The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  Adam gives me a long look. “Okay.”

  Mr. Cates sets down his book, holds out his arms like a preacher, and summons our attention. “Class, the bell will ring in two minutes. Next session we’ll be in the library so you can start to research your poet’s biography. You’ll need to select your poet by then.”

  Adam and I look at each other, and we don’t need to say anything. Of course our poet will be Constance Brooke.

  Mr. Cates continues, “Get down your last thoughts before the bell chases away the muse.”

  I turn back to Adam. “We can’t write—”

  “We already did,” Adam reminds me, turning ahead to the middle of the book. “This page is blank.”

  I peer at it closely to make sure. No faded writing appears.

  I take a breath like I’m jumping into cold water and write, Words outlast stone. Poems are words.

  “Very clever,” Adam snorts.

  “Fine. You do it.”

  Rosemary remembers, he scrawls. Rosemary is an herb and a person.

  “You started off well,” I say.

  We watch the page, waiting to see if the book will write back. It doesn’t, of course. How could it?

  My brain is still untangling equations from algebra when Adam grabs my arm and steers me toward the library. “Let’s look at the diary over lunch.”

  I fall into step beside him. “We can try to read more of what Constance wrote on that one page.” What if she wrote on more pages?

  We walk through the metal detector, and Adam calls out, “Hey, Mrs. W! It’s cool if we eat in here, right?”

  “Just clean up after yourselves.” She smiles behind the big checkout counter.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to eat in the library,” I mutter, as we wend between tables over to a sunny corner in the biography section.

  “Yeah. At some point, there was a big reversal on that. I guess they figure we can take the books home and slobber all over them.”

  I set the diary between us and open to the page with writing—Constance’s, not ours.

  Adam arranges the components of his lunch according to some system. He has one of those lunchboxes that’s a set of small containers, and each compartment holds something different. Grapes. Baby carrots tucked in a tidy row. Finally a sandwich, which he extracts from its box.

  He catches me studying him. “What?”

  The way he sorts everything helps hold the huge, messy shapelessness of life together. But I don’t say that because it would be weird. “You’re weird,” I say instead, but he knows I don’t mean it.

  He starts to summarize what happened with the diary. “You wrote the rosemary line from Hamlet . . .” he says.

  I repeat the line: Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

  He continues. “And then we noticed Constance’s writing.”

  “Which is really faint,” I add.

  “So we didn’t see it before,” he says. “Even though we looked pretty carefully.”

  “But we should have seen it.” I say what we both know. “It isn’t that faded.”

  “You think there’s actually something strange happening with this book?” His voice is just louder than his breath.

  “Don’t you?”

  He nods. Once.

  We both lean over the book, careful to hold our food away, and read together: Father says we . . .

  The next word is blotted, like it got wet. The letters are frayed around the edges, tiniest hairs of ink reaching out into the roughness of the page.

  Need. Adam works it out.

  Father says we need the rosemary so that we can remember.

  “Remember what?” I wonder, as I turn the page.

  My hand flies to my mouth. Adam and I recoil. The new page just says Wilkie. Over and over and over and over. The whole page. Filled with the name Wilkie, written neatly at first and then more and more messily. And then it’s blotchy, like rain fell on the page, drops of water, staining the cursive with pale brown blots. Wilkie. Wilkie. Wilkie. Wilkie.

  Adam whispers, “So that we can remember Wilkie.”

  Four

  WE BOTH LEAP UP, and Adam yanks me away from the table. My wooden chair pitches backwards and clatters to the floor.

  “Everything okay?” Mrs. Wallace calls.

  “Yup!” I squeak. Adam gives an awkward thumbs-up. It’s good that Mrs. Wallace isn’t looking too closely, because all the color has drained from Adam’s face except two weird red blotches low on his cheeks.

  I take a steadying breath. “It’s just a name. Written over and over.”

  “That’s the creepy part.” Adam hugs himself. “You can tell something was wrong.”

  “But whatever was wrong was a long time ago. It’s not wrong anymore.”

  “You don’t know that,” Adam counters. “If Wilkie, like, died, then he’s still dead.”

  “Yeah, and that’s sad, but everyone from history is dead. The tragedy is over.”

  “So why are you standing over here and not sitting with the perfectly harmless, not-at-all-weird diary there on the table?” he challenges.

  “You pulled me!”

  He reaches for my hand. “Together?”

  “Together.”

  Before we can sit back down, the bell rings, and we automatically start stowing our lunch stuff.

  I stash the diary in my backpack, where the bright colors of my other books shout, “Everything is fine here. Nothing to see. Move along.”

  We merge into the traffic of bodies moving every which way in the hall. “Who do you think Wilkie was?” Adam asks, dodging a tiny sixth-grader with a supersized backpack.

  “How would I know?” I wave at Aileen. “Someone gone, I guess, otherwise they wouldn’t have to worry about remembering him.” I want all those Wilkies burned in my brain to go away. “Let’s just put it out of our heads.”

  We walk together into social studies and slide into our seats.

  Adam’s not putting it out of his head. I can tell because his tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth, which means he’s puzzling through something.

