A Dash of Trouble

by Anna Meriano

  “Is that you, Leo?” Tía Paloma asked. “Do you happen to see where I put the bottle of vanilla extract?”

  Leo startled and drew her hand back, almost knocking over the jar of feathers and accidentally pushing several of the bags into each other. The bag with the spiderwebs flopped over backward, and Leo could no longer see where it was on the shelf.

  Tía Paloma bustled up behind Leo and pushed her aside to grasp a small glass vial from the middle shelf.

  “Morning.” Leo turned so her aunt couldn’t see the lump in her backpack. “What are you making?”

  Tía Paloma turned to look over her shoulder, stared into space, and didn’t answer. “It’s chaos around here,” she said after a minute. “I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached.”

  Leo retreated through the swinging doors, her guilt burning holes in her cheeks and through her belly button, hoping the stolen jar didn’t rattle too loudly in her backpack.

  In the front of the bakery, Mamá set Leo to work packing bags with gingersnaps, just like Leo and Caroline had for Brent. Leo was glad the bakery would be selling them, because that meant if Brent ever tried to investigate his secret admirer, he would find out that anyone could have bought the cookies and left them in his locker.

  Not that Brent was in any condition to play detective. He was too busy composing love poems to the whole world.

  As Leo filled bags and twisted the golden wires tight around them, her mind went back to the top shelf of the third cabinet. She needed those spiderwebs to make the honey-jar spell, and she needed the honey-jar spell—the heart snare—to trap Brent’s wild romantic feelings until they turned back to normal.

  When Leo first explained the plan, her idea to use another love spell to cover up the first, Caroline had been skeptical.

  “How do we know it won’t make him worse? What if the spells don’t cancel each other out?”

  Leo didn’t have much of an answer to that. The best she could say was that the trapping part of the spell seemed right to her—it seemed like it would work for what they wanted it to do. And, she told Caroline again, Brent was already the victim of a bungled love spell. It couldn’t get much worse.

  Leo watched from a corner behind the counter as a family with a tiny baby came into the bakery, smiling as they placed a birthday-cake order. The silver bell on the door shook as they left. Next came a very old man who asked Isabel for his usual and was rewarded with a guava cono and a small paper cup of milk. People walked in hungry and excited, sniffing the air and greeting Mamá and Isabel and Leo with friendly waves. They left with smiles on their faces and sweetness on their tongues. Leo wanted to relax into her work and the warm bakery air. She just needed to get the spiderwebs first.

  Leo shoved the rest of her twist ties into her pocket when no one was looking. Then she stood up, stretched, and walked through the swinging doors into the back of the bakery. Tía Paloma kneaded dough with her back to Leo, nodding occasionally.

  “It’s thick enough,” Tía Paloma whispered as Leo crept across the kitchen. “Because I’m the one touching it, that’s how.” She sighed and then continued in an even quieter voice. “Don’t you have other grandchildren to spy on?”

  Leo crept to the last cabinet, hoping the ghost Tía Paloma was speaking to wasn’t a tattletale. She pulled the door open. She slowly unzipped her backpack, stood on her tiptoes, and reached for the top shelf, groping for the crinkly bag with the golden twist tie. Her hand passed over the paper bag, the jar of feathers, and a lump wrapped in silky cloth before finally touching the bag of spiderwebs.

  Behind her, something heavy clanged and clattered, and Tía Paloma yelped. In a flurry of panic, Leo swept everything off the shelf into her arm and shoved it into her backpack, slamming the cabinet door and turning around just in time to see Isabel run through the door and help Tía Paloma clean up the mess of the fallen tray.

  Tía Paloma laughed and apologized for her clumsiness. Leo helped pick up and throw away all the lumps of unbaked dough that were now stuck to the tile floor, and nobody asked what she was doing in the back of the bakery. Nobody mentioned that her backpack was only half zipped, and fuller than it had been that morning. And as she walked carefully back to the kitchen, nobody noticed the tiny clinking noise that came from two glass jars—one empty, one full of feathers—knocking together in Leo’s backpack.

  The spell was officially ready to cast.

