The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams

by Rhonda Hayter

  BOOM!!! A vial of some horrible, gray-looking potion zapped right into March Hare’s hands.

  I’d never loved my dad so much in my life as I loved him just then. As I saw what terrible danger he was in, all the spit suddenly dried up in my mouth. A huge magic charge shot into my fingers and buzzed so powerfully that my hands started to jerk around like they were on marionette strings. I couldn’t think about that though, because I had to figure out how to help my dad.

  There was no chance that anybody inside the lab could hear me through the window, over that deafening hum, even if I screamed. On the other hand, if I zapped in and tried to explain what was going on, it would take so long that March Hare would have time to wipe Dad’s mind.

  The only thing in my favor was that old March Hare loved to hear himself talk and he was still taunting Dad, and complimenting himself on the “delectable irony” of it all. All the time he was doing this, I was thinking as hard as I ever have in my life. But it was no good. I couldn’t remember the exact sequence of the paralysis spell that’s geared for an adult witch.

  “Stomp the feet? Click the tongue?” Thoughts streamed through my mind, but nothing seemed right. My brain started to seize up like it did when I had stage fright. And time was running out for my dad!

  And then I got help.

  “Two clicks of the tongue, Abbie girl. One stomp of the right foot, visualize four cubes of ice, and thrust both hands before you.”

  It was Tom.

  I’d never, ever been so glad to see anyone.

  With Tom’s arm around my shoulders, I felt as if I had nothing to worry about. My mind switched into hyper speed as the whole formula snapped into my brain. As soon as it did, I leaped out, with Tom, from behind the bush and screamed at March Hare, “Leave my dad alone!”

  Then I whipped my hands out in front of me and fired off the spell.

  Well, I guess it’s safe to say that both March Hare and I received very big surprises simultaneously. March Hare, because Tom and I had just jumped out at him. And me . . . because that nervous, magic buildup in my hands, which I should have remembered to discharge before trying to fire a spell, blasted out of the ends of my fingers, jerking my hands way up in the air.

  My spell missed Dr. March Hall completely.

  Well. It felt as if time had frozen without anybody casting a spell. March Hare stood there, agape. (That means with his mouth hanging open, if you’d like the picture.) I just stood there too, completely paralyzed with fear.

  But you know what? I don’t think there was anything that could have made Tom stop thinking. In a heartbeat, he yelled “AAAAAHHHH!” at the top of his lungs, jumped right at March Hare, grabbed that vial of potion right out of his bony old fist, and tossed it to me.

  “Get your mother, Abbie,” he shouted. “Quick as lightning!”

  With a horrible roar of rage and some words that I know my mother would rather I had never even heard, March Hare leaped right at me.

  ZAP!

  As fast as Tom told me to, I zapped myself into the lab behind me. And there, I screamed as loud as I could that Dr. March Hall wasn’t in the cloud of smoke—he was out behind the lab and that Dad and Tom were in trouble.

  There was a huge WHHHOOOOSH as all five witches instantly zapped themselves outside. Through the window, I saw that March Hare had his hands around Tom’s throat, choking him, but the Mather brothers snatched Tom away and then tackled March Hare and wrapped themselves around him, giving him such a dose of combined magic that he passed out on the spot. They said a few words over him to make sure that he couldn’t move when he woke up, and then they stood guard over him, looking pretty darn scary.

  My mom was at my dad’s side, stroking his cheek and whispering an anti-paralysis spell to him. As he came out of his frozen state, tears burst out of her eyes and she threw her arms around him and hugged him really hard.

  Dean Wilkins made sure the wheezing, gasping Tom was okay, and then my mother rushed to Tom and fussed over him too. Then she and Dean Wilkins zapped back into the lab and appeared in front of me.

  I was afraid to look at my mom.

  As I handed Dean Wilkins the vial of horrible potion and explained what it was, I shook all over.

  He immediately snapped a magical lockbox around the vial. “You’re a very brave girl, young Miss Adams,” he said.

