For Better or Cursed

by Kate M. Williams

“There’s a big difference,” Brian scoffed. “For one…”

  My brain whirred and tuned them out. To say I’d never planned a party before was a lie. I’d arranged many a soiree for my dolls, and after our dog, Pig, moved in with us, I even had a living, breathing guest, though she didn’t bring much to the table conversation-wise. But planning a party for a whole bunch of Sitters in three days? Barf me out the door—I’d rather do extra-credit homework.

  The front seat was still arguing about dead versus dried flowers, and it sounded like Cassandra was winning. “I hate to interrupt this debate,” I said, sticking my head in between their seats, “but how are we supposed to do this in three days?” My question united them, and they both looked at me like I was five cans short of a six-pack.

  “I figured that would be obvious,” Brian said.

  “Yeah,” Cass echoed.

  “We use magic?” I guessed.

  Brian nodded.

  “Duh,” Cassandra said.

  “And this,” Brian said, holding something up. In the dark, I couldn’t quite see what it was.

  “A credit card?” I asked as Cassandra snatched it out of his hand. She looked at it and guffawed.

  “Nope,” she said, “try again. Gift card. To someplace called Party Town.”

  “There’s five hundred dollars on it,” Brian said haughtily. “And we get an employee discount.”

  “Have you been to Party Town?” I asked him. “They sell blow-up—” I stopped myself before the word “penises” came out of my mouth. “Body parts,” I said, finally.

  “I have not,” Brian said, as he grabbed the card back from Cassandra and handed it to me. “But this gift card was sent to us directly from the Synod, so I assume they have done their research and Party Town is awash in seasonal decor.” I tucked the card into the front pocket of my backpack. “Do not waste it,” he continued. “And please shop economically.”

  I sat back again as Brian put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. “So, you had no idea this was happening?” I asked him, and he nodded.

  “Then what’s with all the binders?” I asked. “You certainly did a lot of research for something that surprised you.”

  “I, uh, well, I thought this might happen someday,” he said. “I just didn’t think that someday would be so soon.” We passed under a streetlight, and I got a good look at Brian’s face in the rearview mirror. He was biting his lip. Oh, of course. He wasn’t expecting this to happen—he was hoping it would. Brian had been waiting for this. The next thing I knew, we were in front of Cassandra’s house. She had climbed out of the car and turned around and was looking at me expectantly.

  “Oh,” I said. “Am I getting out here too?” She nodded.

  “I have to run,” Brian said, by way of explanation, so I just mentally shrugged and started to climb out. I was now farther from my own house than I had been when he picked us up. “Don’t forget the binders!” he added as I started to shut the door. With some effort, I managed to tug the box out of the back and around the passenger seat, and then dropped it with a thud at my feet. “We’ll meet at my house tomorrow night. And I expect you two to have some solid ideas for the event,” he added.

  “We should have one of those things they have at the fair,” Cassandra said, excited. “Where you swing a hammer and it says how strong you are? And also one of those people who guesses how much you weigh!” Sometimes I swore that Cassandra was just a frat dude trapped in the body of a teenage Jessica Alba. I was glad she couldn’t see me shake my head in the dark.

  Brian drove away, and as I was bending down to pick the box of binders up, I looked over at Cass. “Can you help me with this?” I asked. “This much inspiration can really weigh you down.”

  “Leave it,” she said. “I’ll make Dion come out and get it.” Dion’s van was in the driveway, and through the house’s front window, I could see him sitting on the couch, watching TV.

  “How’s that going, by the way?” I asked.

  Cassandra gave a little laugh. “Well, the house is super clean, and once I get home from school, I barely have to get off the couch if I don’t want to. He made me chocolate chip cookie dough yesterday.”

  “Did you bake any?”

  “No, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream,” she clarified.

  “Oh, wow.” That was impressive. “How did he even know how to do that?”

  “He didn’t. He stayed up until three a.m. to learn.”

  “Doesn’t he have to get up for work at like five?”

  “Yep.”

  I would be lying if I said I knew how to respond to that. “Well,” I said finally, “was it any good?”

