by Natasha Lowe
“Mum, please, that’s private,” Poppy snapped, grabbing it back and inadvertently knocking over her untouched glass of cola. It flooded the table, drenching textbooks and papers and running onto the floor in a sticky brown pool.
“Your homework!” Mrs. Pendle wailed, frantically shoving books aside and trying to stem the flow of soda with her cardigan. “What a mess, what a mess. Now you’ll have to redo it all. Roger, throw me a sponge, quick.” She turned on her daughter in frustration. “Well, help out, Poppy.” But Poppy didn’t move. “Oh, look at this, it’s ruined, it’s just ruined,” Mrs. Pendle screeched, trying to peel the paper on wand technique off the table. “Come on, Poppy, don’t just sit there.” Tears filled Mrs. Pendle’s eyes and she started to sob quietly. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do with you. You fight us on everything. You have opportunities most girls only dream about, and you’re throwing them all away. We’ve done everything for you,” she cried. “We’ve supported you. We’ve always been there for you, and I know it’s not about the money,” she sniffed, “but the sacrifices we’ve made.” Her voice wobbled with emotion, and Poppy covered her ears.
“Mum, stop it. Please.”
“No, I won’t stop it. Do you have any idea, Poppy, how our lives revolve around you? And then running away like that.” Edith Pendle blew her nose loudly. “I can’t pretend I wasn’t hurt.” She stared at her daughter in silence, breathing shakily.
“You don’t understand,” Poppy said at last, her lips trembling. “You don’t care about what I want at all,” Poppy added, bursting into tears.
“I know best. You are only a child,” Mrs. Pendle said, aghast. “How can you say that?”
“Because you never hear me,” Poppy shouted. “You don’t listen, Mum, ever. It’s you that wants me to be a witch,” she sobbed, shoving her chair back from the table. “I don’t. I never have. I hate magic. I just want to bake cakes.”
“Ah!” Edith Pendle put a hand over her heart as if she were in severe pain. “Thank goodness Great-Granny Mabel isn’t here. She’d be mortified if she heard you speaking that way. Isn’t that right, Roger?”
Mr. Pendle nodded, fiddling with the buttons on his cardigan. “She’d be heartbroken,” he agreed. “You’ve been given a marvelous gift, Poppy, love, and we can’t bear to see you wasting it like this.”
“Just leave me alone,” Poppy yelled, her sadness overtaken by a growing wave of anger. “Leave. Me. Alone.”
“You’ve let the family down, Poppy,” Edith Pendle hissed. “That’s what you’ve done. Let us all down.”
“Now, take it easy, Edith,” Roger Pendle said, shuffling over to her in his slippers.
Edith Pendle took a couple of deep breaths, steadying herself on her husband’s arm. In a more composed voice she said, “We need to get this mess cleared up so Poppy can get on with her homework.”
Poppy sat quite still, the anger inside her swelling. There was a long, drawn-out silence, except for the sound of Mrs. Pendle’s heavy breathing as she unwrapped a Twirlie bar and took a big bite. Then leaning forward, Poppy shoved her spell book onto the floor, where it landed in a puddle of sticky cola. “NO!” She glared at her mother in defiance. “I will not.”
“Now, come on, Poppy,” Roger Pendle said, folding his arms across his chest in a show of authority. “Do as your mother asks, please. Finish up your homework.” Mrs. Pendle’s long face was full of self-pity, and she looked tearfully at her daughter as she chewed.
“All right,” Poppy agreed huskily, pulling her magic wand out of her backpack with hands that were shaking almost as much as her voice. “I’ll do my homework if that’s what you want. This is a new spell I learned in school today and I have to practice it,” she sobbed, waving the wand at her parents. “CONSTICRABIHALTUS,” Poppy shouted, firing out the words with so much fury that Mrs. Pendle had not only stopped crying but was rapidly beginning to turn the color of a lead pencil. So was Mr. Pendle, who stood motionless beside his wife, a startled look plastered across his face.
