* * *
—
It took all four of us to break it up, though Superfüd appeared to be in some sort of fugue state left over from their ritual and didn’t put up much resistance to anything. Adrian and I took charge of the fans, who were only placated after Adrian scribbled some pretend autographs on a piece of paper, while Cassandra and Brian decided what to do about the band.
It was agreed upon that they needed to be knocked out until we could do the ritual that would strip them of their powers, but the point of contention was how to knock them out. Brian said spells, while Cassandra was in favor of what she called “good old-fashioned punching.” They finally agreed on spells, with the concession that Cassandra could punch anyone who woke up.
We decided to split up. Ruby, Cassandra, Circe, and I would take care of the band and perform the ritual. Brian was staying behind to start to clean up the mess, and Adrian and Mallory were in charge of getting Janis, Pig, Amirah, and Ji-A home and into bed. Thankfully, the spell seemed to be wearing off.
“They just weren’t that impressive up close,” Janis said, and Ji-A quickly agreed.
“Yeah, they’re huge now,” Ji-A said, “but I have doubts about their staying power.”
“Totally,” Amirah said. “One-hit wonder.”
Mallory ordered a car, and I gave Adrian the addresses.
“Where are you going to stay?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.” We stood there looking at each other for a second, and then I heard Cassandra yelling at me that it was time to go. Quickly I reached out, grabbed his hand, and gave it a squeeze.
“Thanks,” I said, “for everything.” Then, before I could overthink it, I leaned in and gave him a kiss, then I turned and ran toward the van.
I helped Cassandra load the band into the van. Whatever combo of spells and punching Brian and Cassandra had used had left them stiff and catatonic, so we piled them into the back like a bunch of rolled-up carpets. Ruby and I squeezed in so that we were close to Cassandra and Circe in the front and as far away from the band as possible.
Circe sat in the passenger seat, and I think she and Cassandra were both still kind of in a state of disbelief. “I’ve spent so much time looking at this van,” Circe said at one point. “I can’t believe I’m actually in it now.” But other than that, the tasks at hand prevented them from getting too much into a reunion, and Circe explained the Red Magic ritual as Cassandra drove.
“Hey, Cass,” I said, leaning forward. “Where are we going to do this, anyway?” She’d just turned onto a road that would take us out of town.
“There’s a little spot in the woods I know about,” she said.
“Well, that doesn’t sound creepy at all,” I said.
“I go there to think sometimes, Esme,” she said, and that shut me up, considering I’d always just assumed that whenever Cassandra didn’t come to school, she was at home doing boot camp workouts on YouTube.
She finally stopped the van a little ways down a dirt road. As we climbed out, I could see a dark tree line a few yards away. It sounded like there was a creek nearby, and it was indeed a very pretty spot. It had been a long time since I’d been out of the city at night, and the amount of stars overhead was almost shocking.
“Whoa,” Ruby said, looking up at the sky as her breath puffed out in front of her. “The only other time I’ve seen this many stars was when they were projected onto the ceiling at the planetarium.”
This made Circe laugh. “If I ever left Kansas, I’d miss the sky the most,” she said. “I can’t handle that small sky that other states have. It makes me claustrophobic.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said, rubbing her arms, “I think I might be more of a summertime stargazer, but this is really pretty, even if it is cold AF out here.”
As we started to unload everything for the ritual, I turned to Cassandra. “Are you sure you want to poison the vibes of your meditation spot?” I asked, gesturing at the pile of Superfüd in the back of the van, but she just nodded.
“Ninety percent of the thinking I did here was about my mom,” she said. “So I think it’s the perfect place to take care of at least some of the people who took her from me.”
“You guys have a lot of catching up to do,” I said, and Cassandra smiled.
“I’m sorry, Es,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” she said. “I just meant that we’ll get your mom back too.”
I stood there, quiet for a moment, the cold rushing right through my dress. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Now come on. Let’s go finish these losers once and for all.”
It was well after midnight by the time we got the ritual set up, and I’m sure if anyone had seen us, we would have looked like the world’s worst nightmare of witches. Four women in a clearing in the woods, working under a full moon to strip a group of men of the power they had cheated, lied, and manipulated to get.
Cassandra hovered, fists at the ready should they wake up, but they remained unconscious throughout the entire thing. We could tell the ritual worked, because as soon as we were finished, the guys aged right there, sprouting gray hairs and paunchy bellies and under-eye wrinkles.
“What do we do with them now?” Ruby asked.
“Leave them here,” Cassandra said as chirpy as a cheerleader, “and when they wake up, if they remember where they live, they can walk home and find out their house burned down.”
Ruby was shivering, and Cassandra put her arms around her and pulled her close. “I think,” Ruby said, “that I could use a hot chocolate. With lots of whipped cream.”
In the dark, I could see shock register on Cassandra’s face. “You know that whipped cream is full of corn syrup, right?”
“I do know that,” Ruby said. “How do you know that?”
“Because you told me!” Cassandra said as we turned and headed back toward the van.
