Charm His Pants Off

by Cate Martin

"The same class," Sophie said.

  "The last class," I added.

  "Does that mean something?" Brianna wondered.

  "Maybe Mr. Trevor would know?" I said.

  "He doesn't really understand magic," Brianna said.

  "Not magic," Sophie said, "but surely he knows something about our mothers."

  "It can't hurt to ask," I said.

  I don't think any of us had ever knocked on the door to Mr. Trevor's personal office before. I had only ever gotten a brief glimpse of its interior, that first day when he gave me a tour of the house. He certainly looked surprised to see us all standing there, especially as Sophie's eyes were red from crying.

  "Is something the matter?" he asked.

  "We wanted to ask you about our mothers," I said.

  "Your mothers?"

  "Yes," I said. "We were hoping you remembered them."

  "But I told you all when you came," he said, looking at each of us in turn. "I started helping my father out here in the school several years after your mothers left the school."

  "Left," Brianna said, "not graduate?"

  "Well," Mr. Trevor said, chewing at his lip. "There is no graduation per se."

  "So you don't remember them at all?" I asked.

  "Well, as I said, I never knew them," he said. "But I remember things about them."

  "Like what?" Brianna asked.

  "Oh, Miss Zenobia would tell me stories of her former students from time to time," he said with a soft smile. "Some clever thing one girl said. An ingenious invention by another. That sort of thing."

  "You don't remember anything specific?" Sophie asked.

  "I don't know I ever knew much to begin with," he said. "Miss Zenobia was fond of them, that I know. That's why you three were called on to take her place. She was very clear about that. No other students had the potential your mothers had."

  "Then why did she ever let them leave?" Sophie asked.

  "That I don't know," he admitted. "But she kept their class photo in the place of honor outside her office. I often caught her looking at it. There was always something wistful in her face when I would find her standing there in front of that photo. Well, you can see it yourself, just down there."

  We looked at each other then walked back down the hall to where a photo in a simple wooden frame hung on the wall opposite the locked door to Miss Zenobia's office. I glanced at Brianna then at Sophie. I could tell they were thinking the same thing I was.

  How many times had we walked past this portrait and never once glanced at it, let alone given it a proper examination?

  And now we were standing in front of it. There were only twelve girls gathered on the front porch for the portrait. And yet I had no idea which of the three with long, blonde hair was my mother. Perhaps none of them. Perhaps I was wrong even about the hair.

  "Girls?" Mr. Trevor asked, concerned. Sophie was crying again, and even Brianna looked like her confusion was about to spill over into tears.

  "Can you tell us who is who?" I asked.

  "The names are written on the plaque over here," he said, pointing to a slate propped up on a stand on the left of the picture. "Here is your mother, Amanda. Kathleen Stinson. And yours, Brianna. Lula Collins. And right in front is Marie DuBois."

  Sophie raised her hand, brushing the image of her mother's face with a stroke of her fingertip.

  "I don't know what you two are feeling," Brianna said, "but I feel very strange. I look at her face, and it matches up with the name in my head, but the connection is so… clinical. Like I'm remembering what actor played a part in a movie I had never even liked. And I still don't remember anything else about her."

  "My name isn't even Clarke?" I said, then gave myself a shake. That wasn't relevant. "I think I'm in the same boat as Brianna. The analytical part of my brain is making the connection, but there's no emotional subtext to it at all."

  "Sophie?" Brianna asked.

  "That's her," Sophie said, "and yet, I still don't remember her. Even as I'm looking right at her." Then she gasped and retracted her hand as if the glass of the picture frame had scalded her.

  "What is it?" I asked, but she just pointed at the slate.

  I scanned the names, certain she must have reacted that way because another of the names was familiar. Evanora, perhaps. But they were all perfectly ordinary, perfectly anonymous.

  I was about to scan it a third time when I finally saw, and I too gasped out loud.

  "What is it?" Brianna asked, tortured to be left out.

