“I don’t know,” Georgia said, still holding the knife. “Does the red pin, like signify the heart? Are you feeling any pain? Tightness in your chest?”
“I don’t know,” I said, grabbing at my chest. “My heart has been racing ever since we started this.”
“So no change?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe it means now you’re heartless? Like the Grinch.”
“WHAT?”
“No, no, just kidding!” she cried, but I was on the floor, scrambling to pick up the red pins. I raced over and shoved them back into the voodoo dolls.
“Whew,” Georgia said. “That was close.”
I sat back down and tried to catch my breath.
Georgia looked at the instructions. “Now it says to use a yellow string and yellow pins to connect your hearts to signify that you are still connected, but as friends.”
I placed the end of the yellow string over the Quinton doll’s chest and jabbed the yellow pin into the fabric.
“Careful!” Georgia shrieked. “Don’t break his ribs or give him a heart attack!”
“Okay,” I said. Just as I was gently repositioning the yellow pin, Oompa jumped up into my lap, jolting my hand and causing me to make a small tear with the pin. A long strand of Spanish moss poked out.
“Oh my God, you’ve punctured his intestines!” Georgia said.
“Oh no!” I pushed Oompa down and used the yellow pin to frantically stuff the protruding string back in. “Do you think we should use some scotch tape?”
“I don’t know! Let’s just get this yellow string attached. Fast!”
I looked down and saw I had frayed the ends of the yellow string. I frantically reached for the knife, sawed a nice sharp edge, and restuck the pin into the fabric one more time. By the time the voodoo doll sequence was complete, we were both frazzled and sweating like we had just performed open-heart surgery.
“It’s fine,” I said, panting. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I gently placed the dolls inside an empty camcorder box I’d found shoved in the corner of Mom’s closet and eased the dolls under my bed just as Mom walked in the door. She eyed us with a look that made my insides go squishy.
“What are you guys up to?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Georgia said, then gave me a wide-eyed this is going to work look. She gathered her things and left.
It has to work, I thought. The clock is ticking. Quinton is spiraling. Mom’s getting suspicious. And if Quinton’s love spell stays, I may forever lose my chance with Max.
The next morning when Quinton picked me up, I noticed a rip straight through the fabric at his chest. My mouth gaped open. Could it be? I reached over and touched the rip. “What happened?” I asked.
He looked down. “Oh man, I didn’t even see that.”
“How are you feeling this morning?” I prodded. “Does your chest feel funny? Is your heart racing? Upset stomach? Feel like . . . your insides are coming out?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “You’re weird.” He reached over to hold my hand for a minute, then started the car and drove us to school.
All day Georgia and I threw long, anticipatory stares toward each other, waiting anxiously for Quinton to change. For him to suddenly want to cool off our relationship and just be friends. I tried not to deflate when he held my hand as we walked down the hallway. I even ignored it when he offered to hand-feed me potato chips from his lunch. Surely the voodoo powers would infiltrate his heart any minute now!
“The instructions said it could take up to forty-eight hours,” Georgia reminded me.
But the next day he insisted on putting his arm around my shoulder as we walked from the student lot into school. When I told him it was kind of awkward to walk and half-hug at the same time, he said it was just a show of his growing affection. Still, I held out hope that a change of heart was just around the corner.
But I was wrong. Instead, when we literally turned the corner, I saw my locker covered top to bottom in gold foil wrapping paper with a huge red bow stuck to the center.
“What?” I asked, taking in the Christmas extravaganza in early October.
“Open it!” Quinton said eagerly.
“Open it!” chanted a chorus of excited girls who had congregated by my locker.
I tore the gold foil off in one big swoop, and underneath there was an enormous locker-size photo of me and Quinton. Our faces in the picture I recognized from the picture Georgia had snapped after our bike ride, but somehow he had Photoshopped a beach scene behind us and changed our clothes to a white halter wedding gown and a black tuxedo. He had created a locker-size imaginary wedding day.
“Oh my God!” Mia chirped behind me. “You are so romantic! You totally understand a woman’s heart!”
Jake rolled his eyes.
Quinton turned back to me. “Open the locker.”
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but with everyone watching, I had no choice but to spin the combination. When I pulled the metal door open, an enormous ten-pound white teddy bear dressed in a tuxedo, holding a fake red rose toppled out onto me and began singing “You Are My Sunshine” in a tinny electronic melody.
“Oh man,” Jake said, smacking Quinton on the shoulder. “You are totally whipped!”
“Nothing wrong with a little affection, Jake,” Mia said curtly. But Jake kept on teasing Quinton. Mia’s face fell, but she tried to play it off.
The warning bell rang and the huddle of people surrounding me scattered. As the crowd dispersed, I saw Max, standing on the other side of the hallway, frozen, taking in the scene. I tried to step in front of the enormous wedding picture, but I could tell that Max saw it. He looked from me to the life-size wedding dress, then back to me. His face was blank. Then he turned around and walked away.
I wanted to yell, Wait! Please come back! But he was gone.
