The Five Paths

by Isobel Bird

  “No,” Cooper replied. “I just have to have people try to beat me up because I’m not ashamed of who I am.”

  “Which they wouldn’t do if you’d just keep quiet!” her mother said, almost shouting.

  “Can we not do this?” Mr. Rivers asked. “You two don’t have to agree about this, but Cooper does have to go in front of the school board tomorrow. It would really help if everybody could remain calm, at least in our own house.”

  Cooper and her mother both looked at him. His face was strained, and for the first time Cooper realized how hard the situation must be for him. He was caught between his wife and his daughter, the two people he loved most in the world. He was fighting for a cause his wife didn’t support, and he knew it.

  The phone rang, shattering the unpleasant silence that had fallen over the table. Great, thought Cooper as she rose to get it. It’s probably someone calling with a bomb threat. That would be the perfect end to this day.

  She picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

  “Cooper,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s Sophia.”

  “What’s happened?” Cooper asked, worried. Sophia had never called her at home before. Had something awful happened at the store or, worse, to someone in the study group? Cooper knew she wouldn’t be able to stand it if anything else bad happened.

  “Nothing’s happened,” said Sophia. “At least, nothing bad. I think I have good news. Put your father on the phone.”

  “My father?” said Cooper.

  “He’s the one representing you tomorrow, right?” asked Sophia.

  “Yes,” Cooper answered.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Sophia. “Put him on. This is important.”

  Cooper had no idea why Sophia would want to talk to her father, but she did as her teacher asked. As she walked into the dining room to get him she wondered what was going on. But she was going to have to wait to find out.

  Over at her house, Kate was also eating dinner. Aunt Netty was telling them all about her day at the hospital.

  “All my tests came back clear,” she said. “The doctors are amazed.”

  “So you’re cured, then?” asked Kate.

  “I’m in remission,” her aunt replied. “There’s a chance the cancer will return. But right now everything looks fine.”

  “You can thank those new drugs they have,” Mr. Morgan said, cutting his steak and taking a bite.

  “At least partly,” said Netty, looking at Kate and winking.

  Kate knew that her aunt gave some of the credit for her recovery to positive thinking, and particularly to the ritual that Sophia and the others had done. While she didn’t talk about it in front of Kate’s parents, she’d told Kate privately that she’d felt something in her body change during the circle. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it had left her with a renewed sense of hope. She’d even, through Sophia, found a local coven near her own home and had met with them several times since her treatments for similar healing rituals. When Kate asked her if she had any interest in Wicca outside of the healing rituals, she’d smiled and said she didn’t know. “But it’s made me think about a lot of things,” she’d added vaguely.

  That was the only discussion about witchcraft that had taken place in the Morgan house. Kate’s parents seemed relieved and happy that she’d liked Dr. Hagen and agreed to see her again, and they hadn’t brought up the subject of Wicca at all since that first visit. Kate figured that they were hoping she’d forget all about it if nobody talked about it, so she gave them what they wanted and didn’t mention a word about witchcraft or anything even remotely to do with it. She came home from school every day and stayed in her room, studying. She couldn’t wait until the basketball league started the next week, because then at least she wouldn’t feel trapped in the house.

  But it also means you won’t be going to class, she reminded herself. Not that she would be going anyway. Her parents would never let her do that, even if there had been a way to get out of the Tuesday night games, which there wasn’t. She had already attended one meeting about basketball, and Coach Coleman had made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t be pleased with anyone missing any games. “Unless you’re lying in a hospital bed or in a coffin, I expect you at all the games,” she’d said. “This may be intramural basketball, but for it to work everyone needs to show up.”

  Kate took some comfort in the fact that she’d at least be able to spend some time with Jessica and Tara. They were being incredibly supportive of her, and she was happy to have them back in her life. But what kind of life was it now that she didn’t have the Tuesday night class, or the rituals with Annie and Cooper, to look forward to? What kind of life was it without Tyler?

  Until it had all been taken away from her, she hadn’t really realized just how important Wicca was to her. Before it had been something she enjoyed, but now that it had been forbidden she’d discovered that it had been so much more than that. She was still practicing her meditation and the things she could do alone in her room, but it just wasn’t the same. She missed being with other people who were interested in witchcraft. She worried she would miss going to sabbat celebrations, with their songs and dances and costumes. Although she knew those things were only the outward trappings of the Craft, and that the real power and meaning lay in the mental and spiritual aspects of it, she still longed to have them back.

  “We should go bowling tomorrow night,” her father said suddenly, bringing her back to the conversation going on around her. “That would be fun. You used to love to bowl, Kate. Why don’t we go out for pizza and a few games?”

  Kate looked at her mother, who was smiling at her expectantly. She looked at her aunt, who was suddenly deeply intrigued by her dinner.

