by Nikki Loftin
“No, you idiot,” she yelled, and pointed her wand at me. “Fix it.”
I felt my body jerk under her spell, and I reached for the logs that had scattered—reached with my bare hands, grabbing the smoldering embers, unable to stop—and shoved them back into the flames.
My hands seared. I staggered from the pain, screaming, and found my mouth shut by the witch’s magic. The room was silent—and then I heard a sound over my own silent agony.
It was Andrew. He was crying, tears running down his face, his whimpers growing louder. His eyes said everything his mouth couldn’t. I saw pride, and pain, and affection in them.
I pushed my thoughts away from my hands. I could ignore them. I had to. The witch was almost weak enough.
“Now, girl,” I heard through the haze of pain, “come and”—a harsh giggle—“check the water for me.”
I just stood there. What did she mean, check the water? The pot was huge—I couldn’t reach that high. She must have seen the question on my face, since she released my mouth to speak. But as soon as I could speak, the pain returned. I howled my throat raw in seconds.
“Stop that noise,” she commanded, and waved her wand again. I watched her face grow wrinkled and smaller as she did it, but the pain vanished completely. I looked down; my hands were whole again. She had healed them. Why?
“Are you really that stupid?” she said. “Check the water!”
I looked around and saw a small, golden stepstool next to the pot. The metal on the step was carved with dozens of unicorns, running, jumping, rearing. I reached down and touched it. It felt like real gold, soft as the copper pot, warm from the fire. I used it to shove a few logs away from the side of the pot and climbed up, taking the first step carefully.
I tested one finger against the side of the copper pot and yanked it away. It was blisteringly hot, and I inched closer, cautious. Warm moist air rushed past me, and I stared into the pot. There was nothing there but bubbling water. No vegetables, no meat, no rice. Just water. Water that would cover my head, I realized. I couldn’t see the bottom. If I fell—if anyone fell into that pot, they would never be able to climb out, not before they were cooked.
“Test it,” Principal Trapp cackled behind me. Her voice was filled with joy. “Go ahead, test it. Is it hot enough?” I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, moving toward me. Her hands were stretched out, ready to hold me there . . . or push me in.
Quickly, I stepped down off the stool. “How?” I asked, looking up at her like she had switched to Portuguese.
“What do you mean, how?” The witch looked confused for a moment, then angry. “How stupid are you, you little brat?”
How stupid was I? I was about to find out. “I don’t have a spoon, or anything. I’m not a cook; you know I’m just a kid. I never boiled water before in my life.” I stared into her angry face, reaching inside for the expression I needed to convince her I was really trying—but I couldn’t.
Of course, thanks to years of not being able to write reports and essays—semester after semester of getting Allison or one of my other friends to help write the answers that I knew but couldn’t put on paper—I knew exactly how that felt. I poured every ounce of my frustration into my voice.
“I would do it,” I said, and sniffled, “if I knew how.”
“How could I have been so wrong about you?” Principal Trapp asked herself, and stepped up on the stool. “I’ll show you, stupid. First you step on the stool,” she slowed her voice down, and pitched it higher, like she was talking to a baby. The way Bryan did when he wanted to make fun of me. “Then you lean over, and stretch your hand out”—I stepped up on the stool behind her, holding my breath—“and you put your hand into the water to see if it’s—”
“Hot enough?” I finished for her as I shoved her into the boiling pot, head first.
Her foot kicked out as she slipped past me, knocking me to one side. I fell off the stool just in time. The soup pot exploded with black smoke, great pillars of smoke that curled around themselves like hands clawing at one another. A sound came from inside the pot, a high-pitched squealing like a rabbit being killed. And then the smoke was gone, racing out the window, carrying the hideous smell with it, leaving me alone.
No, not alone.
I raced over to Andrew’s side, knelt down, and began to work at the ropes. “Andrew, are you okay? She didn’t hurt you, did she?” The ropes were slippery. I couldn’t untie any of the knots. As soon as I untangled one, the rope itself would snarl into a larger knot a few inches away.
“Ugh,” I said. It felt like snakes in my hands, and Andrew was only tied tighter. “I thought . . . you know, she’s dead, right? I thought the magic would be gone.”
Andrew made a muffled noise, and I saw his eyes dart to a spot right behind me.
Oh, no. I knew what this meant. I had seen this moment in a hundred scary movies, yelled, “You idiot!” at dozens of girls who had turned their back on the bad guy, thinking he was gone, only to have him come at them from behind.
She wasn’t dead.
Before I turned, I felt her, her breath on my neck, her eyes burning me, her hands on my skin. I had never been so frightened in my life. I turned anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:
SET FREE
No one was there. It had been my imagination. But, wait—there was something. On the ground, right behind me. A small stick—a whittled tree branch—nothing to be scared of at all. I picked it up.
