Ghoul Problems

by Sarina Dorie

  I chewed on my lip. Missy was never mean to me. We were friends.

  My audience snickered below. I heard the words “gullible” and “moron.”

  Missy threw down her trump card. “If you jump, I won’t be your friend anymore.”

  My feet rooted to the shingles. She couldn’t!

  She went on. “If you’re going to be my best friend, you can’t do something stupid like this. If you jump off the roof and die—”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  “Fine, if you fly off the roof and survive, I won’t ever speak to you again. I’ll hate you, and you won’t be my friend anymore. Is that what you want?”

  I looked to the trio below and then to Missy. I shook my head.

  She offered me a smile, holding her hand out to me. I trudged back to her and took her hand. She grabbed the broom from me and threw it at Peter. He jumped back. She guided me to the ladder and held it as I climbed down. Each rung brought me closer to my impending doom. Once I stood at the bottom, the three other kids whispered to each other.

  Karen looked me over, her expression unimpressed. “I knew you weren’t going to do it.”

  I hung my head with shame. Tomorrow it would be all over the school. People would have one more reason to make fun of me. Couldn’t Missy understand how she had just ruined my life? I would never have friends now.

  Missy climbed down after me. She picked up the broom from where it lay in the tangles of thyme and rosemary, and swatted at Karen and then Jordan. They dodged back. Jordan kept laughing, even as she hit him. He stopped laughing when she smashed the wood of the broom against his nose.

  He cried out and grabbed his face, blood spurting from between his fingers. I stared in wide-eyed shock.

  “Get lost, all of you. If I ever hear about you egging her on like this again, I’ll make you regret it. Understand me?” Missy’s hair fell out of her ponytail and streamed around her shoulders in wild waves. She looked like she could have been a witch at that moment. She smacked Peter with the broom. “You’re a bunch of jerks and bullies. Someone could have gotten hurt today. I won’t let you pick on my sister.” Her voice turned hoarse as she shouted and chased them.

  They ran around the side of the house and out the gate of our white picket fence. Missy stared after them, waiting until they’d ran across the street. The wooden gate swung on its hinges.

  “Wow, that was great,” I said. My sister could be simultaneously terrifying and wonderful.

  Missy stalked back toward me, dragging the broom in the dirt of the flower beds. Her cheeks were flushed. I smiled at her, grateful she’d told off those kids. Maybe they wouldn’t tease me tomorrow.

  As I reached out to hug Missy, she slapped me across the face, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

  I stumbled back. “What was that for?”

  Missy burst into tears. “Don’t ever do anything stupid like that again. Promise me. I don’t want to lose you.” She grabbed me and clutched me to her.

  I hugged her back and patted her shoulder.

  “Do you know what Mom would have done to me if you had broken an arm when I was supposed to be watching you? Do you know what she would have done to you? She’s one step away from taking away your Narnia books as it is.”

  “No! Not my books!” I said. “You won’t tell Mom and Dad, will you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Please?” I asked.

  If she did, they would command me never to do it again. And then I wouldn’t be able to because it would be bad if I didn’t listen to them. I had to find a new way to prove I was a witch.

  Missy sniffled and pulled away, wiping her face against her sleeve. “I won’t tell … if you can tell me why you aren’t going to do that again.”

  I tried to figure out what she wanted to hear. “You don’t want me to get hurt. You think I can’t really fly.”

  “I don’t think. I know, dorkbreath.”

  “But I can! I did it before. I flew from the wall to the trampoline.”

  She grimaced. “No, you jumped onto the trampoline. Anyone can do that. Repeat after me, ‘I cannot fly.’”

  In my most petulant monotone I said, “Fine. I can’t fly. Will you promise not to tell?”

  She gave me a playful shove. “You’re impossible.” Her smile told me everything would be all right.

  I thought that was the end of it. I went back inside to do my homework. Mom came home an hour later and Dad shortly after that. I didn’t hear Missy tattle, so I thought I’d gotten off easy. It was after dinner as I was playing with my toys that I suspected something was wrong.

