Spark

by Holly Schindler

  But I have no idea what I’m staring at. Bertie’s journal is worse than trigonometry.

  “Alberta,” Cass says as she slides into place on the opposite side of the table we always share during lunch, just the two of us.

  I jump, slamming the journal shut.

  “Didn’t you tell me once that was your great-grandmother’s name?” she asks, pointing at the cover.

  I could do a lot of things at this moment. I could come out and tell Cass I saw the spark. No—sparks, now, between her and Dylan. First from the front of the Avery when they improvised their song, and later at rehearsal when he handed her the sheet music. I could tell her I watched Nick arrive. I could tell her about Emma, and how she felt so much like Cass does. How it seems like we’re another act in a play that started decades ago, that somehow, this magic thing has opened up and here we are, with a shot, somehow, at making everything right. I could tell her I’m looking through this journal for help.

  Only, right then, that all sounds a little nuts. Every bit as nuts as everyone used to say Bertie was.

  And everybody says it out loud; they all brag, “I tell my best friend everything.” Or you look your own best friend in the eye and you say, “I’m so glad there are no secrets between us.” In the job description—that’s the way Cass phrased it. But that’s a lie. No one literally tells another human being everything. I held back on that Pizza Hut kiss. Some dumb kiss that didn’t actually mean anything. So of course I’m hesitant now. Why wouldn’t I be? This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. Magic.

  I shrug, the Queen of Nonchalant, and steer completely around the fact that this is Bertie’s journal at all. Which is by far the biggest omission ever in the history of my friendship with Cass. “Oh, you know. I was just scribbling notes and doodling. I didn’t even realize I’d actually doodled her name. I guess—all this talk about the forties. It has me thinking about—well—all sorts of things.” I tug the journal into my lap, where Cass can’t see it.

  It’s flimsy. It’s see-through. But Cass doesn’t question it. At least not out loud.

  I still believe that somewhere there’s a key. Some way to understand this whole thing. I mean, even the Rosetta stone was cracked. There just has to be a way to understand Bertie’s notes.

  Completely frustrated, I finally sneak out after Mom’s asleep that night, carrying the journal to the Avery. This time, though, the alley door is locked. Dylan must have returned to work on the piano again, and just my luck, he’s obviously locked the door behind him. Nothing to do but head back and try to sleep.

  The next day, all the way through my first-period history class, I hide my phone under my desk to Google how to pick a skeleton key lock. It kind of makes me feel a little Scooby-Doo, actually, this bit about a skeleton key. But it turns out skeleton key locks are easy to pick. They are themselves every bit as silly as a Scooby-Doo episode. So that night I take a metal nail file and a clothes hanger—already straightened—to the Avery’s alley door.

  Success! The lock gives. Easily.

  I step inside. Hugging the journal. Aiming my flashlight. Eyes swelling.

  I take a seat. And wait.

  I try flicking off my flashlight. Nothing happens. I was sure the journal would trigger some kind of action. Anything. The Avery had come back to life; the skies of 1947 had returned like Bertie predicted. The journal holds the rest of her unfathomable predictions. So why isn’t anything happening?

  I wonder, ridiculously, if I’m holding on to the journal too tightly, keeping any magic inside from spilling out. I decide to place it on the seat next to me. When that doesn’t work, I stand, place it on the keys of the piano.

  Nothing.

  No heart beating in the theater. No breathing.

  I’m the one heating up. I pace. I close my eyes and crack them open again. I turn my flashlight back on and flick an SOS signal with the beam—like Cass and I learned one summer in Brownie camp.

  “Where are you?” I ask the Avery. “Aren’t you going to wake up? Come back? What’s the deal?”

  Still—no response. And with no help from Bertie’s journal or the Avery, it’s all suddenly too much: Mom’s high expectations for me and the class and not wanting to humiliate myself in front of her, Cass being forced into the spotlight and not knowing how to make it any less terrifying, and last but oh so certainly not the least of all—no one else in the entirety of Verona sees the crazy changes in the theater but me. This is my responsibility—but I have no powers—I’m not superhuman. The Avery has to help me.

