I Put a Spell on You

by Adam Selzer

  Sorry, Chrissie, but you have to admit that you’re a sucker for secrets.

  “What kind of secret?” she asked.

  “Follow me around behind the school,” I said. “I’ll tell you there.”

  We wandered around behind the school, past the playground, and into this little wooded area that separated the playground from the backyards of a couple of houses. I sat down against a tree, and she sat in front of me, holding out her notebook.

  “What’s the big secret?” Chrissie asked.

  “Well,” I said, slowly, “I have a plan for the spelling bee. And I need your help.”

  “Go on,” Chrissie said. She was writing it all down.

  “Um.” I paused. I had planned all of this out, but actually saying it was sort of different. “It’s like…well, do you remember when we were in kindergarten?”

  Chrissie nodded. “Of course.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And I remember that, my first week there, a bunch of second graders told me about Johnny Dean.”

  “Everyone knows about Johnny Dean,” Chrissie said. “The kid who painted Checkers purple. I’m not helping you kidnap Floren’s dog, though.”

  “I know,” I said. “There’s no way I’d get away with that now. I mean, ever since the Rubber Band War to End All Rubber Band Wars, the staff hasn’t trusted me a bit. But I have bigger plans. Normally you’d be the last person I’d tell about plans ahead of time, but I think you’re the only one who can really help.”

  “You should have been in a lot more trouble for that,” she said. “Jake got in more trouble than you did, you know?”

  “Did he really?” I said. “I didn’t know. Should I say something to Floren about it?”

  I really didn’t know Jake had been in trouble over the rubber band war. He wasn’t even involved in it!

  “No point,” said Chrissie. “He won’t get you in trouble over anything this close to the bee.”

  I made up my mind to apologize to Jake next time I saw him.

  “Anyway,” I said, “this is my last semester here. I’ve pulled some good jokes and all of that, but nothing that anyone’s going to tell the kindergartners about next year, let alone three or four years from now. The bee is my last chance to really leave my mark.”

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “First of all, I’m going to break into the top five of the bee.”

  “So you can go to districts?”

  “Nah. I just want to make the top five so that everyone will be paying attention. Every kid knows that their teachers are going to make them look up every word that comes up at the end of the bee, right? So I’ll have everyone’s undivided attention.”

  “So what do you want to do?” asked Chrissie.

  “When it gets to be my turn, I’m going to step to the microphone and burp.”

  “Burp?”

  “Yep.” I smiled proudly. “Anyone can burp on command, but I’ve been practicing. I can let out a really, really good belch whenever I want. Wanna see?”

  “No,” she said. “I believe you. That’s your whole plan? You’re going to burp?”

  “Not just any burp—a belch to end all belches.”

  “And what do I have to do with it?”

  “You won’t be in the bee. You’ll be out in the audience. And they trust you. Do you think you can manage to sit behind the sound booth?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll give you a signal right before I burp, and you can jump in and turn up the volume on the microphone. I can get a good reaction just by burping into the mike, but if the volume is turned way up…I can shake the windows and rattle the walls. People will remember it forever! And it’ll be on TV, so the whole TOWN will see it! And then the clip will spread all over the world, I’ll bet!”

  She stared at me for a minute.

  “How do you know I’m not going to turn you in for this?” she asked.

  “I thought of that,” I said. “The way I see it, you can’t turn me in for planning to burp. There’s no rule against it. I checked the school rule books and the official spelling bee rules, and there’s not one thing about burping in either of them. The worst you could do is spoil the surprise.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  I really did look that up. It’s true. There’s no way you can get in trouble for suspicion of planning to belch, even if you’re planning a really, really big one. If you actually do belch over and over and over again, they might be able to get you for disrupting the class, but that’s about it. This is the best kind of prank—the kind you can’t actually get in trouble for. All the best class clowns do their homework. That’s how I knew that I wouldn’t get in trouble for bringing a goat to school—there was no rule against it.

  But it was still a risk. Just because there isn’t a rule saying you can’t do something doesn’t mean they won’t punish you anyway. Sometimes they make rules up as they go along. You know that song “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? It says that the lamb “followed her to school one day, which was against the rules.” I’ll bet anything there wasn’t actually a rule on the books about letting a lamb follow you to school, but Mary still got in trouble. She might as well have brought a big sheep to school instead.

  Anyway, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t try to go after me for a single belch. Even a big one. And the worst they could possibly give me was detention until I was out of Gordon Liddy Community School. That was only a few months. Being a legend is worth that kind of time.

  “So what do you say? Can you help me out?”

  Chrissie looked at the ground for a couple of seconds while she thought it over.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  I knew I was asking a lot of her. She was all about law and order, and I was asking her to help really cause a disruption. It wasn’t her style. I should have offered her cash or something.

  So that’s what really happened. I know someone told the school board they saw us having a secret meeting that day, and that they thought I was asking Chrissie to help me cheat. But that’s just not true. All I was doing was asking her to help me become a legend.

  10

  MUTUAL

  rhapsodic—adjective. Joyfully enthusiastic or ecstatic. Members of the Good Times Gang sang in rhapsodic tones about nutrition.

