Spells Like Teen Spirit

by Kate M. Williams

  “Where’d you hear this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear it,” he said. “I read it. We have been going through Wanda’s grimoire. She was a cryptic record keeper, but it appears that she was trying to find a particular talisman. She believed she knew who stole it, but she still wasn’t ever able to get it back. If this is true, and we have no reason to believe it’s not, it’s particularly unnerving because Red Magic talismans can be used by anyone who comes into possession of them. Most Red Magicians seem to start practicing with someone else’s talismans before they begin to make their own.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Clarissa and myself,” Brian said, and I swear I saw him blush. Clarissa was a fellow Counsel who Brian had met at the Summit. She was smart and attractive and had as much of a fondness for tracksuits as he did. As far as I could tell, it was a match made in leisure wear heaven.

  “So this thing that Wanda was looking for,” I said, “is still out there. So someone else could be looking for it as well.”

  “Yes,” Brian said. “And it would be bad news if they found it. There is a small hope, of course, that whoever stole the talisman from Wanda in the first place was smart enough to just destroy it, but we don’t know.”

  “Any suspects?” Cassandra asked.

  Brian shook his head. “We don’t know,” he said. “But as long as it’s out there, Wanda’s work isn’t finished.” The three of us sat there in silence, looking at the map. I watched as the tiny red dot Brian had identified as the dry cleaner faded to black. Probably signing off the Google searches for the night.

  “So, just brain vomiting out loud here,” I said. “Last night, someone who practiced Red Magic, who appeared to be looking for something, similar to Wanda, and who had the taste level of Erebus broke into Cassandra’s house, but both Wanda’s and Erebus’s whereabouts are accounted for.”

  “So, it’s not option A or option B,” Cassandra concluded. “It’s option C, and at this point, option C is still unknown.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “The way you phrased that sounds like you’ve been paying attention in class,” I said.

  “Hardly,” she scoffed. “I just watch a lot of game shows.”

  “There’s also option D,” Brian said.

  “Who’s that?” Cassandra asked.

  “Adrian, Wanda’s assistant,” Brian said, and my heart started to pound. “No one has been able to find him since he flew away from the Summit.”

  “Do you think he had anything to do with it?” I asked, swallowing around the lump in my throat.

  “We don’t know,” Brian said. “But everyone would like to speak with him, and the longer he stays hidden, the more guilty he looks.”

  My heart raced even faster. As much as I thought about Adrian, this conversation was the first time I’d heard his name spoken since the Summit, and the first time I had heard that he was now a wanted man.

  “Esme,” Brian said, clearing his throat, “I know you two were friendly. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, there are crows everywhere, and I see those all the time, but…” I trailed off, deciding then and there that I wasn’t going to mention the mix CD. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Janis, about it, and besides, Brian had asked if I had seen Adrian, and I definitely hadn’t seen him.

  Brian nodded. “If I am being frank with you, Adrian’s situation is a complicated one,” he said. “There are people who believe that his powers should be taken away. Not because he’s presumed guilty but because he should never have had them in the first place. Wanda gave them to him when he was only seven, and it was a clear abuse of her power. Turning an innocent into a therianthrope is not the same as protecting them.”

  I could feel my face getting hot, and thankfully, Cassandra changed the subject.

  “What about option E?” she said.

  “And option E would be?” Brian asked.

  “A member of the old Synod,” she answered. “One of them could be out to finish what Wanda started, and they just left the flyer and other stuff to try to throw us off.”

  At this, Brian grimaced. “I don’t think any of them would be capable of that at this point,” he said. “They were all subject to mnemokinesis right after the Summit. In retrospect, it may have been a bit premature, but we didn’t want to dillydally.”

  Cassandra nodded. “So, our best bet is C or D,” she said.

  “C!” I said sharply. Maybe too sharply. “Come on,” I said, trying to cover my tracks. “Everyone knows that when you don’t know the answer on a multiple-choice test, you just go with C.”

