by Ali Standish
E: Eager for this day to be over
M: Missing Gram so much
M: Might have something wrong with my skin
A: Anxious about my appointment on Friday
After me goes Edie. She clears her throat and takes a deep breath, like she’s about to read some great work of art.
“E: Eloquent
D: Determined
I: Intelligent
E: Entertaining.”
I roll my eyes. Edie might not be an airhead, but she is definitely full of herself. While the rest of the class shares their acrostics, I write a new one in the margin of my notebook, shielding it with my arm so no one can see.
E: Egotistical
D: Disagreeable
I: Irritating
E: Evil
Okay, so maybe evil is a little bit dramatic. But I couldn’t think of anything better for the last E. Next to it, I draw a devil face with long, stick-straight hair. As I’m putting on the finishing touches, I look up to see Ms. Singh staring at me. It’s funny how some teachers know how to scold you without using any words, like a superpower or something.
I put my pencil down and mouth, “Sorry.” I like Ms. Singh—I don’t want to get on her bad side. At least there’s no way she could have seen what I was writing.
Once the whole class is done sharing, it’s time to go. As I reach back to grab my satchel, I bump my desk, and my pencil rolls onto the floor. I lean down at the same time that Fina reaches for it.
“Oh, here you go,” she says, grabbing hold of it first.
“Oh, thanks,” I reply.
“Um,” she says. She’s looking past me.
I turn to follow her gaze, and to my horror see Edie leaning over her desk, staring at my notebook. I slam my arms down on top of it, but not before her cheeks go past red to an “icebox plum” shade of purple. Then she stands up and walks out of class without another word.
But I have a feeling I haven’t heard the last of this from Edie.
In fact, I have just thought of a much better word for the last E in her name.
Enemy.
9
When I get home that afternoon, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her reading glasses and typing away on her laptop. She glances up as I trudge in and drop Gram’s bag. There are circles under her eyes that match mine, which is weird. Usually even when Mom is stressed, she doesn’t look it.
“How was your first day?” she asks, turning on her potential-new-client smile.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you sure? I got you a treat.” She pushes forward a plate of double chocolate cookies from my favorite bakery in town.
I am hungry. I couldn’t face the thought of the lunchroom after the Edie thing, so instead I went to the library, ate half my sandwich under the table, and then tried to read. But mostly I thought about the Edie thing. Why hadn’t I closed my stupid notebook?
I sit down and bite into the cookie. Boomer wags his way into the kitchen, and I stroke his head as I eat.
“Tell me something, at least,” Mom says. “Did you make any friends? What about your teachers?”
“I like my English teacher,” I reply. “And that journalist you met, his daughter goes to my school.”
The instant I’ve said it, I realize it was the wrong move.
“Arnold O’Shea?” Mom asks, her eyes widening. “Did you make friends with her?”
“Not exactly,” I mumble, getting up to pour myself a glass of milk.
“Well, I’m sure—”
Mom stops when she sees me glancing at her laptop. For a second, we both freeze. Then she lowers the screen and I look away, and we both pretend we haven’t seen the website she was just looking at.
It’s only then that it occurs to me that Mom has never in my life bought me an entire plate of cookies as a treat. Or to wonder why she has those dark circles under her eyes.
It’s because she’s done the same Google search as me, of course. She’s been on the same website. Seen the same pictures.
She thinks I do have what those people have.
“I’m going to take Boomer for a walk,” I say suddenly, turning from the kitchen before she can reply.
This time, instead of heading for the Spinney, we walk toward the church. The air is ripe and heavy and smells like the end of summer. As soon as we reach the sidewalk, Boomer leaps toward a squirrel, which scampers up a nearby oak tree. Across the street, Ruth stands at her fence, leaning against her cane. She calls me over when she sees me and invites me in for lemonade.
“These old bones aren’t good for much anymore, but they can still squeeze the lemons and stir the sugar,” she says.
“No thanks,” I reply. “We’re on our way to the graveyard.”
“Going to visit your gram, eh?” she crows. “Well, send her my regards. The garden club just isn’t the same anymore. We all still think about those margaritas she would bring.”
She stares wistfully in the direction of the graveyard as the church bells ring, five minutes late, like usual.
“Me, too,” I say. “Except, you know, the margarita part.”
I wave goodbye and head for the gates of the graveyard, where a few yellow leaves have already fallen onto the grass. Boomer and I walk between the old gravestones—crooked and slick with moss, some of them so old you can’t even read the names on them anymore—until we come to the newer ones.
The grass around the grave behind Gram’s—the one belonging to Isabella Fortune, Gram’s teacher who died really young—has been tidied up recently, and someone’s planted a little rosebush by it. It makes me happy to think there must be somebody left to remember her, even after all this time.
I kneel on the ground in front of Gram and Grandpa’s grave.
My grandpa died of a heart attack when I was too little to remember him, but I think I love him anyway. I know from the way Gram used to talk about him that he was a really good husband. The kind who gave her books and inscribed them, “For my muse and my best friend.”
