“So anyway,” I say, “you know where Sydney is?”
“Like I said, ostracized,” Dina smiles. “She hangs out in the music department now, like some band geek. Probably spending her lunch with a bunch of sophomores. No offense.”
“We’re gonna go ask some questions,” Tam says.
“OK,” says Dina, reaching out to grab Tam’s forearm. “But if I were you, I’d forget talking to that witch. I’d just break into her bedroom and smash everything until you find the one that makes the curse. That’s what she deserves.”
We thank Dina for the advice and head out of the cafeteria, looking to track down Sydney and get some answers.
I’ve never taken a music class, so walking into the music room is kind of a weird experience. I’ve never been in here, and after a couple years at Laurier High, it’s an odd feeling to discover that there’s a strange room I’ve never seen before. It’s actually divided into a couple of rooms, I guess so they can teach multiple classes. In one of the open doors I can see a bunch of kids playing woodwinds (they sound exactly as bad as a bunch of uncoordinated beginners can possibly sound). In another door there are some students sitting around eating lunch. We head over there and see Sydney sitting in a chair with a violin case at her feet, eating an apple. As soon as we step into the doorway the students turn and look, including Sydney, who seems to know right away that we’ve come for her. She stands up and comes over.
“What do you want?” she says to Tam.
“Answers. You want to talk here with your new friends or head to the hallway?” Tam’s voice is icy.
“Here’s fine. I know you can’t sucker punch me with all these people around.”
I’ve never quite gotten the whole story of what happened with these two, but I know they ended up leaving each other bruised.
“Another hex showed up,” I say. “And there’s only one bit—I mean witch—in this school. So why don’t you just call it off and save us the trouble of undoing your little spell?”
“And what do you know about it?” she says, looking at me. “You think I don’t know who broke into my house and stole from me? You might have hidden your face but you’re this girl’s only fat friend. Hard to miss the obvious.”
“Hey watch your mouth,” Tam warns.
“Sure. Act all tough. Next you’ll beat me up, then steal from my home. Isn’t that how it goes?”
“Your spell was going to kill Dina, don’t you realize that?”
“It was the weakest spell I know. Trust me, if I wanted to kill her, I could have. And the same goes for you.” Sydney steps closer to me now, her eyes narrowing with anger. “And I was ever going to hex another girl at this school, it wouldn’t be your loudmouth friend. I know you were inside my house. I know you stole something that didn’t belong to me. If I was gonna hex anybody, it would be you. You should thank me for being so forgiving.”
She’s right in my face, and I can sense Tam about to move in to protect me, and that would end up with Tam fighting and possibly expelled from school, so I manage to say something before Tam feels the need to defend me.
“Where were you last night at eleven thirty?”
“What’s it matter?”
“That’s when the hex appeared. If you have an alibi, we’ll leave you alone. If not, we might have to go investigating again.”
Sydney scoffs. “You mean break and enter? We got an alarm now.” She pauses to think about things a bit then looks to me again. “Screw it, here’s your alibi. I was with Wayne.”
“You mean the guy who dumped you?” Tam scoffs.
“He acts like he’s better than me, until I text him to come over. He was at my house til almost one. He might tell you I was magic, but not the kind you’re thinking. So now buzz off, little girls. I have a halftime show to plan.”
We got what we came for, a denial and an alibi, so there’s nothing left to but leave or start a fight, and a fight would only make things worse right now. I grab Tam’s arm and head back toward the main door to the hallway. Just I open the door, Sydney comes out of the practice room and calls out. “Hey Mindee.” I turn to look back. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re the seer. I wasn’t sure until now,” she says, her mouth closing to a one-sided grin.
I leave the music room, wondering whether or not that last part was a threat.
15
It’s last period and I’m sitting beside Tam waiting for the day to be over. We’re writing notes from what the teacher puts up on the overhead projector, when Tam drops her pen and stops writing. I figure she’s resting a sore hand but after a minute she’s still not taking notes.
“You just expect to memorize all this?” I whisper.
She looks at me, and I can see in her eyes that she’s afraid. Something’s wrong. “Can you see anything? Is the hex different?” she whispers back.
“Nothing.” The blue aura is the same as it’s been all day. “What is it?”
“I can’t feel my hand. It tingles, but I can’t move it. I think my hand’s gone dead.” I can see tears in Tam’s eyes reflecting the brightness of the projector screen.
“Ladies, keep it down,” calls the teacher. Tam shakes her lifeless hand, then shakes her head; it’s not waking up. I stand up.
“We have to go to the office,” I say to the teacher. “I think there’s something wrong.”
“What is it?” he says, sounding more annoyed than concerned.
“I can’t move my arm,” says Tam, standing beside me. “It just stopped working.”
The teacher is a little incredulous at first, but once he sees the fear in Tam’s eyes he agree that we can go. “OK,” he says. “You can take to her the office to wait for a nurse, and then come right back.”
I lead Tam into the hallway, and outside, I grab her hand. “Can you feel this?” I say, squeezing in little pulses.
