Hex-Ed

by Sarina Dorie

  I checked the bus schedule again, not that the numbers were going to change. I was certain more than five minutes had passed. The bus still wasn’t there. After waiting ten more minutes, I suspected it had come early. LTD wasn’t known for reliable transportation. I left the bus stop and started walking. It would probably take an hour to walk a few miles, but I could do this.

  The air had cooled and smelled of coming rain. At least it wasn’t hot anymore.

  I headed out of Joel’s neighborhood, past the restaurants and boutiques, toward Sixth Street where there were more businesses, and it was better lit. As I walked, I noticed the echo of my footsteps. I stopped, and the echo faltered, the click of a heel continuing half a second after I stopped.

  I held my breath and turned. No one was there. I scanned the shadows but couldn’t see anyone. I shuffled back a step while keeping my eyes on the sidewalk behind me. I didn’t hear the echo.

  I turned onto Sixth Street and kept walking. Between the occasional cars driving past, the distant crunch of feet came from behind me. I sped up and so did the footsteps. The street was lit, but between trees, the blue-white of the streetlamps only shone through patches. Leaves whispered in the wind. I would swear eyes watched me in the boughs. My overactive imagination saw a person lurking in each shadow.

  My chest felt tight with anxiety. My mind was playing tricks on me. The shadows were just the shifting of leaves, and that echo might be an actual echo, not someone following me. I thought about the man I’d seen earlier staring at me from the park. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, just seen the shape of him. It was unlikely he was the one walking behind me. He wouldn’t have known I would leave Joel’s house at all tonight, so it wasn’t like he’d waited there for me.

  I picked up the pace. An old homeless woman muttered to herself on the other side of the street. I powerwalked past a group of college-aged men drinking and smoking outside a bar.

  “Hey, honey, are you old enough to drink?” one of them slurred. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  I ignored them.

  “Don’t be stuck-up like that, girly,” another called after me.

  I pretended I didn’t hear that scuff of noise behind me and kept walking. Looping the strap of my purse around my neck, I secured it in place as I took out my portable umbrella. I pressed the button on the handle, and it popped open into a longer stick. It was pretty flimsy. I’d bought it at the dollar store earlier in the year, but it was the most lethal weapon I had at the moment.

  My heart thundered in my chest, and I panted for breath. I glanced at my reflection in a store that was closed. No one was behind me. Maybe I wasn’t being followed. As I passed under a shadowy section of trees planted along the sidewalk, two men jumped out from the branches above. I caught a flash of their faces, their mouths red with blood.

  They waved their hands in the air and shouted nonsense at me. Both were dressed in patchwork skirts and had dreadlocks, resembling other bohemians in the neighborhood. They smelled of week-old body odor and marijuana, but I suspected they’d been smoking more than that.

  I screamed and smacked one and then the other with my umbrella. Even after taking self-defense as my P.E. credit in college, my ninja skills were lacking. What I lacked in strength, height or training, I made up for in fear. I kicked one in the shin and jabbed my umbrella in the other man’s eye as he tried to grab me.

  I jumped from the sidewalk and ran out into the street to get away. A car honked its horn and swerved as it rushed by.

  I tried to dart back onto the sidewalk, but one of the men blocked the way. In the headlights of the passing car, I could see the red around their mouths was badly applied lipstick. The lack of blood relieved me, but only slightly. Instead of being high on bath salts and trying to eat my face, they would just stab me and rob me.

  I smacked the nearest with my umbrella. “Leave me alone!” I shouted.

  He continued to shadow me. I whirled, doing my best roundhouse kick. I was aiming for his stomach but got his crotch instead. He doubled over and groaned.

  Laughter came from one of the trees along the sidewalk. A green dot of light in the shadows caught my eye. Someone was recording the incident with a camera. Probably it was some stupid prank they were going to post later on YouTube. I loved the Whiteaker neighborhood. Except when I hated the Whiteaker.