  I speak fast and low. “Since the book is so old, Wilkie’s obviously dead. There’s really nothing we can—”

  He cuts me off. “We can show Shelby.”

  It’s like the ground was crooked and just righted itself. Shelby will know how to respond to Wilkie, Wilkie, Wilkie.

  Adam looks at me closely. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No! Why would I? Besides, we already showed her.”

  “Yeah, but we thought it was blank. Plus, you didn’t want to show your mom.”

  “That’s different. She has her own thing with books, but Shelby’s thing is the same as our thing.”

  I move through the rest of the school day, listening and discussing and smiling. But Wilkie won’t leave me alone, and I can’t wait for Shelby to explain him away.

  Adam and I stand under the overhang at the front of the middle school, staring at his phone, waiting for Shelby to text back.

  Nothing.

  I try Need your help. Pick us up? She can’t ignore that.

  But she does.

  I call her. It doesn’t even ring before her recorded voice trills happily, “Hey, this is Michelle. I’m busy right now. Leave a message.”

  Finally, Adam calls his dad at work. He turns away from me while he talks, but the slump of his shoulders means his dad is being short in that I-don’t-have-time-for-you-now way.

  “He thinks she has rehearsal for the musical,” he reports. “She’s probably not allowed to have her phone on.”

  “At least she’s not ignoring us,” I sigh.

  We amble toward home in a comfortable silence. We don’t talk about the diary. We don’t talk about how Shelby is always so busy, and instead of always being three, we’re usually just two now.

  On my wall, on the hook where Dad’s stupid Escher print used to be, is the picture of the three of us that Adam gave me when we we
re nine. He painted down one side of the frame, For My Best Friend, and across the bottom, he painted From Adam the Great, and Shelby added And His Super Sister in little letters underneath because she took the picture, or actually her auto-timer thing took it. It’s a close-up of the three of our faces. Shelby and I are cheek to cheek, with my brown hair and her blond hair all tumbled together. Adam’s chin rests on top of my head, and his head tilts toward his sister’s. We’d just finished doing a pajama march from my house to theirs, and we were proud of how silly and brave we were. On the two sides of the frame without any writing Adam drew sprigs of rosemary. For me.

  Adam’s house comes first. We both check our phones again.

  “We’ll come over when she gets home,” he says. “If it’s not too late.”

  It will be too late. It’s already too late. I can’t even remember why I thought it was so important to talk to Shelby. The book is really old and used to belong to a really famous poet, but it’s mostly blank and not actually all that interesting.

  I head home alone, and for no reason at all, I think about when you pretend to throw a ball for a dog and it runs and searches and looks up, expectant and confused and just a little betrayed.

  When I get home, Mom is waiting for me, all delighted with herself for having found bright yellow curtains with rainbow speckles.

  “For your room!” she exclaims with a big smile. “Do you love them?”

  I stand on the stepladder, and Mom hands me the metal bar with the curtain sleeved onto it. My arms aren’t long enough to set both ends of the rod on the hooks, and one end falls out when I try to put the other one in place and then the other end falls out, and Mom and I start laughing. Finally, she takes my place on the ladder, and I step back to admire the splash of color at each window.

  She wants a tour of where I’ve put everything, and I realize she has felt left out of the momentous business of moving me into a new room. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three days.

  “I love how you organized the books.”

  Not for the first time, I consider how Mom and Adam are a lot alike.

  “Adam and I were thinking maybe this used to be Constance’s room. You know, when she lived here.”

  “Maybe.” Mom smiles. “That’s a nice thought.”

  We go down to the den, and each of us curls up on one end of the couch, with our toes just touching in the middle. She’s reading some massive nineteenth-century novel with the spine all creased and lots of pencil marks all over the margin, which means she’s rereading. So am I. I flip ahead to the scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Harry starts writing in the old diary he found, and I disappear into the story.

  At eight thirty, after I’ve gone up to my room, Shelby calls. She’s so sorry she missed my call. The musical rehearsals are crazy long but so much fun. I should totally try out when I get to the high school next year. Everyone’s so nice. Blah. Blah. Blah.

  “Anyway, what’s up?” she asks.

  “What did Adam tell you?”

  “He said it was about the diary, but he got weird and wouldn’t say more.”

  “Yeah, we were using the diary for our poetry journal. For Mr. Cates? And this writing kind of appeared,” I falter. I can’t summon the image of the words on the page.

  “Uh-huh.” Shelby doesn’t even try to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

  “It did!” I exclaim. “It really did write back.”

  “Are you reading Chamber of Secrets again?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “Okay. So, what did it say?” She doesn’t believe me, but the faintest hope that I might be telling the truth lifts her voice.

  Why can’t I remember? “Hang on.”

  I pull the diary from my backpack. The sweet, musty scent of old book rises from the parchment as I turn page after page. Diary of a Poet. The list of herbs. The line from Hamlet. Our lame notes from class. And nothing more.

  “I . . . it’s nothing.” It is nothing, but it wasn’t. Was it?

