I Put a Spell on You

by Adam Selzer

  So, on the Tuesday morning when they’d be holding the written test, I started making notes right away, in a crisp new notebook, about everyone in the room. I’d be so busy investigating that I wasn’t even entering myself. I had more important work to do.

  “Good morning, class,” said Mrs. Boffin. Every morning she says “Good morning” as though she expects the class to respond by saying “Good morning, Mrs. Boffin” in unison, but we never do. Only Marianne, teacher’s pet extraordinaire, said “Good morning” back.

  Even I don’t know exactly how old Mrs. Boffin is. She’s older than middle-aged, but still not exactly old. She says things like “lovely” and “delightful,” never “cool” or “neat.” You’d never guess that such a sweet old lady would work for such a corrupt school system.

  “Now let’s all take our seats,” said Mrs. Boffin, even though everyone already had. “Before we start in on our usual activities, I’m sure you’re all aware that today is the sign-up for the all-school spelling bee. The first-place winner this year will receive a new dictionary and a seventy-five-dollar gift certificate to Hedekker’s Appliance Store.”

  Several people said “Oooh” sarcastically. You’d think that, since the bee was such a big deal, they’d come up with better prizes. Last year it was a gift certificate to a map store. But coming in first isn’t really that big of a deal—the important thing for most people was getting to districts. If you go to districts, you get treated like a celebrity around town.

  “Now, as you know, to qualify for the all-school bee, you’ll have to pass the written test today after school. I’ll now take the names of students who would like to sign up, and submit the list to the office. Who would like to sign up?”

  “Wait, we have to sign up just to take the written test?” I asked. “Why can’t we just show up for it?”

  “Because these are the rules,” said Mrs. Boffin.

  I’m a firm believer in rules, of course. Or I was, anyway. But right about then, I was starting to figure out that you have to question everything that seems wrong. Why did they need a list of kids who wanted to take the written test? I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I made a note of it. I was going to be making notes of EVERYTHING the school did that was suspicious. We hadn’t had to sign up like that last year.

  Mrs. Boffin looked out across the room at all of the students holding up their hands. Practically everyone was signing up except for me. “We’ll start at the back of the room,” she said, setting the sign-up sheet on her desk. “Amber Hexam?”

  Amber was crossing her arms over her chest, rocking back and forth, and chanting something under her breath. Amber considers herself to be pretty good at occult-type stuff, like casting spells, and I guessed she was trying to curse the other kids who were signing up for the bee. There are no rules against doing that, though, so I let it slide. And it’s not like I’ve ever seen anything to make me think she could really get any spells to work, anyway.

  She got up, made her way to the front of the room, wiggled her fingers in front of her face for a second, spun around three times, then wrote her name on the sheet.

  “Jason Keyes?” Mrs. Boffin called.

  Jason “Skeleton” Keyes was wearing a shirt with the logo for a heavy-metal band on it and trying to look tough, like he did every other day. As far back as kindergarten, I’ve heard him brag about vandalizing school property, breaking things on purpose, and doing all sorts of weird things to scare old ladies, though he never actually did any of it. He was all talk. Deep down, he wasn’t that bad of a kid. In cop movies, cops would pick him out of the gang of bad kids and turn him around, I’ll bet.

  Jason shrugged his shoulders, stood up, and slowly lumbered toward Mrs. Boffin’s desk, where he signed the sheet. During the walk back to his desk, he leaned over to me and said, “I’ll give you ten bucks if you tell me how to break into the office and get the list.” I scowled at him, and he walked past.

  It was well known that the word list was kept somewhere in the office, but, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t that hard to get into the office after hours, and it isn’t that hard to find out which filing cabinet they keep the word list in. It isn’t even that hard to find out the combination to unlock it. After all, I’ve known it since third grade.

  “Jake Wells?”

  Jake got up, and a couple of kids called out, “Go, Chow, go!”