  I was aware of the silence downstairs. The television wasn’t on. I lay across my Tinker Bell bedspread, listening. Missy was on the phone in her room. That meant she wasn’t squealing on me. I continued to play.

  A procession of my Barbie dolls dressed in the gowns of a fairy court loomed over the My Little Pony pegasi and unicorns, dwarfing them. Footsteps creaked up the stairs. I lined up three storm troopers beside Darth Vader next to the model U.S.S. Enterprise I’d made with Dad. The two opposing forces faced off.

  Dad leaned against the entry, the bulk of his frame taking up the majority of the doorway. His eyes raked over my tableaux. “Honey, come downstairs for a minute. Your mom and I want to talk to you.” He rubbed at his golden beard and mustache, not meeting my eyes.

  Cold dread settled like ice in my gut as I clutched Midnight Rainbow, my favorite unicorn. I followed Dad down. He moved slowly, lumbering toward the living room like a pack animal burdened by the weight of too many bags.

  Missy had told. I was going to get in trouble. They were going to take my books away. I would have to lie. I didn’t want to, but I would say Missy was fibbing. I didn’t know what else to do.

  They sat on the couch side by side. They never sat on the couch with backs straight and rigid, looking like someone had died. Unless someone had died. Mom smiled, or looked like she was trying to. Maybe my books were safe.

  “There’s something we need to tell you.” Dad leaned his elbows onto his knees and rubbed at his face.

  “We’ve been talking… .” Mom said.

  My nerves jittered with anticipation. Missy had told them. I was certain of it, now more than ever.

  “I didn’t do it.” I hugged Midnight Rainbow. “Missy made it up.”

  My parents looked at each other, confusion painting their faces.

  “What?” Dad asked.

  Mom’s eyes narrowed with shrewdness. “What didn’t you do?”

  Immediately I could see my error. They hadn’t been about to ground me from reading fantasy novels for the rest of my life. Missy hadn’t told them. Only, I had blown it, and they were about to dig the truth out of me. That meant they were going to tell me some other terrible news.

  I tried to cover my mistake. “Nothing. I mean, we were just playing earlier, and she got mad at me and… .” I tried to think of something, but all the imaginative tales stored up in my brain failed me.

  Dad plunged on, unfazed, his eyes glued on the avocado-green carpet. “We’ve talked to you about some things in the past. Grownup things. We need to talk to you about something important.”

  Neither spoke. Mom swallowed.

  “Something important,” I repeated.

  Wait a minute… . This was it! Finally, they were going to tell me I was special. I was a fairy or a witch or something magical.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t Missy be here for this?”

  “Missy already knows about grownup things,” Mom said. She took my hands in hers, staring into my eyes. “Do you remember when we told you some things are for the imagination? Not everything magic is real.”

  “I remember,” I said quickly. The anticipation was killing me. Surely they were about to tell me what was real—that I was a witch.

  Dad pulled at a loose thread on the seam of the brown couch. “Do you remember last E
aster when you found those white, powdery footprints leading from the living room out onto the lawn?”

  “Yes. We looked it up in that book, and we identified it as the Leporidae Eastarus—the Easter Bunny.” Looking it up in one of Dad’s books had been his idea. “Those footprints led to the best eggs ever!” I didn’t know what the Easter Bunny had to do with anything important, though.

  “That was me,” Dad said.

  “No, it wasn’t. Those weren’t your footprints.”

  Mom shoved a paper bag at him. He removed the talcum powder and bunny slippers.

  I shook my head, refusing to believe him.

  Mom nudged him. “Tell her about Christmas.”

  “That was also my idea,” Dad said. “I ate the carrots you left out for the reindeer. And the cookies and milk.”

  “But you couldn’t have. You’re lactose intolerant.”

  Dad’s eyes crinkled up with pity. “I poured the milk back into the carton.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy are stories,” Mom said. “They’re make-believe.”

