Chapter 1: Memorial Service

Bananas. Always bananas.

Every morning, for as long as Jia could remember, her mother would stand at the kitchen counter slicing a banana for breakfast. The musical plonk of the slice hitting the ceramic bowl reassured her that things were normal.

Plop, plop, plop, plop.

After the banana had been vivisected completely, her mother would add yogurt, berries, and granola and slowly spoon the meal while going over that day’s lessons, correcting papers, balancing the checkbook, or whatever else adults did.

Every single fucking day. Her mom always ate the same thing, while Jia vacillated between a depressing variety of choices: toast, a Pop-Tart, orange juice, frozen waffles, a boiled egg. Anything but yogurt or bananas. Ugh.

Years ago, Jia had asked her mother why she ate the same thing every morning.

Sandy smiled and explained, “It’s one less thing to think about. I have too much else to do, so this makes breakfast easy. Besides, I like fruit and yogurt,” as if that made total sense to a teenage girl.

Bananas. Plop, plop.

Sometimes, the plops were evenly spaced, rapid-fire. On rare occasions, the plops were spaced out and uneven, and that told Jia that something was on her mother’s mind. In the past few months, that had been the case more often than not. Something had been on her mind. Definitely. But she never spoke of it, whatever it was.

If only Jia could sit with her mother now and listen to the banana slices hit the bowl. But that was over for good. Into the dustbin of history.

Jia lifted her head to stare at the principal as the memory disappeared. She saw him droning on as his words of sorrow trundled around the room extremely slowly. Even though her mother’s memorial was moving at a snail’s pace, Jia’s mind was going a thousand miles an hour (or, as she quickly did the math, 1,609 kilometers per hour).

For a brief moment, she stared blankly at Mr. Snyder, trying to understand his words.

“Sandy O’Connor, English teacher, friend, loving mother, loved and respected by all, will be sorely missed here at Concord High School….”

She closed her eyes and thought of the store-bought cookies in ugly plastic containers for students on the entrance table. Why did someone from the school bring store-bought cookies? Mom hated store-bought cookies. If she were here, she’d—

A flash of light caused her to snap her eyes open. The overhead lights flickered from bright to dim several times. Jia looked around to see the audience’s reaction, but there was none. Weren’t they seeing this? Her heart skipped a few beats as she reached under her t-shirt and lightly touched the Triquetra amulet her mother had given her only hours before she died. The lights flickered, and the amulet grew warm against her skin.

As she grasped the amulet, the gymnasium, filled with the random murmur of students and teachers and Mr. Snyder’s amplified speech, suddenly became eerily silent, as if someone had clamped noise-canceling headphones over her head. Time slowed, the noise dimmed, and for a brief moment, a clear, melodic voice, soft but unmistakable, whispered her name as if carried on the wind from afar.

“Jia….”

The voice was filled with warmth and an undercurrent of power, and it felt both foreign and familiar. As quickly as it came, the sickening feeling, her super senses, and the perception that time had slowed down passed.

She felt her shoulders tighten and shiver as the background noises returned, leaving Jia feeling that the world she now lived in held even more mysteries than she imagined.

The sound of the voice, which might — or might not — have been her mother’s, took Jia back to the last thing she and her mother had talked about before she had died.

“You need to find your father—” she said, her voice weak, as Jia had leaned in closer to hear over the background hospital noises.

“My dad? Why? I haven’t spoken to him for almost a year. You know we don’t really stay in touch all that much.”

“I know, I know,” her mother said, weakly raising her hand to scratch her gaunt and pale cheek idly, “but it’s important. He’s the only one who—” she coughed for several moments.

Jia watched as her mother slowly settled down. A tiny tear seemed to wander down her mother’s face. The hum and drum of the hospital seemed both distant and overpowering. Everything felt overwhelming, and Jia wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening.

Her mother pulled herself up a few inches and regained her voice.

“Ask your father about — Sinbihan Yeondae. He’ll know what it’s about.”

