The Hex Breaker's Eyes

by Shaun Tennant

  That sounds like a convenient way to say she makes no guarantees, but I’m not looking to start a fight. I’d actually like to have some help. “Can you see my future? Or, Dina’s? Can you tell me if the hex will go away or if it will get worse?”

  “I can try to offer guidance, but I’ve never met this girl. What I see will be for you, not for her.”

  “OK.”

  She slides the crystal ball in front of me and tells me to place my hands on it, then she puts her own hands on top of mine. “Just relax and let me see what I can see,” she tells me.

  “I see a yellow light, lashing out. It’s like it has six arms.”

  “Tentacles,” I say, before I can even stop myself.

  “Yes. Tentacles. It’s strong, bright. I expected to feel the typical emotions of ill will: jealousy, hatred. This is more like anger. Someone’s very mad at this girl.”

  “So it’s getting worse?”

  “Shh.”

  The psychic looks at me, and at the air around my head. It’s a strange thing, having someone look through you. I’m just hoping that I’m not being scammed.

  “Oh for God’s sake, all she did was repeat what you told her and make some stuff up,” says Tam.

  The psychic’s nostrils flare. “You, Tamara, will get your ass kicked very soon. Someone’s gonna put you in the hospital.” She doesn’t say it as a threat, just a statement of fact. Tam goes silent, and I can hear Ryan whispering something to keep her calm.

  “Anything else? Can I help this girl?” I ask.

  “Your future is very confusing,” she says. “I see two possibilities on top of each other. Normally I see one image clearly but with you I never get a single image. Always two, superimposed like a double exposure. It’s hard to make out.”

  “Convenient,” says Tam, her voice absolutely icy.

  “And the person who kicks your ass will break your arm, too. You might want to look into your parents’ health plan, kid.” Again, it doesn’t sound like she’s threatening Tam, just offering a tough truth. She looks back at me.

  “It’s a mess. Whatever’s ahead of you, it’s going to define who you are. And at the end of this stream of double exposures there’s just one thing I see. Well, not really a vision, more like a feeling. It’s very familiar to me, since it’s the most common feeling people have me seek out when they come here.”

  “What?”

  “At the end of this, it’s your mother. If you listen to your mother, you’ll be OK.”

  I yank my hands off the crystal and stand up. Tam gasps behind me and I’m already heading for the door. “Something bother you?” the phony in the robe asks.

  “Some psychic,” I say. “I can’t believe I almost fell for it.”

  “Excuse me?” she asks, indignant.

  “Listen to my mother? How can I do that?” I’m absolutely seething that this phony psychic almost made me believe her. How dare she? I shout, which I don’t like to do, but I just can’t help it. “My mother’s dead!”

  I storm out of the trailer before I have to listen to another word from Madame Fraud. Tam and Ryan follow right after me, and we’re twenty feet away before Marlene comes out of the trailer, running to catch up. There are tears in my eyes but I’m holding them back. I’m not gonna let some trailer trash fraud see me cry. We get to the car and Ryan uses his remote to unlock it so I can get in. Tam climbs in the back next to me.

  “I’m so sorry I made you come,” she says.

  I just want to go home. Not even Ryan, the eternal optimist, tries to say anything to lighten the mood. We ride back to Blue Ribbon in silence, except for the radio, which none of us are listing to.

  4

  Wednesday, November 7

  My mother died three years ago. When I was little she was a great mom, the sort of person that happy kids remember when they grow up. Then she changed. Actually, maybe she never changed, I just became smart enough to see what she was really like. By the time I was nine, I realized that other adults were uncomfortable around my mother, and that they often talked behind her back. Pretty soon I figured out that my mother had a reputation as the town’s crazy lady, and soon I started to see it too.

  I know that she definitely got worse that year. She went from being a doting mother who sometimes spaced out or said strange things, to deliberately going out to harass people. We had the cops called to our house a lot. I don’t recall any police visits when I was little, but in the year I was nine they came seven times. The neighbours saw it, and soon enough I was hearing about it at school. I went from being just like any girl to being the daughter of the crazy woman.