  “Okay, option C it is,” Brian said. “I’d say, start with the clues.”

  If we were right, and I was pretty sure that we were, then there was a whole new person out there who’d grabbed the spoon and was stirring the magical pot. A new person who might have some answers. “Oh yeah,” I told him. “We will find C, and they will pay.” Cassandra and I locked eyes, and we both smiled. I knew my words were true. I mean, she’d dived into another dimension to save a kid, and I’d single-handedly flushed the leader of the magical world. Plus, we’d Returned an uncountable number of demons, and made it two-thirds of the way through our junior year of high school. So what couldn’t we do?

  Brian glanced at the clock and then stood up, signaling that it was time for us to go. It was getting late, and it was a school night for all of us. We made our way back through Brian’s house and were just at the front door when Cassandra turned back to him.

  “Hey, Coach B.,” she said. “You remember at the Summit when you used a spell to make all those crappy party decorations look really awesome and amazing?”

  “I do indeed remember that,” he said, opening the door and ushering us out onto the porch.

  “Can you use that same spell to, oh, I dunno, turn a business card into an ID?”

  He gave her a look like he knew exactly where she was going with this. “What kind of ID, Miss Heaven?”

  “Oh, you know, one that said I was twenty-one,” she said.

  “Good night,” he said, and shut the door in our faces. But Cassandra wasn’t done yet. She bent down and opened up his mail slot.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could find a book that has that spell in it?” she called through the slot. “Or at least know what such a spell is called?”

  Brian answered with his porch light, which he turned off, leaving us standing in the dark.

  When I got home, Dad and Mom were sitting on the couch, watching football. I sat down next to Mom and helped myself to the bowl of popcorn that she was holding in her lap. She didn’t appear to be eating it so much as she was sorting the popped pieces by size. “This sport is still on?” I asked, and Dad shot me a look.

  “This is the Super Bowl, Esme,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked, tossing a piece up and catching it in my mouth.

  “Well, you might know it as the ‘halftime show,’ ” he said, “but what you might not realize is that the halftime show is sandwiched between the two halves of the biggest football game of the year. It’s how the halftime show gets its name, actually.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Thanks for the etymology lesson, Professor. I’m gonna go microwave a burrito.”

  In the kitchen, I opened the freezer and pulled out a burrito, then popped it into the microwave. While it nuked, I pondered option C, an unknown villain searching for an unknown object. Being a Sitter meant that sometimes it felt like I was living in a movie, though without the getting ready, shopping, or makeover montages. Without the love interest either. At least, without a solid love interest. I looked out the window, at the bare, black branches of the trees silhouetted against the night sky. There were undoubtedly crows in those trees, and as much as I hated anything that felt like hope, I c
ouldn’t help but think that maybe one of those crows was also a boy.

  The microwave dinged. I popped the door open and reached in, then immediately yanked my hand back. The plate was as hot as fire. I touched the burrito—it was still as cold as ice. I added a few more minutes to the timer and started the microwave again. I walked over to the sink to get a glass of water, and stepped around Pig’s bowl, which still sat in the same spot because neither Dad nor I had the heart to move it. The metal clanged on the floor, and the sound made me want to cry. The microwave dinged again, and as was to be expected, the burrito was now way too hot, so I stuck it back in the freezer.

  I walked to my room, changed out of my clothes, and pulled on my pajama pants, then checked on my burrito, which was now cold again. I sighed and grabbed it anyway, as I was kind of over the microwave thing by now and this was going to have to do. I took a bite as I headed to my room to blow through my homework and, more important, pick out what I was going to wear to school the next day.

