by Ira Bloom
“But why?” Melinda pleaded.
“I told you I didn’t want to move to the city,” he said. “I have no intention of wasting another minute of this eternity as a house pet to a shopkeeper. You knew I had a quota. I haven’t had a score in years, with your lily-white magic. Do you have any idea what’s going to happen, when the hounds of hell come for me? There’s no action here, not even any gophers.”
“That reminds me,” Melinda said. “There’s a giant rat in the botanical garden.”
“Rat, did you say?” Kasha asked, sitting up with interest. “How big?”
“Biggest one I’ve ever seen,” she claimed. “I doubt you can take him.”
Kasha was already bounding through the store, his mind on his prey.
“We don’t have much time,” Melinda whispered, “and he has unbelievable hearing.” She grasped her oldest daughter by the shoulders with both hands. “You can never, ever trust Kasha. He’s a demon. Did he tell you that?”
“Well yeah, Mom. He told me everything, pretty much.”
“Did he also tell you there’s no such thing as good and evil, only order and chaos, and they were flip sides of the same coin?”
“Uh … yeah?”
“It’s a lie,” Melinda said. “There’s definitely good and evil, and Kasha is evil. So you must be very careful with your immortal soul, do you hear me? He can harvest your soul under his contract if you commit an unforgivably evil act. You must never, ever do anything to harm anyone. You must be better than good. The reason I moved out of the house was to keep him away from you girls, until you’re old enough to know better. But I’m glad he went to you, anyway. At least he went to my one daughter who has a little common sense. If there was anything I could do to keep him away from you I would, but it’s out of my hands now, so promise me, Esme, swear an oath, that you’ll be very careful. And if you’re ever tempted to do a spell that seems a little shady, just … just don’t do it, is all I can say.”
So Esme swore a sacred oath to her mother, knowing that such oaths are not broken in the Wiccan faith, especially between mother and daughter. It was an easy oath to make. Esme was a very cautious individual. If her irresponsible mother and wild great-aunt Becky could handle Kasha, Esme was quite confident that she could.
“Good, honey,” Melinda said, hugging her daughter when they had finished. “Now let’s get that tourist crap out of your basket and we’ll get you set up with some botanicals from my private stash. And I’ve got some Peruvian pink amber that’s the bomb.”
Before they departed for the ride back to Middleton, Kasha consented to help Melinda mix up a quick batch of “Miracle Elixir Cream of Youthe for Face and Neck,” an old recipe from the family grimoire. “If you insist on going around hairless, the least you can do is smooth out those hideous wrinkles,” he said, making a few passes of the paw over the bubbling cauldron, and intoning several rather shocking Latin phrases in a surprisingly resonant voice.
Esme also obtained a jar of zit cream from Melinda’s special stock in the closet behind the tarot room for Veronica. It was the premium stuff, with Kasha’s juju all over it, the quality that Melinda sold to only the most discriminating customers for two hundred bucks a jar.
“Remember, when you give it to her, tell Ronnie her mom loves her,” Melinda said. “And give Katy a big smooch for me. And tell Dad I’ll be home at the end of March.”
On Monday morning Katy awoke to the smell of singed ectoplasm. Her head felt weird, like it was humongous and light as a feather, yet somehow so dense she couldn’t lift it off the pillow. She tried to brush her mop of hair back from her face with her hand and rose abruptly, startled, displacing Socrates, who’d slept on her pillow. She swept the blankets off. At the full-length mirror on her wall by the wardrobe, she checked to see what the damage was.
Pretty brutal. One side of her head, including her eyebrow, was bald as a Magic 8 Ball. She still had hair on the other side, and on the top. She looked back at Socrates on the bed. He was half bald as well. She reconstructed the sleep positions in her mind and decided that some kind of magical depilatory dust had settled on her in the night, like a fine blanket of snow, and removed her hair down to the skin. The only thing that had saved her from a much worse outcome was the little miniature pinscher, who had protected the top of her head like a blanket.
