The Cursed First Term of Zelda Stitch. Bad Teacher. Worse Witch.

by Nicki Greenberg

  Reluctant as I am to ask Barnaby’s opinion on anything right now, I did want to consult him about the sparkles. I saw them in class today, zipping about at the edge of my vision like tiny glowing insects. I haven’t experienced that kind of thing since I was a kid, around the time my witchling started. Why have they come back now?

  I’ve never heard of anyone going through a second witchling, but maybe my powers are having some kind of surge? I’m not sure how I feel about this. It would be nice to have a bit more magic (and finally get Mother off my back about Not Reaching my Potential), but I’m scared that I won’t be able to control it.

  My head feels tingly, too. Maybe from the effort of holding magic in all week?

  Saturday 8 February

  The tingling all over my head has become itching. I’ve definitely never experienced this before. Can it be dangerous to bottle up magic for too long? Do I need to release it somehow? I’ll ask Briony tonight.

  PS – Just discovered that Barnaby borrowed my favourite silk chiffon scarf last night (without asking, naturally) and now it is torn down one side, and has a horrible oily stain. Maybe that’s why he has been avoiding me this morning.

  Saturday, 6pm

  Hex, hex, HEX! Absolute horrors! The itching on my head has nothing to do with magic. I have head lice!!! I looked in the mirror to do my hair, and actually saw one of them crawl across my forehead!!!!! Disgusting! This must be why Barnaby has been avoiding me – he hates parasites of any kind.

  It’s too late to go to the chemist to buy lice shampoo, let alone put it in and comb it out again. I’ll have to wear a hat tonight and try not to scratch. I would be absolutely mortified if the others found out.

  Sunday 9 February

  Dinner with the girls last night started off badly but ended up quite well. By the time I arrived to meet them, the itching was unbearable. All the way there I tried to force myself under control: I did equations in my head, I jammed my hands into my pockets and pinched the skin on my legs until they bruised. But it was impossible; I felt like ripping my own head off.

  I walked into the restaurant with my eyes watering and my face twitching, and the minute I sat down both my hands leapt up, dived inside my hat and started clawing desperately at my scalp. There was no way to hide it, so I had to confess that I’d caught lice. Amanita instantly grabbed her own hair and squealed ‘Eeeeeeh! Nits from the little nasties!’ at the top of her voice, then shrieked with laughter. I actually hated her for a second, I was so full of itchy misery. And shame: I fully expected to be thrown out of the restaurant.

  Briony saved me, whisking me into the bathroom so she could spin a quick spell to get rid of the bugs. We squished into a cubicle together, and as she said the words, I saw the revolting things drop out of my hair and onto the floor. All those bristly legs! Ugghhhh! I couldn’t bear to look at them. Briony was so calm and practical and nice about it, though. She didn’t even flinch when a few dead lice fell on her dress. I made sure to memorise the spell in case I ever need it again (UGH), but whether it will work when I do it is anyone’s guess.

  The restaurant was called Pixies, would you believe. Jessamyn’s choice, of course. It was like stepping straight into one of her ElfinFire books. Seats shaped like giant toadstools, walls painted with enchanted forest scenes, twisted oak branches spanning the ceiling, and glittery fairy statues peeping out among the leaves. The waiters were dressed in green elf jerkins, and they even had on fake pointy ears! Ordinaries just looooove this sort of thing. The fantasy of magic, I mean. They eat it up. But as soon as it is real, they completely freak out.

  Anyway, I could put up with the tacky elves and fairies. But at the back of the room, set into the wall, was a huge fibreglass cave dripping with glowing stalactites, and inside it was a life-size mannequin of a capital-W Wicked Witch, straight out of every fairytale ever. Black pointy hat, black cloak, hooked nose, evil grin, and a bubbling cauldron with green smoke coming out of it. And a broomstick in the corner, of course.

  Jessamyn looked sniffy when I asked why we would ever want to come to a place like Pixies. She gave me an irritated eye-roll and said, ‘It’s called hiding in plain sight, Zelda,’ as if I wasn’t very bright.

