The Babysitters Coven

by Kate M. Williams

  “Oh, they’re still in the aquarium,” she called over her shoulder as she rooted through the closet looking for a rhinestone clutch. “I was hoping you could take care of it for us?”

  Internally I groaned. Externally I said, “Not a problem at all.”

  As soon as Sharon’s car pulled out of the driveway, after she’d finally settled on a pink silk blouse and a gray wiggle skirt, Kaitlyn and I got right down to dead-fish-disposal business. Kaitlyn watched quietly and patiently as I scooped them out with a slotted spoon and laid each goldfish on a paper towel, their blobby bodies shimmering like chunks of orange Jell-O.

  When I’d gotten all three out, we carried them into the bathroom. I made sure to keep my voice somber as I gave the eulogy, as I didn’t want Kaitlyn to think that a fish funeral was a fun new game. “You were good fish,” I said, “smart fish, beautiful fish, talented fish. Master swimmers, so good at eating little fishy flakes and just being very fish-like. We will miss you, oh noble and true fish friends.” I dropped the first one in with a splash. Flush. Then the next one. Flush, and final flush.

  All in a day’s work.

  “Isn’t it sad,” I said to Kaitlyn, “that now you don’t have any pets?” She nodded, and her expression transformed. Suddenly she looked like she was going to cry. Seeing the look in her eyes, I realized I’d laid it on a little thick. To cheer her up, we went to the living room so that she could jump off the couch. She landed maybe eight inches from where she’d taken off, but I screamed and clapped like a gymnast’s momager.

  “Oh my goodness,” I cried. “You’re like an Olympian! Triple gold medals, for the longest jump, the highest jump, and the most beautiful jump!” She grinned like she really had just won a prize, and when she took a bow, I could see all the glitter stuck to her scalp.

  She went to bed without a fuss, and as soon as she was asleep, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and sat down outside her door. I didn’t move until I heard Sharon’s car in the driveway. I wasn’t taking chances anymore.

  * * *

  —

  I wouldn’t say I practiced on Thursday. That sounds like setting an allotted time for something and doing it over and over until you get it right. But I did use my powers here and there. I fed Pig without getting off the couch. I got more toilet paper without getting off the…well, that’s obvious. I repiled some junk in my room without getting off the bed. I was entering a new period of power, and peak laziness, and I had to admit that it was kind of cool.

  * * *

  —

  It was crisp and sunny on Friday, so Janis and I sat outside at lunch, next to the pond that had once been home to several koi but that now housed just one sad turtle that might have actually been dead. (It’s hard to tell with turtles.) The senior class had TP’d the school, an early Halloween prank, and dreadlocks of toilet paper twirled from the trees. It was pretty, in a weird sort of way.

  Janis’s look today was “be all you can be Barbie,” which translated to a camo-print minidress, a military overshirt with a name patch that said “Raul,” and unlaced hot-pink Doc Martens that required deft steps to avoid tripping. The front of her hair was twisted into tight rows, with curlicues of baby hairs on her forehead and the back natural and puffed. She had finished her look with gold door-knocker earrings that said “Patrice.”

  Janis loved things with someone else’s name on them. Maybe that was because she hated her own name, which was Janis Jackson. It was one of my favorite things in the world when someone met Janis for the first time and snickered, “Janis Jackson?” and she snarled back, “It’s a family name!” She already had the forms filled out to change it the minute she turned eighteen.

  My own look was “feminist rodeo queen,” as I was wearing my “The Future Is Female” T-shirt under a fringed denim shirt, with high-waisted jeans and turquoise suede cowboy boots that were seven dollars on the super-deep-discount rack at Dad’s favorite western-wear store.

  Our lunch today came from the snack machine, not the caf line, so I was eating Cool Ranch Doritos and drinking a Red Bull, and Janis had a ginger ale and Sour Patch Kids. It was Friday, and since neither one of us had a job lined up, the night yawned before us, wide open.

