A Dash of Trouble

by Anna Meriano

  Tricia and Mai were in love with the idea of a snack club, and their excited questions attracted the attention of other sixth graders sitting near them. Soon Leo had promised to bring cookies for everyone at the table one week from Friday, and Mai had offered to bring in muffins for the Friday after that.

  Leo had never been the center of so much attention. Her cheeks flushed as she made up the answers to questions about the club—how many servings did you have to bring? Did everything have to be homemade? Would eighth graders be allowed in, or boys? Leo felt a little nervous about all the talking and laughing until she caught Caroline’s eye and saw her friend looking a little overwhelmed too. Leo laughed, and Caroline laughed, and soon the whole table was laughing.

  Leo half wondered if she had cast some sort of accidental bread-crumb spell for popularity, but she knew that there was a different kind of magic happening at the table. All year Leo had felt shy and left out, but with Caroline back at her side, talking felt simple. Maybe having one friend made it easier to make more.

  “I have to tell you what happened,” Caroline said when she and Leo had a minute alone in the courtyard. “I was walking past Brent’s locker, ready to leave the cookies, when I saw Brent walking straight toward me! I got so scared, I hid behind the water fountain. Brent should have seen me, but he didn’t, and he still didn’t see me when I peeked over the top of the water fountain a minute later. He grabbed a few things out of his locker, but then he just stopped moving and stared at the locker for a long time, and then he closed the door and walked away without even locking it. He looked like a zombie or something, and his face was all pale.”

  “Weird,” Leo said. “Do you know why?”

  “No.” Caroline shrugged and frowned. “But he left the locker open, so I put the cookies right inside and locked them up. I was so lucky.”

  Leo nodded as the bell rang and crowds in the courtyard surged into the hallway. The plan had worked even more perfectly than they had imagined. She did feel lucky.

  Of course, as soon as Leo thought this, the plan’s luck ran out. Brent’s seat, when she returned to Ms. Wood’s classroom to start science, was mysteriously empty, and some of the boys around Leo whispered that Brent had thrown up in the locker room after gym and had gone home.

  Leo’s throat turned dry as she tried to hear more of the whispers. Had Brent found the cookies before he left? With no way to know, Leo chewed on her lip and tapped her fingers on her desk. From Caroline’s nervous face in the front of the room, Leo guessed that her friend had heard the same rumor and was wondering the same thing.

  The two girls sat quietly through the bus ride that afternoon, Leo tapping her fingers and Caroline tugging her braid and twisting her bracelet. Leo opened her mouth at least five times to say something, but every time, she stayed silent, worried that someone would overhear her if she mentioned Brent, magic, or cookies.

  At home, Leo stomped around restlessly until she scared Señor Gato out of the living room. She moved to the kitchen and paced, counting and recounting the steps between the table and the refrigerator.

  “Everything okay, Leo?” Daddy interrupted her path to get orange juice out of the fridge. “How did your cookies go over?”

  Leo startled before she remembered the snack club lie. At least she had real news to share now instead of having to make up more lies. “It was great. I think a lot of people are interested.”

  As soon as Daddy left the kitchen, Leo resumed her pacing.

  “Hey, little Leo.” Isabel snuck two gingersnaps out of the cookie jar and ate them standing over the counter. “What are you up to?”

  Leo stopped pacing but continued tapping her fingers against her shorts and tapping her toes on the floor. “Oh, nothing. I’m just . . .” Isabel chomped into her second cookie and smiled, ready to listen. Leo could tell Isabel what was going on. Alma and Belén already knew. Isabel wouldn’t get mad, probably.

  Unless she did get mad. Unless she thought Leo shouldn’t be telling family secrets.

  “Isabel,” she said, “have you ever . . .” She couldn’t risk telling Isabel everything, but she wanted her sister’s reassurance. “What do you do when you’re worried?”

  Isabel sat across the table from Leo, bringing the cookie jar and setting it between them. “That depends,” she said. “What are you worried about?”

  “Nothing. Nothing really. It doesn’t even matter.”

