He smirked the entire time at your hard-on, which even your baggiest shorts couldn’t hide.
You dreamed of him often. Usually they were innocuous and silly, like dreams were. Sometimes, they pulled you awake, gasping and with warm stickiness spreading down your pyjama bottoms. And once, your dream of Jonah lifting you up by the throat felt so real, you couldn’t stop massaging your neck all morning. In the dream, he had big, gauzy wings. He hauled you up to his face and whispered, “You’re mine. I’ll protect you, but you’re mine . . .”
One night, Jonah asked you to accompany him to Khalifa Park at midnight. “I need to bury the dog,” he said. His voice was marble: cold, smooth, and hard.
At midnight? you wondered, but not aloud. Never aloud. Besides, here was Jonah, asking to hang out with you again.
Neither of you owned shovels. You lived in apartments in the middle of a metropolis surrounded by a desert, after all. So, under the light of a gibbous moon, you and Jonah dug a shallow grave beneath a date palm using a wooden spatula and a steel ladle. It might have been funny, in another timeline.
Jonah withdrew a cardboard shoebox.
“Didn’t your parents just get the dog last month?” you asked. You had been delighted by the cute chihuahua-terrier mix, who Jonah’s dad had christened Luke Skybarker. “How did he die?”
Jonah gave you his Look.
“Sorry, Jonah—” you stammered, “just—just that maybe we should say something? Over his grave? He was a good boy!”
Jonah smirked at your display of sentimentality. “I smothered it with a pillow until it fainted,” he said, quirking an eyebrow, “and then sawed off its head with a kitchen knife. All in the aid of a devious experiment.”
He burst out laughing at your thunderstruck expression and ruffled your hair. “You can be such an idiot sometimes! Let’s just get this over with so we can leave!”
• • • •
Odd, unsettling incidents began occurring at school.
Mr. Abbas, everyone’s least favourite Biology teacher, vomited in the middle of class, spewing not the expected churn of half-digested food, but wiry tangles of dirty, black fur. They heaved out of his mouth like large tarantulas, glistening with mucous and stinking of bile. He was rushed to the hospital.
The Exam Hall, the bane of every student’s existence at your school, was unexpectedly shut down one Thursday morning. You snuck under the caution tape they’d put up, peered through the windows—and recoiled with a yelp. On every available surface in the Exam Hall—on every inch of floor, on every table and chair—lay a dead lizard.
A week after breaking up with Jonah, Shanika Ramasinge began shrieking in the middle of the cafeteria during lunch. She sprinted out clutching her mouth, wine-red driblets oozing out between her fingers. When you went over to her seat, you saw, in a sticky, bloody puddle, a small pile of delicate, white teeth. Though you held back, some morbid fascination made you want to reach into the pile with your fingers and count them, one by one, tooth by tooth. Because you were certain there were thirty-two.
• • • •
You were serving after-school detention when Emma Bax cornered you. Mr. Nizar was fast asleep at his desk, his snores a counterpoint to the loudly ticking clock.
Emma plonked herself next to you. She could’ve landed herself in even bigger trouble for that. Your school had managed to flout the general rule of sex-segregation only thanks to a senior Ministry of Education official’s friendship with your principal. A girl and a boy sitting together, though, would be pushing it.
“Why are you friends with Jonah?” Emma asked quietly, looking right at you.
“Err . . .” Girls did not often speak to you. Not like that.
“He’s awful,” she continued.
“Everyone likes Jonah,” you managed.
Emma shook her head. “Does anyone actually like him? Or are they just . . .”
“Afraid?” you whispered.
Emma nodded.
“Didn’t you—didn’t you date him?” you asked.
Emma’s laugh was tiny, sharp, and unkind, like an insect bite. “Date? You might call it that. Didn’t really feel like dating.”
“Was he mean to you?”
Emma paused. “After that party at Faisal’s where we first hooked up, I hung around like a sad puppy for a few weeks. He ignored me unless we were having sex. Then he got bored with me and broke it off. Does that count as mean?”
Mr. Nizar gave a great hmph and stirred in his seat. You both glanced at him warily, but he remained ensconced in sleep. The clock’s ticking punctuated the silence.
“Jonah’s my best friend,” you said loyally.
Emma shook her head. “You seem like a nice guy. I just wanted to warn you. Jonah’s not a nice guy.”
“Why didn’t you break up with him sooner?”
Emma could have stabbed you in the eyes with her stare. “Can you imagine having that conversation with Jonah?”
You swallowed. An image of thirty-two bloody teeth flashed through your mind, but that had nothing to do with you or Jonah, did it?