  Janis picked out a green kid and popped it into her mouth.

  “So, what do you want to do tonight?” I asked. When Janis had been in Chicago, we’d texted nonstop, but she played down her trip from last weekend, at least to me. Her stories still looked like a “cut here” line. I was happy for Janis, that she was out there exploring her options for the future, but I was still happy to have her back. We had a routine, and I liked it.

  “Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that,” she said. “I know that you really want to hang out in your room and watch Bring It On while we eat pizza and scroll to the ends of the internet, but Bernie Goodman is having a party, and I think we should go.”

  “Bring It On is a really good movie,” I said. “You always like the cheer routines.”

  Janis sighed. “I’m not saying I don’t.”

  I shoved a chip into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed, the ranch coating thick on the roof of my mouth. “A party?” As of late, my social anxiety had taken a back seat to the discovery of my telekinesis, but at the mention of a party, it clamored to get back behind the wheel. Nothing sounded less appealing to me than going to a party.

  “Yep. A gathering of like-minded people talking to each other, listening to music, drinking, maybe even—God forbid!—having fun.”

  “At Bernie Goodman’s?” I was stalling.

  “Yes, Bernie Goodman, a junior at Spring River High School whose parents are away for the weekend because his sister got caught trying to buy Adderall from her RA. Bernie’s about five feet eleven inches tall, with brown hair, cheek acne—”

  “I know who he is,” I interrupted her. “I’m just surprised you want to go. It seems like Bernie Goodman’s parties are probably lame.”

  “Esme, it’s not like I think it’s going to be Studio 54. I just think we could go, because it’s not like we have anything else to do.”

  I saw more than enough of my classmates, well, in class, and all I really wanted to do that night was hang out with my pillow, Pig, and a bottle of nail polish, but that was how Janis and I had spent the previous three weekends before she went to Chicago. It was clear she wanted to go.

  I ignored the signs telling me not to feed him, and threw my last chip to the turtle. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go. But I can’t promise that I’ll like it.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” she said. “And no one said you had to like it.”

  * * *

  —

  It was 6:32 when my phone dinged.

  Outside

  Janis was waiting at the curb.

  Unlike me, Janis had gotten her learner’s permit as soon as she’d turned fourteen and her full license the day she’d turned sixteen. She drove a Honda Accord, which had been a nice car when she’d inherited it from her mom six months before. Now it was littered with soda bottles, coffee cups, abandoned school assignments, and a hot-pink smear on the upholstery from when an uncapped lipstick had spent a week skittering around the back seat. Next to my bedroom, I was more at home in Janis’s car than anyplace else in the world.

  I opened the passenger door, threw a magazine and a pair of socks into the back seat, and climbed in. My nose wrinkled as it took in a not-good, not-totally-bad odor—chocolate, with undertones of aquarium.

  “What’s that smell?”

  Janis shrugged as she simultaneously cranked the music and the wheel. “I left the window down last week when it rained,” she said. “I think there’s mildew growing in the passenger seat.” I looked down between my legs. I was sitting in the passenger seat. No wonder things felt squelchy.

  Janis’s outfit tonight was “lead singer of Jewel Tonez,” a fi
ctional nineties all-girl R&B trio. She wore purple eyeshadow that matched her halter top, a pair of teal hip-huggers with a hidden zipper in the back, and a cropped satin magenta baseball jacket.

  I had put extra effort into my outfit tonight in an attempt to camouflage the fact that I really didn’t want to go, and my look was “Edie Sedgwick loves LeBron.” I had on thick black tights, black flats, and a minidress made from a Lakers jersey. I’d slicked my hair behind my ears to show off sparkly purple-and-gold waterfall earrings, rimmed my eyes with about a half inch of kohl, and topped it off with a black fake fur coat to keep me from freezing.

  “Nice,” Janis said as I climbed in. “Most people don’t know that Edie was actually from California.”