  “Well.” Isabel leaned forward on her elbows. “If I don’t know what I’m worried about, sometimes it helps to talk about it.”

  Leo shook her head. Leo wanted to see the results of her spell, and not even Isabel’s encouragement could scratch her impatient itch. Either the spell would work or it wouldn’t, and until she knew, Leo couldn’t stop being excited and nervous and guilty and proud.

  “Never mind. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway.”

  “In that case . . .” Isabel sat up straight, pulled her hair away from her face, and closed her eyes. “You should probably relax.”

  Leo’s heart stopped pounding, and the butterflies in her stomach folded their wings. A dizzy fizzing in her brain almost distracted her from the spicy scent that wasn’t coming from the gingersnaps.

  “That’s magic.” She grabbed the table to steady herself. “You’re using magic on me.” This was Isabel’s power of influence, changing Leo’s feelings.

  “Yes, sorry. I thought it might help. Do you mind?”

  Leo shrugged as the fuzziness faded. She couldn’t be mad at Isabel for trying to help. “I guess not. It tickles, though.”

  Isabel smiled. “Sometimes I just do it without thinking about it. You take it better than Marisol, and she needs calming more than anyone.”

  Leo looked over her shoulder. The kitchen was empty. “Why doesn’t Marisol like magic?”

  Isabel reached for another cookie, took a bite, chewed. “Marisol . . . don’t tell her I said this, okay? I think she does like magic. I think she likes it, but it scares her, so she pretends not to like it.”

  “Why does it scare her?”

  “Oh, you know.” Isabel picked crumbs off the table with her fingertip. “Marisol is scared of everything.”

  This didn’t sound like the Marisol Leo knew. Marisol wasn’t afraid of spiders or cockroaches or strangers or boys. Leo didn’t know anyone so fearless.

  “But there isn’t anything to be scared of, right? Magic isn’t dangerous.” Leo didn’t want to involve Caroline in something risky. She didn’t even want anything bad to happen to Brent, not really.

  “Well, sometimes a spell can backfire,” Isabel said, staring down at her hands. “I guess there is some risk involved, just like with anything. Using the big ovens can be dangerous, but we practice and train so we know how to handle them safely, just like our powers. Don’t worry, Leo. You’ll always have your family supporting you.”

  Isabel probably wasn’t trying to make Leo feel guilty, but her words only made Leo cringe. “Right,” she muttered. “So it’s true that magic experiments can go horribly wrong?”

  “Oh, Marisol said something to you, didn’t she? Some dire prediction of doom? Of course. I could smack her. She shouldn’t be putting fears into your head just because she’s afraid to do any spells.”

  Leo wasn’t trying to make her sisters fight—they did enough of that on their own. “No, she just . . . Magic can be amazing too, right?”

  Isabel beamed. “It always is. Leo, you’re part of the family. You’re a bruja. You don’t need to be afraid of magic. It’s part of you.”

  Leo nodded, but even with Isabel’s calming magic, she still felt anxious. She had never thought her magic would hurt her—it was her friends she was worried about.

  CHAPTER 16

  PATIENCE

  When Brent didn’t show up to school on Thursday, Leo thought she might scream. She and Caroline stared at Brent’s locker, but since Leo’s magic did not seem to include x-ray vision, there was no way to tell if the locker had been opene
d or if the cookies were still there.

  At lunch, Leo found herself surrounded by classmates who had questions about the snack club. Most people needed help figuring out what to bring in, but some had baking questions too.

  “What does it mean when the recipe says to separate the egg?” Mary Gradel asked. “Is that the same as cracking it?”

  “My mom won’t let me use the oven,” Lara Sanchez said. “How long do you microwave cookie dough?”

  Greg Lewis ran over to the table to ask Leo, first, if boys were allowed into the snack club, and, second, what t-s-p and t-b-s-p stood for in a recipe. Leo thought that everyone in the world knew the abbreviations for teaspoon and tablespoon, but she quickly discovered that lots of the things she thought of as basic knowledge made her a sixth-grade baking expert.