  According to Jessamyn, most Ordinaries assume that witches look like the Halloween hag in the corner, not like us. Which makes Madam Cackle the perfect decoy. In her fake fairyland we can talk about whatever we like without worrying about making anyone suspicious. Plus, Jessamyn figures this is the last place anyone would expect to find a real witch.

  I muttered, ‘Yeah, a real witch with any taste.’ But then Amanita chimed in, saying that lots of witches come to Pixies now, it’s become very cool, didn’t you know?

  I looked around, but all I could see were pretend elves and a whole lot of Ordinaries gawping at the scenery. Well, I assumed they were Ordinaries, but who knows? Maybe Amanita was right. Still, I was feeling quite cranky, what with the nits and everything, so I asked Jessamyn whether hiding in plain sight was what her books were about, too, and did she put in all those ridiculous warts-and-cauldrons characters just to throw people off the scent? Because I don’t think she is helping us witches at all, she’s just making the Ordinaries even more afraid of us.

  We might have ended up having a really bad argument, but Briony smoothed things over, saying that we shouldn’t fight, we were here to celebrate my new job. She gave a toast and said how happy they all were for me.

  I told them about my first week, and Amanita said, ‘I don’t know how you do it, putting up with those smelly little gruesomes all day, and not disappearing a single one of them.’ Ha ha – Amanita has about as much patience as Barnaby when it comes to children.

  I do wonder which one of them gave me nits, though.

  Monday 10 February

  Mystery solved. The nurse visited today to check the children’s hair and found the worst infestation of her entire career on Blake’s head. She gave me a disgusted look and said it was ‘astonishing’ that I hadn’t detected Blake’s ‘condition’ earlier. Then she made me read a revolting Health Department pamphlet full of close-up photos of lice sucking blood out of people’s scalps. It was certainly educational.

  Blake was trying not to cry as he went off to wait at the front office for his mum to pick him up, and I knew exactly what his agony of itching and embarrassment felt like. It made my scalp fire up just remembering it. There were quite a few whispers and giggles among the rest of the group as he left, poor thing.

  I told the class that anybody can get head lice, and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Then Zac asked if Blake had caught them from me because it looked like I was scratching my head with my pencil! The giggles turned into outright laughter. I lied and I said that I hadn’t had lice since I was a kid. The lying made me stumble over my words, and I felt like a complete hypocrite and a fool at the same time.

  MM happened to walk past our classroom just at that moment, and from the frowny look on her face I could tell that she’d seen the class laughing at me. I tried to grin as if I was in on the joke, but she was already walking off, swishing her perfect ponytail (which no louse would ever dare enter).

  It was quite a struggle trying to get the class back on track. Is this what MM meant last week with that sarcastic ‘So far, so good’? Maybe she could tell right from the start that my control over the class was an illusion?

  Before I could stop myself, I glanced over at Phoebe to check her reaction. She was staring determinedly at her notebook and biting the end of her pen. Does she talk to MM about me??

  Tuesday 11 February

  I am definitely not as firmly in charge as I thought I was. This morning I caught Zinnia imitating me. She was twirling a pencil in her hair the same way I do (it is not scratching, by the way, it’s just what I do when I’m concentrating), and she had a silly look on her face – presumably like I did.

  This was embarrassing and it was obviously not helping me maintain whatever scraps of authority I might possess. But the
n I saw that she was doing something even worse. She was fluttering her fingers like she was preparing to set off a spell. Which could only mean one thing. My fingers must have been doing that, and I hadn’t even realised it! I dropped my left hand so hard onto the desk that my eyes watered. The class collapsed into giggles. I was far too rattled to properly deal with Zinnia’s obvious breach of Rule #4, so I told her feebly that if she disrupted the class again she would have to pick up litter at recess. It’s my own fault: I’ve definitely let her get away with too much already. Barnaby was right about this, not that I’d admit it to him.

  Perhaps (hopefully!) it was just my imagination, but I got the feeling that Eleanor was watching me very closely while all this was going on. She wasn’t laughing like the others, but looking at me with steady, suspicious eyes. Surely she couldn’t know that fluttering fingers means spells brewing? Or could she? She does seem to know an unhelpfully large amount about all kinds of things.

