Spells Like Teen Spirit

by Kate M. Williams

  “Hey,” he said, “nice tubes. They look like they’ve got good circulation support. Where’d you get those?”

  “Sam’s Club twelve-pack,” Janis said, and Dad wrote it down like it was a hot tip.

  Then he lined us up to take some awkward photos in front of a background that included the trash can and the Swiffer. When he passed my phone back to me, I could tell there wasn’t a single photo where at least one of us didn’t look like she had just accidentally swallowed a slug. “Don’t worry,” Janis whispered, “I’ll pick the best faces and photoshop them all together.” Dad waved us out the door, and then we piled into Janis’s car. Spring River High School Valentine’s Day dance, watch out. Cuz we weren’t the only ones on our way.

  So, yeah, the thing about populariskinesis was that it worked. Really well.

  We were early, so most of the other students hadn’t arrived yet, but the dance committee was in full swing. And they were very, very hyped. “We’ve been waiting for you!” Kendra said, rushing over as soon as she spotted Janis and me. “Are they here yet? They’re still coming, right? I can’t believe we got Jump the Shark to play our Valentine’s Day dance. I mean, they’re huge! They’re so popular. They sell out stadiums! Everyone loves them.”

  None of this was true, but I nodded, also happy that she had just reminded me of what their most recent name was. “Yeah, it’s crazy, right?” I shifted the bag of groceries I was carrying from one arm to the other.

  “What is that?” Kendra asked.

  “Uh, Jump the Shark’s rider,” I told her. “It’s what they want in the green room.”

  Kendra’s eyes widened, and she peeked in the top of the bag. “Oh my God,” she said, “Jump the Shark loves soup. I love soup.” She clasped her hands in front of her and wrung her fingers. “I can’t believe we have so much in common.”

  Nipple boy, whose name I had forgotten, if I had ever known it, came up to us. Now, instead of a polo shirt, he was wearing a button-down oxford, but the nipples were still visible through that. I guess he’d never heard of undershirts?

  “That stuff is for the band?” he asked, reaching out to take Janis’s bag from her, which had the blender sticking out of the top, balanced on yet more cans of soup. “Here, allow me.” His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and I could see a big, dark Jump the Shark tattoo snaking down his forearm.

  I swallowed. “Is that real?” I asked, my mouth going sour with fear.

  Nipple boy sighed and shook his head, and I relaxed.

  “No, my mom would kill me,” he said, “so I just drew it on for tonight. Do you think they’ll like it?”

  “I think they’ll love it,” Janis said, and he beamed.

  Yeah, I was pretty powerful, all right.

  Karen came walking over at a clip, legit holding a clipboard. “Ryan, I need you back on balloon duty,” she said. “And, Kendra, that punch isn’t going to make itself.”

  “I know,” Kendra said, a smile plastered onto her face, “but Esme and Janis were just telling us that Jump the Shark are on their way.”

  Karen’s expression softened, and she actually smiled. “I still can’t believe I got them to play a high school dance,” she said. My spell had worked so well that now Karen thought this whole debacle had been her idea. I stifled a giggle by turning it into a cough. “People are going to remember this dance forever. I hope they play…” Karen trailed off. “What’s the name of their big song again?”

  “Oh, you’ll know it when you hear it,” Janis said.

  The fangirl glow on Karen’s face had faded, though, and now her eyes were fixed behind us. Ji-A, Amirah, and Pig had followed us in, and were standing about ten feet behind us, watching this whole scene.

  “Hi,” Karen said, smiling a smile that did not extend to her eyes. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re Esme’s and Janis’s dates,” Ji-A said.

  “Well, you’re certainly dressed up,” she said, “but no dogs allowed. Someone brought a dog to last year’s homecoming, and let’s just say that the papier-mâché decorations were not, uh, treated with respect. The dog will have to wait outside.” No one moved.

  “She’s my date,” Amirah said with a smile.