  I turned to Mr. Trevor as I planted my fingertip on the photo. "Class of 1966? There was no way my mother was that old."

  "What's going on?" Sophie moaned, clutching at her head. She was putting her hair in total disarray, and for the first time since I'd met her, it was staying that way, a chaotic swirl atop her head.

  "What is going on?" Mr. Trevor asked.

  "Something not right," I said. "We've all just realized we've not once thought of our mothers since we came here, and now that we're trying to think of them, or memories are gone. Like they were wiped, but imperfectly. Fragments remain."

  "But no feelings," Sophie said.

  "But what could do such a thing?" Mr. Trevor asked, shocked.

  "Magic," Brianna said, a determined look to her face.

  "Does this happen to students here?" I asked.

  "No, never," Mr. Trevor said. "Why would it?"

  "Why, indeed?" Brianna pondered.

  "That's not the important question," I said.

  "What is the important question?" Sophie asked.

  "The important question is who," I said.

  Chapter 4

  Brianna was bustling around the library, moving around the large center table that was her usual workstation and consulting this or that page from an open tome then diving deeper into the stacks to find some other more obscure text.

  Sophie and I knew from long experience that even if we understood the way the books were ordered in the library and were capable of helping out, Brianna would find the need to articulate what she was looking for to be maddeningly distracting to her mental processes.

  There was nothing we could do but wait while Brianna whatever it was she was looking for. Which was hard for me, but for Sophie looked to be pure torture. She kept grabbing at her hair, which was already standing on end. I hadn't seen her do a single thing to her clothes, but somehow her entire appearance had downgraded from her usual perfectly crisp and brightly clean look to something… well, I wouldn't say slovenly, but only because it reminded me of what I saw in the mirror most days.

  "This is insane," Sophie said, looking at me with wild eyes. I caught her hands to keep her from having another go at her hair.

  "It's strange, but we'll figure it out," I said. "I'm glad Antoine came. Who knows how long we would've gone on, not remembering our own mothers, if he hadn't said what he did?"

  "I didn't want him to come," Sophie said, turning away from me to start furiously pacing the small space between the last row of bookshelves and the doors out to the front porch. "I asked him not to. I need to keep him away from all of this."

  "Why?" I asked.

  Sophie stopped dead in her tracks and stood frozen for the third time that day. I was just reaching out to touch her shoulder when she spun to look at me. "I don't know. I thought I did, right up until you asked me. My mouth opened to answer, but the words weren't there. I don't know why, but I'm still absolutely certain it's important. What's happening to me?"

  "Does it feel like what I get sometimes?" I asked. "That compulsion that kept me in Scandia until Cynthia Thomas came?"

  "Maybe," Sophie said. "I don't know how that feels for you." She hugged her arms around herself tightly. "I've been telling him not to come here since I got here. I've had this feeling at least that long. Which seems to also be about the time I forgot that I was looking for my mother. Is it related?"

  "Maybe," I said. "Hopefully when Brianna pulls this spell together, we’ll get a better pic
ture of things."

  "I hope so," Sophie said. "But I doubt it's going to explain everything. If something is making us forget our mothers, and making me keep Antoine away, I can see how that could be connected. But what about the other thing? The fact that our mothers were students here in the 60s? That's got to be something else entirely."

  "Well, time travel isn't so strange for us," I said.

  "But we only go back to one time, and it isn't the 60s," Sophie said. She started pacing again, but more slowly, and still hugging herself as if the room had gone cold. She looked like a lost child, the sweater that had fit her perfectly that morning now hanging from her like a stretched out, shapeless garment.

  I didn't know how to make her feel better. Maybe it would just take time.

  "You can still call Antoine," I said. "He might not even be as far as the airport yet. I'm sure he'd come right back if you asked him to."

  "Why would I do that?" Sophie asked.

  "If you've been driving him away for no reason, I just thought maybe you'd want to talk to him again and explain. Or just have him there for comfort or something?"

