by Meg Cabot
“Thanks for the warning, but I can handle it. I think all of Tory’s spells are over. In fact,” I added, as I watched Tory throw what was left of her lunch away and, casting a scathing look in our direction, leave the cafeteria, “I can pretty much guarantee it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It actually seemed that way—at least that day. That Tory’s spell-casting days were over.
That evening, when I returned from Chanelle’s house, Petra was bubbling over with yet more good news.
“I got the only A in my entire Glyconutrition class,” she gushed, the minute I walked into the kitchen in search of a soda.
“Wow,” I said. “Congratulations, Petra.”
“So many good things in one day,” Petra said, with a happy sigh. “I cannot believe it!”
“I can’t believe it, either,” I said.
“Oh, and Jean. Zach called, from next door. Here is the message. He asks that you call him back.”
I didn’t bother going to my own room to return Zach’s call. It didn’t even occur to me. Instead, I took the slip of paper Petra handed me and dialed it on the kitchen telephone, wondering what Zach could have to say, since I’d already spent an hour with him that afternoon, feeding bits of pretzel to some ducks in Central Park, having slipped away from the softball game Coach Winthrop had organized for our class at the baseball diamond. Zach had taken the bad news—about Willem’s impending visit to Manhattan—quite manfully, in my opinion.
“Oh, good, it’s you.” The sound of Zach’s deep voice sent ripples of pleasure up the back of my arms. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“Well, you know how my dad gets free tickets to stuff all the time, through work, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, someone gave him two tickets for Saturday night to see this violinist at Carnegie Hall. He doesn’t want to go, but I know how much you like the violin, so I thought maybe you’d heard of this guy—Nigel Kennedy—” I couldn’t restrain a gasp. Zach, sounding like he was laughing, went on. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. He’s supposed to be good. So I wondered if you’d be interested. I thought I’d come along—as a friend, of course. I mean, unless you’d rather take someone from orchestra, or something.”
Nigel Kennedy! I couldn’t believe it!
“Oh, my gosh, Zach,” I screeched into the phone. “That sounds great! But are you sure you won’t be bored?”
“I think I can probably handle it,” Zach said. “You can always prod me if I fall asleep.”
I sucked in my breath happily—then held it, as Tory strode into the kitchen from the garden outside and stood glaring darkly at me from the doorway.
Had she overheard?
“I thought maybe we could have dinner or something, beforehand,” Zach went on. “As friends, of course. Maybe you could give me some more tips about how I could win over Petra.”
“Ha,” I said into the phone. She’d overheard, all right. Her glare was growing more menacing by the second. “Okay. That sounds great.”
“Cool,” he said. “See you at school.”
“See you then.” I hung up. Tory, still leaning in the doorway, eyed me.
“So,” she said. “You and Zach are going out tonight?”
“Saturday night,” I said. “And just as friends. It’s not a date or anything. His dad got a couple of free tickets to see Nigel Kennedy, the British violinist, at Carnegie Hall, and Zach wanted to know if I was interested in going with him….”
Tory eyed me expressionlessly. “I didn’t know Zach liked classical music.”
“Well…” I glanced at Petra, who was standing a few feet away, chopping vegetables. Other than the fact that her shoulders had gotten kind of tense, Petra gave no sign she was paying attention to our conversation. “I don’t know. Maybe he wants to expand his horizons or something.”
“Isn’t that sweet,” Tory said in a tone that implied she thought it was anything but. “What happened to your hair?”
I reached up instinctively to touch my hair. I’d forgotten that Chanelle had been experimenting on it earlier in the evening. She’d brushed it into a crazy bouffant that she’d then insisted I wear home.
“Oh,” I said. “That was Chanelle. We were just messing around over at her house.”
“Well,” Tory said. “How nice. First you steal my boyfriend. Then you steal my best friend. Is that how they do things back in Iowa? Because it sure isn’t how we do things here.”
Trying to keep my temper, I said, “You know perfectly well Zach doesn’t like me as anything except a friend. And he was never your boyfriend. You have a boyfriend. Shawn, remember?” I didn’t want to bring up the “friends with benefits” thing in front of Petra, so I just added, “And Chanelle feels like, ever since you started hanging out with Gretchen and Lindsey, you don’t care about her anymore. You don’t seem to want to spend time with her. So why shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t care who you spend time with,” Tory said scornfully. “I’m just wondering why you have to spend so much time with this guy you claim isn’t even interested in you. Like it isn’t enough for you that you get to spend fifth period with him every single day. Oh, no. Now you have to go to a concert with him, too.”
I glanced at Petra. She was still chopping away.
“Look, Tory,” I said. “If it’s going to make you upset, I’ll just call him and tell him I can’t make it—”
Because what else could I say?
But Tory didn’t seem to like that idea, either.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t not go on my account. I don’t care how you waste your time. It’s yours to waste. By all means, go see a classical concert with Zach Rosen. What do I care? When it’s through, maybe the two of you can stroll on over to Central Park, since you seem to like it so much. Wouldn’t that be fun? Good, clean fun. Because God knows Cousin Jean from Iowa would never do anything bad. Except skip P.E., of course.”
