A Mixture of Mischief

by Anna Meriano

  “You can hear me?” Leo asked.

  “The whole library can hear you,” the librarian chided. “Please keep it down. If I catch you at it again, I’ll have to let your parents know.”

  Leo probably should have pretended to be worried about the threat, but all she could do was grin. The librarian could see her! “Yes, ma’am,” Leo whispered. Then she took off toward the board-game table.

  “No running,” the librarian sighed behind her, but Leo was in too much of a hurry to listen.

  CHAPTER 11

  REVELATION

  “Leo, there you are!” JP was the first to spot her. “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It got really busy at the bakery. I’m actually coming to get you because we’re going to head home soon.”

  “You didn’t miss too much,” Brent informed her. “Except that the Queen of Catan finally lost a game.”

  “I was trying to be nice,” Caroline grumbled. “It was JP’s first time playing, so I was being generous with swapping materials and giving him advice, and then he totally betrayed me!”

  “It’s not betrayal to keep your victory points hidden until the end,” Brent said. “That’s your usual strategy.”

  “I really like this!” JP said. “It’s all mind games, and you have to think strategically. If you play a certain way one round, you have to switch it up the next, or you’re going to get beat.”

  Leo looked at the game board. Whatever was happening with Abuelo Logroño was a type of mind game, which meant she had to start thinking strategically. She had to figure out Abuelo’s plan—and how to stop it—without letting him know she was on to him. She knew he wasn’t working alone now, thanks to his mention of accomplices, so maybe she could start her investigation there.

  “Leo?” Caroline asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “Her brain is still at the bakery,” Brent said. “As usual.”

  She gave Caroline a look. If she planned to do any kind of strategic planning to outsmart her abuelo, she needed to consult the Queen of Catan.

  Caroline, always an excellent accomplice, picked up on her hint. “If we’re heading out, Leo, do you want to help me return this to the circulation desk?”

  “Are you sure we don’t have time for one more game?” JP asked. “Or are you afraid of how badly we’d beat you with a Logroño cousin alliance?”

  The way he smirked and used their family name sounded too much like Abuelo Logroño, and Leo found herself snapping, “Who says I’d be teaming up with you?”

  While Brent oohed into his fist, Leo grabbed the packed-up game box from Caroline’s hands and flounced away, leaving the boys to a playful shoving match.

  “What’s up?” Caroline asked when they were out of earshot.

  “A lot.” Leo sighed. “My grandpa is even worse than we thought, and he has a plan to destroy the bakery and our whole line of family magic. And I think he stole our bolillo mixing bowl!”

  Caroline’s eyebrows arched. “Can he do that?”

  “Destroy our magic? I don’t know. But my parents are really worried about competition from this new bakery, and I think he might be behind that too. And maybe also something with our new landlord?” There were so many problems and possibilities that she needed to investigate. “And that’s not even the biggest thing I needed to tell you!”

  She was about to explain to her best friend how she had discovered her power of invisibility, and what it might mean, when JP’s voice came from somewhere close behind them.

  “Did they get lost? Do you think Leo’s avoiding me?”

  “I’m sure she isn’t,” Brent answered. “How could anyone want to—I mean, why would she avoid you?”

  “Uh-oh, incoming.” Caroline pulled Leo toward the front desk. “Tell me quickly?”

  Leo’s tongue tangled around the news. She didn’t want to reveal her new power here, in line at the library circulation desk. She wanted to have time to tell the story, and she wanted Caroline to have time to listen. “Can we talk tomorrow?” she asked. “Come by the bakery early so we can plan?”

  “Sure,” Caroline said. “I love plans. Um . . . will JP be there?”

  Leo sighed. “You aren’t going to ask me to make another love potion, are you?”

  Caroline flushed. “I never asked you to do the first . . . I’m not even . . . Brent is the one who won’t shut up about how cool JP is, and his muscles!”

  Leo scrunched her face and stuck out her tongue. “He doesn’t have muscles; he’s my cousin.”

  “Well, Brent is way more obvious,” Caroline muttered, twirling her butterfly ring.

  “I’m way more what?”

