The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams

by Rhonda Hayter

  Well, you can guess how I did on the test. And I had really meant to study for it too. Oh, by the way, in case you ever need to know, “fascinate” is spelled with both an s and a c. Wish somebody had told me. And can I ask you, what is with this silent letter thing anyway? What is the point of it exactly? See what I mean about it seeming like things are designed just to give Miss Linegar ammunition against me?

  At recess with Callie, I really felt like telling her all about Tom but I knew I couldn’t, even though it was driving me crazy. I considered telling her about it and then putting a forgetting spell on her, but you’re not supposed to hex people unless it’s absolutely necessary. Besides, I already felt bad about how many times I’d had to hex her for other things.

  Instead, I just complained to Callie about Munch and what a monster he was sometimes. She looked across the yard at how adorable he looked, playing tetherball with Annalise, laughing whenever the ball bonked his cute curly little head, and I could tell she really didn’t get it. Callie is an only child, as I think you might be able to guess.

  At least I got to go to drama club after school again, but Miss Overton was a bit disappointed in me because I hadn’t learned any of my lines yet. I felt bad about it too, but the truth is I felt better having to hold the script so my hands weren’t flopping around like they had been the other day.

  We worked really hard at the rehearsal and I got a lot of my lines memorized as we went along, but today things broke down when Calvin and Dennis starting goofing around during the mushroom scene.

  “Concentration, children! Concentration!” Miss Overton yelled as the drama group started to get a little out of control.

  When Calvin, the mushroom, collapsed completely under Dennis’s weight, everybody got the giggles so bad that she ended rehearsal a few minutes early.

  Maybe we didn’t get as much work done as we should have. Still, it was an awful lot of fun.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mom and Dad Get Serious

  On the way home, Munch was just as cheerful and happy as if he’d been a total angel all day long. I held a grudge for a little while, due to the Miss Linegar torture, but it’s hard to stay mad at Munch too long, so I finally forgot about it.

  I hurried him along and he let himself get hurried this time, which I was glad about, because I really wanted to get home to see what was happening with Tom.

  When we walked in the front door, we almost tripped over the Schnitzler boys, who suddenly materialized right in front us, with homework papers flying around them. They were grappling over something Felix had in his hand.

  “I need the red crayon!”

  “I had it first!”

  The Schnitzlers looked kind of surprised when they realized they were back at our house. I happened to know where they lived because I’d been with Mom when she dropped off Munch at a birthday party there last year, so I just gathered up their papers, handed them back to the boys, and zapped them right back home again.

  In the living room, my mom and dad were holding hands and staring at a corner of the room. They didn’t turn around to say hello, and I understood that they were working together on a spell and that they couldn’t break their concentration.

  Things were looking really serious. A terrified-looking Tom was hunkered down by himself in the corner, where Mom and Dad were staring. The air was shimmering all around him and the bright daylight of the room was flickering. There was a deep, deep hum that seemed to be getting louder and louder.

  Munch nudged up against me and I put my arm around him because I could tell he was getting scared. Heck, I was a little scared myself because my parents looked so serious.

  We all stared at Tom, who crouched down with his tail all big and puffy. Did you know when cats are scared, their tails puff up to make them look bigger to whatever is threatening them? In this case of course, it wasn’t much of a defense because poor Tom still wasn’t much bigger than a handful. I actually felt sorry for him for even trying, but I guess it’s cat instinct and he couldn’t help it.

  Just then, WHAM!! The room went totally dark, even though it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. That deep hum grew so loud that Munch and I had to let go of each other to cover our ears.

  In the corner, a little light appeared, right down where Tom was cowering, and it got bigger and brighter until the whole room filled with light—and in one great, bright flash, Tom, the thirteen-year-old boy, stood there.

  He looked absolutely delighted to be a boy again and he opened his mouth to speak . . . But before he could say a word, the room went black again and there was all sorts of scary crashing and thumping. Then the daylight returned and the hum stopped abruptly.

  Tom was back to being a little kitten, my parents looked wrung out and exhausted, and the room was a wreck. All the chairs were overturned and most of the books and ornaments had fallen off shelves.

  “Whoever did this had powerful skills,” muttered my dad. “I’d better talk to March Hall again.” And he headed off to Mom’s office.

  My mom shook her head sadly and came over to give Munch and me a hug.

  “Kids, don’t you worry. We’ll find a way to help Tom somehow. In the meantime, you’re going to need to spend a lot of time with him to keep him company and to let him know that you understand what’s going on with him.”

  I picked Tom up and cuddled him, whispering that it was all going to be okay. Then I took him up to my room.

  “Hey, I know what will make you feel better,” I said. “You can sit here on my shoulder and read my science textbook while I study for my science test.”

  It made things a little difficult actually, because he was such a fast reader that he kept leaping down into my lap to try to turn the page before I was ready. Finally, though it took a while, we worked out a rhythm. I opened up my ancient civilizations book on the table beside me so that he could read that while he waited for me to finish the page in the science book on my lap.

  At this point, I didn’t know who this kid Tom was, but I could have told you one thing even then. He was smart.