  “Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”

  She knew that her father was trying to get her to do more things with the family. She’d overheard him telling her mother that he thought Kate’s “problems” all started when they got too busy to do things with her. She’d wanted to tell him that wasn’t true, but she couldn’t. Now he was trying to make up for what he saw as a lack of parental involvement in her life. My life has become an after-school movie, she thought as she smiled at her parents.

  The phone rang once. Kate tensed. It rang again, and she waited for a third ring. It didn’t come, and the phone remained silent. Her mother said, “Must have been a wrong number.”

  Kate hurriedly took the last bite of her steak and stood up. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs.”

  She dropped her dishes in the sink, ran water over them, and went upstairs, hoping no one would notice how much of a rush she was in. When she was in her room she went to her computer, logged online, and checked her E-mail. Sure enough, there was a message from Cooper. Their signal had worked.

  She opened the mail and read it anxiously, wondering what news Cooper had for her.

  Big news from Sophia. You have to be at the school board meeting tomorrow. Do whatever you need to. I’ll explain more tomorrow.

  Short and to the point, Kate thought. But what did Cooper mean? What kind of news could Sophia have that would have any bearing on the school board meeting? She couldn’t wait to find out.

  But there’s no way you can go, she told herself. Her parents would never let her near the meeting. In fact, Kate was pretty sure her father had come up with the bowling idea precisely to make sure she didn’t go. But Cooper said she had to be there. And she wanted to be there. She wanted to support her friend, and she wanted people to know that she believed in something. But doing that would mean defying her parents, and that would get her in even more trouble than she was already in.

  She sighed deeply. She was going to have to make a choice, and she was going to have to make it before seven o’clock the next night.

  Annie sat in front of her altar, looking into the flame of
the white candle flickering in the dimness of her bedroom. She’d been sitting there for some time, trying to calm herself with her usual meditation techniques. She’d already imagined herself in her personal sacred space—a ring of towering redwood trees. She’d imagined drawing power up from the earth and letting it fill her body. She’d closed her eyes and chanted the names of the goddesses she felt most close to: Freya, Hecate, Oya, Baba Yaga.

  But she still felt unsettled. Things weren’t going well, and for the first time since beginning her study of Wicca she was wondering if maybe it had been a mistake. Was everything that she and her friends were going through worth it? Two weeks ago she would never have thought she’d think so, but now she wasn’t sure. T.J. had been roughed up, and the rest of them had narrowly escaped a similar fate. Sasha’s living situation had been put in jeopardy. Kate was basically under house arrest by her parents. Cooper was the focus of a lot of fear and cruelty.

  And she had lost a really great guy. The first guy she’d ever gone out with. The first guy she’d ever kissed. Gone. All because she’d written that editorial about being interested in Wicca.

  If you’d just kept your mouth shut this wouldn’t have happened, said the nagging voice that had been berating her all night.

  The worst part about it was that she knew that what she and her friends were doing was right. If she was objective about it she could see that very clearly. Standing up for their rights was most definitely the thing to do. But why did doing the right thing have to be so hard? Why did it have to make them so unhappy?

  There was a knock on her bedroom door, and her aunt said, “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” Annie called out.

  Aunt Sarah pushed the door open and came in.

  “It’s pretty in here with that candle going,” she said.

  Annie sighed. “I just wish I felt better,” she replied.

  Aunt Sarah came and sat down beside Annie. “I’m not invading sacred space or anything, am I?” she asked.

  Annie smiled. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t think the powers that be will mind. What’s up?” Her aunt had never come up and interrupted one of her meditations before, so she knew something must be on her mind.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said at dinner tonight,” said her aunt. “About feeling like this is too hard and that maybe you should just give up.”

  Annie didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure what her aunt was getting at.

  “When I was in college it was during apartheid in South Africa,” Aunt Sarah continued. “A lot of us didn’t support American commercial ventures in South Africa, as I’m sure you know.”

  Annie nodded. “There were lots of protests,” she said.

  “Right,” Aunt Sarah said. “Well, at my school people were pretty apathetic. But there were still a lot of us who felt strongly about it. One day we decided to hold a protest. We marched downtown and took over an office building that was the corporate headquarters of a company largely invested in South Africa.”

  “Really?” said Annie, impressed. She’d never really thought of her aunt as the radical type.

  “Oh, yes,” said Aunt Sarah. “We had signs and chants and all of that.”

  “And what happened?” Annie asked her.

  “They asked us to leave,” answered her aunt. “When we wouldn’t, they started yelling at us. Then the police came. But we still wouldn’t leave. That’s when they tear-gassed us.”

  “They did not,” Annie said.

  “They threw these containers of gas into the lobby full of people,” Aunt Sarah said. “People started running and pushing. My eyes were burning so badly I couldn’t see. I ended up getting knocked down. People were stepping on me and everyone was screaming. It was awful.”

  Aunt Sarah paused, as if she were experiencing all over again what it had felt like that day. “But even as I was lying on the ground with my eyes stinging, all I could think was, ‘We’re doing the right thing,’ ” she said. “I knew that apartheid was wrong and we were right, even if most people thought we were traitors, or cowards, or just plain crazy.”