  “Come on,” I shout. Out of complete frustration, I pick up Bertie’s journal and fling it onto the stage.

  It hits with a thud and flops open. I aim my flashlight in time to watch Bertie’s words spill out. Like liquid. They’re in a jumbled puddle on the floor of the stage.

  I hurry up the steps. But it’s as though my footsteps startle the words; they jump into the air, taking flight. Like bugs. They blink rapidly. Bertie’s words are fireflies that blink quicker, quicker—then in unison, forming a stream of light. The light from a projector. It hits the movie screen, setting an old black-and-white countdown to motion: 5, 4, 3 . . .

  fourteen

  As shocked goose bumps spill across my arms, I find myself staring at a new scene. A diner of some sort. And a woman is writing in a journal. At the top of the page, she scrawls, “June 5, 1947.”

  “Bertie!” Dahlia shouts through a frown. “You’ve been ignoring me for five minutes!” Roughly four minutes and thirty seconds longer than any eight-year-old could tolerate being ignored. “Bertie!” she barks again at the woman sitting all alone at the front counter.

  “I’m working,” she says dismissively as she points to the dishwashing sign looming behind the open window that separates the diner from the behind-the-scenes work area. But Bertie’s only partly referring to the job she has at the Fred Harvey depot restaurant. Mostly, she’s talking about the journal she’s scribbling in feverishly. She sure looks crazy—like some character in a movie about the loony bin. Her hair has gone permanently frizzy from the steam of the dishwasher. Her eyes are wild, and the hand clutching her pen is dotted with nails bitten deep into the quick. She covers her journal with her body—like it’s a test paper the rest of the world will want to cheat off of.

  “I’ve been seeing lots of things today, Dahlia,” she whispers. “Lots and lots of things. I’ve got to write them down. Don’t disturb me.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve decided, though, that I can only tell people the small things. Because it scares them too much to know about the big ones. I’m keeping most of it secret from now on.”

  “Do you have any powers or not?” Dahlia blurts loudly, not caring that the entire restaurant can hear her.

  “What have you been listening to?” Bertie asks Dahlia, her eyes wounded. “Who have you been listening to?”

  “I need a spell,” Dahlia announces. The diners gasp. After a pregnant pause, the Harvey Girls—pretty waitresses in black dresses and long, white, pressed aprons—begin moving again, refilling coffee cups and sliding menus in front of customers. Diners lurch back into action, like a whole room of wind-up toys come back to life.

  As the ridiculousness of it all finds her, Bertie begins to laugh. She laughs at the way Dahlia’s standing, at the way she tries to look so grown-up and authoritative. Hands on her hips, a boss-style scowl on her face. But the way she stomps her feet to punctuate her demand is pure eight-year-old. Bertie’s laugh gets loud—too loud. This, too, sounds crazy.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Bertie finally manages, through snorts, “that there are times you earn every bit of that nickname of yours? ‘Trouble.’ If you’re not careful, I might have to start calling you—”

  “I mean it,” Dahlia barks, interrupting Bertie. “I need a spell.”

  “What kind of spell do you need?”

  Deciding to try another angle, Dahlia turns her eyes down and folds her arms behind h
er back. She toes the ground and sticks out her bottom lip, attempting to look extra pitiful. “To turn the pastor’s wife into a toad.”

  “A toad! What for, silly girl?”

  “Because she just got me kicked out of Mom’s shop.”

  “And how did she manage to do that?”

  Dahlia’s face wrinkles. “Because—she’s easily amended.”

  “Offended.”

  “Right!”

  “And how was she offended?”

  “Because I said she looked like a fairy!”

  Bertie’s already laughing again as Dahlia explains, “She did, too—she looked like a fairy, in a pink hat with this gauzy stuff across her face. Why would someone want a hat that only makes them look like themselves? Isn’t that a good thing, what I said? When I grow up and start selling hats, just like Mom, I’m only going to sell magic hats that transform the person wearing it. Who wouldn’t want to look like a fairy?”

  “The pastor’s wife, I imagine,” Bertie says, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. “Why don’t you use the word ‘angelic’ next time? That’ll please the pastor’s wife, and if I remember the pastor’s wife right, ‘angelic’ is quite the transformation.”

