Maybe.
I shouldered my backpack and headed to the cafeteria. I would have sent several texts to Jenah to relieve my feelings, but as I mentioned before, I have this stupid phone which only connects to WitchNet and the witch phone system. So Sarmine and any other witches can text or call me anytime they want (yay), and I can access all of Witchipedia and all the witch websites. But I couldn’t call my best friend on it, or stalk my crush on social media, or anything useful. Maybe if the witch stopped giving me so many chores I could get a real-person job and pay for a regular phone myself, but at the moment, I didn’t have time or money or a reasonable mother, so that was totally not in the cards.
At any rate, while I stood there wishing my phone would turn into a useful communication device, a text from my mother popped up. It read:
E’S BUBBLE PLUMMETED.
Oh, no. I looked frantically around the cafeteria, searching for someone undergoing public humiliation. But nothing.
Across the caf I saw Jenah getting her tray from the lunch ladies. I waved at her. She waved back and hurried my way.
That’s when a kid burst through the swinging doors on his bike. “Hey, Brandon,” he yelled at one of the jocks. “The delivery truck smashed your car!”
The athletic kids got up en masse; an irritated teacher went for the kid on the bike. The kid weaved, dodged—and plowed right into Jenah. The tray of lasagna she was holding splattered her white shirt and jeans as she went down hard.
“Jenah!” I shouted, and ran over. Around me I could hear some kids saying “oh, no,” and some kids laughing. Jerks. Poor Jenah must be humiliated. I helped her up, but she was laughing it off. All four feet ten of her jumped on the bench, dripping cheese and tomato sauce.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said to the cafeteria. “For my next trick I will make the food here edible.”
There was genuine laughter at that, and Jenah jumped back down. “Ugh,” she said. “Help me wash this off in the restroom, will you?”
We weaved between the bicyclist and the teacher trying to catch him, and left the cafeteria. “Well, that sucked,” I said.
“Bad luck,” she said.
But was it bad luck? My mind immediately jumped to the bet. I looked again at the text on my phone. But that news had come before the attack on Jenah. Plus, how could the witches have predicted that Jenah would be standing there? I thought again that it would be hard to determine who the victims were. Bad luck happened to people all the time. At least we knew that Esmerelda had drawn an art student. That was a clue in the right direction.
“What am I going to do?” Jenah said. “I don’t have any extra clothes except my gym clothes, and…”
“Yeah,” I said. Jenah usually looked ten times cooler than the rest of us, but not at the moment. “If anybody could make plastic shorts a statement, it’d be you,” I offered.
“This is never going to come out,” she said, rubbing vainly at the tomato sauce. “I wish there were a spell for…”
We both looked at each other at the same time. I had magically dry-cleaned her a couple weeks ago when she had rescued me from a giant pumpkin. “Unicorn hair sanitizer,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Of course. Let’s go somewhere private.”
We headed up to the second-floor bathroom, which is in the old wing but next to the teachers’ lounge, and so, paradoxically, is the best one to hang out in for witchy stuff because there isn’t a permanent crowd of burnouts there glaring at you. On the way up, I explained about the witches and their bet and how I was going to stop it. This is how you can tell Jenah is a good best friend—she didn’t look skeptical that I could stop them, she just said, “Of course you are, and I’m going to help you. After you fix my jeans.”
Once inside the restroom, I scanned the floor under the doors and didn’t see any feet. “All clear,” I said, digging in my backpack for the vial of sanitizer. I pulled out my gross orange fanny pack in the search.
“Ew,” said Jenah. She poked it with a finger.
“I know, right?” I said. “The witch gave it to me. It’s got some of the powders and stuff I’m gonna need in it.”
“Labeled, I hope,” said Jenah. She opened it to see. “And nope.”
“Typical,” I said. “So it’s useless.”
“Unless you can tell a toe of frog from a toe of dog.”