  That was nice to hear, but I knew this was one very brave girl who was in a whole lot of trouble with her mom right now.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Spaceship Incident

  Well, I won’t bore you with all the details of what happened once I had to discuss things with my mom and dad. I’ll just say that it’s a funny experience having someone so mad at you and yet so happy that you did what you did, they keep getting all mixed up between yelling at you and hugging you as hard as they can.

  It’s even funnier feeling so guilty for something you did and yet so happy that you did it, because you helped to save your dad.

  While we were all there, and I was telling my side of the story, Mrs. Drake appeared in a flurry of violet petals, completely recovered from her bad experience with the booby trap. It all had to get explained to her, and somewhere in the middle of that, old March Hare finally opened his eyes. That’s all he was able to do though, because he had one mega-potent paralysis spell on him.

  Mrs. Drake, who’s so fair that it’s almost unbelievable, insisted on giving March Hare back his power of speech so he could tell his side of the story. When it turned out to be just exactly what everyone thought, that he had kidnapped and enchanted Tom, tried to kill him, and broken every other witchy rule in the book and wasn’t even sorry for it . . . even Mrs. Drake had to admit that he was a pretty bad guy.

  There and then, Dr. March Hall’s punishment was decided by unanimous vote. Well, I didn’t get to vote, but you can bet I’d have voted the same way if I had been allowed.

  Mrs. Drake put Tom and the immobile March Hare inside a magical cleansing circle for the purification rite and there was a lot of chanting and spell casting that went on for quite a while.

  Then, in what one might have called a “delectable irony” (if one happened to be an evil, mad, witchy scientist), Dr. March Hall got his memory erased by my dad, whom he’d been planning to leave completely mindless. Then his magical powers were stripped by the Mathers, who alone in all the witchy community have the power to perform that spell.

  After that, Mrs. Drake personally zapped March Hare to a retirement community in a remote area of New Zealand, where he’d get three meals a day and bingo on Fridays. The March Hare was gone for good.

  The Mather brothers stayed to oversee the return of the area to what it was before Dr. March Hall arrived, and to make sure that all the spells he cast got recalled and everything.

  The rest of us all headed back home. We had to go slowly though, rather than zap right in, because Dad was pretty shaky from the head injury Dr. March Hall had given him and Mom was insisting that he have it X-rayed before he zapped the wound closed.

  Dean Wilkins zapped ahead for a moment to let Aunt Sophie know that we wouldn’t be back until later. Then he returned, to make sure we were doing okay with Dad. Myself, I was thinking that once Aunt Sophie heard that I was with the time travel party, she’d be checking my bedroom—and probably not liking what she found there.

  The truth is, I really like time traveling slowly like that instead of zapping, which we usually do for convenience’s sake. Even though it takes more time, you can see things changing in the world right underneath you. You see more and more houses being built, skyscrapers going up, planes starting to fly, seasons changing over and over—all that sort of thing. Even more fun, once you finally arrive at your destination, you seem to approach it from a great, great distance and you can watch what’s happening there as you get closer.

  This time, as we got close to home, we could see what was going on inside the house, but it all looked tiny, as if we were looking at it from far away. As we drew clo
ser in time, we could hear everything being said, and the people and things began to seem to grow bigger, almost as if we were walking up to a movie screen. Well, it’s funny that I use that simile. (And why is it a simile and not a metaphor, class? Why, because we used the word “as” or “like,” Miss Linegar.)

  It’s funny that I used the movie screen simile, because Munch and Aunt Sophie, who had been waiting there so anxiously, had been trying to kill time by watching one of Aunt Sophie’s movies. I knew this movie too—it was a big special-effects extravaganza.

  The effects apparently impressed Munch, because he started trying to create the same sort of thing right there in the living room. And so all at once, an alien spaceship crashed up through the living room floor, causing Munch and Aunt Sophie to topple right down into the basement.

