Small Town Witch

by Kristen S. Walker

  “Oh,” I said, “I hung out with Heather, Glen, and Ashleigh. We went bowling.”

  “That sounds like fun. That new girl was there?”

  “Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I think we’ll go again sometime.”

  “Okay.” Lindsey stared off into space for a few minutes. “Oh, hey, what are you doing later today? We haven’t gone shopping together in a while.”

  “Heather and I have plans.” That wasn’t true. Heather actually hadn’t been talking to me since Friday night, but I didn’t really want to hang out with Lindsey. To be nice, I said, “You’re welcome to come, too.”

  Lindsey was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “You’ve been hanging out with Heather a lot lately. What are you doing this afternoon?”

  I thought quickly through our options. There were many local places that Heather hadn’t visited yet, but I hadn’t planned out what I was going to show her next. “We’re going miniature golfing,” I decided. “That place my sister likes. We’re taking her, too.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I think I’ll pass. Thanks for inviting me. Maybe next time.”

  “Yeah, maybe next time.”

  I was grateful when Lindsey walked away.

  On Tuesday, Heather came over to my house for dinner. We planned on hanging out until the full moon came out and then flying around to take some pictures. We finished dinner just as the sun was starting to go down. Heather and I grabbed our camera bags, then hopped on my broom.

  We flew around for a while, looking for a good place to take some pictures. I made sure to avoid any areas that might have ghost activity. Then Heather pointed to the river: the water was rippling and glinting silver. I landed us on a rocky shore and we took out our cameras.

  There was the river to take pictures of, trees on the shores, rocks casting shadows. Heather had several rolls of black and white film that she wanted to experiment with, and she was very focused on what she was doing.

  After a while, I got tired of trying to frame shots of trees and rocks, and looked around for another subject. I preferred to take pictures of people, so I aimed my camera at Heather. She was busy looking at her own camera and the things that she was taking pictures of, so she didn’t notice what I was doing.

  After a while, the moon moved again and a big tree blocked most of the light. I put my camera back into my bag. “I think that’s a good cue to wrap it up.”

  Heather was crouched on the ground, balancing her camera on a rock and taking shots across the water. “Isn’t there any way that we could get some more light? I’m not finished yet.”

  “I didn’t bring my flash bulb and I don’t have any other light.” I squinted up at the sky. “I don’t think the moon is going to come back any time soon.”

  Heather groaned and stood up. “But don’t you have a spell or something that could create light for us? You know all this magic—can’t you do anything useful?”

  “All of my supplies for spells are at home.” I looked around to see if there was anything that I could use there, but it was all trees and rocks and fallen leaves. “I can create fire, but this is the worst time of year for forest fires because everything is so dry. I don’t want to risk it.”

  “We don’t need fire, just the light. Can’t you call the light part of fire without the heat?”

  I scratched my head. “I don’t know, I’ve never tried something like that before.”

  Even in the dimness, I could see Heather’s dark eyes glittering at me. They looked even bigger than normal in her pale face. “Why don’t you just try it?”

  I took a deep breath and tried to figure out what I would do. When I created fire, the heat was what I called to ignite some kind of fuel. If I didn’t want to burn anything, where would I concentrate the light? And what would be the source of the light? It wasn’t like I could just snap my fingers and conjure something that had never existed before.

  Then I remembered the hobby lanterns—the floating balls of light that the faeriekin made. They looked unnatural, but the Faerie Court was always full of them, so they had to be easy to create. And if my magic was just borrowed from a Fae, then shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing?

  I closed my eyes and focused on what I wanted to create. I could see one of the hobby lanterns in my mind’s eye: a glowing ball of pale white light, about the size of my fist. One of them would not give off a lot of light. Maybe if I tried to make it a little bigger and brighter than a typical hobby lantern.

  I opened my eyes and channeled all of the energy that I could into the air above me. For a moment, nothing happened. Then there was a brilliant flash and a noise like a clap of thunder—the noise went straight through my ears with a sharp pain—

  I clutched my head and fell to my knees on the ground. The light disappeared as quickly as it had come, but the noise kept going on like a ringing in my ears.

  I felt something touch me on the shoulder, and I flinched away. I looked up and saw Heather standing over me. Her mouth moved like she was talking, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  I took my hands off of my ears. “What?” I felt myself speak, but I couldn’t hear my own voice.

  Heather frowned and said something else, but I still got nothing.

  I pointed to my ears, then pinched one of my earlobes and shook it. “I have this ringing in my ears, so I can’t hear anything. Give me a minute and see if it goes away.” Again, I felt the words but couldn’t hear myself speak them.

  So we waited. The ringing gradually faded, along with the pain, leaving behind a sensation like my head was stuffed with cotton. However, none of my hearing returned.

  I stood up and reached for my broom. “I need to go home! I need to ask my mom for help!”

  Heather winced and put her hands over her ears.

  I made a face and lowered my voice. “I’m sorry, I just can’t tell how—what you can—ugh, I can’t even hear myself. Maybe my mom knows how to fix it. We need to go.”

