Pig’s long pink tongue came out and licked her nose, and her big brown eyes stared at me. Then she said, “Hello.”
If I hadn’t been sitting on the floor, I would have fallen out of my seat.
It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t funny.
It was weird. And not the good kind of weird. Pig was an experienced lurker, but now she watched me more intensely than she ever had before.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
“Dog food,” I said.
“The brown stuff?”
“Yeah, the brown stuff.” Wow. This conversation was riveting.
“Ooooh, goodie. I love that stuff. I saw a squirrel today.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, not mentioning that I’d seen probably two dozen squirrels just since lunch. I didn’t want to one-up her.
“The squirrel ran fast. Fast, fast. But I would have caught it if I was outside.” I hadn’t expected Pig to be Simone de Beauvoir or anything, but I had expected a little more than squirrel talk. I tried to think of what else she would want to talk about.
“Piggy, do you want to go on a walk later?”
“Oh my gooooooshhh, a waaaalk. We’re gonna go on a waaaaalk? You’re kidding? A walk! We’re gonna go on a walk. I’m the luckiest girl, I’m the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.” She paused to chew on an itch. “I’m the hungriest girl. What’s for dinner?”
“You had dinner. It was dog food.”
“Yum. I loooooooove dog food.” Pig’s voice wasn’t male or female. It was low and scratchy, like she’d been smoking two packs a day for thirty years. I guess eating rocks and sticks wasn’t the best for the vocal cords.
She looked around my room, her nostrils twitching. “You have any dirty underwear around here?” she asked. “I love dirty underwear, and I haven’t eaten any in months.”
“You ate a pair just last week,” I corrected her.
She cocked her head to one side as if she was thinking hard. She made the hissing noise again, and my eyes started to water with the fumes.
“Pig,” I said, trying not to breathe. “You have to do something about that.”
“About what?”
“About the gas.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She lay down on the floor with a huff, and I found myself worried that I’d offended my farty dog. I reached over and scratched her ears. Pig was nothing if not sweetness and light—pure love—and I suddenly felt tears pricking my eyes.
“Piggy, would Mom have been able to tell us what’s going on?”
She gave me a long look, then raised an ear like she was listening for a rabbit a hundred yards off. I know it was nuts to think my dog could tell me the truth, but after that day in the hospital, I would bet my babysitting money that Pig knew something about Mom that the rest of us didn’t.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
I sighed. “I told you. Dog food.”
“Have I had that before?”
I sighed. Pit bulls were known as the nanny dog, but now that I’d had extra insight into the inner workings of her dog brain, I shuddered to think what would happen if Pig were ever left in charge of a bunch of kids: “Uncooked hot dogs for dinner. Then everyone drinks out of that old bucket under the porch!”
I held out my hand and stopped the spell the way I’d seen Cassandra do earlier. I didn’t relax until Pig looked at me and barked. Then I took her on a quick walk around the block and fed her dinner number two. She ate it like it was the most gourmet meal she’d ever had in her short little life.
My eyes popped open at five a.m., a full hour before my alarm was set to go off and a full two hours before I usually got out of bed. It was that kind of awake where I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I did the unthinkable: I got up early. Before I knew it, I was dressed, as “Wino forever,” in a leather jacket, a Tom Waits shirt I made myself, and mom jeans. I took a look in the mirror, scribbled a note for Dad, then left the house, quietly locking the door behind me.
When I stepped off the city bus at school, it was barely six a.m. There were a few lights on inside the building and a few cars scattered in the parking lot, but everything looked pretty quiet. I knew that some teams of overachievers, like the swimmers and the cheerleaders, were insane enough to squeeze in a practice before school, so the building would be open, if mostly empty.
I walked down the hall as if my feet were moving of their own accord, straight to the school office. I tried the door, just in case, but it didn’t budge. I looked up and down the hallway to make sure no one was watching, and then I held my hand out and concentrated until I heard the lock slide out of place. When I tried the door again, it opened and I ducked inside and locked it behind me.
The school office was filled with posters meant to inspire you and posters meant to scare you—there was a permeable line between the two—and it had always reminded me of a cross between a waiting room for infectious disease treatment and the visitors’ holding pen at a juvenile detention facility. There were several smaller offices off the main one, and I walked straight to the one I wanted—the one for Mr. Loompah, the unfortunately named guidance counselor in charge of schedules. It was barely bigger than a broom closet, and when students sat down across from him to try to plead their way out of Algebra II, their knees touched the front of his desk.
Mr. Loompah had made it easy for me. He hadn’t locked his door or turned off his computer, so when I sat down in his chair, after taking my backpack off and setting it on the floor, I was greeted by a slideshow of snapshots of all the little Loompahs. It looked like there were a lot. I moved the mouse, and the slideshow vanished, revealing a wallpaper of an obese wiener dog. I had half hoped that there would be a folder on his desktop that just said “student schedules,” but I knew that even Mr. Loompah wouldn’t have it set up to be that easy, so I sat and thought about where to start. Janis would have known immediately how to get onto the school servers, but I could just imagine how that phone call would go if I called her now. Janis sitting up in bed in her pajamas, her hair still wrapped, screeching into the phone, “You broke into the counselor’s office before sunrise to do what? Have you lost your freaking mind?” I was on my own with this one.