  Jake makes a pretty good living in the lunchroom as the Kid Who Will Eat Anything for a Dollar, which has earned him the nickname of Chow. He walked up to the front of the room, nervously put his name on the sheet, and sat back down. I wondered why he was bothering to enter—he never did very well in the “spelling practice” that we’d been having every day since winter vacation. He probably just wanted to get on TV.

  “Tony Ostanek?”

  Tony walked up without a word, signed up, and returned to his seat. He hated spelling. But I knew that his parents had promised him a new video game if he entered, and three of them if he won. I’d be watching him, too. He’d go to great lengths—even cheating, maybe—to get three new games.

  “Jennifer Van Den Berg?”

  Jennifer sat at her desk, keeping her hand in the air, but not standing up.

  “Jennifer?” Mrs. Boffin repeated. “You’re signing up, right?”

  Jennifer sighed. “I guess so,” she said, finally. And she walked up and signed the sheet.

  “Marianne Cleaver?”

  Marianne stood up and walked quickly to the front of the room to the sign-up sheet. She doesn’t swing her arms when she walks, which makes her look like some sort of android. Maybe she actually is an android. It would explain a lot of the unanswered questions that I have about her.

  As Mrs. Boffin slowly went through everyone else, I watched Jason as he leaned over toward Amber’s desk. They talked in class a lot—from their spot in the back of the room, they could get away with talking quite a bit without Mrs. Boffin hearing them. But I could hear them. And I knew that they had huge secret crushes on each other.

  “How’d you do in the class bee last year?” Jason asked Amber.

  “Not well,” she said. “But I didn’t know all of the spells that I know now. Or as many curses.”

  Then they started passing notes. They did that when they didn’t want kids around them—like me—to know what they were saying.

  In the front of the room, Mrs. Boffin was finally calling Harlan Sturr’s name.

  When you show up to class and see a live goat wandering the hallways, or find a couple of the doors to classrooms duct-taped shut, you can bet Harlan was involved. Most of his pranks are very small-time, like stealing chalk, or doing impressions of the teachers when they aren’t looking. Your basic class clown business. But every year Harlan has to sit at the desk closest to the teacher’s to keep him out of trouble. He didn’t even get up to sign up for the bee; he just leaned over to Mrs. Boffin’s desk and put his name down.

  Just as Mrs. Boffin was about to fold up the sign-up sheet and ask someone to deliver it to the office, there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she called.

  In the doorway stood Mrs. Rosemary and a kid in a blazer and tie. He had a bowl cut—the kind you normally see on five-year-olds.

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Boffin. “The new student! Please, come inside!”

  A new kid!

  He and Mrs. Rosemary stepped into the room, and every eye focused on the new kid. He was, hands down, the weirdest-looking kid I’d ever seen in person. Besides the blazer and the bowl cut, his face looked as though a five-hundred-pound safe had fallen on it, flattening all of his features, except for his lips, which stuck out from the rest of his face as though they were held out by invisible clothespins.

  “Good morning,” said Mrs. Rosemary. “Everyone, this is Mutual Scrivener. He’ll be joining your class.”

  “Welcome, Mutual,” said Mrs. Boffin. “What a wonderfully interesting name you have!”

  Mutual said nothing.

  �
�Well, Anita,” said Mrs. Boffin to Mrs. Rosemary, “since you’re here, I have the list of students who would like to take the written test ready. I was just about to give it to one of the students.”

  “Is that the list?” Mutual said, opening his mouth for the first time since setting foot in the room.

  “Why, yes it is,” said Mrs. Boffin. “I didn’t imagine you’d want to jump right into entering on your first day!”

  “I’d like to, please,” he said. I noticed his face scrunching up as Mrs. Boffin breathed on him with her coffee breath. Mrs. Boffin’s coffee breath can knock a kid out—everyone else knew to stand back when she was talking to them. She handed Mutual the list and the pen, and I watched as he carefully added his name to the last spot on the list.

  “Lovely!” said Mrs. Boffin. “Now, Mutual, would you like to tell the class a little bit about yourself?”

