They were, in fact, impressive acting skills. She wasn’t overdoing it. But the rest of her scrapes weren’t faked. “You could have been seriously hurt.”
“I know how to pratfall,” she said in a wounded tone. “I really did slip, but the rest was for maximum effect. Playing to the crowd. Think of the emotional capital you can accrue from worried people remembering how much they’d miss you if you weren’t around. Not to mention getting a couple hours off school.” She stopped next to the front door. “Hang on, let me get out my actual phone to text Dad.”
I let her lean on my shoulder while she retrieved it. There was a glass display box next to the front door where Mrs. N rotated people’s artworks in and out. I wondered if Esmerelda would put up everyone’s drawings of her in her pink bikini.
“This is really the best thing for you, Cam,” Jenah said.
“Why?”
“Because you can count on me not to get depressed about it. I’ll keep an eye out for Valda—I’ll even tackle her if I get the chance—but it would take more than a flight of stairs to get me down. There’s no way I’ll contribute to your losing.”
“Unless Valda decides to redouble her efforts,” I said. There didn’t seem to be any pink bikini drawings in the display. They were all line drawings of faces and bodies, most of them startlingly ugly. But somehow … familiar?
Jenah leaned forward. “Do you think she’d try to murder me?” There was a little too much glee in her voice.
“Jenah,” I said slowly. “Do these drawings look like anyone we know?”
She peered in. “It looks like they were practicing caricatures,” she said. “Of … Ohmigod, these are all Henny.”
They were, unmistakably, Hennys. A whole case full of Hennys, her features wildly distorted, each drawing uglier than the last.
“Forget Valda,” Jenah said, her fists balling. “I’m going to bring down Esmerelda.”
* * *
After school, I grabbed my jacket and backpack and went straight to the food carts to meet up with Leo. Hopefully this wouldn’t take too long—I still had the witch’s afternoon chores to do. He was not there yet, so I sat down at our sparkly clean table and updated my logic puzzle list.
WITCHES
VICTIMS
HOW TO MAKE THEM HAPPY
Esmerelda
Henny
Love potion (Is this ethical?)
Valda
Jenah
Just keep her from getting killed
Malkin
Caden
Car fixed; stay on lookout
Sarmine
(not S or E)
Caden
?? Fix his car?
If Valda had Jenah, then Malkin must have Caden. Maybe that’s why that windstorm had blown through the pizza place. She had been there, trying to do something to him. Except—ooh. I straightened up. Maybe my presence had stopped her. It seemed unlikely, but honestly, I could use every drop of encouragement. I smoothed out the creases on the paper, pondering the final blank. Sarmine had agreed to help me win—did that mean she was ignoring her student or actively helping them? I couldn’t imagine her up at the school, helping someone with their Spanish homework. She was bad enough at helping me with witch things—oh. Oh, wait. What if Sarmine had me?
I toyed with this idea. Malkin could well have put me in that deck of cards. It might even explain why Sarmine was helping me in the mornings. And probably, knowing Sarmine, helping me with a double-edged sword—if I stopped following her directions, she wouldn’t hesitate to bring me down and win the game after all.
The wind teased around its corners, trying to take my paper. I pressed it down and wrote my name next to Sarmine, with a big question mark. Should I flat-out ask her? But no, if she really did have me, then I now knew something that she didn’t know I knew, which would make me one up on her. Or something like that.
True Witchery was confusing.
I glanced around. Still no Leo. Maybe I could put the love potion ethics question off a little longer.…
A tall, clean-cut guy in a letterman jacket sat down across from me. It was a shame our colors were forest green and orange, I thought, but he wore it well.
“You appeared out of nowhere,” I said. I had half-thought Leo would change his mind and ditch me—I mean, c’mon, he was a popular guy and I was a liability who knew his most embarrassing secret—but there he was there at the cleanest table on the planet, smiling and waiting for me to give him a love potion.
