I Put a Spell on You

by Adam Selzer

  “What?” asked Harlan, stepping back.

  “I already know everything about everyone else,” I said. “It’s stupid, but it’s bothering me that I don’t know that about him yet.”

  “You know what kind of underwear people wear?” he asked. “What kind do I wear?”

  “Usually boxers. Funny ones. The kind that have a joke on them or something,” I said.

  He blushed. “You could have just guessed that,” he said.

  “None of your briefs are tighty-whities,” I went on. “They’re mostly dark colors. But you wear boxers about eighty percent of the time.”

  He blushed again.

  “And what else do you know?”

  I smirked. “Plenty,” I said. “But Mutual wears suspenders and a belt and a blazer,” I said, “which makes it really hard to see anything. With most people, I can just check out their underwear when they bend over, but he’s really well covered.”

  “He doesn’t take gym class, either,” said Harlan. “So I can’t just look over in the locker room. But I’ll see what I can do. Okay?”

  “Good enough,” I said. “It’s not like I’m some pervert or anything—I just like to have data about everyone.”

  “Right,” he said. “Say, since you know so much, where’s the master word list that disappeared?”

  I smiled, unzipped my backpack, and pulled it out.

  “Holy crap!” he said. “YOU have it?”

  I nodded. “I took it before Jennifer’s dad could get his hands on it.”

  I waited for a second, sure that he was going to ask if he could have it. But he just said, “Awesome,” and I put it back in my bag. I really thought he would ask for it, honestly. I thought I knew all about Harlan, but I was starting to find out that there was a lot I didn’t know. There’s a lot you can find out about someone when you aren’t trying to get them in trouble.

  I knew all about his underwear, but nothing about his heart.

  “Well, make me proud, okay?” I said.

  “I will,” he said, as solemnly as I’d ever heard him say anything.

  He thanked me again and walked off. I stood there in the trees, just watching him, until the end of recess.

  After lunch, Marianne and Jennifer were sent to go see Mrs. McGovern, the guidance counselor, who, I supposed, would probably make them use the infamous “I message,” a technique for complaining politely, to “resolve their conflict.” If that didn’t work, she would probably go into her standard speech about whether they wanted to spread “warm fuzzies” or “cold pricklies” around the school—those were her two main techniques.

  Neither one of them must have worked, because when they came back, they both had playground monitors following them around, acting as bodyguards. Keeping them away from each other probably would have been my job before; it was kind of gratifying that they needed two people to do it.

  At the end of the day, Mrs. Boffin gave us a little speech.

  “You have all been attending and competing in spelling bees for six years now,” she said. “And tomorrow is the biggest one of your lives. I know a lot of you have worked very hard, but I want to remind you all that the bee is supposed to be fun—it will not be the end of the world if you don’t make it to districts. Anyone who is caught cheating will be punished severely. And please, remember not to speak to any member of the press!”

  The bell rang a minute later, and we all slowly filed out of the class.

  I went to one of my usual hiding places in the bushes and waited until ten minutes had passed. Every day, ten minutes after the bell, Floren would be checking the computer lab to make sure no one had stolen anything, and Mrs. Rosemary would be outside, smoking a cigarette around the back.

  I had turned in my hall pass. But I could still get into the office. It wasn’t even locked, in fact.

  So, as casual as could be, I walked into Floren’s office, found the recording labeled “Thursday night”—the night Jennifer’s dad got the phone call—and slipped it into my bag. I also took a whole stack of interoffice memos that were sitting on Floren’s desk, and a few more from Mrs. Rosemary’s.

  When I got home and read the memos, I found that one of the memos on Floren’s desk was the one about Mr. Van Den Berg breaking in. The one I’d sent him.

  That meant that Mrs. Boffin HAD given it to him.

  Floren knew about the break-in, all right. He had gotten the memo. He just hadn’t told anyone or done anything about it!

  Could it be that he didn’t want anyone to know about it because he had set it up himself?

  It didn’t make sense that he’d be helping Jennifer’s dad break in, since he was already helping Mutual.

  Then again, it seemed like nothing made sense anymore.

  24

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Mrs. Boffin

  TO: Mrs. Rosemary

  Bee Day is almost here! And not a day too soon—frankly, I’ll be very glad to see it come to an end. This morning, Marianne Cleaver asked me to ratify a formal declaration of war against Jennifer Van Den Berg. Jennifer was tuning her out to such an extent that I was afraid she might have snapped, but she seems more upset since Marianne officially “declared war” on her. I hope it won’t affect her performance.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Mrs. Rosemary

  TO: Mrs. McGovern, guidance office

  I know that you’re very busy with stress counseling and preparing to deal with post-bee trauma counseling next week, but could you squeeze in an appointment for conflict management between Marianne Cleaver and Jennifer Van Den Berg? Marianne is actually trying to formally declare war on Jennifer. Perhaps you could persuade them to give peace a chance.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Mrs. McGovern

  TO: Mrs. Rosemary

  I have space for such an appointment right after the post-lunch recess. Have Mrs. Boffin send them in.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Mrs. Rosemary