  “But you’re already a date,” Karen said. “So it can wait outside.”

  “I know,” Amirah said. “And the dog is my date, and she is not an it. Her name is ‘Pig.’ ”

  “You can’t have a dog in here unless it’s a support animal,” Karen began. It didn’t surprise me one bit that Amirah was not used to being denied, and now a look crossed her face. I could see a gleam in her eye, and she smiled, a little smirk as sharp as an ice skate, and then she started to open her mouth.

  “It’s Jump the Shark’s dog!” I blurted out. As much as I would have loved to see Karen obliterated into a million pieces that needed to be Dyson-ed up off the floor, we already had enough drama on the books for one night. “They really wanted her to come and see the show!” Ji-A started to laugh and then faked a coughing fit.

  “She’ll need to be in the front row too,” Amirah said, “or else they might mess up your favorite song.”

  Karen’s mouth twitched, but her normal disapproving stance was no match for my populariskinesis. “Does she need a chair?” she asked. I started to say no, but Amirah beat me to it, nodding gravely.

  “With a cushion,” she said. Now Janis was the one seized by a coughing fit, and Karen eyed her like she had the plague.

  “Come on,” I said, hefting my bag, “we have to go set up. Where’s the green room?” I asked Karen.

  “The teachers’ lounge,” Karen said. “It’s the best room in the school, and I wanted to make sure they liked it.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “Great,” I said, “but where are the teachers going to lounge?”

  “Honestly, I couldn’t care less,” Karen said. “But I made it nice in there, so don’t mess it up.” A sound like a balloon popping echoed through the hallway and made Karen jump. “Jeez!” she screamed. “We only have five hundred of those! Who keeps popping the freaking balloons?” Then she stormed off down the hallway.

  The school was still far from crowded, but people were starting to stream in, and I could see that a lot of them were going to great pains to not stare at Amirah and Ji-A. And honestly, I didn’t blame them. Amirah and Ji-A looked like they could have come straight out of a fashion video, and Amirah had a pit bull in a tuxedo shirt.

  “So,” Ji-A said as we walked, the heels of her—my—cowboy boots echoing on the floor and her dress flowing out behind her like a cape, “this is your school, huh? It’s crazy. It looks like something out of a TV show. There are lockers and everything.” She stopped, and stood up on her toes so that she could peer into a closed classroom through the small glass window in the door.

  “Your school doesn’t have lockers?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “I’m homeschooled,” she said, “so mostly the teachers just come to me, and then we go on field trips.”

  “What kind of field trips?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she said, “historical sites. Like the Great Wall.”

  “Of China?” I asked. She nodded, like a field trip to China was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What’s your school like?” I asked Amirah, who just shrugged.

  “Normal,” she said. “A lot like this one. Only everyone’s rich, and some of them are famous.”

  We’d reached the teachers’ lounge, and Janis pulled the door open. “Wow,” she said. “They really took the concept of the green room literally.” We followed her in. I set my bag of groceries down on a table and glanced around. It looked like Kendra and Karen had skipped V-Day all together and gone straight for St. Patty’s. I had no idea what the teachers’ lounge looked like on a regular basis, but now it held a couch with green pillows,
a long table covered with a green paper tablecloth, and a big banner that said, in big green glitter letters, WE JUMP THE SHARK. Ji-A’s dress fit right in.

  Janis was unpacking the soup, and I was looking for an outlet to plug in the blender when my phone buzzed. A text from Cassandra.

  “The band just left their house,” I said, reading from it, “so they should be here in a few minutes.”

  “Ooh, that’s exciting,” Ji-A said. “I can’t wait to lay eyes on these guys and see if they’re as disappointing as you make them out to be.”

  “Oh, I bet they’re even more disappointing!” Janis said, and I turned to see that she had arranged the cans into a pyramid.

  “That looks very…grocery store?” I said, and she shrugged.

  “I wasn’t sure how else to do it?” she said. “How do you take a bunch of cans and make it look sexy?”