At the bottom of the screen was an Internet Explorer icon, and I clicked on it. After what seemed like ages, and an actual, physical whirring sound coming out of the computer, the browser opened to the school’s home page, which was still advertising the date for the previous year’s graduation. What if cyberkinesis only worked on servers that had been built within the last ten years? This one seemed like it probably dated back to the eighties. But I’d come this far, so I had to try.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out the spell ingredients I’d brought with me: a receipt from RadioShack (thank you, Dad, for never throwing receipts away), a pack of Tic Tac Freshmints, a quartz crystal, and a number two lead pencil. I lined them up in front of the monitor, then held out my hand. I was going to either do what I came to do or crash the entire school district’s system. Here goes nothing, I thought.
Almost immediately lines of type began to fill the screen, and page after page of student information appeared. Finally, though I almost couldn’t believe it, the program stopped…at my name. Underneath my name was my entire school record, every class I’d taken and every grade I’d gotten since entering high school. I tabbed down to my freshman year and highlighted where it said “Band.” In its place, I typed “Physical Education,” and in the field for grade, I gave myself a C minus. I wanted this to be realistic.
Then I scrolled back to junior year, deleted gym, and replaced it with a study period. Then I deleted driver’s ed and thought for a second. What else could I do to kill a class period with minimal effort? I finally settled on photography, which was taught by the wrestling coach, and Ansel Adams he was not. All I’d have to do to
get an A would be to take some arty shots of the water fountain and lots of photos of my feet.
I hit save, gathered up all my spell objects and carefully put them back into my bag, and then got the hell out of there. Not just out of the office but off campus entirely. The last thing I wanted to do today was look suspicious, so I had to roll up to school at 7:55, at the earliest, just like I always did.
* * *
—
Today Janis was “Bauhaus janitor,” wearing acid-washed-denim coveralls with a Mondrian head wrap, one red and one blue sock, and Swedish clogs.
“Were you not just Lydia Deetz, like, two days ago?” Janis asked, picking up on my scheme immediately.
“Whatever, you Lisa Bonet freak,” I said as we went through the lunch line. “It’s Wino forever because there is never enough Winona.”
Janis grabbed a bottle of water and shook her head, then launched into a griping session about her upcoming evening. She was scheduled to babysit for Andrew Reynolds, who was a holy terror if there ever was one.
“Last time, he pulled out one of my extensions and threw it over the fence!” she said. “The neighbor’s dog buried it!”
I sighed, then took a bowl of something that looked okay and put it on my tray. “You can handle Andrew, Janis. You’ve done it before.”
“You know that’s gravy, right?” Janis asked. “And you don’t have anything to put it on.”
“Oh,” I said, putting the bowl back. “I thought it was veggie curry. Would it kill this school to serve food that was green for once? Or even just white? I’m sick of brown.”
“I’m sick of babysitting,” Janis said, paying for her corn dog. “I just want to clock in and clock out, and not have to worry about whether or not a kid’s going to get hurt. Or ruin my hair. I mean, aren’t you sick of it?”
I thought for a second. “No,” I said honestly. “Not at all. I like it. I like kids, because they’re funny, and they have a cool way of seeing the world. They’re innocent and imaginative. They’re not all beaten down like adults. Besides, babysitting’s an important job. I mean, somebody’s got to watch the kids.”
“Yeah,” Janis said as I followed her to our regular table, “but that somebody doesn’t have to be me.”
* * *
—
After lunch, I headed to the library to spend my newly acquired study period catching up on all the chemistry memorization I’d been avoiding for the past six weeks. It really was more boring than trying to explain Snapchat to my dad for the seventy-fifth time. I found an empty table in the reference section, which was the quietest part, since the only reference section anyone ever seemed to use for writing reports was Wikipedia.
I had my books and papers spread out in front of me when I heard a strange sound coming my way. It was a swish-swish sound, and it was drawing closer and closer. I looked up, and tried to keep my eyebrows from knitting into a frown. I should have recognized that nylon-on-nylon whisper anywhere.
“Hey, Brian,” I said to the large man suddenly towering over me. “Whoops, I mean Coach Davis. What’s up?” I swallowed. It was just my luck to run into Coach Davis on the same day that I’d abracadabra’d myself out of gym, but I told myself I had no real reason to be scared. There were three thousand kids in the school—Brian didn’t get an email every time one of them dropped gym.
When I first got to high school, I lived in fear that Brian would try to be all buddy-buddy with me there, but he seemed to get that I wasn’t the kind of student who would want to flaunt football-coach privileges. He kept a pretty good distance. We’d smile and nod when we passed each other in the hallways, but until I had gym I rarely saw him outside of that. It was weird now to be seeing him in the library, of all places….
And then I realized.
He didn’t just happen to be in the library.