  A truck sped by, honking its horn. The next car came too closely behind. I screamed and tried to dodge away, but I was too slow. The car was speeding. The wheels screeched. It was going to hit me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hexes and Exes

  People talk about how at a catastrophic moment, they leave their body and go down a tunnel of light and see angels. Or their life passes before their eyes, and they see their past trials and tribulations, the good times and the bad, and it brings them peace. That’s not what happened to me.

  I saw my future—I just didn’t know that’s what it was. I saw a gingerbread cottage walking across the forest on chicken legs, brown dappled unicorns trampling an English garden outside a castle and people dressed as satyrs and fairies—or perhaps they were satyrs and fairies—milling about a rustic village. Time came crashing together all at once, the past intersecting with the future: airship pirates rode on currents of wind and magic, the tornado that had carried Derrick away returned, and a dark figure rode across the sky on thunderclouds. I saw women shifting into the bodies of ravens, circling me like I was carrion.

  I saw death.

  That death wasn’t in the present.

  Screeching wheels silenced. The car stopped, impossibly fast. I blinked, confused. The prankster’s shouts died away. One stood poised with a foot off the ground. The other remained crouched, his face contorted in a silly expression. The green light of the camera was gone. Traffic was frozen.

  A lone figure stood at the end of the sidewalk, an orange spark of light fizzling out of a stick that reminded me of a sparkler kids waved around on the Fourth of July. I couldn’t make out what the figure looked like against the glare of lights behind him, only that he was tall and lean. His hair was long.

  What had just happened had to be magic. Real magic.

  The man strode toward me. My stomach churned with dread. I didn’t like the way shadows twisted around him.

  It might have been the school district psychologist, but I had a feeling from the way he walked purposefully toward me with that light flaring in his hand that I might not want him to get close enough to find out.

  “Who are you? What do you want from me?” I asked, backing away from him.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Stop! Don’t come any closer,” I said.

  He kept walking toward me.

  I’d experienced too much surrealism for one night. I lost my cool and ran. I tripped onto the sidewalk and rushed past the jerks with their prank video. They remained as still as statues. My footsteps pounded the pavement, matching my frenzied heartbeat. A second later, the screech of breaks and the vrooming of engines started up again. Cars rushed past and the distant voices yelled into the night.

  I made good time as I ran. It usually took me fifteen minutes to jog a mile—yeah, that puts me in first place for slowest runner—but what can I say, I have short legs. This time, it only took me twenty minutes to run a couple miles. A record.

  I was completely exhausted by the time I reached my mom’s little house. I unlocked the front door, fumbled through the house to my bedroom, and dropped into bed without changing out of my clothes or brushing my teeth. That was more than my fair share of weirdness for the evening.

  Lucifer, the world’s oldest cat, jumped up on the bed. He placed himself between me and the door as if he was expecting someone.

  That night I dreamed of Derrick. It had been a while since I’d had one of those nightmares. In real life, I had closed my eyes against the rush of wind and flying debris when the tornado had torn Derrick from my arms. I hadn’t seen where he’d gone. Pe
rhaps it was that mystery that had made the experience so much worse. I hadn’t seen him die. He’d gone missing. My heart continued to hope I might see him again.

  I couldn’t listen to the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and not cry.

  In these dreams I was always trapped in the whirlwinds of a tornado, fighting to grab onto Derrick’s outstretched hand. He reached out to me, calling my name, our fingers almost touching. I had the sense that if I could just get ahold of him, I could pull him back into this world, and he would be safe. We would be together.

  This dream started off the same as the others. Only, when I reached for Derrick’s hand, he grasped mine. His hand was warm and reassuring, like I remembered it in life. The fragrance of spices and faraway places washed over me. He pulled me into the eye of the storm.

  Lights flickered and flashed in the maelstrom around me. I spotted my parents’ refrigerator and my sister’s pink bedspread. One of my vintage Spock dolls tumbled past me. The wind roared all around me. It was Derrick’s whisper that drew my attention, a breath of wind that almost blended in with the howls and hisses of the storm.

