A Dash of Trouble

by Anna Meriano

  Tricia and Mai nodded, and Caroline joined them a few seconds later. Leo thought she saw something sparkling in Caroline’s eyes, but it was hard to tell when her friend ducked behind her hair.

  “Come on.” Leo took Caroline’s arm. “Let’s get to class.”

  On the way to her desk, Leo saw pink construction paper squares on desks, peeking out of backpacks, and several folded up and dropped in the recycling bin. It seemed like most of the girls in the class had gotten one, and a bunch of the boys too.

  And there, sitting at his desk in the center of the room, his eyes flickering from seat to seat and a dopey grin stretching his face into a dazed expression, was Brent. He met Leo’s glare and beamed at her.

  “Good morning, Leo. You’re looking lovely today.” And he gave her a terrible, horrible, mushy-gushy wink.

  Leo pressed her hand to her mouth and swallowed hard to keep her Cinnamon Toast Crunch in her stomach where it belonged. She needed to do some magical damage control—fast!

  CHAPTER 18

  ROMANCE

  Caroline did not show up in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

  “Is she okay?” Mai lowered her voice so the rest of the table couldn’t hear. The sixth graders buzzed about the love letters, whispering and giggling and shooting angry or confused or flirtatious looks at each other. “I don’t know what’s the matter with Brent, but . . . well, it did sort of seem like maybe Caroline might have liked him.” Tricia nodded and leaned across the table to listen.

  Leo opened her mouth, then shut it again. She had suspected the same thing, but she didn’t want to add to the rumors, especially when nobody else knew the real magical cause of all the commotion. Besides, Caroline had only said she wanted to be friends with Brent again.

  “I think the note surprised her.” Leo shrugged. “She didn’t know that everyone got one at first. I didn’t either, actually. So that made it extra confusing.”

  Tricia and Mai nodded, pursing their lips in sympathy. “We met at our lockers, so we found them at the same time,” Tricia said. “What do you think everyone’s going to do?”

  Leo looked over at Brent, who sat at the very end of his usual table all by himself, wearing a dreamy smile and pausing from slurping his instant noodles to scribble something in his open notebook. More love letters? Leo’s stomach churned.

  “I don’t know . . . ,” she started to say, but the question was abruptly answered when Emily Eccles threw down her uneaten granola bar, stood up, and stalked across the cafeteria to the far end of the boys’ table.

  “Hi, Brent.” Her voice carried in the echo-y room, especially since every other middle schooler—even the eighth graders—had gone silent. Mr. Kuo, the lunch monitor for the day, looked up.

  “Emily!” Brent jumped to his feet and threw his arms wide. “Emily Eccles, with the beautiful freckles, what brings you here on this fine day?”

  Emily’s eyes popped like a squeezed bullfrog. Leo was sure that her own face looked just the same. Brent sounded like his brain had been replaced by an alien’s.

  “I just wanted to ask you,” she said, taking a step back from Brent’s open arms but quickly recovering her smile, “if you wanted to see a movie with me this weekend.” She settled into a flirty lean against the table. “Since you like my freckles so much.”

  Leo’s table erupted in whispers. What was Emily doing? What would Brent say? Were there even any good movies playing this week?

  Leo wished they would all hush. She had to see what the spell made Brent say next.

  “Nothing would make me happier than to spend an evening by your side.” Brent reached out to grab hold of Emily’s hand. Leo’s table gasped. Brent’s friends, who had been trying very hard to pretend they weren’t watching, gasped. The seventh and eighth graders snickered. Mr. Kuo put down his coffee and pushed his chair back, hovering hesitantly as he watched the scene play out.

  Emily turned straight to her friends at Leo’s table and shot them a satisfied smirk.

  “So you like me?” she asked Brent. “You want to be my boyfriend?”

  Leo held her breath with the rest of the cafeteria, suddenly very glad that Caroline had not come to lunch.

  “Of course!” Brent cried, pulling Emily’s hand to his heart. “I love you more than anything in the world, Emily Eccles.”

  He sounded like a knight from a romance movie. Leo shrank in her seat, sure that someone would suspect supernatural interference any minute.