  CHAPTER 20

  HONEY JAR

  On Monday morning, Leo got permission to go to Caroline’s house after school.

  “Perfect,” Mamá said. “I have a special order to work on, and Daddy needs to take inventory, and we didn’t want you to come home to an empty house. Have a good time, ’jita, and we’ll call when we’re ready to pick you up.”

  Brent spent the day in the same lovesick haze as before. If anything, the weekend seemed to have made him worse. He tried to serenade three different kids at lunch, but the entire sixth-grade class was giving Brent the silent treatment. He earned a detention from Ms. Wood after he proposed to Sarah Florence, one knee and all, in the middle of silent reading. “What is going on with you?” Ms. Wood demanded. Leo slouched in her seat while her stomach twisted in knots.

  On the bus ride home, Brent had some trouble choosing a seat—he wanted to sit by everyone, and no one wanted to sit by him. But Mrs. Lillis glared until Brent settled next to a third-grade boy who scooted as far away as he could and stared out the window.

  The girls discovered Caroline’s dad unpacking boxes in the kitchen when they arrived.

  “There she is!” He pulled his long legs out of the doorway and stood with only a little bit of groaning. “Leo, always nice to have you. You know, you’ve inspired me to make this place livable again.” He gestured around the kitchen, which Leo was happy to see now included some dishes that weren’t made of paper and even a small frying pan. No table yet, but it was a nice start.

  Unfortunately, it was also inconvenient. The plan had been to use the kitchen for spell work, but they could hardly concoct a cover-up love spell right in front of Caroline’s dad.

  “Are you girls going to bake today?” Mr. Campbell asked. “I could help out if you need something stirred or measured. Anything more complicated than that, and I’ll just have to watch and learn.”

  Leo glanced at Caroline, who laughed nervously. “No, Dad, we’re just going to do some homework in my room. Although . . .” Caroline looked at Leo for a moment, then looked back at the floor. “I think maybe we can make some tea to help us concentrate. Do you like tea, Leo? We have honey.”

  Leo worried that Caroline’s eyebrows might crawl right off her face if she kept raising them like that. “I’d love some tea!”

  Once they were safely locked in Caroline’s room with rainbow-handled tea mugs and a bear-shaped bottle of honey, Leo unzipped her backpack to pull out the recipe book, the empty jar, the bag of spiderwebs and the pocketful of candy hearts, and a tall white candle borrowed from the dining-room drawer. The rest of the mysterious magical items she had accidentally stolen were safely stashed under her bed until she could sneak them back to the bakery. Caroline looked at the ingredients—especially the delicate spiderwebs—with awe, and listened raptly while Leo told the story of how she had almost been caught stealing them. The girls checked the recipe one more time, nodded at each other, and began the spell.

  Leo started by blowing into the empty jar. She made Caroline blow into it too, since the recipe book said that all the spell workers should. Caroline argued that she was no spell worker, but Leo said that if she was going to be helping, then she counted. After they filled the jar with their breath, Leo propped the white candle up inside the jar and lit it with the matchbook Caroline had in her bedside table drawer, in case of power outages. As soon as the candle was lit, the fan in the middle of Caroline’s ceiling stopped spinning and the light shut off.

  Caroline gasped. Leo imagined that she could feel the electricity tingling out of the walls and in
to her fingers, but it might have just been the excitement of knowing that her magic really worked.

  The girls watched as the candle burned down, purifying the jar, the spell, and their own intentions—according to the recipe. Leo counted out thirteen minutes on Caroline’s purple cat-shaped alarm clock, and then she twisted the lid onto the jar and let the flame suffocate while she and Caroline whispered Brent’s name three times. Then Leo opened the jar back up, put the candle aside, and peeled away one single spiderweb to lay at the bottom of the jar.

  “It looks thin. Are you sure it’s strong enough to trap all of it?”

  Leo looked at the jar. She had a lot more spiderwebs she could add, but she was going to do this spell just exactly right, according to the recipe, without even the tiniest change. “It’s fine,” she said firmly. “What’s next?”

