by Ira Bloom
Esme had to run and hide in her room. She couldn’t deal with the guilt. Poor Ronnie, already devastated, and Katy so sure her love was being returned. How utterly destroyed they would be when they found out their big sister was the one Zack really loved. She felt outright horrible about the entire thing. But not horrible enough to give him up.
Veronica knew precisely where Zack got out of his car, so she picked the perfect spot to wait for him before school on Tuesday. She wore her shortest, sexiest skirt and her suede wedge booties, which accentuated her perfect ballerina legs, and her little wire-framed push-up bra, with the—might as well admit it—padding. Boys liked that kind of thing, and anyway, it made her look older. She topped the outfit off with a little bolero jacket with faux fur collar and cuffs that dramatically accentuated her tiny waist. Her blond hair was straight and silky and very long. Her silver pentangle earrings accented her graceful neck. She figured he liked mascara, since he wore enough of it, so she did her vivid blue eyes up in the butterfly effect, perfect for her cartoonishly long lashes. With a precision liner, four shades of mascara and a lash volumizer brush, Veronica could give Modigliani a run for his money. Of course, she had a better canvas to work with.
While applying makeup and preening in the mirror, Ronnie always chanted allure spells under her breath. Nothing that would cause the heavens to split open and hordes of cherubim to emerge with little love arrows; simply a bit of willful influence put out into the cosmos that her grandma Sophie had taught her as a preschooler while brushing her hair and fussing over what a beauty she was. It had served Veronica well, over the years.
Unfortunately, by the time Veronica got to school, her so-called friends Carly and Michaela and Karina had already staked out the spot on the sidewalk that Zack would have to walk past, trying to act cool and failing miserably. She didn’t want to be associated with any of that, so she waited on the stairs in front of Hampstead Hall, where she knew Zack had first period.
Veronica had one move for attracting boys: feigned disinterest. Girls at school were already throwing themselves at Zack and he’d only been there for a day, so she planned to stand out as the one girl who wasn’t interested. Zack would realize, she reasoned, that she had higher standards, as was her due, being a great beauty and all. She put her earbuds in her ears and fiddled with her iPhone, watching for Zack out of the corner of her eye. She could hear some girls chattering as he approached. She had her back turned, but she could see him in the mirrored surface of her phone cover. Just as he was nearing, Katy ran down the stairs right past her as if she didn’t exist. Katy gave Zack a familiar hug, and it was reciprocated. Veronica gritted her teeth stoically. I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t care less was her mantra.
Katy took Zack’s arm. She’d doubled down on the Gothic Lolita thing today, a bit sexier than Monday’s outfit. Zack wore his same boots, with jeans and a motorcycle jacket that went perfectly with his silver-lensed goggles and Ed Hardy skull-and-bones scarf. A different hat today: a derby. They proceeded together, a few girls tagging along but unable to keep up with Katy’s energy and quick banter. They mounted the stairs, Katy so oblivious that she didn’t even notice her own sister on the first step. But Zack halted as if he’d applied anti-lock brakes while Katy kept ascending stairs, her hand losing its grip on the boy’s arm.
“You must be Veronica Silver,” he said.
Slowly, Ronnie looked up from her device and hit Zack hard, with the eyes. She tapped the screen a few times, closing apps, and nonchalantly removed the buds from her ears. “Pardon?”
“Aren’t you Esme’s sister?” he asked.
Veronica shrugged. Pointed to Katy with her chin. “Hers, too.” She returned her attention to her phone, as if Zack were boring her already. As if she didn’t want to take him in her arms and smooch him mercilessly.
Katy tried to recapture Zack’s arm. “This is my baby sister, Ronnie,” she said.
Zack didn’t even seem to notice Katy was there. “Esme didn’t do you justice, when she said you were beautiful. You’re a fitty, aren’t you? I’m smitten. But you’re so horribly young.”
“Wait,” Katy asked. “Where do you know Esme from?”
“We met up for coffee yesterday,” Zack replied, pinpointed on Veronica. Around them, a small posse of girls was at the same time pleased to see Katy derailed and dismayed by the new competition.