  Sophie pondered. Then she straightened her shoulders and smoothed her hands over her hair. "No. I'm OK."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes," she said, and she was sounding more like her usual self. "I don't know the reason I wanted him away from me, but I still think there might be one. Maybe when Brianna helps us figure this all out, I'll remember what it is. In the meantime, seeing him again is just going to be more awkward. I can't explain things to him at all."

  "He doesn't know you're a witch?" I asked.

  "No. That much I do remember about my mother: she always insisted on complete secrecy," she said.

  "I think I'm ready," Brianna said, coming towards us with a glass sphere carefully balanced on top of a pile of heavy books. Sophie grabbed the sphere before it could roll off its perch.

  "Should we take this outside?" I asked.

  "No need," Brianna said. "It's not related to the time portal, so we can work here."

  "Where it's warm," Sophie said.

  "Yes," Brianna agreed. "Amanda, there's a chain of yarn in my pocket…" She hiked the books in her arms a little higher until I found the bundle of yarn in her sweater pocket and pulled it out. Although it was an even shade of red and crocheted from a smooth, well-spun yarn, I knew it had been carded and died and spun and crocheted all by Brianna's own hands down in the cellar.

  "What's this for?" I asked.

  "Use it to make a circle on the floor here," Brianna said. "We'll all sit inside it to contain the magic. Just in case whatever I find turns out to be malevolent."

  "And this?" Sophie asked, rolling the sphere from palm to palm.

  "In case whatever we're poking at needs to be contained," Brianna said. She waited for me to line up the yarn chain behind her in a gentle arc before settling down in a cross-legged posture and arranging the books around her.

  When I reached the end of the yarn I had made a circle just large enough to contain the three of us sitting with knees touching, Brianna's books tucked mostly under her own legs, the sphere in the center of the three of us.

  "First we need to cast the circle," Brianna said. "We need to make it a separate space from the rest of the world around us. It shouldn't be too hard; it's just a tiny variation of what we do in meditation."

  "Just make it a circle around the three of us," Sophie said, but she didn't look like she quite grasped it.

  "More like a sphere, really," Brianna said. "The yarn circle is just a visual cue of where that sphere intersects the floor. I'll say some words, but you should think of your protective winds defining that boundary. And Amanda, weave it with threads."

  "All right," I agreed and closed my eyes.

  This time, when Sophie's warm breeze blew over me, I knew the baked goods I was smelling were Auntie Claire's beignets. And I could feel the pang of homesickness that squeezed her heart, but she put it aside to focus on the spell. When I turned my attention to the world of threads, I found them already moving around as if to protect us. I only made a few tweaks to the arrangement before going back to my body and its more mundane awareness.

  "All right," Brianna said, looking down at the page of the book tucked under her left knee. "Take my hands and flow your power into me. I'll say the words of the spell, and then we'll see what happens."

  I put my hand left hand in hers, then took Sophie's hand in my right. This part was very familiar. We'd been practicing it a lot. I had learned to hold back the full force of what longed to flow out of me. It had been a long time since I'd burned either of them, and even though we had never attempted to use that power for anything as big as what we were doing now, I was determined that I wasn't going to slip up.

  Brianna chanted words over and over, words so strange my mind refused to even make out the sounds of their syllables. It was a good thing she didn't want us to repeat them after her because even though I could hear the repetition and knew it was only maybe a dozen sounds, they wouldn't stick in my mind at all.

  I looked up at Sophie, hoping to get a sense if she felt the same confusion, and was startled by the impression that I was looking at some sort of overlapping image. I could, with great focus, see the world of threads and the mundane world at once, layered on top of each other, but it was a strain. This wasn't that, but I was definitely seeing something like a thick, dark cloud overlapping the top of her head. It was both there and wasn't.

  Sophie felt my gaze on her and looked up. Her eyes widened, her focus more on my forehead than my own eyes, and I was certain she saw something going on with the top of my head too.