  “Leo is an egg-cracking machine.” Caroline bragged. “And her kitchen has a hundred kinds of flour, and every spice you’ve ever heard of.” The other sixth graders crowded closer with more questions, and Leo didn’t know what to do with them all. The noise and excitement overwhelmed her until the bell finally rang and she could retreat back to her desk in Ms. Wood’s classroom.

  “I can’t believe snack club is going to be a real thing,” she told Caroline on the bus ride home, staring up the aisle at the profiles of kids who were turning to smile at her. “Nobody was ever interested in baking before now.”

  “I’m sure they were interested. Who doesn’t love cookies?”

  Nobody ever talked to me about it, Leo thought—but then, she had never really talked to her classmates about baking, either.

  The phone rang later that evening, when Leo sat on the floor of the living room doing her homework.

  “Leo,” Mamá called out. “It’s for you.” Her and Daddy’s hands were full stretching out the crust of the pizza they were making for dinner.

  “Um, hello?” She rubbed the bumpy impressions the carpet had left on her elbow as she held the phone to her ear. “Caroline?”

  “It worked!”

  “What?”

  Caroline’s voice was high and thin, but Leo wasn’t sure if that was excitement or phone static. “Brent ate the cookies!”

  Leo glanced at Isabel, who stood a few feet away, smiling her “isn’t the baby growing up so fast?” smile. Very slowly, making sure to keep her face casually blank, Leo paced away from her sister and toward the hall.

  “Mm-hm.” She made extra sure not to sound interested.

  “Did you hear me? He ate them! I saw it through the kitchen window.”

  “Really?” Leo whispered while racing down the hall. “Hmm . . .”

  “Leo! Are you even listening?”

  Leo made it to the safety of her room and slammed the door behind her. She jumped onto her bed and kicked her feet in the air in silent triumph.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “My sister was right there. Are you sure? How did you see? Tell me everything.”

  “I was cleaning the kitchen because I wanted to try baking in my house, you know? And Dad said that he wants to learn with me, as long as we make sure not to set anything on fire.”

  “That’s great. I can help you both.”

  “Yes please! So I was standing by the window, and you know how I can see Brent’s kitchen from there? He opened his backpack and took out his math book, and the cookies fell out with the book, and he looked at them and then he showed them to his mom and then he ate them. He actually ate them!”

  Leo leaned back on the bed and pressed the phone against her ear, grinning hugely. “What did his mom say?”

  “I couldn’t hear her,” Caroline reminded Leo. “She laughed, I think. How long until the spell kicks in?”

  Leo hadn’t thought about that. “When did he eat the cookies?”

  “About two minutes ago.”

  “Hmm . . .” Leo had no idea how long a spell like this took to work, but she didn’t want to tell Caroline that. “Well, the recipe said one bite, so it probably won’t take too long. Probably you’ll hear from him in an hour, since you live so close.”

  “You really think so?” Caroline’s voice jumped even higher. “It’s going to work?”

  “Definitely.” Leo traced the stitching on her comforter and wondered if she believed herself. “By tomorrow morning at the very latest, Brent will be begging you to be friends again.”

  CHAPTER 17

  LOVE LETTERS

  But if Brent had made up with Caroline, there was no sign of it on her face as she got on the bus the next morning. Leo watched her friend walk alone down the aisle and slink into the bus seat.

  “Nothing?” Leo asked.

  “Nothing.” Caroline sighed, chewing on her thumbnail. “And he didn’t come to the bus stop today.”

  “Maybe he’s sick again?” Leo felt her stomach flip over itself. Her cookies couldn’t make anyone sick, could they?

  “I don’t know.” Caroline moved on to bite the nail of her index finger.

  “It’s okay,” Leo said as firmly as she could. “Everything’s just fine. Maybe he had a doctor’s appointment or had to go to school early. Don’t worry about it.”

  Caroline nodded but continued chewing her nails.