“You see?” Emma fidgeted in her chair. “No, I waited until he got tired of me and did it himself.”
Emma paused. She cleared her throat. It seemed that she had reached the heart of what she wanted to say. “Near the end, though, things started getting . . .” She hesitated again. “Has anything weird ever happened to you? Between you and Jonah? Or around him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . this might sound strange, but for a while, I kept having these extremely vivid dreams about him. Like, I’d wake up and they weren’t dreams at all, but strong memories . . . only they couldn’t be memories because they were dream-weird?”
Emma was babbling. But you wouldn’t have stopped her even if you had wanted to, because things had been weird around Jonah, ever since he showed you that book, and you had dreamed of him vividly. And what about all the strange stuff happening at school?
That had nothing to do with Jonah, though. Of course not.
“. . . he had these big wings and he kept telling me things,” Emma was saying, “I know they were just dreams, but it creeped me out. He’d say things like ‘once you’re mine, you’re always mine,’ chara like that.” Emma didn’t speak Arabic, but her accent when she swore was flawless. Growing up here, you’ve all picked up the common curse words.
“I don’t know what to—” you began, but you were interrupted by a loud, angry yell of “HEY!” from Mr. Nizar, whose glare was venomous.
Emma slipped over to the next seat, burbling out an apology, leaving you to stew.
• • • •
Jonah wasn’t valedictorian. Normally, the student with the highest grades earned that distinction, but for your year, the principal announced that the school would start considering “a more holistic picture.” And so, the honour went to quiet Saba Mahmoud, who had organized charity Iftar dinners on campus during the Ramadan of your junior and senior years. Her speech at your graduation ceremony was measured, understated, and boring.
Jonah organized an outing for the whole class that weekend, at what was known as the “American Beach,” the only beach where men and women were allowed to mingle. Saba did not attend. You learned later that Saba had been attacked by a pack of stray cats, and that she spent that entire weekend in hospital.
The party started off well enough. Hammad Akhtar, who’d recently earned his driver’s licence, brought over his grill and cooked everyone burgers, hot dogs, and skewers loaded with alternating cubes of seared pineapple and spicy paneer. Mary Azar, daughter of the Jordanian ambassador, procured bottles of champagne which fizzed your senses pleasantly as the sun dyed the water a dusky pink. Jonah’s bathing suit kept dipping low around his butt as he dove for the beach ball, and you contented yourself with looking from afar.
So you weren’t expecting it when it all went to shit. Perhaps it was a cruel bit of theatre played out by the universe? An abrupt end to an enchanting evening to echo the sharp end to your childhood?
Faisal Al-Faheem—rich, sneering Faisal, whose father sat on the Supreme Court and who tried to hide the welts and bruises on his back that must’ve come from a firmly wielded belt—sauntered over to where you sat, your drink nestled in the sand beside you.
“Were you looking at me?” he demanded, voice thick with alcohol and anger.
You didn’t really know what he was talking about.
“I asked you a question! Were you looking at me?”
Curious glances from some of the others blinked in your direction. Jonah, you saw from the corner of your eye, had turned to watch.
“Everyone knows you’re a pervert!” Faisal said when you didn’t reply. “Everyone knows you’re gay.”
You just sat there in the sand, looking up at your tormentor, because how were you supposed to respond to that? What did you say when a truth that you’d been hiding—that you’d been wrestling, that you didn’t even fully acknowledge—was thrown in your face like that?
People were murmuring now. You caught snatches at the edge of your hearing:
“. . . gross . . .”
“You knew?”
“. . . mithli . . .”
“Really?”
“Chathaab!”
With a deft kick, Faisal knocked over your cup. Golden liquid splashed out, pooling momentarily before sinking into the sand, leaving behind a dark blemish. Idly, you wondered if wealthy kids built sandcastles using champagne instead of water, and then realized you might be going into shock.
Jonah was now jogging towards you.
Faisal still wasn’t done. “People say you’re gay for Jonah. Does he know? Does he know that you’re a faggot—”
WHAM! Jonah barreled into Faisal, knocking them both into the champagne-soaked sand.
Scrambling. Flying dirt. Screams from the crowd.
“Kus ummak!” Faisal swore, shoving Jonah off.
Jonah picked himself up and dusted off the sand. “So sorry, Faisal,” he said with obsidian-sharp politeness. “I wasn’t looking where I was running. The champagne, you know? Gets to your head!”
Faisal muttered something dark as he got to his feet, but you thought you caught the word “homos.”
“What’s that?” Jonah asked, voice still razor-keen.