  “Angelic,” Dahlia repeats. She considers this a moment. “Toad would be better.”

  Again, Bertie erupts in her madwoman cackle. On the screen, the diner collectively bristles.

  As I continue to stare, a splash of red interrupts the black-and-white images, popping across the lips of a teenage girl sitting with her mother at a table close to the front counter. “Bridesmaids,” they say. “Grandmother’s dress.” “Which flowers?”

  “Don’t do that.” Bertie leans forward from the edge of her stool. “Geraldine!” Bertie emphasizes. “Don’t!”

  The entire room freezes and stares at Bertie.

  “Don’t what?” Geraldine whispers. She’s a pretty thing, with her hair pinned into perfect rolls at her temples and her polka-dot dress looking freshly ironed.

  I remember that name—from the last scene I watched play out. “Geraldine”—Emma was supposed to step in for her. She’d quit the play to focus on her wedding.

  “Don’t get married,” Bertie insists, now twitching and wringing her hands. “It’ll be a disaster.”

  Geraldine looks away, embarrassed.

  “Are you threatening my daughter?” Geraldine’s mother roars. She’s a dried-up thing, all prune, no more juice left in that fruit. But still obviously as protective as ever.

  “I’m only— I’m not—” Bertie’s eyes go wild. “There’s a very good chance—near certainty, actually—that something awful— The skies say to beware. Not me. I’m only trying to tell her what the skies are saying.”

  No one in the restaurant moves. No one speaks. “What do you think I’m planning on doing?” Bertie screams at the startled diners. “Grab Geraldine’s bread knife and cut a lock from her hair, dump it into my witch’s cauldron?”

  “Bertie, it’s okay, calm down,” Geraldine coos.

  Still, the diners glare. Their eyes are the knives.

  After the awkward silence goes on long enough to feel sharp—almost dangerous—Bertie grabs her purse and her journal. “Clock me out for the day,” she barks angrily, and bolts, with Dahlia at her heels.

  “As though I have any control over those things,” Bertie snorts, stomping through the square, down the alley behind the Avery. “Are they all simpleminded? Don’t they know there are things in the world beyond our control?” Her heels strike like hammers against the concrete sidewalk.

  “Slow down!” Dahlia cries out. “You’re going too fast. You’re hard to keep up with when you get this angry.”

  “What’s wrong with everyone?” Bertie asks as she turns down her own front walk. “They’re all so concerned with staring at their feet, they never bother to look up!”

  “Better calm down,” Dahlia warns. “Your mom hates it when you get this mad. I heard her say so to my mom—and that if you keep getting worked up like this, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. You and your baby both need her. You’d better not make her upset.”

  “She’s not home,” Bertie says, letting herself in. “And besides, it’s not like I want to get this angry. But every single time I open my mouth, people act like they’re waiting for me to put a hex on them. No one takes my advice. Never. No one listens.”

  “So don’t do it anymore,” Dahlia says. “Let’s have a snack. Some of that ginger tea and those warm prunes.”

  I chuckle. Dahlia still prefers that snack, actually.

  But Bertie ignores her request and leads her to a sunroom littered with weather maps and atlases.

  “Look at all this, young lady,” she orders. “All these notes—hours and hours of research.” She thrusts her journal into Dahlia’s face. “This book describes the sky at different moments of the day, every day of the year: cloudless, cloudy, rainbows, shooting stars. Sunny skies. Black storms. Tornadoes.

  “I’ve been watching all year,” she informs Dahlia. “At first, because I couldn’t bear the thought of forgetting Charley’s eyes.”

  Her tone softens. “Charley’s eyes were so blue. Sky blue. But they changed shades, too, with his moods—light powdery blue when he was excited, gray when he was sick, deep midnight blue when he was sad. Right after—when he—well. In the beginning, after Charley was gone, I played pretend. I imagined that instead of looking at the sky, I was looking straight into Charley’s eyes. It gave me a moment of peace. I’d look up and say, ‘How’s Charley feeling today?’ I’d think I could see his happiness, his end-of-the-day tiredness, the sweetness that came out of him when he was feeling playful, when he was teasing me. It was a game I could play to forget for a moment. To escape.”

