by Meg Cabot
“I…I don’t have ESP,” I stammered.
“Right. How did you know that bike messenger was going to ram into me? How’d you know the exact moment to shove me out of the way?”
“That was just…that was just…” My voice trailed off. His green-eyed gaze held me hypnotized.
“Jean, I know you have…well, special talents,” he said. “But you don’t actually believe all that witch stuff really works, do you? The magic and spells and voodoo mumbo-jumbo? You don’t, do you?”
Tearing my gaze from his with an effort, and keeping it, instead, on the dodgeball game, I said, “I…do, Zach. The thing is, I’ve seen things…things that couldn’t be explained any other way than by magic.”
“Ancient civilizations used the concept of magic to explain anything they couldn’t understand…like illness,” Zach said grimly. “But we know better now, because of science. Just because there’s no other explanation that we happen to know of, doesn’t mean it’s magic.”
“I know,” I said. “But that doesn’t negate the fact that…I believe. And what’s more important, Tory does, too.”
“Well, it’s got to stop. It’s not right. Whatever it is Tory’s doing…I’m not just going to stand by and watch like everyone else in this school does. I’m not going to let her get away with it.”
I hung my head. “Don’t. Seriously, Zach, don’t. Tory…she’s really mad at me. Not just because of you, but because I won’t…well, I won’t join her coven. She’s going to try to get revenge, and one way she does that might be…well, she might try to tell you some things about me—”
“What kind of things?” Zach asked, a little too quickly.
My cheeks began to heat up, but I kept my gaze on the game.
“Stuff about me being a witch,” I said. “I’m not, but, like I said…I used to be into that stuff. And she might say some stuff about…well, a guy—”
“The guy who was stalking you,” Zach finished for me. “Yeah, I figured. What kind of stuff about him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever she says about him will be a lie, because she doesn’t know the whole story.”
“What is the whole story?” Zach asked. “Jean, what happened with this guy? What did he do to you, that you had to flee halfway across the country?”
I threw him a startled glance. “He didn’t do anything to me. It wasn’t like that at all. But that’s what I mean. She might try to make out—I don’t even know. The thing is, Zach, Tory’s got problems.” I thought about Petra’s picture at the bottom of that litter box. “Serious problems.”
“I know she has problems,” Zach said. “My God, Jean, she hung a headless rat from your locker door. This is not the mark of someone who’s got it all together. All the more reason for someone to tell her parents.”
“Zach, it won’t do any good. She’ll just deny it. And there’s no proof it was her—”
The shrill blast of a whistle interrupted us. Coach Winthrop bellowed, “Rosen! Honeychurch! This isn’t the student lounge. Get up!”
I climbed hurriedly to my feet.
“Please, Zach,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “Let me handle it, okay? I know everything is going to be all right.”
He shook his head. “You know it? As in you’ve looked into the future and seen it?”
I grimaced. “Well, no…not exactly. But things can’t get any worse, can they?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
And for the rest of the week, things didn’t—get any worse, anyway. Nothing bad happened. Tory was being kept pretty busy by her parents, who had finally been alerted to the fact that she was flunking out of most of her classes, due almost entirely to the fact that she hadn’t done a lick of homework all semester. How could she? She’d been out almost every night with Gretchen and Lindsey, playing at being witches.
But my aunt and uncle finally put a stop to that, by canceling all of their social engagements and staying home to supervise her comings and goings, and by hiring Tory a tutor, whom she was forced to see six days a week, including Saturday mornings. Tory put up an enormous fight, but her parents weren’t backing down.
Personally, I took this as a pretty good sign that things might actually calm down.
Zach, however, was dubious.
“I’ve seen it before,” he said, with a shrug, when I told him about it. “Your aunt and uncle get in her face about her grades for a while—get her to see her therapist more regularly, the works—and then she’ll do something dramatic to make them feel guilty, and they’ll back off.”