For an hour or more, Poppy sat at the table, too horrified to move, as she watched her parents turn to stone. First their arms and legs and faces, then their hair, and finally even the clothes they wore. It was weird, watching the color leach away from her mother’s orange sweater, seeing how her skirt hung in stony folds so that she looked as if she had been carved from a piece of solid granite by a master craftsman. All she could think about was Madeline Reynolds. Did she feel like this too when she had washed away half of Italy? Despair and shame flooded Poppy, and she was filled with a heavy sense of guilt. This wasn’t at all what she had intended. She had only wanted to stop them from going on at her, shut them up for a bit. Now the house was so quiet Poppy could hear the drip, drip, drip of the kitchen tap. When the phone started to ring, it sounded as loud and invasive as a fire alarm. Poppy sat and listened to it blare on and on. Finally the answering machine picked up and Auntie Viv’s voice could be heard, yabbering away into the silent room.
Another hour passed, and still Poppy didn’t move. She wondered if her heart had also turned to stone, because it sat inside her chest as cold and heavy as a boulder. Finally Poppy pushed back her chair and walked over to where her parents stood. Mrs. Pendle’s face was as long and mournful as a bloodhound’s, tragedy fossilized into every line. Poppy reached out a hand, touching the stone cheek that still bulged with Twirlie bar. She knocked against it gently with her knuckles. It was hard and unforgiving. Her father stood with his arms folded across his chest, his stone feet encased in a pair of stone slippers.
Miss Weedle had been right about the Stop It Now Spell. It was shockingly powerful and Poppy had mastered it perfectly. Ironically, her mother would have been delighted by such an accomplishment, had she been available for comment. Anger started to swell up in Poppy again. I’ll bet nobody else in the class managed to turn their rubber balls into stone, Poppy thought, shoving three boxes of Twirlies and some cans of meat stew into her backpack. Who cared what she ate now? “I hope you’re happy, Edith,” Poppy challenged, addressing the statue-like Mrs. Pendle. She stuck her wand on top of the Twirlies. “Because this is what you wanted, isn’t it, Mum? I’m an excellent witch,” she said, “just like Great-Granny Mabel. And I’ll never bake again either. You don’t need to worry about that. There’s no oven here, and I’m not going back to Marie Claire’s.” If anyone knew what she had done to her parents, they’d be horrified, and Poppy couldn’t bear Marie Claire’s disappointment. Even if she wanted to, she had no idea how to change her parents back again. Right now she felt hopeless. When the police found out what she had done, they would take her off to Scrubs Prison and lock her up. Poppy was sure of that. But her anger and sadness were so deep she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything anymore. Shouldering her backpack, Poppy looked at her mother one last time and gave a hard laugh. “You’ve got what you wished for, Mum. I’m a witch all right.”
Leaving her parents standing in the kitchen, Poppy grabbed her broomstick and left through the front door. She wasn’t running away this time. She had nothing to run from and nowhere to run to. Noticing Maxine’s cat stalking across the top of the garden fence, Poppy whipped out her wand, and with an aggressive wave of her hand, she turned it straight into stone.
It was five o’clock on a Wednesday evening, and Poppy Pendle had passed over to the dark side.
Chapter Sixteen
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Poppy Pendle Disappears
AS Poppy TRUDGED INTO POTTS BOTTOM, SHE scowled at a row of little blackbirds chirping away on a telephone wire. It was a happy noise and Poppy couldn’t stand it. She reached for her wand and turned them all into stone, followed in quick succession by two more cats, a squirrel, and a colony of ants marching across the pavement. The postman was just walking past on the other side of the street, whistling a
way, and Poppy was about to turn him into stone when a goose waddled out from the path that led down to the canal. Pausing a moment, Poppy suddenly had an idea. She would live in that old abandoned cottage, the one beside the canal with the falling-in roof and broken windows. After all, it didn’t belong to anyone and she’d be quite alone there, nobody to bother her. With a determined flick of her wrist, Poppy zapped the poor goose to stone and kicked him under a patch of ferns. Then she marched on by.
