Seriously Shifted

by Tina Connolly

  “I know,” Leo said, confusion on his face. “You’re in my AP biology.”

  “Really?” I said. I thought back to class. AP biology’s my fave, but I didn’t realize I was that out of it. I mean, it’s a good class because it’s only upper-level students who want to be there, and we focus pretty hard on the lectures and lab, and he’s not my lab partner, so … I snapped my fingers. “That’s right,” I said. “You’re in the back, right? You guys were having problems finding the frog’s spleen the other day?”

  “It was a mutant frog,” he protested.

  “Aren’t they all,” I agreed cheerfully.

  Across the room, Henny was giving me a dirty look as she sketched on her tablet. I figured that meant I wasn’t supposed to be getting chummy with her crush.

  “Well, look,” I said. “I’m doing this project for biology”—oh wait, that lie was suddenly not going to work since he was in my biology—“I mean, I’m gearing up for the science fair, and I’m testing the compounds in this honey mixture. It’s supposed to be good for pollen allergies, and I wondered if you’d be willing to be one of my guinea pigs. Do you have allergies?”

  “Not this time of year,” he said. But he was looking intrigued. “I’ll try some if you want. I know you’re the best in that class.” He casually turned his laptop even farther away from me.

  What he didn’t realize was that he was turning it toward the window. And since the blinds on that window were drawn, there was a faint reflection.

  Now I was getting curious. Who was this football player who didn’t act like a football player, and what did he not want anyone to know about?

  “The honey is supposed to safeguard against specific plants,” I improvised further. “I’ve got a whole questionnaire to fill out, and then we’ll expose you to a small quantity of allergen. Do you know which pollens you’re allergic to?”

  Everyone raises or lowers their eyes when trying to recall things from memory. He raised his to the ceiling, and I turned mine to the window, trying to make out the blurry, backward shapes of pictures and text. It looked like pictures of wolves, I thought. So what? What was there to hide? Carefully I pieced together the backward text.

  How to Tell a Shapeshifter.

  5

  How to Tell a Shapeshifter

  “Holy cats,” I said, shocked. The other two boys swiveled to look but I waved them off, scooting closer to Leo. Leo slammed the laptop closed. “Wait a minute,” I said, more quietly. “Are you googling what I think you’re googling?”

  He leaned back and tried to act casual. “Project for English class,” he said.

  At least we were both lying.

  But this was serious stuff. “Don’t mess with me, Leo,” I said in a whisper. “Have you ever gone to bed a human and woken up, I don’t know, a cockroach?”

  “Of course not,” he said, but the defensive way he said it made my eyes get really wide.

  So look, I don’t know much about shifters. But I definitely know they are witch world things and not human things. Leo might not be exactly one of us, but he was very sort of one of us. I crammed the honey bear into my backpack and took him by the shirtsleeve. “You need to come with me now. I am not even kidding.”

  And I wasn’t. I mean, the last thing I needed was other magical things going on in this school. That’s how you get things traced back to you and then all your secrets come out. Henny eyed me as I pulled Leo out of the room but I mouthed “need privacy” at her and she nodded warily in response.

  For his part, Leo looked rather entertained to be pulled somewhere. I mean, he’s apparently one of the top football guys and all. So I expect he mostly gets girls hanging on him and not girls ordering him around. But I wasn’t here to hang on him. I wanted to find out how much he knew.

  I dragged him all the way out to the new food carts at the corner of the high school lot. It was chilly enough that the picnic tables weren’t crowded, even though it was lunchtime. I found one off to the side that was only partly covered with the remains of somebody’s lunch and sat down. “Okay,” I said. “Spill.”

  He was looking all tough now. “I don’t have anything to spill.” He nodded at a couple passing football players. “Hey. Hey.”

  Urggh. Not this act. “You mean, you don’t know who I am or why you should trust me.”

  He shrugged, still looking around.