  “Are you telling me I should buy a gas mask?” asked Annie.

  Her aunt laughed. “No,” she said. “I’m telling you that sometimes even when it feels like you’ve been knocked down one too many times it’s still worth it. Even if you don’t win. We didn’t win that day. Apartheid went on for years after that. But now when I look back on those days I realize that we really did make a difference, if only just a little bit. And even if we didn’t change the world, we changed ourselves.”

  Annie looked at the candle flame again. Then she looked at her aunt. “Did you lose any boyfriends because of what you did?” she asked jokingly.

  “Actually,” her aunt said, “I met a great one at that protest. He helped me wash the gas out of my eyes and we ended up dating for almost a year.”

  Annie laughed. “So there’s hope for me yet,” she said.

  Their conversation was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. A moment later Annie’s little sister, Meg, yelled up the stairs, “Annie, it’s Cooper. She says she has to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Cooper was nervous. It was 6:45. The school board meeting was going to begin any minute. Already the room was packed with people who had come to hear the proceedings. Both supporters and opponents of Cooper’s petition were out in large numbers, and the room was filled with the sound of their sometimes heated discussions.

  Cooper was seated in the first row of chairs, next to her father. A few rows behind her she saw T.J. sitting with Annie, her Aunt Sarah, and Meg. Kate wasn’t there, but that was no surprise. She’d told Cooper she didn’t know if she would be able to make it. Cooper would have liked to have her friend there, but she understood the situation Kate was in.

  Actually, she understood it all too well. Her own mother had refused to come to the meeting. Cooper still felt hurt by her decision, but there was nothing that she could do about it. At least her father was there. And a lot of the members of both the Coven of the Green Wood and the coven that owned Crones’ Circle were there. Archer, Julia, and some of the others were sitting halfway back with Tyler, Rowan, Thatcher, and a dozen other people Cooper didn’t know. Apparently, word had gotten around in the pagan community and people had come out to lend their support to the cause.

  But Sophia still wasn’t there. That’s what was troubling Cooper the most. Sophia should have been there already. She’d promised. A lot hinged on whether or not she came through.

  “Relax,” her father said, noticing her nervousness. “They’ll get here.”

  Cooper turned around and sighed. “They’d better,” she said, “or we’re done for.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Mr. Rivers said. “I didn’t know I’d done such a bad job.”

  Cooper had to smile at her dad’s pretend gloominess. “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  She looked around the room some more. “I can’t believe all these people are here for this,” she said.

  “You’ve touched a nerve,” said her father. “People feel very strongly about this issue, whether they’re for it or against it. Face it, kiddo, you’re a star.”

  “Yeah, well, I see one person who won’t be getting an interview any time soon,” said Cooper as she spied Amanda Barclay in the crowd. The reporter was busily taking notes as she talked to a pinched-face woman wearing a KEEP OUR SCHOOLS SAFE button. Cooper noticed with a little uneasiness that many people seemed to be sporting the buttons, certainly more than were wearing the pentacle-emblazoned pins being handed out by some of the local witches.

  Cooper also noticed that Sherrie was making an appearance. She was sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by a cluster of her friends. She saw Cooper looking at her and gave her a self-satisfied look. Cooper turned away. I wish I could turn her into a toad, she th
ought. It would certainly be an improvement.

  The doors opened again and Cooper turned, hoping it was Sophia. But it wasn’t. It was Mr. Dunford and the rest of the board. They had been waiting in another room so that they wouldn’t be bothered by reporters or protesters. Now they made their way into the room and took their places behind the long table.

  “Sophia’s not here,” Cooper said to her father. “Now what?”

  “I think we all know why we’re here,” Mr. Dunford said. “So why don’t we just get started. Miss Rivers, I’ve received the petition you filed and see that you indeed got the required number of signatures needed for us to review your case.”

  Mr. Dunford shuffled some papers around and picked up another piece of paper. “I have also received a petition from another student, Sherrie Adams, with a more or less equal number of signatures on it supporting our decision to ban your pentacle—and all occult symbols—from the school. Given that the student body seems to support our stance, have you come up with any reasons why we should reconsider?”

  Cooper saw Mr. Adams look at Sherrie and smile. But Sherrie was the least of her problems at the moment. Sophia hadn’t arrived and she was on her own.

  “My daughter stands by the point we made last time,” Mr. Rivers said, standing up. “Her wearing of a pentacle is an expression of her right to free speech. As you can see by the signatures on the petition, many of her schoolmates support her view.”

  “And many do not, Mr. Rivers,” said Mr. Dunford, waving Sherrie’s petition at him. “I must tell you that in all the years I’ve been on this board we have never once received a petition opposing another one. We have to take that into consideration. Clearly, a number of students are—as was expressed at our previous meeting—concerned that the appearance of occult symbols in the halls of Beecher Falls High School will be disruptive to their ability to attend school with a sense of comfort.”