“Not to be the third wheel in this convo,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that the corn syrup is what makes it so good.”
* * *
—
It was only a few hours before sunrise when Cassandra dropped me back at my house. I let myself in, and found Pig and Mallory cuddling, completely passed out on the couch. I went into the kitchen and chugged a glass of water, then went down the hall to my room. I kicked off my shoes but was too tired to get undressed, so I flopped into bed, and that was how I slept, still in my pink, beat-to-hell prom dress, facedown in a pile of Amirah’s designer clothes.
The next thing I knew, Mallory was shaking me. “Esme,” she said. “It’s after noon, and my flight leaves in an hour! Ruby and Cassandra are on their way to pick me up!”
I jolted out of bed and looked at my phone, which was flooded with group texts and missed calls. Then I followed Mallory back out to the living room. She’d already packed up her stuff. Pig’s tail was wagging and she looked much happier than she had the night before.
It seemed like it was two seconds later when Cassandra honked the horn outside. To my surprise, she had Ji-A and Amirah in the van with her and Ruby. We walked out to the van, and I pulled open the back door to see Ji-A, who had dark circles under her eyes, and Amirah, wearing sunglasses that were about the size of party plates.
“I feel like holy hell,” Amirah said, “but I had a lot of fun.”
“Me too,” Ji-A said. “I can’t wait to come back.”
“Same,” Mallory said as she climbed in, “though maybe in the summer.”
“Yeah,” I said. “In the summer, we have mosquitoes. You’re gonna love it.”
“Ooh, exotic,” Amirah said.
“Hey,” I said, “where’s Janis?”
“Oh,” Amirah said with a grimace. “Janis is grounded.”
Ji-A nodded. “Like,
really, really grounded,” she said. “Her parents were waiting up for us at home. She had to lie and say that we were at a bonfire, because we all smelled like smoke.”
“It was kinda awkward this morning,” Amirah said, and I nodded, making a mental note to text Janis and offer to make a coffee and doughnut delivery as soon as I could. Then I gave everyone hugs and stood on the sidewalk in my pajamas, waving to the back of Cassandra’s van as it drove away. As I did, my phone dinged.
I figured it would be the group text with an update on everyone’s flights out of town, but instead it was a number I didn’t recognize. I clicked through to read the text.
Hey, it’s Adrian. I got my phone back on and Brian gave me your number.
My eyes widened and my heart started to race. I had no thoughts of playing it cool, and wrote back immediately.
Brian???
Yeah, he let me stay here last night too. He’s been pretty cool about this whole thing.
Awesome. Brian is kind of the best.
He seems like it. He’s gonna take me shopping too, so I don’t have to wear the same clothes to school tomorrow.
I read the text again, then stood there and let it sink in.
School? You mean…
Ha, Spring River. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?
Not if I see you first!
Before I even had time to second-guess such a cheesy text, Adrian had already responded with a crazy-eyed emoji, and I could feel myself grinning as I walked back into the house. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had something to look forward to at school.
Dad must have been at the gym or out running errands, so Pig and I had the house to ourselves. She was still snoozing in the living room, and I desperately needed a shower. I went into the bathroom and cranked the water as hot as it would go, then climbed in. I grabbed my shower pouf, soaked it in coconut body wash, and gave myself a good scrubbing. I hoped that Janis’s parents hadn’t gotten too close to her, or else they might have picked up on the fact that the “bonfire” she had been at smelled a lot like a burning house.
When I was done, I rinsed and stepped out of the shower. I wrapped my hair in a towel and then walked back to my room, still dripping. My clothes from the night before were piled in a corner, now looking like the remnants of a Halloween costume, and I dug through the ripped and torn pink to find a bit of fuzz. I picked out the tiny bear head and sat it on my desk.
Red Magic had almost killed us the night before, but it had also saved our lives. Red Magic was the reason Mom was cursed, but it was also probably the only thing that would ever, could ever, break that curse and free Mom once and for all. There was a whole world of Red Magic out there, and I was going to find it. Maybe not that day, maybe not the next, maybe not even the next weekend. But soon. Very, very soon.
Pig was sitting there, staring at me as I towel-dried my hair. I looked at her, and she looked back like she wanted something that, for once, wasn’t breakfast.
I pulled on my sweats, and then dropped down onto the floor, so that I was sitting cross-legged, and looked her straight in the eye. “Okay,” I said. “We’re going to figure this out once and for all.”
Back when Cassandra and I had first discovered Circe’s spell book, I had used a spell to make Pig talk in words that I could understand, and I had been both disappointed and totally freaked out by the results. All Pig had wanted to talk about was dog food, and it turned out that hearing a human voice come out of your dog’s mouth was less “Oh, cute!” and more “Oh God, no….”
But now I was prepared, and I raised my hand, aiming my palm at her face. When her lips started to move, it looked like when she was trying to eat a rock, but then she spoke.
“It’s okay,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like it had before, which was like it had been being dragged out of her with a rusty fish hook. Now it sounded normal. “You don’t have to force me.”
