by A. W. Jantha
“‘Witch, please’ is right,” says Travis, smiling and nodding. “That’s my girl.”
Isabella gives me a concerned look, then picks something off the pizza tray and offers it to me. “Mushroom?” she asks hopefully.
I snort at the idea that a soggy mushroom can fix this situation. “I’m stuffed,” I tell her, sitting back up. “But thanks.”
“I guess you could say your stomach doesn’t have mushroom,” quips Travis.
Isabella and I both turn to him. We start laughing at the same time.
“Poppy, you’re a saint for putting up with this,” Isabella says.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say.
“Hey,” says Travis, flashing a smug smile. “If you got it, haunt it.”
By the time American Lit rolls around, I finally find someone who looks more over Halloween than I do. Too bad it’s a painted pumpkin sitting on Miss Chen’s desk.
At this point, I can feel Halloween night approaching. Half the class is anxious to get home and primp before a night of parties, and the other half is still licking sugar off their fingers from the caramel apples Spanish Club sold at lunch. As for me? I’m just plain old anxious. The classroom is split in two sections that face each other, which is fine for discussion classes, but now means that every time I glance up, I see Katie and Jenny texting under their desks. I try not to look, which of course means I just look even more. I’m glad Isabella’s next to me. Her presence is calming, somehow.
Miss Chen, Halloween or no Halloween, wears a black T-shirt and comfortable jeans, as always. She spends ten minutes trying to encourage a class discussion that doesn’t dissolve into giggles or blank stares. After her last attempt ends with dead air, she catches the eyes of everyone in class, one by one, the look on her face announcing her utter disappointment.
“Well, I can see all of you are eager to get on with your nights,” she announces after silently shaming each of us. “Including, perhaps, going to the Dennisons’ Halloween party. So why don’t we spend the rest of the hour catching up on the reading you clearly haven’t done?”
My classmates exchange looks like they’ve just won the lottery and can’t quite believe it, but I feel a wave of guilt because she’s only trying to do her job. Blame my empathy toward her on being a teacher’s kid.
Miss Chen sits back down and picks up a wooden wand. “And the next person who talks gets detention for three days,” she adds, rapping it on the edge of her desk. With a flourish, she flips the wand into the air and catches it, the tip pointing in Katie’s direction like an accusation.
When Katie gives her innocent eyes, Miss Chen sets the wand back on her desk with a snap and picks up a copy of the local newspaper. She’s a big fan of reading the police blotter.
Katie looks over at me, and I feel the full force of her wicked smile. She mouths, boo.
I open my copy of The Scarlet Letter and flip through my notes and highlights to see whether I’ll have anything intelligent to say in the end-of-unit essay. It’s a welcome distraction.
Katie snorts, covering her mouth, and hides her phone under her book. She’s Snapchatting, no doubt. Or in a group text with her squad about what a loser I am. Whatever.
Miss Chen clears her throat loudly and gives Katie a look that would melt lesser students.
“Sorry,” says Katie. “Hester Prynne is just so funny.” Her eyes dip back to her book and then swing up to meet mine. Her smirk grows more pronounced.
I drag my teeth over my bottom lip and stare at my book until the words come back into sharp focus. I will not let Katie Taylor get to me.
But if I were a Sanderson sister, oh, the curses I would cast.
I wish Travis were here right now instead of in Honors Chem. He’d do something to make me laugh, or at least make me feel less like a loser.
Isabella touches my forearm and then jerks back from the jolt of static that passes between us. “Whoa,” she whispers, “you must be mad.” She laughs nervously at her own joke.
I glance up at Miss Chen, who is still tucked behind her newspaper. Isabella is not one to risk detention—especially given all the extracurriculars she has to run and attend after school—so I know she must be really worried about me.
“You okay?” she asks, feigning reading from her book.