  By Thursday, my third day at Gordon Liddy Community School, my curiosity as to what a band of demons on motorcycles would sound like was killing me. I assumed that they would be loud, of course, but that was all I could imagine. Perhaps they screamed. Perhaps they made you want to do bad things. My parents always said that rock music tricked people into setting fires.

  That morning, Mother came in to wake me up at seven o’clock, but I had already been awake for hours. While I ate my breakfast, she had me do several words, including “jasmine,” “vestibule,” “defenestration,” and “sarsaparilla.” I spelled them all correctly, of course, but I was not thinking of spelling.

  When I first arrived in class that morning, nobody else was there. This was quite possibly the first time I had ever been in a room outside my house all by myself, but I did not think much about that at the time. I simply took my seat and began to study my dictionary.

  A minute later, Marianne Cleaver entered the room.

  “Good morning, Marianne,” I said.

  She paused at her desk and stared at me. “No time to talk,” she said. “Time spent talking is time wasted.”

  “Do you study a lot at home?” I asked.

  She pulled a very large dictionary out of her backpack. “More than you do, I’ll bet,” she said. “If you think you’re going to beat me, you’ve got another think coming, Mutual Scrivener. You call that a dictionary?”

  She pointed to the book on my desk, and I nodded.

  “Well,” she snorted, “you’ll never be able to learn all the words you need to know out of a flimsy little thing like that! What is it, a picture dictionary for second graders?”

  “It is just a regular dictio
nary,” I said. “Just like any other.”

  She held hers up triumphantly. “No,” she said, “this is a regular dictionary. Over three thousand pages. You’re dead meat at the bee!”

  And she sat down and began to study.

  I was a bit doubtful as to my parents’ claims that all of the other students were corrupt, but it was certainly true in Marianne Cleaver’s case.

  Slowly, the other students began to arrive. Jennifer came in, holding a large book of Shakespeare plays. I tried to say hello to her, but no words came out.

  Jason and Amber came in at the same time, and sat down in the seats next to mine.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hey, man,” Jason said. “How’s it going?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Getting any more corrupt?” Amber asked. She may have been making fun of me, in a way, but she was being much more pleasant than Marianne had been.

  “Not yet,” I said. I looked at Jason’s shirt, which, like his shirt from the day before, had the logo for Paranormal Execution, only this time it was over a picture of a man in a hooded cloak holding a lantern. I decided that it could not hurt to learn more about the music. The man with the lantern did not look evil, after all. He looked wise.

  And I decided that, if I wanted to be attractive to people like Jennifer, I would have to learn more of the outside world. I knew nothing of popular culture.

  “Would it be too much trouble,” I asked, “if I were to ask you to let me hear Paranormal Execution?”

  Jason smiled. “You wanna hear some metal?” he asked.

  “I would like to,” I said. “But only if it will not make me want to start fires or kill my parents.”

  Amber laughed. “Who told you it would do that?” she asked.

  “My parents,” I told her.

  She laughed again. “You’d have to be pretty unstable to start with to let a song convince you to kill someone.”

  “Are the men who sing metal popular with girls?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Jason said. “Rock singers can be the ugliest, dumbest guys on the planet, and they’ll still get all the girls.”

  “I see,” I said. “But it will not MAKE me stupid, right?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jason said. “Just follow us at recess.” He patted his backpack, which I suppose meant that it contained some of the music. “And we’ll have you headbanging in no time.”

  “Will it hurt?” I asked.

  Jason and Amber laughed, and Jason shook his head. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be fine. We won’t let you get hurt.”

  It was nice to have friends looking out for my welfare, even if they were corrupt.

  When recess finally arrived, I followed Jason and Amber outside. Jason took his backpack along, and they led me over to an area around the corner of the school where no one from the playground could see us. I had rarely been so nervous in my life.

  “Are we allowed to be here?” I asked. “There is no adult supervision!”

  “It’s fine,” said Jason, smiling.

  I noticed a cigarette butt sitting on the ground. “Someone has been smoking here,” I said.

  “It’s probably one of the teachers,” said Amber. “Most of them smoke.”

  My parents would certainly not be surprised to hear this.

  “Anyway,” said Jason, pulling something out of his backpack. “We’ll start you off on a slow one. Put these on.”

  He handed me a pair of headphones, and I put them onto my head.

  “Not too loud, please,” I said.

  He smiled. He pushed a button on a little machine that the headphones were connected to, and a second later there was a tremendous noise in my ears, so loud and scary that I nearly threw the headphones from my head.

  Then it slowed down, so that for just a second there was a single electrical guitar playing, just like a campfire song, but then the noisier instruments started again, and a voice started singing something about infinity.

  I had never heard anything like it. It got faster and then slower again, then fast, and when the man was done singing, one of the players played a solo that sounded like a weather machine malfunctioning, or a cat screaming, only there was a bit of a melody behind it. It sounded as though it was expressing anger, or fear, or something like that. I had certainly never heard music that was able to do that before. It was terrifying—but exciting at the same time. It made me feel as though I were going on an epic journey into space or into far-off lands. I did not know that music could do that.