Veronica’s work, obviously. If Esme had done this she’d be completely bald and probably purple. Katy surveyed the damage from every angle. She had wigs, but they were all rather theatrical. She posed, angling every way she could think of. Then she ran her fingers through her hair, willing the colors. She chanted a few entreaties to the Goddess, until she felt the eerie static between her fingers. She insinuated black into her hair, at the roots, teal in the middle, and fuchsia at the ends. She made an impromptu part on the left side, a sort of zigzag, with hair over and under the part. She trimmed her bangs with a scissors and teased them stiff. Then she draped the bulk of her hair, Veronica Lake–style, over her right eye, half tucked behind the ear, the other half back, over the shoulder.
It was perfect. Ronnie would die a little, when she saw it. Katy shook her head vigorously once, as a test. It still had natural movement, but it held. Now what to wear? Daddy’s borrowed white button-down shirt, open in front to either side of the leather bustier, knotted underneath. Hoop earring on one side. Leggings and army boots. The look was Tank-Girl-meets-Madonna-and-beats-up-Jessica-Rabbit-with-a-billiard-cue. Needed punk makeup, though …
Katy joined her sisters in the kitchen. “Ooh, raisin bread!” she exclaimed, fishing two slices out of the bag. She put them into the toaster and opened the refrigerator.
“New look?” Esme asked. Esme was no longer shocked by anything Katy wore to school.
“Thought I’d try it,” Katy said. “Whattaya think, Ronnie?” she solicited, with a mirth and cheerfulness entirely out of place on someone who’d just been cursed.
Ronnie wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “That’s so tacky, it went past tacky and looped into cool, then kept going back around the wheel to tacky again, and stopped in the worst place.”
Liar, liar, Katy thought. Which gave her a brilliant idea for retaliation.
The Internet, like the universe, is infinite and full of nonsense, Katy had observed. But there was also plenty of truth out there, if you knew where to look. There was a consensus among practitioners of the craft that there was no actual magic on any search engine in the first fifty pages of any search for potions or spells. A layman could spend an eternity on the Internet and never find anything useful at all. But Katy had found a number of great blogs and websites over the years that had yielded a trove of spells and potions and charms. Katy had her mentor’s help, and uncanny kismet. She could throw jelly beans at her computer keyboard from across the room blindfolded and hit exactly the URL she needed at any given moment.
Katy decided to use good old-fashioned voodoo. She had an affinity for it, she practically had Haitian drumbeats in her pulse. She made a totem of her younger sister, mostly from modeling clay and art supplies, retrieving hair from Ronnie’s brush in the bathroom and toenail clippings from the wastebasket that had to be hers, they were so dainty and perfect. The voodoo doll was a very good likeness. Katy was an artist, after all. She snuck into Ronnie’s room and painted the doll’s face with her makeup, which was where her sister kept her powers.
Tonight’s spell was a powerful one. She needed either a small animal sacrifice or her own blood, according to two different websites. Katy frequently improvised, mixing and matching bits of Latin here, English there, Hindustani when the mood struck her, voodoo with Tibetan mysticism with Chinese medicine with Quaker prayer. It almost always worked out, somehow. She was just that good. So she opted for blood and pricked her finger resolutely. She dripped the blood on the throat of Ronnie’s totem, chanting. Tomorrow was going to be a blast.
Veronica awoke on Tuesday morning with a sore throat and thought nothing of it. She’d been up
late the night before with the grimoire, trying to finesse the pièce de résistance, a curse so vile she couldn’t help giggling every time she imagined how funny it would be if she could pull it off. But in a spontaneous panic, she’d dropped everything to put up a protective spell from the grimoire, with some herbs and powders Esme had obtained for her. The ritual had turned out to be far more complex than she’d imagined. She ran through it six times and it never felt right. Her mind was too distracted worrying about what Katy would do to her. She’d crossed the line with the curse of misty baldness, and Katy scared the piss out of her.
Ronnie entered the kitchen entirely blemish free, thanks to her mom’s miracle zit cream, guaranteed against curses, hexes, and French fries. She had her mojo back. Something in the protection spell must have kicked in. She felt bulletproof.
Katy was sitting at the breakfast table in the far seat with a very smug expression. Hair was growing back out on Katy’s bald side at a ridiculous rate. She had almost a half inch of growth already. A shiver ran up Ronnie’s spine ominously. She was insane, going head-to-head with a beast like her sister.