As she climbed over the crumbling wall in front of the cottage, Poppy remembered how she and Charlie had sat there talking. They had laughed and eaten cookies, and she had told Charlie about her dreams of one day owning a little bakery just like Patisserie Marie Claire. Not wanting the sadness to overwhelm her, Poppy used the full force of her anger to turn a beautiful swan, floating down the canal, into stone. Then she shoved open the front door and went inside. It was musty and dark. The floorboards had caved in and nettles were growing up between them. There was no furniture in the room except for two old packing crates and a stained, lumpy mattress. Empty cans littered the floor, but someone had swept up all the broken glass into a corner. Obviously Poppy was not the first person to claim the cottage as her home, although from the dust, it seemed whoever had been living here was long gone. The only other occupants now were a family of mice who had chewed a nest for themselves in the middle of the mattress, and Poppy promptly fossilized them.
It was impossible to go upstairs, because most of the boards had rotted away, so Poppy moved one of the packing crates over to a window and sat down. She opened a can of Super Savers meat stew from her backpack and ate it cold. Even though it tasted like dog food, Poppy didn’t care. Then, holding her wand at the ready, she turned every bird that landed in the overgrown garden to stone. When it got too dark to see by, she lay down on the damp, lumpy mattress and fell asleep.
A dawn chorus of chirping robins woke Poppy, and within seconds they had joined the rest of the little stone birds outside. Sitting back down on her packing crate, she ate two Twirlies and stared out at the canal. Poppy stayed there all day. By the time the light was fading, she had turned three swans, seventeen ducks, a woodpecker, and a rabbit to stone. Each time she cast the Stop It Now Spell, her sadness faded away a little bit more. In its place was cold, heavy emptiness that stopped her from thinking or feeling. She didn’t care anymore, and when she tried to cry, she realized that her own tears had turned to stone and they wouldn’t fall.
When she got hungry, Poppy ate a Twirlie bar or something cold from a can. She made her supplies last for five more days, but the time was coming when she knew she’d have to leave the cottage and find more food. One night, under cover of darkness, Poppy got on her broomstick, grabbed her backpack, and flew to the twenty-four-hour Super Savers Market. She swooped through the front door and headed down the first aisle, filling her backpack with the first cans she came to. Then flying down the next aisle, Poppy reached for some packets of Twirlies and Fudge Monkeys. The cashiers and the manager stared in openmouthed disbelief as she sped past them all without paying.
“Hey, come back here,” the manager yelled, starting to chase after the broomstick. He didn’t get very far, because Poppy turned him to stone before whizzing through the automatic doors.
When she got back to the cottage, Poppy emptied out her loot onto the floor. There were ten cans of Super Savers stew, twelve boxes of Twirlies, and sixteen packets of Fudge Monkeys.
And so Poppy spent her days, sitting by the window, looking out over the canal. She rarely washed or brushed her hair. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Poppy would jump into the canal for a quick swim. As soon as they heard her splashing about, the fishes hid among the reeds; otherwise, they knew what would happen to them. The bottom of the canal was already dotted with stone trout and pickerel. Occasionally, on a day when the sun was shining and a warm breeze blew through the window, Poppy would think about Charlie, but she quickly squashed these thoughts by turning a squirrel or a robin into stone. Friends didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered. Her old life as Poppy Pendle was over.
Chapter Seventeen
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Charlie and the Goose
CHARLIE COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT Poppy, no matter how hard she tried. It had been a shock to discover that Poppy had disappeared again. After hanging around Ruthersfield without catching sight of her friend, Charlie came to the sad conclusion that Poppy had once more run away. Only this time she wasn’t at Marie Claire’s. Charlie had stopped by the patisserie after school one day to see if Poppy was there, and when Marie Claire heard the distressing news, she was beside herself with worry.
“I cannot believe that Poppy has run off again. I should never have let her go,” Marie Claire said.
“What else could you do?” Charlie said, trying to make Marie Claire feel better. “Her parents would probably have called the police.”
