The Tragical Tale of Birdie Bloom

by Temre Beltz

  That one line that wasn’t like anything Agnes had ever heard in all her life: Because I like you, Ms. Crunch.

  Agnes resumed her search with an extra vigor, tossing items over her shoulder left and right. Somewhere beneath all that dust and dirt and witchy odds and ends, it had to be—yes!

  Agnes wrestled the book away from the dust dinosaurs and held it in front of her as if it were a prize.

  But it really was ridiculous.

  Of all the books for a wicked witch to stow away in her haunted cabin, of all the books to thumb her nose at the Council for, it had to be a picture book called Georgie the Giant Dragon.

  Agnes opened the front cover. She squinted and held her breath, but it didn’t help much. The illustrations were even cuter than she remembered. In fact, she had to imagine something suitably disgusting so as not to lose her wormy breakfast. The words were even worse. They rhymed. And Agnes’s nosy cauldron was already peeking over her shoulder and trying to gurgle and burp to the beat!

  “Silence!” Agnes chided. But her witchy toes were having their own difficulty staying planted firmly on the ground. Apparently, they remembered quite well what it was to be seven years old.

  Agnes gritted her teeth and flipped a few more pages. Her knobby finger chased along after the words. She couldn’t believe she was down to combing through a picture book for a tip or two, but if she was going to go after that Blue Dragon on her own, she didn’t want to arrive completely empty-handed. After all, asking a dragon for help was a mite bit different than roasting him.

  Agnes’s finger drew to a skidding halt. There. Right there. That was exactly the sort of tidbit she was looking for! Agnes brought the book near. In a decidedly non-singsongy voice, she growled, “Georgie is shy with all things new, but if you want him to follow you, just leave a trail of peanut butter, and he will like you more than any other.”

  Agnes drummed her fingers together. Toting a jar full of peanut butter was a heap easier than, as Bob suggested, trying to rope someone into coming along with her. Peanut butter didn’t talk. Peanut butter wasn’t annoying. Peanut butter would do exactly what she told it to. And, lucky for Agnes, she had one jar of peanut butter stuffed into the farthest corner of her pantry that she had purchased twenty-five years ago out of sheer necessity when a little girl—who obviously hadn’t a clue she was in witch country—dared to knock upon Agnes’s door for a school fund-raiser.

  Agnes tossed the jar of peanut butter into her knapsack along with the other essentials she’d packed just that morning: two cans of pumpkin juice, a jar of snail slime, three twig bars, and a handful of toadstools. Most people who are about to set off all alone on a dragon hunt might see fit to pack a shield, a bit of armor, and maybe toss in a potion if they’re lucky enough to have such a thing. Agnes merely packed a midmorning snack, because she was certain she’d have that dragon beneath her thumb with enough time to make it home for lunch.

  Agnes snapped her fingers in the air for her trusty broomstick. She pointedly ignored her cauldron, which was still bubbling up rhymes and had flushed an annoying shade of tickled pink, and slammed the door in a way that caused all the Dead Tree Forest to stir.

  Unfortunately, Agnes only made it about two miles from her haunted cabin when things went south. Two miles if you’re a runner is a hearty warm-up; two miles if you’re on a horse is a nice stretch; but two miles if you’re on a broomstick is like blinking your eyes, because broomsticks are fast! So fast that if you aren’t being careful—if your arms, legs, and feet aren’t tucked close to your side, and if you don’t secure all loose items before takeoff—it is really easy to lose something.

  And that’s what happened to Agnes.

  She lost that blasted jar of peanut butter!

  Considering the last thing she wanted to do was go traipsing into town for the second time in a week to purchase, of all things, a jar of peanut butter, she figured it would be far better to simply find the one she’d lost.43 And so, instead of fiercely blasting through the atmosphere in hot pursuit of the Blue Dragon, she was schlepping about the Dead Tree Forest.

  Pinpointing a single jar of peanut butter among miles of forest turned out to be no small task. Indeed, a full two hours later, Agnes’s feet were dragging. She had already blown through her entire knapsack of goodies; her prune-y lips were feeling particularly parched; and her broomstick kept sighing. Agnes very nearly dozed off with her nose buried in a pile of shrubbery when a loud “RIBBIT!” rang out.