  Emily freed her hand and sat in the space next to the one Brent had left. He quickly reclaimed his seat and her hand, and then started writing in his notebook again. The other boys at the table pretended to vomit. Mr. Kuo sat all the way back down, a smile on his face. Whispers flew like spinning knives from Emily’s friends.

  “What are you writing?” Emily asked Brent, her voice still loud, not ready to let the cafeteria return to normal just yet. She had found her spotlight, and she wasn’t going to give it up until she had to.

  “Oh, do you want to see? It’s a love poem. For María Villarreal.”

  “What?” Emily snatched her hand away. Leo buried her face in her hands, but she could still hear the whispers repeating María’s name over and over. “Why are you writing a poem for her?”

  “Because I love her,” Brent said cheerfully.

  Leo didn’t need to look up to imagine the bright red of Emily’s cheeks or the bounce of her curls as she tossed her head angrily, but she looked anyway, peeking through her fingers like it was a horror movie.

  “You can’t love María.” Emily stood up again. The entire cafeteria was murmuring. Mr. Kuo stood up all the way this time, but Emily and Brent didn’t seem to notice.

  “But I do love her.” Brent’s face was still plastered with a dreamy smile. “More than anything in the world.”

  Emily stamped her foot. “You can’t love us both more than anything in the world. You have to make up your mind!”

  “Make up my mind? How? I love everyone in the world more than anything in the world!” Brent flung his arms wide and beamed around the cafeteria. Shocked whispers and snickers erupted from every table. Mr. Kuo started to stomp his way over to the bickering couple.

  “You are a liar, Brent Bayman, and I hate you. We are breaking up!” It was then that Mr. Kuo politely suggested that both she and Brent might want to go chat with Vice Principal Torres about the commotion. Brent gazed fondly at the cafeteria monitor, smiling and nodding as he talked.

  After they left, the conversation in the cafeteria grew to a roar. María talked loudly at anyone who would listen, explaining that she was not interested in Brent. Following her lead, María’s friends rushed to proclaim that Brent was not even that cute, anyway, and annoying to boot. Leo’s stomach crawled with the horrible feeling that had been building since she had seen the first four love letters.

  Something was horribly wrong with the cookies, Brent had gone totally lovesick, and it was all Leo’s fault. She swallowed and coughed to clear the nervous lump in her throat, and looked at Tricia and Mai.

  “Can we all agree not to tell Caroline about this?” she asked.

  The two girls nodded.

  Leo didn’t find Caroline until class started again, and by then Ms. Wood had heard about the lunchtime theatrics and decided on silent reading and worksheet time to keep everything calm for the rest of the day. Leo spent the time not doing her language arts, but trying to formulate a plan that would fix Brent. She had made this mess, so she had to clean it up. Besides, she couldn’t leave Brent the way he was. The sixth grade would tear him to pieces by the end of the week.

  Why wasn’t there a spell-reversal spell? Leo flipped through the pages of the recipe book for the third time, but it was no use. She’d already searched through all the recipes she could read on her own, and none of them was the slightest bit of use for stopping a magically romantic serial poet. She needed Caroline to help her read the rest of the recipes and make sense of what each spell could do . . . if Caroline would ev
en talk to Leo after the mess she’d made of everything.

  Leo tried to catch Caroline’s eye for the rest of the day, but her friend kept her head buried in a book with a medieval castle on the cover, silently reading—or at least pretending to. When Leo got on the bus that afternoon, she didn’t quite believe she still had a seat buddy until Caroline actually sat down.

  “Hi.” Leo swallowed three times, her throat suddenly dry. “Are, um, are you—you know it’s just a messed-up spell, right?”

  “I know.” Caroline didn’t meet Leo’s eyes. “I just don’t understand. . . . What happened? I thought—for a second I thought he maybe liked me, and that was weird enough. But now I’m just confused.”

  “I think . . .” Leo gulped again. “I think I maybe messed things up. Please don’t be mad, but . . . I think it was my fault. I think my idea worked out all wrong.”

  “Your idea?” Caroline met Leo’s eyes, and then she gasped. “The blank part of the spell! Not making him like me. It made him like everyone.”