I picked up the gigantic teddy bear and shoved it back into my locker. “You make me HAPPY when skies are gray,” the electronic voice boomed from behind the metal door. As I leaned against the locker door to make sure it shut all the way, a thought occurred to me. “Quinton?” I asked. “How did you get this bear inside my locker? How did you get the irises inside my locker last month? I never told you my combination.”
“Oh, I just came by early one morning and started trying different numerical combinations. I think I tried about six hundred different ones until I hit the jackpot.”
I stared at him, unbelieving. “Wasn’t that a little . . . tedious?”
“Nah.” He wrapped his arm around me. “Nothing is too tedious for my love goddess. All I want to do is spend my life pampering you!”
The bell rang.
“Well, thanks,” I said, and raced off to class with my stomach in knots. In English I whispered to Georgia, “The hypnosis is taking over his brain! He said the only thing he wants to do is pamper me!”
“What are you talking about?” Mia came up behind us.
“Um . . . just the locker thing from this morning,” I said.
“Oh.” Mia sighed dreamily. I loved that she was just herself with me now. All honesty—no stage smile or presentation of how she thought the queen bee should be.
“Do you really think it’s romantic?” I asked quietly. “You don’t think it’s a little . . . over-the-top?”
“No,” Mia answered vehemently. “I think it’s fantastic.”
Maybe it would feel fantastic if it were genuine. If the relationship were real. I wondered, briefly, how I would feel if it were Max who was showering me with attention.
At the end of class, Quinton walked me to the end of the hallway. Just as we parted and I felt a swirl of fresh air and freedom from his constant presence, I turned the corner and lost my breath.
Because pressed up against the lockers, in a full-on openmouthed passionate kiss, were Max and Minnie.
27
I was standing in our kitchen, staring at the still-dismantled fire alarm. “My life’s a
disaster. The world’s most perfect guy is obsessed with pampering me, but all I want to do is run the other way. And the boy I do love is clearly still in love with someone else!”
Georgia paced around the kitchen, twirling a finger in one of her corkscrew curls. “Max could be playing you at your own game.” She looked over at me. “He knows your class schedule. He knew you’d be walking down that hallway.”
I thought about that while I picked up the large black Hefty bag on the floor. “What’s this?”
“Oh. Mom said you were so good at untangling all those necklaces, maybe you could help with our Christmas lights.”
I nodded. “Sure.” I pulled a giant mess of green cords and little multicolored bulbs from the bag. It’s funny how my heart slowed down a little and my shoulders relaxed as I worked my way into the center of the knot. If only I could untangle my own life.
Georgia dug into her backpack. “Do you care if I rehearse while we brainstorm? Auditions for the play are in two weeks.”
“No, go ahead,” I said.
She flipped through a pile of white papers in her hand. She stood up straight, lifted her chin, and began in a theatrical voice. “Every day I question . . .” Georgia squinted her eyes. “Wait a minute.” She dropped her pages.
I looked up from the Christmas lights.
Georgia ran over to the laptop. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she nodded her head and said, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Bingo.”
“What?” I asked.
“I’m trying out for the part of Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, Sister Helen is a spiritual advisor to Matthew—the murderer.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Sooooo, a spiritual advisor’s job is to offer guidance for life’s problems. Well, I think we both agree we have a major problem here. Maybe you need a spiritual advisor!”
“Are you seriously comparing me to a murderer?”
“Look.” Georgia turned the laptop to face me. “Silver Rain can sense your energy field and guide you to healing and transformative options to fix deep-seated problems.”
“Who?” I asked as I pulled the long green wire through an opening in the knot, coming one step closer to straightening out the jungle of lights.
“Silver Rain,” Georgia said, tapping the computer screen. “She’s a high priestess.”
This was getting ridiculous. The cleansing potion, the voodoo dolls—none of that worked—why should I expect Silver Rain to have any great solutions? I wanted to be able to fix my mess myself—to have the satisfaction of untangling the final knot and pulling the strands straight again. I didn’t want to hand my bag of snarled knots over to someone else to unscramble. But my mind was blank. My heart was distressed. I sighed. “How much?” I asked.
Georgia shrugged. “Each session is tailored to the individual problem.”
“That sounds like a lot.” I made a skeptical face.
“Well, do you have any other suggestions? We’re getting desperate here. Max is never going to stop making out with Minnie if he thinks you and Quinton are designing your future engagement rings! For all we know Quinton is Photoshopping your faces together to create your imaginary offspring! Do you want THAT on your locker?!”
Oompa jumped up off the ground into my lap, a little scared of Georgia’s bug-eyed hysterics.
“Okay, okay,” I relented. “Let’s call Silver Rain.”
We put the phone on speaker and laid it on the table between us. Together Georgia and I explained our predicament to the breathyvoiced woman on the other end.
“What you need,” Silver Rain pronounced, “is a banishment spell.”
“Yes! A banishment spell!” Georgia agreed enthusiastically. Oompa barked enthusiastically. “What’s a banishment spell?”
“For sixty-five dollars, I can send you a kit with the appropriate ingredients for a banishment spell. For an additional thirty-five, I’ll throw in two hematites—grounding and balancing stones—and a tool to use directly on the problematic person. The direct contact between the stones and the person in question is the most surefire method to expel the negative energy.”