  Agnes jerked her head up in time to see a fat, slimy toad bound across her path. It even appeared to give her a buggy-eyed wink before leaping onto a nearby tree trunk. Without thinking, Agnes followed it. The toad continued to hop from tree to tree to tree. Curiously, Agnes forgot all about her missing jar of peanut butter. Even more curious, Agnes had the strangest notion that there was something about the toad she liked.

  Agnes never liked anything.

  The feeling was so astonishing it reminded her of what the Bird-Girl had written in her letter. Maybe she was experiencing the sort of feeling that convinced someone to do something ridiculous like acquire a pet. Of course, Agnes hadn’t failed to notice the toad’s scrumptiously long toes. She did so love a delicate platter of toad toes! But Birdie had been most adamant about not eating pets, and if Agnes was going to go to the trouble of trying it out, she supposed following one rule was not too much to ask. Regardless, at the moment, anything sounded better than a dead-end hunt for peanut butter.

  Agnes slowed to a slink. The toad had stopped on a low-lying tree branch. It had its back to her and was less than five steps away; maybe four. She was nearly close enough to lunge and secure it in her witchy grasp. Agnes fought the urge to cackle, because a toad really was the perfect pet for her, wasn’t it? It was appropriately ugly; it had loads of countable warts; it preferred much the same diet of bugs as Agnes; and she had plenty of windows she could toss the toad against to see how sticky its slime really was.

  Agnes curled and uncurled her gnarled fingers. She ran her squiggly tongue across her lips. She bent low and—

  “MEOOOOOWW!”

  Agnes jumped at the pitiful sound that erupted from behind her. Her toad must have heard it too, because it turned and looked Agnes full in the face. It blinked its bulbous eyes at her; it launched forth its long, sticky tongue and caught a delicious fly in midair as if to prove its perfection; and then, most important of all, it didn’t run away. It was almost like the toad wasn’t opposed to Agnes. As if maybe it even wanted to go home with her. Agnes didn’t waste a moment. She ran for the toad. She scrambled up the tree after the toad.

  But the toad must have changed its mind.

  Or it was merely taunting her the whole time. In any case, it bounded away with nary a backward glance, leaving Agnes with her arms wrapped around a very scratchy tree branch not at all designed to support the weight of a witch. The branch quivered. Agnes lost her grip, careened down the tree trunk, and splashed into a mud-filled ditch at the base of the tree.

  “MEOOOOWW!”

  The awful sound erupted again.

  Agnes raked her fingernails through the mud and tried to stumble to her feet. But the mud was very, very slippery. Every time Agnes placed her witchy boots beneath her, they slid right out again. She splished and splashed and sploshed about. Even her eyelashes were coated in the gooey substance, not to mention the continuous meowing sound that grated against her nerves!

  Agnes swallowed her witchy pride for the second time that week (a burden no witch should have to bear) and rolled onto her belly. She thrust her neck out like the worms she loved to slurp. With her eyelids still caked shut, she wrenched her head back and forth in the direction of the meager sunlight eking through the trees and slithered along in search of a patch of dry dirt to scramble onto. But her hands landed squarely on something else.

  Something furry.

  “MEEOOW!” came the anguished cry. Then, quite promptly, a row of little needle-sharp teeth sank into Agnes’s outstretch
ed hand.

  Agnes yowled.

  “You blasted little bugger!” she cried, grasping wildly about. But it is a terribly hard endeavor to grab ahold of something when you can’t see a thing. And so, Agnes spun only to coat herself in even more mud.

  “Where are you? Come here! Come—” Agnes coughed and sputtered. “Wh-what are you doing? Hey, hey stop that r-r-right now! Y-you hear me? St-st—”

  At the barest hint of a warm, sandpaper-like tongue scraping against the tender skin of her eyelids, a sound slipped out of Agnes’s mouth.

  It was a sound Agnes had never made before.

  It was a sound that caused the dry, brittle leaves of the Dead Tree Forest to rattle and stir.

  It was a sound closely related to her highly practiced, wholly bone-chilling, and marvelously polished cackle, except without the edge. The sound was softer somehow, and it seemed to roll one right after the other like children turning somersaults in the grass.