  I hunched over. “Look,” I commanded him. “I’m on your side. I’m not one myself. But I know more about this stuff than you do. Witches. Shifters. Spells. For starters, I mean, you were googling it? You weren’t even on WitchNet.”

  “WitchNet?” He laughed.

  “Hey, I didn’t name it,” I said. “Do you want help with this thing or not?”

  The football players drifted off and we were momentarily alone. Leo dropped the tough act and looked at me intently. “Cam,” he said. “I know you know where a frog’s thorax is and stuff. But why do you think you can help me on this? I mean, if there was anything to help me on. Which there isn’t.”

  Ah, boys. You had to show them for them to believe anything.

  I pulled the unicorn sanitizer from my backpack and spritzed the noodle-covered table. The anime stars flashed and popped. The noodles vanished. The table lost its graffiti.

  “Wow, that’s, uh…” said Leo.

  “Really clean?”

  “A really nerdy spell.” But he was grinning—making it an in-joke between us. “Kidding. I’m impressed.”

  “I should get something cooler to prove my skills,” I said.

  “Can I see?” He held his hand out for the bottle, and then suddenly pulled his hands away. There was another jock stopping by our table—this one accompanied by a certain cheerleader I knew all too well. “Hey, Parker,” Leo said casually. “Sparkle.”

  My best childhood friend barely nodded at me. I had half-hoped that everything that had happened on Halloween would make her behave in a more friendly way to me, but apparently not.

  “Ready for the game this Friday?” said Parker.

  “You know it,” said Leo.

  The guys high-fived and finally Parker and Sparkle wandered off.

  Leo leaned across the table. “You don’t have to show me anything else,” he said. “I believe you. I mean, I’m already primed to anyway.”

  “After whatever has recently happened to you,” I hazarded. Now we were getting somewhere. The November wind was brisk around the table. I pulled on my jacket and looked for my hair wrap. “Go on.”

  “I didn’t know I was a … a shifter,” he said. “It just happened one night. I was out alone and this noise startled me. And…” He looked embarrassed. “Well, this makes me sound jumpy. I mean, I know I’m this big tough football player and all.”

  “Clearly,” I said. He did in fact have very broad shoulders.

  “But when I jumped and turned around … suddenly I was a rabbit.”

  I choked back a laugh. “And then what?”

  “Well, it wasn’t anyone. Some friends from the football team. So naturally I ran—”

  “Like a rabbit.…”

  He threw me a dirty look.

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “I ran all the way home. I didn’t even know I was a rabbit at first, you know. I was low to the ground and scared out of my wits, which is I guess how rabbits feel most of the time. By the time I got home I was exhausted. Rabbits aren’t made for endurance running. So I was hopping around my yard and I started to think that, however unlikely it was, I must be a rabbit. And then I wondered how I was going to—”

  “Not be a rabbit.”

  “Yeah. And of course my heart’s going a million miles a minute, not just from the initial scare but now the idea that I might be—”

  “Stuck. As a rabbit.”

  “If you don’t mind not mentioning it so much, that would be awesome.”

  “I’m sorry. So what happened?”

  “So finally I calmed down. And I thought hard about how tall I wa
s supposed to be and how broad I was supposed to be.…”

  “Yes, I do see that.”

  “And how calm I was supposed to be and then I was suddenly me again.”

  “Did you have all your clothes?”

  He looked at me like you did not just ask that, and I grinned. It was awesome feeling like I had the upper hand on a football player.

  “Not a stitch,” he admitted.

  “So … is it just rabbits then?” I said. “Maybe you’re some kind of were-rabbit?”

  “Once and for all, please stop mentioning rabbits. I am not a were-rabbit. Or a were-anything. At least not as far as I can tell. Because I started turning into other things too.”

  “Like a hare,” I mused. “Or a bunny.…”

  “I’m going to bunny you in a moment.”

  “So what did you turn into?”

  “Well. I was feeling sort of … placid one day and I suddenly became a cow.”

  “This is amazing. Go on.”

  “And then there was a little tickle in my throat.…”

  “And you became a horse.”

