Diary of Anna the Girl Witch 1: Foundling Witch

by Max Candee

  “You know I’d never do that,” I said, but I probably did sound nervous. Something in my voice must have warned her that something was amiss because Lauraleigh pushed my door open and walked into my room.

  “What’s that?” She pointed at the candle.

  “It’s a votive.” I wracked my brain for an explanation. “Every year around my birthday, I light a candle for my mother. I never knew her, but this feels like a good way to honor her.”

  Lauraleigh’s face softened. She was an orphan too. She understood the need to make a connection to parents we never knew. I hated lying to her, but until I knew more about Squire, I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell even my closest friends about him.

  “Well, just make sure you blow it out before you go to bed,” she said.

  I nodded, watched her leave my room, and shut the door. Wow, that was close. Now I wondered if I should wait before animating Squire again. Who knew what would happen with a big hairy hand running loose in the dorm? And I didn’t know how to un-animate him. He seemed friendly enough, but I had a sudden vision of him zooming around the building, asking people to shake hands. Sister Constance would have a heart attack. Or she’d beat him with her cane.

  I really wanted to know more about my mother, but I blew out the candle and tucked Squire into my bear backpack.

  Tomorrow, I thought. I’ll go back to my special place in the forest and do this right.

  * * *

  I had just about finished studying for my English grammar exam when Jean-Sébastien showed up. I shouldn’t have risked sitting in the open courtyard between the Collège and the orphanage, but I’d been cooped up for days with my books, and the sun had been calling.

  I’d grown up with Jean-Sébastien at the orphanage, but last year, I entered the Collège and moved to the girls’ dormitory on campus. My trust fund allowed me to do that. Lauraleigh, who was brilliant, and other students got in on a full scholarship. Jean-Sébastien never cared enough about school to win a scholarship, so even though we were in the same grade, he went to a public school in town.

  “Cool paperweight,” he said, grabbing Squire off my open grammar book.

  “Give that back!” My voice was a little too loud. I swiped at his hand, but he held Squire out of my reach. “Jean-Sébastien, I’m warning you. Give that back to me right now.”

  He gave me the stink eye and examined the hand carving for another minute before handing it back. “Fine. There, you don’t have to get all huffy.”

  I grabbed Squire and tucked him into my backpack. I almost told him that it was a present from my mother, but I held back. Better that he thought it was just an unimportant trinket. Jean-Sébastien was the king of pranks; I didn’t want him anywhere near my mother’s gift.

  “That’s a pretty good carving,” he said. “I know a guy at the pawn shop in town. I bet he’d get you a decent price—”

  “No!” I interrupted. “It’s not for sale.”

  Jean-Sébastien shrugged. “All right.” But I could see he was still thinking about the hand. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for me to bring Squire out into the open.

  “Shouldn’t you be studying?” I asked. “You must have exams this week, too.”

  “Yeah. I’m good. It’s all up here.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger.

  “Well, if you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I still need to study.” I held my book in front of my face, hoping that Jean-Sébastien would take the hint. When I lowered it a few minutes later, he was gone.

  * * *

  Grammar was my best subject. Usually, I couldn’t get enough of punctuation and verb conjugation, but my mind was on other things today. I looked up and found my friend the moon, glowing like an opal in the bright afternoon sky. I felt as if it were smiling to me, and I smiled back.

  I couldn’t wait any longer.

  I packed away my books and left the garden. At the gate, I hesitated. Leaving the Collège grounds during school hours was not allowed. I could get suspended from school for it. Normally, I’m a stickler for rules, but I thought it would be a worse offense to sneak out of the dorm at night again. So, I looked left and right, opened the squeaky garden gate, and dashed down the path.

  In town, I kept my head down in case an adult from school was running errands at the shops and might recognize me. But I was lucky; no one saw me. I hurried through the park, ran across the bridge, and tumbled in a heap on the grass below my special oak tree and the Bear Paw boulder. The candle and its holder were right where I’d left them under the bushes, but the box of matches was damp. Good thing I’d brought a spare.