  Leaving Mom and me to continue to support the still woozy Dad, Dean Wilkins and Mrs. Drake shot ahead, zapped away the spaceship, fixed the house, and made sure everyone in the basement was all right. They were, because a quick-thinking Aunt Sophie had managed to zap a big feather mattress onto the basement floor just in time to soften their landing.

  When we arrived on the scene a few minutes later, Dean Wilkins and Mrs. Drake were out in the neighborhood, casting a forgetting spell on anyone who might have noticed the spaceship incident. Munch quickly turned himself into a potted plant to try to avoid Mom’s wrath, but she told him he could just take his time-out as a plant right now and that they’d talk later.

  Well, at least I wasn’t the only person in the family who was in trouble with Mom.

  Aunt Sophie was too worried about Dad to pay much attention to me for a while, but once Mom had zapped in the X-ray machine from his office and Dad was being cared for, she turned to me with a wondering look in her eyes.

  Right away, I said, “Aunt Sophie, I am really, really sorry that I snuck out on you and I’m really, really sorry that I . . . well . . . pretty much lied to you by putting that fake me in the bed.”

  “Yes, that was pretty much lying, my love,” Aunt Sophie responded sadly.

  Facing up to what I did was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, and you know why? Because I could tell it really hurt Aunt Sophie’s feelings that I would lie to her.

  Oh man. I hurt my aunt Sophie’s feelings, which is the last thing I’d ever want to do. I really was sorry, I can tell you, and I made a pact with myself to try to prove to her that I would never do anything like that again.

  Well, Dad turned out to have a slightly fractured skull but Dean Wilkins had no problems healing it, and everyone had to tell and retell the story for Aunt Sophie . . . with Munch listening from his flowerpot. When it got to the really scary part about the attack on Dad and Tom getting throttled and the mind-erasing potion and everything, Munch morphed back to himself very quietly and crawled into Dad’s lap.

  Mrs. Drake sat down and took Tom by the hand very sweetly. “Let me explain, Tom dear, what will happen next. You will be returned to exactly the moment in which you left your own time. Your dear family will never know that you’ve been missing. And it’s regrettable for you, I know, Tom, but I have no doubt that you understand that due to the simple physics of time, none of your memories of your stay here will return with you.”

  “None at all?” asked Tom, really sadly, even though he knew the answer. His eyes moved over the books on the shelves, and over everybody in the room too, before landing most sadly right on me.

  I thought about all those nights we’d hung out together with books piled up on the bed, a few sardines on a plate for him and cookies for me, and my eyes filled up with tears.

  “Well, I suggest that we might as well get a good night’s sleep before we start setting history straight.” Mrs. Drake patted Tom’s hand again and stood up.

  Munch giggled when a couple of chocolates fell out of his ears. I reached up to see if there were any in mine, but she was looking right at me as I discovered there was nothing there.

  “It seems you’re quite an extraordinary young woman, Miss Abbie Adams,” she said, and she shook my hand just like I was all grown-up.

  And you know what? I wouldn’t exchange that handshake for a hundred chocolates . . . and anyway, Munch gave me some of his later.

  Just in case you think that the whole episode was over and I had gotten away without any consequences for following the posse back in time, think again.

  I’ve never had such a severe consequence in my whole life. First of all, I had to deal with Aunt Sophie’s feelings being really hurt, which just about killed me. Even worse, Mom was determined to show me what a terrible thing I had done by disobeying her and Dad and putting myself in danger.

  I got the lecture of all lectures, believe me, and because my bungled spell had almost gotten me and Tom killed, I had to go into the time warp where I did nothing but study spell technique for TWO SOLID WEEKS.

  I’ll say it again. TWO SOLID WEEKS!!

  On the upside though, I caught up on a lot of witchy lessons that I had been letting slide of late. For instance, did you know that a buildup of magic charge in a witch’s hands during stressful situations is a defense mechanism much like the one in which adrenaline floods through non-witches’ systems when they face danger? Or, here we are again, the way a cat’s tail puffs out when he’s trying to make himself appear bigger to an enemy.

