“I know, right?” I said.
At the next intersection, Cassandra did a U-turn and then parked the van on the opposite side of the street. I told Mallory and Ruby about how Brian had modified the doppler to track Red Magic, but that nothing had showed up here at all. “Only, as soon as you get close, you can feel something,” I said. “There’s definitely magic.”
“You two stay here,” Cassandra said. “Ruby and I will go check it out.”
“No way.” I was already opening my door. “Cass, we’ve talked about this before. You look exactly like your mom, so if anyone catches you snooping around, it will be hard to be casual, even with those guys.” She stared straight ahead, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. I could tell that she didn’t like the idea of staying behind, even for what was just a recon mission, but she also knew that I had a point. “Besides, they know me,” I added. “Or, at least Tom does, so if Ruby and I get caught, I can make up some stupid excuse about how I lost his number and needed to talk to him about the dance.”
Cass sucked in a deep breath through her nose. “Okay,” she said. “But if you so much as stub your toe, then scream or something.”
“Don’t worry,” Ruby said, leaning forward and squeezing her shoulders from behind. “We’ll be fine.”
I got out and slid the door open for Ruby. Then we made our way down the street to the house. Even without speaking to each other, I could tell that Ruby and I were on the same page, both walking like we had every right to be there. As we turned into the driveway of Jump the Shark’s house, I suddenly felt sick, like I was going to barf, and I stifled a gag. The first time I had been here, it had felt gross, but now that feeling was amped up to awful.
Ruby’s step faltered, and I heard her say “Ew” under her breath.
“Right?” I whispered back, and she nodded. We kept walking past the car, and up to the side of the house. Ruby was sucking in air like she’d just finished a triathlon, and she kept rubbing her arms.
“Crap,” she whispered. “I’ve got goose bumps everywhere and I feel a headache coming on. My Sitter sense is screaming.” I nodded silently, my own head starting to throb, and I followed her as she crouched behind a bush. Then she crept toward the band’s house and laid one hand on the side door, then moved over a few feet and laid the other one against a window. She waited for a few seconds, and shook her head.
I motioned for us to go around back. When we’d come to the house for our stakeout before, I hadn’t seen anything beyond the driveway and the front porch, but as I circled to the other side, I got a good look at the peeling paint on the window frames, the missing shingles on the roof, and the backyard. The dead backyard. It was big and open, with an old clothesline stretching across it, a couple of broken lawn chairs, and nothing else. I glanced around for cover, but there really wasn’t anywhere for us to hide, and Ruby and I stood there, frozen in the shadow of the house. Then a sound ripped through the air.
A guitar solo. Coming from the garage. We swiveled our necks so that Ruby and I were looking at each other, and she raised her eyebrow at me. Now we knew where the band was, and we practically sauntered over to the garage to get a better look. There was one window, which was covered with a thick cloth, but light seeped out around the edges. I tried to peek in, but I couldn’t see much. What I heard, though, surprised me.
The guitar solo was good. Like, Jimi Hendrix good. Then suddenly it stopped. Not like the person playing it had stopped, but like the power had been cut. There was a few seconds of silence, and then someone started yelling.
“What the hell, man? I was just getting going, and I was shredding it! Shredding!”
“That sounded really good, dude!”
“Of course it sounded good! It sounded too freaking good! I thought we talked about this! We don’t need them for our music, because that already rocks!”
“I know, but…”
“No buts, dude! That’s what we all decided. We’re trying to be conservative here until we find the big one, but you go and use one to shred during practice?”
The big one? What were they talking about? Now someone was saying something that I couldn’t quite hear, and as I tried to get closer, Ruby grabbed me. “Esme, no!” she hissed.
But too late. My foot hit a pile of boards leaning up against the garage. I held out my hands, ready to stop them with my kinesis, but Ruby grabbed me and started to run, pulling me along behind her down the driveway. We were just past the car when the pile tumbled down with a crash.
We got to the street, and Ruby held her hands up. Every streetlamp on the block blinked and went out. In the darkness, we slowed to a stroll, once again acting like we were just out for a walk. I glanced back for a split second, but it was long enough to see that a light had come on, and the band members were standing in the driveway, all looking in different directions. I gasped as the magic from the house wore off and I started to feel normal again. Ruby and I didn’t speak to each other until we had turned the corner. Her breathing had slowed, and my headache was subsiding.
“You feel okay?” she asked me.
“Now I do,” I said. “Back there, I felt like I was about to barf all over their car.”
“Yeah, same,” she said. “Now I just feel like I need a kombucha and a shower.”
“Did you hear what they said?” I asked her. “Right before I ruined everything?”
Ruby laughed. “You didn’t ruin everything,” she said. “You just cut our spying short.”
Cassandra came around the corner, and slowed the van so that Ruby and I could climb in. I told Mallory and Cassandra what we’d heard, and how we’d felt.
“So wait,” Mallory said. “This band is good?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I do think they have access to a trick or two that makes them sound good.”
“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” Ruby said. “There was definitely Red Magic at work there. All around the house.”