  TO: Mrs. Boffin

  I know all about Marianne’s attempt to formally declare war on Jennifer—she brought her request into the office and asked us to file it officially. Rather than getting involved, I’ve arranged for them to attend conflict management with Mrs. McGovern. Please send them both after recess.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Mrs. McGovern

  TO: Mrs. Rosemary

  CC: Mrs. Boffin, Principal Floren

  Jennifer is upset, but responding peacefully. However, conflict management has failed to calm Marianne down. As a precautionary measure, I’ve assigned playground monitors to each to keep them away from each other, and penciled in post-bee counseling appointments for each of them on Monday.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Principal Richard M. Floren

  TO: All staff

  In light of the disappearance of our master word list, I have arranged for us to use a different list at the bee tomorrow. Instead of our own list, we will use the list from Shaker Heights. Our two schools have historically been rivals, of course, but, as principal, I have opened favorable relations through my friendship with Principal Mao.

  INTEROFFICE MEMO

  FROM: Principal Richard M. Floren

  TO: All staff

  As the day draws to a close, please remind your students that they are not to speak with any member of the press prior to the bee!

  Let us remember the power of good music to soothe one’s jangled nerves. As a means of relieving the students’ stress, I have arranged for a pre-bee performance by the Good Times Gang. This should put the students in a much better mood!

  25

  HARLAN

  octogenarian—noun. A person age 80–89. Walter is not that into sports, other than watching people eat things for dollars, but if they had a show where they had an octogenarian fight with an octopus, he’d watch that.

  Sometimes I think that Chrissie Woodward is a very sick person.

  I mean, for one, there’s the underwear
thing. It’s really unnerving to find out that someone else knows what kind of underwear you wear. She’s also obsessive. If she knows what one person’s favorite food is, she has to know everyone else’s favorite food, too.

  But that’s not to say I don’t like her or anything. She got Jake and Jason out of trouble when it looked like Jason could have been expelled. And she was going to help me make history. That’s got to count for something. If she wasn’t so busy being a very sick person, she could’ve been a class clown herself. She has the guts for it.

  Guts are a useful thing to have, you know. They came in handy for me on my walk home from school on the day before the bee. Up in front of my house, I saw a couple of old ladies standing around at the end of my driveway.

  “Hi, there, Harlan, honey,” said one of them.

  “Don’t call him honey!” shouted the other. “Boys hate that!”

  “Uh, hi,” I said. My first guess was that they were some sort of obscure relatives of mine. The kind that I’d maybe met once at a wedding when I was five, but didn’t remember at all. I figured I should be polite, in case they were about to die and looking for someone to leave all their money to.

  “Care to answer some questions about the spelling bee?”

  Aha! They were reporters! I knew I wasn’t supposed to be talking to the press or anything, but, honestly…I just can’t resist attention!

  “Certainly,” I said. “Provided you don’t use my name.”

  “Of course not, dear,” said the first old lady.

  “Would you say that giving you ten-to-one odds of winning is just about right?” asked the other one. “That a person who gave you chances like that was telling the truth, not trying to cheat a couple of poor, innocent old ladies?”

  “Ten to one?” I said. “I’d say I can do a little better than that. I’ve beaten Jennifer and Marianne in the class bees before!”

  “Ah,” said the first one. “But you’ve never beaten Mutual Scrivener. Is it true that he’s a genius? Impossible to beat?”

  I shrugged. “He seems pretty smart.”

  “Smarter than Jennifer?” asked the second one.

  “Do you suppose it would be worth someone’s time to pull a prank that kept Jennifer from showing up, so Mutual won’t have to compete against her?” asked the first. “Because we know how much you love pranks!”

  “Shut up, Helen, you ninny!” shouted the second one. “You’re supposed to gently hint that, not come right out and ask him! You’ll scare him away!”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You want me to keep Jennifer from showing up for the bee?”

  They stopped shouting at each other and just stared at me.

  “Could you?” asked the first one.

  “We’ll make it worth your while,” added the second one. “You don’t have to hurt her, just keep her out of school tomorrow.”

  “You’re the class clown, right?” said the first one. “Maybe you could lock her out of the school and make it look like an accident!”

  “No way,” I said. “That would be against the code of the class clown.”

  There’s not actually a code of the class clown, exactly. But there sort of is now. I decided there needed to be one after the Rubber Band War to End All Rubber Band Wars got Jake in trouble, so I made one up, and decided to live by it.

  Basically, the code is that you should never get other kids in trouble, never cheat, and only pull pranks on people who deserve it. Locking Jennifer out of the school would be WAY against the code. It’s also the reason I didn’t ask Chrissie for the master word list, even though I’m pretty sure she would have given it to me. I know a lot of rumors go around about me planning to slash people’s tires and stuff, but I don’t get mixed up in that sort of business—I didn’t do that sort of thing even before I came up with the code.

  “Well, we were just thinking,” said the first old lady.

  “This interview is over!” I said, starting to walk away. I’d always wanted to say that.