  “I’m so sorry, Caroline. I ruined everything.”

  “Poor Brent,” Caroline whispered. “Emily Eccles is going to socially destroy him.”

  Leo cringed. Even though her classmates couldn’t talk about anything else, she had still hoped that Caroline didn’t know about the lunchtime fiasco.

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  The bus turned onto Caroline’s street, and Leo made a quick decision. “You’re going to let me use your phone to tell my dad that I missed the bus and walked to your house, and I need a ride home. And while we’re waiting, we’re going to find a way to make this right.”

  Daddy was not happy with Leo after her phone call. He was busy filling out important paperwork for the bakery and couldn’t pick her up for at least an hour, which was even more time than Leo had been counting on. She said hello to Caroline’s dad, listened to Caroline’s lie about a history project, and then followed Caroline down the hall into the pink-and-yellow butterfly room.

  “I couldn’t find a reversal spell, but maybe I missed it. I don’t know the word for reverse in Spanish.”

  “I’ll look.” Caroline waited for Leo to pull out the recipe book and then started flipping the pages quickly and silently, chewing on her thumbnail.

  Leo watched for a few minutes, then turned away, feeling useless. She scanned the bookshelf next to Caroline’s bed, finding a few books she recognized and many more she didn’t. Maybe Caroline would reopen her lending library. If they were still best friends after this, that is. Leo’s shoulders slumped. Friends were different from sisters, because no matter how angry you made your sisters, they would always be your sisters.

  “I just don’t see anything that reverses a spell.” Caroline flipped quickly through the last few pages of the recipe book. “There are no My Mistake Meltaways or Oops-a-Daisy Pies. There’s not even a Forgetfulness Flan. There are about seventeen different love spells in here, but not one spell to get rid of them.” She slammed the book closed, blowing hair out of her face in annoyance. “What are we going to do, Leo? We can’t just leave him like this.”

  Leo gulped. “Maybe the spell will wear off on its own?” Her voice wasn’t confident enough to fool anyone, even herself.

  Caroline bit her thumbnail and tapped her foot against the floor. “You should tell your mom.”

  “What?” Leo pulled the spell book toward her chest. “No, I can’t.”

  “Isabel, then,” Caroline offered. “We need help.”

  “I can’t tell them. I’m not even supposed to be doing magic. And I don’t need them. I can figure this out.”

  Caroline stayed quiet, but the way she frowned showed she wasn’t convinced. Leo hugged the spell book to her chest, as if she could squeeze a solution out of it. Caroline didn’t understand—if Leo ran to Mamá or Isabel now, it would mean she really was a baby, like they all thought.

  She stared hard at one of the paintings Caroline’s dad had made, a purple flower smiling in the middle of a dark-gray rainstorm. “If we can’t reverse the spell . . . ,” she said, still thinking as she talked, “maybe we can cover it up somehow.” She thought about how the thick purple spread on top of the gray paint, hiding the original color. Could spells work the same way? “How many love spells did you say were in the book?”

  “I was exaggerating,” Caroline admitted. “But there are at least seven. Why?”

  “Because I have another idea.” Leo bit her lip and put the spell book back on the bed. “I’m not really sure if it will work. But I think it’s at least worth a try.”

  Caroline hesitated. “And it involves more magic?”

  “I think another spell is the only way to stop this one.” Leo shrugged. “And . . . we have to try something.” She could have pretended to be more confident, but she was tired of trying to fool Caroline, especially now that Caroline already knew that Leo wasn’t the world’s most perfect witch. “What do you think?”

  Caroline looked from Leo to the book. “What are the chances that your plan will make everything worse?”

  “I have no idea,” Leo answered honestly.

  Caroline’s nervous frown curled into a nervous smile. “Well, at least let me hear it, then.”

  Leo tried not to look too happy when Daddy knocked on the door, but it was hard to keep the skip out of her step as she followed him to their pickup. In her backpack was a sheet of notebook paper with a translated recipe for a love potion that was simple and sweet, just the thing to help Brent focus and stop his widespreading love fever. While Daddy lectured Leo about the inconvenience she had caused and reminded her that taking the bus home was her responsibility as part of the family, Leo just stared out the window, working out her plan to save the day.