  I need to be much, much more careful from now on. I wasn’t even thinking about any spells, let alone planning to let one go. Though I did see those sparkles again today, which is also disturbing. I know they’re invisible to Ordinaries, but they still make me nervous. What do they mean??

  Wednesday 12 February

  Absolutely furious with myself. Furious and horrified. You would think that after yesterday’s close call, I’d be in magic lockdown. You would think I’d do everything in my power to hold it in. But no. Today I threw a spell in the middle of class.

  In my defence, I got a fright. A big one. And I didn’t mean to do it. The spell leapt out of me automatically, like when your hands jump up to deflect a ball that’s flying at your head (Barnaby says most people would catch the ball instead, but nobody has ever forced him to play softball). Anyway, it wasn’t a ball, it was a spider. And I still Cannot Handle Spiders.

  I’m going to force myself to write about this because I know it’s stupid to be so pathetically frightened of what is basically a bug. Maybe if I can write about spiders without getting the shakes, I might somehow eventually begin to cope with them in real life. I have serious doubts, though. I still feel queasy with fear just thinking about how Mother used to let her pet tarantulas wander around on the dinner table (‘Oh, sit down, Grizelda! They’re only being friendly!’).

  It wasn’t even a real spider today, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. I just opened my desk drawer, and the hideous, hairy thing sprang out at me, right into my face. My hands shot up, and – Bam! – the spell was out. As if in slow motion, I saw the spider freeze in front of my hands. Then it flew up towards the ceiling. The whole class went, ‘Oooooh!’, as its spring caught in the blades of the ceiling fan, and the horrible thing started whizzing around and around the room.

  At that stage (gibbering with terror) I hadn’t entirely understood that it wasn’t real. All I knew was that a whopping huge spider was flying around above my head. But bit by bit, reality edged in through the fog of fear, and I could see (peeking pathetically from behind my chair) that it was just a toy. Disgusting, very large and lifelike, but just a toy.

  Of course my relief was immediately overwhelmed with a new wave of horror. I’d just thrown a repel spell in front of twenty children, all of whom had undoubtedly been watching me with intense anticipation when I opened that drawer.

  I pulled myself shakily to my feet, scrambling for something to say, some lie I could tell about what they’d just seen. But no one was looking at me. They were laughing, throwing scrunched-up paper balls at the spider and climbing on their desks to try and grab it mid-swing. It was only when Zac yelled out, ‘Nice throw, Ms Stitch!’ that I realised I had got away with it. They hadn’t understood what I’d done. They just assumed that I had caught the spider mid-spring and flung it at the fan. Obviously they’ve never seen me attempt to catch anything before.

  I can’t let this happen again. Next time I might not be so lucky.

  PS – It’s only just occurred to me to wonder which of those little monsters put the spider in my drawer. I bet I can guess, though.

  Thursday 13 February

  A leak! An actual leak. Oh, stinkhorn, this is way, way worse than yesterday’s debacle. Because this time I have absolutely no idea how it happened. It was a correction spell, of all things. And I didn’t feel it happening at all. No tingling. No flow of heat down my arms. Nothing. But I definitely did it: my mistake on the whiteboard corrected itself right in front of my eyes, just as I finished writing the word. It was an embarrassing one, too. Would you believe, I wrote recieved. Ugh! ‘“I” before “E”, except after “C”’! Zelda, you massive clunker.

  I forced myself to turn around and face the class. My throat was so tight I couldn’t speak, not that I had any idea what to say. I could feel myself flinching, anticipating the exclamations of surprise and accusation. But, amazingly, the room was quiet. Maybe my big head was blocking their view of the whiteboard, or maybe I’d just been saved by the after-lunch drowsies, but once again, nobody seemed to have noticed a thing. They were mostly slumped in their seats, daydreaming, and paying me no attention at all. Phoebe was writing in her notebook, and Eleanor was fiercely sharpening her pencil.