I made a face. “That one I could probably do. But I’m not going to use either, so it doesn’t matter.” I kept digging. Books, water bottle, crumpled-up spell … “By the way, what day of the week begins with Y?”
“None of them?”
I passed the spell over to her with all my scribbly notes, and the solution I’d found so far. “See, today’s Monday, so I have to use monkey brains. But I’m not going to do that.”
“Obviously.”
“So I want to see if this is a spell I can work on some other day of the week, or if Sarmine has reached a new and horrible low, even for her.” Promising the world one moment and taking it away the next. And yes, she had suggested I could experiment to find some substitutes—but really, on the very first spell?
“It looks like S days would use slug guts,” said Jenah.
“No.”
“W is walrus tusks. Oh look, Y is only yak fur. You wouldn’t mind that.”
“If I could find a day that started with Y, sure,” I said.
“Here we go. If the day starts with T, find some thyme. So you can work this spell—tomorrow.”
“On Tuesdays and Thursdays I can be powerful,” I mused. “It’s better than nothing. I won’t kill my mother just yet.”
“Epic witch battle?” said Jenah. “I’d see that.”
“Speaking of epic witches … Any good gossip today? Anything out of the ordinary?” I needed to triangulate on the witches’ victims.
“One of the cheerleaders decided to make over one of the nerds and date him,” she said. “And two jocks have a bet going about who can get the French exchange student to date them first.”
“Business as usual, then.”
“Oh, there’s something funny going on in the art classes today,” Jenah said. “Something to do with a hot young sub.”
“Right,” I said. “The sub is Esmerelda, she’s really like sixty, and I’m pretty sure the card she drew is an art student. Aha!” I finally found the bottle in the depths of my backpack. “Spin around for me.”
Jenah twirled as I spritzed her. The unicorn hair sanitizer took her from disgusting to sparkly clean, literally. Silver stars of cleanliness fizzed around her. Even the tomato-cheese smell vanished, replaced by a pleasantly antiseptic scent that had overtones of apple and mint. By the time she finished twirling, her outfit was so white it glowed.
That’s when we heard the muffled shriek.
I whirled. No one was in here. I had looked under the doors.
“Uh-oh,” said Jenah. “I should have checked for auras.” She walked down to the last stall and said firmly, “Whoever it is, come out right now. I can tell you’re in there.”
The stall opened and two legs swung down from the seat. A vaguely familiar-looking girl walked out. She was curvy and rumpled, all in black, with a nose piercing. She had brown skin and tangled dark hair, and her eyes behind her glasses were red, like maybe she had been crying. I would have asked her about it, except I was currently more worried about the look on her face, which said she had seen everything through the crack in the stall and was now trying to decide if she was going nuts.
“What were you doing in there?” I said.
“Me? What were you doing out here?”
I shrugged, trying to be casually offensive so maybe she’d give up and leave. “Not spying on people, I suppose.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I wasn’t, not at first. I was drawing.”
“In the bathroom?” said Jenah.
“I had to escape for a minute,” the girl said. One hand pushed up her glasses to rub her reddened eyes. “And the art classroom has a session t
his period so I couldn’t hang out there. Not that I’d want to, not with her.”
Jenah and I looked at each other. This must be her. This must be the girl who Esmerelda was busy making miserable. Now that I thought about it, I realized why she looked familiar—our lockers were near each other. I must have had plenty of images of her in my head for Malkin to steal. “You’re Henny Santiago-Smith, aren’t you?” said Jenah. “Freshman? Art crowd?”
Henny nodded woefully.
I started to say, “What can I do to help?” but I was forestalled by Henny opening her mouth.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” she said, and her woeful look transformed into a calculating one that I didn’t like at all. She pointed at me. “Are you a witch?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Jenah said simultaneously.
“Jenah,” I hissed. I mean, come on. She wasn’t the witch. If anyone was going to be giving up my deeply held secrets it should be me. Besides, there was something about this girl that bothered me. I think it was the way she was looking me up and down like I was the solution to a very big problem.
