The Hex Breaker's Eyes

by Shaun Tennant

  “Hey,” I say. “I don’t have a ton of minutes on my phone so we gotta talk quick.”

  “OK. What’s up?” Marlene seems distracted, not paying a ton of attention to the phone call.

  “You find anything out about this curse?”

  “Hex. The word is hex,” she corrects me.

  “Whatever.”

  Marlie sighs, “No, not whatever. A curse is voodoo, a hex is witchcraft.”

  “OK, Marlene. I bow to your occult knowledge. Just tell me the sitch.”

  “You described a yellow aura, but nothing online really talks about auras. But the things you describe, lights turning off, tripping and falling, etc. It sounds like a bad luck hex. Basically, she’s always going to run into the bad version of a given situation. The odds are always against her. Kind of a weak hex. Beginner witchcraft.”

  “It tried to throw her down the stairs,” I point out.

  “No, it tried to make her step on a slippery binder on the stairs. Bad luck hex, not a hex that’s set to injure or to maim or to kill.”

  “So what’s a hex that’s harder to do? If this is beginner, what’s advanced?”

  “Love spell? That seems to be hard. There’s one called ‘The Hole in the Bucket’ that this website says is really bad. And another one that I’ve only seen mentioned on the cache of a deleted forum. They call it a Deathspell.”

  “Jeez. OK. I guess a death spell wouldn’t bother with turning off the streetlights. But what about the bad luck hex?” I ask.

  “What?” she asks, finally paying more attention to me than to her computer.

  “Can this thing keep getting worse? I mean, if this person keeps amping up their anger to boost the spell, can this thing kill her? Just how bad is bad luck?”

  Before Marlie can answer, my phone goes dead. I could call her back on the house phone but I don’t bother. She was too focused on her computer anyway. We can talk tomorrow.

  I head down to the rec room to watch TV, but I can’t focus. Somewhere in this town, in this very neighbourhood, Dina Jennings is in a house full of kitchen utensils, household chemicals, and God knows how many stairs and potential tripping hazards. And between her and them, there’s a yellow monster she can’t see, and its only purpose is to take those normal everyday objects and turn them in weapons against her.

  6

  Thursday, November 8

  “Hey Matty,” I say in the cafeteria at school. “What’s up?”

  Tam and I have been roaming the hallways for most of the lunch period, looking for Matty Charles, who is Mason Charles’ little brother. Matty’s a freshman, a year younger than us, and from the looks of it, he’s a real nerd. We’ve finally found him in a corner of the cafeteria, sitting with one other boy, playing some kind of card game.

  “Um,” he squirms. Maybe girls don’t talk to him very much. “Just, um, building my deck.”

  I sit down on the bench near him, and Tam circles around to sit on the other side with Matty’s friend.

  “My name’s Tam, and this is Mindee,” Tam says. The boys are looking at us like we’re aliens. Honestly, if you ever feel a little ugly or chubby, talk to a nervous ninth-grader and suddenly you’re so attractive that boys shiver in your very presence.

  “How’s it going?” his friend asks. “I’m John.”

  “Hi John. I just wanted to talk to Matty, you think you could give us a minute?” Tam coos.

  “OK,” he says. He’s running away before she even gets the words out. He leaves his backpack and lunch kit on the table and runs off toward the vending machines.

  “Matty, you’re Mason’s brother right?” she asks. I’m thanking God that Tam’s doing the talking because I’m not sure I could figure out a way to talk to this kid.

  “Yeah,” he says, looking disappointed that girls have come to talk to him, but it’s about his older brother.

  “He just broke up with that girl he was dating, right?” Tam probes.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  Matty grunts. “Well, he’s been a total dick for the last week, when he’s not moping in his room.”

  “So you figure she dumped him? Not the other way around?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  “Yeah, she totally crushed him,” he says.

  Tam goes back to asking the questions: “Was he mad about that?”

  “Hell yeah. He’s been a total dick ever since.”