“Nothing. It’s just tingles like it’s asleep.”
I bend a few of her fingers, then open them again. “Anything? Feel the movement?”
“Nothing. It’s just not there.” She looks really scared. “Is it glowing? It is attacking me?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Your hand is no different from the rest of you.”
Now she looks terrified. “Does that mean the rest of me’s going to stop working too?”
While Tam’s in the hospital, waiting for another doctor to examine her (the first two found nothing wrong), I’ve invited Marlene over to comb through the books and websites and figure out what kind of hex Tam’s dealing with.
“Worst case scenario,” Marlene says, handing me her big leather-bound spellbook, open to a certain page, “is the death curse.” The picture on the page is some kind of old etching, showing a man so emaciated you can see his skull under the skin. Reading the page, I see that Marlie was right to think of this as the worst possible hex. It details a long, painful draining of the victim’s life, shrivelling them down to nothing and gradually weakening the body until they cannot move or stand, and then they finally die, after what the book calls ‘a year of torment.’ It sounds horrible, but I don’t think that’s what Tam’s got.
“This says it’s very painful. You lose the use of your body but the pain only gets worse. Tam lost feeling. No pain. And she looks the same, not all skinny like this guy.”
“Hopefully that means this isn’t it then,” Marlene says, taking the book back from me. “Plus, it says you need to speak the hex into an amulet containing a trapped human soul, and I think that’s a bit hardcore for Sydney. Also, it says you need fat from an ox.”
“Ew.” I get back on my computer and look through a website that lists various spells. “Tell me if any of these sound close,” I say. “Sleep spell? Maybe it went wrong and only hit her hand?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” she says, her tone not quite hiding the ‘duh’ she must be thinking.
“Paralyzer?”
“Doubt it. It w
ouldn’t take all day to work and then only affect a hand. It would either paralyze her completely or it would do nothing if they did it wrong.”
I scroll through some more spells, but the website contains a ridiculous number of ‘modern’ magic, like love spells, weight loss, aphrodisiac spells, even a hex to make someone stop smoking. Nothing that would freeze a girl’s hand.
“I have something here,” Marlene says. “But you won’t like it.”
“What?” I ask, worried that she’s found the hex, and it’s something that will doom Tamara. Instead she surprises me with a solution.
“Seerseye Potion. It’s a magic tea you can drink. Sort of a hallucinogenic, maybe? It says it can boost a seer’s power and give them greater insight.”
I take the book, but I don’t understand how that could help Tam. “So what?”
“You’re a seer,” she says. “You have the second sight, or the third eye, or the sixth sense. Whatever numbered thing it is.”
“Two times three is six,” I say, smiling at the joke. “Second sight times third eye—”
Marlene gives me the same look I give her when she’s talking about her role playing games. “I get it.”
“So this tea will make me see even more crazy things? That sounds...” I say, thinking about it, “...horrible. But it could help Tam?”
“Maybe. I think it might make it so you don’t just see hexes, you see the magical people who cast the spells. You’ll generally just be more open to the magic around you. Sort of like how a long exposure on a camera lets in more light.”
“Allowing me to track down whatever witch is doing this to Tam.”
“Exactly.”
I read the page in the book, and then I come to the part that Marlie knew I wouldn’t like.
“Warning: this potion will open the mind to an unnatural state of awareness that cannot always be reversed. In any case, ordinary folk who consume the potion often fall into raving madness, and even gifted seers may not return to sanity. Consume at your own risk.”
“If you drink it, it might make you crazy,” she says, pulling the book out of my hands.
No wonder she warned me I wouldn’t like it. If there’s one thing that I can firmly promise myself, one belief that I hold dear, it’s that I will never let myself end up like my mother. There’s no way I will ever get to that point. The anger, the mania, the years locked in padded rooms. Not a chance.
“We won’t need to use it. I’m not going crazy,” I state firmly. “I stopped the last hex without magic potions, and I can stop this one too. We just have to find the right hex, then we’ll know what kind of talisman we’re looking for.”
“On it,” she says. For a little while we research in silence, me on the internet and Marlene reading her antique book, but neither of us finds a spell that matches what Tam’s experiencing. By the time Marlene goes home, we still haven’t got a clue. I call Tam’s cell, leave a message, and wait for someone to call back to tell me she’s OK.
Friday, January 25
After spending much of the night hogging my family’s phone to keep in touch with Tam, I finally slept for a few short hours, waking repeatedly in fits of worry that my best friend was being somehow taken apart by something I couldn’t stop.
The school’s nurse sent her to the hospital. The hospital doctors poked and examined her hand for a couple of hours. They found nothing wrong. They x-rayed her hand and then sent her for another scan to look at the whole arm. Nothing wrong. The arm has no swelling or tenderness, just a lack of feeling that appears around the wrist and consumes her hand. They scheduled an MRI for Tuesday down in Toronto, so Tamara’s mom will have to take a day off work to take her.
I’m at our lockers waiting for Tam when Ryan comes over and joins me. “How is she?” he asks.
“Can’t use her right hand.”