“What are you in here for?” I said. I wanted to be sure that this was Esmerelda’s victim. “Did something … happen to you in art today?”
Her eyes bugged out. “You really are a witch. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
Henny sighed. “Ugh, we have the worst sub today. And the weird thing is, it’s like I’m the only one who can see how awful she is. I mean, our regular teacher is Mrs. N, and she’s the best art teacher I’ve ever had. She’s amazing, seriously.”
“But today?”
“But today we got this sub called Emerald or something—”
“Esmerelda.”
“And, oh my god, the boys love her.”
“Of course,” said Jenah. We both rolled our eyes at the thought.
“And everything the boys do is right. She seriously has not said one bad word to any of them. Plus, and I don’t even really think this is appropriate, but she said we were going to do some life drawing so we were all like, yay, and then she herself stripped down to a pink bikini and sat up on the teacher’s desk for us to draw her.”
“Um,” I said. “That is a little bit…”
“Right?” said Henny. “And then she said we’d do a critique of everyone’s stuff, right in front of everyone else, you know? And, I mean, Mrs. N does that to get us prepared for how tough they are in art school, so you get used to being dissected in front of everyone. But she basically raved over everyone’s work in the entire room until she got to me.”
“And then she trashed it,” I said.
Henny nodded. “In a real vicious way, too. Like, ‘It must be hard for you to draw my abs since you don’t have any.’”
“That woman is insane,” said Jenah. “The school should yank her out of there.”
“She’s probably hoodwinked the administration,” I said. “They call her in, she magically makes them forget what they were doing.”
“I mean, if regular art school teachers are like that, then I’ll—I’ll drop out of art,” Henny said.
“You should not do that,” I said firmly. “This woman has a vendetta against you personally.”
“She’s probably jealous of you,” put in Jenah.
“Me?” said Henny dubiously. She looked down at her faded black hoodie and paint-splattered black jeans. The hoodie had a twelve-sided die on it, and read ELVES RULE AND WIZARDS DROOL. “I’m not really a pink bikini sort of person, y’know? I mean…”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” said Jenah firmly. “You are super great just the way you are and Cam will be happy to magic up a spell to fix your problem with this teacher.”
“I will?” I said. Frankly, Esmerelda was starting to sound as terrifying as Malkin. I poked my own softish abs and wondered how easily she would vivisect me.
“Well, some kind of spell then,” said Jenah. She nudged me significantly. “To make her week? Go better?”
Henny was clutching her tablet tightly, her eyes bugging at us. “You really are witches.”
“Look, you can’t tell anyone,” I said. “Or…” I didn’t know if I should plead with her or threaten her. Sarmine would have straight away turned her into a newt, so I supposed I should do the opposite of that and said gently, “Please don’t tell on me. It won’t be good if I attract attention.”
Henny nodded, and then tilted her head. “Would you do something for me if I won’t tell? Quid pro quo? I mean, I’m not threatening you. I could make your lives pretty miserable but I’m not the sort of person who would do that. Even if it would be amazing for me.”
Okay, this girl was kind of rubbing me the wrong way. “I am trying to make people’s lives better,” I admitted. “And maybe even specifically yours.” I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell her the details of Esmerelda’s goal for the week. “But how do I know I can trust you? I’ve never even heard of you.”
She crinkled her nose in a quick glare, like she understood that I didn’t know who she was but at the same time wished that were not the case.
“Why did you say it would be amazing for you to destroy us?” Jenah said.
“Well, not destroy you intentionally,” Henny said. “But I do an online comic. It’s called Henny’s Pathetic Love Life.” She sighed. “It does not have a massive following. But Henny Meets Two Witches Right Here in Her High School? Now that, I think, might get some traction.”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly, “it might.”
“Oh, man,” Jenah said. “High school crossed with crazy witch hijinks? I would read that.”