  “See, Helen?” shouted the second one. “You scared him off!”

  “You’re the one who scared him, Agnes!” said the first. “You and that ugly dress you have on!”

  They went back to shouting at each other.

  “Stop!” I said. “What the heck kind of reporters are you, anyway?”

  They stopped shouting again and looked back at me. “We’re not reporters,” said the first one, who I guessed was called Helen. “We’re just interested citizens!”

  “That’s right,” said the other one, Agnes. “Interested harmless old ladies!”

  Harmless old ladies who were so interested in the bee that they wanted me to start cheating and sabotaging people!

  I guess I should have known right away that they were freaks. But they’d been prepping us for having to deal with a whole bunch of reporters all week, and, anyway, there wasn’t anything unusual about having strangers talk to me about the bee. Everywhere I’d been the past couple of weeks—the grocery store, the post office, Hedekker’s Appliance Store—people were patting me on the back and wishing me luck. Everyone in town knew the bee was coming up, and everyone was excited about it. There wasn’t anything that unusual about having old ladies I didn’t know ask about it.

  I wished Jason were there. Everyone knows he loves to freak old ladies out, and these old ladies seemed like they could really use a good scare. But I couldn’t think of anything to do to them offhand, so I made the sign of the cross with my fingers. I don’t know what that’s supposed to do, but in horror movies, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you see a vampire or a werewolf or something. And I was starting to get the idea that these old ladies were just as scary as any movie monster.

  But they didn’t react to the cross, so I just ran like crazy around into my backyard, and went in through the back door and up to my room. It was a long time before I had enough nerve to look out the window to see if they were still there. Thankfully, they were gone. Within about an hour, I’d recovered enough that I could wish I’d played some sort of prank on them. Creepy old ladies who go around suggesting that people pull dirty tricks to keep people out of spelling bees deserve to get pranked, or I don’t know who does.

  That was when I called you to tell you everything they’d said, Chrissie.

  I called Jennifer, too, to warn her to be on the lookout for old ladies who had something against her. She practically cried when I told her—I guess she had enough to worry about without having to worry about crazy old ladies, too.

  Something was really messed up in town. Messed up enough that weird old ladies were taking to the streets. And they were up to no good.

  This town needed something to cut the tension.

  Something like a belch to end all belches.

  26

  JENNIFER

  renounce—verb. To give up a claim, belief, or position formally. Jennifer was prepared not only to give up the spelling bee, but to renounce spelling altogether and spend the rest of her life misspelling everything.

  I found out early on Thursday that Marianne was actually trying to get the school to ratify her “war” against me. She had actually issued a formal declaration of war! Like, maybe she thought she could actually get permission to lob a grenade at me if she got Floren to sign the right form! That girl would probably LOVE military school.

  They sent us both to talk to Mrs. McGovern, the guidance counselor, who made us sit around talking in “I messages.” An “I message” is a sentence in which you say “I feel (blank) when you (blank), and I want (blank) because (blank).” I thought it sounded pretty robotic, though I could imagine that Marianne would think putting that much structure and rules into complaining was really super.

  My “I message” was “I feel bad when you accuse me of cheating, and I want you to leave me alone because I’m not cheating.”

  Hers was “I feel that you’re a disgrace to spelling when you claim that you don’t have the word list, and I want you to surrender because y
ou’re a cheater. S-U-R-R-E-N-D-E-R. Surrender.”

  Mrs. McGovern then went into her speech about whether we wanted to be known as “warm fuzzies” or “cold pricklies,” but I sort of tuned out, since I’d heard her give that speech a dozen times before. After that, they gave us both playground monitors, women whose normal job was to keep kids from cracking their heads open at recess, to act like bodyguards or something, and I went back to my routine of just ignoring her. I was ignoring everything in class by then. Even Mutual. I just sat there and recited Shakespeare lines over and over in my head and concentrated on that instead. It helped a lot.

  I tromped through the snow like never before on my way home the day before the bee. I dove face-first into drifts and rolled around. I even intentionally shoved snow down into my clothes. I was freezing cold and soaking wet and aching all over when I got home. My mother was upset, of course, but the faces she made were really terrific, and it gave her something to yell about besides spelling for a minute.

  After I got changed into dry clothes, she came into my room and told me, very softly, that she and Dad didn’t want to push me or put too much pressure on me in regards to the bee (ha! I wonder which magazine for hyperactive parents told her to say THAT!). They just wanted me to get into a good college and get a good job. Then she told me that all of those other kids were my enemies, and should be shown no mercy.

  I thought about telling her that I wasn’t sure how much winning a spelling bee would actually help me get a job. And I thought about telling her that these were my friends, and the fact that we had to compete against each other in a spelling bee didn’t make them all into bitter enemies of mine. But instead I just politely told her that I was under a lot of stress and needed to be left alone to concentrate, and that I’d be up in my room the whole night. They could come in to bring me some dinner, but, other than that, I was not to be disturbed. This meant that I’d be skipping all of my normal Thursday evening activities. She didn’t argue.