by Isobel Bird
“Looks like you’re doing a paper,” the person behind the desk said as she took the circulation cards out of the books and stamped them with a due date.
“Yeah, it’s for my history class,” Kate answered, glancing up. When she saw who it was, she froze. Of all the people she didn’t want to see, she’d thought Scott was number one. Now she realized he was number two—next to his alleged dream girl, Terri Fletcher. As Kate stared at Terri, all she could think was that she would never be as pretty as her, that Scott would never ask her out, and that she was a social failure. Then, to make things worse, she heard Scott’s voice coming toward her.
“Could you hurry?” she said, anxiously watching Terri stamp each book methodically. “I really need to get home.”
“I’m almost done,” Terri said. “Just one more to go.” She stamped the last card, put the book on top of the others, and pushed the stack toward Kate. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” Kate said hurriedly. She picked up the pile of books and moved away from the desk as quickly as she could, trying to keep her back to Scott. She didn’t want to bump into him again—and, even more, she didn’t want to see him smiling at Terri.
Dumping the books into her backpack and grabbing her coat, Kate took off, deliberately not glancing at the circulation desk, where Scott was leaning over the counter, talking to Terri. Instead, she focused on the doors as if they were the net in a basketball game. The goal was to get to them and out into the hallway without looking anywhere but straight ahead.
When she felt the door handle beneath her fingers, she pushed hard and practically burst into the hallway. Then she ran down the hall to the front doors and out into the cold January afternoon. As she began her walk through town and toward home, she couldn’t help but think about how she wished she was the one Scott had come into the library to talk to instead of Terri. As much as she hated to admit it, her friends were right. She would give almost anything to have him be interested in her. If only she could find some way to make him notice her.
CHAPTER 2
“Hello?” Kate called out as she shut the front door of her house behind her.
There was no answer. Kate hung her coat in the hall closet and looked into the living room, but it was empty except for the tools her father never managed to put away. Although they’d lived in the old house on Halifax Street since before Kate was born, her father was always finding something else to fix or restore. At the moment he was repairing the tiles around the fireplace, and there was a mess all over the floor. The dining room was empty as well. But in the kitchen Kate found a note from her mother on the counter.
Kate:
I’m catering a party this evening and your father is working late at the store. Dinner’s in the fridge. Hope you like it. We should both be home by 10:00.
Love,
Mom
Normally, Kate loved having dinner with her parents. Unlike some of her friends, she got along really well with her family. She liked telling them about her day as they ate together, and she enjoyed hearing her mother talk about her catering business and laughing at her father’s good-natured complaining about the neophyte hikers and cell phone–toting outdoor enthusiasts who flocked to his sporting goods store to get outfitted for their trips into the forests that surrounded Beecher Falls. But tonight she was happy to have the house to herself so she wouldn’t have to answer any questions. As much as she liked her parents, she didn’t want to talk to them about how awful she was feeling over what had happened at school.
Kate peeked into the fridge, saw that her mother had left her some pasta salad and chicken for dinner, and grabbed a soda to take up to her room with her. Upstairs, she put a CD into the stereo, took off her shoes, and flopped onto her bed. Outside the window the sky was gray and stormy, which was exactly how she felt herself.
She opened her backpack and dumped the library books onto her bed. She’d been in such a hurry to get out of the library that she hadn’t even really looked at which books she’d grabbed. Now she went through them, hoping one of them would give her something to work with. It looked as though she was going to have to find out all she could about witchcraft, whether she liked it or not.
She picked up the first book and started reading. At first she found it difficult going because there were a lot of dates and numbers, and the style was dry. But the longer she read, the more interested she became. According to the book, hundreds of thousands of people had been tried as witches in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of them had confessed to being witches after enduring horrible tortures, and most ended up being executed anyway.
The more she read, the more Kate found it incredible that anyone would believe the stories told by the people who accused others of being witches. Flying through the air? Talking to the Devil? Making people die? None of it made any sense. Yet thousands and thousands of people had died because someone did believe that they were witches and could do these things. People had been so frightened by the idea that witches existed and had terrible powers that in some villages in Europe entire populations had been wiped out.
There was definitely enough material for her to write a paper. Relieved, she shut the book she was reading and put it back on the pile. She’d been reading for a long time and was feeling more than a little hungry, especially since she’d left most of her lunch uneaten. She decided to get the dinner her mother had left her and get back to the books later. Now that she knew there was enough for a report, she wasn’t in such a hurry.
As she got off the bed, she knocked the pile of books over and they fell onto the floor. She bent down to pick them up, and the cover of one of them caught her eye. It had a picture of a woman sitting behind a burning candle, and it was called Spells and Charms for the Modern Witch. She didn’t remember choosing it at the library. I must have grabbed it by mistake, she thought as she picked it up and opened it.
