“Been saving.” With her teeth, she bit off one of her fingernails, then spit it out. “For you.” She pulled at her ponytail, strands of her hair tangling in her fingers. “Esme.” Then she turned and went back to being absorbed in an infomercial for leggings that zipped off into underwear.
Her back was to me when I started to cry.
* * *
—
When visiting hours ended, I said goodbye to Mom and started my slog home. I’d walked there because I’d wanted the space to clear my head after Returning Kevin so many times, but now I had no desire to walk anywhere. I would walk, though, because it was late enough that the bus only ran twice an hour, and calling Dad for a ride would only lead to unwanted questioning about where I’d been and what I’d been doing. He’d texted me earlier telling me there was pizza, but I’d been too busy to respond. Now if I just showed up at home, he’d assume I’d been out babysitting again or that Janis had dropped me off.
I wearily started down the block, and did a double take when a familiar van pulled up at the corner. It idled there, and then the window cracked. “Esme?” called a voice.
“Dion?” I called back, even though I was sure it was him because no one else in Spring River drove a car like that. No one else in the world drove a car like that.
“Where are you going? Do you want a ride?”
“I’m just heading home, and yes, I do. What are you doing down here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” he said, helping me open the door so that I could climb in.
“I was visiting my mom,” I said. “You?”
“On my way home from work,” he said. “The condos are behind schedule, which means more overtime for me.” He seemed stoked about this, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in that universal sign for gimme-dat-cash.
“Did you get the walls dry?” I asked, and the confused look on his face told me I had gotten it wrong. “Never mind,” I said quickly. “What are you doing now?”
“I was trying to find a place to get something to eat, but it looks like the only place open is McDonald’s, and that’s what I had for breakfast. And lunch.” In the glow of a stoplight, I could see his smile.
We made small talk about his job, where he’d been putting up the drywall, not drying the walls, apparently, and about Spring River’s lack of culinary options, and before I knew it, we were in front of my house. Once again, the drive had gone by way too fast.
Dion parked, and a low grumble filled the car. “Was that my stomach or yours?” he asked, making me realize I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.
“Let’s assume it was both.” I continued, “Do you want to come in? We have pizza.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I bit my tongue in surprise. Who was this bold new person inviting a hot guy to come into her home? But I had no time to reconsider, as Dion was nodding and unbuckling his seat belt.
Thankfully, Dad had gone to bed, so I didn’t have to do any awkward introductions, at least between humans. Normally a cuddle monster, Pig chose tonight to act weird and protective. As soon as Dion came in, she went to her bed in the corner, but instead of lying down to snooze, she just sat there, staring him down.
“I think your dog is mean-mugging at me,” he said.
I tried to send Pig a mental message to help me out here, but instead I could just hear her farting, which made me glad she was on the other side of the room. “Ignore her,” I said. “She thinks this is her house.”
I could count on my chin the number of times I’d had a guy over—one. This one. So I wasn’t sure what to do. Did I put pizza on plates? Should I ask him if he wanted a fork? Though who ate pizza with a fork?
Telling my brain to shut up, I just grabbed the box and a couple of paper towels, then went back into the living room, where Dion was sitting on the couch. “It’s cold,” I said, “and TBH, it probably wasn’t that good to begin with, but it is food.”
“That’s all that matters,” Dion said, helping himself to a slice. I did the same, and we chewed in silence. I flipped on the TV, then flipped it back off as soon as I realized it was a Grey’s Anatomy make-out scene.
“So,” I said, casting around for something to talk about. “How’s the house going?”
“Expensively,” he said. “At the rate I’m going, I should be able to add two or three tiles to the bathroom every other week. It’s going to take forever.” He gave a little smile. “I asked Cass if she couldn’t just use one of those spells you guys have to conjure up a Home Depot gift card, but she wasn’t having it.”
I almost choked on my crust. This was a surprise. I’d thought she wasn’t going to tell him about the spells. Also, using spells to get stuff for free was exactly the kind of thing that Cassandra was all about.
“Oh, she told you about that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
He shifted and crossed his legs, his body turning now so that it was slightly facing me. He was just close enough that I had to remind myself to breathe, and to make sure I didn’t have any food on my face. I dabbed at my lips and chin with a paper towel.
“Yeah, all that stuff is crazy. It’s like you two can do whatever you want.” Now, that did sound like how Cassandra would have explained it. Dion was looking at me so intently that I couldn’t hold his stare. Instead I started an intense examination of the chipped polish on my thumbnail.
It was quiet enough in the room that all I could hear was breathing. His. Mine. Pig’s. Still, there was something funny about the tone of his voice. It was like he thought Cassandra and I had somehow been given a free pass for everything. He sounded almost envious. “It seems like a lot of responsibility too,” I said, trying to get him to understand. “It’s kind of overwhelming. I mean, look at my mom, and your parents. Though Brian says that being a Sitter had nothing to do with one of them ending up on another planet and the other ending up dead.”
“Brian?”