  “Clarissa,” he said.

  He stood before me, transparent like a ghost. His blue hair was longer. His face was older and leaner, his baby fat gone. He had aged, but he was more like a shadow than a real person. I wasn’t afraid of him. Derrick had never hurt me in life. I couldn’t imagine he would hurt me as a ghost either—if he was dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

  His eyes were mirrors reflecting my own sorrow. He started to fade away. I reached out for him again, not wanting to lose him. He took my hands in his. I could no longer see the wispy phantom he had been moments ago, but I could feel his warmth.

  His breath warmed my ear. “Clarissa, remember.”

  “Remember what? Remember you?” I held his invisible hands tighter. “I’ve never forgotten you.”

  “Remember you. Remember what you are.”

  He didn’t say who I was. He said what.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What am I?”

  I awoke to sunshine and birds chirping outside my window. The dream was fresh in my mind. Lucifer sat on my pillow, peering closely at me. The black cat licked a paw.

  My feet were twisted in the blankets, and I fell out of the bed as I tried to rise. I didn’t want to forget what I’d just dreamed. What could Derrick want me to remember about myself? What was I? An accidental witch? A succubus? A complete dork?

  I shoved a box of shoes aside from under my bed and pulled out a dusty suitcase I’d decoupaged with flowers and fairies. Inside were a couple of my old sketchbooks and one of Derrick’s that his grandma had given me after he’d disappeared. Next to that was my only remaining fairy figurine that hadn’t been destroyed in the tornado, a Strawberry Shortcake doll, two My Little Ponies, and a Lucius Malfoy replica wand. At least, I thought it was a replica, but I wasn’t sure. I had found it on the floor of my therapist’s office and tucked it into my pocket. Later I’d painted it hot pink and white to make it more feminine, more me. When I held it in my hand it felt warm, like it had been resting in the sunlight.

  I set the wand aside.

  I flipped through Derrick’s sketchbook. To this day, I still found his drawing skills superior to artists I’d seen in galleries. I smiled at a sketch of Cthulhu coming out of a black hole in space and reaching for the planet Earth. I remembered the day he’d drawn that. It had been the day he asked me to homecoming. I turned him down because I thought he was only asking as a friend and he’d felt obligated to ask me. I’d liked him so much it had hurt.

  Even after all the years of his absence, that reservoir of longing inside me felt bottomless. More than ever, I pined for a boy I could never have.

  The next pages were filled with sketches of me. Some were in charcoal and some in Copic Markers. He’d included my freckles and upturned nose. In that portrait he’d managed to capture the way he’d seen me: shy and pretty, instead of the awkward and gawky way I’d felt in high school.

  A folded yellow paper fell out from between the sheets of the sketchbook. At the top was the title: Student Self-Assessment. It was a questionnaire with options for: “Yes,” “No,” and “Sometimes,” and a place for comments after each question to explain in more detail. I stared at the questionnaire, puzzled. I didn’t remember answering these questions, but my handwriting filled the comments section.

  Question 1: Do unexpected and unusual things happen around you that you can’t explain?

  Yes, like that time the washing machine exploded when my older sister and I were pretending to play with magic.

  Question 2: Do you feel a close connection to an element such as fire, water, wind or earth?

  Yes, all of them. Sometimes I feel electric currents under my skin when I’m out in nature.

  Question 3: Have you ever wished for something bad to happen to someone and later found out they had mysteriously taken ill?

  No. I don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone.

  Question 4: Do you have difficulties with social interactions with peers?

  Yes, I don’t feel like I belong. Everyone is immature. I don’t have much in common with most students my age.

  Question 5: Do you have a hypersensitivity to certain sounds, smells or tactile sensations?

  Sometimes I think I see sparkles in the air or smell things no one else can like spring flowers in the middle of winter. Sometimes when people touch me, my belly flutters and I feel strange and uncomfortable.