“Did you sleep well, beautiful?” Katy asked, in excellent cheer.
“Yeah, fine,” Ronnie replied.
“Are you hungry?”
Of course not, she meant to reply. She was never hungry, as far as anyone was concerned. Appetite of a bird. She would never admit to being hungry, because then someone would ask her why she didn’t eat something. “Starving,” she admitted, and Katy laughed.
“So why don’t you eat something?” Katy asked, absolutely gleeful.
Ronnie clutched at her throat. She’d been about to say she wasn’t hungry, then she’d gotten a tickle in her throat and the other thing came out. She was always hungry, any idiot should know that. She starved herself, to keep those hip bones angular, to keep every muscle in her abdomen in perfect tone, to keep her waist small enough that Zack could encircle it entirely with both hands. “What did you do to me?” she gasped, aghast.
“I made an honest girl out of you,” Katy replied. “So, why don’t you eat something?”
Ronnie was mortified. She’d been cursed to tell the truth! What a nightmare! “Because I don’t want to be a fat pig like you,” she answered, wiping the smirk off her sister’s face.
Then again, Ronnie thought, there might be a way to work this honesty thing.
At school, the sisters hardly trusted each other out of sight anymore. Nobody wanted to give anybody else a chance to sneak off with Zack. They were like the three Graeae, the gray witch sisters of myth who shared one eye and one tooth, each guarding jealously for fear that one of the others might steal away with the cherished items. Each sister had places staked out where they knew Zack would pass, so among the three of them they’d reconstructed his entire schedule. They all caught up with him at lunch, as he was headed to his car.
“Wow, déjà vu,” he joked as he paused for a brief chat. “It seems I’m running into you three all over today. Must be destiny.”
The sisters all laughed, each in her own way. “That’s odd,” Katy mentioned. “We were just talking about you, Zack. Your ears must have been burning.”
“All lies, I’m sure,” he teased.
Esme hated how easily Katy could joke with Zack, how natural they seemed together, how his eyes sparkled with mirth behind the dark glasses when he looked at her.
“Lies don’t do you justice,” Katy said, taking his hand and swinging it in time to the banter. “Ronnie was just telling us how she feels about you. Go ahead, Ronnie, tell Zack how you feel.”
Veronica paled, and her stomach churned. This is what Katy had planned all along, with her truth spells. Katy wanted to take away her entire game of hard to get, to drag her down to the level of girl-with-puppy-love-crush. But she could do nothing about it. It was like watching herself from a distance, saying words she’d never intended to say out loud:
“I love him,” she confessed. “I love you, Zack. I don’t think anybody else is good enough for you. Especially not Katy, she’s a pig half the time, she makes noises when she eats.” And then Veronica found herself concluding the entire spectacle by kissing Zack earnestly on the lips.
“Wow,” Zack said. “I had no idea. I was just heading off campus for a coffee; care to join me? We’ll have to hurry if we want to be back for fourth period.”
Ronnie didn’t hesitate. She dropped her hand from his shoulder down to his waist, and hooked a finger into his belt loop in back. Then she steered him toward the parking lot and they were off, before Katy and Esme even had a chance to pick their jaws up off the ground.
Watching them walk off arm-in-arm, Esme turned to Katy. There was nothing but resignation in her voice. “Nice going, genius.”
On Wednesday morning Katy woke up with farts so loud they could call a ship back to port through pea-soup fog. They were coming out of her like waves rolling up on the shore, one after another: As soon as one was out, she could feel the next one building. They were so stinky Edna the Great Dane tried to worm her way under the bed. Even Kilroy was offended by the stench, a dog that loved nothing more than to roll in horse poop.
Katy tried pulling the covers up over her head. Bad idea. She found herself in a Dutch oven that practically burned her flesh off. So she got out of bed and opened the window all the way. She couldn’t go to school like this. And Katy needed to go to school today, because Ronnie had taken a solid lead in the Zack derby and was headed for the post eight lengths ahead.
