For a moment, we’re both silent. Shadows fall on his cheekbones, and his lips part slightly. I have the sudden desire to be closer to them. I lean forward before I realize what I’m doing.
“How’s my dad?” I ask, bringing my heels back down to the ground.
“Well cared for.”
Good. “Did you find anything, or do you just like broom closets?”
A small smile forms on his lips. “I found the story of Cotton at George Burroughs’s hanging. You see, Cotton wrote another book about witchcraft called Wonders of the Invisible World after the Trials.”
I can barely understand Memorable Providences.
“After which, a man named Robert Calef wrote a book called More Wonders of the Invisible World. This contained the story of which you had the vision.”
“Why was Calef’s book title like Cotton’s?” I ask, realizing I’m still holding on to Elijah’s arm. I make no effort to let go. He feels so solid and alive.
“Robert Calef was making a commentary on the Witch Trials. He had a lot of unpleasant things to say about Cotton.”
“Wait, so Calef was Cotton’s enemy? And he boosted his own fame by destroying Cotton’s reputation?” I hear people bustling in the hallway, but I don’t care. “Then it’s possible that story about Cotton and Burroughs isn’t true? Why would Cotton show me a story some dude told to make him look bad?”
“It is hard to say. Cotton wrote in his journal that he did not believe Calef’s book would ever make it to print. And if it did, that none would take the book seriously. Tell me again what Cotton said about Burroughs after he recited the prayer.”
“Something about how wicked people can pretend to be good. So don’t let them deceive you.” I readjust my feet in the small space between the buckets, and my body brushes against Elijah’s for a moment. He puts his hand on my waist to steady me, and my stomach drops like I came over a hill too quickly.
He lets go. “Potentially, it is a metaphor. He may be pointing someone out, someone who seems good and is not.”
“Actually, if we take the whole Calef thing into consideration, it would be someone who spun a story about me and appears to be good but really sucks. Lizzie? I mean, she’s been awful to me, but everyone else in school thinks she’s awesome.”
“Or one of the other Descendants,” Elijah says.
The thought that Mary or Alice or Susannah could be my secret enemy makes my chest ache. Not Susannah. Anyone but her. “Did you get a chance to look for the cause of the rash?”
“No, but now is the perfect time—empty houses.”
The first bell rings, and I grab on to his shirt. I don’t want to go out there. I want to stay in this lemon-scented closet with Elijah. He knows all the weird things that are happening to me, and he doesn’t think I’m crazy; he thinks I’m special. Heat spreads through my body like flame with dry wood.
He lifts his hands up and holds my face. His fingers are gentle, and he brushes my hair back. “I’m right here with you. And I will be for as long as you need me. You are not alone.”
The comfort in his words wraps around me like a hug. He pulls my face toward him and kisses my forehead. Before I say a word, he blinks out. I’m left gripping the air where Elijah’s shirt used to be and feeling the weight of his absence. I flick off the light and exit into the sea of people.
I rush to my homeroom, and when I open the door the hostility is palpable. The Descendants’ seats are empty. I sit down in my usual place. Behind me, hushed voices discuss John’s death. The bell rings.
Mrs. Hoxley doesn’t need to quiet everyone. The room goes silent by itself. “There will be a special assembly this afternoon, an opportunity to discuss the tragedy that occurred yesterday. If anyone feels they need to discuss the event individually, please ask for a pass to the counselor’s office.”
I put my forehead in my hands. My tiredness and anxiety mix as my unbrushed hair falls around my face. I’m sure by now Alice and Mary know about my blunder at Susannah’s house. I had no idea they didn’t see the vision of John when I did. My telling it to them after what happened to John does look suspicious. Alice already suspects me as the cause of all this. If only I can explain. There’s no guarantee how much time we have before Susannah…I can’t even think about that. I won’t let the same thing happen to her.
The bell rings. I open my eyes, and my head feels heavy. On my way out, a guy bumps into me. I stumble, but he doesn’t turn around. Great, a day of this type of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they lynch me in that assembly. Wait, what if they do? My stomach rumbles with nerves and lack of food.
I make my way into history class and catch Jaxon watching me. I feel terrible, but I don’t know what to say. Lizzie’s not in her seat, either. Are all the Descendants together? Would Susannah have told Lizzie about my visit to her house? If so, this is all going to get a lot worse.
The bell rings.
“I’m not sure there’s a good way to begin today,” says Mr. Wardwell, and he proceeds with his lesson. I stare out the window, not listening.
What Elijah told me this morning about an enemy gnaws at me. It was definitely a warning. Cotton was furious when he said I was focusing on the wrong things.
Elijah blinks in, and I jump. Jaxon notices.
“I found something you will want to see,” Elijah says.
I raise my hand, but Mr. Wardwell doesn’t call on me. I can see the bathroom pass is already gone from his desk. He continues for a few more seconds while my hand is in the air.
“Yes, Sam.” Mr. Wardwell sounds annoyed.