Her wand. But now, of course, there was no witch to use it. Unless . . .
Was I like her? Really? Even if I hadn’t killed my mother, I had killed the principal, or made her turn into smoke anyway. I was a murderer, or close enough, and I didn’t even feel bad about it.
Deep down, maybe she had been right. Maybe I was witch material. I held the wand out, pointed it at Andrew, and willed the rope to untie.
It fell away in gleaming, silver coils, like a pet, a snake that did tricks for me.
“L-Lorelei?” Andrew stood up, slowly, like an old man. “Are you . . . you are Lorelei, right?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. My voice sounded different—strong, confident. Smooth. I looked at the side of the copper kettle; it gleamed, reflecting me.
But a different me. I had black curls now, a gorgeous, long curtain of hair. I stared at the wand. Did magic change you? Was the wand helping me . . . or making me into something else?
Whatever it was, it felt good, right. I felt strong. I could run a hundred miles, climb a hundred trees.
Trees! I remembered the trees. The kitchen staff. “Come with me,” I shouted to Andrew, and raced for the door. He limped along behind me. I held the door open for him, impatient, and had to keep myself from pushing him through it. I felt like, if I waited, they would be gone. Like the school, the property around us, and everything on it could disappear in a blink.
“There they are,” I whispered. The trees were bowing in the sudden wind that swept across the field. I ran to them, hearing the voices of my friends in their rustling leaves. I stopped, and held the wand up, willing it to change them.
But the voices cried out. No, they rustled, and more insistently—you must not!
Why not? I thought back at them. There was no answer, and I raised the wand again. The wind shrieked around my hair, and I saw it flying, black as a raven’s wing, dark and beautiful and strange, around my shoulders.
You will become one of them, the leaves answered in the wind. You are changing now.
It was true. I knew it.
The branches of the close-rooted trees rubbed together, like arms holding each other up. Friendship, they seemed to say, in the soft scrape of bark against bark. Love. Family.
“What do I do?” I whispered. “I want to save you, too. I can save you. You don’t have to . . . die.”
&
nbsp; The leaves began to fall, great green flakes swirling around my head. We are already dying, they said as they fell. You cannot save us.
You can only set us free.
I looked at the branch in my hand. I thought I knew what I needed to do. But if I was wrong . . .
Set us all free.
Something peppered the back of my neck and my hair, and I turned. It was sand from the playground, blowing away. Great clouds of white, glittering dust swept around the field and into the sky, becoming transparent, shifting as they rose. All those children, magical again. The sand vanished into the sky, and I knew they were going home at last. They were free.
A leaf caught in my hair, and I heard Vasalisa’s whisper. Set yourself free, Lorelei. You know how. Clever, clever girl.
I heard her laughter in the wind, and I knew what to do.
I broke the wand over my knee, splintering it into two ragged twigs.
It was over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
FINALLY FORGIVEN
Andrew and I sat on the edge of the drainage ditch full of water. The field behind us was flat. No mounds of earth, no trees. The school itself looked like it was twenty years old and the playground equipment looked older, rusted, and warped. As I watched, one of the seesaws cracked into two pieces and fell with a soft thunk onto the raw earth below.
“Are you okay?” Andrew asked, reaching for my hands. He lifted one of them up. “You’re scratched. Bleeding, a little.”
Surprised, I looked down. I hadn’t felt anything. But there, across both palms, were marks. It looked like I had been beaten with a thin branch.
I shifted, feeling the broken pieces of the wand—now just a handful of splintered wood—move in my back pocket. I hadn’t wanted to leave the pieces on the ground; broken or not, it seemed like a bad idea to throw them away. “Could have been worse,” I said. “How are you?”
“Good as new,” Andrew said. “Hungry, though.” We both laughed. “What happened, Lorelei? Where are the other kids? Did she—”
“No,” I interrupted. “They’re all fine. Well, puking up their guts, but they’ll live.” I told him about the medicine, and the kitchen staff, and Molly locking me in so I couldn’t warn him. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Are you kidding?” His eyes were saucer-big. “You came back to save me! That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard.” He leaned back, looking like a startled hedgehog with his dark hair poking up worse than ever. “I can’t believe it!” A pause. “You know, no one else will believe it either.”
“I know. And no one would listen to us anyway. They’re grown-ups. They’ll come up with some explanation for it. They always do.”
Andrew cleared his throat. “You still have a streak of black in your hair, you know.”
I pulled a piece toward me. “Huh. Yeah, I do. Oh, well. They’ll just think I dyed it.”
“What are you going to do now?” Andrew asked, standing up.
I stood up next to him and looked down into the drainage ditch. It was slowly emptying out, the salt water that had filled it the night before trickling away, downhill. “I’ll go home. Eat, sleep. Come back here when this ditch is empty and see if I can salvage Bryan’s skateboard.”
