“You wouldn’t have if you didn’t steal my pepper!” shrieked Alberto.
“Well, think of poor Pink,” I tried. “Can you imagine how much her life will suck if the kids find out her mom is a wicked witch?”
Alejandra looked scornfully down at Pink. “Why do you care what the other kids think, Primella? You should be proud to be a witch.”
Pink and I just looked at each other. If we couldn’t explain that then there was no hope.
“I guess I’ll get used to being an outcast,” said Pink mournfully. “And I was just starting to make a friend or two.”
“Nonsense.” I scrunched up my nose, thinking. Time for all my years of babysitting to come into play. What was going to work on these little terrors?
“Well, I guess you’re right,” I said to Pink. “It was a dumb idea. The witches are way too powerful for us.”
“And way too clever,” added Pink. She was quick.
“I can’t imagine how we’d get the bad bread away from them,” I said.
“You could do, like, a levitating spell,” said one of the kids in the hot tub. He clambered out of the water and dripped on our feet. “I mean, if you were gonna do it.”
“I don’t know how to do a levitation spell,” I said.
“Duh, you don’t know how to do any spells,” said another kid. “It’s just rutabaga, parsley, and three ladybugs.”
“Can you do that?” I said to Pink.
She shook her head mournfully. “Everything I do comes out wrong.”
“Anyway, we don’t got rutabaga,” said the first kid.
“Well, what do we have?” I said. “You guys have some powders there. And you each have a few spells you know how to do.”
“A few,” scoffed Alejandra.
“Well, start listing them,” I said. “Things that you can do and you have the ingredients for.”
A cacophony of voices rose up from the children.
“Make your pants so heavy they fall off.”
“A pretend chair that looks like a real one so you fall through it.”
“Annoying ringing noises from a cell phone you can’t find to turn off.”
“Invisible pushpins on your chair.”
I nodded thoughtfully as the list of spells grew. “I’ve got an idea.”
Ten minutes later we were creeping up to the pool area. The witches were steadily getting more sloshed as they threw powders onto the loaf of banana bread. “A pig nose!” shrieked Esmerelda, giggling. “A thousand purple pimples!” They seemed to have completely forgotten about calling us back for dessert. Rimelda’s birthday cake sat sadly by the pool, and Rimelda herself looked grumpier than ever, unimpressed by the drunken horde.
“Okay, everyone have your pouch of ingredients?” I said. “Wands at the ready?” My army of children flicked their wands out. “Alejandra, you first. Go.”
Alejandra combined several things from her pouch and held it out to her brother to spit in it. I must have looked grossed out because Pink gave me a shrug like: whatever works. Alejandra dipped her wand in her palm and flicked it over the pile of fluffy bath towels.
They turned invisible. We each picked one up and draped it over ourselves.
“Excellent,” I whispered. “Now you, Alberto.”
Under cover of the invisible bath towel, Alberto snuck all the way up to the table that held the banana bread. Meanwhile, another couple kids in their bath towels went around to the other side of the pool. We waited, breaths held, until they had set their spells. Super-irritating cell phone ringtones started playing from the other side of the pool. While all the witches turned their heads to look, Alberto made an illusion banana bread that looked exactly like the real one. It would only last a few minutes, but that was just enough time—I hoped.
Alberto grabbed the real banana bread, covered it with his towel, and hurried back to us.
Meanwhile, the twins’ mom had gone to investigate the mysterious cell phones. (“One of those is my mom’s ringtone,” whispered Alejandra.) We held our breaths, hoping she wouldn’t stumble on the towel-covered kids. But she was stopping for a different reason.
“Ew, Esmerelda, your daughter’s exploded kraken is everywhere,” she said. “Can’t you teach her how to master a basic shrinking spell?”
A very drunk Esmerelda laughed. “Oh, let me see. Did I give my snoogie-woogums the wrong powder? I feel terrible.”
Several witches laughed—cheating is considered fair play among witches, and this evidence of double-cheating was even better.
Pink and I just stared at each other. I gasped at the horribleness of it as Pink’s eyes welled with tears. “She deliberately gave me the wrong stuff!”
“She wanted you to fail,” I said, shocked. Across the pool I saw Sarmine frown as she, too, was working this out. “Pink,” I whispered. “You’re part of her plot. Your mom wants you to stay little so she can stay young. She wants you to stay four.”
Pink’s trembling lips set in a firm line. Her witchy side asserted itself. “I am not taking this lying down,” she said. She seized the hexed banana bread and motioned us over to the other end of the pool, where Rimelda’s birthday cake sat on a little rolling cart. She nodded to Alberto. “Can you make the bottom of that cake heavy?” she whispered. “Very, very heavy?”
He nodded and, concentrating, mixed up a powder and inscribed a rectangle in the bottom of the cart, under the birthday cake. It was just the size of the banana bread. He pointed his wand at it, and as we watched, the rectangle grew so heavy that a long crack ran right around it as if invisible hands were popping out a perforated section. It broke out of the cart. Alejandra shoved one of the invisibility towels under it as it thumped to the ground, dampening the sound. Some cake came with it—just about the right amount.
Carefully Pink wrangled the hexed banana bread up into the hole of the birthday cake. “Someone make it stay,” she whispered at us. The twins looked at the table, considering.