  I rapped on the whiteboard with the end of my marker, and said, much too sternly: ‘Right! Wake up everyone! I want you to write at least one page answering this question: “What is the best advice you’ve ever received?”’

  Then I dropped into my chair and tried to stop the shaking in my hands.

  How can I avoid leaks if I can’t even feel the warning signs? I could really use some advice right now, but after all my bragging to the gang, I’m too embarrassed to tell them. And there’s no way I’m asking Barnaby. Especially after what he did to me this evening.

  As if my day hadn’t been bad enough, I got home to find that the evil little flea bag had completely destroyed all the homework assignments I was planning to mark on the weekend. He was sitting in the middle of the lounge room on top of a huge nest of shredded paper and grinning while he cleaned between his toes. I am furious.

  I got a phone call from Mother right afterwards, which did not help my mood one bit. I couldn’t help telling her about Barnaby’s latest outrage, to which she replied: ‘I don’t understand it, Grizelda, he always behaves beautifully for me when I mind him. Goodness me, I can’t imagine how you’re managing to keep an entire classroom of little grubs in order!’

  I said that in actual fact I have the best-behaved class in the school and that they’ve given me no trouble whatsoever. Luckily Mother couldn’t hear Barnaby snickering on the couch. I haven’t told him anything about school, but he knew perfectly well that I was lying.

  Mother said she would be in town on the weekend for her Cauldron Club, and asked if she could stay at my place. What is a Cauldron Club, and why is Mother in one?? No doubt I will find out on Saturday, in great detail.

  PS – I saw Ben during our library session today. I asked him if he’d read any of Jessamyn’s books, and he said yes, all of them, and they were brilliant! Ugh! I can’t believe he has such bad taste. Of course I didn’t say this to him. Instead I told him that Jessamyn is an old friend of mine, and he got quite excited, suggesting that maybe we could invite her to speak at the school. Huh. I don’t think so.

  Friday 14 February

  Marvellous day! It just shows you never can tell when a bucket of mud might turn into gold! It’s Valentine’s Day, and guess what I got? A new pet! Meet my darling little dog, Pom Pom. He’s tiny and fluffy, and he’s got loads of personality. And the best part? He’s completely imaginary.

  Let me explain…

  I came in to school feeling awful, because (a) I was terrified about having another leak, and (b) I had to confess to the class that their assignments had been destroyed ‘in an accident’. There were whistles and cheers from all around the classroom, and an indignant gasp from Eleanor, who had done an elaborate project twice as long as anyone else’s.

  Almost immediately the class
erupted with shouts of ‘What happened?’ ‘Did they catch fire?’ ‘Did you drop them in the bath?’ and so on. And then Zinnia yelled out ‘Did your cat eat them?’

  I panicked, wondering how on earth she knew I had a cat. All I could think was that she had guessed the truth about me. And before I could stop to really consider it, I found myself calling out above the laughter: ‘Cat? Oh, no, ha ha! I don’t have a cat! I have a dog. A puppy! His name is Pom Pom, because he’s so fluffy! White and fluffy! And yes, I’m afraid that cheeky little Pom Pom ate your homework.’

  The children were still laughing, but now it was a different sort of laughter. It was mixed in with cries of ‘Ohhh, that’s so cute!’ and ‘I have a Maltese Terrier! Is Pom Pom a Maltese?’ and so on. Suddenly there was something about me that made them all pay attention. Good attention, I mean. They seemed positively in love with the idea of my cute pet doggie and his homework-munching antics. And that’s when I had a moment of genius. I said that if everyone did their work and behaved beautifully, then at the end of class I would tell them a story about mischievous little Pom Pom, one that was even funnier.

  Believe it or not, this worked! They were perfect for the rest of the day. Well, almost. When I pulled the blinds down after lunchtime, out flew my old friend, the rubber spider. I couldn’t help letting out a strangled sort of scream, but this time my hands only jumped up to my chest. I didn’t hit the floor, and, most importantly, I didn’t throw a repel spell. Everyone laughed, of course, but I didn’t care. I was so flooded with relief that I laughed too.