I glanced at Petra, who’d given up pretending not to be eavesdropping. She’d turned from the cutting board and was totally listening, her gaze focused on Tory, her expression inscrutable.
“I wonder what Coach Winthrop would say if he found out what you two were up to,” Tory said musingly. “You and Zach. Every fifth period. You know, Coach Winthrop can’t stand it when people skip his class….”
I swallowed. “Is that supposed to be some kind of threat, Tory?” I asked.
Tory laughed. She’d changed out of her school uniform into another of her black minidresses. This one appeared to be made out of leather.
“No,” she said. “This is: I wonder how friendly Zach would feel toward you if I happened to mention to him that that book you bought at Enchantments wasn’t for your sister, after all, but for your own personal use—”
“Torrance,” Petra said.
Tory had been walking slowly toward me as she spoke. Now she whirled around impatiently. “What?” she practically yelled at Petra.
Petra, however, was perfectly calm as she said, “Your mother called me from her office today. She says your guidance counselor contacted her at work. Your mother wants me to make sure you’re home for dinner tonight, so she and your father can talk to you. I think you know what it is about. So please stay home tonight, all right?”
Tory didn’t say anything right away. Instead, she flashed a look of pure hatred in my direction. The look said all too clearly, You did this, didn’t you?
I shook my head. Of course I hadn’t! Whatever this was, Tory had brought it all upon herself.
But it was too late. Much too late.
Tory let out a laugh that didn’t have any humor in it.
“That’s it,” she said. “This is war, Jinx.”
Then she turned around and ran from the kitchen. A few seconds later, we heard the front door slam, hard enough to cause the windows to rattle.
Petra was the one who broke the silence that followed.
“You listen to me, Jinx,” she said. �
��You go to that thing, that violin thing. Go with Zach.”
I shook my head. “No, Petra. It’s not worth it. Not if it’s going to upset her so much. It’s all right, really.”
Because what was the point? Tory was just going to tell Zach, at her earliest opportunity, about my spell-casting past…what she knew of it, anyway, which thankfully wasn’t much. And he’d realize I’m as big a freak—if not an even bigger one—than her, and drop me like a hot potato.
“No, it’s not all right,” Petra said, raising her voice for the first time since I’d met her—to me, anyway. Startled, I stared at her. “There is something wrong in this house. I know this. And I am telling you, what is wrong in this house is that one.” Petra pointed with her paring knife in the direction Tory had just gone. “It is not fair of her to tell you this, that you cannot see Zachary. He does not belong to her. He has never made her any promise. You go with him.”
“It’s not worth it, Petra,” I said. “It’ll just make her angry.”
“She is already angry.” Petra turned back to her carrots. “You let me deal with her anger. I am used to it.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little at Petra’s strong, slender back. She had no idea what she was talking about. It really was funny, if you thought about it.
“And what did she mean by that?” the au pair whipped around to demand. “What did she mean about a war?”
“Nothing,” I said. I reached up and touched the pentacle that hung around my neck.
It looked like I was going to be needing the good luck it was supposed to bring me a little sooner than I’d expected.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It started the next day.
I knew it as I approached my locker, before first period had even begun. I stopped suddenly, the traffic in the hallway streaming around me, people giving me annoyed looks as they tried to get by.
There’d been no sign of Tory that morning, and, having noticed the tenseness in Aunt Evelyn’s face at the breakfast table (apparently the little meeting she and Uncle Ted had had with Tory the night before, when Tory had finally turned up again, had not gone well), I hadn’t waited for her, and had just gone on to school without her.
Zach—whom I’d run into on my way to school—looked around the hallway and went, “What is it?”
“Look,” I said. And pointed.
The halls of the Chapman School are usually crowded. The exclusive school, whose graduates routinely go on to Ivy League colleges, was experiencing a surge of popularity that had resulted in classrooms that were almost spilling over, and hallways that were barely passable. But that day they seemed even more so.
Then I realized that the crowd was not made up of the kids I normally saw lingering outside their classrooms waiting for the bell to ring, but teachers and even some administrators from the principal’s office, too. They were all standing around, staring at one spot…and that spot, I knew, even from a hundred feet away, was my locker.
With a growing feeling of dread—not to mention the resurrection of the knot in my stomach—I pushed my way past a couple of lacrosse players who were blocking my view, then stumbled to a halt. There, hanging by a shoelace from the vent in the top half of my locker door, was a dead rat. Fluid of some kind—not blood—dripped from the cavity where the rat’s head should have been, forming a pinkish puddle on the tile floor in front of my locker.
Zach squeezed through the crowd behind me, and then froze. I felt his breath, warm on the back of my neck, as he whispered, “Holy—”
A maintenance worker was carefully unstringing the rat, a plastic bag held open beneath it to receive the body as it fell. It did, with a sickeningly soft thud. Several students groaned.
“Is this your locker, young lady?” a sharp-nosed administrator asked me.
I could not take my gaze off the pink puddle in front of my locker door.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Do you have any idea who could have done this?”
