Small Town Witch (The Fae of Calaveras County)

by Kristen S. Walker

  I looked at Kai and raised my eyebrows at him in surprise. “Wow, these look great. I would love to have a copy.”

  He nodded and wrote, “I’m happy to share with you. You’re having a hard day.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s an understatement.” I looked across the table to where I had been sitting with Heather. “Do you think that I could sit next to you during class so that I could read your notes and try to follow along? I hate feeling left out.”

  He nodded again. I went and grabbed my stuff from my old seat, and then moved back next to Kai.

  When class started again, I leaned over and watched Kai write. He wrote in pen, quick and confident, the ink gliding across the paper in round letters. I looked up at Julie’s white board and then back down at the paper: he wrote almost as fast as I could read.

  Kai saw me looking up and wrote in the margin, “Am I writing too fast for you?”

  I shook my head. I reached over with my pen and wrote below his note, “No, I’m just impressed.”

  Kai smiled. “As a reporter, I have to write fast. I can go faster in short-hand, but I don’t know if you would be able to understand that.”

  “I’m so glad that I can talk to you,” I added. “It’s been so weirdly quiet all day.”

  “At least you can’t hear those two making all their lovey-dovey noises at each other.” He pointed with his pen to the table next to us.

  I turned my head just a little to take a peek, and caught a glimpse of Lindsey whispering something in Peter’s ear. I looked away quickly and made a face. I wrote, “Gross!”

  A few minutes later, Kai wrote again: “Is this what texting was like for our parents?”

  Without thinking about it, I giggled. Julie glanced at me for a moment before she continued.

  “Be careful!” Kai wrote. “Remember that other people can still hear you.”

  I covered my mouth. “Oops.”

  Kai finished filling up the page on the left-hand side of his notebook and started writing on the right.

  I had to lean over farther in order to see. My arm brushed against his.

  He flinched and looked over at me.

  I moved back an inch. “Sorry,” I mouthed.

  Kai smiled and shook his head. “It’s okay,” he mouthed back.

  I leaned forward again, slowly, until I was touching him again, my arm against his. I sat just there for the rest of the class.

  By Friday, my hearing had mostly returned to normal, although I kept thinking that I was still hearing a ringing or something off in the distance from time to time.

  When my mom came home, I turned my head at the sound of her coming in the back door.

  Mom looked at me sharply. “Is your hearing back yet?”

  I turned away. “Yes.”

  She went to the counter and put down her bag. “See, I told you that you would probably heal on your own. And now maybe you’ll remember what happened.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fortunately, I also got class notes from a friend at school, so I didn’t miss out on anything this week.”

  “There you go.” Mom left the room.

  I clenched my hands together and took a deep breath. She still believed that she had done the right thing not to help me, and left me struggling for three days—what kind of teacher, what kind of mother was that? One of these days, I was going to snap and give my mother a piece of my mind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Kiss

  On Tuesday after school in the middle of October, all of my friends were busy with one thing or another. I dropped Akasha off at the library and then I had some time to spend by myself. I stopped by What a Drip for chai tea, thought about going next door to visit Mom. Then I changed my mind and wandered down the street in the other direction without any real aim in mind.

  It was a beautiful day outside, still sunny and warm in the beginning of October. The leaves on some of the trees had just started to turn yellow and orange, but most of the trees around here are evergreen, especially all of the giant sequoias, so there wasn’t a lot of fall color. The huge twisted madrone tree in the center of town had green leaves and the new bark that had grown over the summer was starting to darken into a reddish brown; big, red berries were starting to appear in the branches. I stopped and looked up to admire it.

  Then I heard someone call my name, and turned around. Kai was waving at me from the other side of the street. I waved back with faint surprise. When was the last time that I had seen Kai hanging around downtown?

  Kai crossed the street and walked over to me.

  “Hi, Kai,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Yes, it is.” He stood next to me and looked up at the twisting branches overhead.

  Once, this tree had to compete with other trees for sunlight, forcing it to contort into odd shapes in order to catch the sunlight; now, most of its fellow trees were gone, leaving behind the single madrone in a large open square of grass with only a few small Douglas firs nearby and several large, blackened stumps that remained from a fire that happened long before the town was founded. The grass was planted by the town and the other trees were trimmed back to leave room for our namesake.

  Kai took a deep breath. “Whew! It’s impressive. Have you ever taken a picture of it?”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Even standing in the shade of the tree, my face felt hot. “Yeah, I’ve taken a few shots before, but I don’t think one picture can really capture it completely. It’s so—big.”

  Kai met my eyes and smiled. “I know what you mean. But I’m sure your pictures of it are beautiful. I always love your work.”

  I looked away from him, unsure of what to say. I stared at the tree and pretended to sip my chai.

  “Actually, I just wanted to say hi. See what you’re up to. Hang out.” He looked around. “Are you meeting someone here?”

  I shook my head. “Just me. I’m wasting time while my sister’s at the library.”

  “Oh. I don’t usually see you by yourself.”