  Well, maybe you might have figured that one out, but I’ll bet you didn’t know the twelve simple techniques for “. . . dissipating, directing, or diverting the defensive charge while casting a spell.”

  I know all twelve. And why do I know? Because I read all four chapters on the subject in the Level Five Spell Textbook. Six times.

  Tom would be proud.

  EPILOGUE

  I woke up to the sound of a lot of people downstairs and with a jolt realized that today was Tom’s last day. Feeling nervous and weird, I rushed to brush my teeth and get dressed. Before I started down the staircase though, I ran into Tom on his way up to see me and we sat together on the top stair.

  Neither of us said anything for a while and then I bumped my shoulder against him.

  “You know, I’m feeling pretty funny here, Tom,” I said. “On the one hand, I really want you to go so you can start with that recording sound thing . . . because you know how much I adore it when Munch blasts heavy metal and everything. But on the other hand, I don’t want you to go at all.”

  He smiled sadly and looked down at the floor, his knees jiggling. “Yes, hang it. It’s all mixed up, isn’t it? Here I am wanting to go home to my family, but feeling like I’m leaving my family at the same time.”

  He drew a little closer to me.

  “Say, Abbie. I was studying on how you won’t really have anyone to talk to after I go and that it might be powerful lonely ’cause you’re obliged to keep secrets from Callie. So I had a notion there might be something about it in some older witchy books, ones that nobody much reads these days. Last night, I spent a week in the time warp and by jings, I found something that old Mrs. Drake herself wrote.”

  He opened up a thick, yellowed old book.

  “Look here, Abbie, where I marked it. It says there are precedents in years gone by, for witches telling the secret.”

  He stopped for a second and grinned as he watched me trying to figure out what the heck “precedent” meant.

  “Or let me tackle it this way,” he said. “Ah . . . see . . . it’s happened before, that witches haven’t kept mum about magic.

  “There’s an old-fashioned precautionary spell that can be cast . . . You can figure that out, can’t you, Abbie, ‘pre’ meaning before and ‘caution’ meaning carefulness?”

  “Yeah, yeah, smarty-pants,” I said, giving him another little shove with my shoulder. I happened to have learned all about that precautionary spell stuff during my TWO WEEK consequence. “Precautionary spell for what?”

  “So they can’t let on about magic! Even by accident! It’s a bully spell, Abbie, bully! And I allow your parents wil
l let you use it on Callie, if they talk to Mrs. Drake about it first!”

  Then he pressed the old book in question into my hands, jumped up, and cupped a hand to an ear.

  “But hark!” he boomed dramatically. “What on earth is that I hear? Why, it’s the cry of the wild goodbyetoabbiegift! A noble and ferocious beast!”

  Then he pulled open the door of the hall closet, reached down, and picked up something tiny and trembling that was mewing sweetly.

  I gasped and reached out my hands for the adorable little gray kitten he held.

  “Well, blame it all. I figured you got cheated of a pet when I got disenchanted, and your parents agreed, so . . . well, I hope you like her, that’s all.”

  I sat there cuddling my new kitten and looking up at Tom while I tried to think of how I could show him how I felt about the gifts he’d just given me. But in the end, all I could do was say, “Thanks.”

  That was the last private moment I shared with Tom, but it was a good one. There really wasn’t much else to say but good-bye, and all the people gathered downstairs, from Mrs. Drake right down to the Schnitzler brothers, had come to say just that.

  There was a lot of handshaking, quite a bit of hugging, and a few tears shed. (The tears were from my mom and Aunt Sophie . . . and, well, okay, from me too.)

  Tom shook my dad’s hand.

  “Upon my word, Dr. Adams, it’s rotten hard that I won’t be able to remember everything you’ve taught me. It’s been a bully honor, sir. Bully,” he said.