  “That’s because most people don’t care,” I said.

  “Most people are stupid.” Janis stepped on the gas and pulled away with a squeal.

  Bernie Goodman only lived about ten minutes from me, in the next neighborhood over, and I’d barely picked out the song I wanted to hear, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Halloween,” when we turned onto his street. We pulled up behind a long line of cars, and Janis nosed her way into a spot by knocking some trash cans out of the way. I popped open my door and could hear music coming from the house several buildings away. The gutter by my feet was littered with beer bottles, even though it was still early, and for every car that pulled away, two seemed to pull up.

  Bernie Goodman’s house was a split-level painted bright orange and gray. Like all red-blooded suburban families, the Goodmans had gone all out on the seasonal decorations, and said decorations were now being thoroughly pillaged. A headless dummy slumped on the porch swing, and a few feet away, a guy in a werewolf mask lay sprawled across the walkway. Nearby, two seniors kicked a plastic jack-o’-lantern back and forth like a soccer ball, and as we walked up, a freshman I recognized from gym class pushed past us to dry heave into the mums.

  It was as grim a social scene as I’d ever encountered, and I missed everything I’d left behind at home. I wondered what my nail polish collection was doing right now.

  The inside of the house was in the process of being defiled by teenagers. The carpet was beige, the drapes were floral, and there were footprints and purple stains trailing across the cream-colored couch. All flat surfaces were covered with half-empty bottles, cans, and every mixer imaginable. Bob Marley blasted from the speakers, signaling that this was still considered the pre-party. The official party would start when a shrieking group of girls stormed the stereo, demanding some of-the-moment incoherent pop song that would give them an excuse to dance like baby strippers and be the center of attention. The lights were on, fully illuminating everyone’s bloated cheeks and smeared makeup, and I could see shiny trails of spit stringing between the lips of a couple drunkenly making out in Bernie’s dad’s maroon La-Z-Boy.

  Who named their kid “Bernie,” anyway?

  A crowd had gathered around a Solo-cup-covered dining room table to watch a girl and two guys try to throw a tiny plastic ball into them. Upon catching sight of it, Janis practically squealed, “Beer pong! I love beer pong.”

  That was one of the last things I would have expected to come out of the mouth of an intersectional feminist. It was also something I had never heard her mention before. I grabbed her sleeve. “Janis! That’s for frat bros. How do you even know about beer pong?”

  “One of Dad’s students taught it to me when I was little,” she said. “He’d come over and babysit, and we’d play juice pong in the backyard. Come on. It’s fun.”

  She tried to pull me along with her, but when I resisted, she let go of my wrist and pushed her way up to the table. Before I could even blink someone had handed her a Ping-Pong ball and she’d sunk it, with a splash, right into one of the beer-filled cups. Suddenly the other people were yelling, and clamoring for Janis to be on their team. Someone handed her a cup of beer, and she took it.

  A guy I’d never seen before, with a red face and hair so blond it was almost white, reached across the table to give her a high five. Steven Marshall, who slept next to me in history, reached out to touch her hair, and when she whipped around and poured her beer down the front of his shirt, the crowd fell silent.

  Only for a second. Then they cheered again, even more loudly. Janis was the queen of beer pong.

  Watching her, I felt like she was on a ship sailing out to sea and I didn’t know how to swim. Sometimes I felt like this about Janis. Like if we lived someplace else, where she had more options, we probably wouldn’t be friends. Janis was cool. She had normal parents and could have fit in if she’d wanted to, and I was just lucky that she didn’t.

  She lined up to take another shot, and I could tell the second the ball left her hand that it wasn’t even going to be close. I held up my palm and made a little kinetic adjustment, so that the ball switched directions midair and landed, with a splash, right in the middle of a cup. The crowd cheered. Janis beamed, and I turned to go outside.