Today, though, I’m almost jealous enough to hate him, because she’s with him now and not here with me and Boomer.
The grass is uneven at the place where they buried Gram’s ashes. Unlike on the old tombstones, the lettering on this one is sharp—sharp enough to cut me all up inside. Where there used to be only one name, now there are two.
“Hi, Gram,” I whisper, pressing my palm to her name.
Boomer whines before flopping down beside me.
“It’s weird being in the cottage without you,” I go on. Just because Gram can’t answer doesn’t mean I can’t keep on talking to her. It makes me feel a little less lonely anyway.
Boomer lays his head in my lap, and I rub his ears, tugging them gently the way Gram used to.
“I guess everything’s been kind of weird since you died, Gram. It’s too lonely in the Spinney. And there’s this thing that’s been happening to my skin. It’s turning white. I think . . . I think I might have this condition.”
Until now, I haven’t actually said the word out loud yet. Maybe I’m worried that if I say it, I’ll make it real. Like an incantation.
But maybe the opposite will happen. Maybe it’s like in Rumpelstiltskin. Maybe if I say the name, I’ll take away its power, and I won’t feel so scared about it anymore.
“It’s called vitiligo,” I say.
I know. It doesn’t sound like a big deal. It sounds more like something you would order at an Italian restaurant than a skin disease.
“It isn’t dangerous or anything, which is good, but it makes your skin turn white. And it can spread all over your body. Weird, right?”
A few more leaves float down to the grass. I bite my lip.
“Also, I started school today, and it was awful. There’s this girl there. She was really rude to me, so I wrote a mean poem about her, and she saw it. She’ll probably tell everyone, and now they’ll think I’m the mean one.”
Boomer spots another squ
irrel and goes bounding off, but I stay where I am, trying to picture Gram next to me, trying to hear what she would tell me to do.
Instead, I see us at the village fair when I was seven.
Gram had abandoned her parasol to the side of the tent and was dancing with Old Joe, her long dress skimming the grass as she spun on bare feet. Nearby, Ruth led Professor Swann in a waltz, and he kept looking over at Gram like she might be able to rescue him.
I was sitting under the dessert table, nibbling at an oatmeal raisin cookie and wiggling a loose tooth with my tongue, when two boys walked up.
“That pale lady dresses funny,” said one boy.
“That’s because she’s a witch,” the older one said knowingly.
“Is not.”
“Is too. Just like the ones in the stories who do spells and have cauldrons and warts and eat little kids for breakfast.”
Fuming, I reached out and pinched the boy who had just spoken, hard on his leg.
“Ow!” he howled as I darted away, ducking under the back of the tablecloth, so that when he raised it to look under the table, there was no one there.
“It was her, it was her!” the younger boy yelped. “The witch put a . . . a . . . a curse on you!”
That night, I couldn’t sleep, and when I came downstairs, Gram was there, already putting a slice of apple pie on a plate for me.
“What’s keeping you awake tonight, darlin’?”
I repeated what I’d heard the boys say.
“And did that bother you?” she asked. She sat across from me in her white nightgown, her hair in a long silver braid, the way she always wore it to sleep.
“The parts about you eating little kids and having warts,” I said. “Not the part about being a witch. I wouldn’t mind if you were a witch.”
It was kind of witchy, the way she always knew when I couldn’t sleep. And she had said that she might have some magic in her blood.
“Well, that is certainly comforting,” she replied.
“Doesn’t it bother you, Gram? That those kids think that stuff?”
“Goodness, no,” she said. “If I spent my life being bothered by what other people thought of me, I’d never get anything else done, would I? Besides, there’s no point in worrying about things you can’t change, and you can’t change what people think of you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, because what people think of you usually tells you much more about them than it does about you. For instance, I think you are the smartest, best, most wonderful little girl in the world. Now what does that tell you about me?”
I giggled. “Um, that you love me?”
“Very much,” Gram said.
The memory ends abruptly as Boomer flies up to me, skidding to a halt just as he reaches my chest. I hug him tight as he pants, looking over his back at Gram’s gravestone.
“I know there’s nothing I can do to change my skin,” I say, “and maybe I don’t even have this vitiligo thing. I’ll try not to worry. And I’ll try not to care about what people think of me.”
But secretly, I bet it’s easier not to care what people think of you when you’re Gram’s age than when you’re twelve.
And anyway, when I was with Gram, it was like I lived in a different world—one made of old books and warm milk and sprinkled with fairy dust. A world where Gram could fix anything with a twinkle of her eye. But now that she’s gone, the spell has broken. And I’m not sure if her advice can fix things in the world I live in now.
I think about the last thing that little boy said after I pinched his friend. About Gram putting a curse on him.
I feel a tear snaking down my cheek.
Gram always said that there was magic in the world for those who cared to see it.
And if magic is real, then I guess curses must be, too.
10
Instead of turning for home when we leave the graveyard, Boomer and I walk to the meadows, duck underneath the barbed wire strand, and slip into the Spinney.