“Like a panther,” Leo agreed. “Science project. Lay it on me.”
I took out the honey bear.
I measured one tablespoon onto a plastic spoon. He held out his hand—but I could not move mine.
Think of Henny, who must have had the worst day imaginable, I told myself. Winning Leo would convince her Esmerelda was wrong.
It’ll wear off quickly.
It won’t make him do anything.
But no. I couldn’t go any further.
I kept saying I wasn’t going to be like the witches. Well, here was my test. This was the slippery slope. It was one thing to try to stop the malice that the wicked witches were working. It was another to perform a spell on somebody without asking them first, no matter how great an idea it seemed to be. They should get the choice to say no.
“I’m going to tell you something,” I said.
“Yes?”
“It’s embarrassing. I think I need a bubble tea to get through it.”
“We can do that.”
I stuck the spoon back in the honey, shouldered my pack, and we walked twenty feet to the bubble tea cart. I got mango, and he got kiwi. I was getting out my ten when Leo handed over a credit card, saying casually, “My treat.”
“I did not know football players drank bubble tea,” I said.
“That is one of the many things that you don’t know about me.”
“You forget, I already know some of the many things.”
“I suppose you do.”
We took the bubble teas back to our clean table. I immediately put several tapioca bubbles in my mouth in order to avoid talking.
He watched me in silence. “So what’s the embarrassing thing,” he said finally, “and can it possibly be worse than mine?”
Chew and swallow.
Have to confess sometime.
“I was going to give you a love potion,” I said.
He stared at me blankly and I realized what was going through his head.
“Oh god, no, not for me,” I said quickly, cheeks reddening. “I like someone else. I do not need any love triangles in my life.”
“Ah, well, my loss,” he said easily.
I didn’t know what that meant so I sailed on. The worst was out now. “The embarrassing thing was that I was going to do it at all. Or that I’m capable of doing it, possibly. That’s also kind of weird.”
He leaned in. “So who asked you to give me a love potion?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “Witch-client confidentiality. But I can tell you it’s not a real love potion, if that makes you feel better.”
“Should it?”
“It’s like a … being Open to Possibilities potion,” I said. “So you’ll be more aware if potential crushes or crushees are around you. You’ll consider shaking up your love life.”
“And how do you know I don’t already have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?” he said. “Might be hard on them.”
“Do you?”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s been tough to think about my love life when I’ve been dealing with all this … shifting.”
“Well, I don’t think it would mess up what you already have going on,” I said. “I read through all the witch’s notes on it and it’s basically an opening up to possibility. So if you already love—er, like someone, you’ll probably just go on liking them.”
Leo wrapped his hands around his knee and leaned back, considering. He was really a good-looking guy. The moody, overcast light bathed h
is high cheekbones, his heavy brows. I could see why Henny liked him, or at least liked looking at him. “You must have a pretty good reason for trying to help this person who likes me,” he said.
“I didn’t actually know her before this week,” I said honestly. “But let’s just say that somebody is deliberately trying to ruin her life. And I’m against that sort of thing.”
He nodded. “You’re a helping person. I like that.” There was silence for a minute, and then he said, “I tell you what. I’ll take your spoonful of honey.”
“You will?”
“If you take one, too.”
6
A Lovelie Spell, Take Two
I gulped. This seemed like one of those crazy romantic-comedy pacts that get people into deep trouble. “Why me?”
Leo looked at me seriously. “Should you be messing with people’s lives without knowing what you’re doing?”
I swallowed. “No,” I said in a meek voice.
He didn’t say anything after that, just kept watching me while I realized that now was my moment to toughen up, be brave, be ethical, be a good person, et cet, et cet. It was rather odd that I had reached a turning point where taking a love potion would prove my morality, but clearly that is where we were.
“I will,” I said.
I retrieved a second plastic spoon from the food carts and measured us each a spoonful.
“Bottoms up,” he said.