What she really needed to do was stick her butt out the window for these, she decided, wincing at the stink.
Esme awoke in a cold sweat to the sound of thunder, from a nightmare about being Cinderella’s ugly stepsister in an ugly dress, fighting to steal a peek through a throng of enraptured fans mobbing the two most beautiful people in the world, Zack and Veronica, as they ran laughingly down an aisle strewn with rose petals, pursued by paparazzi and Hollywood directors waving contracts at them. Fourteen was too young to date. Ronnie was like one of those underage gymnasts with mad skills and muscles of coiled carbon steel and zero gravitational mass who China was constantly sneaking into the Olympics because they could kick the crap out of anyone over fifteen. It was unfair to have to compete against fourteen-year-olds. There was a good reason they were banned.
The thunder rolled over the house again, and Esme shot out of bed with a start. It was the first day of December and she’d left a vital element of her beauty potion to infuse overnight in the light of the full moon, but it couldn’t get wet. She ran out the basement door in her pajamas and slippers into the chill morning air, slipping on the frost in the grass. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. She heard another peal of thunder. Sonic boom? In the attic, Katy’s butt was hanging out the window, mooning her. How horribly rude! Odd, but rude.
Upstairs for breakfast, Esme found Veronica on the floor by the sink and rushed to her aid. “Ronnie, are you okay?” The girl appeared to be having some kind of seizure, her face buried in her hands, writhing on the floor in apparent agony. With calming fingers, Esme brushed back her sister’s hair, and felt her forehead with the back of her hand. She managed to get Veronica to stop quivering and catch her breath. Then the sound of thunder rolled over the house again, and Ronnie had a relapse. That’s when Esme noticed that Ronnie was actually rolling on the floor laughing her ass off.
“Ka-Katy isn’t c-c-coming to school today,” Veronica managed, wheezing for breath.
“My Goddess,” Esme said. “Do you smell that? What is it? It’s like a sewer line exploded.”
This observation only served to cause another relapse. “Help me up, Esme,” Ronnie begged, gasping. “We have to get out of here.”
At school that day, Esme was confident in her red-and-white Manchester United Red Devils authorized winger’s sports jacket, which had finally arrived. She couldn’t wait for Zack to see it. But wherever she stalked Zack, she kept running into Norman. She didn’t want to talk to Norman. She�
�d gotten a C on her calculus test and hadn’t turned in two weeks of homework.
“Esme, I have to talk to you,” Norm said with some urgency as they left first period.
“Not now, Norm,” she replied. She cut left at the door and lost him, but she never caught up with Ronnie. And Zack wasn’t on his normal route between classes.
Norman was already at his desk in biology, writing in his notebook. Esme slipped into a chair in the second row so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She could feel his eyes boring into the back of her head. He caught up with her in the hallway after class.
“Esme, if you won’t talk to me, at least read this note,” he said, pressing a folded piece of paper into her hand. She grabbed the paper, glaring angrily.
“If I read it, will you stop stalking me?”
“Read it,” he insisted. “I’ll see you in the cafeteria.”
Esme still had the note in her hand when she walked into computer lab. She’d been in the quad, waiting for Zack. He’d never showed up. She got out her workbook. She’d see Zack at lunch, or in world history. She dropped Norm’s note and smoothed it out on her desk.
Norm’s handwriting was a kind of tiny, jagged but even script. Crumbling the note had been a mistake. It was a wonder Norman could write so small. A pen looked like a toothpick in his gigantic hands. Your life is in grave danger, the note began.
She scanned the rest of the note quickly. It was about Zack. She had very little patience for Norm’s opinion on the subject. He was jealous, obviously. The note mentioned how Zack had put Danny Long and Logan Rehnquist in the hospital. Well duh, she’d been there. And stuff about how Norm’s dad had heard of certain types of people who were very dangerous, shadowy characters, and they all shared this odd characteristic illness, urticaria, a kind of photosensitivity. Zack had already told her about that. Then there was more nonsense, about how he was worried about her and cared about her and would she please come with him after school and talk to his dad? Norm had written about fifteen hundred words on the front and back of one page, all jumbled up tight. It was enough to give her eyestrain.