  “No, a giraffe. Are you taking this seriously?”

  “I take everything seriously.”

  “Well, so then I started worrying about the football game.”

  “Where you charge down like a young lion, or a bull, or—”

  “Exactly. I don’t want to be thrown into jail for goring somebody. I want to finish my senior year and go to college.”

  “You could always be the mascot.”

  He stood up. “That’s one crack too far,” he said. He was very tall.

  I stood up, too. “Gallows humor,” I said. “I can keep apologizing for it but really it’s the only way I can cope with the wicked witch some days.”

  “Wicked witch?”

  “You told me your secret, I’m telling you mine,” I said. “We’ll be even. It’s not just a few fancy tricks with a squirt bottle. I actually live with a wicked witch, and I’m training to be one, too, except not the wicked part.”

  “Is that for real?”

  “Is the rabbit part for real?”

  He sat back down. He looked excited. “So maybe you can help me,” he said. “I want to stop it.”

  “I’ll ask,” I said. “But I don’t know if you can stop it. Maybe you can learn to control it.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “But can’t you ask your parents? Surely this trait didn’t come out of nowhere. Not like the frog with no gallbladder.”

  He shook his head. “I’m adopted,” he said. “I’ve got two dads.”

  “Well, was it a closed adoption or whatever it’s called?” I said. “Don’t your dads know where you came from?”

  He shook his head. “From what they’ve said, they wanted a kid, but at the time no one would adopt to them through the official process. My mother was the friend of a friend. They only met her a couple weeks before I was born. I gather she was maybe here illegally, or she was a refugee, or something, I don’t know. It was all very hush-hush but she said she couldn’t keep me safe, and she would rather see me safe than with her.”

  “How thrilling,” I said. “Like a spy novel.”

  “Well, I wish it were a little less thrilling and more mundane,” he said. “I love my dads, wouldn’t trade them for anything, don’t get me wrong. But they’ve said a million times that if my mother had been able to stay in my life, they would have been happy to include her. She could have visited me whenever she wanted. And I know she wanted to. But she … couldn’t.”

  “Do you think that her fleeing is related to you being a shifter?” I said.

  He nodded. “I am definitely starting to wonder. Occam’s razor and all that.”

  “Occam … that was just on a biology handout.”

  “The simplest explanation is usually right,” he reminded me. “My birth mother disappears under weird circumstances. I am a weird circumstance. Ergo.”

  “They must be related.” Frankly, the weirder circumstance was that he remembered some biology terminology that I didn’t.

  “So that’s when I started coming to the computer lab every day. I thought maybe I could do some research on any leads to my mother, as well as on this whole shapeshifting thing. I didn’t want to do it at home in case my dads saw what I was doing. I don’t want to hurt them, plus, I’m reasonably sure they don’t know about the whole shifter business. I mean, none of the ‘so you’re a man now’ talks we’ve had exactly included ‘and by the way, if you start growing a bunny tail you will tell us, right?’”

  “Wow,” I said. “Wow.” I sat back, trying to process all of this.

  “So you can help me?”

  I nodded. “I don’t know how, but I’ll try,” I said. Add him to the list of students I was already helping this week. Henny, and now—oh, wait. Henny’s love potion. I had completely forgotten.

  I looked at Leo—innocent, quarterback, bunny Leo. Now that I knew him, it seemed harder to slip him the dose. “I guess I forgot.…” I said, hesitating.

  “The honey,” said Leo, snapping his fingers. “Do you want to do that now?”

  I pulled up my phone to check the time. “I, um. I would have to make notes. And sit with you for ten minutes to check for allergic reactions. And gee, look at that! The bell’s going to ring for the end of lunch in two minutes.”

  “After school then?” he offered. “It’s the least I can do if you’re going to help me with my shifting problem.”

  “After school,” I said, thus continuing my exceptionally ethical method of pushing complicated problems out to let future Cam deal with them. “It’s a plan.”

