Artemis!” Rico shouts up to the window, and Artemis jumps—it’s the wrong day. The window isn’t even open. Mary Margaret isn’t here to gently make fun of her. Artemis is sitting at the dining room table, filling out a spreadsheet to send to her bosses—which billiards players have paid, the scores for each game in each bar. Usually, she would be doing this on a computer; today, she is doing it by hand, her own powered-down computer piled in the closet with everyone else’s. She plans to tell her bosses she is having computer trouble, that once it’s resolved, she will input this stopgap measure, that their system will go entirely uninterrupted. She wonders how long that will last—maybe they will try to throw money at a problem and buy her a computer. Maybe one of them will get exasperated and do it himself.
Either way, she will wear on the goodwill she has built by being autonomous, reliable, and largely someone they don’t talk to. How long will it be before they fire her? Rico interrupts this swirling anxiety coupled with complete focus, and she is so surprised her body twitches. She has reading glasses from the Duane Reade perched on her nose, ugly things, and she flings them off, which is a silly response. It’s not as though Rico can see her.
She hauls the window open, leans out over the fire escape. Despite the day, she comes out smiling. Rico is such a source of sun as the city grows dark and the lights wink on. But when she sees Rico’s face, her smile fades.
He looks different than when he’s performing, but not by much. His clothes are warmer and more plentiful, but not less flamboyant. A red coat; a checkered scarf. He is still an exaggerated man; some people just have a large presence to them. His unpainted eyebrows are still expressive, and right now they are open with sadness. His large mouth is panting, despairing, a far cry from the usual easy turn-up at the corners. He has clearly cried. “Artemis,” he shouts again. “I need to talk to you.”
She almost shouts down, “Why? What’s wrong?” But she realizes Rico might shout back, that she might accidentally ask him to yell his business, and he would. He is guileless. Instead, she says, “Okay.”
Down in the alley by the dumpsters, she doesn’t know the appropriate way to receive his face with hers. He is so stricken and she has no clue about why. What she does, naturally, is arc her eyebrow in a question, and she internally winces at what she imagines the expression to be—parental. The last thing she wants to do is be parental to, or even around, Rico. She is expecting, perhaps, one of the Smoking Guns is sick or hurt or worse—something large and bad. Instead: “Artemis, if you wanted to dump me, I gave you plenty of opportunities.”
“I—What?” Artemis’s face shifts from stern to straight up confused. “Rico, I haven’t broken up with you.”
Rico’s face sour-scrunches. “Yes, Artemis, you did. You can’t really walk this back—” He takes his phone from his pocket and gestures to its screen. “It’s brutal.”
Artemis gasps, understanding. “Rico, listen. I haven’t touched my phone in at least a day and I’m sure of it. Whatever you got, whatever he sent you, it’s not from me! I didn’t type it, didn’t say it, didn’t think it.”
He flaps his hand emphatically back toward the screen. “Artemis! It’s in our text thread! You—Wait, he? Who’s he? Artemis, what’s going on. Are you in trouble?”
Artemis regrets not initiating him more deeply, regrets not explaining, in detail, what it means to exist around Power before this moment. She could have, should have, performed a light show around him, cast a spell on him, something other than the dumb rock still sitting on the bar at Jacqueline’s, anything. It isn’t that he doesn’t know she is a witch, that Mary Margaret is a witch, that her family, her coven, all possesses Awakened Power. But keeping her worlds apart wasn’t without reason! She never wanted him to fear her or fear for her, so Artemis has been vague on the details. He cannot picture, therefore, what it looks like practically, what it might mean for something else to Awaken.
Artemis explains everything. She narrates the details as best she can—what it looks like to watch Quibble arrive in a burst of fire, hearing Wilder switch between three languages while watching them light like a struck match, the absolute futility of trying to figure out what Mary Margaret has stolen and from whom (though this he has seen more of than the others), the Hex. Both Artemis and Rico slide their backs down the wall and sit directly on the cold, dirty ground. Artemis can feel the spring in the pavement; not as frigid as before. But warmth is no comfort as she’s watching Rico’s face crescendo into the loudest confusion. She even calls light to her hands, visible to people other than her. With alarm, she realizes how tired she feels after. She hasn’t used her Power very much and it shouldn’t feel this weighty; is it just the psychic toll of looming danger? She hopes so. Rico’s face uncurls from a question mark to an exclamation point. But he does not flinch away, lets her finish the whole story. He lets what passes for silence in an ever-sounding city envelop them, his face like the glass of a fish tank, so, so easy to watch his internal workings. Transparent, unguarded. She loves this about him. It is one of the things she finds most difficult about him, too.
Finally, he speaks. “My instinct is to trust you, Artemis, it always is. But my problem is that right now, I don’t trust me. I feel crazy for believing you.” Rico pauses and puts his hand on his chest and presses, hard. He takes a deep breath. “I think I need some space, Artemis. I believe you; I believe you every single time we speak. I don’t always understand it. But I think I need a break. From doing that. For a little while.”
Artemis feels as though the alleyway plummets from under her feet. She can feel the red blush in her, on her chest and her face and under her beard. Even her ears feel hot—anger, shame, inadequacy, loneliness all spinning together. “Okay,” she says, her voice as small as she feels. Because there is nothing else to say. Rico squeezes her hand and walks away. She turns and trudges back up the stairs.
She lets herself open the door while crying. She lets herself collapse upon the couch, usually Mary Margaret’s territory, but hell, she’s not here anyway. She folds herself in two and sobs, two heaving sobs, before the sensation of being watched hits her, on the skin and in her Power. She leaps up and turns toward the window, which she’d left open, and she has called Power to her fingertips in a blaze of light before she can even think of what she’s going to use it for, doesn’t matter if she’s tired, if calling the light downstairs felt hard. Contrary to Wilder or the Magpie, it’s taken her years and years and years to be able to access her Power like this, to know herself so deeply. To do it even sad, even exhausted.
The child perches on the windowsill, feet resting on the back of a dining room chair and knees drawn up to her chest. Mary Margaret looks more like a bird than Artemis has ever seen her, which is saying something because she always has an avian quality to her—always ready to take flight. Artemis lets the Power drop from her fingers. She is torn between saying “oh thank Goddess” and “oh no,” for she is deeply embarrassed by her own dramatics. Her hands fly to her face, and she dabs her under-eyes with her fingers, a little less gentle on her own skin than she intends.
“He dumped you. Didn’t he,” Mary Margaret says.
She’d been ready to ask what I’d refused her—why does Artemis hate me so much? What had I said to Artemis, long ago? But Mary Margaret holds her tongue. The question will be there another day.
There are a million sharp responses Artemis can think of, some along the lines of “none of your business,” or “don’t worry about it.” Rather than deploying any of them, she sinks back onto the couch. The crying is over. “How did you know?”
Mary Margaret moves gracefully, hops off the sill, walking lightly. “I know what getting dumped looks like,” she says. She settles next to Artemis and puts a hand on her shoulder. The role reversal is deeply confusing for both. But they sit in it, sit in the awkward, until Artemis finally squeezes Mary Margaret’s wrist, gets up, and goes to bed.