“I’m fine,” I say tightly. I really want to tell her that I’m not fine, but I don’t think Isabella knows what it feels like to be made fun of. She’s basically gifted at everything she touches. Maybe that’s what I should tell Travis: I’ll never ask Isabella out, even if she’s smart, beautiful, and nice, because it’s too much pressure to be with someone who is so good at life. I love my photography and I want to go to a good school and find a way to make money with my art, but that’s not the same as what Isabella Richards likely wants. She’s probably looking for someone perfect. Like her.
My phone lights up: it’s a text from Isabella. don’t worry. katie won’t talk, it says. she’d rather hold the secret over you and make you squirm. I chew my lip. That makes sense. I hope she’s right. I look over to Isabella and see her slide her cell phone under her book.
I glance up and see Katie giggling to herself again, but this time she’s being more discreet. She looks over, catches me staring, and winks.
My phone lights up again and I look down to see that Katie has posted on the Facebook event for my mom’s party. I click it open, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. She’s posted to the page with the cryptic words: Can’t wait to see all you guys and ghouls! #RealWitches
She did hear me at Allegra’s. I’m so dead.
I stew in my thoughts until the bell rings.
Miss Chen’s sigh of relief is actually audible. “Everyone out,” she says, tossing her thick gray braid over her back. “Happy Halloween. Don’t drink the blood of babies.”
I stuff everything back into my bag and hurry to the door, but Katie manages to intercept me. “See you tonight,” she says sweetly. “Can’t wait.”
“Katie, get over yourself,” Isabella says over my shoulder.
Katie swivels on one heel. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t mind if we do.” Isabella takes my forearm to steer me through the door.
Thankfully, we don’t zap each other this time. Her hand is warm and firm and I pray to god she doesn’t notice the goose bumps rippling over my skin.
“I’ve got to get to debate,” she says to me while still looking straight ahead once we’re a good distance down the hall, “but seriously, don’t let her get to you. She’s not worth it. Trust me.” She squeezes my arm and dips back into the crowd. She’s tall enough that I can see the glint of her gold circlet over the heads of the other students.
While it’s blindingly obvious that Katie isn’t worth stressing out about, something about Isabella saying it makes me feel warm and tingly. You don’t need external affirmation, Mom would say—but one could argue that you don’t need cheese fries, either. Both are pretty damn satisfying indulgences.
Isabella disappears down the stairs and I lean against a wall of lockers, chiding myself for being such an idiot. I’d like to blame it on the emotional turmoil that comes with being a Dennison on Halloween, but unfortunately, this isn’t that unusual for me. Acting like a grade A weirdo around the girl you have a giant, extraordinarily inconvenient, and almost certainly ill-fated crush on is a very Poppy Dennison move.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about Isabella’s love life—she’s too busy getting ready to run the world to expend energy on dating, presumably. But then, I doubt anyone talks about my love life, except maybe to speculate about whether Travis and I are secretly a thing. Which is so far from true. What is true is that the chance that Isabella likes me back is so remote, I’m far more likely to get struck by lightning. Twice.
“Pops.”
I look up and see Travis coming down the hall with a Jacob Bailey High baseball duffel bag slung over his shoulder. It’s a relic from his one and only seas
on on the team, before he gave up any lingering MLB dreams. My gaze slides from the duffel to his T-shirt, the top half of which is sopping wet.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Donnie Thompson got carried away during the chem experiment,” he explains. “He said saline conductivity was too boring, so he started flinging salt water everywhere. Dude needs some anger management lessons pronto.” He arches an eyebrow. “But what happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I say, suddenly self-conscious.
Travis jerks his chin at my head. I reach for my hair, thinking I’ve had a leaf stuck in it all period. But I realize that long strands of my hair are floating above my head like tentacles.
I gasp. “Oh, crap.” I grab my head with both hands.
“That’s some serious static,” says Travis.
“Being the town freak must be a hair-raising experience, huh, Dennison? That’s some serious volume,” Katie quips as she breezes past with her soccer squad. Then she turns and calls out to me, walking backward, “You’re not a long-lost Sanderson, are you?” She feigns alarm, really hamming it up for her friends, who look on with a kind of wicked glee. “Please, spare me your hexes! Think of the International Witch Tribunal! Surely they’d have your head for misuse of magic.” She grins at her own joke and spins on her heel, flanked by her mean-girl posse, and hurries off, the cleats tied to their backpacks bobbing in unison.