  At one point, it seemed like Cassandra’s older brother, Dion, and I were maybe someday going to have something. That was before, of course, he let his father take over his mind, kidnapped my babysitting charge, and performed a Red Magic ritual that got Cassandra and the eleven-year-old girl sucked up into the Negative. It was as complicated as it sounds, and Dion didn’t remember any of it.

  There were a lot of things Cassandra could have done to punish him, and maybe she still would, but for now she seemed content to use him as her slave by way of a custom-tweaked memory spell that I was pretty sure wasn’t legal by Sitter standards. In some ways, it seemed like she was letting him off easy—after all, staying up late to make your sister ice cream hardly seemed like a fitting punishment for kidnapping—but then Dion hadn’t totally been acting on his own free will, and besides, he was the only family Cassandra had. I could see why she didn’t want to lose him, even if she also didn’t want to let him off the hook.

  As we walked into the living room, Dion was, I swear to goddess, watching Love Actually. He looked up and smiled at me. “Hey, Esme!” he said, way chirpily. “Have you seen this movie? It’s pretty good!” He was wearing a sweatshirt, and when he pushed one of the sleeves up, I could see his horrible tattoo, a botched homage to his mother’s Mexican heritage and love of Greek myths. I’d used a spell to fix it for him, but it had reverted to the original version when the Synod had reversed all our powers while cleaning up the mess from Halloween.

  “I prefer movies where people get stabbed,” I said, then turned away to signal the end of the conversation.

  “There’s a box of stuff on the curb,” Cass told him. “Go bring it in.” Dion jumped up off the couch and was out the door in a flash. I followed Cass to her room, then picked my way over to her bed and sat down in the one clear spot I could find.

  Her room looked like she was auditioning for Hoarders. It was hard to walk on the floor because it was covered with so much stuff. Old dolls’ heads, spools of thread, dead plants (Brian might have called them “dried”), Popsicle sticks, bags of expired bubble gum, spray deodorant, silly string, old bathing suits, a plastic kiddie pool, a bicycle wheel, press-on nails, anything and everything. Her desk was covered with jars and bags of spices—cardamom, anise, rosemary, cloves—and herbs, and dried flowers (Cassandra might have called them “dead”), like crispy crushed rose petals and lavender buds. Rocks and crystals, tigereye, garnet, onyx, and what looked like parking lot gravel. Being a Sitter inspired pack-rat tendencies. Our spells required all kinds of ingredients, and the spells updated themselves all the time, so you never knew what you were going to need. Cassandra, I guess, had decided it was good to keep stuff on hand. It didn’t look like she had thrown anything away, ever.

  There was something new too: a mini freezer that was plugged in, whirring away in one corner like Cassandra was worried she’d have a Fla-Vor-Ice craving in the middle of the night and not have time to get to the kitchen.

  “What’s up with the freezer?” I asked.

  Wordlessly, she opened the door. Cold air rushed out and I bent down to look at the contents. It was empty, save for a large block of ice with something black and round frozen right in the mi
ddle of it. It took me a second to realize what it was: a Magic 8 Ball.

  “Is that the one from Halloween?” I said, knowing even as the words came out of my mouth that it was a stupid question. Cassandra wouldn’t buy (or acquire, since I wasn’t sure she actually bought the things she needed) a freezer just to hold a random toy. Through some combination of Red Magic and sheer a-holery, Erebus had managed to turn a Magic 8 Ball into a multidimensional communication device, and that was how he’d sent Dion the directives for his dirty deeds. If anyone else had done it, I would have found it quite clever.

  It turns out that Erebus, Cassandra and Dion’s dad, was a pretty powerful Red Magician, and years ago, he’d been banished to the Negative for doing a bunch of awful stuff. Like, oh, cursing my mom. But his extreme d-baggery didn’t stop there: the whole reason he’d enchanted the 8-Ball was so he could manipulate Dion into doing a Red Magic ritual that would break him out of the Negative, and it involved sacrificing a child. In short: Erebus was human garbage. There was only one reason I didn’t want him to stay exactly where he was: If Erebus got out, Mom’s curse came off. Just thinking about all this made me feel like my heart was going to implode. I turned my attention back to Cassandra.

  “I was keeping it in the kitchen,” she said, “but I started to get nervous that Dion would find it again, so I spelled this room to keep him out.”