  The fragile world I had always loved shattered before my eyes. I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye and held my chin high. I was a big girl. I could handle the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy not being real. I’d already suspected as much from the gossip of third graders in my class. I was fine with that creepy guy at the mall who always waved at me and invited me to sit on his lap not being the “real” Saint Nick.

  Everything would be fine if magic still existed in the world.

  I drew in a shaky breath, afraid to ask. “But Hogwarts—that’s real, right?” It wasn’t like I was asking if Harry Potter was real. Even if he was fictional, it didn’t mean the place he went to school couldn’t be real. The place I would be going to school.

  My parents’ nervous glance at each other said it all. Mom fidgeted with the frizzy tail of her long red braid. My heart plummeted to my stomach and settled like a pair of concrete shoes in a river.

  “I’m sorry, Clarissa.” Dad sat me between the two of them. He kissed the top of my head. His beard tickled my face.

  My mother muttered under her breath. “See, I told you those books were a bad idea.”

  Those words were more powerful than Missy’s slap to my face earlier.

  I covered my eyes and bawled. “What about Jesus? Is he a lie too?”

  Mom said nothing.

  “No, honey. God is real,” Dad said.

  Yeah, right. See if I believed anything they said ever again.

  I squirmed out from between them and threw my toy unicorn on the floor, about to run out of the room.

  “Not so fast.” Mom grabbed the back of my shirt and tugged me onto the couch beside her. “It can be hard to tell the difference between what is real and what we want to be true. Sometimes there are strange things that happen in the world that we don’t understand. Don’t try to take care of these things by yourself. If you ever notice something isn’t right, come and tell Mommy.”

  “Or if someone goads you into climbing on the roof with a broom,” Dad said. “Maybe you should ask a second opinion from an unbiased source. Like one of us. Or another adult.”

  “Missy told?” I shrieked.

  “No. Mrs. Mesker called me when I got home from work,” Mom said. I hadn’t counted on the elderly neighbor to be the one to tattle on me.

  Despite my parents’ intervention, I couldn’t shake my belief in magic.

  * * *

  On my eleventh birthday, I sat at the window, waiting for my owl to come and tell me I had been accepted to a magical school of witchcraft and wizardry.

  My older sister, Missy, bounded into the room, dressed in a cheerleading uniform from spring break camp. She waved a letter around. “Look! They want me to come to drill camp this summer and invited me to try out for the high school squad. They’ve chosen me!” She ran out of the room, oblivious to my misery.

  I wanted someone to tell me I was the chosen one, that I was special too. Maybe it was because my older sister was so good at everything, and I wasn’t good at anything. Except drawing, and that didn’t count.

  No owl came. No letter arrived. I was destined for an ordinary life of non-magic. Or so I thought.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Day My Sister Was Abducted by a Witch

  I had just celebrated my fourteenth birthday a few days before we went to Oregon Country Fair. Back in the early two thousands it was considered the bohemian Mecca before Burning Man gained notoriety.

  “It’s one part renaissance fair, one part music festival, and two parts hippieville,” Dad said as he parked the minivan. “There’s something for everyone at this event.”

  Even before my family exited the van, I knew it was going to be a magical day. A lady wearing a medieval gown walked toward colorful banners above the entrance, followed by a troupe of teenagers in black and white striped costumes reminiscent of characters from a Tim Burton movie.

  Something flitted past the window. The bright colors and rapid wing movement reminded me of a hummingbird. The shimmer was more like the iridescence of a dragonfly. It zipped around the van as my parents unloaded backpacks with water bottles, snacks, and ninety-nine other items my mom thought were essential. The little creature hovered above Dad’s bald spot, and that’s when I saw the body was shaped like a person’s.

  “Look, a fairy,” I said in wonder. “A real fairy!”

  Missy raised an eyebrow. “There’s no such thing as fairies. You know that, right, Clarissa?”