I dropped my hand back into my lap, and she raised a hind foot to scratch an itch behind her ear. “Who are you?” I asked.
“It’s me, dear,” she said. “Abigail.” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it. Still, I knew I’d heard it before. Pig cocked her head to the side. “Your grandmother,” she said.
That was where I had heard the name.
“Though I had always imagined that you would call me Nana,” she continued, “because that’s what Theresa called my mother.”
I was sitting there, dumbfounded, and I had no idea what to say. My grandmother was my dog, or my dog was my grandmother? “Wait, what?” I said finally, the only words that I could manage to get out. “I thought you were dead, but this whole time, you were a dog? My dog?”
“It’s a long story,” she said, cocking her ears.
“Well, I’ve got time! Like, all the time in the world. Does Mom know?”
“I think she was beginning to suspect,” she said, and her eyes looked as sad as they did when we were out of dog food. “And I think that me showing up here again last week might have been the trigger on her curse.”
Ruby’s words came back to me, and I was sure that Mom did know that her mom was a dog. “She was happy to see you,” I said. “It was everyone she loved in one house. That was what ramped her curse up.”
Pig/my grandmother nodded, the tags on her collar jingling against each other with the movement. “I don’t think she knew when we saw each other on Halloween,” she said. “There was a lot going on that night, and she was so focused on you.” My eyes started to get warm and fill with tears. “But I think she did know it was me this time. She’s aware of so much.”
I nodded, and now the tears spilled over onto my cheeks. Abigail/Pig took a step forward, and licked the tears off my cheeks, her rough pink tongue as familiar and slobbery as ever. “Stop,” I said, pushing her away. “Now that I know you’re my grandma, that’s too weird.”
“Sorry,” she said, sitting back down. “Old habits die hard.”
“I thought you died when Mom was young,” I said. “Dad said there was some sort of accident, and he never met you.”
“Oh no, no,” she said. “That must have just been what Theresa told him. I’m very much alive and well.”
I looked at her, confused. “But you’re a dog,” I said, not quite sure how that constituted “well.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “but I haven’t always been a dog. I was a cat for a while, and a flying squirrel, a bunny, and I even spent a few weeks as a mountain lion.” At this, she seemed to give a little shudder. “Didn’t enjoy that one bit,” she said. “I don’t want to have to chase my food down. I prefer having it dumped into a bowl for me. Speaking of…”
“You already had breakfast,” I said.
“Oh yes, of course,” she said, “but I figured it never hurts to ask. So yes, being a dog suits me the best, and it allowed me to be close to you, my granddaughter.”
I was starting to think that every person involved in the Sitterhood had no idea how to craft a narrative and told stories that were lacking more info than they contained. “But how?”
“Oh, there was an accident, all right,” she said, “but I didn’t die. I just got separated from my body. I had nowhere to go for a while, but then I figured out that I could share.”
“Share?” I asked, and she nodded, then licked her nose.
“Yes, share,” she said. “I don’t completely take over, because our mission is to protect the innocent, not possess them. So there’s still a dog in here, and we just switch off. Sometimes she drives, and sometimes it’s me.”
“The night of Halloween, when we did the ritual to help open the Portal…,” I started.
“That was me,” she said. “But the farting, that’s all her.”
“Glad you, uh, cleared the air on that,” I said, “but what happened at the Summit? When Wa
nda threw you off the roof?”
“That was a little bit of both of us,” she said. “She took the initiative. Dogs have a lot of intuition, you know, and when she saw Wanda up there, she just snapped. She really does love you, which isn’t surprising, since we’ve been here five years.”
I nodded. “I love her—I mean, you—I mean, you both—too,” I said.
“I took over once we were actually flying off the roof,” she said. “I tell you, that was about the scariest thing I have ever experienced in all my lives. I would have peed my pants if I’d been wearing any. I didn’t think we were going to survive.”
“How did you?” I said.
“We landed on something soft,” she said. “A Sebring.”
“A what?”
“A Chrysler Sebring,” she repeated. “A convertible.”
I sat there in silence for a second, dumbfounded. One of my favorite episodes of The Office was where Michael Scott demands a Chrysler Sebring as his company car, and now I was hearing that one had saved the life of my grandmother—who was actually my dog.
“Like the one Michael Scott drives?” I said in disbelief.
“I don’t know him,” Pig said. “But the car broke our fall.” I thought back to running down to the parking lot. Everything was hazy and there had been plenty else going on, so even if I had seen a Sebring with a dog-sized dent, nothing about it would have stood out to me.
“But where have you been?” I asked. “I put signs up everywhere for you.”
“I don’t know where she went, dear,” she said, settling back down on the ground and putting her head on my knee. “The impact knocked me right out of her, and I had to grab on to the first being I could find who was willing to share. By the time I got my bearings, she was gone. She was injured pretty bad from the fall and scared to death. I think that someone must have picked her up and taken her home.”
Spells Like Teen Spirit Page 33
