And It Harm None

by Isobel Bird

  You can do this, she told herself. You can do it.

  Reluctantly, she walked over to where Sherrie was sitting. “I guess we’re partners,” she said neutrally.

  Sherrie looked at her, an expression of deepest disgust on her face.

  “I don’t like this any more than you do,” Kate said. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Sherrie stood and together they walked over to Ms. Ableman’s desk. The teacher handed Kate their assignment and the two of them went to a table to look it over. Kate read the sheet first while Sherrie sat silently, sullenly picking at her cuticles. “Well?” she said finally.

  “We have to do an experiment with plants,” Kate said. “We’re going to grow them in different conditions and report on what happens.”

  “Plants?” Sherrie said, sounding as if she’d just discovered something really nasty on the bottom of her shoe. “I have to work with plants?”

  “It’s just seedlings, really,” Kate said. “They’re not going to get all that big in two weeks.”

  Sherrie snorted. “This is just perfect,” she said. “First I get stuck with you, and now I have to grow things.”

  “I’m no happier about this than you are,” snapped Kate. “But this project is important, and I’m not going to get a bad grade. So why don’t you just lose the attitude?”

  Sherrie glared at her. “Don’t be bossing me around,” she said.

  “Don’t give me a reason to,” replied Kate. She’d already decided that she wasn’t going to put up with any of Sherrie’s games. “Now, let’s read over this assignment and decide who’s going to do what.”

  They spent the rest of the period planning their project. Kate was relieved when the bell rang and she could get away from Sherrie. She was even more relieved that her next period was gym. Because she was on the basketball team, she got to spend the period practicing with the other girls who also played on the team. That meant that she, Tara, and Jessica had a chance to hang out and play some ball. As they practiced their shots Kate told them what had happened in Ms. Ableman’s class.

  “Oh, man,” Tara said as she snapped a free throw and it went in. “I wouldn’t be you for anything.”

  “Sherrie doesn’t work well with others under the best of circumstances,” said Jessica. “This is going to be a nightmare.”

  Kate sighed. She’d been trying desperately to convince herself otherwise, but she knew her friends were right. “What am I going to do?” she asked plaintively. “I have got to do well on this.”

  “Too bad there’s not a spell that would make Sherrie tolerable,” Tara joked, passing Kate the ball.

  Kate caught the ball and ran for the basket. As she jumped up and tipped the ball into the net, she thought about Tara’s comment. Maybe there is a spell, she thought to herself as she landed on her feet and the ball fell back into her hands.

  That afternoon when she got home, Kate went right to her room. Putting her stuff down, she went to her bookcase and looked for a book she’d gotten at Crones’ Circle a few months before. It was a book of rituals and spells. She’d glanced through it briefly but hadn’t really had a chance to look at it in depth yet. But she recalled a spell that had caught her eye. This is what she was looking for.

  She found it on page 153. “A Spell for Neutralizing Hatred,” she read. “This spell is useful for eliminating feelings of anger toward someone. It is particularly useful when you need to create a peaceful atmosphere around you.” Kate nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly what I need,” she said.

  The spell seemed simple enough. All it called for was a black candle. Kate had one of those. She retrieved it from the box of magical items she kept in her closet. Then she sat on the floor in the middle of her room, the book open beside her. She read the directions for the spell, then closed the book. She sat with the candle in her hands and closed her eyes.

  The instructions for doing the spell said that she should think about the person she had angry feelings about. She should, it said, think about everything she really hated about this person.

  That’s easy, Kate thought as she imagined Sherrie’s face in her mind. Then she let herself feel every negative feeling she could about her old friend. She thought about all of the horrible things Sherrie had ever said to her or about her. She thought about all of the mean things Sherrie had done to Kate and to her friends. It wasn’t difficult; Sherrie had done a lot of things to be angry at her for. In just a few minutes Kate’s mind was a tornado of angry thoughts. They swirled around in an ugly, black cloud, making her feel sick with hatred.

  The next step of the spell involved imagining the black candle standing in the center of the cloud of angry thoughts. Kate pictured it towering into the sky like a great black pillar. She imagined her anger swirling around it, trying to knock it over and being unable to. She imagined her feelings toward Sherrie as a violent storm tearing across the land. The candle was in its way, and the storm wanted more than anything to knock it down.

  But it couldn’t. The candle stood steady as the winds buffeted it and screamed at it. And then the candle began to absorb the blackness. It sucked all of Kate’s negativity into itself, filling with the full force of her anger. As the candle took in more and more of her hatred, the tornado became weaker and weaker. It swirled less forcefully, until finally it was nothing but a few gusts of air. Then these, too, were absorbed by the candle and the storm was over.

  Kate sat with the candle—now filled with her anger—and imagined herself standing beside it, looking up at the tower where all of her feelings about Sherrie were stored. They were safe inside it. Nobody could let them out except her, and she wasn’t going to do that. Instead she was going to light the candle and burn it. As it burned, her negative feelings would be burned away with it. They would be transformed into energy and returned to the universe.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the candle in her hands. It looked exactly the same as it had before she did the ritual. But something about it felt different. Kate knew that her spell had worked—at least the first part of it had. She’d been able to channel her negative feelings into the candle. She’d worked with energy enough over the past year to sense the subtle change in the way she felt inside. She was more at peace, more confident that she could handle working with Sherrie.