  I didn’t feel like doing laundry, so all of today’s thrifting finds would have to wait a while before they got into the rotation. I’d been burned too many times before by wearing unwashed clothes that started to smell halfway through the day. I sat down on the bed, took a bite of my burrito, and chewed. Nothing like cold beans to really get the appetite going. I looked around, taking in the clothes that were hanging in my closet, the ones that were strewn across the floor, and the stuff piled on a chair. I had a pair of black-and-white-check paper-bag-waisted jeans that I could pair with a lipstick-red sleeveless turtleneck crop top—the proportions balanced out nicely. A few weeks before, I’d thrifted a wide black leather belt that had a shiny green-and-red plastic apple for a buckle, so that would look supercool. I could throw on an oversized men’s button-down for an extra layer, and thick, fuzzy black-and-white polka-dot socks would keep my feet warm inside my black high-top Chucks. Black and white and left-on-read, I texted Janis.

  I planned to do all, or at least most, or maybe just some, of my chemistry homework, but the next thing I knew, I was startled awake with drool on my chin. My phone said it was eleven-thirty, so I turned off the light, shoved my books to the floor, and went to sleep for real.

  * * *

  —

  The most notable thing about school on Monday was Janis’s look. It was Olive Garden: an olive drab jumpsuit, floral head wrap, and breadstick earrings. We spent our lunch hour eating BBQ wings with ranch and planning our staycation weekend. Amirah and Ji-A were going to stay with Janis, and Mallory and Ruby were going to stay with Cassandra. I felt bad about not having anyone stay at my house, but with Dad sleeping on the couch, there wasn’t a ton of extra room.

  Janis had made a Google map of all the best thrifting spots, and I was in charge of entertainment. But aside from curating a list of nineties slasher flicks that we could watch, I was kind of drawing a blank. I’d made the mistake of mentioning that the Ford dealership had a karaoke machine—as a joke—and now Amirah wouldn’t shut up about it. Improbably enough, “Any Man of Mine” was her song.

  As if she could tell I was thinking about her, our group chat dinged with a text, and it was her sending yet another Shania Twain GIF.

  Janis laughed. “She did say she bought cowboy boots.”

  “I know,” I said. “She sent me a pic. They’re Dsquared2.” I turned to Cassandra. “What do you think Ruby will want to do this weekend?”

  Cass shrugged. “I figured we’d just sneak into the gym.” I nodded, though this was a totally foreign concept to me. If I ever found myself in a gym, I’d try to sneak out as quickly as I could.

  One thing that we could all agree on was that the weekend couldn’t come quickly enough.

  Tuesday went by in a blur. Usually, I counted the minutes to the final bell, but today, I felt myself getting more and more anxious as each class period came and went. Sneaking into a bar, even in the name of Sitting, was not part of the Esme Pearl playbook, and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

  But time stops for no dread-filled girl, and after school, I headed home to relieve Mom’s nurse for a few hours before Dad got off work and went to the gym. When I got home, Olivia was knitting and Mom was doing what she seemed to do almost 90 percent of the time: sitting and staring at the wall.

  “How’d everything go today?” I asked Olivia as she was packing up her stuff.

  “Just fine,” she said. “She’s a model patient. See you guys tomorrow.”

  I nodded and walked her out. The only reason that Mom needed round-the-clock care was to fix her meals and make sure she didn’t just leave, though I had a feeling she wouldn’t. Since she’d moved back in with us, she hadn’t tried, even though it was something that had happened several times a week when she’d been at the facility. And really, who could blame her?

  I wasn’t meeting up with Cassandra and Janis until seven-thirty, so I had plenty of time to hang out. Mom and I worked on a puzzle for a while, and she actually seemed into it, though she did try to fit the same two pieces together for almost a half hour. Then I got up to make us some food. Dinner was a little specialty I liked to call spaghetti a la jarra—spaghetti with sauce from a jar—and then Mom and I went into my room so that I could get ready. Normally it didn’t take me that long to get dressed, but I had no idea what to wear. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to, but then, I’d never tried to sneak into a bar before.

  “What do I wear to try to sneak into a bar?” I asked Mom, but she was too busy petting one of my pillows to answer. I texted Janis and Cassandra.