  The main hall of Rose Hill Middle School was noisiest the five minutes before homeroom started. Leo dodged between a group of slow-moving eighth graders and grabbed her locker like a drowning animal clinging to a branch to keep from being pulled downstream. Leo’s locker was number 15A, the same bright red as all the lockers in the hall, with gray, white, and black paint showing underneath the scratches. Leo spun the combination lock, pulled the door toward her, and reached for the math book she would need for the beginning of the day.

  She didn’t expect anything to fall out of her locker, but something did.

  She didn’t expect the thing that fell to be an unfamiliar square of bright-pink construction paper, but it was.

  And she definitely, definitely, definitely didn’t expect what was written on the paper in wobbly script, with the r’s erased and rewritten.

  Dearest Leo,

  Always quiet, always cool,

  Always on your own at school.

  Lots of sisters, lots of cake.

  How I hope someday you’ll bake

  Something wonderful for me.

  I don’t even care if it’s gluten free!

  Please be mine! Xoxoxoxo,

  Brent

  Leo read the note three times over, and then she dropped it on the floor and stomped on it, and then—slowly—she bent down and picked it up to read a fourth time. Her stomach churned, and her face felt hot enough to broil. Dearest? Xoxoxoxo? The love bite cookies lived up to their name and more—Brent was totally in love! But with Leo? That wasn’t right. He was supposed to make up with Caroline. If he fell in love with anyone, it should have been her. Leo double checked the note, but it was still her name on top. Had she accidentally put her eyelash into the dough? Did Brent automatically fall in love with the bruja who cast the spell?

  Or . . . Leo buried her red face in her locker. Had the spell not worked right?

  “I have to tell you something.” Leo grabbed Caroline’s arm before she could sit in her regular seat at the front of the room. There was still a minute, maybe a minute and a half, until the tardy bell rang, so Leo tugged Caroline, backpack and all, out into the hallway. “I’m so sorry, Caroline, I don’t know how it happened, but—”

  “Look!” Caroline’s eyes bulged wide and the corner of her mouth quirked up into a worried smile. “Leo, I think the spell worked a little differently than we expected. . . .”

  In her hands, she held a square of bright construction paper with shaky cursive writing covering it.

  Leo’s mouth fell open.

  Tricia and Mai rushed into class but stopped when they saw Caroline and her note.

  “Oh,” Mai said, “you got one too?”

  “I heard he got his mom to drive him to school early just to give them all out.” Tricia sighed. “Is this what it
’s like to become a teenager?”

  Both she and Mai held their own pink squares, and Leo drew hers out of her pocket, and Caroline’s smile flickered and died as she looked at the four identical-looking love letters from Brent Bayman.

  Dearest Caroline,

  I love your smile,

  I love your hair.

  I’d love to see you anywhere.

  I love your brain,

  I love your house.

  You’re as cute as a tiny mouse.

  Please, oh, please say you’ll be mine.

  I can’t even wait for Valentine’s!

  Love,

  Brent

  Dearest Tricia,

  You’re as pretty as a deer,

  And I think you’re really cool.

  So I hope you won’t think I’m weird

  If I ask you to go out after school.

  Please say yes, I’ll be so glad.

  We can eat some ice cream, maybe.

  I’ll be really really sad

  If you say you won’t be my baby.

  Love,

  Brent

  Dearest Mai,

  Japanese haikus

  Are pretty and I like them

  Just like I like you.

  Love,

  Brent

  “I’m Vietnamese!” Mai wailed, crumpling the note with a scowl after Leo had read it. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Leo looked down, suddenly feeling like the world’s smallest cucaracha. She wanted to crumple her paper too. Brent hadn’t even bothered coming up with different rhymes, reusing “cool” and “school” in both her poem and Tricia’s. The love letter was the opposite of special, and Leo felt silly silly silly about the tiniest second when she had felt special, thinking that Brent had written it just for her.

  And if that hurt her, she couldn’t imagine how Caroline must feel.

  “I don’t know if it’s a joke or what,” Leo lied. “But obviously he doesn’t really mean all of them. Let’s just ignore it.”