The honey was rich and flowered on my tongue. It tasted the way I imagine mead tastes when I read about it in books. Like it was honey, but there was something else there, too, the potion part, making me feel … well, quite specifically, like I was a little more open to possibilities. I don’t think I would have noticed it if I hadn’t been expecting it—I probably would have thought exactly what Leo said, which is—
“That is some darn good honey.”
He looked at me, really looked at me, and for the first time he laughed. Just a smirk-snort thing, like he was pleased with himself for noticing something. Something … appealing?
“Remember that this is the honey talking,” I cautioned him. “Nobody needs to be open for possibility right this very second.”
“Right,” he said. He put his face back into a serious expression. “Love potions are no joke.” The smile crept upward again.
I stood up from the picnic table before anything weird could happen. Well, weirder than love potions and bubble tea with a football player. “I’m going to go home and research your problem,” I said as I shouldered my backpack. “Find out a way to stop it.”
The smile vanished and he stood, too. “Don’t tell anyone yet,” he said. “I thought about it this afternoon and I’m not ready for more people to know.”
“Okay,” I said. “But it might be interfering with your life. I mean, you can’t keep worrying about what you’re gonna become whenever your emotions take over.”
“That’s why I’m nervous about the football game,” he admitted. “First one since this started happening. I mean, I sat one game out—pretended I had a pulled muscle. I can’t keep doing that.”
“It seems like it often happens through fear,” I mused.
“But not the only time. It’s just the most obvious trigger.”
“I wonder if we could—” I started, and then stopped cold. A dead, ominous hush had fallen on the parking lot. The wind was gone; the flag on top of the bubble tea cart was limp. “I don’t like this,” I said. It was the calm before the tornado, the flat before the implosion. Leo looked around with a wary expression.
Power. Near.
Malkin.
Somewhere. Moving closer. Any second now—
“Leo! Down!” I pushed him toward the picnic table. We dived under it right as the hurricane hit. It swept through the food cart area, ripping the banner off of the bubble tea cart, knocking over the tables, blowing the plastic chairs straight across the parking lot and slamming them into cars. Luckily the picnic table was bolted into concrete. I heard shrieks from other students and I shouted behind me at Leo, “I’m going out!”
If he responded, I didn’t hear him in the gale. I nudged out on my elbows, trying to get the spices from my backpack while staying somewhat protected. Branches cracked around me, sticks and leaves flew past. One pinch ginger, one pinch thyme … I didn’t have a bowl and match like Sarmine suggested, but I added a spritz of unicorn sanitizer to get everything well-mixed in my hand.
I knew my feeble spell would never stand up to Malkin, even with the unicorn-hair vodka.
That didn’t matter.
I touched the wand to my palm, closed my eyes, and licked the ginger-thyme-unicorn sanitizer off of my hand. Ginger and thyme do not go well together, and the burn of the few drops of alcohol didn’t help. Still. Focus on the power, Cam. Imagine it filling you. You are ten feet tall. You are the equal of Malkin.
“Give up,” I shouted, and my voice whipped away in the wind.
Big words coming from me. I really wasn’t sure if my tiny spell would have any effect at all.
But a small, localized area around me calmed. It went from a hurricane to an everyday brisk wind. I hurried to where several students had fallen in the parking lot, bringing the calmer wind with me. Someone was flat on the ground, trapped under a tree branch. Was that Caden? As I neared the group, the other kids were able to stand, to brush themselves off and wipe the grit from their faces. One of the guys pulled the tree limb off of the guy on the ground, and he stood up, shaken.
It was not Caden.
I whirled—was he somewhere else around here? Had something worse happened to him?
But around us the rest of the winds were calming. I did not for one second believe my spell had done it. Malkin must be moving on.
The trees stood up again. The brittle leaves fluttered to the ground. My heart rate slowed as I looked around for Caden, and then—
Leo.
