A Bad Day for Voodoo

by Jeff Strand

  Copyright © 2012 by Jeff Strand

  Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Jacob Covey

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410 (630) 961-3900 Fax: (630) 961-2168 teenfire.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to everybody who’s kind of weird.

  FAQ

  Q: Is this book any good?

  A: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s not The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo good, but there are worse ways you could spend your time. It’s at least better than that one book you read that one time that totally sucked and you were all like “How did this ever get published?” and you shoved it into the garbage disposal and let out a primal roar as you listened to the metal blades grind it up.

  Q: Is this book totally realistic?

  A: Yes. No matter how silly things get, no matter how weird the characters act, and no matter how far somebody is able to walk with a severely injured foot and not bleed to death, rest assured that every single word in this book is exactly how things would happen in real life. When you find yourself saying, “C’mon, that’s so unrealistic!” just remember that you’re wrong.

  Q: How many people were injured during the writing of this book?

  A: We writers are dangerous. Everybody knows that. I’d say that maybe ten or eleven people got slapped around, and one of my assistants injured his back carrying my bags of money. The poor guy had to hold it for almost forty-five minutes while I tried to decide which room should be the “Wow, Look at All of My Money” room. I should have figured that out beforehand. My bad.

  Q: Is any material in this book inappropriate for teenagers or those who wish to become teenagers someday?

  A: Oh yeah. All of it. Teenagers, don’t let any responsible adults catch you reading this, because they will absolutely freak. They’ll flap their arms around and shout, “This is going to destroy society! Kids copy everything bad they read in books! All is lost, all is lost!”

  (Note to librarians: I’m only kidding. It’s not that bad. I mean, it’s gorier than Winnie the Pooh, and the word “crap” is used fifteen times, but none of the major curse words are represented, and nobody gets nekkid.)

  (Note to teenagers: Or DO they...?)

  Q: Is this book going to be a series?

  A: I don’t know. It depends on whether or not everybody dies at the end.

  Q: Will this book scare me so badly that I'll wake up screaming from nightmares and need to sleep with the lights on for the next several weeks?

  A: Nah.

  Q: Does this novel send a positive message to readers?

  A: Not really, but this FAQ does. Eat healthy foods. Get plenty of exercise. Study hard. Don’t talk or text during movies. Sing, even if it’s really bad singing. Give somebody you love a hug for no reason, so that they say, “What was that for? What have you done? Do I need to be worried? Tell me!” Don’t waste nitroglycerine. Do. Not. Talk. During. Movies. (Your grandparents never learned that lesson, but it’s not too late for you!)

  Q: Anything else?

  A: Enjoy the book!

  Q: Anything else after that?

  A: No, actually I thought the last one was a pretty good stopping point. It ended things on an upbeat note and got you all psyched up to enjoy the novel. Now I’m sort of rambling. Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you; I just wish we’d gone right from “Enjoy the book!” into the actual book instead of continuing this FAQ, because I think people are going to start to skim.

  Q: Did you?

  A: Did I what? I’m not sure what you’re asking.

  Q: Sorry. I forgot my question. Do you own any pets?

  A: I feel like we’re drifting off topic here. Let’s try to get back to—

  Q: Answer the question!

  A: Two cats.

  Q: How much cottage cheese do you think you could eat in one sitting? Let's say that somebody offered you $1,000 to eat twelve tubs of cottage cheese. Not bathtubs—those plastic tubs that cottage cheese comes in. Could you do it?

  A: Enjoy the book!

  CHAPTER 1

  “So what if we let the air out of his tires, and then we rig the car so it crushes his arms when he goes to check? He can’t give you another F if he doesn’t have arms.”

  “Seems extreme,” I said.

  “Well...maybe his arms don’t actually have to come off. We could just make it so they don’t work anymore.”

  Here’s the thing about Adam: I knew he was only kidding, but a small part of me suspected that he really would help me rig Mr. Click’s car to crush his arms if I asked. Does it make me look bad to admit that my best friend might be a tiny bit psychotic? I hope not.

  “I don’t want to do anything destructive,” I said. “And nothing that could get me suspended. I’ll be in enough trouble for the F.” For most of my life, I’d had pretty good luck with my teachers. There were only three of them that I didn’t like. Mrs. Teeser, in third grade, was a yeller. She yelled about everything. “Finish your assignment!” “Line up for recess!” “Stop gluing your fingernails together!” My friends and I suspected that she had some sort of medical condition where her head gradually inflated throughout the day, and yelling was the only way to release the pressure. If she didn’t yell, her head would pop. We cut her some slack for that.

  In seventh grade biology, Mr. Greg was unbelievably strict. He didn’t much appreciate jokes that his last name was really a first name, which is understandable, but he treated every moment of every class as if we were discovering a cure for cancer that we could totally screw up and lose forever if we lost concentration for a split millisecond. I have to admit that once the school year ended, I stopped disliking him quite so much, but he certainly wasn’t one of my favorites.