“Sinibi—what? What’s that?”

“Jia, stop interrupting and listen. There’s something you should know about our family—about the Mystic Alliance. If anything happens to me, you must—”

“Mystic Alliance? Who—what are they? I don’t understand.”

But her mother’s eyes had closed, and her breathing weakened. Jia watched with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. After several moments, her mother opened her eyes, looked solemnly at Jia, and continued.

“A group of magicians—sorcerers and sorceresses, perhaps a magician, a wizard. I never wanted to know anything about them because they meant nothing to me. But now that you’re about to—”

“About to what?” Jia’s voice rose, and as she held her mother’s hands tighter, the machines next to her started beeping incessantly, chirping a warning. A nurse rushed in, asking Jia to stand back. She watched anxiously as another nurse and a doctor entered and fussed over her mother, doing this and that. They seemed professional to the core, fiddling with this, checking that, and shortly, things settled back to normal.

“She’ll be okay for now,” one of the nurses, Erica, who had been very friendly and understanding to Jia, said as she patted Jia’s shoulders as she exited and shut the door behind her.

Jia’s mother seemed smaller and weaker than ever, as if she were shrinking. Jia sat down again beside her, holding her mother’s hands. She watched as her lips moved slowly, but the words were too quiet to hear. Jia shook her head and leaned in closer.

“What did you say?”

“Your amulet,” she said weakly, “never take it off. Never give it away, not until you have a sixteen-year-old son or daughter. It’s—” she stopped as if searching for the right words.

“Yes, mother, I know. It’s magic. You just gave it to me, but I don’t know how to use it. I don’t know—”

A long moment passed, and it looked like her mother had gone to sleep. But then suddenly, her eyes opened wide, and she said, “Your father will help you.”

Jia thought, You already said that as her mother’s eyelids drooped, and she drifted back to sleep. Jia felt a coldness creep over her and thought, she’s losing it. She can’t even remember what she just told me a minute ago—

Her mother had mentioned her father. Jia tried to remember the last time they’d communicated. But the thought tightened her stomach—they hadn’t spoken over six months. And now, a couple of weeks later, with nothing more than his vague reply to her email after Mom died and his subsequent radio silence, she had no idea how even to start the conversation.

Grandma Constance, who’d magically shown up from her northern Idaho home, wasn’t much easier to approach, though they were slowly finding small moments of understanding after nearly a week together.

Jia felt a hand tighten around her arm, startling her and returning her to the present again. All of this daydreaming, as if she were untethered from the present. Zilly, her best friend in the whole wide world, badass bass player, and future fellow band member, leaned in and whispered, “Mrs. Pierce is coming,” as she nodded and glanced toward a figure slowly shuffling toward her.

“Jia, did you want to play something for your mom?” said the middle-aged, friendly woman who had been her music teacher for years and one of the few adults at the school she trusted and almost actually liked.

“You mentioned earlier that you had a piece for her.” Jia looked into the warm eyes, wiped her own eyes, and turned towards the piano, which had been wheeled in for the service. Jia vaguely recalled telling Mrs. Pierce that she’d written a piece of music for her mother and agreed to play it.

Here. Today. Now. Why the fuck would I have done that?

Jia stared at the piano as Mrs. Pierce waited, a look of concern on her face. She thought about the music she’d written, a short melancholy piece that her mother had loved, saying it ‘tugs at my heartstrings.’ But it was unfinished, so why had she volunteered to play it?

Time stood still, and Jia looked at the frozen face of Mrs. Pierce, who finally gave a sad and imperceptible wag of her chin and turned to walk away.

The bananas jumped back into Jia’s mind, making her stomach growl, and she started thinking of all those casseroles, soup, cake, fruit baskets, and gobs of food teachers and friends had brought after her mother’s death that still filled the fridge. Then her brain swarmed with guilt for thinking only of her stomach on the day of the assembly for her mother—her mother, for God’s sake, one of the most-loved teachers at the school and who was the closest human being to Jia and even though they butted heads now and then, those moments were always filled with love— and that guilt was soon replaced by the feeling of regret that would hit her like a dump truck if she didn’t get up and head to the piano.