  I lit the candle and dug Squire out of my backpack. Holding the hand carving over the flame, I watched closely. I wanted to see the exact moment when he went from an inanimate carving to a live hand. But, like last time, it happened with a pop! I had blinked my eyes and missed it. Suddenly, Squire was floating in front of me again.

  And he dove at me.

  Poke!

  One of his big, hairy fingers poked me in the side. Then he zoomed back and waited, bobbing like a duck at sea.

  “What was that for?” I asked.

  He poked me again. And again.

  “Stop that!” I laughed. “It tickles!”

  Squire nodded a yes. He was trying to tickle me! So, my new friend had a mischievous side. He picked up a pinecone and tossed it to me. I caught it and tossed it back. He nodded as if that were exactly what he wanted. We played catch for a few minutes; then I decided we needed to get serious.

  “I brought pen and paper this time,” I said. “Can you answer some questions?”

  Squire dropped the pinecone and nodded. I opened my three-ring binder that held all of my study notes, turned to a fresh page, and handed him the pen. It looked tiny in his big grasp.

  Now that I had the opportunity to find out about my parents, the questions in my mind were endless. I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Okay. Let’s start easy. What was my mother’s name?”

  Squire wrote quickly. His handwriting was beautiful, like calligraphy, all swirling tails and fat, rounded letters.

  “Malyshka,” he wrote in Russian.

  “Malyshka? That can’t be her name.”

  But Squire nodded. I recognized that word. Uncle Misha had often called me “malyshka.” It wasn’t a name any more than “darling” was. I sighed and tried a different question.

  “What about my father? Do you know his name?”

  Squire shook from side to side so fast that I suspected he knew more than he was saying. So far, this wasn’t going well.

  “Do you know where I come from?”

  Squire carefully traced his elegant letters again: “Russia.”

  Well, I already knew that. “Where do you come from?”

  “Home,” he wrote.

  “Where’s home?” I asked.

  “With Knight.”

  Knight? Was that a person? I was starting to think that Squire was talking nonsense. Maybe he wasn’t as aware as I had thought he was.

  “Who is Knight?”

  “My other half. We are a pair.”

  Of course! Where there was one hand, there had to be a match. “Do you know where Knight is?”

  “No.” He paused; then he continued, “I miss him.”

  Poor Squire. He hung in the air limply. I could imagine his sadness. If I were a hand, I’d feel terrible without my match too.

  “Maybe if you help me find out about my mother, we’ll find Knight too,” I said.

  Squire seemed to brighten up at this. I asked him a bunch of other questions about my mother: Where did she live? How old was she? Was she still alive? But Squire couldn’t answer any of them. I tried not to get frustrated.

  “Do you know what my mother meant by my destiny being great? And what do I need to learn about myself?”

  Squire scrawled out the words: “You are a witch.”

  “What? No way!”

  He wrote more. “Your mother was
a witch. Your grandmother is a wi—”

  Before he could finish writing, a cold gust of wind blew through the trees, tearing the binder from my hands. It slammed into the ground, opening the three rings. Another blast of wind rattled the branches overhead and scattered my study notes across the grass and into the trees.

  “My papers, no!” I screamed when I saw all my hard work being lost. “Freeze!”

  And the papers did exactly that. They froze, some in midair, others standing on end in the grass. The wind died down as if it had never been.

  “What the…?” My heart was pounding in my chest. What had happened? Had I done it again? All I’d done was yell “Freeze!” If that was magic, shouldn’t I have felt something, like a zap? And didn’t witches need spells to cast magic? Screaming “Freeze!” hardly seemed like spellcasting.

  But that is just what had happened at the beach too, when Jean-Sébastien had almost ruined my cake. Only that time, I had frozen everything and everyone around me. This time, only the papers were frozen. The leaves still shook in the trees above me. Squire still bobbed around too.

