Funny
Tragic
Crazy
Magic
Sheena Boekweg
This book is a book of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
www.boekwegbooks.com
Copyright © 2013 Sheena Boekweg
All rights reserved.
Summary: After her parents died trying to keep her life secret, a young girl must find her mother’s magical notebook to save the boy she loves, without anyone noticing.
SECOND EDITION
Cover Design by Boekweg Books
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 1482793792
ISBN-13: 978-1482793796
For my mom, who gave me the paper,
my husband, who gave me the cover,
and my dad, who gave me the words.
“Magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that,
you can make anything happen.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FOURTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
CHAPTER ONE
I’m not supposed to say anything about what happened. I promised.
However, I never promised I wouldn’t write it all down.
Don’t worry, Giara. No one will ever read this. Once it’s all down, I’ll light it on fire. I just have to get it out of my head.
No one would believe it anyway.
In case it does get out, in case someone decides that this pile of paper might mean something, remember, it never happened. None of this is real. Nothing like this is even possible.
That cover it, Giara?
My name is Larissa Alvarez, and right now, I am sitting in a mental hospital. I know… cliché, right? If I was making up this story I would have started it in a better place, but that isn’t where the story starts. That’s where it ends. Try not to forget that while you are reading.
I guess it started when I met Joe.
No, actually, it started earlier than that. It all really started on the day my parents died. I was in my room. Billy Joel was playing on my iPod, and my freshly vacuumed carpet clung to my toes as I stood in front of my mirror. I kept messing with the rune for transformation, but I couldn’t get the shape right, so my hair frizzed up in the back.
In my defense, runes are difficult to draw on the back of your own neck. I didn’t realize at the time I could have drawn it on my stomach or something. I just knew my mom always drew transformation runes on the back of her neck. I didn’t realize there was another way.
My parents were in the kitchen talking about the price of ground beef. I’m sure my little sister, Fee, was in front of the television, and Dora (or something equally depressing) was on the T.V.
I wasn’t really paying attention to them; it was later when I thought back to the last moments I had with them that these details stick out. It’s crazy what I remember. My memories come back in flashes now. Just moments stuck forever, like still pictures stamped on my brain.
I walked out of my room and into the kitchen, leaving my iPod still playing. The music seemed to soften the sudden silence from my parents in the kitchen.
My mom’s notebook was on the counter next to her purse. I took it without her noticing. She and my dad were in this intense conversation, their words blocked out by the rune for silence, a triangle shape drawn in glowing light on the backside of both of my parents’ hands. I took the notebook and sat down on one of our leather couches in the TV room. The leather felt cold against my neck. My hand went through Fee’s hair without me paying much attention to it. Her tiny fingers resting around my ankle made me feel self-conscious about my unshaven legs.
Runes filled every page of my mother’s notebook. I should have stopped and smelled the notebook, breathed in the clean and ancient paper, touched the leather cover, or taken in my abuela’s handwriting and the way my mom curled the edges of her runes. I didn’t. I skipped past the important runes, the knowledge that would have saved a life more important than my own, because I was intent on having perfect hair for Sarah Johansen’s party that night. I wish I hadn’t been so shallow then. I wish I’d done a lot of things differently that night.
The sound of my parent’s argument filled the kitchen, so I knew the runelight had faded. The moment the rune ended, I caught my mom yelling the word “Grandfathers!” and my dad saying, “I’d never do that.” Then there was silence.
A few seconds later, my mom walked into the room. Her face softened when she saw me reading her notebook. “Is there anything you wanted me to answer?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just trying to fix my hair.”
My mom’s smile faltered, but she helped me find the transformation runes and pointed out that my rune wasn’t curling right. She smiled as she helped me. Magic was about the most important thing in my mom’s life, other than me and my sister. I think because I knew it was important to her, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Not really. Maybe I was a little jealous of how much time she spent dealing in magic, or maybe I thought she loved magic more than she loved me. I don’t know. Maybe I was just self-absorbed. That’s always possible.
It was just hard trying to be a normal teenager when I knew I had freak written down to my DNA. Hiding my magic from all my friends felt like a lie. I think I tried to keep the secret as small as possible, so I wouldn’t feel guilty for not telling them.
After a minute, my dad walked into the front TV room with his notebook. His glasses perched crookedly across his nose. He asked, “Are you ready?” to my mom in Spanish, and she nodded.
