by Jodi Picoult
Hailey walked past Meg, deliberately splattering her with even more mud. “If you can’t shoot straight, hippo, pass the ball!”
“Hailey!” the teacher said sharply. And then sighed. “Meg, go get it.”
Meg jogged off, painfully aware of Hailey whispering about the way she looked while she was trying to run. One day she’d be reincarnated as an anorexic. Or a supermodel. Or maybe both at the same time. Head down, Meg concentrated on the fire in the pit of her lungs and her belly, instead of the tears pricking the backs of her eyes.
“Here you go.”
A man handed her the out-of-bounds ball. He was tall, and the sun caught his hair like it did Gilly’s. He had a kind smile, and she would have thought he was incredibly handsome if he wasn’t as old as her father. “Don’t kick it with your toe,” he said.
“What?”
“Raise your knee, push your toes down, and hit it with your shoelaces. Swipe under the ball.” He grinned at Meg. “You’ve got more power in one leg than that blond girl has in her whole body.”
Meg let her eyes slide away. “Whatever,” she muttered. She slogged onto the field, letting the action fly around her. She was facing her own goal when the ball slammed her in the back of the knees. “Knee up, toe down, on the shoelace!” Meg heard his voice again, and without thinking about it, she did exactly what he said.
The ball flew low and strong, driving straight toward the opposite goal. Maybe it was the surprise that Meg Saxton had actually hit it; maybe it was—as that man had said—that she had power she didn’t even realize—but for whatever reason, the ball streaked past the defense and snugged in the net.
For a moment, everything stood still, and Meg felt herself suddenly cloaked in the thick satisfaction of doing something perfectly right. “Killer shot!” one girl said, and another patted her on the back. Gillian ran up to her side. “Unbelievable. Did you cast a spell?”
“No,” Meg admitted, a little amazed this had happened without witchcraft.
But Gillian’s attention was on the field, where the man was walking off, hands in his pockets. “Who’s your coach?” she asked.
Meg shrugged. “Some guy. I don’t know.”
“He’s cute.”
“He’s old!”
Gillian laughed. “Next time,” she said, “ask his name.”
The basement of the diner held the lion’s share of the food that couldn’t fit in the narrow kitchen: a stacked ladder of hamburger rolls and breads, huge tins of sweet corn, tubs of ketchup large enough to fill half a bathtub. Jack had been sent down there by Delilah for a fifty-pound bag of potatoes. Hefting the bag onto his shoulder, he yanked it out of its spot on the shelf and found himself looking right at Roy.
The old man was in back of the metal shelving, his fist closed around a bottle of cooking sherry. “Oh, shit,” he sighed.
“Addie’s going to kill you.”
“Only if she finds out about it.” Roy offered his most charming smile. “I’ll let you watch whatever you want on TV for a week if you pretend you never saw me.”
Jack considered this for a moment and nodded. Then he balanced the potatoes on his shoulder, trudged up the narrow stairs, and dumped the sack at Delilah’s feet. “Start peeling,” she ordered.
“Have you seen my father?” Addie demanded, hurrying into the kitchen. “We’ve got a line a mile long at the cash register.”
Delilah shrugged. “He’s not here or I’d have tripped over him. Jack, you see Roy in the basement?”
Jack shook his head but he didn’t meet Addie’s eye. Then, with impeccably lousy timing, Roy sauntered through the basement door. His face was glowing, and even from across the room Jack could smell the cheap alcohol on his breath.
Addie’s face went bright red. Tension filled the confines of the kitchen, and Jack tried to ignore the fact that someone was going to say something any moment that he or she would regret. Words, he knew, could scar.
So he squeezed the base of the potato he was peeling, then watched it fly in an arc over his shoulder toward the grill. Then, taking a deep breath, he grabbed for it, deliberately pressing his palm to the burning plate of metal.
“Goddamn!” he cried, geniune pain pricking behind his eyes and making him weak in the knees. Delilah pulled him away from the stove as Addie hurried to his side. With the brisk expertise of someone who’d done this before, she led him toward the hand-washing sink and ran the cold water. “It’s going to blister. How badly does it hurt?”