  Most of my other teachers were pretty cool, and I’d go so far as to say that Mrs. Rowell in fifth grade was a genuine life- changing inspiration.

  But not Mr. Click.

  Mr. Click, who taught my sophomore-year world history class, was just plain mean. Not in an ultra-strict “I want you to achieve excellence!” way like Mr. Greg, but in a “Kids suck!” way. I don’t think he liked any of us. He didn’t even like my girlfriend, Kelley, who got straight A’s, always sat up front, and asked intelligent questions, all without being a smarmy, teacher’s pet creep.

  Maybe if I taught high school history for thirty years, I’d become mean and bitter too. He was a small man, short and thin, with a bushy black mustache and a large haircut-with-a- hole-in-it bald spot. He wore glasses but probably needed a new prescription, because he was always squinting.

  Some teachers, when they give you a bad grade, seem like they’re mad at you. Sometimes they’re disappointed. Sometimes they’re a little disgusted. Mr. Click always seemed delighted to hand out a bad grade, and he’d call kids out right in front of everybody. He wouldn’t announce, “Hey, Kelley, here’s your A-plus!” to the class
, but he’d sure say, “Another D, Seth. That doesn’t surprise me.”

  (I’m not Seth. I was just using him as an example.)

  I’m Tyler Churchill. My report card was usually pretty good—A’s and B’s, but they didn’t come easy. Except for art, which was a natural talent, I had to study for every test until my butt literally fell off.

  (Kelley hated, hated, hated it when people used the word “literally” wrong, so I’ll clarify: My butt did not actually detach itself from the rest of my body from the intensity of my studying.)

  I wasn’t mad at Mr. Click simply because he was pure evil. I was mad because we had a vicious test, the second of five tests that were each worth 10 percent of our grade, and I studied until my eyes figuratively dropped out of my head. And I don’t mean that I was a total slacker until the night before and then did a desperate all-night, coffee-fueled cram session. I mean that I studied for that thing for a week. I mean that Kelley said, “Wanna hang out?” and I said no. And when she asked if I wanted to study together, I still said no because I knew we’d just end up making out.

  Do you understand how hard I studied for this test?

  I took the test that Friday and nailed it. We walked out of class, and everybody was complaining about how hard it was, especially Adam, but I knew every answer. One hundred percent, baby! Okay, maybe not 100 percent, but at least a 95. I had an awesome weekend.

  Monday afternoon, on a cool February morning in Florida, I got my test back. F.

  You’re probably thinking, “You sure must be dumb to study so hard for a test and still get the answers wrong! Hard to believe you wrote a whole book!”

  Nope. He hadn’t even marked any of the questions. Just “0/100” and the F at the top.

  Kelley turned around in her desk, which was right in front of mine. “What’d you get?”

  I folded the test in half. “Ninety-two.”

  I spent the whole class feeling more than a little sick to my stomach. Our next classes were in the same direction, so normally, Kelley, Adam, and I would walk together, but when the bell rang, I told them to go on ahead. I went up to Mr. Click’s desk. “Why’d I get an F?”

  He squinted at me. “Cheating.”

  “Cheating?” What was he talking about? Except for the occasional game of Monopoly, I’d never cheated in my life!

  “Your answers were exactly the same as Donnie’s, word for word. Do you have another explanation?”

  “Yeah, he copied off me!”

  “It takes two to cheat. He also received a zero.”

  “But I didn’t let him cheat! It’s not my fault if he copied my answers! I can’t help that!”

  “Hmmm.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “Let it be a lesson in personal responsibility.”

  He really said that. I know, I know, you’re outraged on my behalf, right? I bet you’re thinking, “You should’ve punched that guy in the face!” You can’t really punch teachers, though. I mean, you can, I suppose, but you really shouldn’t. I sure wouldn’t.

  “I’ll retake the test,” I said, even though I knew that at least 70 percent of what I’d studied had leaked out of my brain over the weekend. “That’ll prove it.”

  Mr. Click shook his head. “Life and my classroom share a common trait: no second chances.”

  I stormed out of the room, furious enough to strangle a cute small animal, though the feeling would pass long before I encountered a cute small animal. This was beyond unfair. This was go-to-the-principal unfair. This was “call the local TV station (on a slow news day)” unfair!

  I spent all of eighth period economics fuming. And believe me, I can fume.

  When school let out, I headed straight to Donnie’s locker. Now, I’m not a big guy. I look a bit taller than I really am because of my awesome posture, but my growth spurt was not yet all I hoped it would be, and most other sophomores had a couple of inches on me. Still, I wasn’t some scrawny little weakling—I ran track and did well on the swim team—and I did not live in fear of getting beat up or shoved into lockers.

  Donnie, on the other hand, was a big guy.

  He was not the biggest guy in school. That was a senior named Hank whose flattop haircut emphasized the fact that his head really was kind of flat. But Donnie made the top five, easy, and though I knew we weren’t living in a cartoon universe, I did sort of think that he could punch me so hard that my nose would fly off and stick to the wall.