  Maybe I was already getting better at this magic thing without knowing it?

  Squire was rushing around collecting the papers, so I turned my attention to helping him. I grabbed one of the pages that hung suspended in the air, expecting it to be rigid. But when it touched my fingers, it fluttered easily into my hand.

  We gathered all the papers and reordered them in my binder. When we came to the page with Squire’s writing, he jabbed at the second-to-last line.

  “You are a witch.”

  “That’s ridiculous. There has to be some other explanation.”

  I thought about Jean-Sébastien and his snake that had turned into a scarf. I thought about the wet and muddy cuffs on my pajamas. I sat on the grass with my knees drawn up to my chest.

  I couldn’t really be a witch – could I?

  Squire seemed to recognize that I needed a bit of time to think. He busied himself with collecting pinecones into a big pile.

  The dream stone was warm against my chest. I held it up and scoped the moon through the hole in the stone. It was only last year that I realized that not everyone saw the moon all the time.

  I had made a fool of myself in science class. The teacher had explained about the orbits of the moon and the sun and why we could only see the moon at certain times of the day and month.

  “But I can see the moon every day!” I piped up. “Look, there it is, right now.” I pointed out the window.

  Some of the other kids snickered. My science teacher frowned.

  “Good joke, Anna,” Jean-Sébastien said as if he wished he’d thought it up himself.

  I shrank back in my chair, wondering what was going on.

  Now I was a whole year older and smarter, smart enough to keep my mouth shut about the odd things I see, like the moon, and my dreams about running with bears. Uncle Misha had told me that there is more to this world than what we see with our eyes or hear with our ears.

  “Sometimes, we see and hear with our hearts,” he’d said. And I believed him. So while the whole science of the moon and the solar system made sense to my head, I let my heart see the moon and kept it my secret.

  Maybe I really was a witch.

  Squire was perched on top of his pile of pinecones. I stood and walked toward the river. Like a faithful dog, he followed me, toppling his tower of cones. He still held one in his grasp. He tossed it up and caught it again and again. I wondered if he was nervous.

  I certainly was.

  At the edge of La Fourche River, I raised my hands and yelled, “Freeze!”

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe the water would stop like ice. Of course, that would have been impossible. There were thousands of liters of water – maybe millions – in that river, all flowing downstream from the mountains. I couldn’t freeze it all with one word – and nothing happened to it.

  I turned my attention to the leaves on the trees. They were young spring shoots, and they shook in the light wind.

  “Freeze!” I said again, this time putting as much authority as I could into the word.

  Nothing.

  Now I was feeling frustrated and just a bit silly. If I was a witch, I wasn’t a very good one. It was time to go home.

  “How do I… uh… turn you off?” I asked Squire. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s not a good idea for anyone to see you like this.”

  Squire nodded and grabbed the pen again. “Just say: ‘Sleep, Squire,’” he wrote.

  I nodded and almost said the words.

  “Wait! One more thing: Is there any other way to wake you besides fire?”

  Squire shook as if saying “no” and wrote, “Only flames.”

  “All right. Sleep, Squire.” The hand dropped out of the air like a stone. I caught him before he hit the ground.

  That night, while I lay in bed, trying to go over my notes for my grammar exam, I kept turning back to the page with Squire’s writing. The paper was dirty from being blown about the forest floor, and some of the writing was smudged. Hence, I didn’t notice one glaring detail until I had read it three times.

  Squire had written, “Your grandmother is a wi—”

  He had probably meant to write that my grandmother was a witch too. But he hadn’t written “was.” He had written “is.”

  My grandmother was still alive.

  Chapter 6

  Dear Diary,

  I continue trying to access my witch powers when no one is looking. On Tuesday, I finished my grammar exam early (I’m sure I got an A!) and spent the rest of the hour trying to make my pencil move with nothing but my mind.