  Daddy noticed that his scolding wasn’t making an impact, because he sighed and turned on the radio, and Leo watched Rose Hill fly by to the twangy voices of country singers and their equally twangy guitars. They didn’t need to sound so depressed, Leo thought. If it was heartbreak they were singing about, she could have helped them out. This love thing might have some ups and downs, but she was pretty sure it always turned out right in the end.

  CHAPTER 19

  SPIDERWEBS

  Leo felt relieved it was the weekend, because that meant no school, and no school meant no Brent. With her new spell in mind, Leo tagged along to the bakery with Isabel on Saturday morning, telling Mamá that she wanted to start helping out more now that she had practiced some baking at home. Guilt from all her lies grew bigger and bigger, like rising dough in her stomach, but she didn’t have a choice if she wanted to fix her mistake.

  Mamá and Isabel served customers in the front, leaving Tía Paloma in the kitchen kneading sweet-bread dough on the wooden countertop and muttering angrily to herself. Leo snuck behind her easily and made straight for the row of wooden cabinets. She needed a few special ingredients for her new spell, and she suspected that these cabinets were just the place to find them.

  FRASCO DE MIEL ATRAPACORAZONES

  UNA TRAMPA DE AMOR

  INGREDIENTES

  1 frasco de vidrio de cualquier tamaño

  1 vela (para purificación)

  miel, suficiente para llenar el frasco

  1 telaraña

  1 puñado de corazones de caramelo

  unas hojas de lila

  The Heart Snare Honey Jar recipe, used to attract and trap someone’s mushy-gushy feelings, was simpler than the love bites. It didn’t require any baking, or boiled sweatshirts or eyelashes or anything too hard to get from Brent. But it did need a single spiderweb and a box of Valentine’s Day conversation hearts, which Leo didn’t think they sold at the drugstore in November.

  Leo started by opening the first cabinet and quickly scanning the contents of its shelves. It was filled mostly with nonfood things—bowls and spatulas and eggbeaters and waxed paper. And on the top shelf, next to a few glass casserole dishes, Leo spotted the third thing she needed: a big glass jar with a meta
l lid, exactly the sort of jar that jelly or pickles might come in.

  Leo glanced over her shoulder, made sure that Tía Paloma was busy. Then she stood on her tiptoes and grabbed the glass jar, pulling it down and slipping it into her backpack as quietly as she could.

  She moved on to the second cabinet. The chalky conversation-heart candy was easy to find, filling a big Ziploc bag next to a smaller bag of candy corn, another filled with red-striped peppermints, and the plastic mesh sack of chocolate coins. Leo had no trouble sneaking a handful of hearts out of the bag and into her pocket (she didn’t think a little bit of lint would bother the spell). So far, so good, Leo thought.

  The spiderweb turned out to be a little trickier.

  Leo scoured the corners of the bakery floor, but other than scattered specks of dust and flour, she didn’t find anything. Mamá would never let spiders live in the bakery, and she would never allow dusty cobwebs to collect anywhere near the food she served her customers. Leo thought hard. She couldn’t imagine Mamá putting spiderwebs from the floor into any recipe, no matter how magical. But if she didn’t get her ingredients from the floor, then she must get them from somewhere. . . .

  She turned back to the last cabinet, the one she hadn’t looked through yet. At first glance she only saw flour, sugar, and other large bags full of common ingredients. But the top shelf, up so high Leo could barely see it, held small boxes and tins that Leo couldn’t name, ingredients that she had never seen used.

  A plastic bag sat on the top shelf, a gold twist tie around its neck, holding what looked like a stack of very fine lace doilies. It was next to a jar of blue-black feathers and a rolled-up paper bag labeled Extra Strength, along with some odd-looking dried plants and leaves that practically screamed, “Magic ingredients stored here!”

  Leo checked over her shoulder. She stood on her tiptoes to get a better view of the top shelf and almost clapped her hands when she saw the title Spiderwebs written in Tía Paloma’s scratchy handwriting across the front of the plastic bag. She reached up to snatch it and—