  I checked to make sure we both had everything packed in our camera bags, then I picked up the broom and got on. Heather sat down behind me and we took off into the sky. I was starting to worry that I’d done serious damage to my hearing, and I really wanted to get home. I hoped my mom would know what had happened and how to fix it.

  Flying home in the moonlight was eerie because I could feel the wind rushing over us, but I couldn’t hear anything. All the little sounds that I took for granted—leaves rustling in the trees, night birds calling to one another, crickets, even the sound of our feet touching the ground in my front yard—they were all gone, leaving an emptiness behind. I kept looking around me, just to make sure that things were still there. I felt like I was passing through a fake world, or maybe a movie with the sound turned off.

  I ran inside and found my mom in the living room watching television. I waved my hands in the air to get her attention. “Something went wrong and now I can’t hear anything.”

  Mom switched off the television and looked at me. Then she turned to Heather. They talked back and forth for a minute. I watched their expressions to guess what was happening: Heather looked worried, but Mom barely reacted at all.

  Then Mom left the room and came back with a pencil and a pad of paper. She wrote something down and held it up for me to see. It read, “Tell me what happened as clearly as you can.”

  I blurted out, “I don’t know, there was this really loud noise and a ringing in my ears and then I couldn’t even hear myself talk—”

  Mom put a hand up to stop me. She wrote down two more words on the pad of paper and underlined them: “Calm down.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to slow down. “We were in the woods, and it was dark. Heather asked me to do a spell to light things up.” I glanced at Heather, who nodded. “I said that I couldn’t start a fire because the whole forest would go up right now, so she suggested that I try to just create a light. So I did, but then I stopped hearing.”

  Mom held up a new note. “What exactly did
you try to do?”

  “I was trying to make a hobby lantern, only bigger.” I held up my hands to show the size of a normal hobby lantern, then spread them apart until they were as wide as my head. I think that was about the size I’d been visualizing. “I thought if a Fae could make one, then I should be able to, too. So I tried to picture one that was a little bigger and a little brighter than the normal ones that we see at parties, and use magic to make it happen. Then there was a bright flash of light and a—a sound, like a big crash or thunder. It really hurt. My ears were ringing, and now that’s stopped, but I still can’t hear.”

  Mom frowned and started writing again. This one took her several moments to compose. At last she held up the pad, which now read, “You tried to overextend your powers and do something that I never taught you. When you abuse magic, there are consequences, and when you screw up, the consequence is a backlash that harms you. Your spell wasn’t that bad, so you’re probably just experiencing temporary hearing loss.”

  My face fell. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I looked from the paper back to her, pleading. “Can’t you fix it?”

  Mom shook her head and started to write. I walked over to the couch so I could read what she was writing over her shoulder. It said, “I’ve tried to tell you that you need to learn control. This is a lesson for your recklessness. It will probably clear up on its own in a few days—”

  “A few days!” I grabbed her shoulder. “Mom, I have school tomorrow! How am I supposed to learn anything if I can’t hear what the teacher is saying? How am I supposed to play in the orchestra? I can’t go without hearing anything for a few days!”

  Mom pulled away from my grip and looked up at me. Her frown was turning into a scowl.

  I shrank away from her. “I’m sorry for freaking out, but I really need you to help me with this, Mommy.”

  She shook her head again and started to write. I waited until she held up the pad again to read it. “You need to learn from your mistakes. If your hearing hasn’t returned by the weekend, then I’ll look for a way to help you. Next time, think about what you’re doing before you try to show off your powers. They’re not a toy. I’m going to drive Heather home, and you need to figure out your plan for school tomorrow, because you’re not staying home sick.”

  Mom put down the pad and walked out of the room.

  I looked down at the floor and wrapped my arms around myself. My breathing started to speed up and my heart was pounding. How could my own mother, who was supposed to help me with witchcraft, just leave me to suffer like this? Just to teach me some stupid lesson about not trying to do too much with my magic? If Mom didn’t want me to use witchcraft or teach me how to do anything, then why had she told me to become a witch in the first place?

  Mom came back into the room with her purse and said something to Heather, then turned to go again.

  Heather looked at me with her big, dark eyes and bit her lower lip. She came over to me and gave me an awkward hug.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Heather and Mom left me alone.

  While Mom drove Heather home, I found my dad in his study. “Knock, knock,” I said from the open doorway. “Can I talk to you?”

  Dad put down a stack of papers on his desk and waved to the empty couch. I saw his mouth move, but I had no idea what he said.

  “I hope that was a yes.” I flopped down in the middle of the couch. “Look, I need to talk to you about something, but the first thing that you need to know is that I can’t hear anything. You’re going to have to write stuff down for me to understand.”

  Dad frowned and rummaged on his desk for a minute. He found a pad of paper and a thick black marker. Normally it was hard for me to read his handwriting, but he wrote carefully in big block letters. “What’s wrong with your hearing? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  I pointed to my ears and started to explain my little adventure all over again. I finished with, “Now Mom says she won’t do anything to help me, because it’s my fault. You’re a doctor. Can you look at my ears and figure out what’s wrong with them?”