“Oh,” I said. I’d figured that if Cassandra had told him about the spells, she’d also told him about Brian. If she hadn’t, it now seemed too late for me to backtrack. “Brian is just like an old dude who’s supposed to teach me and Cassandra stuff. He’s the football coach at Spring River and one of my dad’s friends. Or, I mean, my dad thinks they’re friends. It’s kind of complicated….” I was talking in circles, and realized that I had just made it sound like Dad and Brian were in an on-again, off-again relationship.
Fortunately, Dion seemed to have already moved on. “Did Cass tell you what I found in the basement?”
Huh, I thought, shaking my head. She hadn’t, and I was starting to think that there were a lot of things Cassandra wasn’t telling me. Dion pulled out his wallet, and from the section where the bills were supposed to go, he pulled out a creased photo and handed it to me.
“That’s my dad,” he said, then corrected himself. “Our dad—Mine and Cassandra’s. It’s the only picture I have.”
I looked at it closely, and it certainly looked like Dion took after his dad. They had the same chiseled features, the same dark hair, the same gaze like a controlled burn. I handed the picture back to him. “He looks cool,” I said, thinking back to what Dion had said a few days before, about his dad being in a band and everything.
Dion nodded and looked down at the photo. “I was going through a bunch of old junk in the house and found his journal from right before he died. He wrote songs and poems and stuff, and a lot of it was pretty good,” he said. “But he also wrote about their life.” He sighed and pushed his hair off his forehead again, the gesture that always made me catch my breath. “It, uh, doesn’t sound like our mom was the nicest person,” he continued. “It seems like, with all the Sitter stuff, she pretty much treated him like a servant, and I guess she was messing around on him. His last entry was the day that they died, and it looked like they were fighting.”
I cou
ldn’t read him, and couldn’t tell what he wanted me to say to this revelation, but I understood where he was coming from. I’d been there with Mom a million times, scrutinizing any little thing of hers, trying to piece together a picture of who she was and what her life had been like. If I’d ever found a journal, it would have been like hitting my own personal jackpot, though I could also imagine that finding out that his parents didn’t get along wasn’t exactly the kind of info Dion had been hoping for. “Why would he hide his journal in the basement?” I asked.
“I guess he really wanted to make sure she didn’t find it.” Dion fidgeted again, and from her dark corner, Pig gave a small grunt. “To be honest, his side of the account sounds pretty accurate to me,” he continued. “I don’t remember much, but I do remember how everything was always about my mom. That had to be hard on him, you know? I think Cass is a lot like my mom, and I’m probably like my dad, so it’s no wonder that we don’t always get along. She really sees Mom as this perfect superhero, which maybe she was, but she was still human.”
Wow. After telling me she wasn’t going to tell him anything, it looked like Cassandra had pretty much told Dion everything.
“So why do you worry about her? Cassandra, I mean,” I asked. “She seems like someone who can handle herself.”
“I guess it’s just that…if she thinks our mom could do no wrong, then what if she thinks that about herself too? And maybe it’s the older brother in me, but it seems like there are a lot of ways things could go wrong.” He paused for a beat. “A lot of ways that she could make things go wrong. I’ve been cleaning up Cass’s messes my whole life, and I don’t expect anything to change now that she’s a firestarter.”
It felt weird to be talking about her behind her back, but I had to admit that I felt the same way about Cassandra. That day behind the annexes with the cheerleaders, she hadn’t given anything a second thought. She hadn’t given me a second thought. She’d just straight up gone for it, consequences be damned. Same with her shopping trip. She had a level of confidence in herself that I’d never seen in anyone else. It went past confidence, even, to hunger. She didn’t doubt, for a second, that she deserved to get what she wanted, no matter what she had to do to get it.
Dion sighed, then smiled at me. “Let’s stop talking about my sister,” he said. “Let’s talk about you. How do you feel about all this? Ready to save the world from evil?”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “I have no idea. Most days, I don’t even feel ready to get out of bed. It’s weird knowing something can choose you even if you didn’t necessarily choose it.”
“I can’t imagine,” he said. “I’m the opposite of chosen. As unchosen as you can get.”
I coughed, thinking that if I were a different kind of person, now would be the time when I’d say something coy about how I’d choose him. The thought of me being that kind of person almost made me laugh, so much so that Dion looked at me. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said quickly, then tried to change the subject. “Want to watch a movie?” It was the first thing that popped into my head, and it wasn’t a real suggestion, as I thoroughly expected him to use that as a cue to stand up and say he had to get going. I was prepped for the rejection when he surprised me and nodded.
“Something funny that I’ve seen a million times before,” he said. “I know you probably like smart movies where people talk about how complicated life is, and I’ll watch those with you sometime, but right now, I don’t want to think.” Had I heard him right? Had he just insinuated that this was the first of several movies we were going to watch together?
“I’m flattered, but you give me way too much credit,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “My desert island pick would probably be Mean Girls.”
He started laughing. “But that’s serious cinema. So,” he continued, a note of teasing in his voice, “are you more a Cady Heron or a Regina George?”
“Wow,” I said. “That was a question specifically designed so that you could do some impressive name-dropping.”
“Well, were you impressed?”
I nodded. Dion was definitely the Aaron Samuels of the situation, but I wasn’t going to just volunteer that information. “I’d probably want to be the Janis Ian,” I said. “But that would go to Janis, for the obvious reasons. So I guess I’m…Ms. Norbury?”
