Becoming Jinn Read online

“I am,” I grumble, even though I’m not. We’ve been at it all morning. My mother’s aggressive agenda has taken the magic right out of these lessons. Memorizing the periodic table was more fun than this.

  Her worried eyes dart toward the mantelpiece, and the rosy-cheeked Russians dance over our heads, landing safely on the couch.

  “This isn’t working,” I say, upending the empty bucket in my hand. I release my grip, and the metal pail falls to the floor with a hollow clank. The drops of water I’ve managed to conjure are less than the amount of saliva I could summon sans magic. “How about we compromise and I turn the faucet on with my mind?”

  An ember hurtles past the hearth and lands on the antique Turkish prayer rug. My mother stamps it out and shakes her head. “Come on, Azra. Dig deeper than your surface instincts. This isn’t hard.”

  “For you.” The frustration in my voice just slips out.

  And an admonishment stabs right back.

  A zap! ten times stronger than a shock from a shuffle across a wool rug pierces the back of my neck. The source of my electric jolt materializes a second later. Yasmin, one of my Zar “sisters.”

  Having arrived via Jinn teleportation, she quickly drops the red clay pot she’s holding onto the coffee table and shouts, “Lalla Kalyssa, watch out!”

  Sable-black hair flying behind her, Yasmin rushes to the fireplace, nudging (more like shoving) my mother aside. With less effort than it takes to inhale deeply, Yasmin conjures a wall of water that douses the sizzling fire. The charred logs eke out a final hiss as she dissipates the resulting smoke before it fills the room.

  “Phew!” she says, tossing her long hair off her shoulder. “Good thing I apped when I did.”

  This is my first time sensing an apporting Jinn. Turns out, it’s less like being licked by a puppy and more like being stung by a wasp.

  Or in Yasmin’s case, a swarm of wasps.

  By mutual unspoken agreement, we haven’t seen each other in months. For me, these few seconds are enough to reinforce why.

  “I mean,” Yasmin says, thrusting back her shoulders, “someone could have gotten hurt.”

  The muscles in my jaw tense, preventing me from returning her condescending smile. Though, since it’s always condescending, I should just call it her smile.

  My mother straightens her kaftan. “Thank you, Yasmin. Azra was just about to conjure the water. And if not, well…” She twiddles her fingers. “I would have never let her get hurt.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” For once, the patronizing tone is missing from Yasmin’s voice. She blinks her thick eyelashes and lowers her gold eyes. “I didn’t mean to imply you couldn’t have conjured the water, Lalla Kalyssa.”

  “Lalla” is a term of endearment and respect often used when speaking to a female Jinn one is very close to, kind of like how humans refer to family friends as “aunt” or “uncle” even though they aren’t related by blood. I almost believe Yasmin’s usage is sincere.

  Almost.

  “Anyway…” Yasmin waves her silver-bangled hand. “My mom wanted me to return your tagine.”

  Running a finger along the conical dish, my mother says, “The original this time. Not a conjured replica. Thank her for that.” She floats the red-glazed tagine straight from Marrakesh, which she swears is better than any magic can create, into the kitchen. “And thank you for bringing it, Yasmin. Though I did expect you yesterday. I had planned to start cooking Azra’s special dish this morning.”

  Back straight as a rod, Yasmin places a hand on her heart. “My apologies, Lalla Kalyssa. I forgot you like to spend all day cooking. Like a human.”

  She smiles, and I expect to see fangs. She’s always seemed more serpent than genie.

  She slithers closer as her almond-shaped eyes scan my body. “At least your bangle didn’t do much to improve—” She covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry, I mean change your appearance, Azra.” She flips her hair. “We had to move states.”

  This bangle may change a lot of things, but it doesn’t change this: Yasmin getting under my skin in less than five minutes. This time though, instead of scratching and walking away, I burrow right back under her perfect complexion.

  “Really?” I raise an eyebrow. “I thought it had something to do with a sloppy lottery rigging. Right about the time you started granting wishes…”

  Yasmin’s flared nostrils are at odds with her syrupy tone. “Having trouble with the H2O?” She kicks the empty bucket with her foot. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Sometimes the Afrit wait months before assigning wish candidates. Me getting the hang of this in a day was probably a fluke.” She snorts. “Took Farrah weeks.”