“Dad and I need to go out. Could you watch your sister?”
I should have said yes, but there was Sa
rah’s party, and I didn’t want to miss it. Everyone important at East Point High was going to be there, and I was one of only two sophomores invited. If I didn’t go, then Erika Fisher would hold it over me until I graduated.
I argued with my mom for a while, my sister Fee looking on with her angel brown eyes as I explained how much I hated spending time with her, how I hated being the live-in babysitter, and how much I wanted to have my own life. I remember saying I wished they would all just leave me alone. After they died, my own voice saying that awful thing filled my ears at frequent intervals as I sat alone in my house for months on end.
My whining worked, and they took my sister with them. They never brought her back.
I didn’t drive the black SUV that crashed into my parent’s Honda. I didn’t drive the Honda to the north end of the valley where they had no business going. It wasn’t my fault my parents died.
But it was my fault my baby sister died. My selfishness caused it.
I was at the party when I found out. How my hair looked, what I wore, what cute boy was looking at me… that all stopped mattering the second I got the call from the hospital. I started crying in front of everyone. One of the seniors videotaped me with his camera phone and then posted it on YouTube, so I could go back and relive it whenever I wanted to.
Giara Templeton took me to the hospital. She’s one of the Grandmothers, the highest station in the Witch hierarchy. Giara is… beautiful. She’s blonde with razor sharp features and cold eyes. Perfect. I’d been intimidated by her on the two other occasions I had seen her. The first was when I was accepted into the Fellowship of Female Witches. The second was at a Costco by a sample for bagel pizzas. I noticed, even through the avalanche of grief that overtook me, when she came to Sarah Johansen’s house to pick me up, that her shoes didn’t match.
I don’t remember anything about the trip to the hospital, but I do remember being in my mom’s room when her heart monitor went to that shrill stillness. Her purse and her notebook were on the floor under a chair. I know the notebook was there.
Giara led me out of the room, and I sat in the hallway as she talked heatedly on her fancy cell phone from behind the partially closed door. I still managed to hear her yelling, and caught a glimpse of her smug smile when she won the argument about what they should do with me, before she closed the door in my face.
My rube uncle still lived in Mexico, and, numb as I was, I started wondering if my Spanish was too rusty to sound fluent. No such luck. As a fully accepted Witch, I was technically a grown up. I should be able to take care of myself.
Giara seemed strangely calm about the decision as she dropped me off at my empty house. She told me, before she closed the door in my face once more, that if I needed anything, I should call her for help. She would watch over me. From Chicago. Not exactly the guardian my mom would have wanted. The Grandmothers left me on my own not… four hours after my entire family was killed. Not the warmth you’d expect from a Grandmother.
A couple days later, when the Fellowship returned all my family’s belongings through USPS, my mom’s notebook was gone. There was a short note taped on top of this white box full of priceless mementos saying they never found her notebook. I searched through that package for hours. Everything else was in there except for the notebook, and one of my sister’s princess shoes.
My own notebook had only four runes written on it in purple glitter ink. They were mostly all transformation runes, the makeup and curling irons of Witches. But luckily, I had the sense to put in the rune for fire, (how else would I have heated up my eyelash curler?) or else that empty house would have been a cold place to live until the life insurance money kicked in.
For a while, I ran on autopilot. I still went to school. That must tell you how numb I was. I could have totally skipped, but the idea didn’t even cross my mind.
At school, my social standing dropped, and my grades improved. I couldn’t face lying to my friends, so all I did was stay home and study.
I still had friends; people cared about me. But I just couldn’t really face them. No one at school knew my parents had died, not even my best friend Meg. The Fellowship took care of that with a simple hiding rune. I’ve seen the rune for hide often enough, and I know its power when I see… or more truthfully, don’t see it. Everyone knew my parents had been in an accident, but they took my ability to share my grief with my friends away as surely as they had taken my mom’s notebook. I should have protested, told my friends anyway, but every time I tried, the words froze in my mouth, and I got this sick feeling at the pit of my stomach.
I was alone. The only freak in a school of normals. Joe always called them the rubes. I think he came from a line of circus people or something. See, in the circus, they call regular people rubes, because all they see is the magic, they never see the strings. It kind of fit. The name stuck as most things Joe said did. Stuck to my brain and etched its way in.