  “You okay, Rosie?” The skepticism is replaced with kindness and concern.

  No, I’m not okay. I think I’m going crazy. But I don’t say that. I make an excuse about being tired.

  “Is Adam still up?” I ask.

  “You know he keeps the schedule of a toddler,” she quips.

  “Why does he do that?”

  “Always has,” she replies. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I could tell her. I could tell her the book was blank and then it wasn’t and now it is again, but is that really what happened? Maybe Adam and I just wanted so badly to find something in the diary that we imagined we did. But my chair clattering to the floor in the library echoes in my head. We did see something. I’m sure of it.

  “The book . . .” I begin. “It’s . . . strange.”

  “It’s pretty different, that’s for sure,” Shelby says.

  She’s waiting for me to offer more of an explanation, but I don’t know what to say. My throat tightens like I might cry.

  “Yeah. Really different,” I choke out. “I gotta go.”

  “Okay.” She sounds uneasy. “But call me back if you want.”

  I nod but can’t speak, so I just hang up. I use all my strength to hold tears at bay. I thrust the book back into the cupboard, where it had waited for who knows how long to come out and confuse me and torment me. I slam the door shut.

  In the morning, I stand in the middle of my room, biting the inside of my cheek and trying to decide whether or not I should take the diary to school. When the honk summons me, I tear down the stairs to the front door, but then I pivot and dash back up. Yank open the cupboard and grab the book. The cracked leather cover feels like skin. I don’t want to touch it. I shove the book into my backpack.

  I pull the front door closed behind me and climb into the Steiners’ back seat.

  “Hi, Michelle.” The name is awkward in my mouth. “I thought your mom was driving.”

  “She had to be at work early,” Adam grumbles.

  “This is great, actually.” I unzip my backpack. “I can show you what we found in the diary.”

  “What did we find?” Adam twists to look at me over his shoulder.

  My memory of the afternoon in the library has gone fuzzy around the edges. Why can’t I remember what we thought was so strange? “Was it writing?”

  I open the book to the notes Adam made in class. Rosemary remembers. Rosemary is an herb . . . And back again to my handwriting, the line from Hamlet perched neatly at the top of a page, a page that is otherwise blank.

  I look up at Adam. His mouth is open slightly, as if he’s forgotten what he was going to say. He faces front and runs a hand through his hair.

  “I can’t look while I’m driving, Rosie,” Shelby says. She steers around the curve on River Road, her eyes straight ahead, her hands perfectly positioned on the wheel.

  I keep a hand on the book, waiting for a chance. Maybe at a traffic light. I look past Shelby to the island. The bare trees of winter make it look forlorn and incomplete.

  Last time the three of us went there, we paddled through the leaves drifting on the water. Shelby and I worked the oars while Adam lounged in the front of the boat and sang loudly and badly in made-up Italian.

  We tied up the boat and carried our picnic to the rosemary patch, which Shelby calls the Rosie patch. While we ate, we plotted a play version of some book we were reading. I don’t remember what it was. We were always planning plays and casting them and collecting costumes and props and then the actual play would only take about three minutes, and the Steiners wouldn’t be able to make it, and Mom would gush about how we’d done such a great job, and we’d start in on the next one.

  “Do you guys have Mr. Cates today?” Shelby asks.

  “Yeah. We’re meeting in the library.”

  “For biography research,” Adam adds.

  Shelby sighs. “I loved that class. It was way better than ninth-grade English. Who’re you doing fo
r your project?”

  “Constance Brooke,” I answer.

  “Really?” Shelby glances at me in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, because of the diary,” I explain.

  She swoops into the drive in front of the school. Adam’s already climbing out of the car.

  “I really want to show you—” I start, but the person behind us honks.

  “Sorry.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Later, okay?”

  We stand together and watch Shelby pull away.

  Mr. Cates is waiting with Mrs. Wallace in the reference section. The rest of our class is already scattered around a handful of square tables for four.

  “Welcome!” Mr. Cates beams at us. He explains how we’ll research the poets we’ve chosen and then tomorrow, we’ll start assembling our poetry projects. Working with our partners, we’ll put together a binder of poems by our poet but also poems we write that are inspired by the poet. “A conversation in verse,” Mr. Cates explains.

  Mrs. Wallace leads us to a bank of computers and shows us how to find this online thing called the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She demonstrates how it works by looking up Shakespeare. I study the portrait of him while she talks about the different kinds of information we can find.

  “He had earrings!” I whisper to Adam.

  He grins. “Like a pirate.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Wallace,” Mr. Cates says. “All right, folks, we only have about forty minutes before the bell, so get to work.” He hands out half sheets of blue paper with the assignment printed in a medieval-looking font.

  Adam reads the instructions while I pull the diary from my bag. “For the biography part, we’re supposed to learn about our poet’s life and pick some detail that interests us. Then we’re supposed to read poems by the poet that might be about that detail and also write our own poems about it. Like, if we pick the fact that our poet had a dog, we could write about our own dog.” He looks up at me. “Except neither of us has a dog, so a different detail than that. Obviously.”