“Juliet was only thirteen, when she hooked up with Romeo,” Veronica said. “And I’ll be fifteen soon.”
“Yeah, well, Juliet … that didn’t end well, did it?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she returned. “I’m more the homicidal type than the suicidal.”
“A girl after me own heart,” Zack teased.
Veronica checked the time on her phone, replacing the buds in her ears as if Zack didn’t even register. “Yeah,” she said, scrolling through her playlist, the sarcasm in her tone uninflected. “Like you have a heart.” And then she walked away from him.
“Who the hell does he think he is?” Logan Rehnquist asked in a rabble-rousing voice of the other guys in the weight room after school. He’d spied Sandy Hardesty at lunch walking toward the student parking lot arm-in-arm with Zack.
“We should definitely kick his skinny ass all the way back to England,” Jackson Gartner agreed, standing in front of the mirror-covered wall, curling 75-pound free weights. “Danny almost cold-cocked him in the hall today; he was talking to Diane.”
“I wanna be there to see that,” Logan said. “Danny Long could take his damned head off.”
Danny was absent from the weight room because the varsity football team had practice five days a week after school. Wilson and Nick were not on varsity, so they had weight training on Tuesdays. They were spotting Norman, who’d earned himself a kind of grudging respect from Logan, Jackson, and Danny by virtue of his mind-boggling feats of strength and his bygones-be-bygones attitude.
“Let’s put another coupla dimes on there and go for the record,” Wilson told Norman. “I wanna see you bench a thousand.”
Norman pumped the weights like a slow, rhythmic machine, a perfect set of ten. With his long arms, the weights had quite a distance to travel, touching his chest on every rep and fully extending. Coach had ordered a special Olympic competition 84-inch bar, and Norm was benching twenty 45-pound steel plates plus a few 10-pound discs. Jackson stopped admiring his biceps in the mirror long enough to watch the giant do his last set.
“Damn, Frankenstein, that’s gotta be a world record,” Jackson said, no disrespect intended. It was generally agreed in the weight room that “Frankenstein” was an apt nickname.
Norman replaced the bar and sat up, wiping his face with a towel. “Record’s like twelve hundred pounds. But they only need to do one rep.”
“Norm could beat it,” Wilson attested.
“I can’t believe I fought you and lived,” Jackson joked. “I must have been crazy.” He looked over his shoulder to see if he’d upset Logan. The topic was still a sore point.
“You know,” Norm told Logan, “there’s something not right about that Zack guy. He creeps me out. Like he’s a sociopath, or a sexual predator, some kind of … I don’t know what. Monster. He’s bad news. I feel it in my gut.”
“I know, right?” Logan concurred. “He’s trouble, big trouble, there’s really something wrong about him, something … I don’t know, dangerous. Like, a threat to us all.”
“You said the same thing about Norman,” Nick reminded him.
“No, Norm’s all right,” Logan admitted, a huge concession. “I was wrong about you, okay? And I apologized. We’re cool now, right? But this Zack guy … ” Logan shook his head, like shaking off a punch. “Something’s not right about him.”
“You know, Logan, I totally agree with you,” Norm said. “We need to keep an eye on him.”
Katy confronted her sisters that very evening, and the rest of the week was spent in accusations, threats, pleas, arguments, and tears. Esme admitted
she’d had coffee with Zack and that she found him attractive, and not just physically, and that they’d had a great conversation:
“I mean, I mentioned Victor Hugo, and he knew exactly what I was talking about.”
“Victor Who-go?”
“You know, The Hunchback of Notre Dame?” Esme clarified. “Quasimodo?”
“Rings a bell,” Katy said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s my boyfriend. End of story.”
“You might be reading too much into his innocent flirtations.”
“Well I saw him first,” Veronica said. “So you can both back off. Or else.”
“Bring it!” Katy challenged. She turned her back in contempt and stormed off to her room.
“Like she has a chance,” Veronica said, walking down the hallway toward her own room.
Esme watched Ronnie go. Apparently, her sisters didn’t consider her much of a threat. She had to admit, between Katy’s talent and personality and Veronica’s beauty and charm, Esme’s brains were not going to give her much of an advantage.