  We sit in silence for a moment, not sure what to ask next. Finally, I see the logo on his card game and decide to ask the most obvious question.

  “What are you guys playing over here?”

  “Magic cards.”

  “Oh, magic huh? You know anything else about magic?”

  He looks confused. “What?”

  “You know,” I’m trying to phrase this right but I’m terrible with words. “Do you guys know anything about actual magic? Real magic?”

  He fidgets with the stack of cards in his hands and seems to blush a little. “Are you…” he starts. “Are you… hitting on me?”

  Now it’s my turn to blush. I come here to do a good deed and help Dina, and end up with a nerdy ninth grader drawing wildly embarrassing conclusions. “No! Not what I meant!”

  “Oh,” he says, looking a little disappointed (which is good, right?) “Then what did you mean?”

  “Nothing. Just a question for my, um, sociology assignment.”

  “Sociology?” I think he realizes that there is no sociology class offered in Blue Ribbon.

  “Thanks for the help, Matty. Good luck in your card game thing,” Tam says, saving me from the horrors of having to talk any longer.

  We’re out of the cafeteria and back in our comfortable upstairs hallway as fast as we can get there without running. We’re both turning pink from a combination of stifled laughter and embarrassment, and as we get closer to our lockers we break down and start laughing out loud.

  “You are such a terrible detective,” Tam says between laughs.

  “I wanted to ask some of the questions,” I say. “I felt bad that you were doing all the talking.”

  “And then he thought you were hot for him!” she breaks into laughter again. I ignore that comment, stare straight ahead, and keep walking.

  Just as we lean against the lockers and sit on the floor, I get distracted by the yellow aura entering the hallway. Dina Jennings heads to her locker, which is about halfway down the hall from us, and I see one of those tentacles (of which there are now three) reach into the locker.

  “Hey, watch out!” I blurt, before I can stop myself. Dina looks at me as she pulls the locker door open. A textbook falls out, and the corner of the book hits her in the thigh. She yelps in pain and the book hits the floor with a loud bang, and the small handful of people in the hallway all turn to look at her. She looks even worse now, like she doesn’t sleep at all. The book didn’t seem to hurt her much, but the social awkwardness of everyone looking at her seems to be a really big deal to her. She punches the next locker in frustration, picks up her book and throws it on the top shelf before slamming the locker door hard. Whatever she came here to get, she’s forgotten it as she snaps her lock into place and kicks the door. She’s probably had a ton of things trip her, fall on her, and otherwise bother her for the last three days and it’s obviously getting to her. She kicks the locker a second time, and even this far away I can see the tendons in her neck tense up like she’s about to start screaming in anger. Instead, she sprints away and around the corner. A moment later we hear a door slam.

  “Washroom,” Tam says. “You should go talk to her.”

  “What?”

  “You could find out who holds a grudge. Maybe it’s not Mason,” she says, but that’s a flimsy excuse. Tam’s just trying to force me to ingratiate myself into Dina’s life.

  I’m not buying it. “It’s totally Mason. And why don’t you talk to her? I’m the one who’s not a good detective, remember?”

  “But you have a re
ason to talk to her. You caught her on the stairs. That’s your icebreaker.”

  God, this is starting to sound like it does when Tam tries to coach me to talk to boys.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll go see if she’s even in there.”

  I head around the corner and into the ladies’ room, where I find Dina standing by the counter with her face red, hair ruffled, teeth clenched and hands rubbing her eyes.

  “Um, hi,” I say.

  “What do you want?” she asks. She pulls her hair out of the ponytail and shakes it out, so now I can’t see her face behind the curtain of hair.

  “Are you OK?” I ask as gently as possible.

  “What do you care?”

  “Well, yesterday I caught you when you fell down the stairs and today you’re freaking out, so I thought—”

  “—That I’m a freak? Some kind of insane spaz?” She’s really on edge.