  He looked down and thought for a minute before writing. When he held up the paper, it said, “I think your mother does what she thinks is best when it comes to your magical training. I can’t really say if her methods are the best, because it’s not really my area of expertise, but if you have a magical problem then I can’t help you.”

  I leaned forward. “But it’s not fair! I knew I made a mistake the moment I lost my hearing—and it was painful for a few minutes, too. But do you think that it’s right to leave me like this, without even trying to find a way to fix it, all in the name of trying to teach me a lesson?”

  He frowned and the marker moved across the paper. “Well, she did promise to try helping you if your hearing doesn’t return on its own in a few days. It was a little harsh, but you ought to know by now that you can’t be reckless with magic.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think the extra time will help me learn that lesson any better. That’s not harsh, it’s needlessly cruel. If I knew how to fix it—or if I knew a spell that let me create light, or anything else useful, which she keeps refusing to teach me—then I wouldn’t need her help. But I do need her help, and she won’t help me.”

  Dad shrugged. “I leave those choices up to her. I’m sorry that it’s tough on you.”

  I clenched my fists. Maybe he didn’t realize how much he was letting her get away with, like the spells in my room. “Do you even know about all of her choices? What about her snooping—“ I stopped, distracted by a movement by the door.

  He glanced at the door and then at me.

  I saw a black, furry tail disappearing around the corner. “Sorry, I just saw the cat walk by.” I shook my head. “Fine, I guess I should stop arguing about this.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll just drop the subject.” He smiled at me.

  “But I don’t think that I should just let this go. It’s hard to explain—” I tilted my head to one side. “I don’t want to fight with you, and I don’t want to be mad at Mom, but I think she was wrong. Don’t you?”

  Dad’s smile faded. He looked down for a long moment. Finally he wrote, “I let your mother make these decisions.” He put the cap back on the marker and put the marker down with a sense of finality.

  “Whatever.” I stood up. There was no sense in trying to keep talking about it, so I left.

  Wednesday at school was very difficult to get through. Everyone who wanted to talk to me had to write their part of the conversation down on a piece of paper, which was time-consuming and tedious so most of the time, they didn’t bother. I could see people talking and laughing around me but I was left out of most of the fun.

  Julie hand wrote a list of all our assignments and homework down for me, and she tried to keep notes on the white board during classes, but she wasn’t used to writing much while she was talking and I knew that I was missing a lot. I sat next to Heather and tried to copy down her notes as she wrote them, but it was hard for me to keep up, especially since her handwriting wasn’t very neat.

  Then during the first break, Kai came to my rescue. He passed me a note that said, “I’ll give you copies of all my notes after school today. Meet me in the school newspaper room.”

  I smiled and sat down in the empty chair next to him. “Can I see your notes?”

  Kai nodded and slid his notebook across the table to me. I leaned over and took a peek. His handwriting was neat and clean, much easier to read than Heather’s. I was also surprised how detailed his notes were, and organized into bullet points.

  I looked at Kai and raised my eyebrows at him in surprise. “Wow, these look great. I would love to have a copy.”

  He nodded and wrote, “I’m happy to share with you. You’re having a hard day.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s an understatement.” I looked across the table to where I’d been sitting with Heather. “Do you think that I could si
t next to you during class so I could read your notes and try to follow along? I hate feeling left out.”

  He nodded again. I went and grabbed my stuff from my old seat, and then moved back next to Kai.

  When class started again, I leaned over and watched Kai write. He wrote in pen, quick and confident, the ink gliding across the paper in round letters. I looked up at Julie’s white board and then back down at the paper: he wrote almost as fast as I could read.

  Kai saw me looking up and wrote in the margin, “Am I writing too fast for you?”

  I shook my head. I reached over with my pen and wrote below his note, “No, I’m just impressed.”

  Kai smiled. “As a reporter, I have to write fast. I can go faster in short-hand, but I don’t know if you’d be able to understand that.”

  “I’m so glad that I can talk to you,” I added. “It’s been so weirdly quiet all day.”

  “At least you can’t hear those two making all their lovey-dovey noises at each other.” He pointed with his pen to the table next to us.

  I turned my head just a little to take a peek, and caught a glimpse of Lindsey whispering something in Peter’s ear. I looked away quickly and made a face. I wrote, “Gross!”

  A few minutes later, Kai wrote again: “Is this what texting was like for our parents?”

  Without thinking about it, I giggled. Julie glanced at me for a moment before she continued.

  “Be careful!” Kai wrote. “Remember that other people can still hear you.”

  I covered my mouth. “Oops.”

  Kai finished filling up the page on the left-hand side of his notebook and started writing on the right.

  I had to lean over further in order to see. My arm brushed against his.

  He flinched and looked over at me.

  I moved back an inch. “Sorry,” I mouthed.

  Kai smiled and shook his head. “It’s okay,” he mouthed back.

  I leaned forward again, slowly, until I was touching him again, my arm against his. I sat there for the rest of the class.

  By Friday, my hearing had mostly returned to normal, although I kept thinking that I was still hearing a ringing or something off in the distance from time to time.