  “So,” Amirah said, plopping down on the couch and propping her feet up on Pig, “what time is dinner served? I’m starving.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “This is an event,” she said. “So, I’m assuming there’s food?”

  “Uh, no…,” I said.

  “May I interest you in a can of”—Janis grabbed the top one from the pyramid and read off the label—“beef stew? I assume there’s a microwave around here somewhere.”

  “Gross,” Amirah said. “But there really isn’t a dinner? Usually when you buy a table for—”

  I interrupted her. “This is just a school dance,” I said. “No one buys tables. It’s free.” I could sense that I wasn’t getting through, and that she was legitimately expecting there to be shrimp cocktail or something. “But you know what? There is a Panda Sub just, like, two blocks away,” I offered.

  She was on her feet like her butt had just been electrocuted.

  “Really?” she said. “Do we have time to go?”

  “Of course,” I said. “We’ll be here all night.” I gave Amirah and Ji-A directions, and they assured me that even though they didn’t have jackets, they wouldn’t be cold.

  “We’ve got spells for that,” Ji-A said, and then they headed out the door. I wasn’t totally sad to see them go, because I was starting to get more and more nervous. I had every reason to suspect that the members of Jump the Shark were not the brightest crayons in the box, but I imagined that even for them, Amirah and Ji-A wouldn’t necessarily look like they were regulars at Spring River High School, where half the students wore athleisure even to a dance.

  My phone started to buzz again, and I looked down to see that Brian had texted me. “Brian wants to see us in his office,” I said to Janis, who was busy trying to get Pig to pose in front of the soup pyramid. Pig just kept looking at the soup like she wanted to eat it, which she probably did. I grabbed her leash, and the three of us left the teachers’ lounge and headed to Brian’s office, cutting through the gym on the way. Pink, white, and red streamers dangled from the ceiling and the basketball hoops, and balloons in the same color scheme bounced around, gathering in the corners, and a few helium ones floated through the air. I had to hand it to the Ks, they had made this place look pretty okay for a gym.

  I held Pig’s leash, and Janis followed after me, and as with taking Pig anywhere, it felt like being a bodyguard to a celebrity. A celebrity who was very easily distracted by anything that might hold the promise of a tasty nibble. I turned down photo ops and laughed at dumb dog jokes all the way across the gym, then took a deep breath before I pushed open the door to the boys’ locker room, though I doubted there was anyone in there at this time of night, or Brian wouldn’t have asked us to come.

  “Wow,” Janis said, “so this is where the patriarchy is built, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “Everything you expected?”

  “Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “I expected more. I mean, where are all the phallic symbols and monuments to capitalism?”

  “What about that?” I asked, motioning to a freestanding punching bag in a corner, and she curled her lip.

  I knocked on Brian’s door, and he called for us to come in. He did a double take as soon as he saw Pig, and when she saw him, she made a break for it, and the leash went flying out of my hand. Brian crouched down to the floor, and soon she was covering him with kisses as he covered her with pets. Whenever he’d come over to our house, I’d never seen Brian give Pig more than a passing pet, and she’d never seemed to care much about him.

  But now, when he finally stood up, his eyes were glistening. “She looks good,” he said, with a sniff. “Same old Pig. Any idea where she was all this time?”

  I shook my head. “None,” I said. “Wherever it was, she’s not telling.” Now Brian was silent for a second as he looked at her, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing that I was: Pig was not just a dog. But that was a discussion topic for another time, and Brian shook his head briefly and went back to what he’d been doing. Normally when I went into Brian’s office, he was doing something like watching football, or drawing about football with a bunch of Xs and Os on a big whiteboard. Now he was, I kid not, ironing a tracksuit, while wearing a tracksuit. Both were exactly the same.

  “What are you doing?” I sputtered.

  “Ironing,” he said, holding up the iron. “This is an iron. You have seen an iron before, right?”