“I don’t know, chérie.” Marie Claire shrugged. “All I know is that after Poppy left, everything seems to have gone wrong. My breads don’t rise like they used to and my cakes and pastries taste flat.” Marie Claire wiped at a smudge on the counter. “Can you believe my landlord came by on Wednesday to tell me he would not be renewing my lease?” She looked at Charlie out of sad eyes. “It is as if the life has gone out of my bakery, and I blame myself. I really do. It’s all my fault. Poppy is meant to be here. She has baking in her blood. I knew that, Charlie, and I let them take her away.”
Walking slowly home from Marie Claire’s, Charlie wondered for the hundredth time what could possibly have happened to her friend. She had been by the Pendles’ house once already. The car was in the driveway, so obviously the Pendles hadn’t gone anywhere. She had even glimpsed Mr. and Mrs. Pendle through the kitchen window, but Charlie didn’t have the courage to go up and knock on the door. It was all so strange. As she walked past the pathway that led down to the canal, Charlie found herself wishing for a sign. Something that would help her find Poppy. She had been so lonely without her friend. And that’s when she came across the goose, its long, curved neck sticking out of a patch of ferns. Charlie crouched down and gently stroked the goose’s head. It had a rather surprised look on its stone face, which made Charlie smile. She tugged at the goose, but it was heavy. Too heavy for her to move, so she ran most of the way home and made her father return with his pickup truck. Charlie’s dad hauled the stone goose into the back and slowly drove it home.
“Where on earth did you find that?” Charlie’s mum asked as they lugged the goose into the back garden.
“Down by the canal path,” Charlie said. “Under some bushes, all covered in dirt. Look at his face. Isn’t he sweet? I’ve always wanted a goose for a pet.”
“I wonder who would throw such a thing away?” Mrs. Monroe mused, watching her daughter wipe the bird gently down with a damp towel. “Those sorts of garden ornaments are expensive.”
“It’s beautifully carved,” Charlie’s dad remarked, running a hand along the goose’s back. “Solid stone. Whoever made this was a true craftsman.”
“I can keep it, can’t I?” Charlie asked, and her parents exchanged a brief look. Both of them nodded. They were happy to see Charlie smiling again. She had been so miserable the past few days, and when her mother asked what the matter was, Charlie had just mumbled, “Friend trouble.”
Charlie spent all her free time with the goose. After school she would run straight home to see him. She liked to brush the leaves and dirt off his back and then sit down beside him to eat her snack. Charlie’s mum could see her chatting away to the stone bird as if they were having a conversation; which in actual fact they were. Although the goose couldn’t talk back, he was an excellent listener, and Charlie felt as if he could some
how understand her.
One afternoon it was raining hard and Charlie dashed out to cover the goose with an umbrella. The next day the temperature dropped and she wrapped him snuggly in a blanket.
“Should we be worried?” Mr. Monroe asked his wife, peering through the kitchen window at their daughter. “That goose seems to be her only friend.” He watched in concern as Charlie left half her oatmeal cookie on the ground in front of the stone goose. “She appears to be feeding him,” he remarked to his wife as Charlie skipped through the back door.
“I thought he might like something to eat,” she said. “Doesn’t he look hungry to you?”
“It’s a statue, sweetheart,” her father replied gently, but the next morning when Charlie came down for breakfast, the cookie was nowhere in sight. “He ate it!” Charlie shrieked, jumping up and down. “I knew he was hungry. He ate it and he took a little walk.”
“Did you move him?” Charlie’s mum asked her husband in a whisper, but Mr. Monroe shook his head and gave a puzzled shrug.
That night Charlie fed the goose again. This time she left him out a slice of her mother’s fruitcake, and in the morning the cake was gone and the goose had waddled across the grass and was standing under their apple tree. The ground was damp and there were webbed feet marks left in the wet earth. “I think he likes being sheltered from the wind,” Charlie said at the breakfast table. “He has a smile on his face now, Mum.”