  I wish I was good at talking to people. This is just too hard. “I just thought maybe you’d want to vent. Bitch about everything that sucks in the world. Trust me, I know.”

  She pulls her hair back again, and under the light I can see that her face isn’t quite right. She’s done a good enough job with the makeup that most people won’t notice, but she has a big bruise on the side of her face, around her temple.

  “What happened to your face?” I ask.

  She looks appalled that I noticed. “What? Nothing. I just fell into a wall.”

  “OK.”

  “And don’t act all fake like when I say I fell into a wall what I really mean is that someone beats me. I actually fell into a wall. Tripped over my shoelaces.”

  “I bet that’s happening a lot.”

  “What? Is that a joke?” she’s really pissed at me now. I should filter my brain before I talk. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Mindee. We live around the corner from each other? We walk home the same way a lot.” I hope to God she doesn’t think it’s creepy that I know where she lives.

  “Great, I have a stalker.” (OK, so that didn’t work.)

  “Can I tell you something crazy?” I ask, trying for a kind, conciliatory tone. “Something you might not really believe?”

  “Sure,” she’s looking in the mirror, checking her makeup in the hope that no one else will see the bruise.

  “I knew that textbook was going to jump out at you.”

  She stops and looks at me. “You shouted. Before I opened the locker.”

  “And I knew you were going to fall down the stairs, that’s why I stood there to catch you.”

  Dina finally turns her body to face me, giving me her full attention for the first time. And she is not happy with me. “What?”

  “You’re cursed.”

  “What?” she demands again, her skin reddening with anger. Darn, this is not going well. “What did you just say?”

  “I can see things, sometimes. Strange things. And you, well, you have a really bad energy that’s attached to you, trying to trip you up. I think it’s a bad luck curse.”

  “Buzz off, kid,” she says. “Mindee.” She repeats my name as if it’s some kind of threat that she knows who I am now.

  “I can help. If you know who might have wanted to curse you, I could maybe break the spell.”

  She looks at me like I’m completely nuts. Her face is showing what I can only describe as disgust. I almost expect her to hit me. “You are such a freak,” she says. “All you weird goth kids who sit in the hallway and don’t have any friends, you all have nothing better to do than dream up fantasies about people who actually matter.”

  “That’s not—” I try to say something but she’s on a full-blown rant now. I guess I deserve it, since I did offer to let her vent.

  “You see that I’m not a fatass and that boys actually like me and I’m on student council and that I’m going to go to college and get out of this town and you dream up stupid magical crap to try to make yourself feel better. ‘Oooh, Dina’s not a cool person who’s going to go on to a life of success, she’s actually cursed by magic gypsies to fall down the stairs!’ You even realize how stupid you sound? Get lost!”

  I want to say something to her. I want to tell her that I’m trying to help her, that I don’t know anything about all this magic stuff, that I’m not goth and not fricking fat. But everything about this girl is so damned irritating that I can’t even find words. Her tantrum has completely gutted me. Is that what people see of me? I’m not a girl with a couple really good friends, I’m a loser who other people say is fat? I know I’m close to breaking down in front of Dina and I’m not going to let her see me crack.

  One of her tentacles is holding onto the cold water tap, making it glow just like it made her shoe glow, just like it make that binder on the stairs glow. I could warn her about it, but why bother? I slump, shrinking my shoulders in, and leave the washroom. As the door closes behind me, I hear a blast of water hitting the sink, and I know it’s coming out so fast that it probably sprayed all over Dina. She shrieks so loud other people in the hallway turn and look at the washroom door.

  “What happened?” Tamara asks when I return to our lockers, my face red, eyes wet. Ryan has joined her, and they’re sitting against the lockers, snacking on their bagged lunches.

  “I hope the bitch is soaked,” I say.

  Tam looks shocked, but also entertained by my angry mood. “What?”

  “She doesn’t deserve help. She’s awful. No wonder someone hexed her.”

  “What happened?” she repeats.