  “I know what an iron is, Brian,” I said. “I just choose not to use them.” I paused. “Doesn’t nylon melt?”

  “Not if you know which heat setting to use,” Brian said, laying the freshly ironed track jacket on the ironing board, and unzipping the track jacket he had on. “Anyway, I wanted to check in and make sure everything was set for tonight.” He then took off the un-ironed track jacket and replaced it with the one he had just finished working on. He zipped it up over his T-shirt, and I swear on frozen pizza he looked exactly the same.

  “Well,” I said, “the band is on their way, and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but my populariskinesis spell worked really well, and the dance committee seems to think that Jump the Shark are the best thing to happen to music since Nirvana.”

  “And where are the other girls?” Brian asked.

  “Well, Amirah and Ji-A are getting Panda Sub right now, and Ruby, Cassandra, and Mallory are at Jump the Shark’s house, ready to see what they can find.” As if on cue, my phone dinged, and I looked down to see a text from Ruby.

  “Wait,” I said, reading the text. “Apparently they’re waiting, because the next-door neighbors are barbecuing, so there are a whole bunch of people in the neighbor’s backyard? They’re going to wait to see if they go inside soon. If they don’t, Ruby will spell them.”

  “Barbecuing?” Brian said. “In Kansas in February?”

  “I don’t know!” I said, shrugging. “People like to grill?”

  “Cassandra sent that text?” Brian asked, and I shook my head.

  “Ruby,” I said. “She’s in charge of the updates, since Cassandra…you know.”

  Brian nodded, because he did know. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “At least she’ll keep us in the loop.” Then my phone started ringing, a local number I didn’t recognize.

  I tapped accept and was met by a voice practically screaming at me. “Where the heck are you? The band is here, and there’s no can opener!”

  “Karen?” I asked.

  “No, Kendra!”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “Who cares?” she screamed back. “How are they supposed to eat this chili?”

  I hung up and turned to Janis. “That was Kendra,” I said. “The band is here, and apparently they are freaking out because there’s no way to open all that soup.”

  “Oh crap,” Janis said, then dug into her bag and pulled out a can opener. “I brought this.”

  “Well, we’d better get back there before someone has a meltdo
wn,” I said. We started to head out the door, and Brian stopped me.

  “Esme, before you go, what’s your plan for casting populariskinesis on everyone?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just going to cast it on everyone.”

  He shook his head. “Do it in sections,” he said. “You’ll have more control that way. And please do not let the teachers get caught in the cross fire. If they think the band is awful, that just makes it more believable.”

  I nodded. That was a good point. “Thanks for the tip, B.,” I said. “See you on the other side.” Then Janis and I went back through the locker room, Pig trotting after us, and booked it through the gym to the teachers’ lounge.

  I pulled open the door, and the smell of dollar-store cologne hit me in the face. Farther into the room, I could see that the four members of Jump the Shark were sitting on the couch, somewhat packed in there, and that Kendra, Karen, Ryan, and a few other members of the dance committee were standing there, awkwardly, right in front of them. I could hear a girl who’s name I didn’t know babbling about how she loved all their songs, even though she didn’t refer to a single one by name.

  On the end of her leash, Pig started to whimper and plant. “Come on, girl,” I whispered, giving her a tug into the teachers’ lounge. “We have to do this.” Her claws scraped on the ground as I pulled her over the threshold, and I didn’t blame her for the resistance, because looking at the band made me want to do the exact same thing. Once we were in the room and the door had closed behind us, I took off her leash, and she headed straight to a corner. Fortunately, the Ks were too enamored of the band to know that the band’s own dog didn’t want anything to do with them.

  I had to force myself to swallow. I had to be extra cautious tonight. I didn’t want to give the band any more reason to think that there was anything strange about me—or about this dance. I could still feel how the magic around their house had made my stomach roil, but I steeled myself to act “normal” and walk toward them. In my experience, the best way to distract someone was flattery. Lots and lots of flattery. So that was what I was going to do.