  Brent and JP caught up just in time to see Caroline’s face turn an even darker shade of red.

  “More obnoxious,” Leo said.

  “Ouch. Leo’s cranky today,” JP teased back, and the four of them joked their way to the circulation desk and then out of the library.

  At the bike rack outside, Caroline and Brent buckled their helmets and gripped their handlebars.

  “See you tomorrow?” Leo asked Caroline.

  Brent broke out into an immediate grin. “Are we doing this again tomorrow? Awesome. It gets boring being off school for the whole week. We should keep hanging out.”

  “Um, sure,” Leo said. Maybe Brent coming along would be good, if he could distract JP.

  Caroline and Brent waved and pedaled away toward their neighborhood, leaving Leo and JP to walk the few blocks back to the bakery.

  “You know,” JP said as they went, “it’s okay if you were trying to get rid of me today. I know you and Marisol were busy this morning and I wasn’t helping very much. It’s cool to see how the bakery works and everything, but I checked out a couple of comics on Caroline’s library card, so I can definitely make myself more scarce from now on. I’m not trying to annoy you.”

  Now Leo felt guilty. “No, I’m sorry we were so busy,” she said. “That’s not usually how things are. We’re sort of stressed right now.”

  “The pest problem?” JP asked. “And the new bakery?”

  Leo nodded. They approached Amor y Azúcar, and she could see that the front-door sign had been flipped to CLOSED. Through the window, the empty shelves gaped at them, like a bad omen.

  JP zipped and unzipped the main pocket of his fanny pack. “Yeah. Before my mom got tenure at her college, there were a few times when she didn’t know what was going to happen with her department. We had to move when she lost her job in Houston. It’s not fun.”

  Leo nodded. “I’m sorry I said I wouldn’t be part of your Catan alliance. I was mad at . . . other things, not at you.”

  JP smiled. “Thanks. I was afraid for a second that maybe you didn’t really want me to stay here for the whole week.”

  “I was afraid you didn’t want to stay here with Alma and Belén gone,” Leo admitted. “But Brent was right. It gets totally boring around here on breaks.”

  “You should come stay in Austin sometime,” JP said. “Even if none of our bakeries can compete.”

  Leo grinned, then sighed. Thinking of competing bakeries made her think of Honeybees, which made a heavy lump reappear in her stomach. She had to find a way to stop Abuelo, but she didn’t know where to start, and she didn’t want to keep making JP feel bad by not spending time with him. The more she thought about all the secrets, the colder and heavier she felt, like she was being swallowed by a cloud of foggy bad feeling.

  “Whoa,” JP said.

  “What?” Leo pulled her gaze up from the sidewalk.

  “You didn’t . . . There was something weird with the light. It looked all wavy, like you were . . . Never mind.” He shook his head. “I must have imagined it.”

  Leo shrugged, knocking on the locked bakery door.

  “Welcome back,” Daddy said as he opened it. “Hope you had a good time at the library. Leo, your mamá wanted to talk to you.”

  “Did she find the bowl?” Leo asked hopefully.

>   Daddy shook his head. “Not yet, but you know what they say: the dough must go on!” Daddy’s goofy grin and JP’s loud chuckle helped pop the bubble of worry around Leo’s head.

  “Mamá?” she said, running into the kitchen.

  “Back here.”

  Leo followed the voice to the office, where Mamá sat in front of two lit candles and two mugs of tea. Leo sniffed the air. Chamomile.

  “Sit down,” Mamá said. “I didn’t really get to talk to you about . . . everything. How are you handling it all?”

  Leo breathed the calming smell of candle smoke and steam and smiled. Finally she and Mamá could share their secrets and work on tackling the problem together. “Well, I talked to Abuelo Logroño again, and I learned a lot—”

  “You what?” Mamá spilled tea on her apron and yelped. “Why did you talk to him? Leo, how did he find you? The ward we set up should keep him from being able to locate you. If it’s not working, we need to know.”

  “No, Mamá—I called him,” Leo said. “And I think the ward did work, because it took him a lot longer to answer this time.”