  CHAPTER 13

  The March Hare Gets on My Nerves

  A few weeks went by with my parents still worrying a lot and staying up late working on spells and potions and doing lots and lots of research. No matter what they tried on him though, Tom was still a cat.

  Dr. March Hall came over practically every single night to confer with my folks. Whenever Tom was in the room with them, I happened to notice that the doctor always sat as far away from him as possible. It seemed funny to me, but when I asked Mom what she thought about it, she said that he was probably allergic. A lot of people are, you know. Glad I’m not.

  It got to be no fun at all around the house at dinner-time because it felt like the March Hare, excuse me, I mean Dr. March Hall, was there all the time and he wasn’t what you could call a really fun guy. First of all, he talked to Mom and Dad in this kind of snooty, I’m-smarter-than-you tone and he never talked to Munch, or Tom, or me at all, as if we were too unimportant to even notice.

  My mom doesn’t like it when adults don’t treat kids with respect, and I could see Dr. March Hall’s attitude toward us was bothering her, but he was never actually rude, so she couldn’t really say anything. Instead, she was just extra nice to us.

  One night, Munch went a little over the top at dinner and tried to levitate the butter, which he doesn’t really know how to do yet. He ended up knocking it into his glass and spilling his milk into the doctor’s lap. You could tell that Dr. March Hall was deeply annoyed, but Mom didn’t even reprimand Munch. She just zapped up the milk off Dr. March Hall’s suit with a clean-up spell and gave the anxious Munch a big kiss, telling him not to worry about it because accidents happen.

  Dr. March Hall looked sour for a minute and then he went back to droning on about “. . . multitiered stratum hexes with supplementary characteristics . . .” or something incredibly boring like that. Munch and I excused ourselves as soon as we could and went
up to our rooms.

  Whenever Dr. March Hall was there for dinner, which as I’ve mentioned, was practically every night, Munch and I never got to talk at all about drama club, or music, or anything fun. Tom steered clear of Dr. March Hall entirely, unless my dad picked him up to try some spell that the doctor had recommended. Once I even heard Tom hiss when the doctor arrived. I knew how he felt.

  Apparently, Tom’s enchantment involved some interlocking spells and security hexes that made it very difficult for any counterspell of my mom and dad’s to get through. No matter what spell they tried, it came up against a sort of magical firewall that blocked them from going any further.

  Even though I never got to talk about it at dinner anymore, the play rehearsals were going really well. I don’t know if I was just doing some pretty good acting or what, but after we’d rehearsed a lot, I started to feel as if I really was a kid who didn’t believe in magic and that Calvin and Dennis really were a funny talking mushroom and caterpillar.

  I forgot all about my dangly hands, too, and I’m not sure, but I think they stopped dangling and started to look sort of natural. That is, I hope so. Anyway, at least I didn’t worry about them anymore. I have to say, it was the most fun I ever had without using magic and I couldn’t wait until we got to perform the play in front of people.

  Until then, at least I got to do it in front of Tom every night. He’d sit up on my dresser and watch me practice all my lines. One night, when I got a little lazy and didn’t feel like practicing, he sat on the dresser anyway and stared at me, until I felt guilty enough to run through them one time before bed.

  I was sort of sorry about my costume though. I had been hoping for something really showy and glamorous like the kind of thing that Aunt Sophie got to wear in the Civil War movie. Unfortunately, all I got to wear was pajamas because my character was supposed to have fallen asleep while reading. Mom had a great idea though. She got me just some plain flannel pajamas and then she zapped pictures of books all over them. And then, just as a private thing between us, she made them all my favorite books like The Tale of Despereaux and the Lemony Snickets and the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. I mean honestly, could my costume be more perfect?

  CHAPTER 14

  Tom Gets Depressed

  Back at home, I’d been noticing that Tom, who despite being about four weeks older than when we first got him, was still just as tiny as he was to start with. Dad told me that’s a built-in fail-safe for involuntary morphing spells, which told him that Tom didn’t ask to be morphed. Somebody did it to him—how awful is that?

  Anyway, this fail-safe is apparently built into magic code. This is something I haven’t gotten to yet in my Witch Studies (and yes, I am a little behind with them, but only because Miss Linegar is a homework fiend).

  The fail-safe is so that no matter how long enchanted people are out of their normal shapes, they can return to their lives in exactly the same moment they left it without being any older. Once Mom and Dad got Tom back to human and figured out exactly where and when he lived, they’d easily be able to zap him back to within a moment or two of when he got zapped out. Then time would shift and his mom and dad wouldn’t be aware that they had ever been worried sick about him being gone. Still, that didn’t mean that in the time line that was going on right now they weren’t worried to death, or that if Mom and Dad couldn’t find a way to reverse the spell, his parents might never get Tom back.

  I know that whole time line business is really hard to follow. Dad assures me it will all get clear by the time I’m in Witch University, but for now it tends to give me a big headache. Let’s just say, if Tom gets changed back to a boy, everything will work out fine but if he doesn’t, there’s some family back in the nineteenth century (yes Miss Linegar, I know that’s the 1800s) that is going to be pretty sad.

