by Anna Meriano
CHAPTER 12
CRY FOR HELP
Caroline bolted for the kitchen, and Leo was right behind her, ears ringing with her sister’s words. She banged her shin against the coffee table, barely registering the pain as her mind hoped that somehow this was all a silly misunderstanding and the spirits would be sitting at the table eating Toaster Strudel when she arrived.
By the time Leo skidded to a stop on the linoleum kitchen floor, Caroline was already there, shaking her head slowly back and forth. “They’re gone.”
Leo yanked open the back door. “Come on,” she said, “We have to catch them!”
Isabel and Tía Paloma stayed in the kitchen doorway, faces tight and worried. “Do you see them?” Isabel asked.
Leo shook her head.
“I think running down the block after them would look more suspicious,” Tía Paloma said. “The last thing we want is to cause a scene.”
Leo stared at the kitchen table, still ringed by seven empty mugs and one half-eaten bowl of shredded wheat. She traced the trail of petals out the back door and down the driveway, where it scattered in multiple windswept directions. Fear settled into its familiar spot at the bottom of her stomach, spreading out all its wiggly tentacles and shoving her breakfast into a lump as it made itself comfortable.
Where were the spirits going to go? How could they avoid a scene while all six of them were running around town?
“You were supposed to be watching them.” Isabel spoke the accusation softly, but Leo wanted to cover her ears. Isabel tugged the hem of her shirt and smoothed her skirt, fingers picking away viciously at invisible spots of lint.
“Settle, Isabel.” Tía Paloma held out a hand. “Leo? I don’t understand. You just turned your back for a minute and they all decided to run away? That doesn’t make sense.” She stared out the kitchen window at the trail.
It’s not my fault, Leo wanted to say, except this time even the thought felt like a lie. She wanted to say, I’m sorry.
“I know why they left,” she said instead. “I was about to tell you.” She freed her finger from the thin magic book and spread it open on the counter. “I think the spirits are in danger.”
“Danger? What kind?” Isabel leaned to read the book, but Tía Paloma snatched it away first, her fingers skimming down the page until she slammed the book back onto the counter.
“Of course.” She sighed. “You had that hunch, Isabel. Their energy is being depleted by being here. So if we don’t get them back, they’ll—”
“Disintegrate,” Leo said. The world sounded even scarier spoken aloud.
Tía Paloma pursed her lips. “Did you tell them about this, Leo?”
“No!” Leo hunched her shoulders, cheeks burning. “I mean . . . just Abuela. And Mrs. Morales saw the page too. But they’re the ones who told me not to tell anyone, and to go get you so you could—”
Oh. Mrs. Morales had sent her away on purpose, and she had fallen for it. She hugged her arms across her stomach, where the fear tentacles mixed with embarrassment. It wasn’t so much fun to be on this side of tricking people into doing what you wanted.
“I don’t get it,” Caroline said. She was looking at the book. “It sounds like they’re going to . . . die?” Her forehead wrinkled. “But they’re already dead.”
“They’ll lose themselves.” Isabel spoke quietly. She reached for the book and flipped the pages, lifting it to her face and scanning. “They won’t be able to hold themselves together anymore, so they’ll break into pieces. Become nothing.”
“Everything,” Leo corrected, remembering how Abuela had described el Otro Lado. “She said they become everything. But it didn’t sound like a bad thing.”
“And in el Otro Lado, it’s not.” Abuela appeared at the open back door, her eyes tired and her steps heavy. “But on this side of the veil, it’s a different story.” Her eyes fell. “I’m sorry. I tried to stop them. But that mayor went and gave a rousing speech, and it turns out I’m not much good at convincing people when I can’t use my influence.”
“What did the mayor say?” Caroline asked. “What do they want?”
“If this is about running out of energy and disintegrating, shouldn’t they stay here instead of tiring themselves out around the city?” Isabel added.
