by Anna Meriano
But the office didn’t offer many promising hiding spots. The bookshelves were still mostly empty, the desk made with thin bars of metal, modern and drawerless. Besides a laptop to match her phone and tablet, Mrs. O’Rourke didn’t seem to need much equipment or storage space in her office. Leo half wanted to check all the shelves for hidden doors, but it seemed impractical to do it while Mrs. O’Rourke was sitting at her desk. Besides, the family had been in the house for only a week, hardly long enough for elaborate secret-door construction projects.
Leo checked the two bedrooms upstairs as quickly as she could without sacrificing thoroughness. She still felt a tiny bit bad poking her head into the corners of Becky’s closet or checking under Mrs. O’Rourke’s bathroom sink, but she pushed aside those feelings and focused instead on Mrs. O’Rourke’s undeniable guilt. It wasn’t nice to spy, but Leo would do anything to protect her family.
She was holding Becky’s doorknob to keep it from clicking closed when she heard Caroline’s voice, overly loud and echoing up from the first floor.
“Thanks so much for the tea. We should get going. Tell your mom thanks for having us. In fact, maybe I should go up and tell her myself that we’re leaving.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Becky said. Leo bit her lip. This would definitely be her best chance to leave the house without getting caught, and she knew Caroline was trying to send her a message. She didn’t want to worry her friends by not showing up. But she hated to leave empty-handed. She was sure the O’Rourkes had the mixing bowl somewhere. She just needed more time to search!
“Well, I really hope to see you soon.” Caroline projected in her best reading-in-front-of-the-class voice. “We should catch up.”
Leo tugged at the pouch around her neck. She wanted to stay, but she couldn’t abandon her accomplices.
She scrambled downstairs in time for another round of goodbyes. Leo thought that Caroline was going a bit overboard pretending to want Becky to call her up over the summer. But finally the front door opened, and Leo only had to shove JP out of the way a little bit so she could slip out.
The late-afternoon sun was bright, and Leo missed the feeling of its warmth on her face. This whole street was lined with tall oak trees that made a majestic line in the yards but, at this time of year, also covered the sidewalk in thick mats of orange-brown pollen.
“Okay.” Caroline let out a big sigh when they reached the end of the block. “That went well, I think. Leo, you’re here, right?”
As an answer, Leo kicked a pile of catkins, the dried pollen clusters exploding in a puff of dust. Brent covered his face, grumbling about allergies.
“Sorry,” Leo said out loud, but of course no one could hear her. Instead she tried patting Brent’s shoulder, but that just made him yelp and jump.
“How long until your powder wears off?” JP asked. “Or, wait, you can’t answer that question. Shoot.”
Leo stomped her foot, wishing for a birth-order power she could actually control. But the puff of pollen her foot kicked up gave her an idea. With a handful of catkins in each hand, she wiped clean a square of sidewalk with her foot. Then she sprinkled the catkins carefully to make a figure in the space.
“Is that a snake?” Brent asked.
“No, it’s an S,” Caroline said. “She’s spelling something.”
“I think it’s supposed to be a five,” JP guessed. “I did ask about how much time was left. I’m hoping that’s minutes and not hours.”
Leo tapped his shoulder excitedly.
“But we can speed it up, right?” Caroline asked. “We just have to make her laugh.”
“Knock, knock,” JP said with a wry smile.
“Who’s there?” Brent replied immediately.
“Oh, um, I didn’t actually have a knock-knock joke.” JP tugged his fanny-pack zipper. “I just meant we should . . .”
“I have a great one,” Caroline said, a glint in her eyes. “You start.”
“Knock, knock,” Brent said, smiling and helpful.
“Who’s there?”
The pause stretched long as Caroline grinned expectantly at a totally confused and flustered Brent. “Hey, wait a second, that doesn’t work!”
Leo giggled at the prank, but the laughter didn’t reach her belly.
“Sorry, I tried.” Caroline shrugged.
“It was a good joke,” JP said.