  At least I think I can, she told herself as she reached for a match.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Okay,” Aunt Sarah said to Annie. “So, what’s the big surprise?”

  They were sitting across from one another at a fast-food restaurant. Normally, Annie would never set foot in a place that served food in cartons emblazoned with a smiling clown and which employed orange, red, and yellow as its primary decorating colors, but she had particular reasons for wanting to be in a very public place when she made her announcement to her aunt. Being surrounded by loud families and children cramming fries and shakes into their mouths made her feel a little more at ease. Somehow, she thought, it would be harder for Aunt Sarah to yell at her in such surroundings—at least without drawing unwanted attention to herself. She’d suggested that the two of them have dinner and maybe do a little shopping, as Meg was at a friend’s house for the evening.

  “Well,” Annie began tentatively. She chewed her hamburger thoughtfully, briefly wondering what exactly was in the “special sauce” that graced its rubbery surface, and then said, “Well” again.

  She paused, totally unclear on how to proceed. She’d gone over and over her speech in her mind, until finally it had seemed to her to be just about perfect. Now, though, sitting and actually facing her aunt, she realized that perhaps it wasn’t going to be quite so simple.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what you told me,” she said finally. “You know, about Mom and the baby,” she added when her aunt looked confused.

  Aunt Sarah nodded. “Oh,” she said. “Right. You know, I’m sorry I told you the way I did. I know it must have seemed really careless.”

  Annie shook her
head. “No,” she said. “It’s fine. In fact,” she continued, “I’m really glad you did.”

  Aunt Sarah sipped her milk shake and made a face. “Do you know there’s no actual milk in these things?” she said to her niece. “They’re all chemicals. It’s too bad, because they taste great.”

  “What do you think the baby is like now?” Annie asked suddenly.

  Aunt Sarah put down her shake. “I have no idea,” she said. “To tell the truth, I hadn’t really thought about her until you mentioned what that astrologer told you.”

  “Would you like to know?” asked Annie, the nervousness in her stomach threatening to erupt at any second as she waited for her aunt’s answer.

  Aunt Sarah sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was so long ago, and part of me thinks it’s best left in the past.” She looked at Annie for a long moment. “Why?” she asked.

  Annie swallowed. “That’s kind of what the surprise is,” she said.

  A strange look came over her aunt’s face. “What do you mean?” she said.

  Annie was wringing her hands under the table. “I sort of found her,” she said. As soon as the words were out she felt all of the tension in her body leak out like air from a deflating raft. There, she thought, I said it.

  “You sort of found her,” Aunt Sarah repeated slowly. “How much sort of?”

  “I did find her,” Annie clarified. “I’ve spoken to her. Several times.”

  Aunt Sarah had gone white. She sat back in the booth and just stared at Annie for a long time. “How?” she asked finally, her voice barely a whisper.

  Annie explained to her aunt how she had found a letter from the agency that had handled the adoption of her sister, and how she’d searched for it on the Internet and come across a site that connected people looking for information about adopted children. “And she called me,” Annie concluded.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Aunt Sarah. “I just don’t believe it.”

  She had put her hand to her mouth, and she sat there that way, not looking at Annie but through her, as if her niece wasn’t really there and she was all by herself in the booth. “I don’t believe it,” she said yet again.

  “I know I should have told you,” Annie said anxiously. “But I didn’t want to say anything in case I never heard from her. And then when I did hear from her I was so surprised that I wasn’t sure how to tell you about it. Are you mad?”

  The words had come out in a rush. When she was finished speaking Annie sat in the awful silence that followed and waited for an answer from Aunt Sarah. Finally, when Annie thought that for sure she would die if her aunt didn’t say something, Aunt Sarah shook her head and seemed to come alive again.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not mad. It’s just that it’s been so long. Your mother and I used to talk sometimes about what she might be like. But we never thought—” She stopped talking, and Annie knew she was trying not to cry. “We never thought we would ever know,” she said finally. Tears had formed in her eyes, and she blinked them back. “What’s she like?” she asked Annie.

  Annie sighed. Where should she begin? “Her name is Juliet Garrison,” she said slowly. She looked at her aunt, gauging her reaction. “She’s twenty-three. But you know that,” she added, feeling foolish for forgetting.

  “Juliet,” Aunt Sarah repeated. “It’s pretty.”

  “She lives in New Orleans,” Annie continued. “She went to school there, and now she works as a costume designer for a theater company. I guess she inherited the whole artistic thing from Mom,” she added.

  Aunt Sarah smiled, which made Annie feel a lot better. “She was adopted by a family from Wisconsin,” Annie said. “They had a farm. She grew up with five brothers and sisters. Three of them were adopted and three weren’t. She’s kind of in the middle, age-wise.”