Faisal shook his head. “Nothing.”
Jonah nodded. “Well if that’s all, I’m going to take this one—” he jerked a thumb in your direction, “—home. His mummy worries so!” He gestured to the rest of the class. “Enjoy the rest of the party, everyone! And someone please get Faisal some water!”
The taxi ride was entirely silent. It was only when you reached Jonah’s living room that you started sobbing into a cushion.
You heard the clink of glassware and a gurgling splash of liquid. When you looked up, Jonah was handing you one of two tumblers of amber liquid. “Brandy,” Jonah explained. “My dad says it’s soothing.”
The drink burned as you swallowed, but did warm you up.
You were used to long silences when you hung out with Jonah. He would pause by a tree, or put down his game controller, or set the CD back on the display shelf, and then drift off to someplace else. You would let him gather his thoughts. Often, you would snatch the opportunity to furtively admire him.
But right now, the air between you both felt heavy. There were a thousand things you wanted to blurt out, but the air pressing against your nose and mouth wouldn’t let you.
“Faisal’s a shithead,” Jonah said finally.
You nodded and forced yourself to speak. “Thanks, Jonah,” you said, though it almost hurt your throat to say it out loud. Thanking him almost meant that you were admitting what Faisal had accused you of. Which was ludicrous because of course you were—what Faisal had said. Of course you were—
“Let’s deal with him?” Jonah asked suddenly. There was a strange, fervent quality to his voice.
You looked up from your drink. That quality, it was in his face too, a dark excitement that began at his eyes and radiated down to his mouth.
“Wait here,” he said.
You were not surprised when he fetched the book from his room. Somehow, you’d always known it would boil down to the book. Fées by Jeanne.
But you were surprised by what he held in his other hand: A glass pickling jar. And inside it was . . .
Well, it had to be a fairy.
This was nothing like a fairy from children’s books. It was upright and human shaped, yes, with two arms, two legs, and a head, but the resemblance ended there. Its skin was leathery and a mottled yellow-brown, like a snake. Its face was pointed and equally reptilian, though beady black eyes betrayed an uncanny intelligence. Its wings were made of thin membranes of wet, slimy skin, like that of a frog, stretched taut over slender ridges of bone.
And it was banging against the glass furiously with tiny fists, struggling to break out. You noticed that Jonah had placed a little bundle of herbs tied with twine in with the fairy.
“The scent of the herbs keeps it weak,” Jonah said, noticing your look. “The German parts of the book were very helpful there.”
You drew your attention to the book, which Jonah had placed on the coffee table beside the trapped fairy. Since the last time you’d seen it properly, it had gained a number of bookmarks, tabs, and inserted sheets crammed with notes. It didn’t make you uneasy anymore, not with the jar and its prisoner overshadowing everything. It had always been just a book.
Wasn’t it funny how that happened? How different spectres gobbled up the ones you used to fear? Like, in that moment, you couldn’t have cared less about Faisal, or what he thought of you.
“Jonah, is that really a . . . ?”
“A fairy, yes.”
“How . . . ?”
“Good old Jeanne collected every fairy tale she could find. Every mention, every story, every scrap,” Jonah said, sitting back down next to you on the sofa. “She was trying to piece together a picture of real fairies. A lot of it was rubbish; she even admitted that. The Greek portions are completely made-up shit. But she succeeded in teasing out parts of the good stuff . . .” He tapped the jar. You saw the fairy open its mouth. Maybe it screamed. You heard nothing through the glass.
“This is a species of desert fairy particular to the Middle East,” Jonah continued. “The Arabic translation took me a while; it was all in verse. But once I figured it out, it was easy to catch them.” He smiled deeply, proud of his accomplishment.
“Them? There are more?”
Jonah nodded. “I’ve managed to catch about three dozen.”
“You have three dozen fairies up in your room?”
Jonah laughed, and you were suddenly reminded of that moonlit night in Khalifa Park, when you’d buried a dog together. When Jonah had laughed exactly like that.
“Do you want to know the reason Jeanne was obsessed with fairies?” he asked. “It’s not because they’re pretty.” He gestured lazily at the jar. “It’s because Jeanne believed that fairies could grant you wishes.”
“What? Like a genie?”
“No. You don’t ask a fairy. There’s no rubbing lamps, no crafting carefully worded requests.” Jonah brought his fingers together like he was portraying a cartoon villain. “You have to eat them. Jeanne had recipes.”
You stared at Jonah. Then you stared at the reptilian thing, whose angry motions had slowed. It took a moment to slump against the glass and pant, before resuming. In that little moment, despite its alien features, it looked . . . extremely human.