Abuela sat heavily at the kitchen table. “They’re afraid,” she said. “Miguel Antonio wants to go apologize to his sister, and that teacher wants to tend to his piano, and so on. They know they’re running out of time, and the mayor stirred them up asking how they would want to spend their last hours before they . . .” Abuela waved her hands in the air and fluttered a few petals into a coffee mug. “Poof. Into nothing, like dust. We’ll be real ghosts then, the kind that are lost. Broken, like La Llorona.” Leo offered Abuela a fresh cup of coffee and got a weary smile in return. Abuela cupped the warm mug in both hands and took a sip before she continued.
“In el Otro Lado, you can flow like water. Be yourself, or not yourself, just following the current and drifting in the possibilities. El Otro Lado is where magic operates, where objects can be drawn out of thin air and where emotions take shape and form and can be altered. Where spirits walk and talk and stay safe.” She shook her head. “Without the magic to protect us, we’ll fade and scatter, and then we won’t be able to find our way back to ourselves. Or any of the things and people we love.”
“That’s horrible.” Isabel sank into a chair next to Abuela, reaching for her grandmother’s hand and clinging tightly to it.
“We’ll have to unravel the spell,” Tía Paloma said, voice thick as she hid her face behind the book she had returned to reading. “As soon as possible.”
“We have to find the spirits,” Leo said. Their escape might put them in more danger by speeding up the process of disintegration, but it also put them in danger of being caught. Since she had let them escape, any confusion or chaos they caused to the town—or to her family, by giving away their secret—was her fault.
“I have to read this.” Caroline held up her diary from the attic. “I need to know more about my family magic. I need to understand what I did.”
Leo nodded. “You need Tía Paloma to help you, and Isabel,” she said. “So it’s up to me to go after the spirits.”
She puffed out her chest, waiting for the arguments to come. You’re too young, too small, you’ll make a mess of it. Leave it to someone else, Little Leo. Don’t worry about it. She wasn’t going to accept it, wasn’t going to sit back and watch everyone else be part of the solution while she sat on the sidelines. Not anymore.
“Of course,” Isabel said. “That makes sense.”
“Thank you, Leo,” Tía Paloma said, squeezing Leo’s shoulder.
“Use my bike,” Caroline offered. “You should be able to catch up with them if they’re all walking.”
Leo nodded, trying not to show her surprise. She was going to fix her mistake, and they believed in her.
It wouldn’t just be a matter of following a trail, not if all the spirits had split up and the petals were scattered by the wind. And even if she had a guess about where each spirit might be heading, this wasn’t like a game of hide-and-seek. She also had to bring them back, and they weren’t going to come with her willingly.
How could she gather them all without making a scene and giving away their presence to the living people of the town? What if she couldn’t get them back in time, and they disintegrated? What if this was more than she could handle?
Her doubts threatened to leak out of her mouth like pineapple jelly out of an empanada, but then her train of thought was interrupted by the blare of a phone. Caroline jumped, rushed to the wall next to the refrigerator, and answered with a high-pitched “Hello?”
The whole kitchen held its breath.
“Hello?” Caroline said again. “Is anybody there?” After a few long seconds, she pulled the phone from her ear, shrugged, and hung it back on its base. “Nobody,” she said. She pressed a button on the phone. “Caller ID didn’t
recognize it. I thought it would be my dad checking in again, but I guess it was a wrong number?”
A mysterious call on a morning already full of spirits back from the dead was plenty spooky, but Leo wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking how she had called Caroline not too long ago, hoping to ask for help, and how that call hadn’t gone the way she’d expected at all. She was back in the same position now, with too many imaginary timers ticking down to zero, and not enough people to deal with the problems. Maybe she should try a similar solution.
“Caroline,” she said. “That reminds me. Can I borrow your cell phone? Um, in case I need to call when I’m out tracking the spirits.” She was being sneaky again, but only a little. Caroline would understand later. She hoped.
“Sure.” Caroline patted the pockets of her shorts. “I thought I had it. . . . I guess I left it in my room.”