He wiggled his eyebrows. “I have always had a thing for girls in glasses.” It came off as deliberately sleazy, and I leaned over to punch him in the shoulder. As he rolled away, his arm shifted so that I could see the smooth underside of his forearm, the one that was marked with the thick, runny lines of his tattoo. Without thinking, I reached out and traced one of them with my index finger. It was slightly raised, like a scar.
He groaned and clamped his hand down on top of mine, pinning my fingers to his arm. “Don’t look at that,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.” I shrugged his hand off, and then leaned over so that I could do the opposite and see it better.
The idea itself wasn’t atrocious. It just looked like it’d been done by a middle schooler with a sewing needle and a Bic pen.
“You really hate it, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, looking not at the tattoo but at some point on the floor. “It reminds me of everything I don’t like about myself.”
It was funny to hear him say something like that. If anyone ever asked me what I didn’t like about myself, I’d ask them how much time they had to listen to my answer. I could start with my baby-fine hair, which ended up plastered to my head no matter how much product I used, and end with my feet, which had not gotten the memo that toes are supposed to decrease in size as they go down the line.
But right now I was close enough to Dion to see his chin stubble, and I could attest to the fact that he was actually physical perfection. Except, of course, for the tattoo. Maybe that was why he hated it so much.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just, like, another grand idea that turns out kind of stupid. I’m starting to think that maybe moving into this house was another one. Even if I dump every penny I earn into it, it’ll never be nice….” He opened and closed his fist, making the eagle and cactus shimmy as his muscles contracted. “Man, I just keep bringing up the happy topics with you, don’t I? Sorry. I swear I’m not usually this negative.”
A fully formed idea popped into my head. “Wait here,” I said, getting up off the couch. “I have an idea.”
* * *
—
I flipped through the stack of papers until I found the one I was looking for, a spell that until this moment, I hadn’t known what to do with.
I wasn’t going to say anything to Dion until I was sure I had everything I needed. There was always the possibility that he would reject my offer flat out, but on the chance that he was enthusiastic about it, I didn’t want to get his hopes up unfairly.
Melani, for melanikinesis, the power to manipulate ink. I needed an eraser. Mom had given me several as part of her collection, and the spell didn’t say anything specifically about how it needed to not be shaped like a fruit, so I chose the bunch of grapes.
Calendula flowers—I had a face toner that had petals and buds floating in it. I went to the bathroom and used tweezers to pull some out, then patted them dry on a Kleenex. Yellow jasper—again, thank you, rock collection, and thank me, Esme, for never throwing anything away, even when I’d long outgrown it. Finally, a paintbrush. That I did not have, but I had dozens of eyeshadow brushes, so same-same.
When I went back into the living room, Dion was standing looking at our bookshelves, which mainly held Dad’s DVD collection, but he quickly sat back down when he saw me. I sat next to him and put the four items in a row in front of us on the coffee table. “I think I can fix your tattoo,” I said, and the look on his face made me smile. “Not with needles but with magic.”
; “Oh,” he said, leaning forward and looking at the stuff on the table. “Really? You could do that?”
“No guarantees,” I said. “But I can try. What would you want it to look like?”
“Just better,” he said. “Like it was done by someone who knew what they were doing. Thin lines. Brighter colors. An eagle that looks more majestic and less…”
“Like a bald rooster?” I asked, and he nodded.
“No guarantees,” I said again.
“I know,” he said. “I trust you.”
I happened to look up at him right when he said that, and our eyes met in a way that made me want to lick my lips, and not just to check for crumbs. I held his gaze for as long as I could without blushing, then cleared my throat and got serious.
I sat cross-legged on the couch, facing sideways, and Dion mirrored me, so our knees were touching. Then I arranged the four items around us and had him hold out his arm. He rested his elbow on his knee and his hand, palm up, in my lap.
I held my hand out over the tattoo and said the word, letting everything else but the image on his skin fall from my mind. Aside from trying to make Cassandra fall asleep—when I’d managed only to make her sleepy—I’d used the spells only on objects or Pig, never another human. Now I felt my hand getting hot, and it felt like it was held over Dion’s arm by magnetic force. My fingers trembled slightly, and my heart was pounding. I could hear his breathing speed up, and I wondered if it hurt him, like a burn, or if he felt anything at all.
The skin on his arm started to swirl like oil paints dripped in water, and as I moved my hand slowly up and down, from his wrist to his elbow, I could feel the space between us crackle. I almost panicked when the colors blended together in a sea of muddy brown, but I forced myself to keep my hand steady. Slowly they separated and differentiated themselves, as if red, yellow, black, green, and brown all knew exactly where they needed to go. The cactus filled in first, then the eagle, starting with its claws and ending with the feathers at the tips of a grand wingspan. The snake in the eagle’s beak looked like it was ready to thrash right off Dion’s arm, and the crown of laurels made the eagle look immortal. The whole thing was so detailed, it looked like it had been painted with a brush the size of a straight pin. It was beautiful.
The Babysitters Coven Page 20