Sticks & Stones

by Emily Jenkins

  “Excuse me!” The booming voice belonged to Principal Gonzalez. “I am ashamed of every single one of you,” he said, striding over and breaking the group apart. “Do not gawk at a fluxed student. You all should know better. Everyone, get to class—now!”

  Nory took one step before she felt Principal Gonzalez’s hand on her shoulder. “Except you, Nory Horace. Please get the wheelbarrow and take Bax to the nurse’s office.”

  Nory nodded and rolled it from her classroom.

  This time, there was no back way.

  This time everyone saw.

  Nory could feel them all judging.

  For Bax’s sake, she held her head high.

  * * *

  In his office, Nurse Riley was as cheery as ever. He accepted Bax in the barrow, but left him in a corner for the time being.

  Tiny Lacey was perched on the very edge of the cot. She glared at Nory.

  “Yes, I’m still small,” she said in a pinched voice. Her tiny arms were crossed across her tiny chest. Her tiny legs dangled over the vast distance between the cot and the floor. “The school will be hearing from my parents.”

  “Have you tried to unshrink her?” Nory asked the nurse.

  Nurse Riley nodded. “She’s looking at a trip to the hospital, I’m afraid. Her parents are sending an air taxi to transport her.”

  That was probably Aunt Margo. “Will the hospital doctors be able to fix her? Marigold couldn’t unshrink her toothbrush. Or her grandpa’s car,” Nory said.

  “Ah, but cars are cars and humans are humans. I bet they’ll find a way. They have a lot more experience than Marigold. Lacey will probably have to be small for a couple more hours, but these things happen, don’t they?”

  “No!” cried Tiny Lacey. “These things don’t happen! These wonkos are dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed at Dunwiddle!”

  “Let’s not get dramatic,” Nurse Riley cautioned. “I treat a lot more burns caused by Flares than I do small people caused by Marigold.”

  Tiny Lacey snorted. “Those are not the same at all,” she said, and pointed her puny finger at Nory. “You can tell Marigold that this is far from over.”

  Nory didn’t know what to say.

  So instead of talking, she fluxed into a dritten.

  She jumped up on the infirmary cot and loomed her dritten body over Tiny Lacey. Dritten-Nory flapped her wings and bared her teeth. “Roar!”

  Tiny Lacey screamed.

  Nurse Riley picked up Dritten-Nory under her kitten armpits and held her at arm’s length with one hand. With the other hand, he held her mouth closed so she couldn’t breathe fire. He carried her out in the hall and set her down gently. He told her to flux back and that she owed Tiny Lacey an apology.

  He was clearly annoyed.

  Nory did as Nurse Riley asked, but she wasn’t really sorry.

  In the UDM classroom, everyone took a while to settle down. Ms. Starr, wearing wide-leg red pants and a turquoise sweater, declared that now was a good time for a trust exercise. The students all had to bring their chairs into a circle and hold hands. Ms. Starr gave Andres a backpack full of bricks to wear, and strapped him to his chair with a bungee cord. Even so, he and the chair floated a couple of inches off the ground.

  “Now we’ll send a squeeze around the circle. I’ll squeeze Pepper’s hand, Pepper will squeeze Willa’s, and so on!” Ms. Starr said, smiling. “It’s like a current of electricity uniting us.”

  Nory’s hand felt sweaty. Bax still wasn’t back from Nurse Riley’s office. She squeezed Marigold’s hand when Elliott squeezed hers.

  She worried about the rocks in the hall.

  She squeezed Marigold’s hand when Elliott squeezed hers.

  She worried about what Tiny Lacey would do for revenge.

  She squeezed Marigold’s hand when Elliott squeezed hers.

  She turned into a puppy with squid legs.

  Zamboozle! thought Squippy-Nory. My tentacles are stuck to the floor. Am I still holding hands with—

  No. Elliott and Marigold had dropped Nory’s squid legs. They were staring at her.

  “What the zum-zum is that?” asked Marigold.

  Excuse me? thought Nory. Shouldn’t Marigold be extra polite about wonky magic after what she did to Lacey this morning?

  And also: Ooh, that sneaker smells good. Maybe I should chew it. Yeah. Yeah.

  And then: Who is that SCARY human wearing the sneaker?