  Agnes’s jaw dropped open. Her eyes popped open too, because the incessant licking had managed to wash all the mud away.

  Agnes was staring face-to-face with a kitten.

  “Did you . . . ? Could you . . . ? How did you . . . ?” Agnes paused. She took a deep breath. She summoned up her best, most intimidating bellow. “Did you make me GIGGLE?”

  The kitten blinked its one big green eye at her. It attempted to fluff up its mangy coat with the haphazard network of scars stamped all along its skeletal frame. It wasn’t a monstrous kitten (for then Agnes might have taken an immediate liking to it), but merely a miserable, scrappy thing who seemed to have had a rough go of it.

  Agnes slapped the palm of her hand against the ground. “Do you even know who I am?” she asked the kitten.

  “Who-who-whooooo?” an owl hooted cheerily from a nearby tree.

  Agnes jerked her head up and scowled.

  Since when did the Dead Tree Forest become so chatty and full of life? she wondered.

  Amid her musing, the kitten leaped on top of her head. It began to groom itself. It kneaded its paws in Agnes’s nest of ratty purple hair. Every so often the kitten dipped its tongue near enough to have another lick of Agnes’s eyelid such that Agnes giggled again.

  Agnes had enough. She plucked the kitten off her head. She plunked it on the mud beside her and turned on her heel, fully determined to put the nonsense business of pets behind her once and for all, because it was a toad or nothing.

  But the kitten dashed in front of her.

  It parked itself directly beneath Agnes’s witchy boot such that if Agnes fully executed her step, the little bugger would be pierced straight through in the chest! The last thing Agnes wanted to deal with was the mess associated with a speared kitten, so she stepped aside. But Agnes’s reflexes weren’t quite what they used to be. And she got to teetering and bobbling about all over again until she toppled fully over into a second muddy ditch!

  The kitten bounded back into Agnes’s lap, and Agnes gave it her most wicked glare.

  The kitten couldn’t have cared less. It swiped its paw against Agnes’s cheek; quick as a whip, and without even a warning!

  Agnes touched her fingers to the place where her skin burned. She felt the four neat lines where the kitten’s claws had dug in and the warm, ooze of blood.

  If you can believe it, Agnes Prunella Crunch smiled.

  “My, you are an especially rotten one, aren’t you?” she said.

  And she began to think. Maybe the kitten was nearly as rotten as she was. Maybe the sort of creature who would ruin a perfect plan was the only sort she could stomach. Maybe they could even try to outrotten each other for kicks. Of course, that seemed to completely contravene the Bird-Girl’s hope of turning Agnes good, but that was never going to happen anyways, was it?

  Agnes stuck the kitten beneath her smelly armpit. She snapped her fingers for her broomstick, which had forgotten all about being bored and was instead anxiously shedding entire bristles because, small or not, that kitten looked to be a heap of trouble it did not want to tangle with.

  Agnes’s broomstick pointed meekly in the direction of the Deepest, Darkest Bog, but Agnes pooh-poohed her hand in the air. “Goblin’s goo!” she said. “That dragon’s been there for a decade at least, and it’ll still be there tomorrow. Anyways, our rotten quota’s filled for the day because we’re going to take this kitten home and ruin its life for good. Ha-ha!”

  Nestling in closer to Agnes, the kitten vibrated.

  Agnes thrust it out in front of her. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Is that some sort of warning? Are you going to explode?”

  But the kitten was as obedient as Agnes was (meaning not a hint) and persisted in its mysterious vibrating all the way home. It also managed to nip Agnes’s earlobe three times and administer four new scratches on her craggy neck, which was impressive given the speed of broomstick travel. By the time a muddied, bloodied Agnes finally rolled through the doorway of her haunted cabin with the kitten in tow, Agnes’s broomstick was trembling all over, her cauldron had paled to a wan shade of lime green, and the enchanted ceiling rumbled with round after round after round of thunder without any prompting from Agnes.

  Because what place did a kitten have in the haunted cabin of a witch, i.e. what had gotten into Agnes?