“Yeah, yeah, we want that!” Georgia said, and the next thing I knew, she was reciting her emergency-only credit card numbers once again.
Later that night my cell phone rang and I saw it was Grandma. I watched as her name flashed across the screen, but for some reason I couldn’t make myself answer it. Instead, I held onto the bundle of entwined Christmas lights, still working on the mess. When I saw the voicemail icon light up, I put down the twinkle lights and listened to the message. Her chipper voice asked if I would like to go to the mother-daughter luncheon at the Junior League next weekend.
“We’ll make it a grandmother-granddaughter event, ha-ha!” she announced.
I wished I could call her back and suggest all three of us go. Three generations of Grey women together, I could propose. Or that she take Mom—her daughter. But my fingers wouldn’t dial her back. I’d thought we were going to be the perfect family, but I was wrong. Her criticism of Mom rang too fresh in my ears. Mom’s desperate need for acceptance was still too evident in her sad eyes. And my mess from hypnosis swarmed all around me, making it impossible to focus on anything else. My biggest fear was if Grandma found out, she would judge me the way she’d judged Mom—preventing our family from ever being whole again.
I pulled the green cord one more time through an opening and, magically, the long strand of bulbs untangled. I stretched one end all the way to my wall and plugged the cord into the socket. Instantly the tiny bulbs lit up in a twinkling array of primary colors. I pulled my blinds down and turned off the overhead light, letting the Crayola colors sparkle in my hands and cast my room with colored light. Untangled and illuminated—just how I’d thought my life would be once we started over. Once we reconnected with my grandparents. Once I had a boyfriend. Once I had the spotlight.
But my life was exactly the opposite.
Two agonizing days later a large box arrived. Georgia and I placed it on the kitchen table and used a sharp knife to slice through the thick packaging tape. Inside were four small vials of oil, two flat brown stones, and a large tongs-shaped contraption.
“Interesting,” Georgia said as she picked up the tongs and pressed the handles, clamping the ends in and out.
I picked up the instruction manual tucked inside and began to read.
“Peppermint oil,” Georgia said, sniffing one of the vials.
“Wait a minute,” I said, pointing at the print. “We can’t do this.”
“Why not?” Georgia continued to press the tongs in and out with fascination.
Oompa came over and sniffed the end of the tongs. He whimpered loudly, then turned and waddled off toward my room.
“Because,” I said, “it says using this hematite stone dipped in the banishment potion and applied with the application tool will literally push the problematic person out of your life.”
“That’s good!” Georgia insisted, still playing with the tongs.
‘Listen!” I looked back at the paper. “ ‘Sometimes the person will find him- or herself accepting a job out of state or moving out of the country. In rare circumstances’ ”—I raised my voice—“ ‘the person winds up in jail, but this only happens in cases where the person is dangerous.’” I tossed the paper down. “This is crazy, Georgia! Silver Rain and banishment spells. What are we doing?! I can’t risk Quinton going to jail—I’ve messed up his life enough already!”
Georgia put the tongs down. “Well, how are we going to reverse the love spell, then?”
I thought about asking my mom for help. She had done hypnotism for nine years. She would know what to do. I felt a sting of tears. But she would be so upset with me. “Maybe we can just wait it out,” I suggested. “Maybe if I just pull myself away from him a little each day . . .”
There was a knock at the door. Georgia and I eyed each other with delirium. We ran
around wild-eyed, flinging the vials and stones and tongs back into the box. The person knocked again.
“Coming!” I called as Georgia threw a People magazine on top of the return address marked Spiritual Assistance from Silver Rain.
I opened the door and saw Quinton standing there.
“Hi!” he said.
“Oh, hi,” I said, startled. “What are you doing here?”
Oompa came running from the bedroom at the sound of Quinton’s voice. But when he saw the large box of banishment tools still sitting on the table, he sniffed, growled at the box, and turned away, running off back to my room.
Quinton pointed to the large red canoe strapped to the top of his car. “I’ve done some research,” he said. “There’s a lake up in the north Georgia mountains where one cove is filled with ducks.”
I stared at him like he was a lunatic. Why is he talking about ducks?
“I’ve rented this canoe, and I’m going to drive us up to that lake so we can paddle through hundreds of ducks and re-create the love scene between Allie and Noah from The Notebook. Remember? Our first date, the first movie we ever watched together?”
“Quinton,” I said in a slow, calm voice like, I was talking someone off a ledge, “why are you here with a canoe, talking about ducks and the north Georgia mountains when it’s 4 p.m. and you’re supposed to be at football practice?”
He just kept on smiling. “Because this is more important. You are more important.” His eyes were glassy and dazed.
“NO. NO, I’M NOT!” I stated emphatically. “You’re going to mess up your chances for the football scholarship. I can’t be responsible for that!”
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Quinton said calmly. “We haven’t discussed after graduation. I need to know where you plan on going to school so I can tailor my applications.”
“No, no, no!” I grabbed his shirt. “Look at me! Your future does not revolve around me!”
“Your eyes,” he mused. “They’re so mesmerizing.”
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