“It’s probably for the best,” Brent muttered. “We don’t want someone to look out their window and see Leo appear out of nowhere.”
“Good point,” said JP. “Let’s walk while we wait.”
Leo trailed along with her friends and her cousin, trying to think of something funny enough to break her spell despite Brent’s worry. Everyone walked in silence, which just made her feel tense and curious. Had her friends gathered any clues? Did their silence mean they hadn’t learned anything? Nothing seemed very funny when she was stuck with a million questions and no way to answer them.
They reached Caroline and Brent’s street just as Leo started to feel the warm pricks on her arms that meant the invisibility powder was wearing off. She rushed up to Caroline’s porch so she would be slightly hidden as she appeared.
“There you are.” Caroline smiled. “It’s no fun not to be able to see you.”
“Yeah, it’s a little creepy,” Brent added. “You got the creepiest power.”
Leo glared at him until he dropped his eyes.
“Uh, I mean, it’s probably useful, though. Did you find your bowl?”
“She obviously doesn’t have the bowl with her, Brent.” Caroline sighed. “She probably didn’t find anything.”
“But it would have been hard to carry it out the door without getting caught,” JP argued. “Maybe she found it and now we have to plan a recovery mission.”
“I can talk for myself now,” Leo reminded them, “And no, I didn’t find it. I was hoping maybe y’all had gotten some clues from Becky?”
“Oh.” Caroline’s eyes darted around the porch. “No. We were just talking about, you know, life and stuff.”
“She didn’t say anything about the move?” Leo asked. “She didn’t mention, I don’t know, a kind old stranger who gave her mom the idea to move?”
“Pretty much the opposite,” JP said. “Her mom’s been wanting to open Honeybees for a long time.”
“Yeah, it seemed pretty normal,” Brent said. “Nothing suspicious about it.”
“I’m sorry, Leo.” Caroline was staring at the floor now, twisting her ring around her finger. “I know you really thought they were the accomplices, but after talking to Becky . . . I think your mom might be right. It sounds like it’s just normal nonmagical bad luck.”
Leo felt like borrowing a page from Bumble’s book and growling at her friend. “No way,” she said. “Becky is lying. She has to be.”
“I don’t know why she would lie,” Brent said.
“Because she obviously wouldn’t admit that her family is only here to ruin my family’s life,” Leo snapped. “But we know that they are.”
“It was a hunch,” Caroline said with an infuriatingly sympathetic smile. “A reasonable hunch, but if you didn’t find any proof . . .”
“I did find this in a drawer,” Brent said, pulling a crumpled paper out of his pocket. “I pretended to be looking for spoons. Clever, right?”
Leo snatched the paper from his hands. “What is it?” She smoothed the corners of the faded print image.
“An old Honeybees logo,” Brent said “There’s a date up in the corner. Five years ago. So Becky wasn’t lying about that.”
“Well, she’s lying about something,” Leo said. “Because I heard Mrs. O’Rourke say that she was really just here in town because of Abuelo Logroño!”
“You heard that?” JP asked. “She said those words exactly?”
“I . . . basically!” Leo frowned. “She talked about being here because of him. What else could that mean?”
“Just off the top of my head?” Ca
roline asked, rolling her eyes. “Could be a travel agent. Or a family member. Or someone she has a crush on. That’s not exactly hard evidence.” She sighed, easing the hardness out of her voice. “Becky . . . she’s going through a hard time with the move, and she didn’t even want to come here, and she misses her friends. If there was anything bad to say about Honeybees, she would have said it, but she didn’t. I know it’s hard for you to hear, but . . .”
Leo thought for a moment that her invisibility was simply wearing off, but the warmth spreading through her was just anger, not magic. “You think she’s nice?” She spat the word at Caroline. “So, what, you’re on her side after one conversation?”
“That’s not what I’m . . . I’m not on anyone’s side. I just—” Caroline looked to Brent for help. He traced the lines of the front porch with his toe but shifted his body, just a little, so that he stood with Caroline, the two of them facing Leo.
“Maybe you should talk to Becky,” he said. “She was cool.”