  Still, as you’ll recall, I’d passed up the chance to make out with my girlfriend to study for this thing.

  “Hey,” I said, walking up to Donnie’s locker.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I got a zero on that test.”

  He nodded. “Me too.”

  “It’s because you copied off me.”

  “I didn’t copy off you.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You wrote down all the same answers.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “So you copied.”

  “Nope.”

  “You need to tell Mr. Click.”

  “Maybe you copied off me.”

  “I sit in front of you!”

  “That’s weird.”

  Then he gave me a look, one that said You go bye-bye now or Donnie hurt you.

  I left.

  I guess I should’ve been way angrier with Donnie, but Mr. Click had been unpleasant and evil all year, whereas Donnie was like a big, dumb puppy that pees on your video games but doesn’t really mean any harm.

  Adam and I walked home while I ranted against my unfair treatment, which is when he said that stuff about squishing Mr. Click’s arms with his car. “You definitely need to get revenge,” he said.

  “Maybe I’ll talk to Principal Zelig. There’s no way he’ll let him get away with this.”

  “Nah, get revenge first. Egg his windows. TP his house. Leave a dead skunk in his desk drawer. Spread superglue on his chair. Spit in his coffee. Photoshop a picture and post it online. Have twenty or thirty pizzas delivered to his house. Get some laxatives and—” “Where would I get a dead skunk?”

  “I don’t know. There’s got to be one lying around somewhere.” “I’m just going to talk to Zelig.”

  “That’s weak.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, do me a favor. Don’t talk to anybody until tomorrow morning. I think I’ve got an idea. If you’re not cool with it, fine, you can tattle to the principal, but I think you’ll like it.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll find out.. .tomorrow.”

  “It’s not ready yet,” Adam told me as we walked to school the next morning. “But Wednesday for sure.”

  “Can I borrow eighty bucks?” Adam asked on Wednesday morning.

  “In what universe do I have an extra eighty bucks?”

  “Do you have anything you could sell? A watch or something?” “Not if you don’t tell me what you need it for.”

  Adam considered that, for a long moment. “Never mind. Friday for sure.”

  On Friday morning, Adam handed me a wooden box about the size of the Spider-Man lunch box I used to have when I was a little kid. There were weird, curvy symbols on the lid.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Open it.”

  I opened the lid. Inside was a small doll.

  “What’s this?” I asked again.

  Adam grinned. “It’s your very own Mr. Click voodoo doll.”

  CHAPTER 2

  When your best friend gives you a voodoo doll of your history teacher, certain questions come to mind:

  1. Are you kidding me?

  2. A voodoo doll?

  3. Seriously?!?

  4. Where did you get it?

  5. (Two part question) Did you really pay eighty dollars for it, and if so, are you expecting me to pay you back?

  6. You don’t really believe that voodoo dolls work, do you?

  7. How do you use it?

/>   8. How come, even though we’ve been best friends since the fifth grade, you’ve never expressed any previous interest in dabbling in this sort of thing, not that I’ve ever asked if you were into voodoo or anything like that, but still, doesn’t it seem like a topic that would have come up sooner?

  9. Does anybody else know about this?

  10. Are you insane?

  I started with number 10.

  “No,” said Adam. “When you think about this, it really makes a lot of sense.”

  “Wrong. Voodoo is something that seems like a good idea at the time.”

  “Trust me. This is gonna be awesome.”

  I picked the doll up out of the box. It was tan-colored and had the texture of a burlap sack. It was mostly featureless—a couple of black dots for eyes and a line across the mouth, but it looked more like a gingerbread man than a representation of Mr. Click. “It doesn’t look anything like him,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to. What’s important is that it has his essence.”

  “If you’ve spent the past week collecting Mr. Click’s essence, our friendship is over.”

  “Nah, just one strand of hair. Found it right on his desk. No problem at all.”

  “Where did you get the doll?”

  “It’s a place called Esmeralda’s House of Jewelry. But they have voodoo stuff too. It’s across town on Duncan Street, where all of those small shops are.”

  Duncan Street was where tourists went to be scammed. Not that Geyser, Florida, attracted a lot of tourists. We didn’t even have a geyser. The city was named after William Geyser III, who invented some breakthrough in construction in the late 1800s that nobody in Geyser really understands, but that was enough to make him rich and get a city named after him. His statue in our central park was actually built as somebody else in 1913, but that guy turned out to be a bank robber, and the other city sold the statue to us, and everybody agreed to pretend that William Geyser III had worn a beard and gained a few pounds.

  Geyser was an okay place to live. We were big enough to support two Walmarts but not big enough that any cool bands ever played here. The city had a bizarre design—we had wealthy, gated communities right next to neighborhoods where you could get knifed for pocket change and a few Tic Tacs. Most of my friends and I lived in the middle-class areas. I sure didn’t plan to live here past high school, but I also wasn’t looking to pack up my stuff and hitchhike to LA or anything like that.