I found this hard to believe, but Zach, who still wanted to tell Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted about the rat—except I wouldn’t let him—only said, “Just you wait. You’ll see.”
I did wait, thinking that he’d be proved wrong. Aunt Evelyn remained vigilant for the rest of the week about checking with Tory’s teachers to find out what her homework was, and Uncle Ted went over it with her every night, even after she’d met with the tutor. Except for the dirty looks she regularly shot me, Tory left me alone…and I didn’t think it was because of the pentacle I was wearing for protection, either. She left Petra alone, too. Was that because of the binding spell?
Or had Tory really turned over a new leaf?
“I think she’s doing better,” I told Zach, over dinner at a boisterous Italian restaurant the night we went to see Nigel Kennedy. “She doesn’t have time to think up ways to torture people. She’s too busy catching up with her Geometry homework.”
“Well, maybe she hasn’t strung any more dead animals from your locker,” Zach said, “but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t plan on doing something worse. That girl has it in for you, Jean.”
But, giddy with joy at being out on the town with Zach—even if we did spend a good portion of the meal discussing Willem’s impending visit, and how that would impact Zach’s campaign to win the heart of the woman of his dreams—I couldn’t exactly share his gloom over Tory.
And by the end of the concert, he was smiling as much as I was…though probably more in amusement over how hard I’d clapped than because of anything else. It wasn’t until we were strolling home, having decided to walk in order to enjoy the warm night air, that anything happened to dampen my spirits.
“It wasn’t the most boring concert I’ve ever been to,” Zach was trying to assure me.
“Then why were your eyes closed during most of it?”
“I was resting them,” Zach said. “Honest. Seriously, I have nothing against classical music. Jazz, though? Don’t get me started on jazz. Especially—what’s it called? Free jazz. You ever try tapping your foot to free jazz? Yeah, not gonna happen. What I really like is the blues. There’s a great blues place downtown…maybe we should go there next weekend. I have to get you a fake ID first, since they don’t let you in if you’re under twenty-one.”
“That’d be great,” I said.
“Actually,” Zach said, “we better make it the weekend after next. Next weekend is the spring dance. You know, the formal. I don’t know if you’d want to go—it’s pretty lame. But I’ve never been, so I thought, well…would you want to go? With me? To the dance? Strictly as friends, of course.”
My grin felt as if it might split my head in two. It’s true he was in love with another girl. But he’d asked me, not her, to the dance.
This was too good to be true. This couldn’t be happening to me, Jinx Honeychurch. This had to be happening to some other girl.
“Okay,” I said, my heart feeling as if it were about to burst. “That sounds like it might be fun….”
And then we turned the corner onto East Sixty-ninth Street.
And I was able to see the ambulance parked in front of the Gardiners’ townhouse, the flashing red lights reflected off all the dark windows in the brownstones around it.
“It’s probably nothing,” Zach called after me, as I broke into a run.
It wasn’t nothing, though. We got there just as the paramedics emerged, bearing Tory on a str
etcher. I saw at once that she was conscious, and even looking around. When her gaze fell upon me and Zach, her eyes, as dramatically made up as ever, narrowed dangerously. And then they were loading her into the back of the ambulance, and I couldn’t see her anymore, because they’d closed the doors.
I raced up the stoop and nearly collided with Petra, who was standing in the foyer, flipping through a pile of credit cards while a police officer stood nearby.
“Oh, Jean,” she cried, her pretty face tear-stained. “Oh, Jean, thank goodness you are home. You will stay here with the children, while I go with Torrance? Her parents—they had a benefit to attend. They aren’t here. She was doing so much better, they thought it would be all right to go out—”
I said, “Of course.” It was Zach, who’d raced in behind me, who asked Petra, “What happened?”