“I know, right?” said Henny. “And I can already see how I would draw you two. You’re such perfect sidekicks—one cute, short, punk girl with amazing hair, one tallish, sort of average girl who looks even more average by contrast…”
“Okay, let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “I am the witch. Jenah is not. If anyone is going to be a sidekick, it’s her.” I turned to Jenah. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“And thing two: there’s not going to be a comic. There are lots of dangerous witches out there. Let’s just say I’m undercover.”
Her eyes bugged again. “Okay, when you said that, you stopped looking average for a moment and looked all fierce. You really would be amazing to draw.”
“No.”
Henny sighed. “All right, all right, Scout’s honor.”
“What is it you want us to do for you?” said Jenah. “If not try to destroy Esmerelda.” She was studying Henny with her questioning, I’m going to figure you out look. It was good she was on the case because even though I wanted to like Henny, I was feeling a little grouchy about her, “Boy, it would be awesome for me if I could expose your deepest secret” statement.
“Well, there’s this boy,” said Henny.
“Obviously,” I said, “Or I presume the comic would be Henny’s Amazing Love Life that She’s Totally Got All Figured Out.”
Henny shot me a dirty look.
“Of course,” said Jenah, soothingly and helpfully. “And what have you done to try to win him so far?”
“Nothing,” said Henny glumly.
“I think I’ve solved the source of your comic’s woes,” I said brightly. “People like action. They want things to happen.”
“I can think of something that happened today,” Henny said darkly.
“Cam, give it a rest,” said Jenah. “I can tell by Henny’s aura that she’s a good person in need of our help. It has these lovely, smudgy, baby-blue bits. You wanted to help her.”
It was true. I did. So why was I balking? I guess, because when it came right down to it, I had wanted to both somehow help her and not get found out that I was a witch. Having my cake and eating it, too. I shoved down my irritation. “Okay, Henny. You’re in.”
“Ooh, secret witch club.”
“One spell. But I don’t know if I can do the thing you want. I’ll
have to go home and research it, and see if it’s A, possible, and B, possible by me. I’m just a beginning witch.”
“I know,” said Henny. She must have seen my look, for she hurriedly said, “I mean, I’m sure you’re great. But you didn’t understand the clue in the spell you guys were talking about, and it was even trying to lay it out for you.”
“It—what?” I floundered. It wasn’t fair that this random human was better at solving spells than me. “What clue?”
She gave us an expression that said she was certain she knew the answer but uncertain about the advisability of proving to us that we were morons.
“Go ahead,” Jenah said gently. “She won’t turn you into a newt. I promise.”
Henny picked the spell off the bathroom floor and pointed to the day-beginning-with-Y business. “That’s your clue,” she said. “To start thinking outside the box. There isn’t a day that begins with Y.”
“Obviously.”
“So what else could it be?” She looked at our confused faces and simplified. “What’s another way to describe Sunday?”
“You mean yesterday?” I said, and then did a double take.
“Now you see,” said Henny.
“And I can’t do the spell yesterday, but I could do it today, and today starts with T.… So then it’s always today, and I can always use the thyme! Henny, you’re a genius.”
She beamed.
“Go ahead, lay it on me,” I said, feeling more generous toward her now. “I’ll try to do whatever spell you want. Do you want a makeover or something?”
Henny looked hurt. “Of course not. Despite what that horrible witch said, I’m fine with the way I look. I just need him to see me for who I really am.”
“Like, you’re friends but he needs to see you as something more?”
“Oh, I’ve never talked to him,” said Henny. “I worship him from afar. My three loyal readers know the ups and downs about how I’ve crushed on him all semester.”
“Okay,” I said. “I am not the premier expert on boys but I think the first rule of thumb is that you should talk to someone you like. Wouldn’t you say so, Jenah?”
“Sure,” said Jenah easily. She was studying Henny. “Do you think he knows who you are?”
Seriously Shifted Page 4