  Fluke? Sweetie? That’s. It. So what if Yasmin’s been an official Jinn for almost a full year? Older means older. Period. Not wiser. And sure as Jinn not better.

  Narrowing my eyes, I glare at my silver bangle. My heels drive into the wood floor as I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on the thud thud, thud thud of my heart. The harsh squawk of a blue jay in the front yard. The traces of my mother’s vanilla perfume. The weight of the humidity in the air. Instead of letting it all distract me, I do as my mother instructed and absorb these elements of nature that surround me, welcoming them, internalizing them, commingling their energy with my own.

  The sudden shock of current that shoots through my body ends in my fingertips. Water sloshes over the side of the pail, puddling around my bare feet. And Yasmin’s.

  “Azra!” Yasmin leaps back. “These are lea-ther!”

  My mother’s fleeting smirk doesn’t escape my notice as I shove my trembling fingers into my pockets. Still, I’m a bit surprised to hear her unsubtle sayonara.

  “No harm done,” she says, drying Yasmin’s gold gladiator sandals with a swish of her hand. “There, you’re good to go. Thanks again for returning the tagine in time for Azra’s birthday.”

  As if this reminds her, Yasmin tips her head in my direction. “Oh, yes. Happy Birthday, Azra.” She squares her shoulders and snaps her heels together. “See you later.”

  And she’s gone. Disappeared. Like a snake down a hole.

  The mutual unspoken agreement between my mother and I is not to acknowledge that Yasmin, like her mother, Raina, makes her skin as itchy as mine. Instead, she eases over to me, extracting my fists from my pockets. “Better than picturing a wrench, isn’t it?”

  She’s referring to the way I conjured the tools earlier. Simple visualization is, according to my mother, the equivalent of a cheap parlor trick.

  “Inelegant,” she says.

  “But effective,” I say, nodding to the box of tools at the front door, poised for donation.

  “Maybe, but we Nadiras are better than that, Azra. That’s textbook stuff. If you know how something looks and works, you can conjure it. The more intimately you know the item, the better you do.”

  Hence my perfect hammer but my unidentifiable reciprocating saw.

  “But,” she says, “we are not sideshow freaks. Our ability to harness the light and energy of this world allows us to manipulate the environment in ways two-bit charlatans can’t even fathom. We can access laws of nature that humans don’t even know exist. Until you ground all your magic in nature, your skills will be limited.”

  My instinct is to dismiss her, but the tingle in my fingertips won’t let me.

  She tucks a loose strand of hair back into her impromptu updo. “At least one benefit of Yasmin’s visit is we learned all you needed was a little encouragement.”

  “Encouragement, condescension, fine line,” I say.

  “Whatever works,” she says with a teasing glint in her eye.

  A childhood of watching my mother perform magic made me fear I wouldn’t be any good at it, certainly not as good as her, someone who long ago earned the nickname “model Jinn” from her Zar sisters. But she’s always said that being descended from a long line of Jinn means magic lives inside me. Once I received my bangle, all I’d need to do is access it. Or as she’s been insisting all day, allow mys
elf to access it. I hate proving her right.

  Fanning her face with her hand, she says, “How about you prove just how encouraged you are by putting out the rest of the fires? I fear I’m on the verge of perspiring.”

  I’ve never seen my mother sweat, literally or figuratively. But if she were going to, today would be the day. The house is stifling, even for us.

  My magically ignited fires churn in the rest of the house’s nine fireplaces. Nine because we live in Massachusetts and hate to be cold. Nine because my mother, though no longer a wish-granting Jinn, still has her magic and can install fireplaces at will.

  Though my hands still shake, all I have to do is think of Yasmin’s smug face and I’m able to conjure water instantly at the dining room fireplace. I make my way to the second floor, extinguishing all the flames that have transformed our house into a two-thousand-square-foot sauna.

  My bedroom being last, the air is thick with heat. I raise the double-paned glass window all the way up before kneeling in front of the fire.

  “I’m flying, Henry!”