Katie knows everything about my family’s Sanderson secret: confirmed.
I try to shake off how upset I feel. “What’s going on with my hair?” I ask Travis.
“You must be coming into your powers,” he teases, but he leads me to the bathroom and pushes me through the swinging door.
I run in, place my backpack down, and splash water onto my hair. Desperately, I smooth down the wayward dirty-blond strands, adding more and more water until they hang as limp and still as they’re meant to.
Alone, I stare at myself in the mirror, looking like a golden retriever just out of the bath. My throat feels tight, but I try not to panic. After talking about the Sanderson sisters at lunch, some of my family’s superstition seems to have wiggled its way into my brain, and I remind myself that magic isn’t real and there’s no way I’ve somehow wished myself into magical abilities just to spite my personal nemesis. I zapped Isabella with static earlier: that must be the answer. Static from my sweatshirt or from a change in the atmosphere or something. Static and paranoia, because it’s Halloween night and I’m nervous about my entire class meeting my parents.
I take a deep breath and grip the edge of the sink, willing my thoughts to stop spinning. I look at my own face, sad and pale, in the mirror once again and try to see it objectively, as if I were looking at a tree or an old house, searching to find the perfect shot. Mascara streaks down my cheekbones in little spikes, stark against my skin. My wet hair clings to me, too, snaking across my cheeks and chin and down my neck, curling around my collarbone and jawline.
My photo teacher, Ms. Ahmed, said I needed to work on my range and stretch myself, and capturing this moment on film isn’t something I’d normally ever do. I look scared and vulnerable and raw—and not social media ready, that’s for sure. If Katie Taylor could see me now. But in the rawness is something sharp, like a fire beneath my skin that feels just out of my control.
My eyes fall to my backpack on the floor, and I lean down and root around for the smooth, solid body of my camera. I frame the shot in the mirror. Half-open bathroom stalls stand in formation behind me as I hide behind my camera, my face obscured in my reflection in the smudgy bathroom mirror. All I can see is my hair trailing water onto my sweatshirt, and a streak of mascara that’s found its way to my chin. I adjust the f-stop and shutter speed to suit the incandescent bathroom lights. I take a deep breath, hold it, and take the photo, the crisp snap of the shutter satisfying in the tiled room. I’ll call this shot Portrait of the Artist as a Drowned Rat.
When I reemerge from the bathroom, Travis points from my hair to his shirt. “Look!” he says. “We match!”
I know he’s trying to make me feel better, so I give him a weak smile.
Principal Taylor comes around the corner, probably on patrol to clear the halls. He’s wearing a plaid button-down shirt like always, the collar fastened all the way to the top and a few locks of his blond comb-over falling out of place. Jay Taylor grew up with my dad, and they have a long-standing tiff because decades ago, Jay was one of the biggest bullies at Jacob Bailey High. It’s not surprising, I guess, that his daughter turned out the same way—though with her own special brand of petty meanness. He looks from my dripping head to Travis’s damp shirt.
“Would you care to explain why you’re both soaked, Mr. Reese?” Principal Taylor asks, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips into a sharp point. He directs his question to Travis, as if he suspects it’s all my fault and my friend would rat me out if asked the right question. He always does that with Dennisons, except for my aunt Dani, who could get along with even the angriest crowd of pitchfork-wielding townspeople.
“Science experiment gone wrong,” says Travis, rescuing me, “but it’s just water.”
Principal Taylor nods slowly, his eyes flitting from Travis to me as if he’s trying to look right through us.
This guy needs to ease up. It’s Halloween, and for all he knows this wet look could be our extremely sad and lame attempt at costumes.
He clears his throat and continues down the hall.
“Let’s go,” I whisper to Travis, “before Principal Taylor accuses us of being whatever the water equivalent of a pyromaniac is.” I stay rooted in place as I watch Principal Taylor come across a group of girls giggling around one of their lockers.
