Waywood

by Sarah Goodwin

  I shake my head, refusing to take them. “I’m done with that, I can’t do magic anymore. I won’t.”

  None of them look angry, just serious, like they won’t take no for an answer. The girl raises her hand and the topmost Grimoire opens, its pages turning until it reaches the last spell. I know that the last page was blank when I’d looked before, but now it has words on it, written neatly in black biro.

  There are more.

  I jump awake, fighting the duvet and nearly falling off the edge of the mattress. I turn the lamp on, sending a stack of CDs flying off of the bedside table. The room’s empty.

  The door opens and Mum pokes her head around it, looking worried.

  “What was that?”

  “Just the CDs,” I get out of bed and start picking them up.

  “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “No, I just can’t sleep.”

  Mum nods sadly. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”

  “OK,” I say, wanting her to just leave me alone so I have a moment to think.

  The door closes and I straighten out the duvet. The problem with being a witch is that you can never be sure if something’s just a stupid nightmare. I’m fairly sure it was all a dream this time, after all how can there be more sacrifices? The ritual’s complete now. I’m living proof of that.

  When my hand closes around the Grimoire, half lost under the duvet and bedspread, I flinch. I pull it out and turn the pages, stopping on the last one, knowing what I’ll find.

  There are more.

  Save them.

  So it was real, but who are these people I’m meant to save? Other witches? I don’t know what to do, but the knowledge that something of Waywood has followed me to my parent’s house makes me shudder.

  Mum comes back up the stairs and I stuff the Grimoire down the side of the mattress out of sight.

  “There you are,” she says, setting down my Little Mermaid mug. She reaches over and strokes my messed up hair. “Try and get some sleep.”

  “I will.”

  I drink the hot chocolate and lie back down, but I can’t force myself to turn the light off. The red numbers on my alarm clock tick towards morning as I lie stiffly in bed, looking at the shadows.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Next morning Dad does a cooked breakfast and we eat it in tense silence. Afterwards I get dressed and come downstairs to find him and Mum sitting on the sofa together. Both of them must have called work and taken the day off. Though, thinking about it, I don’t know what day it is. Without school to think about and being away from town for so long I’ve stopped marking out the weeks in my head.

  “Michaela, we’d like to talk about where you were,” Dad says.

  “I told Mum already – sleeping rough with some other people.” I don’t want to sit down in the armchair across from them, but the alternative is standing in the doorway, so I sit down and fold my legs up under myself.

  “We just want to know what it was that made you come home. We’re both so glad you did, but we’re worried about what happened to you,” Dad says.

  “I was with someone and he died, Dad,” I say, “please can we just...I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Was he taking drugs?” Dad asks.

  “No!” My face goes hot.

  “But you told your Mum that some of these people were.”

  “That doesn’t mean he was.”

  “And they’re gone too?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” I can feel myself getting more and more upset. “Stop interrogating me. Why can’t you just be my Dad for once?”

  Dad snaps his mouth shut. I hate it when he treats me like someone’s he’s pulled into the station, he knows that.

  “Dad’s just worried about you,” Mum says, “if you’re scared of these people, or if something happened to them, we can help.”

  The sudden urge to laugh nearly overwhelms me. Even if I told them what I’ve been doing at Waywood, even if they believed me, there’s no possible way that either of them could help me. Even if one of them had the shade’s power before I was born, it’s mine now. I know from the Grimoire that only one person in each family can have it. I wonder who it was that gave me Ceridwen’s bloodline. I wonder if they knew what they had?

  “There’s nothing to help with,” I say, “it’s over. All of it. I just want things to go back to normal.”

  Mum and Dad share a look, like they want to push me.

  “I’ve said I don’t want to talk about it, so leave it alone,” I say, getting up and going to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Mum asks, a hint of panic in her voice.

  “Upstairs. I’m going back to school right? So I’ve got some stuff to sort out.”

  In my room I boot up the computer and check the day; it’s Friday. Three days until school, which I know I should get back to as soon as possible. Nothing could be as normal as sloping off to school in the morning and going through the routine of registration, lessons, break, lunch, more lessons and home again in time for Simpsons and dinner. I look through the wardrobe and find all my uniform stuff there, clean and ironed. My school bag’s at the bottom and I take it out and go through it; gel pens, hair ties, lipgloss, gum, three exercise books, pink pencil case and my planner.

  I flip through the exercise books. Maths, where all my sums are laid out neatly on the squared paper (quite a few ticked, even if there are a few red crosses on the most recent pages). There’s also English and French and I try to remember what we were doing in those before I became homeless. French was my last period on a Friday, the day I’d been kicked out. I take one of the hair ties and practice doing my hair up, put on some lip-gloss and look at myself in the mirror. I might be able to pull it off, I look like the old me.

  For the rest of the day and the weekend, I hang around inside the house watching TV or looking through the things in my bedroom; reading my old magazines and fiddling with my make-up and nail polishes. Mum and Dad treat me like I’m a bomb about to go off, but they don’t ask me any more questions about where I was. I think they want it to all be over and done with as much as I do. Mum hugs me extra tight every night before I go to bed. Even Dad gives my shoulder a squeeze before he leaves for his weekend shifts. I know they really have missed me, that they love me.