  “You called him?” If Mamá hadn’t set down her tea she might have spilled it again. “’Jita, what were you thinking? He’s dangerous!”

  “I know, Mamá!” Leo said, exasperated. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. “Listen. I got information from him. He wants me to train with him really badly, and I think he’s messing with the bakery as a way to pressure me into it. And he’s not working alone. But I think we can fight back.”

  “Leo.” Mamá rubbed her hands over her face. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with Álvaro, and I certainly don’t want you fighting him. Please, leave this to me. You are absolutely not to contact him again.”

  “I wasn’t going to! I’m strategizing.”

  “Stop strategizing,” Mamá ordered. “None of this is your concern. We put wards up against your grandfather, and as long as no one goes calling him again, they will hold. That’s the end of it.”

  “But Mamá—”

  “But nothing. Drink your manzanilla.”

  “To cleanse me from bad magic, right?” Leo snapped. “You’re worried too, I know you are. And what about Honeybees? A bakery just happens to be opening that just happens to have our same menu?”

  Mamá looked up sharply. “Who told you that?”

  Leo swallowed. She had been about to bring up the rent as well, but remembered that she wasn’t supposed to have overheard Mamá and Daddy before. “Nobody, I . . . we looked it up on Caroline’s phone. Mamá, what if that’s part of Abuelo’s plan? Or what if there are other threats to the business? Shouldn’t we be able to use magic to stop all of that?”

  “Leonora Elena!” Her mother’s voice was sharp. “If that’s what you think magic is for, then you haven’t learned the most important thing I’ve been trying to teach you. Our magic is love. We are not going to attack another business out of fear.”

  Leo hung her head. It wasn’t as if Mamá had ever exactly told Leo that she shouldn’t use magic to hurt others, but that was because she’d never had to. Leo knew that the way she knew she shouldn’t punch other people when she got angry. But . . . “What if they’re using magic against us?”

  “I’ve known Belinda O’Rourke since I was younger than you are now,” Mamá said. “Her grandmother babysat me. We ran against each other for class president, were always competing for class rank. . . . She’s not my favorite person in the world, but she’s not evil, she’s certainly not a spell caster, and I can’t see any possible way she could be working with your abuelo.”

  “But shouldn’t we at least investigate? What if—”

  “Drop it, Leo. You are not attacking Honeybees with magic. You are not attacking anyone with magic. You are not worrying about any of this, because the only thing you need to know is that I’m handling it.” She turned back to her tea, let out a long sigh, then pulled an extra sugar packet out of the air to add to the mug. Leo lifted her tea and burned her tongue, frustrated tears threatening to spill. She knew Mamá and Daddy were worried. She knew they suspected that Abuelo Logroño was plotting from the shadows. Why wouldn’t they tell her? More secrets, more lies.

  Well, if Mamá wasn’t going to do anything, then Leo would. She just didn’t know what.

  “Are you kids getting hungry?” Daddy asked when she stomped back into the front of the store. “I was going to head home and start dinner while Elena finishes here.”

  “Definitely!” JP said.

  There was a huge steaming pot that smelled like chamomile in the kitchen. Mamá was probably going to scrub the whole bakery. But Leo wasn’t supposed to know or care anything about that. “Fine,” she said. She followed her cousin into Daddy’s truck.

  “I hope you’re ready to learn the legendary Logroño family quesadilla recipe,” Daddy said to JP as the truck rattled away from downtown Rose Hill. “There aren’t many people I would trust with my most valuable cooking secrets.”

  Leo rolled her eyes from the back seat. “It’s not very secret,” she said. “It’s just cheese. Plus all the, you know, salsa and crema and pico de gallo and everything you put on at the end.”

  “Spoken like someone who doesn’t know the legendary Logroño family recipe,” Daddy said. “Passed down for . . . well, not passed down for any generations, really.”

  Leo paused thinking about that. “Grandma Logroño didn’t teach you to make quesadillas?”

  “Oh, she might have.” Daddy shrugged. “Okay, so passed down for one generation maybe.”

  “But”—Leo felt annoyance itching the back of her throat—“didn’t she learn to make quesadillas from somewhere? Maybe from her mom?”