  “Yeah, usually Lindsey comes and hangs out with me while I wait.” Or Heather, now that Lindsey was with her boyfriend, Peter. I felt that distant twinge again when I thought about Lindsey, but it went away again almost before I noticed it was there: the spell was still holding. “I don’t usually see you outside of school at all,” I said.

  Kai glanced away from me and swallowed. “Um, well, no, I don’t usually, uh, say hi to you. When I see you around. You know, when I’m just around, hanging out. With other people. I’m not usually by myself either.”

  I tried to remember if I’d noticed Kai hanging out with other people in the background, but I guess that I don’t pay enough attention. “Oh. Well, there’s not much to do in town when you’re by yourself. It gets lonely.”

  “Yeah. Lonely.” He stared up into the tree branches again.

  I took another sip of my tea and looked down the street. “I was just going to go for a walk, um, around. Do you want to join me? It’s going to be at least an hour before my sister wants me to pick her up.”

  He flashed me a big grin. “Yeah, sure. Where shall we go?”

  I gestured down the street with my free hand. “Just wander anywhere. I don’t really care.”

  “Lead on, fair maiden, and I shall follow.” He made a little half bow and gestured ahead.

  I had to laugh a little at that. Kai is nothing like the elegant, courtly Fae—he’s on the short, stocky side, and he’s got this twisted little smile like he’s always mocking you even when he’s being totally serious—so their mannerisms are strange on him.

  When he straightened up again, Kai offered his arm, and without thinking, I followed along in the game and accepted it. We walked down the street together past the shops, making small talk about the displays in the windows and the other people who were walking around.

  I told Kai about bowling in Fenton with Heather, Ashleigh, and Glen over the weekend, leaving out the end of the nig
ht when I broke down at Ashleigh’s.

  “That sounds like fun,” he said. “We should go do that sometime.”

  “Yeah, if we get a few more people together, we could have two lanes next to each other and all hang out,” I said. “I think they do the whole black light thing every weekend. Maybe we could invite Lindsey and Peter, and then we’d have room for one more—maybe one of your girlfriends?” I suggested, since I couldn’t think of a single other person that I would invite.

  Kai stiffened a little. “I told you, I don’t have any girlfriends.”

  “I know, just girls you date sometimes.” I twisted my arm in his so that I jabbed my elbow into his ribs gently. “Well, you could sometimes date them at the bowling alley with the rest of us. Or anywhere else we hang out. We don’t mind extra company.”

  “So it’s all one big group date, then? Lindsey and Peter, Ashleigh and Glen, then that leaves you and Heather, right?”

  “I’m not dating Heather!” I said quickly.

  “I know, you don’t date anyone.” Kai’s voice softened.

  We had reached the end of the shops on the street, and the area changed to residential on one side with forest on the other, so Kai stopped. “Where are we going?”

  Lindsey’s house was down that street. I turned and steered us into the forest. “What I meant was, we are all just hanging out together as friends. Some people are couples and some of us aren’t. We’d have an empty space open for bowling, since there’s four people to a lane, so I was trying to be nice by letting you invite a girl. You don’t have to bring a date.”

  Kai was silent for a long moment. Then he said, in a low voice, “I keep trying to get up the courage to ask you out.”

  I stopped walking again and turned to look at him. My heart was pounding in my throat, but I tried to stay calm. “Kai,” I said slowly, because I was struggling to keep my voice even, “there’s a reason why I don’t date anyone.”

  He turned to face me, but he kept my hand trapped in his arm. He looked straight into my eyes: we’re the same height. “I don’t care. Don’t call it dating, if you like.”

  I started to recite my old arguments. “Whatever you call it, it’s a distraction. I already have a lot going on at school and home and I don’t have the time—”

  “You have time for your friends.” He shifted closer to me, and took my hand in his. His hand felt very warm and surprisingly soft. “Just hang out with me. How would that be any different?”

  “It just—would be.” I was having trouble thinking of the right words to say. I knew in the back of my head that my mom and I had talked about me dating before, and every time it always came out making sense that I shouldn’t date anyone, but now that I was looking straight into Kai’s eyes like this—they were a deep brown, almost black, and if I kept looking into those eyes I was going to fall in—had I ever noticed before that Kai had such long, thick eyelashes? Up this close, there was almost a feminine quality to his features: eyes close together, high cheekbones, narrow eyebrows. I guess that was the fox in him showing through.

  All of the arguments in my head disappeared.

  By now, his face was only inches away from mine. I leaned in the rest of the way and pressed my mouth to his.

  I kissed him, and he kissed me back, and then our arms were around each other. I dropped my tea on the ground. The rest of the world shrank until it was nothing more than a tiny bubble surrounding us.

  A minute later, I pulled back. Kai was smiling at me, and at first I was smiling too, but then I shook my head, as hard as it was.

  “I’m not supposed to do this,” I said breathlessly. The guilt was already building.

  His face fell. “Who would it hurt?”