It hurt, but not the way she thought. It hurt to have her fingers stroking the back of his hand, to feel her concern flowing over him like a river. Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.
Addie fussed over the red streaks branded into his skin, a scarlet letter that in his imagination took the shape of an A. “Really,” she scolded, now that the danger had passed, “you’re no better than Chloe.”
Jack shook his head. He pressed Addie’s fingers to his chest, so that his heart beat in the palm of her hand.
Thomas glanced up to find the very girl he was daydreaming about standing less than two feet away from him. “Uh, hi,” he managed. Brilliant.
“Would you mind if I sat down?” Chelsea asked, her gaze lighting on the other lunch tables. “Pretty crowded today.”
“Mi table es su table.”
“What?”
“It’s Spanish. Well, kind of. I don’t know how to say table . . .” Shut up, Thomas, before you hurt yourself.
“Thanks.” Chelsea set down her lunch, then waved. And suddenly Thomas realized that the princess came with an entourage. Gillian Duncan and two others sat down, and the minute they arrived, it was as if Thomas himself didn’t exist.
Still, it was better to eat his lunch with Chelsea Abrams just six inches away from him on a wooden bench than by himself. His breath caught when she mistakenly reached for Thomas’s napkin and touched it to the corner of her mouth in nearly the same spot where Thomas had touched it to his own mouth. He winged a silent prayer to God for Chelsea to leave first, so that she wouldn’t see his thoughts broadcast across his groin.
“Maybe he’s some kind of pervert,” Meg said, and Thomas jumped a foot, wondering if they could sense his hard-on even through the barrier of the picnic table. Then he realized that Meg was talking about someone else entirely. “You don’t see other grown men lurking around outside the high school gym.”
“Lurking? God, Meg. You think you’re being dramatic enough?” Whitney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Perverts live in places like Detroit and L.A., not Salem Falls.”
“First off, my dad has always said that crime statistics don’t mean much if you’re the victim in that one percentile. Second—I talked to him, you didn’t.”
“Still,” Gillian pointed out, “I wouldn’t be so quick to cast stones at someone who made you look like Mia Hamm.”
“Are you talking about the guy out by the soccer field?” Thomas asked.
Chelsea turned. “Do you know him?”
Thomas felt the heat of their attention. “Sure. He works at the diner in town.”
Gillian took a drink from a water bottle and glanced in the direction of the playing fields, where the man might even now be standing.
“You can work at a diner and still be a pervert,” Meg murmured. “That’s all I’m saying.”
It seemed to Jack that the kid at the counter had been there long enough to warrant concern, but then again, it wasn’t his diner or his place to care. He sat stone-faced at the cash register, a job he’d won by default because he couldn’t get his bandage wet.
The girl kept staring at him. She was lean and pretty, coltlike, although she wore too much makeup. She was in the process of ripping open her sixteenth sugar packet and pouring its contents on the counter.
Addie burst through the swinging doors, plates balanced on her arms like armor. “Help me a second, will you?” Jack obligingly stood up and trailed in her wake. He lifted each d
ish, setting it down where Addie directed.
“Thanks,” she said. “If I can keep Chloe from getting underfoot, I just may actually finish getting out the orders for the dinner rush.” She started back into the kitchen but stopped when Jack called her name.
“That girl . . . she’s been here for three hours.”
“She can stay here for three years if she wants, as long as she’s hungry and has her daddy’s charge card. That’s Gilly Duncan . . . daughter of the guy who owns the pharmaceutical plant.”
Jack sat back down and watched Gilly Duncan rip open sugar packets number seventeen and eighteen and pour them on the Formica. Well, hell. It was one thing if Jack himself was busing tables, but with his burn, Addie had taken on that work. The thought of her having to sweep up after this spoiled little brat fueled his courage. “You’re making a mess,” he said.