  “I would prefer not to, please,” said Mutual, quietly.

  “What a goober!” Tony said under his breath.

  “Wow,” I heard Jason mutter to Amber. “That kid may look like a geek, but he sure has guts to talk to a teacher like that!”

  Mrs. Boffin paused. “Well, that’s all right, too. It’s perfectly normal to be shy, especially on the first day. Why don’t you take your seat? You’ll be over there, next to Jason.”

  Mutual slowly moved over to the empty desk in the back of the room, and Jason did his best to look threatening. He made sure his T-shirt, which had the logo of the band Paranormal Execution above a picture of demons riding motorcycles, was clearly visible, and Mutual stared at it as though he’d never seen a demon on a motorcycle before.

  As he walked, I noticed that, in addition to a belt, he was wearing suspenders under his blazer. This meant that of all the kids in school, or maybe the state, he was probably the least likely to have his pants fall down. I wrote that down in capital letters. It was going to make it pretty hard to figure out what kind of underwear he wore, but I was going to have to find out. I knew that sort of thing about everyone else, of course, and there was no way I was going to let that kind of data go unrecorded on a kid this weird.

  A minute after he took his seat, Mrs. Boffin was talking about Christopher Columbus, and Mutual was staring at his desk, not taking notes or anything. I tried to look like I was taking notes about Columbus myself, but I was actually writing down everything I could about Mutual. Luckily for me, Amber and Jason did their best to get him talking.

  “Hey, kid,” Amber whispered at him. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

  Mutual shook his head, and Amber chuckled.

  “Well,” said Jason, “you’ll fit in pretty well back here. We don’t pay attention, either! You can talk if you want to. Boffin won’t be able to hear you if you aren’t too loud.”

  “Yeah,” said Amber. “She’s so old she can’t hear anything past the first couple of rows.”

  “Are you trying to corrupt me?” asked Mutual, still whispering.

  Jason and Amber laughed. “Corrupt you?” asked Jason, through giggles. “On your first day?”

  Mutual said nothing.

  “Why?” asked Jason. “Aren’t you corrupt already?”

  Mutual shrugged. I wondered what Mrs. Boffin was thinking, putting him right next to Jason. The kid was obviously an easy target.

  “Come on,” said Jason, who, I could tell, was trying to think of the best ways to freak the new kid out. “Haven’t you ever stolen all the chalk from a classroom?”

  Mutual shook his head. Jason hadn’t, either, really. Only Harlan really did that sort of thing. But I could tell from the shocked look on his face that Mutual believed that Jason had.

  “Really?” Amber whispered. “You mean you never stole anyone’s underwear and ran it up the flagpole?”

  Again, Mutual shook his head. Neither Jason nor Amber had ever actually done this, either, but, again, Mutual obviously believed they had. Jason tried to push it a step further.

  “Haven’t you ever even danced naked in a school cafeteria?” he asked.

  Mutual’s eyes got so wide that it was a miracle they didn’t fall into his lap. Again, he shook his head. Surely he didn’t believe that anyone had done that! Who was this kid? Had he just been living under a rock all his life?

  “Really?” Amber laughed. “Everyone’s done that! It’s part of growing up.”

  “Well,” said Jason, giggling, “if you need to be corrupted, we’ll see to it. But you’ve got a long, long way to go.”

  For the first time since he’d been in the class, Mutual smiled a little.

  4

  Jason—

  Writing this down so Mutual can’t hear you. What do you think of him?

  —Amber

  A—

  I dunno. Poor kid. His parents make him get all dressed up just to go to school!

  Seems like he doesn’t get out much. Five bucks says he’s never heard a metal song in his life.

  —J

  Yeah, probably not. Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us. I’ll cast a spell for luck.

  —A

  Go for it! Ah, nothing like a fresh young mind to corrupt. I should be a teacher!

  —J

  You, a teacher? Hahahahahahaha.