Leo followed Caroline through the living room, past the ladder to the attic in the middle of the hallway. They entered Caroline’s room, and Leo stood in the doorway as her friend dug through her unmade bed and checked her bookshelves looking for her phone. Caroline’s room had a new border of sunflowers and butterflies stenciled along the top of each wall, adding to the other hand-painted decorations. Mr. Campbell might need a new outlet for his creative energy.
On the bedside table Leo found the stolen candle—a fat yellow one, burned down now, with its tall sides curling up over the blackened wick deep in the center. Caroline had placed it next to the photo of her family, and in front of one of the flyers from this year’s Rose Hill Day of the Dead Festival. Leo wondered if those could have contributed to the spell, but then, the bedside table also held a book about dragons, and the candle hadn’t summoned any of those (that she knew of). She was glad Isabel and Tía Paloma were working on the reversal spell, but she did want to learn more about how it was done. There was so much she didn’t know.
“How did it happen?” she asked. “And how did you know what was going on? I’ve never done a spell by accident, but it sounds scary.”
“Well, I have been hanging out with you for the past three months,” Caroline said. “So I guess I knew that what I was doing might cause something to happen. But at first I was confused. Mayor Rose was the first one to show up, just knocked on the door a few minutes after my dad left for work. And he can be really . . . intense. Then Mr. Nguyen, and Mr. Pérez did the same thing. I almost thought the reyes magos had come early.”
Leo laughed. The three spirits would make an odd trio of Christmas wise men. “I had Abuela with me,” she said. “So I knew she was a spirit already. Well, I thought she was a ghost, but then we figured out she was, you know, touchable.”
Caroline nodded. “That’s good. I wasn’t sure. Mayor Rose kept saying he had been ‘sent’? I guess he was talking about the spell, but I thought he meant he was the plumber or something.”
The explanation felt off to Leo. “You think the spell sent him to your house? Or drew him here? Why didn’t Abuela feel it, then, or Mrs. Morales or Old Jack?”
“I don’t know, but what else could have made three spirits knock on my door?” Caroline asked. “Maybe the other three were just the most stubborn ones.”
Leo laughed and Caroline smiled. Her eyes darted around the room and her hands fiddled restlessly with her green beaded bracelet. “Where could my phone be?” she asked, biting her lip. “I had it when you called earlier, and I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Did you bring it up to the attic?” Leo asked, checking between the piles of books Caroline kept on her desk because her bookshelf was too crowded. “When did you last have it?”
“This morning I was in the living room when you called, but then I came here”—Caroline turned to her bedside table—“to check that the candle was out. I thought that if your grandma had just appeared, the spell might still be going.” She opened her closet and stared inside for a minute before shaking her head and closing the door. “But you said she showed up earlier, in the morning, right?”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “At like seven o’clock.” She knelt to check under the ruffled edge of Caroline’s bed, but all she found were dust bunnies and marigold petals.
“Seven?” Caroline asked. “Are you sure? That means we’re off again.”
“Off what?” Leo had run out of searching ideas, so she smoothed out a spot on the comforter and settled onto the bed. This was why Isabel was always the one who found things in the Logroño house—she had more patience.
“Off on our count.” Caroline came to stand by the bed, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I have a theory that matches up, see? Because I lit the candle at midnight, and I thought I blew it out a little before seven—but I’m not positive. It could have been a few minutes after.”
“What difference does it make if it was before or after seven?” Leo asked.
“Well, the ghosts—the spirits—didn’t all show up at the same time,” Caroline explained, sitting on the bed next to Leo. “Some came in the middle of the night, and some closer to dawn, and your grandma even later in the morning. They were all spaced out.” Leo nodded, but Caroline must have known she wasn’t following. She bounced on the bed as she continued, “I think one ghost came through each hour. So one at one a.m., one at two, and so on. If I blew the candle out at six fifty-something, six ghosts. But if I blew it out after seven . . .”
“Oh.” Leo made a face. She hoped there wasn’t one more spirit running free around town. “I guess we have to hope that you blew it out in time. Except . . . you know you’re not supposed to blow out spell candles, right?”
Caroline shrugged. “No, I didn’t know.”