“They’re hiding something,” Cassandra said, “and it could be my mom.”
“They definitely don’t want people coming around there,” I said. “I just don’t understand why it’s not showing up on Brian’s monitor.”
“Oh!” Mallory said. “It could be a protection spell, right?” She looked toward Ruby.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Ruby said.
“And then the spell would prevent the house from showing up on the monitor because it’s protecting it,” Mallory explained. “It might be keeping the normies away too, to stop people from snooping around.”
My mind flashed back a couple of days to when I’d grabbed Pig’s flyer and gone up on the porch. If there were protection spells, they hadn’t been that bad then, but Tom had seemed extra cautious, and almost surprised, to find me standing on their porch. “Oh God,” I said. “What if me showing up there alerted them to something?”
“That’s possible,” Ruby said, “but regardless, if we are going to come back tomorrow night, and actually try to break into the house, we need to be prepared.”
“We’ll have to layer up, then,” Mallory said. “And use protection spells to protect us from the protection spells. If I remember correctly, black plastic is really effective.”
“Well, I know where we can get some trash bags,” Cassandra said.
“Really? Where?” I asked. We had just pulled up to a stop sign, and Cassandra turned around and fixed me with a look.
“The store,” she said.
“Oh, duh,” I said. “I think maybe I should get some sleep.”
Ruby yawned luxuriously. “We all should,” she said. “Big day tomorrow, and I want to go for a run before brunch.”
Beside me, Mallory pretended to gag, and she and I burst into giggles. Cassandra dropped us off, with plans to pick us back up in the morning, and when Mallory and I walked into the house, Dad
was still up. I felt a pang when I saw that he’d already made the couch up for Mallory. He came out of his room—which had been Mom’s room as recently as this morning—to introduce himself to Mallory and ask her a few questions about her trip.
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “I tried to make your bed up for you. And those sheets are, or were, clean.”
I heard a snort, and I walked over to look down at the couch. Sure enough, Pig was luxuriously lounging, her head on the pillow and her legs stretched out to their full length.
“Get off!” I said, starting to shove her. “Not everything soft is meant for you.”
“That’s okay,” Mallory said, laughing. “Dogs are, like, the one thing I’m not allergic to. I’m happy to share the couch.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “She snores. A lot. When she’s awake, and when she’s asleep.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m a very heavy sleeper.”
I let Mallory use the bathroom first, and then I brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went back into the living room to make sure she had everything she needed. Pig had moved over a few inches, leaving Mallory barely enough room to fit on the couch.
“I should feel betrayed,” I said, giving Pig a pat. “Your second night back, and you’ve already ditched me for someone new.”
A sound from outside made me look up sharply toward the window. The wind had picked up, and I could see the silhouettes of the bare tree branches whipping around in the cold. It couldn’t be pleasant for any species to sleep out there tonight.
“So, I heard that the Sitterhood is still looking for Adrian, Wanda’s assistant,” I said, turning back to Mallory, who was now cuddled up with Pig. “How well do you know him?”
“Not well,” she said. “We know who each other are, of course, but whenever the Sitterhood has had family weekends and everyone got together, it was a lot of people, so it wasn’t like we all hung out together. And Adrian was always off by himself anyway. I think some people thought it was because he was snobby, and that he thought he was better than everyone because he worked for Wanda, but I always just thought he was shy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, eager to keep talking with someone who had known Adrian, if not better, then at least longer, than I had.
She stroked one of Pig’s ears. “He was different and he knew it,” she said. “A lot of people said giving him powers was an abuse of Wanda’s magic. She shut that down pretty fast, but I’m sure Adrian still heard about it.”
“What was Wanda like?” I asked.
Pig gave a harumph, apparently unhappy that we were disturbing her snooze with our yapping. Or maybe it was because we were discussing the person who’d tried to kill her without giving it a second thought.
“I didn’t know her that well personally,” Mallory said, “but from what I heard, she wasn’t very tolerant of anyone disagreeing with her. Like, when she gave Adrian his powers, I heard that one of the members of the Synod at that time was really against it. Well, Wanda did it anyway, and a few months later that woman quit the Sitterhood to open her own nail salon. She kept saying it was her lifelong dream, but there was some gossip about how no one had ever heard her mention it before, and people said they’d never even seen her with a manicure.”
I nodded. “So Wanda could have used some sort of magic to get the woman to quit so she’d be out of the way?”
Mallory nodded. “Or just forced her out the old-fashioned normie way,” she said, “through a mix of bullying and gaslighting.” Both of those sounded like tools Wanda definitely would have had in her toolbox.
“So, was Wanda the only Sitter to get caught using Red Magic?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure she wasn’t, but I bet every other time someone got caught, the Synod was able to keep it under wraps. Wanda’s just the first person to get caught with a full-scale plot to destroy the entire Sitterhood.” Mallory stopped, and shivered. “Also, she was the Synod. Honestly, Esme, you’re a hero. It gives me chills to think about what could have happened if she’d succeeded.”