“Get on home,” he says to them. “We’re locking up the building.” He looks back over at Travis and me. “You never know what wild things kids will do on Halloween night.”
His words make my stomach turn: has Katie already told him about my family’s Sanderson secret?
Travis doesn’t seem to notice, or at least ignores Principal Taylor so he won’t think we care. Instead, Travis slings an arm around my shoulders and pulls me toward the stairs. “Don’t trip,” he says. “So, I did some Googling while you were in the bathroom, to explain the static. It might storm tomorrow. It’s probably a pressure thing. Or humidity. Or maybe there are extra ions in the atmosphere.”
I roll my eyes. “Sure,” I say.
Travis ruffles my wet hair. “Let’s get you home. We got a party to crash.”
My house doesn’t exactly scream “Halloween party.”
I mean, our house isn’t usually decorated for Halloween, but we’re throwing a fairly large Halloween shindig in a few short hours, so I’m slightly concerned. It’s also the only house on the block without a single pumpkin or decorative gourd on its porch—and you’d better believe there aren’t any fake gravestones, which my mom finds tasteless since she has a soft spot for a zombie named Billy she apparently met twenty-five years ago. That, and she generally doesn’t think it’s very funny to make jokes about the (living) dead. But tonight, we should probably have some kitschy knickknacks out on the lawn, or at the very least a pumpkin. Sigh. What is my life?
Travis looks from the hedges of the festive house next door, which are probably 90 percent fake cobwebs, to its bales of hay stacked high and its large, painted pumpkins wearing witches’ hats, to our pristine yard decorated only by a few stray yellow and orange leaves.
“So, remind me again why your parents are throwing a party to celebrate a holiday they absolutely abhor?” he asks.
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I mutter, walking down the lantern-lit brick path. My big white house with its dark shutters and two stories can certainly hold a good number of people, that’s for sure. As I open the front door, I see there isn’t even so much as an autumn wreath on it.
Inside, Dad kneels in front of the fireplace with a pile of sticks and cut logs. He’s wearing
a green sweater and brown corduroys, and when he turns to wave hello, I see that he has a headband on with hollywood in white block letters.
“Hollywood sign,” says Travis with a nod. “Classic.”
“Thanks.” My dad clicks his silver lighter and holds it to the firewood.
“Can I help?” Travis asks, even though he already knows the answer.
“I’ve got it,” says Dad, on cue, “but Allison might need help in the kitchen.”
When Nana and Grampa retired to Palm Springs a few years ago—because they’d heard so many wonderful things about California from my dad—he was skeptical about moving into his in-laws’ old house. He’s since become very particular and territorial about certain things—including the way fireplace wood is stacked. Maybe it’s a result of getting older: Mom says Dad used to be much more laid-back. Apparently, kids even nicknamed him Hollywood for a long time after he moved here from California. But I know he got more serious after their “face-off” with the Sanderson sisters, and even more so after my parents got married and I made my debut.
When Mom was pregnant, Dad bought a safe to lock up the stub of the Black Flame Candle. He even tried to get the Sanderson house condemned and bulldozed, but the city pushed back since it’s a historic landmark. My parents are de facto caretakers, with possibly the only set of keys, even though they never go there. I’m surprised no one’s made the Sanderson house into an escape room by now.
Travis and I drop our bags by the front door and head into the kitchen, where we find Mom poring over case files—which is to say, we find Mom being Mom. Her white blazer is draped over the back of her chair, but she’s wearing one of her favorite blouses—crimson with cascading ruffles at the front—rolled up at the elbows, which means it was a court day, and a long one at that. Her honey-colored hair is pulled back in a sleek bun, and her cherry-red lipstick has started to fade because she chews her lips when she’s thinking. Beside her, there’s a platter of dark chocolate chip cookies, and half of them are iced to look like pumpkins. So there will be treats at the party. That’s a relief. There are two tubes of icing near Mom—one orange and one green—but she’s so engrossed in her case that she seems to have forgotten them.