  “If so, I never heard anything about it. Who’s to say?”

  “It wouldn’t be a Logroño family recipe, though,” JP pointed out.

  “Good point.” Daddy nodded. “The legendary Logroño-Hernandez-Mayo . . . hmm, this is getting a little too complicated. Better forget the whole thing.”

  A sense of unfairness pinched Leo’s chest. Why did names work this way in the first place, making it easy to name a whole family of men but impossible to name things passed down by women? She wondered if this was the feeling that made her five-times-great-grandmother start her own family line of magical brujas.

  A red light stopped the truck in the shadow of a tall oleander bush, the white flowers blooming against the reflection of Leo’s fuming face in the window. As her thoughts kept twisting into gloomy knots, the image on the window flickered and shimmered. But just as quickly, the flicker was gone, and it was only her reflected face again among the oleander blossoms.

  She thought about the danger the bakery was in, the danger of Abuelo Logroño’s plot. Her stomach grew heavy and goose bumps pricked her arms as she focused on her sadness. And—there!—her reflection flickered away once more in a shimmer of shadow, leaving a split second of plain white flowers.

  Leo laughed in surprise, and her face reappeared. She stared at her wide eyes, heart pounding. Sadness, frustration, heavy feelings that weighed her down . . . they seemed tied to her powers. Could it really be that easy?

  “What do you think of your cousin’s idea, Leonora?” Daddy looked in the rearview mirror with a grimace. “I’m not sure how it would taste to cook whole tomato slices into the quesadilla. It sounds more like a grilled cheese.”

  “Trust me,” JP said, “it’s good. I can show you.”

  “I guess there’s no harm in trying something new,” Daddy said. “Maybe your way will become a legendary Logroño family recipe, passed down for generations.”

  Leo’s tiny sigh caused another ripple on the window. She was still scared, but also, just maybe, the tiniest bit excited. She had a clue how to control her birth-order power, and she hadn’t needed Abuelo Logroño’s help to figure it out. That was something no one had expected. It was like a hidden card in Catan, a power she could use to her advantage, a shadowy secret Ma
má didn’t even know about.

  She just needed to get better at it. Abuelo Logroño and anyone he was working with wouldn’t know what hit them.

  CHAPTER 12

  PRACTICE AND PLOTS

  Mamá told Leo she didn’t need to help open the bakery early with her and Isabel and Marisol the next morning, but Leo didn’t sleep in. As soon as the car pulled out of the driveway, Leo was up and practicing in front of the mirror.

  For the first fifteen minutes she was so nervous that she couldn’t manage to make so much as a pinkie go blurry. But after a half hour, she started to be able to tap that heavy, sad, frightened feeling in the pit of her stomach, the one that made the air around her grow cold and shimmery. And by the time Daddy knocked to see if she wanted breakfast, Leo could—with enough concentration—make her reflection shimmer and blink out of sight for about two seconds at a time.

  It wasn’t exactly power beyond her wildest dreams, but it was a start.

  With the excuse of wanting to check the library hours, Leo borrowed JP’s phone during breakfast and googled Honeybees Café as a starting place for her investigation. The website was everything Leo had already overheard, plus an irritating pale green and neon yellow color scheme. More interesting was an article on the Rose Hill Chronicle’s site: an interview with Belinda O’Rourke, the West Coast entrepreneur returning home to Texas at last.

  Leo stared at the pale and brightly made-up face of the Honeybees owner. Was it just Leo’s imagination, or did the wide smile and light brown curls feel like they hid something sinister? Leo scrolled down to the middle of the interview.

  Rose Hill Chronicle: Why did you want to open up Honeybees here in Rose Hill?

  Belinda O’Rourke: I came up with the idea for this café years ago, but it seemed like it would be impossible to get off the ground, so I never pursued it. And in the meantime, I was busy raising my daughter, trying to give her the life I always thought I wanted. But eventually I missed my roots, and I wanted Becky to have a connection to my hometown. It wasn’t until after I decided to move back that I started thinking about all the possibilities the move would open up for me, and that’s when I remembered my old dream of opening a café.