“I don’t feel like a hero at all,” I said.
Pig’s breathing had mellowed, a sign that she was moving from falling asleep into completely asleep. I envied her, because now that my encounter with Jump the Shark’s protection spells had worn off, I was totally wired. “Are you tired?” I asked Mallory.
She thought for a second, and then shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
Those were seven of my favorite words in the English language. “Yeah,” I said, jumping up to get the remote. “Anything in particular?” I asked as I flipped on the TV.
“Well, if we’re going to a school dance tomorrow, I feel like we should probably watch Prom Night.”
I spun around and stared at Mallory, because it was like she had read my mind. She misinterpreted my look, though, and quickly backpedaled. “I mean, if you like scary movies,” she said. “I know some people don’t like horror.”
“No,” I said enthusiastically, “I love it. Rosemary’s Baby is my comfort movie. And Prom Night is an excellent choice. But do you mean the original or the remake?”
“The original, obviously,” she said. “If you can find it streaming somewhere, of course.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, queuing it up. “I already own it.” I muscled Pig over a few inches so that I could curl up on the couch, and then pressed play. The original Prom Night had all the elements of a classic—a killer disco soundtrack (pun intended), mysterious phone calls, and a young Jamie Lee Curtis in a role that helped establish her as the scream-queen-final-girl prototype.
“You know,” Mallory said as the movie started, “I’ve never actually been to a school dance, probably because horror movies totally scared me away from them. Actually, not just horror movies, all movies. I feel like there’s no way anything good is going to happen at a dance. You’re either going to get drenched in pig’s blood”—she paused and covered Pig’s ears—“hacked to death in a locker room, or all your friends are going to end up making out with someone and you’re going to end up standing by the punch bowl making small talk with a math teacher who feels sorry for you. I think I fear the third scenario the most.”
“Same,” I said, giving an involuntary shudder. “I went to one dance freshman year, before I knew better, and came dangerously close to that exact situation, though it was a health teacher. Also, teachers love dances. All adults do, and I can’t help but think that whenever adults are telling you how important and special something is going to be, it’s probably just going to be mediocre and forgettable.”
Mallory nodded as the sound of children playing hide-and-seek came from the television, and we watched in silence for a few moments. Eventually our girl, Jamie Lee, came on the screen, playing a high school student, but dressed like she was about to approve someone’s home loan. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sitters are teenage girls,” Mallory said as she jammed down the pillows to make herself more comfortable. “It’s the same reason why the final girls survive—because no one expects anything of us, and the only way you can carry the weight of the world on your shoulders is if you’re not already lugging around a bunch of expectations.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I never really thought about it that way before, but you’re totally right.”
“So, what do you think is going to go down at this dance tomorrow night, anyway?” Mallory asked. “Will there be pig’s blood?” Again, she covered Pig’s ears as she said it.
“God, I hope not,” I said, thinking of K and K. “I think that would give the dance committee an aneurism. What I hope is that we’re all just subjected to some horrible music for a while, Cassandra finds Circe, and then we go get ice cream. What I think is going to happen…well, I have no idea. I’m glad you all are here, though.”
&nb
sp; “Me too,” Mallory said. “Sitters stick together.”
We both fell silent as the movie picked up, and about fifteen minutes later, I heard a little snore. Mallory had fallen asleep, for real this time. It was after midnight, and since I’d already seen the movie a million times, I turned it off and headed to bed.
Back in my room, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers up, my mind spinning like a Tilt-A-Whirl as I went over everything that had happened these last few days, and tried to prepare for everything that was going to happen in the next. It was overwhelming, but I felt strangely calm. Mallory was right—Sitters did stick together, and no matter what happened, I wasn’t alone.
In the morning, Mallory and I got up and got dressed to go to Brian’s. Since we had an afternoon of thrifting after, I kept it casual with leggings and a flannel, and when I turned around, Mallory was looking at me.
“You’re good at getting dressed,” she said. “I never knew that was a skill before. I always just figured clothes were a thing that kept spilled soup from getting on your skin.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like getting dressed up. It makes things more exciting.” I paused. “Wait, I mean, they’re pretty exciting now, no matter what I wear, but before I knew I was a Sitter, clothes were about the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning. You can borrow something if you want?”
“Really?” Mallory said, her eyebrows shooting up her forehead. “Thanks!” She jumped off the bed and headed to the closet.
“Uh, most of the good stuff’s on the floor,” I said, “and it may or may not be clean.” She nodded, and started to pick through the pile that had been Pig’s bed less than an hour before. A few layers in, she found something that she liked, and turned around holding it up: an oversized hand-knit sweater, black with a white hand that displayed pointy red nails as it proudly raised a middle finger. Janis and I had spent a lot of time musing on the origins of this sweater, and finally had decided that it was probably made by a grandma going through a divorce.
“Can I borrow this?” she asked, and I nodded. “I feel like it really goes with my new personality,” she said as she pulled it over her head, causing her red hair to be filled with static and fly out into a halo.
Spells Like Teen Spirit Page 20