  I jerk upright, dousing myself and the hearth with my conjured water as the sound of the little girl from across the street penetrates my bedroom. I cross the room and pull the curtain aside.

  The open back of the Carwyns’ small SUV is crammed with beach chairs, towels, one, no, two coolers, and an overflowing bucket of plastic toys. Mr. Carwyn, a bit rounder and grayer than the last time I saw him, shoves a bright green tote bag in between a large umbrella and a thickly folded plaid blanket as his six-year-old daughter, Lisa, soars down the driveway.

  Head bent against the wind, arms straight out behind her, Lisa makes airplane noises as she circles the car. A shiver travels up my spine as she yells again to her older brother, “I’m flying, Henry!”

  Ducking his head to get a glimpse through the open back, Henry yells, “Jumbo jet or single prop?”

  “Jumbo!” Lisa comes in for a landing next to his passenger-side door.

  The top of Henry’s sandy-brown-haired head pokes out of the car. He leans down, picks Lisa up, and hauls her into the backseat. “I thought you looked like a 747,” he says.

  A tired-sounding Mrs. Carwyn calls from the front passenger seat, “Ready, Hank?”

  Mr. Carwyn’s grunt precedes him slamming the cargo door shut. He steps back, his flat palms aimed at the car, ready to shove the door closed again should it fail to latch on account of the family of four’s mountain of gear.

  Mr. Carwyn’s halfway to the driver’s seat when the door begins to rise. All four Carwyn heads face forward, away from me.

  Should I? Can I?

  The “can” overcomes the “should,” and I test out my range. Click. The latch catches. Henry turns around. My heart catapults to my throat. But there’s no way he saw. Heard? Doubtful. Even so, he wouldn’t know what he heard.

  Henry pushes a rainbow-striped beach chair to the side and cranes his neck to see out the back. He cocks his head and smiles. At me? Can he see me? Just in case, I smile back. We haven’t talked in a while. Not that when we do talk we say all that much. But still, some days, he’s the only one in school I have more than a “hi,” “hey,” or “’sup?” conversation with.

  The thumbs-up he gives his father answers my question as the SUV then backs out of the driveway, headed for a day at the beach. There was a time, long ago, when I would have been strapped into the backseat, Henry on one side of me and Jenny on the other.

  Before I release the curtain, I let myself seek out the “A+J” scrawled in the bottom right corner of the garage door. Faded as it is, I’m probably the only one who knows it’s more than a series of black scuff marks.

  I know because I wrote it. I’m the “A,” and Jenny was the “J.”

  For the first nine years of my life, Jenny Carwyn was my best friend. Jenny and I were born on the same day but not in the same place. As Mrs. Carwyn gave birth in a sterile hospital room ten miles away, my mother expelled me out into her jetted bathtub, surrounded by her Zar sisters.

  Our entries into the world marked one of many differences, but Jenny and I were inseparable from the moment we became mobile. Before I could even talk, Mrs. Carwyn would find me on their doorstep, having somehow escaped my mother’s eye long enough to wander across the street.

  Jenny, too, would have turned sixteen today.

  “I’m flying, Azra! I’m flying!”

  I close my eyes and see Jenny’s fingers wrapped around the metal chain next to me. Higher and higher, we rode the swings on the set in my backyard, me promising her that just a little more and we’d be able to touch the tulip-shaped cloud in the sky.

  “I’m flying, Azra!”

  She was. She did. And then all that was next to me was the metal chain.

  The day she died was the day I realized magic couldn’t fix everything. It was the last day I wanted to become a Jinn. A Jinn like my mother. A Jinn like my grandmother. A Jinn like my great-grandmother. On and on, generation upon generation, we become Jinn. In exchange for granting wishes to humans, we receive powers that allow us to do the impossible. Though there are some things even our magic cannot do.

  We cannot bring someone back from the dead.

  This I learned the day Jenny fell from the swing in our backyard. The day I begged my mother to use her powers to save my best friend. The day I lost my best friend was the last day I had a best friend.

  “Azra,” my mother’s voice floats up the stairs. “How about a break from all this, kiddo?”

  A break. From all of this. If only there was one. If only I could find one.

