The evening remained warm, a promise of summer evenings soon to come. Selena had persuaded her mother to let her have a fire in the yard to roast marshmallows. It was just her and Melissa, and they scurried around in some nearby brush gathering old dry branches. They only took ones that hadn't gotten soggy on the wet ground. Selena made a game of preparing the fire so well in advance that it took only one match to light it. While the feeble flame flickered and grew, then shrank dangerously small again, Selena talked to it like it was a living spirit and they both held tiny twigs above it, frightened that they would kill it.

"Grow fire. Take our offering," Selena's tone was spooky but in moments the fire had grown.

The day had been quite warm, and though her mother had argued she should take a jacket for later, Mel had refused. Now the fire was a big benefit. With it, she felt better, even in her short sleeved shirt.

"We're going to make a spell to get Trevor for you," Selena declared as they carefully toasted marshmallows on long willow sticks.

"The first thing you have to do," she began again as they each put the hot sticky stuff in their mouths," is find a rock from the rock pile that reminds you of him."

"What do you mean?" Melissa mouthed, speaking around her full mouth.

"Go over to the pile and find a rock that feels like him. You'll know it when you find it."

Melissa left the campfire and walked over to a pile of stones that must have been cleared from the adjacent field years ago. Most were cream-coloured limestone. Some were partly buried in the turf. But there was one that was different because it was green and kind of nobby. It looked like it was sort of muscular in a way. It reminded her of the washboard stomach muscles of a guy who pumped iron.

She had misjudged its weight. It was very heavy. At first it slipped out of her grasp but she set herself determinedly and strained until she had picked it up in her arms. It was way too heavy but she kept her aching hands clenched to it and staggered with it to the fire, where she let it fall with a thump. Her fingers hurt and her back had a sharp pain.

"Good one Mel." Mel noticed that Selena had tied her shirt-tails in a knot in front to expose her mid-rift. She looked at the rock again. It was roughly the shape of an ottoman. She stooped and rolled it so that it stood on one end. This way the long indentations that gave it the muscled washboard look were horizontal. In the flickering light, deep shadows played in those creases.

Mel ran her fingers over the contours that had attracted her from the first. Her heart was still throbbing from the exertion of hauling this thing. Or was it partly because she felt some kind of excitement about touching those rolling 'stomach muscles'? She rose and went to take a place at the fire that would put herself, Selena, and the rock at the corners of an equal-sided triangle.

Selena had hooked a burnt piece of a twig out of the fire. She was using the charcoal to draw a five-pointed star on her bare tummy.

"You do this too."

"That isn't still hot is it?"

"Of course not. I'm not crazy." She grinned, "Just a little odd."

Mell pulled her blouse from her jeans and undid the two bottom buttons, then tied the ends of the hem together just under her chest.

"You can use my stick. I'm done."

For a moment Mel looked at her flat stomach trying to envision the pattern before she started. It wouldn't come to her. Well, the first step would be to draw a straight line. She decided to start just below her ribs and drew a line from there to where her jeans began, slanting to the left. Then she started at the same place and drew a similar line slanting to the right. She looked, trying to see how the star would go now. Each of the ends of the lines would be other points of the star. But where would the lines that formed each of those points end?

She decided to draw a line that was horizontal that was cutting across the two lines that formed a point already. It came halfway between the top point and her tummy button. Now she could join the two lines from their ends at her pants to the ends of the horizontal line. Presto. She'd made a perfect star. Her bellybutton was right in the centre of it.

The firelight made Selena and the rock very witchy looking all right. Melissa imagined it was doing the same to her.

"Now concentrate on Trevor and say his name with me three times slowly. Reach out to him with your feelings of love for him."

"Trevor. Trevor. Tre-vor."

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