  * * *

  I went to fourth-hour American history, aka the class where we watch bad videos and I think about anything else I want. Today’s topic: Good Witches, Love Potions, and the Blurry Lines Between! Scintillating stuff.

  The problem was that I needed to give the love potion to Leo, but I still wasn’t sure I should. My friends and family weren’t helping, either—Sarmine obviously considered this to be a bend-over-backward, overly considerate sort of potion, and Jenah thought love potions were funny. Finally, after much thought, I pulled out my ethics list and added to it.

  Good Witch Ethics

  1. Don’t use animal parts in spells.

  2. Don’t cast bad spells on good people for no reason.

  I sighed. It was pretty clear to me that what I wanted was a way to make slipping Leo a dose of the Possibilities potion okay. It wasn’t a bad spell—right? There was a reason—right?

  Making a list I was okay with was going to be harder than I had thought.

  * * *

  I was near the end of fifth-hour AP biology—and yes, Leo was correct that he was in that class with me, way in the back—when a student knocked and entered with a note for the teacher.

  Ms. Pool motioned me to the front and handed me the note. “The nurse’s office needs you.” She must have seen my confused expression, because then she patted my shoulder, with the awkward air of someone who is not sure if shoulder-patting is the correct social protocol. “Your locker mate had a fall.”

  I hurried out of the room, worry and anger flooding me. There was no doubt in my mind now that Jenah was one of the victims. One of those horrible witches had done something to her. But what?

  I opened the note, searching for more information. The note asked me to fetch Jenah’s jacket and phone from our locker so she could call her mom to get her. I changed course, confused now. One, Jenah never left her phone in her locker, and two, it was her dad who had the job where he could come pick her up.

  I’m only a little slow on the uptake, so by the time I had halfheartedly searched our locker I had realized it was a ruse. Jenah wanted to tell me something. This was code.

  But even if fetching me was a ruse, Jenah wouldn’t be in the nurse’s office without something having happened to her. I jogged to the nurse’s office, pulling out my own phone for a prop. Who was her wit
ch? I would be crushed if Sarmine could do such a thing to my best friend. I wasn’t going to consider that. Was it Valda? Malkin?

  I rounded the corner into the nurse’s room to find Jenah sitting on the bed with her leg elevated. Several industrial-sized bandages were taped up and down her left shin, her ankle was taped, and she still wore her wrist brace from that morning. But her eyes were alert and she was here.

  “Ohmigod, Jenah,” I said. “What happened?”

  “I twisted my ankle,” Jenah said sadly. “It hurts to walk.” She turned puppy-dog eyes on me and my prop phone. “Thanks for getting my phone. I can’t remember Mom’s number.” I handed it over to her and watched her pretend to text somebody. A few seconds later she announced, “She’s coming right now.”

  The nurse signed her out and agreed I could help her to the front steps. I eyed Jenah suspiciously as we left the office. She really did look banged up, but there was something more going on. She balled her bloodied tights into her jacket pocket as we limped down the corridor. The hallway was strangely quiet between classes. I could hear the squeak of our shoes.

  Jenah leaned into my ear. “Is one of the witches short and kind of frumpy? Smokes?”

  Valda. I nodded.

  “Word from the Granola Crowd is there’s a new lunch lady this week who smells like an ashtray. She started yesterday.”

  “Right when you got bowled over by that bike,” I said. The too-quiet hallway magnified our words.

  “And today at lunch, I almost slipped on some water that appeared out of nowhere. I didn’t think about it at the time. But then, I was at the top of the stairs, right before fifth hour. And this time—the puddle got me.”

  “I am so sorry, Jenah,” I said quietly as I helped her limp down the hall. “This is all my fault.”

  But she was beaming. “Ohmigod,” she said. “This means I really get to help you fight witches. I really am in the thick of this.”

  “May I remind you that witches aren’t all rainbows and butterflies?” I said to her. “Look at your ankle.”

  In my ear she said, “Acting skills. So I could tell you what I saw. You don’t have a phone for me to text you.”