“It was my fault,” Petra said, as she thumbed through the pile of plastic cards. “I was supposed to check on her at six o’clock, but I was too busy helping Jean get ready to go out—”
I slid a guilty look in Zach’s direction. Petra had spent nearly an hour helping me put together an outfit for my date with Zach at six, instead of checking on Tory, who was supposed to be in her room studying.
“If I had checked her then,” Petra said, her voice filled with barely suppressed tears, “I would have found her sooner. But with helping you, and then Zach coming over, and then getting the children’s dinner, and then their baths, and storytime—I just forgot. She was so quiet, I forgot she was even home. When has she ever been home before on a Saturday night? Oh!” She turned to the police officer. “I can’t find it!”
“That’s all right, miss,” the police officer said. “Just take them all, and you can look for it on your way to the hospital.”
“The insurance card,” Petra explained to me, as she slipped out the door. “I can’t find it. I haven’t had a chance to call Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, either. Can you call them, Jean? Tell them we’re at—” She threw a questioning glance at the police officer, who said, “Cabrini.”
“Cabrini Hospital,” Petra repeated, as she started down the front steps toward the waiting ambulance. “Will you tell them to meet me there, Jean? Tell them Torrance—”
“Torrance what?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“Tried to kill herself,” Petra called, holding up the tiny clear plastic bag Shawn had delivered Tory’s Valium in. “Overdose.”
“Oh,” I said, looking from the plastic bag to Petra to the cop and then back again. “Actually, if the pills were in that bag, they were just baby aspirin.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Well, what else was I supposed to do?
I couldn’t just let my own cousin go around taking drugs. Not if there was something I could do to stop her.
So I’d found her secret stash one night when she wasn’t home (it hadn’t been that hard; she’d hidden the pills inside her jewelry box), then searched all over the local Duane Reade until I found similar-looking, but harmless, pills that I could substitute in place of the real thing—which I’d then flushed down the toilet.
“When she gets home,” Zach observed, over his Coke, “she’s going to kill you.”
“She was going to kill me before this,” I said glumly. “All this will do is cement her resolve.”
“You know she didn’t really mean to do it, anyway,” Zach said. He lifted the soda can to his lips and took a long swallow.
“Didn’t mean to do it? Zach, of course she did. You don’t overdose on Valium by accident. That’s just crazy!”
“Huh.” Zach reached into the bag of chips someone had left open on the kitchen table, and helped himself to a handful. “Crazy like a fox. Valium’s the one drug it’s pretty hard to kill yourself with. And her timing was impeccable, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Slumped miserably in the chair at which Alice usually sat at breakfast time, I glanced at Zach in astonishment. “Her timing? What are you talking about?”
“She knew you and I were going out tonight, right?”
I chewed my lip, remembering our confrontation in the kitchen.
“Well,” I said. “Yes.”
“That’s what I thought. So she must’ve taken the pills at suppertime,” he said. “Right before I came to pick you up. If Petra had checked on her, like she was supposed to, she would have found Tory sprawled across the floor, and our little trip to the theater”—he bit down noisily on a chip—“would have been indefinitely postponed.”
I stared at him across the kitchen table. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “You’re saying Tory wasn’t trying to kill herself at all—that she took a handful of pills just to keep me from going out with you?”
He shrugged and washed the chip down with a swig of soda.
“Not a handful,” he said. “Two. That’s how many she told the paramedics she’d taken. Tory knows two Valiums won’t do anything. It’s all just for show. A big, inconvenient show. She’d never really hurt herself. Fortunately for us, this time, you swapped out the real thing for some baby aspirin. And then Petra screwed up, and didn’t find Tory until after we’d left.”
“Oh, Zach.” I sighed. “Poor Petra thinks this was all her fault, but it isn’t. It was mine.”
Zach put his soda can down with a thump. “Screw that,” he said, making a face.
But it was easy for Zach to say screw that. It wasn’t so easy to say it myself. Tory had, after all, confided in me, showing me that doll she’d made. And how had I paid her back? By going out with Zach myself. Sure, Zach didn’t like me—not the way I liked him, anyway. We were just friends.