  It was Pepper, of course. But Squippy-Nory couldn’t understand that. She had lost control of her human mind. All she could think was: Run! Hide!

  This was what Pepper’s fiercing magic always did. It frightened animals and sent them yowling and howling for the hills.

  Squippy-Nory scurried away from Pepper as fast as she could. Where could she hide? Oh! Yes! Wide red pant leg! Just the right size for a frightened squippy.

  Squippy-Nory scuttled up Ms. Starr’s leg and lodged herself in just below the knee, wrapping her tentacles around her teacher’s calf. The calf smelled like vanilla body lotion and was wearing a stripy sock.

  Ms. Starr patted Squippy-Nory’s dog head through the fabric of her pants. “There, there, Nory,” she said. “It’s going to be okay. It’s just Pepper. Can you remember your human mind? Pepper’s your friend. She’s not going to hurt you.”

  Squippy-Nory made doggy whimpering sounds.

  There was a loud laugh.

  Sebastian said, “Andres, your laugh looks like a huge hairy moth swooping around the room.” Sebastian could see sound waves as well as hear them.

  Someone else’s laughter turned into a coughing fit.

  “Elliott!” Marigold shrieked. “You spit on me!”

  “There are icicles in your hair now,” Andres said. “Elliott’s spit turned to ice.”

  Marigold shrieked again, and Sebastian moaned. “The shrieks look like steak knives! They’re attacking me!”

  “It’s just ice,” Willa said. “What’s the big whoop?”

  “It’s Elliott’s spit!” Marigold cried.

  “Class! Children!” said Ms. Starr in a remarkably quiet voice. “I cannot walk with Nory’s tentacles around my leg.”

  Everyone stopped laughing and shrieking. Nory was still a squippy, and she was still inside her teacher’s pant leg.

  “I do not want to shout when Sebastian is feeling sensitive to the sound waves,” Ms. Starr went on. “We are all feeling sensitive this morning, don’t you think? So let’s be sensitive to our friends.”

  The room became silent. They were all feeling sensitive after the rocks in the hall and the shrinking of Lacey Clench.

  “Pepper, I’m going to ask you and Sebastian to go down the hall to the art supply room,” continued Ms. Starr. “Please get me glitter, glue, sticks, and yarn. We’re going to skip math this morning and do a therapeutic art project. Take a good long time about it, Pepper, okay? And we’ll help Nory get back to her human self.”

  Squippy-Nory relaxed her tentacles a little bit and peeked out of the pant leg at the scary being. It was very small for such a CREATURE OF TERROR. It was looking down at the floor and sniffling a little bit as it walked to the door of the classroom.

  A moment later, it was gone.

  Phew. That was so much better.

  Squippy-Nory didn’t know what to do next. It was dark and warm in Ms. Starr’s pant leg, and the squippy part of her thought staying right there was an excellent plan. The girl part of her didn’t relish the idea of leaving the pant leg either. She’d have to face everyone. They’d laugh. Marigold had said, “What the zum-zum.”

  But she knew she couldn’t hide forever. She started down Ms. Starr’s calf, moving backward inch by inch. Soon she felt fresh air on her tail and hindquarters.

  “Elliott?” Ms. Starr said. “Can you come help remove Nory from my leg, please?”

  With Pepper out of the room, Squippy-Nory wound her tentacles around Elliott’s arm and gave him a doggy smile.

  “You look totally cool,” Elliott said
kindly. “I never saw this one before.”

  And with Elliott being so nice and talking to her directly, as if he expected her human mind to understand, Nory flipped back to her girl self. She found herself hugging Elliott, and stepped back awkwardly.

  Ms. Starr directed everyone to bring their chairs back to their desks and put on smocks. “That is enough hullabaloo for today, I think,” Ms. Starr said. “Time to listen to Mozart and express ourselves with glitter.”

  * * *

  “Do you want to hear an outrage?” Aunt Margo asked later that night.

  It was evening, and Aunt Margo was home from work. She and Nory were eating pizza on the couch.

  “Of course,” Nory replied. She loved hearing Aunt Margo’s outrages. Aunt Margo was a Flyer, and a very strong one. Unlike most Flyers, she could carry other people with her. That’s how she’d ended up in her line of work. She ran a taxi service—but instead of driving a car, Aunt Margo was the taxi.