I started adding to my notebook, writing experimental runes in my house when the rest of the student body watched reality television or wrote reports on the French Revolution. I finally became the kind of Witch my mom wanted me to be. Just too late for my mom to see.
When my notebook of real runes had grown to a grand total of seven, I started making plans of how I could get my mother’s notebook back. It was my right. My legacy. There were runes in there from her abuela… maybe her abuela’s bisabuela. They had no right to take it.
I started making the plans that would destroy my life. They wouldn’t have worked if I had done it by myself. My life would have gone on in its own pathetic, hidden, non-earthshaking way.
Then everything changed. Like most things in my life, that plan I made to break into the Grandmothers’ Study and steal back my mother’s notebook was only made possible when I met Joe.
That lying jerk.
CHAPTER TWO
Right now, one table away from me, Henry Jarbonie is drinking Jell-O through a straw. His hospital gown is open at the back, but he is facing perpendicular to me, so luckily I can’t see anything puke-inducing. I do know that I will never sit in that chair again though; no amount of Lysol is going to wash this memory from my mind.
I have the decency to wear pajamas. The best thing about being here in Saint What’s-Her-Name’s home for the mentally disturbed is that I no longer have to deal with the horror of zippers. All that time and energy fastening clothes together is better used drinking Jell-O through a straw, or painting with watercolors, or staring out the window at the peaceful expanse of green grass and blue sky. They wouldn’t want to give us crazies any more stress.
There are some real characters here. If I were a writer for real, or if I were making this stuff up, I would find a life’s worth of inspiration from visiting hours five through seven.
I guess it’s possible for this story to mean something. I hope it does. I hope someday someone finds this, or I put it online and someone else reads it. It would be like revenge, I guess… proof that the Grandfathers and Grandmothers aren’t infallible… that they can’t hide the truth forever. One day someone might just take them down. Or maybe one day Disney Channel would even make a movie out of this. I’d like to see them try.
Okay, where was I?
Joe.
My life kind of started, and ended I guess, when I met him. He’d probably say the same thing about me; only thing is, for me it’s actually true. See, he was an Instinct. A rogue. He knew he could do magic, but he didn’t know the whole culture. He didn’t know if he was the only one.
I was the first person he met who could do magic. That fooled him into thinking I was someone special. But that comes later.
I’m no good at this.
Okay, so when I met Joe I was well into my plan to get my mom’s notebook back. Right then, that meant I was trying to be invisible. I wanted the Grandmothers to forget about me so I could sneak in and take back the notebook without a fight. I wanted them to think I wasn’t any kind of a problem. Then, even if the sneaking in didn�
�t work, maybe they’d just, you know, give me the notebook back anyway.
It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all I had. So I tried to look unthreatening… you know, wearing sissy dresses, braiding my hair, wearing pearls. Trying to look so out of date and out of touch, even the popular kids wouldn’t know I existed, much less the Grandmothers.
The funny thing is, the more out of date I tried to be, the more the popular kids complemented me. I started to get this reputation for being hip and fashionable, which was the opposite of what I was going for, but… I guess I still had enough vapid in me to think it was cool.
The first day of school my junior year, I was wearing a pink baby doll dress with an appliqué peter pan collar, lace tights and pearl earrings. It was a cold day for the end of August, so I decided to turn back for a cardigan. I pulled my parents’ Toyota out into my driveway and left it idling, and then locked the car with stay. My notebook was in my backpack on the backseat. I was only inside for about two minutes, but when I got outside, the car was gone.
Cold air blew past me and whipped around my flimsy dress. The air smelled like magic -- woodsy, with a little honey mixed in.
How did they know? I thought. I decided the best thing to do would be to pretend as if nothing strange had happened. I hadn’t written anything about my plans in my notebook. If anything, it would just show the Grandmothers how unprepared I was, and how much I didn’t know.
I put a smile on my face and started walking to school, humming a happy tune that kept turning darker when I wasn’t paying attention. A passing car honked at me, and a senior stuck his head out the window and howled. Real juvenile. I smiled back and waved at the moron as a non-threat would.
When I got to the school, my feet were already aching. Mary Jane’s are not only hideous, they are also kind of uncomfortable. By the time I walked through the parking lot, I already had a red streak across my skin where the white leather rubbed the side of my foot.
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