In her room that weekend, Esme attacked the problem like a complicated research paper. She’d seen Zack around campus with a few girls, notably Sandy Hardesty and Katy, but didn’t think much of any other girls at school as competition. Zack liked her. Nobody could fake that. They were comfortable together, genuine. He sat with her in the back of history class every day, and he was so attentive, so engrossed in her take on everything, it was hard to imagine he could possibly be interested in anyone else. But it would be a mistake to discount Katy, with her intimidating talent for the craft. She could resort to jinxes and hexes and spells to get what she wanted. Esme didn’t kid herself that she could compete there. Potions, now … she’d dabbled in a few, with some success in the past. Katy couldn’t even cook a hard-boiled egg.
Veronica, on the other hand, had a ruthless streak that Katy didn’t possess. Ronnie had always had a gift for charms, little sing-song spells. Things didn’t come as easily to her as they did to Katy, who enjoyed the favor of the cosmos. Katy was so used to winning, she shrugged off the little losses with happy-go-lucky indifference. Ronnie had grown up watching things unfold in Katy’s favor time and again. She’d learned to harness her tenacity, to win by refusing to accept defeat. The battle was never over until Ronnie had what she wanted. She had Katy and Esme and their dad wrapped around her fingers. She’d gotten a horse, from their cheapskate father, and dressage lessons, and more clothes than Esme and Katy combined. Veronica was far more intimidating than Katy. Goofy Katy, how could anyone ever take her seriously as a love interest? But Ronnie … Ronnie was irresistible. And she knew how to work it.
Esme used her superior brains to look for an advantage, a connection with Zack. First of all, she’d have to lose the glasses and go back to wearing her contacts if she was going to compete with Veronica. But she needed another edge. She researched British accents on the Internet, listening to examples from various regions, eliminating them as she went, using her ear. He was not from London or Liverpool. The vowel sounds were off for Cambridge, the consonants too pronounced for Birmingham. She noted some similarities of usage in Leeds, but Zack had a hard G in his NG combinations. She looked northeast, to Newcastle, and found the vowels flattening. Zack’s vowels were over-enunciated. After three hours of painstaking research, Esme was fairly confident that Zack was from the Manchester area.
A furry body walked across the keyboard. “What are you up to?” Kasha asked. He sat down on her mouse and started licking himself. His whiskers were flecked with blood.
“I’m trying to figure out what soccer team this boy likes.” She shoved the cat back.
He lay down on his side with complete indifference. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” She typed Manchester soccer into her browser.
“Norman likes soccer?” Kasha continued grooming himself. His breath had a carrion stench.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.” There were two major soccer teams in Manchester: City and United.
“You should date Norman,” Kasha advised. “You’ll never find another one that big.”
“What’s it to you?” she asked, focusing on stats. She’d need to know team members’ names if she wanted to convince Zack she was a fan. She’d have to study the traditional rivalries.
“It looks like I may be your familiar for a while,” he mentioned. “I don’t want to deal with your boy troubles all the time. Your great-aunt Becky was pretty wild in her heyday; the melodrama was exhausting. Your mother had the right idea, pop out a few daughters, then abandon them for some poor sap to raise while she gallivants off with her lesbian friends.”
“You horrible beast!” she said. “My mother did not abandon … and who says I want a familiar?”
“I have a contract with your family line, for three generations. Becky was the first, your mother was the second, and now it’s either you or one of your sisters. And yes, you do want a familiar, so show some respect. I haven’t made a decision yet. I might go with Veronica.”
“Not Katy? I thought she was the talented one.”
Kasha wrinkled his nose. “I refuse to lend my millennia of expertise to anyone without the sense to prefer cats to dogs. Even I think they stink, and I have a fondness for carrion.”
Esme was of the same mind, but contrarian that she was, felt obligated to make a halfhearted effort in defense of the canines: “Cats are lazy, indifferent, sadistic little carnage machines capable of feigning affection when they want something.”
“Just like people,” Kasha argued.