  Question 6: Have you ever had visitations from winged creatures that might resemble fairies, angels, demons or other worldly beings?

  No, not visitations exactly. I think I’ve seen women with black wings and feathers for hair. I think they might be ravens or something like were-ravens.

  Question 7: Have you ever intentionally performed witchcraft or magic, and if so, did it work?

  Yes, I’ve tried. It has never worked on purpose.

  At the bottom of the form was a footer labelled: Intake Form/Womby’s School for Wayward Witches.

  That name was familiar. Womby’s.

  What the hell was this form? Had this been some kind of joke test Derrick had given me? I wanted to laugh it off, but I knew I couldn’t. This was real. I vaguely remembered. The memory tickled my mind, teasing me like a dream.

  I shoved the form back into Derrick’s old sketchpad and hugged the book to my chest. I felt unsettled, my stomach queasy. If only Derrick had been here . I could have confided in him. He would have hugged me and told me everything would be all right. I remembered the pressure of his hand in mine in the dream. He had felt so real.

  My belly kept fluttering. I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t thinking about sex. I was just thinking about Derrick, about his hand on mine, his breath whispering against my cheek as he tried to talk to me in my dreams, and of the way he pulled me out of the nightmare and into the calm. I remembered the way his lips had felt on mine the night he’d kissed me.

  I picked up my striped-pink wand and pointed it at my bed. Lucifer jumped off. It was a good thing too. A blue bolt of light crackled out the end of the wand and zapped my pillow. The stuffing exploded and sent feathers everywhere. Lucifer shot out the door.

  That was the moment Mom walked in. Her eyes were wide as she took in the mess. It looked like I’d just plucked a chicken.

  “Um,” I said.

  “How about a breakfast smoothie?” she asked.

  I shoved the wand behind my back. I didn’t know which was worse, getting caught with a vibrator or a magic wand.

  CHAPTER NINE

  To Market, To Market

  In the days that followed the incident with Joel, I felt on edge, waiting for something unexpected to happen at any time. But magic didn’t randomly manifest itself. Even when I picked up the wand again, nothing happened. I tried to think of sexy thoughts, but it still didn’t w
ork. The mysterious man I’d seen before remained out of sight. I found nothing online about any school named Womby’s School for Wayward Witches.

  On Saturday morning while my mom was at work, I dyed my hair hot pink. The novelty of the hair color made me feel like a new person, like the self I wanted to be who wore funky clothes and didn’t have to pretend to be normal. I wore a striped skirt and a polka dot tank top for vending at the Skinnersville Saturday Market that I hoped made me look like an artist. I felt liberated and more myself than I’d ever felt as I rode my bike downtown to the park blocks where the market was held.

  The morning clouds lingered while I stood on a corner performing magic tricks and making balloon animals. The day started off all right. I’d made fifteen dollars in the first two hours, but the shoppers dissipated with the first drops of rain. The few people who shopped along the park’s long row of tents shifted from covered booth to covered booth, avoiding my area.

  I stood under a tree, trying to keep my pens and paper for drawing caricatures sheltered from the drizzle. The weather forecast had predicted sunshine. My dad had always said the meteorologist was a liar—a fancy charlatan who practiced pseudo-magic. That had always made my mom laugh.

  As if the rain hadn’t been enough to make the day miserable, Brutus got loose from Mrs. Peters and came barreling toward me. I hadn’t climbed any trees since I was a kid, but I scrambled up the nearest one, clinging to a branch for dear life. The Rottweiler foamed at the mouth in excitement.

  Mrs. Peters grabbed his leash and tried to tug him away. “Stop antagonizing my baby. You’re teasing him.”

  He continued to bark at me until Lance hauled his mother and her dog back to his booth. I grabbed my more or less repaired sandwich board, the bag with my balloons and art supplies, and traveled farther from the glass art booth.