“You’re never supposed to,” Leo said, proud to share information memorized from her study packet. “It weakens the magic. Your spell was strong enough anyway, I guess. But it’s a bad habit. Tía Paloma says brujas always cover their flames.”
Leo knew she was being a little bit of a sabelotodo. But she couldn’t help it—she never got to be the one explaining a magic idea to someone else. And maybe she did let her voice get a little bit snooty, like Isabel sometimes did when she lectured.
But she didn’t expect her words to make Caroline drop her head into her hands and burst into tears.
“Caroline?” Leo asked. “Are you . . . ?” Her friend’s shoulders shook, so Leo decided not to finish that question. “It’s okay,” she said instead.
“No, it isn’t.” Caroline’s voice was muffled but firm. “This is all wrong. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing! I’m not a real bruja. This is all a disaster. I put people—ghost people—in danger. And if the whole town finds out about them? So many things could happen, and they’re all bad! And why are you smiling at me?”
“I’m sorry!” Leo covered her mouth with her hands. “I’m sorry, I’m not smiling at anything you’re saying. I’m just . . . smiling.”
“It doesn’t seem like anything to smile at.” Caroline pouted.
“No,” Leo agreed, “it’s just that . . . well, those were all the same things I was thinking in November. I get it, and it’s my turn to tell you that everything’s going to be okay.”
Caroline wiped her nose on the sleeve of her flannel shirt. “Nothing you did was nearly as bad as this.”
Leo hopped off the bed, because this required her to put her hands on her hips and stomp her foot for good measure. “Caroline Campbell, did I hear you correctly? Are you saying that your magic mishap is worse than mine? The whole entire school practically saw my love spell backfire! I shrank a boy! The police were out looking for Brent! Your spell hasn’t made anyone call the police.”
“Not yet,” Caroline said, sticking out her bottom lip. “Not that we know of.”
“Not at all,” Leo insisted. “And nobody is going to. You’re going to fix this, and then, well, then you’ll figure out a way to learn more about your magic. And you’ll practice and you’ll get better—even if it’s slow and boring sometimes—and we’ll be the two best brujas in to
wn. You’ll see.”
Caroline let out a long breath. “You think so?”
“Of course,” Leo said. “Didn’t you believe in me when I had to make an unraveling spell to unshrink Brent?”
“Um . . .” It was Caroline’s turn to smile. “Maybe . . . ?”
Something buzzed on the other side of the room, making both girls jump and interrupting Leo’s offended gasp. “My phone!” Caroline stood up and followed the buzzing underneath one of the open books on her desk. “That’s so weird—how did it get . . .” She held the phone to her ear. “Hello? Hello-o-o?” She hung up, shrugging. “It’s a blocked number,” she said. “Like when you use star sixty-seven. My mom taught me that trick when I was tiny so we could prank call my aunts.”
Leo wondered who would want to call Caroline with a blocked number.
“Here.” Caroline held out the phone to Leo. “You should get going. Sorry it took me so long to find it.”
“Thanks,” Leo said. “That’s weird, though. The mystery calls.”
“Maybe it’s just a bad connection,” Caroline said, nodding like she was trying to convince herself. “We had a problem with that a couple years ago, when every time my grandma would try to call, it would cut out and we wouldn’t hear anything. . . .”
Leo nodded too, even though she wasn’t entirely convinced. With the way her and Caroline’s day had been going, it seemed more likely to be a seventh spirit or a dragon or some other wild explanation.
“I should call her!” Caroline smacked her forehead. “My grandma. I can ask her if she knows anything about the curanderos in our family. I won’t reveal your secrets, but I can at least talk.”
“Great idea,” Leo agreed. “We need all the help we can get.” She had an urge to tell Caroline her plan, the real reason she wanted the cell phone. Caroline would understand. “In fact, I was thinking that—”
“Leo.” Isabel knocked on the open door and peered into Caroline’s room. “Are you ready to go?”
Leo clamped her mouth shut and wrapped her hand tightly around Caroline’s cell phone. “I’m ready.”