“Dogs are loving and loyal and faithful,” she insisted.
“Yeah, what’s that all about? Sniveling, brown-nosing sycophants. Their overall hygiene is deplorable, and their personal habits are disgusting. I’ve seen dogs eat feces and then lick people on the face, with no consideration of what was just in their mouths.”
“Okay, you’re right. But why not Veronica?”
“Fine,” Kasha said, standing and stretching. “You’ve never tried casting spells or brewing potions with the help of a demon cat. I have sources of energy I can tap that would boggle your little mortal mind. But you obviously have no interest in witchcraft. I’ve been watching you for three months and you haven’t even cracked that grimoire. All you care about are your stupid grades. I’ll cast a little memory spell on my way out, and you’ll forget all about the talking cat. Then you can spend the rest of your life watching Veronica get everything her heart desires: fame, money, boys, power, revenge … She’s more ruthless than you, your little sister. More my type.”
“Wait!” Esme said, in a panic. “Who said I didn’t want you?” Veronica, everything her heart desires? Boys? “I’m a witch, aren’t I? And I’m, like, totally a cat person, you know that.”
Kasha climbed the cat structure. When he got to the landing by the door, he sat for a moment, grooming himself. Esme had no doubt that if Kasha went out that door, the next day Veronica would have a new pet. And everything she desired. Everyone.
“I suppose,” he mentioned, “that Veronica would be willing to feed me whatever I wanted.”
“I’ll feed you whatever you want,” Esme blurted immediately. Demon cat? Did he actually say he was a demon? Was she crazy, making a pact with a demon?
“I eat first,” he negotiated. “Before the other cats. I sleep in your bed when it’s cold, or whenever I want. No collars. No flea baths. No vets.”
“Of course,” Esme agreed.
“That’s it,” he said, jumping back down off the structure. “Anything else that comes up during our professional relationship, we’ll negotiate case by case. I’ll switch to Veronica if things don’t pan out. The rest of the stuff is ironclad, under the original contract with Becky.”
“Okay,” Esme said. She noticed that her entire body was shaking with anxiety. Consciously, she made her shoulders relax. She breathed. She was a witch with a demon cat for a familiar. What had she gotten herself into? But Kasha
had been her legendary great-aunt Becky’s familiar, and her mother’s. Both strong women who were nobody’s fools. She could do a lot worse than to emulate those two. “Well, let’s get to work,” she told her familiar.
“What I want to know is, how do I find out something that I don’t know the answer for?”
“You’ve asked the right cat, mistress,” Kasha replied. “Have you heard of Google?”
“Google doesn’t have the answers I want,” Esme explained.
“You’d be surprised.” He poked at the keyboard. “How do you make this thing work?”
“Okay,” she said, blocking the cat’s flailing paw. “Just … stop that. The kind of information I want isn’t online. I want to find out what Zack’s favorite soccer team is, so I can make a connection with him. British boys are crazy for soccer, I know that much.”
“So this boy’s name is Zack? And both your sisters want him, too?”
“Everyone wants him,” Esme explained. “But I think he really likes me.”
“Well you’re going about it all wrong,” the cat admonished. “You’re a witch. Don’t you have a Ouija board?”
“That would be in Veronica’s room. But we haven’t played with it since we were kids.”
Kasha looked around the room. “There,” he said, indicating her bookcase. “You have a Magic 8 Ball.”
“It’s a toy,” she said dismissively.
Kasha licked himself casually. “I’m a demon. You can trust me.”
“Can I?”
The demon stared at her with unblinking golden cat’s eyes. “Do I look like someone who’d corrupt you just to harvest your soul? Get out your tarot cards.”
Esme found the deck on the bookcase, buried behind a stack of YA fantasy. She’d never had much use for the cards, having had disappointing results in the past. Magic never worked for Esme the way it did for Katy. Magic came to Katy naturally, and Veronica was able to willfully focus her faith into spells or readings with the fervor of a snake cultist. Esme was always second-guessing magic. She had a rational, scientific mind and could not accept anything on faith. She needed to know how things worked, which was anathema to the practice of magic. Magic demanded conviction.