“Wish there was something I could do.”
I don’t want to mention any suspicions I may have had about Ryan, since he’s here and he’s concerned and he seems to be really upset. He drops his heavy bag on the floor and looks at the corner where sometime soon Tam should appear. “Is it a curse?” he asks without look at me.
Now there’s an interesting question. “Did she tell you that?”
“No, but what else could it be?” he says with a slump of the shoulders.
I nod. “It is. I’ve being seeing Tam in blue for the last couple days.” He still doesn’t look at me, or even express any surprise.
“Since before or after...” he says, “she broke it off?”
“After. By a few hours.”
He shakes his head a little. “I feel so bad,” he says. “I know it’s awful but I was kind of hoping she was hexed somehow.”
“So she’d know how bad it felt when she dumped you?” I say, and immediately realize that was both too harsh and completely without tact. He finally turns and looks at me, his eyes opened wide with surprise.
“No way! I meant I hoped that it was some outside force that broke us up, and not just Tam deciding we were done. If she was cursed, then maybe someone fooled her mind into wanting to break up. Then we could break the spell and get back together. But if she wasn’t cursed, then she meant it, really meant it. . . ”
“I don’t think it was over,” I say. “She did nothing but regret it, at least from my point of view.”
Ryan shrugs. “She never called, or even said hi in the hallway. I was so busy thinking about myself, how she was hurting me, it never really occurred to me that she had bigger problems the last couple days.”
“I thought you said you hoped she was cursed?” I say, since he seemed to have both hoped for it and been oblivious to it at the same time.
“You know what I mean. I hoped for that like you hope for a million dollars. It wasn’t a real thought. Not until I heard she lost the feeling in her hand yesterday. I called her cell, but she never answered.”
“Maybe the hospital has rules against it,” I lie. I talked to Tam three times while she waited for doctors and tests.
We both settle into waiting by the lockers and looking for Tam. Finally she comes around the corner, her right arm in a sling, her winter coat draped over that side of her body like a cape.
“Hey,” she says to me as she reaches for her lock. After a long pause she nods toward Ryan and repeats “hey.”
“So how is it?” I ask.
“You tell me. I feel the same but I can’t see the real problem. You’re basically my doctor now.”
I look her up and down. She still has a blue light all around herself, but it’s completely even and uniform. It doesn’t glow or move or target any part of her more than the rest. “It’s the same as yesterday. Nothing special about your hand.”
“Is that good?” Ryan asks.
“I guess you told him?” she says to me.
“He guessed.”
Tam finally faces her ex, and he looks at her with the same kind, loving look he had for her two days ago before she broke his heart. “Are you helping?” she asks.
“Of course. I can’t exactly watch you fall apart.”
“OK. And just to be clear, you didn’t do this to me, right?”
He looks shocked. “What?”
“It was Mindee’s idea. She thought you had motive.”
Ryan looks at me like I betrayed him. I want be small enough to hide inside my locker, but all I can do is shrug. “I wanted a list of suspects, and you would have every reason to be mad.”
He shakes his head but says “I get it. It wasn’t me, but I get it.”
“OK,” Tam says. “I knew it wasn’t you anyway. We confronted Sydney, and as soon as we pissed her off this happened to my hand. It got worse when her emotions got stronger. She even made sure to point out that she got a security system so nobody can break into her house to steal the talisman this time.”
Ryan nods, always the one looking for the non-criminal solution: “Maybe we can find some proof without committing a felony?”
I agree: “She says she has an alibi. All we have to do is talk to Wayne Shepherd and we’ll have a better idea.”
So we decide that since we’re on the same lunch as Wayne, Tam and I will try to get him to say whether or not he was with Sydney when the spell was cast, and the once we know for sure that Sydney’s lying to us, we’ll come up with a plan to track down the talisman that’s creating the hex.
We find Wayne eating his lunch with some friends in the cafeteria.
“Can we talk to you a second?” I ask.
“I’m not on council anymore. If you have a question, ask Dina,” he says. We haven’t talked to him since before the election last term, so I guess he still thinks of us as helpful student council volunteers.
“I know that, but I had something to talk to you about.” Wayne’s friends, all seniors, look at him like this visit by younger girls is somehow funny, but he gets up and comes over to an empty table with us.
“I’m sure you know that last term Tam got into a fight with Sydney,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says like I’m wasting his time.
“Well last Wednesday somebody did something really bad to Tam and we think it was Sydney retaliating. But Sydney says she has an alibi. You.”
He looks confused. “What exactly do you think she did?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she said she was with you, on Wednesday, at eleven thirty. Can you confirm that or not?”
Even though I’ve done all the talking, he looks at Tamara. “I don’t know what you have against Syd but leave her alone. It’s bad enough that Dina told all the girls they shouldn’t hang out with her anymore, now you’re going around slandering the poor girl.”
Tam scoffs. “I can’t use my arm because of that bitch and she’ll do worse to me if she gets a chance.”
“Whatever.”
I interject. “Were you with her or not?”
The Hex Breaker's Eyes Page 10