Leo looked at her friends. Together, they had fought messed-up spells, hunted spirits, plotted and planned, and played Catan. They had been through too much to not be on anyone’s side. They were Leo’s friends. They were supposed to be on Leo’s side.
“You think Becky is cool?” Leo said. “Like you think JP is cool? You should really decide who you’re in love with, Brent—it seems like a big problem for you.”
“Leo,” Caroline gasped while Brent’s face flamed red. “What is wrong with you?”
Leo rounded on her other friend. “What’s wrong is that my friends don’t know how to be loyal.”
Caroline’s expression of outrage, disappointment, and hurt almost made Leo regret her words. She was tempted to turn invisible right then and there, but at the last second she remembered her cousin. “Come on, JP,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Her stomach tightened as she met his eyes. He looked uncomfortable, maybe even mad.
But whatever JP was feeling, he followed her off the front porch and onto the pollen-dusted sidewalk, to her relief.
“You’ve already learned a lot from your abuelo!” Caroline shouted behind her. “Like how to be cruel when you don’t get your way!”
As she walked, Leo blinked blurry eyes and shivered, teetering on the edge of invisibility without using the powder. It felt like trying to balance a seesaw, or stay awake when she was falling asleep at the cash register on an early-morning shift.
“Uh, are you okay?” JP whispered. “You’re sort of . . . winking.”
Leo concentrated her thoughts, tipping the balance of the imaginary scale, holding her body on the normal side of the shadows, then letting go. Only when she was sure she was invisible did she look back over her shoulder to see Caroline’s tears and Brent’s angry glare.
She set her eyes forward and pushed herself back out of invisibility.
“I’m fine,” she told JP, not even enjoying the fact that she had just taken control of her birth-order power. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 17
DISAPPEARING ACT
Leo kept her mind on the new feeling of balance. It kept her from seeing her friends’ hurt faces or hearing Caroline’s parting accusation. JP walked next to her in silence, body tense and still. Leo watched him out of the corner of her eye. He probably wished Alma and Belén were here so he wouldn’t be stuck with Leo.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.” Speaking broke her concentration, and her brain tipped back in the wrong direction. “Rats,” she muttered, slipping out of invisibility.
“Hey, that’s new,” JP said. “I could hear you even when I couldn’t see you.”
“Really?” Leo’s smile felt as precarious as her powers. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to control that.”
They turned onto Main Street. “You don’t really need to apologize to me,” JP said. “That was . . . rough. I know you’re not okay, but, uh, are you okay?”
“The O’Rourkes are up to something,” Leo said. “They stole our menu. They’re trying to put us out of business. You believe me, right?”
JP sighed and stared at the blue sky. “I believe that there’s definitely some shady business going on,” he said. “I guess I’m just not sure that it’s, you know, magically shady. Mrs. O’Rourke could just be a normal shady businessperson. Like Kingpin, or the Penguin. Or politicians.”
“You don’t think she’s Abuelo’s accomplice?” Leo asked.
JP fiddled with his fanny pack. “I don’t know that much about our grandpa, but he doesn’t seem to like single moms or woman-owned businesses or playing nice with anyone who doesn’t share his last name.”
Leo felt his words drop like stones in her belly, hard and cold and true. But if JP was right, that meant Leo was wrong, and Caroline and Brent . . .
They would hate her. They already hated her.
“Hang on.” JP pulled his buzzing phone out of his pocket. “It’s Uncle Luis. Um, what did we tell everyone again? We were going to Caroline’s house?”
“Brent’s,” she corrected. “To play video games.”
JP nodded, eyes widening nervously as he put the phone to his ear. “Hi, uh, we were just finishing playing Super—” He stopped to listen, which was probably for the best since his voice was too loud and stiff to sound honest. Leo waited, ready to snatch the phone away before be could say something that gave them all away.
“Mhm . . . um, okay, sure, here she is.” JP handed the phone to Leo with a shrug.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Leonora.” Daddy’s voice was high with fake cheeriness. Leo’s stomach clenched in preparation for more bad news. “We’re just checking in to ask—and you’re not in any trouble, we just need an honest answer, please—did you take the molcajete out of the bakery?”