Gillian raised one delicate red brow. “Oh, my. Did I spill?” She stuck her forefinger in her mouth, rolled it in the white grains, and started to suck on it. “Sweet.” She coated her finger in sugar again and held it up. “Very sweet.”
Jack jumped back, as if she’d brandished a gun.
“I didn’t mean to make more work for you.” She began to scoop the spilled sugar into the cup of her hand and empty it onto the side of her saucer. “There. I’m Gilly, by the way. And you are?”
“Going,” Jack said, and he ducked from behind the counter and walked out the diner’s door.
In Whitney’s garage, Gillian cupped a small heap of cinnamon in her hand and began the third casting, trailing a ring around her friends. “Set me apart from the world of man. Set me apart from the world of spirit. Hold me between the two, so I might work my magick.” The last bit of cinnamon sparked from her fingers, and she turned to the others. “The circle is perfect.”
She knelt in front of the altar and reached for the green candle they’d brought to the garage. Rubbing oil from the tip to the base, she began to chant: “Heal him whole, heal him whole.” Using the quartz from the Wiccan Read, Gillian scratched into the candle a crude sketch of a caduceus, to symbolize perfect health. “Who has the matches?”
Whitney grimaced. She pointed toward the hood of her mother’s car, a silvery Volvo. “Damn. I left them over there.” She picked up the knife on the altar and cut through the invisible boundaries of the circle to open it, reached for the matches, and then stepped back inside. “Here,” she said, pressing the small box into Gilly’s hand.
The flame rose higher every time the girls breathed in, visualizing Stuart Holling as he rose from his hospital bed and walked away from it. Wax slid down the candle until the etched snakes were smooth again. And then, a quick draft coming from beneath the garage door blew the fire out.
“Do you think that means he’s better?” Chelsea whispered.
“Either that or he’s dead.”
“Maybe we should call the hospital to see.”
“They wouldn’t tell us,” Gillian pointed out. “We’re not related to him. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow.”
The girls sat, lost in thought. “It was different tonight,” Whitney said finally.
“Like I was humming inside,” Meg agreed.
“Maybe it was because we weren’t just doing it for ourselves.” Whitney spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. “When we cast a spell for money or for love . . . it was to change us, to help us. This time, we were sending all that energy to Mr. Hollings.”
Chelsea frowned. “But if we were sending the energy away, how come it felt so powerful in the circle?”
“Because it takes more strength to change someone else’s life than it takes to change your own,” Gillian replied.
“And if it works—” Whitney said.
“When it works.”
“When it works . . . it will be something he wanted all along, anyway.” Whitney stared at the altar, at the smoking candle. “A true witch can cast spells for someone else.”
“A true witch can cast spells on someone else.” Gillian raised her finger, smudged brown with cinnamon, and blew so that it clouded the air in front of her. “What if we hadn’t healed Mr. Hollings? What if we made him sicker?”
Chelsea’s eyes widened. “You know that goes against the Wiccan rede, Gilly. Whatever you do comes back to you threefold.”
“Well, okay. Mr. Hollings is a stupid example. But if Wicca’s all about keeping the balance of nature, then why couldn’t we use magick for that?”
Whitney looked at Gillian. “I don’t get it.”
Meg leaned forward. “She means if we help people who’ve helped others, it’s natural to hurt people who’ve hurt others. Right?”
Gillian nodded. “And to do it so that they don’t know who’s making it happen.” Her voice skimmed over the others’ reservations, smoothing in its wake. “Think about how powerful you felt tonight, healing someone. And then imagine how powerful you’d feel if you could ruin someone’s life.”
“Hailey McCourt,” Meg whispered.
Gillian turned. “That’s a start.”
“And where have you been?” Addie demanded, as Jack entered the diner.
“Out.”
It was empty of patrons, quiet in the kitchen. Overhead, Jeopardy! played on the television, the sound muted. Jack pulled off his jacket, determined to help close for the night.
“Well, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you can’t just walk off a job without an explanation. Or maybe that’s what got you fired from teaching?”