  Speaking of Tom, he’d started to seem a little depressed. I kept handing him books off of all the shelves in the house because that usually made him get excited, but he had no interest in a lot of the stuff that I really liked, except for history and my dad’s Complete Works of Shakespeare. When I was going through my books, trying to find him new things to read, I realized he’d already been through all the science books in the house. Every single one I picked up had grubby little paw marks all over each page.

  I started going to the library to get science books, which kind of confused Mrs. Koneff, the librarian, because she’d never seen me borrow anything but fiction before. I decided it was better not to try to explain.

  Anyway, I’d come home with the books and Tom and I would cuddle up and read every night. After that he began to cheer up. And even though he mostly liked to spend his time reading, he’d even chase a few paper balls around now and then, when Munch fired them out of his toy cannon for him.

  Mom and Dad were still trying new spells on him every day without much luck. The best that happened was that sometimes we’d see Tom flicker into boyness again, for just a moment or two. Is “boyness” a word, or did I just make it up?

  One day, when I came home from the library with an armload of books for Tom, something really weird happened. I heard a voice inside my head. It was so strange and unexpected that goose bumps flared up and down my arms, and the back of my neck prickled as if all my hair was standing on end. If I’d been a cat, my tail would have been huge.

  When you’re a witch, you’re used to strange occurrences, but you can usually count on your own head as being a private place. I mean, come on! People aren’t supposed to suddenly start talking inside of it. How’d you like to be innocently walking in the door one day with an armload of books for your kitten and hear this in your head: “Father’s going to owe me a lot of dimes soon”? How random and creepy is that???? What does something like that even mean???

  I mean, I’m used to hearing my own voice in my head, but this was a boy voice, for heaven’s sake. It certainly didn’t belong inside my head. I was so startled that I dropped my books and started screaming for Mom, who came tearing out from her office. I made such a racket that Munch, who was watching his hour allotment of Saturday morning cartoons in the living room, let out a yell and zapped himself right into the TV. Poor little Tom jumped about a mile, into the pocket of my dad’s jacket that was hanging on the coatrack near the front doorway.

  I threw myself into Mom’s arms and tried to tell her about what was frightening me so badly and then I heard the voice again.

  “Crikey! What’s Abbie so fired up about? You might think the barn was burning down!”

  I mean, that’s even creepier than the remark about the dimes because my name was involved, and I got scared all over again and the goose bumps got even bigger. I jumped around as skittish as a squirrel and my mom had a terrible time getting me to calm down enough to tell her what had just happened.

  As soon as I managed to tell Mom what I’d heard in my head, she zapped Dad right out of his office without even calling him first. He had a stethoscope in his ears and he looked a little peeved until he saw how upset everybody was. Mom explained what had happened and he got that worried look we’d seen so often lately and put his hand on my forehead and started muttering incantations.

  Just then, Tom popped up out of the jacket pocket on the coatrack and jumped onto Dad’s shoulder. I heard the voice again.

  “Blame it! I wish he’d speak a little louder.”

  Then, with a slow, dawning realization, I understood that it was Tom’s voice I was hearing.

  Knowing that, I felt a lot better because I knew that Tom loved me and would never do anything to hurt me. I told Mom and Dad what I’d figured out and they looked very relieved too. They started talking and came to the conclusion that some of their deenchantment spells must have broken through part of the communications barrier that Tom was hexed with.

  “Tildy. Do you think we ought to call in March Hall?” asked Dad.

  Thankfully Mom answered, “Well, we don’t have much to go on yet, love. So we might as well wait to see if anything
else happens first.”

  Well hurray. Maybe we could have one dinner where Munch and I got to squeeze in a few words.

  “At least we know we’re making progress,” added my mom, giving me and Tom a comforting pat. Then she went into the living room to zap Munch out of the TV, where he was having a great time, running around behind Sylvester as he chased Tweety Bird.

  Suffering succotash. I like the old cartoons the best, don’t you?

  CHAPTER 15

  I Get Into Very Big Trouble

  I tried all that night to have a conversation with Tom. Though he always seemed to understand what I said, sometimes, if he wasn’t looking right at me, he didn’t seem to hear me at all. Meanwhile, his own voice kept breaking through to me now and then.

  It wasn’t as if Tom was able to hold a real conversation with me, but just as if I got random glimpses into his mind. Though some of his thoughts were really clear, like the father and the dime remark (which still creeps me out), a lot of them seemed scientific and technical and I couldn’t understand what they were about. That was one busy mind.

  There were really a lot of thoughts about telegraphs, which was a way they used to communicate in the days before phones and e-mails and texting, when they’d tap out a code over wires. Tom seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about them.

  Sometimes I could sense a sadness coming from Tom and got images of a woman and a man and a whole bunch of kids who all seemed older than him. I figured this had to be his family, and whenever his thoughts of them popped into my head, I made sure that I was especially nice to him.

  On the next Monday, I got a great idea. Knowing that Tom was incredibly smart and curious, I thought that he’d enjoy going to school with me. It might not be his grade level because I knew he was older than I was and knew a lot more, but I figured it would probably be more interesting than hanging around alone all day.