  I just wish it was easier to forget how I felt on the night they threw me out.

  By the time my alarm goes off at seven on Monday morning I’m bored out of my mind. With no one to talk to aside from my parents, who I have to keep lying to, I’ve missed Cray and the others more than ever. Even though it’s too early to be awake as far as my body is concerned I just want to get out of the house and into the noise and routine of school.

  I’m too anxious to eat any breakfast. As much as I want to go to school to get out of the house, I know that as soon as I walk through the gates there are going to be questions and staring and whispers behind my back. Chloe might not have told anyone she’d seen me, but that didn’t mean she’d kept her mouth shut. There was no end to the gossip she could have been spreading.

  “Call me if you want picking up,” Mum says, giving me a hug once I’ve put my coat on.

  “I will.”

  “OK, well...” she looks at the door, biting her thumb.

  “I’m coming back Mum.”

  “I know!” she waves me off like I’m being silly, but I can see how worried she is. “Just, have a good day.”

  “I’ll try,” I mutter to myself as I go down the front path.

  It’s weird, walking the route to school. It feels just like the first day I put on the red and grey uniform and walked there with Mum. As I get nearer to the school and start seeing other kids, familiar little groups, I get more anxious. It’s even worse when people start noticing me. A group of Year Twelve girls grab each other and I hear one say ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe she’d show her face!’ and a gang of boys nudge each other and drop thei
r bikes so they can get out their phones and film me. I feel my face getting redder and redder, my heart thumping wildly. The headache that’s been plaguing me the last few days gets worse, until the sun feels like it’s skewering my eyes.

  I walk right up to the school gates and make my way through all the whispering crowds. Year Sevens stop playing ‘It’ to watch me, Year Elevens stop chatting and stare, there are people holding up camera phones, people whispering and gleeful over the potential for gossip, a lot of them look sympathetic – it all makes me feel worse. A few kids get into step with me and ask me how I am, one girl touches my arm.

  “Fine. I’m fine,” I walk faster, so that I’m almost running by the time I get near the school building where my registration group is. I’m through the double doors and into my form room before I notice that there’s someone in there already.

  Chloe and Tasha are sitting on the desks at the front of the room. Tasha jumps up as I come in and swoops across the room to hug me. I don’t hug her back. She moves away from me, frowning.

  “Kayla?”

  “Told you,” Chloe says, folding her arms, “she’s being a bitch.”

  “Shut up,” I snap.

  Chloe pulls a face. “Ooo scary.”

  “Kayla, we’re your friends,” Tasha says, “we were really worried about you. Didn’t you get my texts?”

  “I got everyone’s texts. Like the one from Chloe that said you told her I never even called the night I got kicked out?” I watch Tasha’s face colour, “I came to your house. You wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I told her...just not right away.”

  “You mean when you thought you’d get into trouble for lying?”

  Chloe stands up and picks up her bag. “You’re acting like such a tight-arsed cow, especially considering you spent the last few months living in a flea infested sleeping bag with some wannabe pimp.”

  Tasha won’t look me in the eye.

  “So you told everyone I’m a prostitute?” I say.

  Chloe smiles, scrunching her nose the way she does when she’s really pleased with herself. “It might have come up.”

  I almost want to laugh. Since I last saw Chloe I’ve been psychically attacked, stabbed, drunk human blood killed someone and burnt a shade out of a human body. A few spotty morons thinking I’m on the game isn’t going to break me.

  “Well sadly they’ll be disappointed if they come round looking for anything like that,” I say, “but I can always give them your number.”

  Chloe narrows her eyes and Tasha glances at her, like she’s waiting for her to jump on me and claw me to bits. Thankfully at that moment my form tutor arrives with two or three kids in tow.

  “Girls, can you get to your own forms please,” she says, “registration started three minutes ago.”

  Tasha and Chloe give me death stares but leave the room. I go to the corner furthest from my tutor’s desk and get out my planner, trying to remember what lessons I have on a Monday. Unfortunately my first period is Maths, with Tasha. The rest of the day is all stuff that I don’t have with my former friends, but break times and lunch present another challenge altogether. I try to tell myself that it’ll be fine; I’ll just have to be one of those losers that reads through lunch.

  It’s an assembly day, but once we’ve filed into the hall and taken our seats the head just talks about the new recycling policies and reminds everyone that the field is out of bounds until summer. Mum phoned the school on Friday to tell them I’d be coming back this week and I know she told them not to make a fuss over it. She’d also set up a meeting with my form tutor for lunchtime so I could discuss catching up on work.

  I’m not used to fighting through the crowds anymore and everyone’s trying to get to their lessons at once. My headache is worse now and I’m fighting the temptation to start shoving people aside with magic, clearing the whole hallway for myself. I get to first period late. Everyone is already sitting at their desks, my space is next to Tasha. I sit down and get out my exercise book. Miss Drew glances at me but doesn’t say anything, any other time and she’d be ripping my head off for being late. She gets up and starts talking about converting fractions to percentages. I’m lost by the end of the first sentence.