  Dahlia’s trying to appear interested, shifting her weight onto one foot, then the other. Bertie rattles on, seeming to have forgotten, for the moment, that Dahlia’s even in the room. “Charley had curly hair. I loved letting individual corkscrews wrap themselves around my finger. Sometimes when I was staring at the sky and pretending it was his eyes, I could almost feel his hair. . . .

  “After a while,” she says, clearing her throat and bringing herself back to the point she’s trying to make, “I started to notice that events right here in Verona matched up with what was happening in the sky—storms coincided with deaths, rainbows filled the sky along with births—and I began to record it, to write it all down here.” She pauses to wave her journal. “Just like Charley’s eyes matched his moods, the skies over Verona match up with what’s happening to the people in this town.

  “I’ve watched long enough to understand the patterns. Now I know what’s going to happen before it happens—and I’ve charted it all!” She reaches into a drawer and unfolds a map, spreading it on the newly emptied table.

  “I’ve had to study a lot of maps in school,” Dahlia says. “But not any that look like yours.”

  I push my glasses up higher onto my nose and lean closer to the screen. This is the map from the bottom of the Lilly Daché box—decorated with hand-drawn clouds and lightning bolts and stars and rainbows. And next to the drawings, predictions regarding illnesses, fights over land, weddings, births, deaths.

  “We always talk about trying to predict the weather. But Dahlia, we’ve got it backward. The weather is doing the predicting. It warns us—and guides us. It says what will happen next. The skies talk, Dahlia. They tell me things all the time. And I’ve written it down. This map shows what’s in store for us.”

  “What does it say about me?” Dahlia asks. She places her forearms on the table and leans forward, trying to find her name there somewhere. “Say!” she shouts, pointing at the cover of the journal. “Who’s that?”

  When I see it, I tremble. There it is: my name, in cursive. Just as I saw it in the photo on my computer.

  “That—it’s too big to talk about right now,” Bertie says. She grabs an eraser from the drawer and scrubs my name out, replacing it with her own.
>
  “Dahlia,” she insists, grabbing the little girl by the shoulders, “there are no spells that turn ministers’ wives into toads. There is no need for them. There is real, undeniable magic in this world—all around us. The skies talk. They have talked to me. I’ve tried to show people. But everyone thinks I’m crazy. They close their ears to me.

  “And if they would listen, they would know so much more! The skies, they tell us about the future, but they’re—oh, they’re even more powerful than that! They can do things, too. They can make the future happen. Yes! It’s like—it’s like those skies are telling us what they’re going to do to us. And no one will just look up to see it! Nor will anyone listen when someone—me—when I figure it out and try to tell them all.

  “They’re wrong about me, Dahlia. I’m not a witch, and I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m eccentric. Okay. But I’m right, too. I’m right about sky predictions, and I’m right about Geraldine. What I told her back at the restaurant is true. She should not get married. She will be cursed with unhappiness. It’s not the right time. And he’s not the right love.”

  Nervous, unsure how to respond, Dahlia reaches down to smooth the small cloth flower in her sash.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret. There is love in Verona. The kind of love Geraldine wants but can’t have, not with that man she’s so determined to marry. The kind of love everyone in that silly Fred Harvey dreams about but will never have. Not like this. It’s just beginning to bloom, but I already know this isn’t simply a once-in-a-lifetime love, but a once-in-a-forever love. The kind of love that changes the world around it.”

  Dahlia looks at Bertie blankly. “It doesn’t make a bit of sense to me,” she asserts, puffing out her chest in a way that announces she’s used her big-girl voice.

  “It’s Emma,” Bertie insists. “Don’t you see? It’s for her. That’s who the magical love is happening to. Not to Geraldine.”

  Dahlia frowns. “You mean that Emma’s got some sort of spell on her?”

  “Of sorts.”

  Dahlia’s head flies back. “That scares me. I like Emma an awful lot. I should watch out for her. If she’s got a spell on her, I should save her.”