Am I imagining it, or is he being a real jerk? Does he think I had something to do with John’s death, too? Maybe Jaxon was wrong; maybe Wardwell is a descendant. “May I have a pass for the counselor’s office?” I really don’t want to see Mrs. Lippy, but he can’t say no.
“Just go.” He waves his hand toward the door.
I grab my bag. As I pass one of the girls in the front row, she says, “Don’t come back.”
I rub my face as I enter the hallway. “What did you find?”
Elijah hands me a tiny piece of paper. I carefully unroll it. There are symbols written in black ink, smeared in places from some kind of liquid. “What is this?”
“That is parchment paper, and those symbols are a spell.”
I open my mouth to argue the legitimacy of this and remember the promise I made to my dad last night that I wasn’t gonna resist believing in this stuff. “Where was it?”
“Artfully concealed in a ruffle of the dress Susannah wore to the party.”
“So this was most likely the cause of the rash since she got it the worst, right?” I always assumed the rash somehow manifested by itself, like a sign of the apocalypse or something. “This doesn’t explain why I didn’t get the rash when everyone else did, though.”
“You see spirits, and have visions. You are many things, but typical is not one of them.”
Maybe this is what Cotton meant by his warning. “If Lizzie was trying to set me up, my not getting the rash would be the perfect way to do that.” Or Alice. Oh man, I so hope it’s not her.
One of the classroom doors near me opens and we start walking toward Mrs. Lippy’s office.
I should show this to the Descendants. Susannah would get that someone planted it and trace it back to Lizzie. Who else knows witchcraft besides these girls? “Oh no! Susannah came to my house before the party. That makes me a prime suspect.”
“I considered that.”
“Is there any way to prove who wrote this?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I stare at the little paper that possibly caused all this trouble. “Can I keep this?”
“Certainly,” Elijah says as we arrive in front of the counselor’s office.
My bad luck rears its head, and Mrs. Lippy steps out of the door. “I thought I heard a voice in the hallway. You’re in luck, Sam. I’m currently free.”
I take one last look at Elijah before he
blinks out, and step inside her office. I tuck the spell into my wallet and notice the business card Captain Bradbury gave me when he questioned me.
“I’m glad you came down here. It was the right choice.”
I was hoping this place would be packed and I would spend the rest of the period in the waiting room. I sit down at her desk.
“I imagine you’re here about the tragic event.”
I nod. “I’m not sure what to think.”
“Were you close to John?”
“He was in my class.”
“How did you feel when you saw him? You found him, correct?” If she knows this, everyone in the school knows I was the only one with him when he died.
I sigh. “Honestly? Numb. I couldn’t move.”
“And when the numbness left?”
I pause. “Guilt.”
She releases her breath as though she’s relieved we’re getting somewhere.
“I felt like I should have been able to stop it.” I hated John, but I didn’t want him to die.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Sam. It might help if we talk about the events leading up to this incident. See if we can find the source of the problem.” She pulls out a paper full of notes. “Have you been in any physical altercations recently?”
“As in physical fights? No.”
“Have you touched anyone and then realized they were sick shortly after?”
So much for my moment of honesty. “No.”
“Have you purposefully sabotaged anyone’s grade during a quiz?”
“I’m not sure I understand.” So this is the list of complaints Mrs. Lippy was trying to go over with me yesterday.
“Have you ever wished anyone ill will with your eyes?”
That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. “So people are coming in here making these crazy complaints about me? Or, their parents are?” Elijah was right. The whole school wants to vilify me. They might not openly attack me, but the result is the same.
“It may be that some of these are more of a stretch than others,” Mrs. Lippy concedes. “But this many people can’t all be wrong. I believe if we break this pattern you seem to have with the other students, we’ll get somewhere.”
Break this pattern? But it’s not my…Wait a second. Maybe I can break the pattern I have with them. Everything about this curse seems to be a pattern. If I can break one link in the chain, it might help. Elijah did compare my social situation here to the Witch Trials.
“Sam?”
“Sorry, Mrs. Lippy. I actually think you helped me figure something out.”
Mrs. Lippy beams. “All part of my job.”
I need some time to think this through. “Is there a place where I could sit quietly for a little while? An empty classroom or something?”
“It’s not exactly school policy.”
“You gave me a lot to think about. I’m afraid if I go back to class I’ll lose all this progress we’ve made.”
Mrs. Lippy wavers. “Are you sure we can’t talk this out?”
“Believe me, I have to think about things privately first. Then I can share.”
She nods and begins filling out a slip of paper. “This is for room one twenty-seven. It’s usually empty at this time.” She hands me the pass. “This will give you a half hour.”
“Thank you so much!” I smile at her, and she looks pleased. I pick up my bag and bolt out of her office.
As soon as I’m in the hallway, I start whispering Elijah’s name. By the time I open the door to the empty classroom, he is standing right in front of me. “You whispered?”
“Sorry,” I reply. “I don’t really know how else to get in touch with you.”
His face softens. “I do not mind if you call me.”
“Elijah, how do you know that I’m calling you if you aren’t watching me?”