When we reach the middle of the forest, I sink into the moss. It’s a relief to be here after spending all day at school. I lie there for a while, breathing in the smell of the wild roses and looking up at the branches of the sycamore tree.
For now, most of the leaves are still green, but in a couple of months, they’ll be amber and orange and gold. Then they’ll fall and sunlight will take up the whole sky.
Change is coming, the trees whisper.
That’s the thing about transformations. You think you’re looking at one thing, but it’s already on its way to being another. Just because you can’t see it changing right in front of you doesn’t mean it’s not. And there’s usually nothing you can do to stop it.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to sink deeper into the moss, stretching out my arms and imagining they are tree roots. I listen to the stream trickling toward the river, which will take its water to the ocean, where someday it will turn into clouds and come down again as rain.
Everything turns into something else eventually.
I hear a twig snap nearby, and I shoot up.
“Hello?” I call. “Is someone there?”
The glade is deserted. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not alone. Or that someone was just here, right before Boomer and I slipped under the barbed wire.
I look around for another minute to assure myself that the forest really is empty. Then I stand to go. It’s only as I brush my palm against the trunk of the sycamore tree, wanting to feel its smooth skin against my own, that I see it.
The journal is not where I left it, deep in the hollow. A corner pokes out, like someone left the book there in a hurry, without taking the time to push it in properly.
A chill rushes over me. Has someone been here, reading my journal?
I pull it out from the hollow and flip through the pages, looking for signs of an intruder, until I come to the end of the chapter I wrote last week. When I flip to the next page, it is filled with words.
Words I didn’t write.
As she grew older, Ivy was allowed to roam the great wood by herself. She delighted in its secret thickets and in weaving between the trees as fast as her feet would carry her.
One winter’s day, Gran sent Ivy into the village to buy a loaf of bread from the baker. As Ivy waited in line, she overheard two children talking in low voices.
“There’s no moon tonight,” said the first, a boy with laughing blue eyes and dirt on his cheek. “You know what that means.”
“The witch will wander the forest,” said the second, a girl with eyes that matched the boy’s, though hers seemed afraid.
“That’s right,” said the boy, “and all those who look upon her are lost, for one glance from her red eyes will turn any man to stone.”
“But what about a child?” asked the girl.
“Not a child,” said the boy. “One look from the witch will put a child under her spell. Then the witch can take her back to her cottage and—”
But just what the witch would do, Ivy did not hear, for at that moment, the children’s mother called them away, and it was Ivy’s turn to order.
As she made her way back through the snowy lanes to Poppy Cottage, clutching the warm bread to her chest, Ivy wondered at what she had heard. Was it true? Could there be a witch in her forest? She had the feeling that the boy was only teasing the girl, but she had to know for sure.
So that night, Ivy crept from the cottage and into the heart of the forest. She climbed into the crook of her favorite cottonwood tree and pulled her blanket tight around her shoulders. Then she waited, watching the shadowed forest below for any sign of the witch.
But the night was long and the blanket warm, and soon Ivy found herself drifting off to sleep.
When she awoke, it was still night and, though she couldn’t say why, her heart was racing. Blearily, she looked around until she saw something that made her blood run cold as snow.
Not a stone’s throw away, there was a silent figure g
liding across the forest floor. She wore a white cloak that fell to her feet, with a hood that was lined in fur. She carried in one hand a large wooden staff. The way she moved was unnatural, as if she floated rather than walked. Suddenly, the figure stopped and then, as if she could sense Ivy’s gaze, slowly turned her head toward the cottonwood tree.
“No!” cried Ivy, remembering what the boy had said about the witch’s gaze entrancing children. She jumped from her tree and ran, faster and faster, all the while feeling the witch’s breath like a cold wind on the back of her neck. Just as she was sure the witch would catch her, she broke free of the forest and into the clearing where Poppy Cottage stood.
Her gran waited in front of the cottage, and Ivy threw herself straight into her arms.
“Where were you, my girl?” her grandmother asked. “I’ve been ever so worried.”
Ivy told her about the witch. When she was done, her grandmother shook her head.
“That was no witch, Ivy,” she said.
“Then who was it?” Ivy asked.
“A dream, I should think,” Gran said. “Come, let’s go in and get you warmed up. I’ve a pot of stew on the fire.”
They spoke no more about the strange woman that night, but long after Ivy was asleep, her grandmother sat awake, staring into the fire. Trying to read the shape of the future in its dying flames.
11
When Ms. Singh’s class lets out the next day, I head for the library again. My journal is tucked safely into Gram’s satchel, and all day, I’ve been itching to pull it out and examine the new chapter. I walk faster, until I round the corner and get stuck behind Edie and Fina, the nice girl from California.
“Are you from LA?” Edie’s asking. “My dad goes there sometimes.”
I’ve been waiting for Edie to get her revenge for yesterday, but she hasn’t so much as looked my way all day.
They head straight, toward the cafeteria, and I turn right to the library as Edie tells Fina to sit with them at lunch. I guess being from California makes you automatically cool. Meanwhile, it’s halfway through the second day of school, and I still haven’t made any friends.