  She wasn’t sure what else to tell her aunt. She and Juliet had spoken about all kinds of things, but now that she was trying to tell Aunt Sarah about her, she found it difficult to put their conversations into words. Finally, her aunt made the decision for her and asked a question. “Is she happy?” she asked.

  At first Annie thought this was a peculiar question. Then she looked at her aunt’s face and saw the real question in her eyes. She wants to know if my parents made the right decision, she thought.

  “Yes,” she said. “She seems really happy. She loves her family, and she loves what she’s doing now.” She hesitated, thinking about something she and Juliet had talked about during their last phone call. “She says that she always felt a little different from them, though,” she added. “That’s why she contacted the adoption search people. She wondered what her birth family had been like, not because she was upset at them or anything but just because she wondered where she’d come from DNA-wise.”

  Aunt Sarah gave a short laugh. “If she only knew,” she said, smiling. She looked at Annie. “Part of me thinks I should be really angry with you,” she said. “But I know that if I were you I would have done the same thing.”

  Annie grinned. “I know,” she said. “And you wouldn’t have told you, either.”

  “No,” her aunt said, “I wouldn’t. Now let me ask you a question: How do you feel about all of this?”

  Annie thought about her answer for a minute. “Happy,” she said. “At first I was shocked, and maybe a little angry at Mom and Dad. I don’t know why, because I understand why they did what they did. But part of me felt like they’d taken this really big thing away from me. Now I feel like I’ve gotten it back, even though I haven’t met her or anything.”

  There was a dramatic pause before Aunt Sarah asked, “Do you want to meet her?”

  Annie nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I really do. And she wants to meet me—us—all of us.”

  “You haven’t said anything to Meg, I take it,” replied her aunt.

  “Not a word,” Annie answered. “I don’t really know how to explain it to her.”

  Her aunt breathed out deeply. “That will be an interesting conversation,” she said. “Maybe we should do it together. Have you and Juliet talked about when you might get together?”

  “Well, that’s something else I want to talk to you about,” Annie said. “She suggested that maybe we come visit her for Mardi Gras.”

  “Mardi Gras?” Aunt Sarah said. “Isn’t that, like, next week?”

  “It’s in March,” Annie told her. “Juliet says it’s really fun. We could stay with her and she’d show us around New Orleans and everything. What do you think? I have a week off for spring break anyway, so I wouldn’t be missing school or anything.”

  Aunt Sarah was smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” Annie asked her, confused.

  Her aunt shook her head. “Nothing,” she answered. “It’s just that I’ve never seen you want something so much before.”

  Annie blushed. The truth was, finding out she had a big sister had really affected her in ways she could never have imagined. She wanted to meet Juliet more than anything, and she realized that she’d been afraid that her aunt would say no for some reason.

  “I think you should go,” Aunt Sarah said. “I want to talk to Juliet first, of course,” she added as Annie started to thank her.

  Annie nodded emphatically. “Sure,” she said.

  “And I don’t know if I’ll be able to go myself,” Aunt Sarah continued. “There’s still a lot to do for the wedding. And I’m not sure if Meg should go yet,” she added. “It might be best for you and Juliet to get to know each other first.”

  “Whatever you think is best,” Annie said agreeably. She didn’t want to say anything that might make her aunt change her mind.

  Aunt Sarah took another sip of her milk shake. “Chloe would be so happy right now,” she said.

  Annie thought about that. What would her mother think if she knew her two older daughters were about to meet for the first time? Annie was pretty sure she would be okay with it. No, she knew she would be okay with it. But it made her sad to think that h
er mother would never get to know how her first child had turned out.

  Oh, she knows, said a voice in her mind. She and your father both know.

  Was that true? Annie wondered. She thought about the time she’d been able to speak to her parents’ ghosts. Yes, they had been watching her grow up, they said. Had they also been able to watch Juliet grow up? Annie didn’t know, but she hoped so. She wanted more than anything to believe that her parents knew that the little girl they’d given away was happy.

  “Does Juliet’s family know that she’s found you?” Aunt Sarah asked, bringing Annie back to the moment.

  “Yes,” said Annie. “She told them that she was going to try to find her birth family. They were okay with that. I think it was hard for her to hear that Mom and Dad are dead.”

  Wait until she finds out you started the fire that killed them, said a familiar, taunting voice in her head. Annie had grown up with that voice, and had pretty much learned to ignore it, particularly since beginning her study of Wicca and coming to terms with the deaths of her mother and father. But from time to time it returned, teasing her, and at those times she felt like a six-year-old girl again, watching her house burn and knowing her parents were inside. She had, of course, told Juliet about the fire, but she hadn’t revealed her role in it. She wasn’t sure she was going to, either. At least not until she could talk to her sister face-to-face.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by yet another squeal from a child sitting near their table. Her aunt looked at the child and then at Annie. “Ready to get out of here?” she asked.

  “Big time,” Annie replied, glad to leave. The fast food was sitting uneasily in her stomach, and she was happy to be away from the harsh colors and the noise.

  They threw their trash away and left the restaurant. As the doors shut behind them Aunt Sarah put her arm around Annie and said, “Next time you have something important to tell me, can we do it at a nicer restaurant?”