  Next was the honey bottle, which Leo emptied into the jar while concentrating on her memories of Brent’s sappy notes, his cafeteria fight with Emily, and his silly serenades. These were the emotions they wanted to trap, and Leo reeled in all the sourness they had brought and replaced it with the sweetness of the honey and the candy hearts she dropped into the jar.

  It was complicated, trying to think and feel and concentrate on so many things at once. But the complications made her feel strong. She could smell the magic dripping and oozing into the jar along with the honey.

  When the jar was half full and the bottle almost empty, Leo stopped. She put the bottle down, licked the sticky smudges off her fingers, and brushed loose pieces of hair off her forehead.

  “Next is the lilac leaves?” She looked at Caroline sitting cross-legged on the bed and watching with wide eyes as Leo worked her magic. “You said you could get that, right?”

  “Got it!” Caroline reached to grab something off her bedside table. “My dad got a new bonsai collection, and one of them is a miniature lilac tree.” She opened her hand, and Leo smiled at the pile of little green leaves her friend held out.

  “They really look like hearts. Tiny ones.” She picked up one of the leaves and dropped it into the honey. “So cute!”

  Trap Brent, Leo thought as she let more leaves fall one by one into the jar. Don’t let him act enchanted anymore. Snare his feelings.

  She hoped the spell was going to work, because she had no idea what she would do if it didn’t. She had followed the recipe exactly this time—from the spiderweb to the heart candies to the leaves that, while small, were still lilac. The spell had to work.

  When the honey-jar trap was set, Leo screwed the lid on tight. The lights flickered back on, and the fan resumed its buzzing hum. Caroline helped Leo pack the full jar into her backpack along with the recipe book, jumping up and down as she did so.

  “Now we have to bury it.” Leo pulled the heavy backpack over her shoulder and tapped her fingers against the straps. “Do you think your dad would be suspicious if we did it behind your house?”

  “Not at all. Let’s go.”

  Caroline’s backyard had grown wild since the move to Houston, a sea of tall spiky grass interrupted by the tree in the back corner and the round island of the trampoline that Leo was immediately tempted to visit. Mamá hated trampolines (“Unsafe!”), but Leo loved them. They’d jumped for hours when Caroline first got it.

  Beyond the trampoline, under the shade of the yard’s one tree, there was a long wooden table covered with potted plants and gardening tools. Leo smiled and made her way to see Mr. Campbell’s bonsai.

  The miniature plants were impressive, a line of three beautifully shaped trees in shallow black pots, and four or five more wobbly-looking plants that seemed bare and incomplete, some with sections of leaves turning brown or yellow.

  “The nice ones he got from a nursery. He keeps trying to make his own, but they always die.”

  Leo nodded. “Like my dad trying to make avocado seeds sprout.”

  “My . . . my mom always made fun, but she loved them too. She would read outside while my dad worked on pruning new trees.”

  Leo traced the trunk of a bonsai that curved in a spiral. She thought of Mamá and Daddy sitting side by side in the living room, working through a pile of papers. One of them without the other would be unbalanced, off-kilter. Leo pressed her lips together and curled one hand around her stomach.

  “Sorry,” Caroline said. “It’s weird if I talk about my mom, right?”

  “Of course not! I don’t know . . . I probably don’t say the right thing, but you shouldn’t stop talking. Unless you don’t want to talk?”

  “Sometimes I don’t.” Caroline stared at the cloudy gray sky. “Sometimes I want to pretend like everything’s normal, and she’s still alive and inside the house. And sometimes I get tired of pretending. It feels good to remember. Like at the Day of the Dead festival.”

  Leo nodded, wishing she shared Isabel’s ability to comfort by magic, or at least Mamá’s nonmagical talent for listening.

  “The bonsai make me think of her. There’s something special about them, isn’t there?” Caroline asked.

  Leo grazed her fingers over the light-purple blossoms of the lilac bonsai, noticing a few bare spots in the tree’s heart-shaped leaf canopy. There was something special about the tiny trees. She could imagine fairies living under the branches.

  “Let’s dig here.” They had planned to bury the jar on the west side of the yard, as close as they could get to Brent’s house. But looking at the bonsai trees, Leo felt certain that the plants carried their own kind of magic, and she wanted to tap into that magic. What better place to hide a spell than in a fairy garden?