  Jason watched my face as I listened to the song all the way through.

  “What do you think?” he asked as it finished.

  I took a deep breath and thought about what I’d heard. I had listened to a whole heavy-metal song, and I did not feel at all inclined to take drugs, commit crimes, or burn things. Maybe the song had not worked, or maybe I was just too strong to be taken in by their tricks.

  “More, please,” I said.

  Jason and Amber smiled.

  11

  JENNIFER

  pathological—adjective. Uncontrolled or unreasonable. A flood in my uncle Henry’s basement led to his pathological obsession with checking for leaks in the plumbing.

  I loved, loved, LOVED the None of the Above school of studying. All I did was read Shakespeare and look up the stuff I didn’t know—not just the words, but the history and all of that. At the bottom of every page of the Shakespeare book, there were notes on that sort of stuff. For the first time in my life, I really felt like I was actually getting smarter, not just making myself look better to colleges. And I was feeling more relaxed than I ever had. I don’t know what it is about reading Shakespeare, but it just makes me breathe better. Weird, huh?

  Look, it’s like this: I have this idea in my head for the kind of person I want to be. The kind you sometimes see in movies or read about. They have their own cool way of living that seems strange at first, but turns out to make perfect sense. Some people think they’re nuts, but they’re actually really smart. That’s what I want to be. One of those sorts of people.

  It was one reason for me to want to win the bee. Not only would Mutual be impressed with me, but when people came up and asked me how I’d done it, I’d surprise them all by telling them about the None of the Above school of studying. And they’d all say “What a fascinating person!”

  On the other hand, I was getting more and more afraid of what was going to happen if I DIDN’T win. At the very least, my parents would think they had to sign me up for even MORE activities. Military school probably wasn’t out of the question. But if I won, Mom could probably talk Dad into letting me drop a few of them altogether.

  Anyway, by midweek, Marianne had mostly stopped speaking in multiple-choice questions. Instead she was spelling at least one word out of every sentence she uttered. Like, she’d say “What did you bring for L-U-N-C-H today?” or “Don’t you wish that the school would start up a K-A-Y-A-K-I-N-G club?” Maybe she actually was learning two letters’ worth of words per night—in fact, I hoped she was. It would be a shame for her to look as stressed and miserable as she did for nothing.

  But she wasn’t the only one who was starting to freak out. Every time I passed Amber in the halls, it seemed like she was chanting something under her breath, or staring intently at her pencil, like she was trying to get it to move with only the power of her mind. If she and Jason hadn’t had Mutual, the new kid, to keep them busy, she might have gotten herself stuck in some sort of trance.

  Even Tony Ostanek, who normally only read video game magazines, was reading the dictionary during SSR. And rumor had it that you were up to two notebooks a day, with college-ruled lines, Chrissie.

  The only person who didn’t seem to be acting strange was Mutual. I guess I don’t know how he normally acted, but he reminded me of a cat who was just getting to explore the backyard for the first time. He looked at everything like it was new and fascinating.

  But I wasn�
��t getting anywhere with him. He hadn’t asked me about Henry V again, and he was always talking to Jason and Amber, so I never really had a chance to go up and talk to him. But I was reading Henry V, and I planned to ask him about it the first chance I got. Maybe if I won the bee, he’d want to try None of the Above studying with me.

  At lunch on Thursday, I sat at my usual spot, next to Jake. Sitting near him is sort of a dangerous habit, because you never knew when he could be called upon to eat something gross for a dollar. Jake’s a nice guy, though. And when I want to just sit there and ramble about Shakespeare out loud, he doesn’t mind, and he never acts like I’m nuts. Still, even though eating for dollars interests me more than most sports, I don’t really need a front-row seat.

  Sure enough, I was just finishing my sandwich—thank goodness—when Tony Ostanek, Harlan Sturr, and Gunther Vredenberg showed up, holding a Baggie full of something that looked suspiciously like barf.

  “Hey, Chow!” said Tony. “Look what we’ve got!”

  “What is it?” asked Jake, whose mouth was still full of shoestring potatoes.

  “It’s a little bit of everything,” said Tony. “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some blueberry yogurt, and milk, all mixed together. Here you go!” He dropped the disgusting bag onto the table in front of Jake, along with a dollar.

  “Go, Chow, go!” said Harlan. Then the others joined in, chanting, “Go, Chow, go!” The other kids at the table took the cue, and pretty soon the whole long table was shouting, “Go, Chow, go!”

  I couldn’t look—I turned my head away and closed my eyes really tight so I wouldn’t have to watch if he actually ate the stuff. And I knew he would. Sure enough, after about ten seconds, everyone quit chanting and started cheering. I looked back up to see Jake holding up the empty Baggie with one hand and the dollar bill in the other, grinning triumphantly.

  When all the cheering died down, he was still smiling.

  “That was really gross, Jake,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. I mean, peanut butter, jelly, yogurt…all good stuff. And I can always use an extra buck.”

  He went back to the shoestring potatoes he’d packed with his lunch.