  “Do you think the 8 Ball still works?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But I’m not trying to find out.” She shut the freezer door and turned and started to rummage through the stuff on her desk. “At least not right now.” This last part made me give her a strange look, one she didn’t catch.

  “You think you might want to find out if it still works later?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I just think it’s a good idea to keep our options open, don’t you?” She had found what she was looking for: a piece of wintergreen gum. She popped a piece into her mouth, and then smoothed out the wrapper and tucked it in an envelope.

  “No, actually, I don’t,” I answered. “I don’t think we should be keeping any of our options open. I think we should unfreeze that thing, take it outside, and run over it with the van. I don’t want anything to do with Red Magic.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “He’s my dad, and I’ll keep him in my freezer if I want to. Besides, we don’t really know that much about Red Magic.” That last statement made my stomach cartwheel. Red Magic terrified me, but it intrigued Cassandra. Her dad had obviously been very powerful, and I wondered whether there was something in her blood that drew her to it.

  “I don’t think you need to take a class on it to know it’s bad,” I said, trying as I always did to steer us into more benign territory. “I mean, the Synod basically nuked the Spring River Portal because your dad did some dabbling.” But a part of me understood, because Cassandra and I had the same weakness: family. That was the reason our villain was in her freezer, and why his imbecile sidekick was down the hall acting like his sister’s house elf. I knew what it was like to grab the shards of a connection and hold on until it cut your fingers.

  “Do you miss Dion?” I asked her, and as if on cue, we could hear him laugh at the TV.

  “He’s just in the other room,” she said.

  “Cass, you know what I mean,” I said. “He has no idea what’s going on. He’s more like a Roomba than a person these days. You can’t have a real conversation with him.”

  She shrugged and attempted to blow a bubble, which popped on her lip. “We didn’t have a ton of conversations before.”

  “Then who do you talk to?”

  “I talk to you,” she said. “I’m talking to you right now.” She kicked some stuff out of the way, and then dropped to the floor and started to do push-ups. Cassandra liked doing push-ups.

  I sighed. “Yeah, but you won’t talk to me about Halloween. What was it like down there?”

  She stopped doing push-ups and looked up at me. “Esme, did you ever think that maybe I don’t talk about it because I don’t want to talk about it? You want to know what it was like? It sucked. That’s why it’s called the Negative.”

  I got to my point. “Does being in the Negative have anything to do with why you wanted to talk to the Shimmer?”

  Cassandra answered me by getting up and walking out of the room. After a bit, I heard a toilet flush and then she reappeared, acting like she hadn’t heard my question. Who knew, maybe she hadn’t, but I did know Cassandra well enough to know that when she didn’t want to talk about something, me pushing her was going to accomplish jack squat. “Come on,” she said, “Dion will give you a ride home.” I followed her back through the house. “Dion, take Esme home,” she said once we got to the living room.

  “Not a problem,” he said, getting up off the couch and grabbing a jacket from a nearby chair. As he pulled it on, his T-shirt rose a little, just enough to reveal a strip of skin above his jeans. I swiveled my head, looking away, and ended up looking at my own reflection in the picture window.

  Cassandra and Dion had mythological names, and they also both looked like Greek gods. There was no doubt they were physical perfection; I had to admit that, even though I hated Dion’s guts. I had no idea whether Cassandra understood how she looked, and that it wasn’t normal. She treated her beauty like it was an unsquanderable resource. The only time I’d ever seen her wash her face, she’d used dish soap. But Dion knew, and he understood the power it gave him; that week before Halloween, he knew I’d swoon and play right into his hands. Or did he? That was what I didn’t know—how much of me and Dion getting to know each other had been his father, Erebus, and how much of it was Dion? It was one of those things that I was starting to realize I might never know.

  His jacket on, Dion stood to the side of the door to let me go first. I walked out onto the porch and then turned around. “You know, I think I’m just going to walk,” I said to Cassandra.

  “Okay,” she answered with a shrug. I was starting to learn that the parts of Cassandra I found the most disconcerting were also the parts that were the most comforting. She wouldn’t ever ask how you were doing, but that also meant she wouldn’t ever pry. I turned and started my walk.