  All the time Miss Drew is talking I keep my eyes on the board and copy down the methods she’s showing us. I don’t understand any of it, but my copy is perfect. I’m trying not to notice the way Tasha’s pointedly moved her chair all the way to the other side of the desk. We’re set some conversions to do by ourselves and the class goes from silent to buzzing with chatter in a matter of seconds.

  None of the work makes sense and after starting on a conversion and messing it up I just stare helplessly at the method I’ve copied down. It feels like someone’s trying to drill into my head with a hot poker. I press my hand against my head and close my eyes for a second.

  “Michaela? Do you need some help?” Miss Drew asks from the front of the classroom.

  A few people snort and whisper as I shake my head. Tasha sticks her hand in the air.

  “Miss?”

  “Natasha?”

  “Can I move seats Miss?”

  I grit my teeth, force myself to look at my exercise book and write down the next conversion, pretending I can’t hear the giggling and muttering around me. The back of my neck burns. Living with Cray and the others I’ve forgotten how mean people can be. None of the people at Waywood had anything, but they’d shared with me and listened to my shitty little problems, even though they’d been through worse.

  “No, Tasha,” Miss Drew says, a warning note in her voice, “have you solved any of these problems yet?”

  “No Miss. But she smells.”

  The hissing whispers get louder, someone throws a torn off bit of rubber at my head. It bounces onto the table in front of me. I bite my lip. My head hurts so much, it feels like my eyes are going to burn up in my skull. My palms are damp, my shirt stuck to me by a cold sweat.

  “Natasha, go and stand outside,” Miss Drew snaps.

  “She does though!” Tasha says, standing up and circling around the desk on her way to the door.

  “She does Miss,” says a guy behind me. It’s Ben Greenall, one of Chloe’s on-and-off boyfriends; gorgeous naturally and a prick, obviously. “It’s like someone did a shit in old yoghurt.”

  A chorus of disgusted noises goes around the room, some gleeful, some genuinely annoyed. Not everyone is enjoying the joke, but everyone is staring at me, I can feel the weight of all their eyes.

  “Quiet!” Miss Drew says, “or you’ll all be in detention at break time.”

  The noise dies down and Miss Drew puts some more conversions on the board, pausing to glance at me worriedly. I keep my face calm, like I didn’t hear any of what just happened, like I don’t care.

  I shouldn’t care. It was only an hour ago that I wanted to laugh in Chloe’s face because she would never experience half the things I’ve done. She’ll never have the kind of power that I have. Only, it’s power I can’t use. Her power, the kind you get by being blonde and thin and mean to everyone in that weird backwards-way where everyone laughs with you instead of calling you a bitch; that’s a power I could really do with. I might as well be the old Michaela, only now I don’t even have Chloe and Tasha pretending to like me. I’m all on my own.

  “Everyone stay quiet and finish the problems on the board, I’ll be right outside this door,” Miss Drew goes outside and closes the door, presumably so she can talk to Tasha. It doesn’t make me feel better, Tash’ll just hate me more now.

  Something hits my shoulder and falls onto the floor. I ignore it. Something else, the same kind of hard, pellet-like object, hits my hand and rolls across the desk. A penny. Another coin hits my hair and drops onto the carpet. They come quickly now, most hitting me, others missing and going to the front of the class. I can hear smothered laughter and one girl saying under her breath, “Dan, stop it.”

  I look down at the messed up conversions, where the le
tters swim and blur in front of me. I mustn’t cry. I know how this works and crying will only make it worse. Even ignoring it doesn’t work, but crying would be like bleeding into shark infested waters.

  “Did you see that?” It’s Ben again, poking me in the head with something, it feels like a ruler. “There’s nits in there. Eugh.”

  I jerk my head away. My palms are hot, there’s a scream building in my ears, the kind of sound that could shatter glass. I look down and see the blue numbers on the page sprout legs and scuttle over my hands like ladybugs. My mistletoe hand is shaking, the glamour cracking like a layer of paint. I stand up, swaying, panic starting to break through the calmness. The snickering of my classmates breaks through the soft silence.

  “She’s off her face,” someone says.

  “Miss!” Ben shouts, “Michaela’s high!”

  My hand starts to rise, power making the wooden joints of my fingers vibrate. The scream in my ears is coming from inside my brain, inside my bones. The energy inside me has me more charged than a pylon. I can’t shut it out, but I know that I have to try. If I let all that power out now, here, it could kill everyone, blast the walls to dust and it still wouldn’t be done. It’s like trying to cram a thousand lightning storms into my pocket, but I pull back on the energy that’s crackling through me.

  “Weirdo!” A shower of small change hits me in head. I’m not sure who said it but no one’s disagreeing. I can hear people muttering all around the room.

  “Quiet!” Miss Drew shouts, the door slamming shut behind her.

  Everyone obeys. I turn around to see Tasha glaring at me from behind Miss Drew.

  “What’s this mess on the floor?” she demands, pointing at the coppers and five pence pieces all over the carpet.

  “It’s so Michaela can buy some lunch Miss,” a guy from the back says.

  I look at the table and see that the living, scuttling letters have gone back to being gel pen lines, only now the numbers are all over the desk, not on my notebook.