  I pulled out of his arms and took a step back. The farther I got out of his contact, the more that my head began to clear again. “I can’t do this,” I said again. “I’m sorry. If you want to hang out as friends, I can do that, but this is too, um—I can’t lose control around you.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

  He started to say something else, but I turned and walked away. I began marching back up the street the way that we had come. My heart was still pounding but now I was starting to get angry. Why had I done that? And why was it wrong? I needed to get my head sorted out.

  I had a long time to think as I walked. There were two different ideas fighting in my head. One of them was the old idea that my life has always been simpler without dating, that I’ve always been happy just having friends, concentrating on school, and spending time with my family. It’s a full life and I’ve never quite been able to see where a boyfriend or girlfriend would fit into that. Besides, dating added drama and the risk of getting hurt, like with Lindsey. That wasn’t going to happen with my friends or my family.

  But there was another, new idea. This idea said that dating someone casually, or even being in a relationship, wouldn’t have to take up all of my time. After all, most people seemed to find a way to balance it, didn’t they? Lindsey was just a bad example. She chose to let boys take up all of her time, and ditch her friends, and created drama because she was selfish and just looking for attention. I didn’t have to make her mistakes; I may not be the best student at school, but I’m smart in my own way, and I like to think that one of my strengths is understanding and dealing with other people. Why shouldn’t romantic relationships be one of those things that I could be good at?

  The idea sounded logical. But part of me dreamed of having someone who could sweep me off of my feet, the selfish part of me that said I wanted to be happy and worry about myself instead of trying to please everyone else all of the time. And my friends still had time for me even when they were in relationships. Glen and Ashleigh had always been a pair, but I never felt like Ashleigh wasn’t available for me because of Glen. Lindsey was—well. I was trying to let go of that jealousy.

  There was emotional stuff behind the old argument, too—dating was something new and kind of scary. How much of my attraction to Kai was just the lure of the forbidden and the unknown? Maybe if I actually did date him, then this tendency to feel my heart pound and my palms sweat and my stomach to tie up in knots around him would go away after a while, and I’d find that his joking manner just irritated me or his pretty boy looks would stop being attractive. And even thinking about dating someone felt like a betrayal of my family.

  Every step brought up another thought, and every pound of my heart was another emotion. I could not calm down. I had to fix this.

  When I got to the end of the street and saw my mom’s shop, Rose’s Garden, I went straight in the front door. I paused only long enough to make sure that there were no customers in the store, and then I burst out, “Mom, I need to talk to you. I think it’s way past time for you to let me start dating.”

  Mom was sitting behind the front counter. She was tying together little sachets of dried herbs, but she stopped to look up at me. She seemed to be measuring me. After a moment, she said, “We’ll talk about this when I get home tonight.”

  “No, I want to talk about it right now.”

  She let out a heavy sigh and began cleaning up her half-finished work. “All right, I will close up the shop early for today, and then we can go home and talk. I won’t discuss it here.” She glanced behind me. “Where is your sister?”

  “She’s still at the library,” I said. “It’s Tuesday.”

  “Oh, yes.” She stood up and gathered her box of supplies to take to her work room in the back. “Well, go get your sister while I clean up here, and then you can give me a ride home as well.”

  “Fine.” I turned to go.

  “Would you please flip the sign over to ‘closed’?” Mom called after me.

  I took a step back, flipped the sign over, and turned the lock on the door behind me. I didn’t stop to say good-bye.

  The drive back home was quiet. Akasha sat in the back, already reading one of her newest library books. Mom’s broom was in the trunk. Mom sat up front in the passenger seat n
ext to me, and Menolly sat in her lap. We were lucky that the cat would stay calm in the car as long as she could sit with Mom, and she never got car-sick, but I guess any familiar would get used to that after flying on a broomstick every day.

  I tried to think about what I was going to say. I’d already told her what I wanted, so there was no backing down now. I was going to present my rational arguments about why I should be allowed to date. We could negotiate some ground rules. It was going to be simple.

  I did wonder why I didn’t insist on this before. Last year, when Lindsey and I were getting closer and I had let myself think that I might be able to have a relationship with her, I’d thought about how I would talk to my parents about it. That had been scary, because I’d never quite gotten around to telling my parents that I was bisexual. I didn’t know for sure they would take it badly, but I also didn’t know if they would be accepting, either. Was it easier to tell my parents that I was ready to date now because I was interested in a guy? Yeah, probably.

  Well, I could worry about the other conversation if I met a girl later. One thing at a time.

  When we got home, Mom told Akasha to take her books up to her room and then called me into the kitchen. She sat down at the table and folded her hands in front of her. “Okay, let’s talk.”

  I didn’t feel like sitting down. I stood at the other end of the table and leaned forward with my hands on the back of the chair. “I’m not a flighty girl like Lindsey and you don’t know for sure that I would ruin the rest of my life if I was allowed to date someone. I should get a chance to try.”

  Mom pursed her lips together. “I think that you need to calm down, Rosamunde. You’re obviously tense. Why don’t you sit down?”

  The cat was winding around my legs and butting me with her head, but I pushed her away. “I don’t want to sit down and I don’t want to be calm. You’ve been putting me off with excuses for a long time now and I don’t think it’s fair anymore.”