  Fourteen

  A Terrible Choice

  Birdie Bloom was trying not to worry about the fact that she had trusted a witch with her address and hadn’t heard from her in two whole days. She hoped that meant Ms. Crunch was busy training a pet. She hoped that meant she was so busy getting “good” that the laughter potion was practically brewing itself.

  Whatever the reason, Birdie desperately hoped she would hear from Ms. Crunch soon. Because lately Mistress Octavia was acting stranger than normal. Indeed, the night she arrived back from the Council meeting, instead of popping magically back into the manor with her usual jarring BOOM, it was more of an explosive BOOM, THUD, THUD! Moreover, Mistress Octavia was no longer retiring to her bedchamber at night, but remained holed up in her Room of Sinister Plotting only to emerge each morning with terribly bloodshot eyes. Most strange of all, on that morning, with the children seated at their desks in the Instruction Room, Mistress Octavia was late.

  Birdie and her classmates were getting a bit restless.

  A few weeks prior, they would have thought to do nothing other than lay their heads on their desks for a short snooze, or maybe silently count their fingers thirty times in a row, or simply stare at the thick black curtains without ever wondering what the world (if it even existed) looked like outside of Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical.

  But the Tragicals had grown used to so much more than that.

  Even Francesca Prickleboo’s aloneness had taken on a new and somewhat troubling dimension. Whereas before she simply failed to notice the other Tragicals, now she seemed to notice them a great deal. She seemed to notice their newfound togetherness, and she was going to great lengths to avoid them. On that morning, however, she hadn’t needed to make the effort given her assignment of kitchen duty.

  With the small slice of unexpected freedom, Cricket shyly pulled a piece of paper from her gown pocket. She unfolded it carefully. The other Tragicals made no attempt to hide their curiosity and gathered near. Benjamin, the six-year-old with the heart pattern beneath his sleeve, shuffled so close he came to lean upon the back of Cricket’s chair. He peeked over her shoulder and began to nod his head.

  “This one,” he whispered. “This one for sure is my favorite.”

  Cricket took a deep breath and turned the drawing around so the rest of the children could see.

  The Tragicals, seventeen of them, were gathered in what looked to be a library and were surrounded by—of all things—books. The ends of their hair, and the hems of their clothing, were lifted by an invisible wind. The pages of the books turned beneath the wind’s hand, and on every page was an image so lovely some of the younger Tragicals began to cry.

  Most remarka
ble of all, however, were the expressions Cricket had drawn on their faces. They were expressions of . . . joy. Small expressions, subtle expressions, but still, joy. Birdie knew it was joy because, lately, she had seen it on the faces of the other Tragicals. She nodded in recognition; the others did too. Though they might never have dared to believe it on their own, by the light of Cricket’s drawing, they could not deny it. Joy. Real joy. Joy even among Tragicals.

  Five-year-old Amelia twisted a lock of tangled hair around her finger. She pointed at a girl in Cricket’s drawing and then pointed at Mildred. “Y-you do that. That thing where your eye crinkles. I—I’ve seen you do that when Sprinkles is being silly.”

  Mildred’s face lit up. “Really?” she said. Birdie watched as Mildred slipped off her cracked eyeglasses and held them in the palm of her hand. Perhaps Mildred thought she could see far better through the eyes of a friend.

  Still hovering near Cricket, Benjamin began to bounce up and down. “What about me? What about me?” he asked. “Can anyone tell which one’s me?”

  Ralph stepped forward. “This one, of course.” He pointed to the drawing of a boy whose sleeve was raised just enough to reveal a heart-shape pattern on his arm. Benjamin’s eyes shone because, certainly, that was him. Certainly, it couldn’t be anybody else.

  Amid the Tragicals’ excited whispering, Birdie was the first to notice Francesca slip through the doorway. Though Francesca’s expression was initially smug, when she saw the other Tragicals all clustered together, she thrust her hands on her hips and scowled. And then she did what she hadn’t done for over a week. She marched right up to them. She eyed the drawing in Cricket’s hand while Cricket tried desperately to fold it shut and stick it back inside her gown pocket.

  But Francesca was too quick. She snatched the paper away from Cricket. Francesca lifted high her bony elbows and pushed her way out from the older children, including a still-healing Ralph, who tried to stop her. A few feet away, she flattened the drawing with the palms of her hands and stared at it.