  Often Margo’s outrages involved people lying about the number of passengers when making reservations or people who insisted on having her carry their shopping bags on her ankles rather than holding them themselves. But this time, Nory suspected the outrage was something a little closer to her own day.

  “The pickup was at your school, actually.” Aunt Margo talked with her mouth full. That was something Father didn’t allow back home. He didn’t allow eating in front of the TV or putting your feet on the coffee table, either.

  Nory had lived with Aunt Margo for a month now. She missed Hawthorn and Dalia, her brother and sister. She missed Father, too, she supposed. But she didn’t miss Father’s endless list of rules.

  “This horrid man called me at the last minute. Mr. Clench. And he didn’t want to pay full fare. He asked me to fly his daughter from school to the hospital—in the rain, I might add—and he wanted to pay just a quarter of the usual price.”

  Nory’s heart thumped. She knew it. Clench! The horrid man was Lacey’s father!

  “He was in a tizzy because his daughter was three inches high. She’d had some sort of magical accident. Maybe I’m being too hard on him,” Aunt Margo said. “But it wasn’t a medical emergency, and he couldn’t seem to grasp that I charge for travel time, with no discount for tiny passengers. ‘Thirty minutes is thirty minutes,’ I told him.”

  “Did Lacey get fixed?” Nory asked. “Is she back to her normal size?”

  “I don’t know. I left after dropping her off,” Margo said. “But she was healthy as can be, aside from being so small. Oh! And she blamed your friend Marigold, but I couldn’t get a straight story out of her. She was quite a little ball of hostility, that one.” Margo rearranged her feet on the coffee table, crossing her ankles. “Now, what do you know about the whole business?”

  Nory stuffed a big bite of pizza in her mouth to buy herself time. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. When she’d been with Father, the family hadn’t talked much about upside-down magic. In fact, they tried not to mention anything uncomfortable, ever.

  Aunt Margo was more open. She was Nory’s mother’s sister. (Nory’s mother had died a long time ago.) Even though Aunt Margo thought about things very differently than Father did, Nory still wasn’t sure she wanted to share how badly things had gone today.

  “I don’t get along with Lacey Clench,” she finally said. “But guess what? I’m going to join beginner kittenball. There’s a club at school.”

  “Kittenball?” Aunt Margo said. “I love kittenball.”

  “You do?”

  “Your mother was a great swatter. I used to go to all her games. She was on an all-state champion team in high school. It helped get her into that fancy college, and there she got licensed for a tiger. That was a serious tiger, let me tell you. I do not like large carnivores in the house with me, even if they are my blood relatives. We used to share a bedroom when she was back from school. I’d walk in and there’d be a tiger sitting in front of the vanity, examining its own pretty fur.”

  Wow. Nory knew her mom had been a Fluxer, but she had never known about the tiger, or the kittenball.

  “I think she could have played professionally, if she hadn’t met your dad and gotten interested in becoming a doctor. Anyway, she was a great player. You should have seen her pounce when the yarnball came her way.”

  “The coach is really nice,” said Nory. “He invited me to sign up. There’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know the rules.”

  Aunt Margo grinned. “There’s a tigerball game on tonight. Start of the season, Stripeys versus Pouncers. Shall we watch? And have popcorn? I’ll explain the rules to you. We can invite Figs over—he loves a good tigerball game.”

  * * *

  And so they did. Aunt Margo’s boyfriend, Figs, brought some cinnamon rolls he’d baked.

  “See the tower in the middle of the court?” Aunt Margo asked.

  Nory nodded.

  “On top of the tower is a basket. Each team has nine yarnballs—nine chances to score.”

  “Got it,” Nory said. She took a big bite of cinnamon roll.

  “The Pouncers are up!” Figs hollered. Like Nory, Figs was a Fluxer. His preferred animal was a Saint Bernard. Right now he was an olive-skinned human wearing jeans and a blue Pouncers jersey.

  “Okay,” Aunt Margo said. “It’s the Pouncers’ yarnball. They’re the ones wearing blue collars. They have to start at the edge of the court, pass the yarnball, climb it up the tower, and drop it in the net. But, see, at the same time, the Stripeys—the tigers in white collars—are trying to stop them from scoring by unspooling their yarn.”