I lifted my gaze from the puddle, but instead of fastening it on the administrator’s face, I scanned the crowd, searching it for one person in particular. I finally noticed Tory pressed up against the shoulders of the lacrosse players, peering around them, a triumphant smile plastered on her face.
I looked away and said to the administrator, “No, ma’am. I have no idea who could have done this.”
I went through the rest of the day in a sort of haze. What, I kept asking myself, did Tory think she was doing? Stealing a dissection rat from the bio lab—because that, I learned, is where the rat had come from. The fluid dripping from its open neck had been formaldehyde—cutting off its head, and hanging it upside down outside someone’s locker wasn’t witchcraft, black or white. It wasn’t magic at all. It was just sick. Was this how Tory intended to punish me for binding her from doing magic? By showing me how powerful she could be without using magic at all?
Well, it was working. I was scared—not of the rat, but of what it represented. If someone could do that to a rat—even an already dead one—who knew what they’d do to a cat…or an innocent au pair.
How could my protection spells—putting pennies in the four corners of a room, or writing someone’s name on a piece of paper and putting it in a freezer—keep someone safe from the kind of dangerous pranks Tory and her friends liked to perform?
Because that’s all they were. Pranks…foolish pranks. Certainly not magic, and certainly not funny. They were enough, in fact, to make the most even-tempered of people angry.
“There’s no way we can prove it was her,” Chanelle said at lunch that day, glaring at the table where Tory and Gretchen and Lindsey normally sat…which was conspicuously empty today. They seemed to have chosen to eat elsewhere. “They’ll never expel her without proof. She’ll just figure out who told, and then she’ll do something even worse to that person. She and those witchy friends of hers.”
“They aren’t witches,” I said adamantly. “They’re playing at being witches. The ability to make magic—real magic—is a gift, a life-affirming gift. People who have that gift follow a moral code, a code which seeks to build harmony with nature and among people, not harm them.”
Even Robert, chowing down on a bacon cheeseburger, looked impressed by my speech. “Wow,” he said. “Where’d you hear that? The Discovery Channel?”
I said, “No. I…I read it somewhere.”
“Then what about the rat?” Chanelle demanded. “That wasn’t very life-affirming.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to say,” I said. “That wasn’t witchcraft.”
“It was just plain deluded,” Chanelle said. She looked at Shawn, who was busy typing into his Treo. “Dude. She’s your girlfriend. Can’t you say something to her? Like if she doesn’t calm down, you’re not going to take her to the spring formal after all?”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Shawn said, not even looking up from the screen. “I told you. And I have to take her. I already bought the tickets and put a down payment on the limo.”
“Take someone else,” Chanelle said.
That did make Shawn look up from the screen.
“If I tell her I’m taking someone else,” Shawn said, wide-eyed, “she’ll hang a rat from my locker. Or worse.”
“Are you saying you’re afraid of your own girlfriend?” Chanelle demanded.
“Hell, yeah,” Shawn said. “Besides, what do I wanna make her mad for? She provides a valuable service for me every day during free period.”
“You’re disgusting,” Chanelle declared. Then, looking sadly at me, she said, “Sorry, Jean. I guess there’s still nothing we can do about it.”
Nothing we can do about it. The phrase echoed through my head for the rest of the afternoon. It couldn’t be true. There had to be something we could do—something I could do. Only what?
“I know it was Tory,” Zach informed me matter-of-factly, when fifth period rolled around. “And it’s time someone did something about her.”
“P
lease don’t get involved,” I said. Clouds had finally moved over Manhattan, and instead of conducting his P.E. classes in the streaming rain, Coach Winthrop was forcing his students to play dodgeball in the cafeteria. I had promptly allowed myself to be struck by the ball, and a minute later, Zach joined me, sitting with our backs against the wall, along with the other people who’d been struck out.
“I’m already involved,” Zach said. “Come on, Jean, I’m not stupid. I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I have my suspicions, and I’m not going to let her—”
“I mean it, Zach,” I said. I concentrated on relacing my running shoes, so he wouldn’t see how close I was to crying. “Just stay out of it, okay?”
He didn’t look the least bit cowed. “Why? Why do I have to stay out of it? I’m the one who’s causing it, aren’t I?”
“Not exactly,” I said. I knew what I had to do—where Zach was concerned, anyway. I just really, really didn’t want to do it.
But what choice did I have? Either I told him the truth…or Tory would tell him her version of it. At least if I did it, there was a chance—a small one, I’ll admit—that he might understand.
Because there was so much more to the story than Tory knew.
“There’s a little more to it,” I began awkwardly, wondering how on earth I could ever make him understand, “than just Tory’s crush on you.”
But to my surprise, he made things much, much easier by reaching out and touching the pentacle hanging around my neck.
“Is it this stuff?” he wanted to know. “Witch stuff?”
Something caught in my throat. I think it was the knot from my stomach.
“Yeah,” I said, after coughing. “That day we went to Enchantments, down in the Village…I didn’t…I didn’t quite tell you the truth—”
“You mean that that book you bought was for you, and not Courtney?” The look he threw me was on the sarcastic side. “I may not have ESP like you do, Jean. But I did manage to figure out that part for myself.”