Unlike the other books, this one wasn’t a history book. It appeared to be an actual book of spells and rituals. The contents page listed all kinds of weird things, like charms for warding off evil, rituals for bringing good luck, and directions for making potions. It all sounded like a bunch of nonsense, but Kate found herself leafing through the pages anyway.
There were some photographs in the book of people doing the different spells and rituals. Unlike the creepy engravings in the other books, these photos showed normal-looking women and men. They weren’t wearing pointy hats or black capes or anything. Some were dressed in plain old jeans and T-shirts. They didn’t look much different from the people Kate might see at the mall—or even at church on Sunday mornings. As she looked at their faces, Kate wondered if they were really witches. She would have expected them to look different somehow, but they looked just like her.
She turned to one of the spells and started reading. It was a spell to cleanse a place of negative energy. She was surprised to see that there were no complicated rhymes or incantations. In fact, the spell didn’t seem difficult at all. It just involved lighting some candles, doing some kind of meditation, and saying a few words. Anyone could do it.
Kate was sort of disappointed. From her few impressions of witchcraft, she’d expected spells to be at least a little bit spooky. But the ones in the book sounded about as easy and mysterious as making Jell-O—just add hot water and wait. There were no strange ingredients, and the book didn’t say anything about having to do the spells in a secret place in the woods or under a full moon or anything like that. The woman in the picture that accompanied the cleansing spell was doing it in her living room.
Anyone could do that, Kate thought. Then she had another thought: I could do that if I wanted to. The idea of trying to perform a spell herself made her laugh. She’d feel so silly sitting in front of a candle, saying the words of the spell, and waiting for something to happen. Besides, she was no witch. She was just plain old Kate Morgan, who needed to do a report for school. This wasn’t really her kind of thing at all.
Leaving th
e book on her bed, she went down to the kitchen and took out her dinner. A quick three minutes in the microwave had the chicken smelling like it was fresh from the oven, and Kate sat down at the table to enjoy her mother’s cooking. As she ate, she found herself thinking about the people accused of witchcraft by the witch-hunters. What would she have done if she’d been accused of witchcraft? Would she have proclaimed her innocence, as so many of them did despite being tortured, or would she have confessed in the hope that she might be spared? Would she, if pressed, have accused other people of being witches, even if she knew it wasn’t true?
She couldn’t even imagine being in that situation. She couldn’t understand what it was about witches, or even just the idea of witches, that made people so upset that they would torture and kill one another in such terrible ways. But then she thought about her reaction to the book of spells. Just looking at it had made her a little uncomfortable. Why? Was it because she was afraid that witches might really exist and that witchcraft might not be just stories and legends? The people in the photos had looked just like her, but she couldn’t ever imagine calling herself a witch. She didn’t even know what made someone a witch. In her church, people were confirmed by a priest. She wondered if witches had some kind of similar ceremony, or if you just decided you were a witch and that made you one. But if anyone could do it, why couldn’t she? Maybe she could. She found the idea both strangely exciting and distinctly upsetting.
She finished her dinner and washed the dishes. Then she returned to her room. Avoiding the book of spells, she opened one of the others and started to read more about the witch persecutions. But her mind kept wandering back to the book on the floor beside the bed. Finally, after she’d read the same paragraph over three times without remembering a word of it, she gave in. Tossing aside the book she was reading, she picked up the spell book and opened it.
She didn’t have any intention of trying any of the spells. But she was curious about what else was in the book. She read through a few more spells; they all seemed similar to the one she had read earlier. Then she turned the page and saw something called the “Come to Me Love Spell.” Intrigued by the suggestive title, she started reading it.
“The Come to Me Love Spell should be used when you want to attract the attention of someone special,” she read. “It will draw love to you and make you irresistible.”
That could come in handy, Kate thought. At least it could if it were true. But there was no way something like that could work. You couldn’t make people fall in love with you just by saying some words.
But what if you could? a voice in her mind asked. What if you could make someone notice you? What if you could make Scott fall in love with you?
Suddenly, Kate was looking at the Come to Me Love Spell differently. Could she really do it? Could she actually make Scott Coogan notice her, even fall in love with her, just by doing a spell in a book? She wasn’t even a witch. Would a spell work if just anybody did it? Kate didn’t know. It seemed so ridiculous.
But what have you got to lose? the voice in her head asked.
“Nothing,” Kate said out loud, surprising herself. But it was true. She didn’t have anything to lose by trying out the spell. If nothing happened, she wouldn’t be any worse off than she already was. And if it did work . . . she couldn’t let herself think about that.