He was there for me.
I rearranged my expression to look as innocent as a kitten. Brian smiled down at me, and from this angle, he had a bit of a double chin, and I could see gray whiskers dotting his mustache. He looked, actually, a bit more haggard than he had the last time I’d seen him.
“Hi, Esme,” he said, smiling a smile that looked more like a grimace. “I saw that you dropped gym class from your schedule.”
Crap. Was this really happening? Didn’t he have anything better to do?
But I just nodded and tried to keep that I’ve-done-nothing-wrong look in my eyes, while wondering if he had also noticed that my records now looked like I’d suffered through gym freshman year with everyone else. “I needed an extra study period,” I said as lightly as I could. “I have to start thinking about college.”
He looked like he was about to say something, but after a few seconds of silence, I added, “I’m going to make up for it in summer school.” I was talking out of my butt basically, since I had no idea if gym was even offered in the summer.
He nodded again. “If you were having problems with PE, I wish you had come and spoken with me before you made any big decisions. We could have worked out an independent study.”
Why did he care so much about me taking PE? It wasn’t like a few times around the track was going to flip some switch in my brain and turn me into an athlete. Plus, it made me shudder to think what he meant by “independent study.” Doing tai chi in the corner by myself? Or some other form of social suicide, like golf?
“It’s okay. Really,” I said. “And I’m looking forward to it. In the summer, I won’t have any other classes, so I can really focus on my, uh, physical development and uh, playing sports…and I won’t have to worry about showering after. I can just walk around all sweaty, and no one will notice.” Brian almost always acknowledged my jokes, at least with an eye roll, but now his face stayed serious. He looked like he was about ready to walk away, but then he paused.
“How is the babysitting going, by the way?” he asked.
I surprised myself by answering honestly. “Ah, it’s okay. I think Janis wants to quit the club, and there’s a new girl who wants to join, but I think she’s a pretty crap babysitter, so…” I caught myself before I went any further. Why was I being so honest? I was so used to trotting out the rote answers that adults wanted to hear, but Brian had totally caught me off guard. Since when did he care about my babysitting?
I gave him a quizzical look. “Why do you ask?”
He toyed with the plastic whistle that hung on a cord around his neck. “Just interested, that’s all,” he said. “Babysitting’s a big job. A young woman, in charge of so many lives…”
“Well, when you put it that way…” I smiled at him, forgetting that Brian didn’t have a sarcasm meter. “I know,” I said, switching back to serious, “but I’m up for it.”
Teachers were usually so bad at camouflaging their feelings that you could read them from across the street, but Brian was different. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all. “I know you are,” he said, “You’re very capable.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering where this conversation was going, but then he just turned and walked away, leaving me completely confused.
Had Brian and I just had the thing I’d been trying so hard to avoid, a heart-to-heart? It was baffling. He didn’t even seem that mad about gym.
* * *
—
Photography was as much a joke as I had expected it to be. Half the class just used their phones to complete their assignments, since Mr. Briggs couldn’t tell the difference between overexposure and a filter. In Earth Sciences, we were still on geology, so the whole room smelled like baking soda and vinegar since that week’s lesson was volcanoes. When the final bell rang, I was more ready than usual for the day to be over. I was speed walking toward the bus after school when I heard someone yelling my name. A guy yelling my name. I turned, and saw his car first. It was hard to miss the car, even in a sea of clunkers like the Spring
River High parking lot. But then I saw Dion, leaning against it, his arms crossed over his chest, one hand up waving at me. I had to resist the urge to do the movie thing—exaggeratedly looking over my shoulders, then pointing at myself and mouthing “Me?” Of course he was talking to me. I was the only Esme at school, probably the only Esme in town. Still, it seemed unreal that my name could come out of the mouth of someone who looked like that.
I walked toward him, trying to instill each step with nonchalance. I wanted to say something like “What’s up” or “Hey, what are you doing here?” But what came out was “Hey, what are you doing up?”
He smiled. “Just can’t sleep that late anymore,” he said, and I could feel myself blushing.
“Are you looking for Cassandra?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly, and smiled. “I was looking for you. Where you headed?” I tried to keep my eyebrows from skyrocketing up my forehead in shock. It was really nice of Dion to give me a ride home on Friday, but I’d assumed that was it. A ride home. But now he was here, looking for me? I must have fallen through a hole in the universe, and this was the Twilight Zone, an alternate dimension where I was someone a hot guy sought out.
“Home,” I said finally. “I was just on my way to catch the bus.” Behind me, the bus ground into gear and pulled away. I corrected myself. “I was gonna walk.”
“Come on. Let’s go do something fun,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day, and I just got a job, so I need to do something to celebrate.”
I smiled, hoping it hid my confusion. Was I really the only person he knew, aside from his sister? That was the only possible explanation for it—for why he was here, asking me to hang out. He must not have had any other options. I glanced around behind me. Where was Cassandra, anyway? I had a million questions, but I also had a hot guy who was standing in front of me, waiting.
The Babysitters Coven Page 13