  I decided that pencils are cosmically heavy. Oh, well, I will keep trying.

  Jean-Sébastien is going to be a problem. When I came back from the forest on Monday, he was waiting for me at the garden gate.

  “I’m pretty sure that leaving school grounds is a big no-no,” he said with a grin. “I’ll bet Sister Constance would be curious to know what you were doing in town all this time.”

  I’d tensed up when he first spoke, but then I relaxed. “In town”: He hadn’t followed me into the woods. That was a relief. Now I just had to keep him from squealing on me for leaving campus.

  “What do you want, Jean-Sébastien?” My heart fluttered as I thought he might ask for Squire. There was no way I could hand him over (pardon the pun). Jean-Sébastien narrowed his eyes in that way he has when he’s trying to solve a problem. He really shouldn’t do that. It’s not a good look for him.

  “I don’t know what I want just yet,” he said. “But having the great Anna Sophia owe me a favor is worth keeping your secret, for now.”

  Perfect. Now I owe Jean-Sébastien a favor. That could lead to all kinds of trouble. And what did he mean by “the great Anna Sophia” anyway. He made it sound like I’m stuck up or something. The boy is infuriating.

  * * *

  I put my pen down with a sigh. The exam week was finally over, and my hand ached from all the intense writing. I wanted to record all the ways I’d tried to manifest my magic powers this week. But it was nearly six o’clock, and Marie would be here soon to pick me up for my sleepover with Gaëlle.

  I dumped my books out of my backpack and filled it with pajamas, a toothbrush, and a spare set of clothes for tomorrow. I almost brought my mother’s letter but felt it was too precious to risk losing. I was excited to tell Gaëlle all about it though I still hadn’t decided how much to let on about my new magic powers. She might not believe me. As an afterthought, I added Squire to the bag in case I needed proof that I wasn’t completely crazy.

  Downstairs in the lobby, Lauraleigh waited through one of Sister Constance’s lectures.

  “You drive at the speed limit, young lady. Not a kilometer faster.” Sister Constance pounded the floor with her cane for emphasis. “And you have these girls home by ten tonight, or this will be the last time I agree to such nonsense.”

  Lauraleigh h
ad learned to drive last year. Like me, she had a trust fund; hers was governed by her grandfather. He had allowed her to take out enough money to buy a car. Not that she got to drive it much; Sister Constance was a stickler for curfew, which was normally nine o’clock. I was amazed that she was letting Lauraleigh stay out later tonight.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. Three of our dormmates stood beside her. Jodi, Yvette, and Marjorie were all dressed up. So was Lauraleigh, now that I noticed. She was wearing a deep blue dress that looked fabulous with her pale hair. “Is there a party somewhere?”

  “Yes, of course. At Irvigne Manor,” Lauraleigh said. “Weren’t you invited?”

  “Uh, yes, I was. But I thought…” I thought I was going to have a quiet night alone with Gaëlle. Marie had promised, but I should have known better. Whatever Marie wanted, Marie got.

  “Are you all going?” I asked.

  “Everyone is going to be there!” Jodi chimed in. “It’s in a real castle!” she exclaimed.

  I wished I could muster some of her excitement. Instead, I felt a sense of dread as if that dark shadow already had its arms around me.

  Marie waited outside. Beatrice sat in the front seat of the convertible, and Sister Daphne stood beside the car.

  “There’s our girl!” Marie beamed when she saw me. “But you forgot your party dress! No matter. I’m sure I have something just your size at home. We’ll have fun dressing you up, won’t we?”

  “I guess,” I said, opening the rear door.

  “You’ll keep an eye on Beatrice, won’t you, dear?” Sister Daphne asked. “Make sure she doesn’t eat too many sweets, or she’ll get a tummy ache.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  We sat in the car for a few minutes while Sister Daphne chatted with Beatrice, reminding her to be on her best behavior.