  Even though my mother always insisted there was no way out of me fulfilling my destiny, when I was younger I thought maybe she was forcing me into this like other parents force kids to take piano lessons.

  I steal a last glance at the “A+J.” Henry, barely a year older than Jenny and me, tried to take her place over the years, but I wouldn’t let him. Couldn’t let him. Though it surely would have been better for both of us if I had. But for the past few years, at least he’s had Lisa, whose resemblance to Jenny both comforts and unnerves me. For the first time, I wonder if Henry feels the same.

  At the brick hearth, I steady myself against the mantel, allowing my thumping heart to retreat to its normal rhythm. I lay a finger on the oval pendant hanging from a silver chain around my neck. The cursive A engraved on the front stands for the first letter of the name I share with my grandmother on my mother’s side—the necklace’s original owner, whom I’ve never met. Like a security blanket, my A has always calmed me. I was so young when my mother first looped the chain around my neck that I don’t remember it.

  Leaning over the terra cotta bricks, I wring the water out of my shirt and clutch my A once more before heading back downstairs.

  When I enter the living room, my mother points to the bookshelf. “Up there,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

  A box wrapped in silver and gold is nestled in among the tchotchkes. Painted tribal masks from Ghana, onyx candleholders from Mexico, baskets of yarn from Ireland, the objects cramming the shelves are a tangible history of my mother’s life. Being Jinn has allowed my mother to see the world. Traveling to even the farthest reaches is only a matter of a blink and a nod for Jinn.

  My hand reaches the box without me having to stand on tiptoes even though it’s on the highest shelf—something I couldn’t have done yesterday, but then again, yesterday, unlike today, my mother and I were not yet the exact same height. My tank top rides up, fully exposing my belly button.

  “Tell me,” my mother says, waving her hand and drying my damp shirt, “because, knowing you, it could go either way. Is the midriff baring an unfortunate side effect of your metamorphosis or an intentional display of contempt for this whole thing?”

  I run the tip of my red nail along my exposed stomach, working to bury the ache that always comes with thinking of Jenny. I issue a wry smile that lets her think it’s the latter. I wish I would have thought of that. I wish. Rolls
off the tongue. So easy to say. Takes so much to do.

  Inside the box lies a deep purple tunic with pinstripes of gold so thin the effect is subtle, not flashy. I rub the soft linen between my fingers. “It’s … it’s beautiful. Thanks, Mom. Really.”

  My sincerity throws her. “I can make it black if you want.”

  “No, I like the purple.” The understated nature of the shirt—a departure from the bright fabrics of her wardrobe but in line with my monotone collection of blacks, whites, and grays—proves she knows how hard all of this is for me. As does what comes next.

  “I know I said we’d wait until tomorrow,” she says, refolding the shirt. “But if you want, if you’re not too tired, we can give it a try.”

  “It” can only mean one thing—the power even I couldn’t help but crave.

  “Ready to app, kiddo?”

  4

  The rides I’ve hitched while my mother apported us both are nothing like doing it myself.

  I do as she says and stand as still as stone. I’m so attuned to the beating of my heart that it pounds in my ears as if playing through earbuds. I close my eyes and picture the space around me in such detail that I could paint it if I had any artistic talent, which I don’t. I envision my destination, focusing on one item I know to be in that location, clearly drawing it in my mind. Eventually, my mother says I won’t need a specific object to latch onto. The name of the place itself will be enough, which is how we accomplish long-distance apping to grant wishes around the world in locales we’ve never been.

  My mind zeroes in on my old single-speed bike.

  Then it’s pulse racing, head spinning, adrenaline skyrocketing. Rush, rush, rush.

  Unlike the chill that accompanies conjuring, apping sears my insides as if they were made of fire. Light-headed, I plant my hand on the wall of the garage.

  I’m in the garage. I apped myself to the garage.

  What’s that sound? That big ole creak? The door to the world just opened, and I’m standing on the welcome mat.

  It may only be the garage, but it’s a start.

  As I app back into the living room, I work to erase the grin that’s plastered itself to my face. I convince my mother to conjure us a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I produce the two spoons.