  “She yelled at me. Insulted us, told me I’m a weird fat goth freak.”

  Ryan makes a face. “You’re not goth. You don’t even wear black.”

  “Not the point, Ry.” Tam says as she pats him on the knee like he’s a dumb dog.

  “Gotcha. So what are we going to do?”

  I slump to the floor beside them. “I’m gonna let the yellow thing make her life miserable until it fades away. Why should I try to help someone like that? She deserves to fall on her face a few times.”

  We manage to eat our lunches in the remaining few minutes of the lunch period, our investigation closed on the grounds that the victim deserves it.

  7

  I spent all of my lunch break still fuming over the things Dina said to me. To think I tried to help that girl. I should have investigated whether or not she was a monster beforehand.

  Now in fifth period, I’m sitting in chemistry class, the last class of the day, at my lab station with Marlene. I filled her in briefly before class about my encounter with Dina and how I let the hex make the faucet spray her with water. Mrs. Cole is using an overhead projector to show us some equations, but most of the class is using the darkness as convenient cover to lean on their desks and close their eyes. Only a few students are doing anything more than sleeping in the dark.

  There’s Bryan Johns, the perfect student, taking notes at the front of the class, switching between four different pen colours. By the window, Viola Arnason is looking at her own reflection in the glass. Viola is gorgeous, because her own face is Viola’s only concern in life. I swear I have never, ever, noticed her doing anything other than looking at her own reflection. At the other side of the room, poor Janelle Haas is trying to pay attention, but her lab partner is Melanie Woods, the attention-starved class clown. Melanie has taken to wearing a red bow-tie around her neck and is currently folding binder paper into origami and trying to make Janelle notice. As I look around, suddenly engrossed in this little bout of people-watching, I wonder what it’s like in Dina’s senior classes. Do they have the same mix of goofballs, vain princesses and studious nerds? Is there someone in another room of this same building, staring at Dina and feeding the anger that powers the hex?

  I snap out of my daydream when the overhead projector dies, and the lights in the hallway also cut out. For a second or two, there’s no power in the school at all, and then it comes on again. The overhead hums as it comes back to life, the fluorescent lights in th
e hall flicker a bit before staying on. Mrs. Cole carries on, making some lame joke about electrical conductivity.

  I can hear a siren coming. It’s still far away, but it’s coming closer. I try to tell what type of siren it is, but I’m not really good at that. Police, fire, ambulance, I don’t remember the difference.

  At the side of the class near the window, every kid who has a view to the outside is peeking under the blinds to see. Even Viola seems to be looking through the window rather that at her own reflection. The siren has pulled right up to the school, and then it cuts out with a final blurp of sound.

  “What’s going on?” Mrs. Cole asks.

  “Ambulance,” says Sarah Santana, one of the students who had been napping through the lesson. “The EMT guys just took a stretcher into the school.”

  Mrs. Cole shrugs. “Well, I’m sure they can handle it. If this was anything that concerned us, there would have been an announcement. Eyes up front.”

  We all go back to looking at the screen (where Mrs. Cole’s precise penmanship on the overhead sheets is really quite impressive,) except for the kids who sit by the window, who are still staring outside for any sign of the emergency responders.

  There’s a murmur at that side of the class.

  “What now?” Mrs. Cole asks.

  “They’re taking a girl out,” Sarah tells her. Mrs. Cole heads over to the window to look out, and a lot of students take that as permission to head over to the window and look for themselves. Soon, most of the class are standing by the windows, pulling open the blinds to look down at the front parking lot, where a paramedic is rolling out a stretcher with a brown-haired girl on it. The girl is moving her arms, and from here it looks like she’s trying to get up, but the paramedics keep telling her to lie down. They load her into the back of the ambulance, close the doors, and pull away.

  Mrs. Cole orders us back to our seats, but the bell rings and school is over, so we all just start packing our backpacks.

  “Did you see that?” Marlene asks me.