Damn the torpedoes, her mother used to say, grab the precious moments of your life. They’re few and far between.

Jia breathed deeply and said, “Wait.” Mrs. Pierce stopped and turned as Jia stood up, swept up in a feeling that the floor would give way beneath her. Smells and sounds jumped and rebounded, from the sweat and underarm antiperspirant of the girl sitting to her left to the smell of cigarette smoke on Zilly’s hair to a siren ten blocks away, to a barking dog down the street. A chipmunk screamed in the distance, and a bird screeched in response as she shuffled to the piano, knowing every eye in the audience was on her while a distant, lone train whistle underscored her gloom.

Then she began to sweat and suppressed an urge to remove her thick leather jacket, which would draw even more attention, so she wiped her face and pulled the piano bench out with a loud scrape.

Jia shifted on the bench, pulled it toward the piano, and touched the keys, tentatively finding the A-minor opening chord. It lingered for a few seconds before confidence kicked in, and she nimbly found the next chord and the next; moving through the sequence, she felt her heart nearly break as the melody lifted out of the melancholy chord progression and began to soar.

Only a month prior, a lifetime ago, Jia had been working through the piece in her bedroom when her mom leaned in the doorway, dishtowel and bowl in hand.

“That’s beautiful,” she’d said with a smile. “It is yours?”

“It’s all I have so far.”

“Gorgeous, Jia. Your music is going to take you places.”

“Thanks. But it’s not done,” she said with a blush, “I’m not sure where to go from here. I want it to change from this minor key —” she played the section — “to a major key, but I’m unsure how to transition. I’m still working on it.”

“Well, when it’s time, you’ll figure it out,” her mom said encouragingly.

Now, Jia approached the midway point, realizing what she’d gotten herself into and how dumb she’d been. She hadn’t finished the piece, played it, or even thought of it since her mother had died. Knowing disaster was only seconds away, she desperately wanted to disappear or to somehow have the chord and key change that she so desperately needed suddenly magically appear so that she wouldn’t —

But no.

Jia abruptly lifted her hands from the piano and sat like a statue as silence filled the vacuum. She felt like she had fallen off a cliff, and the bottom was fast approaching. She thought of Quadrophenia, the movie that she and Zilly had watched last fall, where, in the end, the main character apparently just drove his scooter off a cliff.

The End. Fini.

Jia abruptly stood up and rushed back to the front row, her head down all the way, her face flush, avoiding everyone’s eyes, although she couldn’t help but hear a few smirky laughs. She quickly sat next to Zilly, hoping to disappear, waiting for the world to end. Zilly, true to herself, wrapped Jia in her arms and said, “Well, that was some fucked up shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Jia?” Zilly said when the principal returned to the front of the room.

“Yeah?”

“How about this for a band name?”

This ongoing conversation about the perfect band name had lasted for years since they first started jamming in middle school. A band’s name was critical, not only to describe the music but to draw attention, get gigs, and show off the brand of the band, or something like that. And they’d always maintained it would be an all-girl band, no ifs, ands, or buts. So, the name had to reflect it. But it had to be edgy and forward-thinking. And tongue in cheek. And a hundred other things. It was an impossible task.

“What?” Jia said.

“Flash Cunt Mama.”

They both broke up and tried but failed to keep their giggles down, drawing a reprimanding stare from Mr. Snyder.

“I still like Tattooed Love Bitch, though,” whispered Jia, stifling another laugh.

“Yeah, that’s hard to beat. But still….”

The assembly was over, and as students and teachers noisily dispersed, Jia looked down at her right hand, where she was steadily tapping her middle finger on her thumb.

Sparks dropped slowly and scattered on the floor before going dark. She quickly stopped, looked around, and hoped no one had seen the sparks.