“What? No! I left it right in the office!” Leo’s heart lurched. “On your desk. Isabel saw me.”
“Okay, okay.” Daddy tried for soothing, but he still just sounded worried. “We had to check. Your mother’s trying a scrying spell right now to see if she can get any answers. I’m sure it will . . . turn up. Enjoy your game.”
Leo shook her head. “I’m coming to the bakery right now.”
“You don’t have to, Leonora. We have everything—”
“Stop it!” Leo slammed her finger on the red end-call button. “Stop lying, stop hiding things!” she shouted at the dark phone screen. “I know we’re in trouble, I know the bakery’s in trouble. I know! You don’t have to lie about it!”
Her hands shook and shimmered as she passed JP back his phone. She could feel herself wavering in and out of sight. JP looked like he might be trying to turn invisible himself, shuffling his feet and avoiding Leo’s eyes.
Poor JP. He had been dropped unexpectedly into the worst week the bakery had ever had. Leo’s brain whirled through the list of terrible things, trying to make sense of it all. She and her cousin walked in silence toward the bakery, feet pounding the sidewalk.
Clomp clomp clomp. Mamá said the bakery was warded against burglars, but another heirloom was gone.
Clomp clomp clomp. As much as Leo tried to imagine a sneaky way the O’Rourkes could have made it to the bakery and back since she had left their house, it just didn’t add up. They probably weren’t the thieves, which meant they weren’t the accomplices.
Clomp clomp clomp. Leo had wasted all this time, hurt her friends, for nothing. She was no closer to understanding Abuelo’s plan.
His plan didn’t make sense at all, anyway. Why would he send a thief to steal heirlooms one at a time? Having planned her share of heists, Leo was sure it was harder to break into and back out of the busy bakery twice than it was to do it just once. Unless . . .
Unless they didn’t have to break into the bakery at all, because they were already welcome inside.
Leo stopped walking. After a few steps, JP turned around. “What’s up?”
Leo stared at her cousin. Her Logroño cousin. JP had been approac
hed by Abuelo Logroño and had never said anything about it. He wanted to see everything in the bakery and learn more about it. He had taken the news of the family magic pretty calmly, and he had been completely supportive of Leo’s wild goose chase to spy on the O’Rourkes. He had been one of the last people to see the molcajete just before it disappeared.
He had dropped unexpectedly into the worst week the bakery had ever had.
“Leo?” JP said. “Is there a problem? Can I help?”
All the anger Leo felt, all the rage and uncertainty and fear, burned her throat, clawing to come out. She wanted to scream that she knew exactly how much JP wanted to help. She wanted to punch her cousin right in his sympathetic face.
But that wasn’t the smart, strategic thing to do. If JP really was the accomplice, Leo needed to warn her family. And if she tried to warn them with no evidence, they wouldn’t believe her. Mamá had already dismissed one of Leo’s hunches, and Isabel would be disappointed that she had trusted Leo’s wrong guess about the O’Rourkes. No, if Leo wanted to stop JP, she had to catch him in the act.
Besides, she might be wrong. Caroline was right that Leo shouldn’t let her feelings explode and hurt the people around her. She didn’t want to hurt JP the way she’d hurt her friends, or even the way she’d hurt the O’Rourkes by using magic to totally invade their privacy. She needed to be more careful. She wanted to be a bruja Mamá would be proud of, not one who followed in Abuelo Logroño’s footsteps.
If she was right, then even Mamá would understand her use of magic to protect herself.
“Fine,” she said out loud. “I’m fine.” Her voice came out strangled, and she couldn’t meet her cousin’s eyes for fear he would see the suspicion burning in her mind. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to walk alongside him one more step without exploding her doubts everywhere. If JP was guilty, and if he knew she suspected him, he would be more cautious, harder to catch. She couldn’t let him know, but she couldn’t act like everything was normal, either.