  “Okay.” Caroline glanced at the living-room window and then positioned herself so that any of Leo’s movements would be blocked from sight. “There’s a little shovel behind that pot. Tell me if you need help or want to switch places.”

  The shade of the table discouraged the grass, making Leo’s digging easier. A few scoops down, the dirt was soft and damp and dark. In almost no time at all, her nails were black rimmed, and the jar fit into the hole with only a little bit of pushing and wiggling around the sides. Leo patted the dirt down around the jar, said a quick prayer hoping for this to actually work, and then stood up and smiled at Caroline, trying to look less nervous than she felt.

  “The recipe said it needs to stay overnight.” Caroline glanced toward Brent’s yard, then at her living-room window, then at the still slightly noticeable bulge of dug-up and replaced dirt under their feet. “So we definitely, definitely won’t see results until tomorrow.”

  “Right, so we definitely don’t need to worry about it until morning.”

  “Right. No worries,” Caroline said.

  The two girls stared at each other and worried.

  “We could . . . I guess we could go lie on the trampoline, if you want.”

  “Yeah.” But Leo didn’t move, and neither did Caroline, and they both stood in front of the table worrying until Caroline’s dad came outside to ask if they wanted to order pizza for dinner.

  Mamá couldn’t understand Leo’s hurry to scarf down her scrambled eggs the next morning. Isabel and Marisol couldn’t understand why she craned her neck to try to spot the school bus from blocks away. And Mrs. Lillis couldn’t understand why Leo nearly sprinted up the bus steps and down the aisle, slamming into her seat.

  Leo kept tapping her toes and drumming her fingers until the bus pulled up to Brent and Caroline’s stop, and then she leaned forward in her seat and watched as . . . a third grader walked onto the bus, followed by Caroline, alone, chewing on her pinky fingernail and tugging her ponytail. And then the doors closed.

  “I don’t know,” Caroline whispered before Leo could even ask anything. “I don’t know if it worked. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where he is!” Her voice squeaked on the last sentence, and the fifth graders in the seat in front of her turned around to giggle.

  “It’s okay.” Leo tapped her feet faster than ever. “Maybe he just got sick again. Maybe he’s cutting class. Maybe his
mom is taking him to the psychiatrist to figure out what happened to his brain.”

  Caroline’s face went white. “You don’t think she really would, do you?”

  “Um, no, probably not.” Leo didn’t want to make Caroline worry any more. “I’m sure everything’s fine.” And then, because she had made up her mind to try not to lie to Caroline anymore: “I hope.”

  Despite that hope, Leo got more and more worried as the day went on. Volunteering to bring the attendance sheet to the office, Leo saw that Ms. Wood had marked Brent’s absence unexcused, which meant that his mom hadn’t called. During the daily math warm-up, Leo overheard Josh and Randall talking about how mad Coach Q was going to be at Brent for missing another soccer practice without giving any notice.

  Then, after lunch, Ms. Wood had red eyes and a worried expression and didn’t act at all surprised when Josh, Randall, and Emily Eccles were all called to Principal Jefferson’s office right in the middle of silent reading time.

  Caroline turned around in her desk. Her eyes were wide and full of panic. Leo scribbled a note on a scrap of paper ripped from her notebook, dropped it on Caroline’s desk on her way to pick a new book from the classroom library, and when she guessed Caroline had taken enough time to read the plan, took a deep breath and started to cough as loudly and violently as she could.

  “Goodness, Leo, are you all right?” Ms. Wood pressed her bright-red nails to her mouth, looking more upset than a simple coughing fit deserved. “Why don’t you go get some water?”

  Just a few minutes later, Caroline joined Leo in the girls’ bathroom, pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans.

  “I don’t know the number, but my dad taught me how to use 411.” She dialed the number and held her phone to her ear. “Hello? Um, Rose Hill, Texas. Can you give me the number for Mrs. Margaret Bayman?”

  Leo raised her eyebrows, impressed. She didn’t know how to look up phone numbers without the internet.