  I didn’t have to wander far before I saw Cassandra sitting in the corner, talking to Craig Lugweather, and I sincerely hoped she knew better than to let him anywhere near her “pearly gates.” She caught my eye, and I was relieved when all she did was smile and wave, instead of coming over. I didn’t want Janis wondering when Cassandra and I had gotten so cozy.

  I’d never kept a secret from Janis before. It wasn’t like I couldn’t tell her. It was more like I didn’t know what I’d tell her—“Hey, bestie, just FYI, I can move things with my mind.” Yeah, right.

  I felt like my brain was starting to look like one of those string conspiracy walls that you always see on crime shows when the detectives finally discover the shooter’s storage unit. All day, it had been jumping around, but instead of things beginning to make sense, they were just becoming more tangled and complicated.

  Cassandra and I had powers.

  Our mothers knew each other. Were probably even friends.

  This has something to do with babysitting. Maybe?

  From across the room, Janis caught my eye, and the look on her face told me I must have been scowling. I flashed her a smile and a thumbs-up, then motioned that I was going outside. I’d planned to just sit down on the porch for a while, but I kept walking, my feet carrying me down the path to the sidewalk, then down the street. Before I knew it, I’d passed Janis’s car and was more than a block away. In a little bit, about the time when she’d notice I was gone, I’d text her and say I’d gone home because I wasn’t feeling well. She knew enough about my stomach’s habits to take me at my word.

  It was still early enough that I could catch the city bus home. Thanks to my car-less lifestyle, the city’s bus maps and schedules were etched into my brain. One might even have said that I was a connoisseur of the bus, if one used words like “connoisseur” for a thing that had no air-conditioning or heat and often smelled like pee and Fritos.

  I was putting my earphones in when a familiar minivan pulled up beside me.

  Dion.

  It took him a minute to roll down the window, because it appeared to be stuck, and by the time he got it fully down, I was standing right there. Up close, I could hear that the car was making a low, rhythmic rattle.

  “You going to this party?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Just leaving, actually.”

  “That’s a bummer,” he said. “I was just going to meet my sister, because why stop going to high school parties just because you graduated, right?” He shrugged and held up his hands in a look of mock cluelessness, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Exactly. Don’t let a little diploma come between you and your love of bad music and people who can’t hold their liquor.”

  Dion smiled. “So, why are you leaving?”

  “Bad music and people who can’t hold their liquor?”

  “Get in,” he said. “If I can’t convince you to stay, at least
I can give you a ride home.”

  You could convince me to stay, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut as I opened the door and got in.

  I tried to ignore the beauty sitting beside me, and we drove in silence for a while until I finally broke it.

  “I feel bad about you missing the party,” I said.

  “Don’t. I didn’t really want to go. I just didn’t have any other options, and now I do.” He turned to look at me, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Honestly, I’m kind of jealous of Cass, that she’s making friends.”

  I wanted to scream “I’ll be your friend, Dion!” but I bit my tongue. Keep it casual, Esme, I told myself. And play it as cool as you possibly can.

  “So, what have you been up to?” I asked instead, and he responded with a sigh and a shrug.

  “Looking for jobs,” he said, “which is basically just like letting people use your self-confidence as a punching bag.”

  “What kind of jobs?” I asked, thinking that I couldn’t imagine anyone who looked like him ever feeling less than perfectly confident.

  “Right now, just construction.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, and meant it. “You know how to build stuff.” He smiled as he cranked the wheel in a way that clearly took some effort. No power steering, apparently.

  “Well, I’m learning. When I was little, I wanted to be an architect. I would draw buildings all day in my notebook.”

  “I did that,” I said, surprisingly myself that I had just said something without totally overexamining it in my head first.

  “You drew buildings?”

  “No, I drew outfits. I wanted to be a fashion designer. Still do, actually.” This was something that I’d only ever talked about with Janis, not even with Dad, but talking about it with Dion felt okay. Somehow, I just knew that he’d understand. “I mean, only if this whole babysitting thing dies out.”