I ran back to the picnic table. He was not there. I whirled, seeking him in the devastation. No tall boy. No cow, either. No giraffe. No nothing. “Leo!” I shouted. But there was nothing, not even a flash of fluffy white tail.
* * *
What with the extra excitement, I just missed the bus. I ended up jogging the four miles home. Okay, so it’s mostly downhill. I was still pretty tired when I got home. Wulfie was out in the front yard, running back and forth and mostly being well behaved. Sarmine was inside, cooking her favorite beetroot lasagna for dinner. I collapsed on a bar stool and chugged a glass of water.
“You missed your stirring chores,” she told me over her shoulder. “I had to tend to the cauldron in the RV garage myself.”
“Bus woes,” I said.
“Your face is all scratched up. Did you get hit with something?”
“Witch woes.”
“Hey, crack the front door for Wulfie, will you?” she said. “He’s been out there a while.”
I went back and did that, then stopped to look at the thermometers on the coffee table. Malkin’s was a little down but not too terrible. Whatever Malkin had been trying to do to Caden at the food carts, she had missed. The rest were slightly above grade. Sarmine’s was quite buoyant, in fact. I felt a renewed sense of warmth toward my mother, despite the beetroot. She was playing me fair.
“Did you discover anyone yet?” said Sarmine.
I pulled out my list and smoothed it out on the counter. “Esmerelda—Henny. That’s the love potion girl.”
“Did you try out the love potion?”
“Yup, but I dunno if it works yet.”
Sarmine sniffed. “If you performed my spell correctly, than naturally it will work correctly.”
“I mean I don’t know if it’ll make him fall in love with Henny,” I explained. “Okay, and Valda’s got Jenah. That sucks, frankly, but on the other hand it’s better because Jenah knows what’s coming, so she can steel herself.”
“Well observed,” said Sarmine. She placed the lasagna in the oven and began cleaning up the kitchen. “Anyone
else?”
“Yeah, Malkin has this kid named Caden.”
“Oh?” said Sarmine, not turning around. “What did she do to him?”
“She disintegrated his car,” I said, and then the penny finally dropped. There were now at least three dead cars. Maybe more I hadn’t seen. That meant that Caden wasn’t necessarily the victim. And in point of fact, Caden had rebounded quite nicely from the first attempt, when he had been given a new car from his dad’s dealership. And if more and more cars were dying under mysterious circumstances … well, that would be awfully nice for a boy whose dad owned the biggest set of dealerships in town, wouldn’t it? I peered more closely at Sarmine’s thermometer, at the bubble bouncing near the top of the water. “You wouldn’t … you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“About what?” said Sarmine.
There was a screech from the street and then a howling noise.
Wulfie.
Sarmine ran for the door, her face ghastly white. I ran, too.
I got there first and flung open the door. Wulfie was on the other side of the street, running around in tight circles and howling mournfully at the sky. Our neighbor’s massive orange SUV had skidded to a halt in front of us. He leaned out the window, yelling at us. “Your dog just ran across the street, lady! He’d better not have scratched my paint.”
Sarmine drew herself up in righteous fury, but before she could utter a scathing rebuke, the man tore off down to the end of the block, honking at a kid on his bike to get out of the way. I hurried across the street to catch Wulfie.
The witch was shaking with anger. “That does it, that absolutely does it!”
“Sarmine,” I said warningly. But she was already stalking down our sidewalk to the street, presumably headed straight to our neighbor’s house.
“Aaaaggh,” I said coherently. Wulfie had stopped running in circles and had darted into some thornbushes. He was huddling in fear from the scare and from Sarmine’s anger. I tried coaxing him out, but he was not willing to budge. Finally I stuck my arms in, heedless of the thorns. I scooted him back into the house, where he scrabbled frantically at the floors and shed a million werewolf hairs all over everything. Sarmine would have a fit, but then Sarmine was the one who was off on a vengeance mission, heedless of anything else, as usual.
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