  I pointed. Mom and Dad were busy talking and didn’t see. By the time Missy turned to look, the creature had flown off. I was certain this was a sign anything could happen today. Magic was real. Even if no one else thought so.

  We passed a jillion cars in the field as we walked to the shady area where the entrance of the woodland fair was located. Dad made us stop in front of a dragon statue to snap a photo with his digital camera.

  “Say cheese doodles,” Dad said, making a goofy face so we would smile.

  He took another photo of Mom, Missy, and me in our matching tie-dyed shirts next to a wall of artwork. The blue and green of our shirts made the auburn of my mom’s hair shine more vividly in the summer sunlight. It even made the golden whiskers peppered through Dad’s beard appear redder. I could only imagine what it was doing to my own hair. Missy was so lucky to be born blonde. I would have traded my vintage Spock doll collection to get rid of my freckles and red hair.

  “Your eyes were closed, Missy,” Dad said to my sister. He snapped another pic. “A real smile, this time, Clarissa. I want to see your seven-thousand-dollar smile.”

  I sealed my lips together so my braces wouldn’t be visible. I hated it when he acted like my braces cost a fortune. He was my orthodontist. It didn’t cost him anything.

  I thought Mr. Documentary was finished with his photo session, but no, not my parental unit. Dad flagged down a man dressed as a human-sized chess piece. White paint covered his face and arms to match his tunic.

  “Nice costume.” Dad said. “Would you mind taking a photo of me with my family?”

  “Sure, dude,” the man said.

  Mom eyed the stranger warily. He smelled like a skunk, and I wondered whether he had encountered wildlife at the woodland forest of the fair. A lady walked by, her bare breasts covered in glitter paint. My sister caught my eye, and we both giggled. This wasn’t like the county fair. Dad had warned us there wouldn’t be rides, cotton candy, or people showing off cows and pigs. This was the fair he used to go to when he’d been in college at University of Oregon.

  Dad hugged us to his sides under a shady tree, looming over the three of us as the stranger snapped photos. We thanked the man and checked the photos in the digital camera’s screen. Dad’s head was cut off in the first photo. The second one wasn’t so bad, but it showed a woman in a bird costume, black plumage ruffled out
like a collar as she photobombed behind us.

  Mom stared at the photo, her brow furrowing. She glanced around. The woman was long gone.

  Dad muttered under his breath about amateur photographers.

  “You’re an amateur, Dad,” I said.

  “I’m not just the president of the Amateur Club of Photographers, I’m also a client.” His barrel chest heaved up and down as he laughed at his own joke.

  “Lame,” Missy mouthed.

  “Let me get sunblock on you girls.” Mom fussed at us and slathered a gob of white goop over my face. “Now, what is the plan if you get lost?”

  “Find a staff member who can escort us back to the main entrance,” Missy said in an unenthusiastic monotone.

  “And if you get hurt?” Mom asked.

  I held up the map, pointing at the first aid symbol. “White Bird’s Medical Station.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Dad said. “We’re all going to stay together.”

  A shadow blotted out the sun and chilled the air. I looked up. A flock of birds swarmed above us like bees, their silhouettes black and ominous. I’d never seen birds circle in a frenzy like that before.

  “It isn’t too late to go home.” Mom bit her lip, looking at me and talking about me as if I wasn’t there. “Fourteen is too young for a place like this.”

  “Resistance is futile. You will have a good time, hon,” Dad said, hugging Mom around the shoulders.

  Mom made me hold her hand as we walked through the crowd, even though it was uber embarrassing. Missy held my other hand as Dad snapped photos of everything. I stared in wonder at the booths full of clothes that would have been perfect for a woodland fairy to wear. A rainbow of ribbons hung from a tree, wafting in the wind. The fair was unlike any other festival I’d been to. People wore funky costumes, and there were so many stages playing cool music. We stopped and watched a belly dance performance.

  “Isn’t it absolutely magical?” I said to Missy. I felt like I’d walked into another dimension. These people were my people, and this place was home. I’d finally found somewhere I belonged.