He fixed his eyes on the screen above her left shoulder. The core of a quarter is made of this metal.
What is zinc? Jack thought. “I’m sorry,” he said aloud.
“You should be. I needed you here tonight. I may not be paying you a lot, but—”
The bells over the diner door jingled. Addie narrowed her eyes at Jack, blaming him for forgetting to lock the door behind himself. Wes Courtemanche walked in in uniform. “Coffee, Addie?”
“Sorry, Wes. I just cleaned out the pots.”
“I have a perfectly nice Mr. Coffee in my kitchen.”
Jack stuck the mop in the bucket and inadvertently knocked it over. A small flood spread beneath Wes’s feet. “Sorry,” Jack murmured, hurrying to swab the spill.
“Even if I wasn’t so tired, Wes, I couldn’t. Chloe’s asleep in the back, and I have to get her home.”
Wes didn’t know what to say to that. “Chloe,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“You know, I’ve been blown off before, Addie . . . but never because of a ghost.”
None of your business, Jack thought to himself over and over. He pushed the mop over the black and white tiles in a smooth, easy rhythm.
The last surviving Brontë sister.
“C’mon, Addie.”
Not Emily.
“No, Wes. I can’t.”
Not Jane.
From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Courtemanche reach for her, saw Addie back away.
Who is Charlotte?
He dropped the mop and wedged between Addie and Wes, pinning the policeman to the wall. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”
“Jack, don’t!”
Wes shoved, sending Jack sprawling. “I could throw your ass in jail for that.”
Jack did not move from where he’d fallen. Wes jammed his hat on his head and stormed out of the diner, furious. Addie, Jack thought. I did this for Addie.
“Are you crazy?” She leaned down so that her face was level with his, her eyes hard and cold. “He’s a policeman, Jack. He can make a small-business owner’s life miserable. And if that isn’t bad enough, this is only going to make him try twice as hard to come after me next time.”
Jack hauled himself to his feet, yanked on his jacket, and for the second time that day left without telling Addie where he was going, or why.
Addie’s strongest memory of Chloe took place underwater. Chloe had been seven the year Addie managed to scrape together enough money
to take the two of them to the Caribbean. They stayed in a tiny rental house that was sixteen giant Mother-May-I steps from the beach. Palm fronds batted against the peeling pink shutters, and every morning on the sand there would be a new coconut.
One afternoon, Addie watched Chloe streaking back and forth beneath the water, as if she were logging mileage. “What are you doing?”
“I’m a mermaid. Come and watch.”
And so Addie had waded in with her daughter’s scuba mask. Underwater, Chloe wriggled: legs tight, hips undulating, as her bright blond hair streamed out behind her. Through the ripples of the water Addie could see the sun quivering like the yolk of an egg. Suddenly Chloe turned to face her, eyes wide, hair snaking soft about her face, arms blued by the shadows of the sea.
Addie could remember being a kid in the pool at the Y, pretending that she was a mermaid, too. There were moments she was certain it had happened—that her legs had turned into a scaled tail, that her lungs could take in water, that the wide thighs of women in the water aerobics class had thickened into pillars of coral. Beneath the water, the world was a different place, and you could be anything you wanted to be. Beneath the water, you moved slowly, so slowly you might never have to grow up.
On the day that Chloe died, the nurses had let Addie sit with her body for an hour, alone in the hospital room. Addie had tucked the sheets tight around Chloe’s still legs. She had witnessed those thin limbs going blue from lack of oxygen; she had seen Chloe’s cheeks and temples glisten wet from the spots where her own tears had fallen—and she’d thought, You are a mermaid, baby.
She’d thought, Wait for me.
The neurologists at the hospital had never seen anything quite like it—a man with significant damage in the aftermath of a stroke suddenly get up and start the day as if nothing had happened. But the nurses had been standing right there: Stuart Hollings, who could not speak or move an entire side of his body, had awakened asking for breakfast . . . and then threatened to leave when it didn’t arrive fast enough.