  On the screen, the Stripeys were whacking the yarnball out of the Pouncers’ paws. Blue yarn was now strung across the court.

  “As soon as there’s no more yarn left, it’s the other team’s ball,” she added. “They get a fresh yarnball in their team color.”

  “The Pouncers are going for it!” Figs cried. “They’re climbing up the tower! They’re going to—”

  “Score!” they all cheered.

  The three of them cheered the Pouncers to victory.

  * * *

  There were ladybugs in Bax’s dad’s house. Not one ladybug, but eight—no, nine ladybugs. They weren’t flying or sitting among the plants. It seemed like they were watching television. They were all together on the arm of the couch, near Bax’s dad’s favorite spot.

  “Are you doing something Fuzzy with these, or should I put them outside?” Bax asked. His dad was a Fuzzy, but he was allergic to fur, so they didn’t have any pets.

  “Whatever you want,” his dad said.

  “Couldn’t you just ask them to fly outside?”

  His dad shook his head. “I’m too tired. Why don’t you scoop them into a cup?”

  Bax put the ladybugs outside in the backyard. Then he practiced piano and folded laundry on the living room floor while Dad fixed cheese toast and pickles for dinner. Bax’s parents had divorced a year ago. Not long after, Bax had turned ten and fluxed into a rock.

  Bax had been hoping to be a Flicker, like his mom, or a Flyer, like a couple of his friends from ordinary school. Whatever magic came, he’d known it would show up soon—he just hadn’t been expecting to miss it when it happened.

  One minute he’d been sitting outside, licking a chocolate ice-cream cone. The next thing he knew, he was awake at the hospital, with the bitter taste of Burtlebox in his mouth.

  Bax’s mom had met them at the hospital. It was awkward and sad, since his parents didn’t live together anymore. Bax had gone back to his mom’s house with several bottles of Burtlebox and a long list of safety precautions.

  Not long after, his dad had heard about the Upside-Down Magic program starting at Dunwiddle. He had rented a new house near the school. It was a nice house, but it still felt kind of empty.

  Bax thought his dad felt a little empty, too. But he didn’t know how to talk about that. They had eaten cheese toast for dinner for a week
now. That made Bax think something was wrong. Then his dad sat down at the table and said, “I have to tell you something”—and Bax knew it for sure.

  “Okay.” Bax felt scared. “What?”

  “I lost my job.”

  His dad worked in the office of the local art museum, with a bunch of computers. Bax didn’t really understand what he did.

  “Oh.” Bax’s heart sank. “I wondered why you were home early.”

  “I got let go last week.”

  “I wondered why you got home early every day last week, too.”

  “I was hoping to find a new job before I had to tell you. But that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Why’d they let you go?”

  “They had a lot of layoffs. I didn’t do anything wrong. They just don’t need me anymore.”

  “Can you get another job?”

  “Of course. I hope.”

  “Will we run out of money?”

  “I have savings. Don’t worry.”

  “Can’t you take allergy pills?” Bax asked. “Then you could use your Fuzzy skills. Or maybe you could get a job at an aquarium?”

  A few years ago, they had gone together to the Ocean Blue Aquarium, and it was amazing for Bax to watch his dad communicate with the schools of leaping rainbow and parrot fish. They had tried to dance behind him as he bounced through the room.

  “I’m out of practice with magic,” Dad said. “I’ll have to find a job that requires my smarts instead.”

  “Let’s watch the tigerball game,” Bax suggested. He made his voice eager, to cheer up his dad. “Okay?”

  “Stripeys for the win,” Dad said, forcing a smile. “The Pouncers don’t have a chance.”

  They brought their cheese toast to the couch and watched the game. By the end, there were four more red ladybugs sitting next to Dad.

  The Stripeys lost.

  * * *

  Bax’s mom picked him up in the morning and drove him to Cider Cup by the Sea, where she worked as a police detective. Her house was where the whole family had lived until the divorce. These days, Bax spent Saturday nights and Tuesday nights with his mom. The rest of the time he stayed with his dad, who lived closer to school.

  It was hard. The shirt he wanted to wear was always at the wrong parent’s house.