  We both looked to Brianna, who had stopped chanting. Brianna looked from me to Sophie then back again, more with intellectual interest than with shock.

  "What is it?" Sophie asked. Her hand twitched in mine, as if she wanted to reach up and touch whatever it was.

  "The spell made manifest," Brianna said.

  "So someone did cast a spell on us," Sophie said.

  "Yes, this was deliberate," Brianna said. "It has intentionality. We didn't just accidentally trip one of Miss Zenobia’s old wards somewhere in the house or anything."

  "But why don't we remember the spell happening?" I asked.

  "Because it's still there, in our brains," Sophie said. "It's no wonder I can't think straight. Look at it."

  "Can't we get rid of it?" I asked.

  "It gets tricky," Brianna said. She wrinkled up her nose and crossed her eyes, and the cloud in her brain jostled then settled back down. "We can't dispel our own brain fogs, but two of us working together can pull it out of the mind of the third."

  "Let's do Brianna first," Sophie said, and I nodded my agreement. Brianna being clear-headed was definitely a priority."

  "Focus on drawing it out but putting it into the glass sphere," Brianna said. "Don't let it slip away from you."

  "Got it," I said, closing my eyes. In the world of threads, I could see the darkly glowing filaments resting in the shining web of her mind, like the scribble of an angry child. They were tangled among her own threads, but I gently separated them out, aided by a warm breeze that I couldn't feel, no longer actually being in my body, but I could see as it softly blew through the threads.

  Then Brianna was free. I opened my eyes.

  "Oh," Brianna said, blinking.

  "Tell us," Sophie said.

  "No, not yet," Brianna said. "Let's get Amanda free first, and then you, and then we'll talk."

  They both turned their attention to me. I fought the urge to tense up, as if I were about to come under a surgical knife. Sophie's magic was easy to relax into. Brianna's magic was more like little brass instruments working in my brain, but I could feel how deft she was in her work.

  It felt like losing a scab that had dried so tightly it was pulling all the skin around it. Now my mind was coming free, little by little. Then it was gone entirely. I saw the cloud floating past my nose to sink to th
e floor, joining Brianna's little cloud already in the sphere.

  And I remembered. All at once, a flood of images from as profound as the day my mother had died in my arms to as mundane as baking cookies on a rainy afternoon while listening to Buddy Holly on the radio.

  "I remember," I said, my vision starting to swim.

  "Sophie now," Brianna said. I nodded, but the tears wouldn't stop coming. "Amanda."

  I took a deep breath and, as much as it killed me to do it, pushed the memories aside. "I'm ready," I said.

  I focused on the scribble of threads in Sophie's brain, this time aided not by a dancing breeze but as if by surgical instruments I couldn't see except by their effects. Brianna let me take the lead, somehow sensing when I was going to turn my attention to this filament or that knot, and she would lift it or scrape something away.

  Then it was done, sealed inside the glass sphere with the other two. I opened my eyes, suddenly acutely exhausted. Magic was so tiring.

  "Sophie?" Brianna called softly.

  Sophie still had her eyes closed, but tears were spilling out between her lashes. Then she tugged on our hands, and we all went from sitting with our hands joined to kneeling in the center of the circle in a tight hug. And even Brianna was crying now.

  Chapter 5

  I don't know how long we stayed like that, just holding each other. We weren't trading magic at the moment, and yet I could still feel the tangle of emotions running through all of us. Happiness, at having our memories back. Sadness from the memories themselves. But soon those collapsed down into just two things: confusion over what exactly had happened to us, and resolve to figure it out.

  We sat back, no longer even holding hands but still within the magic circle we had conjured. The three clouds were now one, swirling darkly within the confines of the glass sphere. Brianna pulled one of the books onto her lap and started turning pages.

  "I never knew my mother's name," I said. "Not until today, when Mr. Trevor showed us that photograph. Whoever put this spell on us, it must have been that very first day. I still don't understand how I just forgot to ask even that much when I got here."