But he and Tory were just friends, and he wasn’t going to any concerts with her. Of course she’d been jealous. Of course she’d acted out of that jealousy.
And now he’d asked me to the dance. If she’d tried to kill herself—or, if you believed Zach, faked a suicide attempt—just because we’d gone to a concert together, what would she do when she learned Zach had asked me to the spring formal?
I didn’t know. But I did know I didn’t want to find out.
It was right then that the phone rang. I was up and out from behind the table, snatching the phone from its cradle, before it rang a second time.
“It’s me,” Aunt Evelyn said. “We’re here at the hospital with Tory. We’ll be home soon. She’s going to be fine. Thanks to you.”
I let out a gusty sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.” I gave Zach a thumbs-up signal. He mouthed, I told you so.
“How are the kids?” Aunt Evelyn asked.
“Asleep,” I said. Alice had mercifully never woken up. Teddy had heard the commotion and come downstairs, but Zach had convinced him to go back to bed by promising a game of catch in the garden the next day.
“Good. Well, it looks like they’re going to discharge her soon. They didn’t have to pump her stomach, once they knew it was…well, what you said. I could hardly believe it when they told me—I don’t know how she got hold of Valium. How did you know, Jean?”
“Know what?”
“Know that she had those pills?”
I swallowed and said, “I, um, just found them—”
“And didn’t tell us?” Aunt Evelyn sounded really disappointed in me. “I’m very grateful for what you did do, Jean, but you still should have told us. Tory is—Oh, here comes the doctor. Don’t wait up for us, Jean. We’ll talk in the morning. Thank you for watching the kids.”
“Oh, it’s no pro—”
But Aunt Evelyn had already hung up.
I put down the receiver, then turned toward Zach. I felt as if I were going to be sick. But I had no choice.
Tory had seen to that.
“So?” Zach was looking at me with those intense green eyes. “She’s okay, right? I told you so.”
“She’s fine,” I said. And swallowed. “Zach. I can’t go to the dance with you.” I said it fast. And I said it firmly.
He just went on looking at me.
“That’s what
she wants, you know,” he said. “That’s why she did it.”
“Still,” I said, remembering how ragged Aunt Evelyn’s voice sounded on the phone. “I can’t go. I’m sorry.”
Zach rolled his eyes. “Stop beating yourself up. None of this is your fault.”
“It is too my fault! That’s why I can’t go with you. It wouldn’t be right. You’d better ask someone else.”
Zach looked angry. “I don’t want to ask anyone else,” he said. “If I can’t go with the girl I want, I won’t go with anyone.”
“Why?” I demanded hotly. “Petra’s the one you want, but you were going with me. So what difference does it make?”
“You know what?” he said, letting out a sudden—and totally humorless—laugh. “You’re right. It doesn’t make any difference at all. I’m going home now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And then he was gone.
I was all alone in the Gardiners’ kitchen. Which made it easy to do what I did next, which was sit down and cry my eyes out for a good ten minutes. I wasn’t just crying for myself, either, or because I’d lost Zach—not that I’d ever had him in the first place.
No, I was crying for Tory, and for Petra, and for all the people my magic—was it magic, or was it just simply bad luck?—had hurt.
Because, in the end, wasn’t what Tory had done to herself a direct result of my binding spell? I’d bound her from harming others…
…but not from hurting herself.
This fact stung all the more when she finally got home, and I saw her there with them—her parents and Petra—in the foyer when I hurried in to greet them. She was pale, and looked thinner than ever.
But though she might have looked wan, there was nothing weak about the way that she flung a look of pure, unadulterated malevolence over her shoulder as she paused on her way up the staircase, upon hearing my voice when I said, “Oh, you’re home.”
“Oh, Jean,” Aunt Evelyn said, as she shrugged off her evening coat. “You’re still up? You didn’t have to wait. It’s late.”