Skipping the rest of the introduction, Kate went right to the directions for working the spell, before she could change her mind. She looked at the list of things she would need. She was pretty sure she had everything right there in the house, and she ran downstairs to look for the first two things—some red candles and some matches. Luckily, there were a number of small votive candles on the fireplace mantel, left over from the Christmas arrangement her mother had made, and Kate gathered them and carried them upstairs after grabbing some matches from the junk drawer in the kitchen. She made a detour to her mother’s sewing room and returned with a piece of red construction paper, a black marker, and some red ribbon from the well-stocked box of craft items her Martha Stewart–obsessed mother kept.
Even though she was alone in the house, Kate shut her door. Part of her was still worried that someone would walk in on her, and she felt silly enough trying out a spell from a witchcraft book without having to explain to her parents what she was doing if they came home early and surprised her. They were pretty cool as far as letting her do her own thing, but she had a feeling this was something they would definitely not understand.
She put the candles on the floor and looked at the spell again. She had almost everything on the list. But the last item was a problem. The book said she needed something that represented the person whose attention she wanted to attract. “You might want to use a photo, or even make a doll out of a piece of clothing belonging to the object of your affection,” she read. But there was no way for her to get something that belonged to Scott, and she didn’t have any pictures of him.
She was about to abandon the idea and put everything back, but then she had an idea. In her closet was a bag filled with the dolls she’d played with when she was younger. Dragging it out, she pawed through the assorted Barbies and Skippers until she found what she was looking for—a Ken doll. With its blond hair and blue eyes, it looked sort of like Scott. It was even wearing a letterman jacket like the one he wore.
“You’ll be perfect,” she said to the doll as she threw the others back into the closet.
Then it was time to go to work. She picked up the book and read the directions: “Arrange the seven small candles (or more if you like) around you in a circle.”
She cleared a space in the middle of the room, pushing her clothes, shoes, and assorted books and papers aside. Then she arranged the seven red candles in a circle, leaving enough room to sit inside the circle without being too close to the candles. Before sitting down, she turned off the bedroom light. Once she was surrounded by the darkness, she felt a little bit afraid. What was she doing? Was it dangerous? For a moment she was tempted to turn the light back on and forget about the whole thing. It was silly anyway. But another part of her, a more insistent, curious part, wanted to see what would happen.
“Light the circle of candles,” she read, holding the book close to her face in the milky darkness. “As you do, imagine yourself sitting in a circle of bright light.”
Kate struck a match and lit the candles one at a time. As the circle grew, the room filled with a soft warm glow. So far, so good, she thought to herself as she read the next step.
Following the directions, she cut a heart shape out of the red paper and, using the marker, wrote her own name on it. Then, holding the Ken doll in one hand, she pressed the heart with her name on it against his chest and held it there. Then she took the red ribbon and began to wind it around the doll, starting at the feet and moving up the body. As she wound the ribbon, tying the heart to the doll, she spoke the words of the spell.
With this ribbon I do bind
my heart to yours and yours to mine.
Love, I call you, come to me,
As is my will, so mote it be.
She said the words three times, each time a little more loudly. On the final “so mote it be,” she tied the ribbon firmly across the doll’s chest and knotted it. It was now wrapped up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, with only its head visible. Its smiling plastic face beamed up at her stupidly.
I guess that’s it, Kate thought. She found herself giggling nervously, like a little kid. I just did a spell. It all seemed so silly. She hadn’t done anything but light some candles and play with a doll. She didn’t see how that could possibly have an effect on whether Scott would notice her or not. Plus, she didn’t even know when it would kick in, since the disclaimer at the bottom of the spell very clearly stated, “Effects may take up to forty-eight hours to appear. Results may vary.” But it had been kind of fun.
She looked at the clock on her bedside table. Her parents would be home any minute. Standing up, she turned on the bedroom light. Then she ble
w out the candles. She couldn’t put them back, because her mother would notice that they had been used and ask why. Instead, she put them into an empty shoe box. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the doll, so she stuck it in the shoe box with the candles and put the box in the back of her closet. She would figure out what to do with everything later, but for the moment she didn’t want anyone stumbling upon it accidentally. She had just closed the closet door when she heard the downstairs door open.
“Kate?” her father called. “Are you home, honey?”
Kate opened her bedroom door and went downstairs. Both her parents were there, taking off their coats.
“I stopped by the store after my party and forced your father to come home,” her mother said. “If I hadn’t, I think he would have just set up camp in one of the display tents.”
“Hi, Daddy,” Kate said. “Was the store busy today?”
“Very,” he said. “We had a bunch of winter campers come in. They’re all heading up to Olympia National Park for some snowshoeing this weekend and needed gear.”
“How was the party?” she asked her mother.
“The shrimp puffs were a little too toasty, but I don’t think anyone noticed but me,” she answered. “And what did you do tonight?”
Kate wondered what they would say if she told them, “Oh, I tried out this witchcraft spell. No big deal.” Instead she said, “Just some school stuff.” Technically it was true, so she didn’t feel bad about not being completely honest.