  * * *

  —

  Instead of going home I started to walk to my mom’s, a place with locked wards where she wasn’t allowed to have anything sharper than a spork. Which happened on Halloween but—thankfully—just for a hot minute. Now he’s back down there, doing whatever it is he does. The dark side of that is that mom is still here.

  It was getting late, but I still had time for a quick visit. I signed the visitors’ log at the front desk, and Marie, who’d worked there as long as I’d been coming, smiled at me.

  “Hi, Marie,” I said. “It looks nice in here. Did you do this?” There was a tiny Christmas tree covered in white twinkle lights, cotton-ball snowmen on the wall, and a flickering menorah (no real candles, of course). A small radio was turned to the same station Brian had been listening to, and it was playing “Jingle Bell Rock.” Again. Marie’s fingernails were candy-cane-striped and she drummed them on the desk in time to the music.

  She nodded in answer to my question. “Make sure you come next week,” she said, smiling. “I’m making my rum balls!”

  “Yum,” I said, though I was pretty sure rum balls were not something I would like. I’m not a Scrooge, it’s just that the holidays have never been that big of a deal in my house. Mom is in here, and Dad is the kind of person who thinks toasting waffles counts as home cooking. He’s not all that great at gifts either. Two years ago, it was a Target gift card. Last year, it was a Starbucks gift card. This year, I have my fingers crossed for a gift card to the Starbucks in Target.

  Thank God for my best friend, Janis. Janis may have Rihanna’s cool and Claudia Kishi’s closet, but when it comes to Christmas, she turns int
o a Hallmark-watching, gift-wrapping, tree-decorating elf in vintage Burberry. And her presents are epic. Last year, she gave me an Edward Scissorhands diorama that she made herself. I gave her some socks. But Janis’s and my friendship is so strong that she persists, in spite of my anti-Christmas attitude.

  Marie walked me down the hall and used her key card to swipe me into Mom’s ward.

  “Thanks,” I said, as she turned to leave. “I’m not going to be long.”

  I’d been here every day since Halloween, when Mom’s curse was briefly lifted. Which also had meant Mom’s curse was lifted, also for a hot minute. She was herself, and she was whole, and then, just like that, she was gone again. Since then I couldn’t help it; I needed to see her every day to search for some shred, some sign that the Mom I met on October 31 was still in there somewhere. Also, I didn’t want her to be bored, or to hate what she was wearing, because now I knew that Mom was aware of everything, even though she couldn’t do anything to let me know. I tried to comfort myself with this small fact, because I used to think that Mom couldn’t tell the difference between me and an Elvis impersonator.

  I made my way down the hall and found Mom’s room. The door was open a few inches, and I knocked, then let myself in. Mom was lying on her stomach across her bed, her feet hanging off one side and her head hanging off the other, the ends of her black hair touching the floor.

  “Hey, Mama,” I said. She rolled over so that she was facing the ceiling, but she still didn’t look at me. She was wearing teal leggings that were stretched out at the knees and a too-large purple sweatshirt with a glittery iron-on decal of Christmas ornaments. I had no idea where those clothes came from, because they were nothing I’d ever bought her.

  I dropped my backpack at my feet and pulled out the clothes I’d thrifted for her when I got my suede jacket. “Look at this,” I said, holding up a bright-blue peasant blouse embroidered with red, yellow, and white flowers and trimmed with lace. “It’s definitely not a fall-winter look, but it was too good to pass up. I figure we can save it for vacations or something.” I hung it up in her closet and then pulled out my next find: an ’80s-esque wrap dress, black run through with gold threads. “You look so good in black,” I said. “And the wrap style means it’s easy to put on and take off.” That was super important, since sometimes Mom couldn’t dress herself. The final find was an oversized, probably hand-knit sweater coat of marled red wool. “This is for walks outside,” I said. “I figured you needed something warm, but something a little less…athletic.” I’d seen the coat they’d been putting her in, and again, it was one of those things I didn’t know where it came from—an orange and blue leather jacket with a giant Denver Broncos logo on the back. I imagined that every time Mom wore it, the little tiny shred of herself still locked inside was screaming in protest.