  —A

  You think he’s just here so he can be in the bee?

  —J

  Probably. I’ll bet he’s homeschooled or something.

  —A

  They have to let homeschooled kids compete in the bee if they want to. It’s in the rule book. I’ll ask him if he knows that later on.

  —J

  5

  HARLAN

  defenestrate—verb. To throw someone or something out of a window. On particularly dull days, Jason and Amber would tell people that they were plotting to defenestrate the teacher.

  Okay, Chrissie. I have one secret that I’ll bet you don’t know about. Unless you’ve been inside my bedroom, digging through my stuff.

  Here it goes:

  I spend a lot of time planning my own funeral. I have five whole pages’ worth of plans for it.

  Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m perfectly healthy and all that. Heck, if I don’t get hit by a car or something, I’ll probably live to a ripe old age. My great-grandpa is ninety, you know. And by the time I get that old, they’ll probably have a cure for old age, right?

  But it still scares the heck out of me to think that I’ll have to die sooner or later. I’ve never told this to anyone—class clowns aren’t supposed to think of morbid stuff like that. But once you’re dead, that’s it. You’ve played your last joke. Your last chance to be remembered is gone. Unless you have a really awesome funeral, like I’m going to.

  My funeral is going to have jugglers and clowns and a laser light show. And I’m going to have a tombstone with my face carved on it, and when people walk by, it’ll spit water out at them. That way I’ll be able to keep playing jokes on people for years after I’m dead, and when people get spit at, they’ll go, “Who was this Harlan Sturr guy?” and go try to find out about me. Whenever I start thinking about death, it always cheers me up to think about my funeral and my tombstone (which, by the way, will say, “Here lies Harlan Sturr. Please don’t pee on him”).

  Also, I may or may not be buried in the middle of a busy street. I haven’t decided yet. I think it would be kind of cool to be right under a traffic light—don’t ask me why, but I do. And I want to see if my service in the Rubber Band War to End All Rubber Band Wars, the Great November Food Fight, and the Three-Bean Casserole War can get me a spot in the veterans’ cemetery first.

  I was scared about finishing sixth grade for a lot of the same reasons. I’d pulled some good pranks in my day, but I didn’t think I’d pulled any pranks that people were really going to remember. I mean, the goat thing was great, but they remembered the goat, not me.

  That was what I was thinking when I taped all the doors shut that one time—I thought it was the sort of thing people would remember. But t
hey didn’t. They’d gotten them opened by the time most people got to school. And I couldn’t take credit for it without getting in trouble. (I’m only saying it was me NOW because you promised I wouldn’t get in trouble for it—and I’d better not!)

  So none of my pranks had made me a legend. Not the goat. Not the doors. Not the Rubber Band War to End All Rubber Band Wars. I still hadn’t really left my mark.

  Not like Johnny Dean.

  I’m sure you know about him. Johnny Dean was in sixth grade back when we were in preschool—I guess he’s in college by now. But in sixth grade, when Principal Floren brought his dog to school, Johnny somehow managed to paint the dog purple, and brought it out onstage right in the middle of the assembly where everyone was watching the Good Times Gang, those singers that Floren likes so much. Even now, every kindergartner still hears about Johnny Dean. The guy’s a legend.

  And it used to depress me to think that soon I’d leave Gordon Liddy behind and most people a grade or two below me would forget that I was ever here. But then I came up with a plan for the all-school spelling bee. If I could pull it off, I’d go down in school history for sure. All I had to do was get to the top five in the bee.

  After school on Tuesday, the written test only took about five minutes. It was a pretty easy—everyone in class who took it passed. But, anyway, you wanted me to talk about the stuff I thought was unusual at the written test, right?

  Well, for one thing, most of the words on it were words we’ve had in regular spelling tests already this year. It’s almost like they wanted to make sure that all of the sixth graders would qualify. All of them did, after all. Even Jake. And I thought it was kind of weird that they even needed a list of who was taking it to start with. They didn’t do that last year.