  I don’t know what to wear.

  Look hot and older, Janis wrote back. NO FLAT SHOES.

  Sumting slutty was Cassandra’s response.

  I was glad they were such good friends in all other areas, because they were zero help right then. “Slutty” I wasn’t even going to justify with a second thought, but hot and older were two things that were not usually in my repertoire, so I was going to have to figure out how to interpret them.

  For “older,” I took that to mean no kitsch prints, cartoon characters, or jewelry that could double as a toy. “Hot” was confusing. For most people, “hot” meant looking just like everyone else, which was something that I always tried to avoid. I decided to go with basic black. I owned several “little black dresses,” but none were basic. I had a black lace gothic Lolita dress; an asymmetrical, bilious black T-shirt dress; a floor-length black muumuu that Dad said made me look like the grim reaper; and a vintage eighties black sequined cocktail dress with shoulder pads. I had one bodycon, but it was printed like a tangerine, complete with leaves around the collar.

  But black jeans I had, so I pulled those on. I also had a black, long-sleeved crop top. The sleeves were printed with pictures of Frida Kahlo, but I could hide those if I wore a jacket. I pulled out an oversized, black-on-black pinstripe blazer and shrugged it on. I added a silver necklace, made from hammered triangles overlapping like a snake’s scales. Non-flat shoes were harder, as the only ones I had were made for warmer weather, and unlike Janis’s claim regarding her own toes, mine did freeze. I had a cool pair of black platforms, so I decided to wear those, with a pair of silver socks. It actually looked pretty cute, and made the outfit seem a lot more me.

  I put some styling creme in my hair and slicked it behind my ears with a sharp side part. I’d let Janis bleach it on New Year’s Eve, and the dark roots were growing in in a grimy way that I liked. Then I added a whole lot of black eyeliner and layered on jammy lip stain until my lips were a deep berry. I wasn’t sure I looked hot, or older, but I definitely looked different from how I normally looked. I kinda liked it.

  When Dad got home from the gym, Mom and I were sitting at the table, basically just waiting for him. “Whoa,” he said, opening the fridge and pulling out the spaghetti à la jarra leftovers. “You’re all dressed up.” He popped the container into the microwave and randomly
punched buttons until it started. “Where exactly are you going, dressed like that on a school night?”

  I stood up from the table, and in my platforms, I was looking Dad straight in the eye. “Sitter stuff,” I said.

  He looked down at my shoes. “You’re going to chase down demons and fight them in those shoes and a bare stomach?” he asked.

  “It’s not that kind of Sitter business,” I said. “It’s more like an investigation.” My phone dinged, telling me that Janis was outside.

  “Sure,” he said, “just as long as it’s an investigation that ends by nine-forty-five.”

  “Huh?” I asked as I grabbed my keys. “Nine-forty-five?”

  “So you can be home by ten.”

  “Dad—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “Okay, nine-thirty, then, if you’re going to argue,” he said. “You may be in charge of protecting the innocent, but you’re still a teenager, who lives in my house, and it’s a Monday night.”

  “I haven’t had a curfew in forever,” I pointed out.

  “I know,” he said. “And if you were leaving the house in your combat boots with a backpack full of weapons and herbs, I’d tell you to be safe and have a good night. But since you’re leaving the house in heels, eye makeup, and a purse barely big enough to hold a strawberry, you’ve got a curfew.”

  My phone started to ring. Janis, no doubt wondering what was taking me so long. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have stood there and argued with Dad just for the sake of arguing about whether or not I had a right to argue, but now I didn’t have it in me. I had no idea what the night was going to hold, so figuring it was always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, I nodded and then turned around and headed to the door.

  Janis had picked up Cassandra before me, so when I got to the car, I climbed into the warmth and comfort of the backseat, which I had to share with about fifteen cardboard boxes, a disassembled garment rack, and two trash bags full of Janis’s Depop merchandise.