You felt bile rise in your throat. You forced yourself to swallow.
“Her recipes weren’t perfect. My first few tries, I could only send people vivid dreams.”
“Jonah, did you . . . did you do that to me? Did you send me dreams? Did you send Emma Bax dreams?”
Jonah’s teeth were particularly prominent when he smiled. “Jeanne, of course, wasn’t a scientific thinker. I realized that eating the whole fairy was probably unnecessary. And unnecessarily bad-tasting.”
The fairy was definitely growing tired now. Its violent attempts at escape looked half-hearted at best. Jonah nodded. “Good. I can show you.”
He withdrew a thick rubber glove from his pocket, donned it on his right hand and reached for the jar. With practiced efficiency, he unscrewed the lid, stuck his hand in and grabbed the fairy by the torso. It struggled weakly, even trying to sink its teeth into Jonah’s hand, but the glove did its job well.
“I experimented. I realized what really mattered was this fluid-filled sac at the base of the skull. The other ingredients in Jeanne’s recipe weren’t even that important; they just help mask the taste. Eating that sac alone gets you much more potent results. Such exquisite curses . . .”
Another wave of nausea washed over you. You gripped the arm of the sofa, digging your nails into the fabric.
“The experiments weren’t easy. There was a whole month I couldn’t catch any fairies at all. I had to content myself with practicing my butchering skills on Luke Skybarker.”
Jonah held up the fairy, now slumped over his hand. “I’ve made so much progress. I don’t even need to use a knife anymore; their skulls are so soft.” The fairy hammered feebly at his wrist with its tiny fists—and then Jonah grabbed its head with his other hand and snapped its neck.
You gasped and stumbled out of the sofa.
Jonah laughed again. “Don’t be such a pussy. These fairies . . . well, you saw what I did, didn’t you? With horrible Mr. Abbas? With that bitch Shanika who wanted to dump me? With Saba, who stole my valedictory spot? I even thought it would be funny to put the Exam Hall out of commission for a while!”
As he spoke, the memories rushed back. You could almost imagine them as though they were your own. The undulations of a throat as a tangle of wiry hair clawed its way out. The twitching limbs of a lizard, dying on its back. Teeth clack-clacking onto a table, blood and drool puddling around them.
“And now—” Jonah began to dig the fingers of his left hand into the dead fairy’s head, and you had to look away, “—we’re going to get revenge on that shithead Faisal.”
You heard a crack, then a squelch. Sitting on the carpet, you squeezed your eyes shut. There was a tearing noise and a strong odour bloomed into the room, at once coppery and floral. It made you want to retch.
“Poor baby,” Jonah crooned, “you can look now. It’s done.”
The corpse of the poor fairy was back in the jar. In Jonah’s pink-stained left hand sat a small, jelly-like, fluid-filled sac. It was white, but splotches of pinkish blood clung to its surface. Perhaps it was your imagination, but it seemed to quiver, like there was something in it, trying to get out, trying to . . . hatch?
“Here, open wide! I’ll let you do the honours,” Jonah said, beckoning to you. “All you need to do is chew and think hard about what you want to happen to Faisal.”
“Jonah, I—I don’t want to . . .”
His eyes hardened instantly. “Don’t be a little bitch. With this, you could get even with anyone who ever hurt you. Faisal? Make him piss acid and see how he enjoys that. Are you afraid of coming out to your parents? Well, if they react badly, maybe they’d like it if their eyes turned to wax. I have so many plans . . .” Jonah’s voice turned almost reverential. “After we deal with Faisal, I’m going after our bastard principal . . . and then, the sky’s the limit, right?”
You looked at Jonah, who was grinning madly. You looked at the book, now so small and innocuous on the table. You looked at the jar, the mangled corpse of a tiny creature lying inside.
“Jonah’s not a nice guy,” Emma had said. Did you fully see that now, or was there still a part of you that ached for him?
But you knew what you had to do.
You didn’t dare look at Jonah again. You didn’t want to be enthralled. You knew you didn’t stand a chance against him if you looked at his face, at Jonah, Jonah, Jonah . . .
You crawled over to him as he extended a hand.
Your lips closed around his fingers. Despite everything, you felt a frisson of delight, putting your mouth on Jonah. What you would give to just—
No. You had to focus.
Curses, right? You wondered if Jonah had tried anything else, any other kinds of wishes. Maybe it simply hadn’t occurred to him.
But curses worked. You had proof of that. You’d seen it.
As hard as you could, you focussed your thoughts on Jonah.
• • • •
Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah. What would happen when it was just you?