But that one I could do. I grabbed several paper plates and wedged them into place. Nothing like a little non-witchy ingenuity for saving the day.
“And one more for luck,” Pink said fiercely. She pulled out the orange powder her mother had given her, the horrible orange powder that made everything get bigger, and sprinkled it all over the white-frosted cake. It sparkled like sugar crystals in the sun.
We were just backing away from the birthday cake cart when I saw Sarmine looking our way. We were invisible, so she couldn’t have seen us—right? Had she heard the bottom of the cart fall? Her eyebrows drew together and her lips pursed.
I ran back to the kids. Not a moment too soon.
Esmerelda tipped back the last of her martini and made her way over to the birthday cake. She wheeled the cart up to her mother. “A hundred today, but not a hundred forever,” she said tipsily. “We’ll take care of you.”
“Whee,” said Rimelda.
“And someone find a piece of foil for that banana bread,” Esmerelda said. “Boy, wouldn’t I like to be there when she cuts into it. All those hexes activated at once.…” Esmerelda shoved the knife into her mother’s hand as she sang off-key: “Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you.…”
When she cuts into it …
My stomach sunk. All those horrible hexes were going to attack Rimelda. Poor, one-hundred-year-old Rimelda, whose only crime was being grumpy at her own birthday party. She hadn’t added anything to the banana bread. She definitely didn’t deserve pig pimples, or whatever it was that Esmerelda had been adding.
“Happy Birthday, dear Rimelda. Happy Birthday to…”
I shook off the invisibility towel and ran for the cake. “Nooooo…” I began, and everything seemed to go in slow motion, the way those things do. My eyes met Sarmine’s across the way as I ran toward Rimelda. She was raising that knife, looking for a good place to cut.
Sarmine has a million faults, but being slow-witted is not one of them. Her eyes narrowed as she put two and two together, and real
ized what I had accomplished with the help of a pack of first-grade witches. Quicker than lightning, her fingers flashed into her fanny pack and combined several powders. Quicker than lightning, her other hand scooped up a splash of chlorinated water and added it to the pile.
The wet powder flicked out on the cake, Sarmine’s wand came down, and she whispered some words. Nobody saw her. They were all focused on Rimelda, with a couple heads slowly turning to me and my “Nooooo…”
Rimelda’s knife pierced the orange-dusted cake.
The cake parted and out poured a stream of horrors.
Rimelda’s eyes widened. Her martini-addled fingers fumbled for her pouch.
And then she saw that none of the horrors were headed toward her.
A stream of purple pimples shot after Esmerelda. The skunk-smelling frogs hopped after the redhead. Giant green snakes rained down on the twins’ mom.
Witch after witch ran shrieking from the pursuing hexes. They were all too drunk to master any self-defense spells. And the things pursuing them were not little, either. Aided by Pink’s messed-up shrinking spell, the horrors got bigger and bigger as they pounced on the witches who’d created them. Esmerelda was a mass of disgusting purple boils from her platinum hair to her pink-polished toes.
Rimelda’s wrinkled face slowly broke into a smile and then a grin. She fell over, howling large hoots of laughter. As she straightened up, I saw the years slowly fall away—a hundred fifty, a hundred twenty, a hundred. Eighty. She stopped and stretched when she looked about a healthy and fit sixty, around the same age as Sarmine.
“Primella,” she said, and beckoned her granddaughter to her side. Pink was still holding the orange powder, which had clearly been dusting the cake. “Did you do that?”
“Well…” Pink said.
“We all helped,” butted in Alejandra. I gave her the stink-eye. This was not the time for Alejandra to shine. She nodded and said fairly, “But Primella’s the one who made the goonies all huge.”
Rimelda squeezed her granddaughter close. “You’re really turning into an excellent witch, you know that? This is exactly the kind of chaos that makes me feel like there’s a future for our family. The kind of well-deserved chaos,” she said severely, and looked very deliberately at her daughter, who was fighting off a six-foot banana slug.
Pink breathed a deep sigh of pride. “You think so?” As we watched, her legs visibly lengthened. Her seams started popping at the shoulders. The four-year-old’s pink dress was way too small for this ten-year-old girl.
“I know so,” said Rimelda. She stretched out her arms and studied her granddaughter at arm’s length. “You know, we’d better get you some new clothes,” she said. “You’ve completely outgrown that dress.”
I crossed over to where my guardian perched on her lawn chair. Sarmine was her usual stiff-backed, straight-mouthed self, yet her eyes glimmered with amusement as she surveyed the scene. “I saw you with that potion,” I said to Sarmine. “You made all those hexes revert to their creators.” I looked suspiciously at her. “You know that was rather a … nice thing to do?”
“Nonsense,” said Sarmine. “I didn’t want to get attacked by stray purple boils, is all. Such a bother.”
We sat back in our lawn chairs and watched the flurry of grown-up witches get chased by bats and slugs and bears and boils. The witch-kids were eating the entire birthday cake, now cleared of its banana bread hexes.
This might turn out to be a rather pleasant birthday party after all.
About the Author
TINA CONNOLLY lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, in a house that came with a dragon in the basement and blackberry vines in the attic. Her stories have appeared all over, including in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Tina Connolly
Art copyright © 2015 by Chris Buzelli
That Seriously Obnoxious Time I Was Stuck at Witch Rimelda's One Hundredth Birthday Party Page 2