“Will you teach me to skate?” he asked. “If you think someone like me could do that.” He looked down, his cheeks turning pink. I got it. He thought he was too fat. I tilted my head to look at him. He would actually look really good in skater clothes. Baggy jeans, a chain or two.
“Well, I would,” I said, “if I knew how. I’m awful at it. Haven’t you seen my knees?” We both laughed. “How about I ask Bryan if he’ll teach us both?”
“That sounds fun,” Andrew said, smiling at the ground. He shuffled his feet back and forth for a few seconds, like he was thinking about something. Then, still looking at the ground, he asked a question. “You know how the principal said you murdered your mother? You never really thought that, did you?”
I had completely forgotten Andrew had been in the room for that conversation. “Yeah, I did,” I said. “I really did think that.”
It felt strange not to hurt; I had been in pain so long the pain itself had become something real. And now it was gone. It reminded me of losing a tooth, when you can still remember what it felt like, but you can’t feel it anymore, the hole where it had been the only thing left.
“Wow,” Andrew said. “I didn’t know you felt that way. You always seemed so . . . strong, I guess.”
“Me, strong?”
“You forgave yourself. That takes a lot of strength, Lorelei.” He shrugged. “At least, that’s what my therapist tells me.”
I almost laughed. He was right! I’d gotten rid of a witch, saved the lives of hundreds of kids. But only Andrew could understand I’d done something even harder. I’d forgiven myself. I’d set the memory of my mother free. I could almost hear her voice, singing to me in the breeze that blew past. I held one stinging palm up to my ear, and for a few seconds, I did hear her voice.
Magic? Or just memory?
“Thanks, Andrew,” I said after a few seconds. “I guess I was strong enough at the end.”
The silence between us stretched out, both of us thinking of the principal’s last few moments, until Andrew nudged the dirt with the toe of one of his sneakers. “So . . . skateboarding with Bryan, huh?”
“Definitely,” I answered. “Saturday work for you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll walk you home. We can make up our alibis on the way.”
“Thanks. I’m not looking forward to telling Molly I boiled the principal up in a giant soup pot.”
Andrew stared, like he couldn’t believe what I’d said . . . and then, his lips wiggled. Twitched. Jerked up and down, and up again, like he wasn’t sure whether to frown disapprovingly or laugh. I smiled. He snorted. Within seconds, we had to hold each other up, we were laughing so hard—not from humor, but from sheer relief, and the knowledge that no one would ever believe what we had to say.
My hands itched and I peered at them. Something was still there. I could just make out three tiny splinters of wood in each of my palms, buried deep under the skin. I flexed my fingers, and six droplets of blood welled up by the splinters, each droplet as round and red as a pomegranate seed. Six reminders of everything that had changed.
I thought of Persephone, going home to her mother after six months with Hades. I was going home, sure, but my mother was the one who would never return. At least I had the memory of her now, I thought. Without the old, sharp guilt pressing into me, I could love my mother, love her memory, as much as I wanted to. I knew this was what she would have wished for me.
I was strong. I could live with a few splinters of wood in my hands, even if they did burn. Now that I’d healed my heart? I could have a thousand real splinters and never stop singing.
The feeling of the splinters faded when I walked, changing as I moved away from the school. My world was still changing, all around me, I thought. But now, I had a feeling I was the one making the changes. Could I make the one that was most important and figure out how to fix my family?
I’d gotten rid of three witches already. Rehabilitating one wicked stepmother couldn’t be that hard. For all I knew, Molly was as lonely as Principal Trapp had been. As I had been.
It was worth a try.
I could always toss her in a soup pot if she wouldn’t stop being such a witch.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If not for the inimitable and fearless Suzie Townsend, I would never have had the courage to write this book. Suzie, you are truly splendid. Thank you as well to Laura Arnold for her sure guidance and vision, and for saying yes!
Sweet thanks to friends and first readers: Lindsey Scheibe, Sam Bond, Lori Walker, Laura Jennings, Pamela Hutchins, Holly Green, Tricia Mathison, and Sheryl Witsch
orke.
A chocolate-covered thank you to my critique partner and dear friend, Shelli Cornelison. They will, indeed, rue the day.
To Cynthia, Debbie, Bethany, and all the Awesome Austin Writers, for their invaluable support through the whole process—you really are awesome.
Family takes care of one another, and reads manuscripts, too. Lari, Rae, Taryn, Cameron, Drew, Dave, and the entire Borg: I love y’all.
I want to recognize the excellent teachers who allowed me to read countless books under my desk while I was supposed to be doing schoolwork, and the librarians who gleefully provided them. You won’t find yourselves in this story—but you are in my heart forever.