“I have not quite figured it out myself. I believe it is correlated to the amount of time I focus on you. I must be tuned in to you. I can hear when you say my name. Names have power.”
I like that he’s tuned in to me. “I think I stumbled across something while talking to Mrs. Lippy. Did you know people were complaining that I messed up their grades and got them sick with my eyes and all kinds of nonsense?”
“Not exactly those things. But I did have an idea.”
“Remember how you said my situation is like the accused witches’ in the sixteen hundreds? And that silence is a death sentence.” He nods. “I was thinking my situation is more like that than I initially thought. That it might all be part of a larger pattern.”
“Elaborate.”
“So, the deaths occur in a pattern. That we know. And we figured out that they were occurring only when descendants of all the main Witch Trials families were in Salem at the same time. What if the pattern is more complex than we thought? What if the original Trials are re-created? As in, the same basic thing happens, just in a different form. In this case, it would be my being accused as a witch and everyone else falling in line to kill me off, at least metaphorically.”
He tilts his head. “It is a better rationale than anything we have come up with thus far.”
“Right?” I’m so excited that my sleepiness fades. “Let’s review the major causes of the Trials. Maybe if we stop some of those things from happening we can break the curse…or at least slow it down.” I pull out a piece of paper and pen to make notes. “To start with, there was Cotton’s book.”
“To start, we must look farther back. Witchcraft was a common crime in those times. In only a few hundred years there were upward of eighty thousand witchcraft executions in Europe. And before the Salem Trials, approximately fifteen people had been executed in New England.”
I wince. “So witchcraft was something that people accepted as real.”
“Indeed. And, as I have told you, Massachusetts Bay Colony was a Puritan community. The political leaders were all members of Puritan churches and consulted their ministers frequently. Puritans were Calvinist—all rituals besides the approved ones were associated with paganism.”
I write quickly in my notebook. “Basically, anything outside of the norm was jumped on as evil or something.”
Elijah nods. “Also, Salem Village was a quarrelsome place. Villagers fought over land and church-related matters. Almost every villager could come up with a list of complaints about his or her neighbors.”
That’s high school in a nutshell. “I bet once the accusations started flying, they spread like wildfire.”
“Certainly. Now, what you said about Cotton’s book was correct. It provided people with the information they needed to make their accusations plausible.” Elijah sounds regretful.
“So it was the perfect setting for things to get out of hand.” I pause for a moment. “Which is like my situation here. High schoolers immediately go for the throat of the different person. And once the war starts, it just rages on until someone is broken.”
Elijah frowns. “I guess witchcraft accusations have not disappeared. They have just transformed.”
I was hoping for a more straightforward task. “How am I going to change a whole system? Something that’s been happening forever?”
Elijah smiles at the word change. “I wanted you to understand the context of witchcraft accusations in Salem. We can look at it more specifically, examining which things are necessary to convict a witch.”
“Okay.” I’m more comfortable with that idea. “You tell me what happened during the Trials, and I’ll find the equivalent for my situation.”
I write in my notebook:
“To start with, you need a fearful community,” Elijah says. “In addition to what I have already said about the townspeople, the French and Indian battles made New Englanders particularly skittish. There were people in Salem who had been attacked, lost ones they loved, or were refugees. They feared the wilderness and were always ready for something bad to happen. They wanted something to explain their losses and fears.”
“Like a
ll the mysterious deaths and weirdness in Salem. Alice said they were looking for an explanation.”
Elijah nods. “And most of the accusations were formed by a select group of people.”
“The Descendants.”
“Once that group decided to turn against a witch, no one in the town would stand up for that individual. They feared that they would also be accused if they said anything.”
“My whole school’s scared to stand up to the Descendants, especially to Lizzie. Maybe the town is, too.” Connecting these dots is too easy. I don’t like it.
“Oftentimes, the complaints about the witch would increase in frequency. More townspeople would join in and reinforce the idea that there was something wrong with that person.”
“The complaints Mrs. Lippy read…”
Elijah nods. “Then proof was provided in the form of physical harm and visions, going so far as to blame past murders on the witch.”
“The rash and John’s death.” It’s pretty morbid.
“The evidence was reviewed by the magistrates and the community in the court. When everyone agreed that the evidence was sufficient, the witch took a hanging sentence.”
My heart pounds. There’s no way they could hang me, right? Even if it’s a metaphor, the idea is sick and disturbing. My mind goes to the drawing in the dirt at Gallows Hill Park and the noose on my coffee cup. “On this one, I got nothin’.”
“I’m not sure what could be the equivalent of going to trial,” I say. “Also, most of those things have already happened. I can’t stop them. Was it ever possible to escape a death sentence?”
“Occasionally, yes. But that individual needed a good deal of support and a way to make her voice heard. You will need an audience and you will have to be convincing.”
My stomach drops so low, I feel it in my toes. “Like a speech?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He pauses, and I know what he’s going to say next. “Also, our courts were not formal the way you might imagine them. They were more of a community event. Will the school gather to discuss John’s death?”
How to Hang a Witch Page 20