  Eventually, my mother harassed somebody enough that she had a restraining order put on her. (An order which Mom broke repeatedly.) Eventually, her harassment of this other woman got so bad that she was arrested and jailed. Soon enough, the doctors were saying she was insane, and they locked her in a facility a couple hours south of here. Something about being locked up must have just killed her inside, because every time I went to visit her, she was thinner, paler, and crazier. She went from being a healthy, round-faced woman to a skeleton with wild eyes. For the first little while, she’d hold it together when we visited. She’d smile and ask about school and read stories to Devon. But after an hour or so, she’d start to get twitchy, irritable, and angry with the nurses. Our visits never lasted long after that.

  By the end, she wasn’t able to put on the normal face at all anymore. She couldn’t play sane for me and Devon when we came to visit. She was just crazy all the time. The insanity turned into rage, and she would often direct that rage at us. I was about to graduate eighth grade, and my mother was descending into complete madness so severe that she terrified me.

  The summer I turned thirteen, she died one night, in her sleep. Whatever it was that drained her, and made her refuse to eat, it finally caught up and killed her. For the last three years that I knew her, she was a wide-eyed maniac, and in the end she barely knew me. I spent the last years of my mother’s life making excuses not to have to see her because I was so scared of her, and the two years since then feeling like the world’s worst daughter because of it.

  So when Madame Knight in her trailer-park robe tells me to listen to my mother, all I hear is the sound of the kids who have taunted me for the last five years, telling me I’ll be just as crazy as her.

  I’ll never be that way, crystal ball be damned.

  I’m back at school, hoping to forget all about Madame Tracksuit and get back to normal. There’s only one problem: Dina is still glowing. Her aura now has seems to have two tentacles and they never fade back into the blob of light around her. They just exist, all the time. I’m in the upstairs hallway by my locker, and she just came around the corner. She’s still pretty, but it seems like she isn’t getting much sleep. She has bags under her eyes, she looks pale, and instead of styling her hair today she just pulled it into a ponytail. I don’t want to look at her, so I stuff my binder into my backpack and head in the other direction. This is actually the longest possible way to get to my first period class, but at least I won’t have to walk through those tentacle things.

  And just to be clear: seeing tentacles does not mean I’m crazy like my mother. It’s something wrong with her, not with me.

  I have to head back to my locker after second period to swap a different binder and textbook into my backpack. I’m running up the stairs, making good time, when I see the yellow haze heading my way. Our school is two floors, and the stairs between the floors have two flights. You go half-way, reach a wide landing, turn around and head up the second flight to reach the second floor. I’ve just made the turn when I see that Dina Jennings is at the top of the stairs, heading down toward me. Those yellow snakes are still flailing around her, and if I pass her on the stairs, those things will pass right through me. That just seems gross, so I’m going to pause on the landing for a moment, and let her pass by. If I keep my back flat against the wall, she should go past me without the tentacles getting
close.

  But then I see one of the tentacles shoot straight out from her. It seems to latch onto a binder tucked under a boy’s arm. The boy is talking to his friend, rushing up the stairs like everyone else. And like all those other kids he doesn’t see the invisible snake of light that’s now making his binder glow. He reaches the landing and turns with everyone else, heading up the second flight of stairs to the top floor of the school, and he passes close by Dina.

  That’s when the tentacle yanks back on his book. To everyone else, it would look like the plastic binder just slipped out of the kid’s grip. After all, it was just tucked under his arm; not like he was holding it tightly. The binder falls to the steps, and bounces downward. As it falls, it flies open, and the thin plastic cover manages to bounce directly under Dina’s foot. She steps on the binder, it tips and slides under her weight, and pitches her forward. She’s only four steps from the landing, not enough for this to kill her, but it will be a bad fall if she lands the wrong way, and I bet her aura will make sure that she does.

  Somehow, without really thinking about it, I’ve stepped a little closer. I’m basically right under her now, and since I use my backpack to carry everything, my hands are free. Dina Jennings is fully airborne, launched over the steps, legs flailing beneath her but finding nothing to stand on. I hold my arms out, and she thumps into me. Her elbow hits me square in the middle of my chest and knocks the air out of me, but I break her fall and she lands on her feet. Thankfully neither of us has done an embarrassing face-plant in front of everyone here. I want to say something to her, but I’m trying to catch my breath. She looks at me, realizes that I saved her from embarrassment and injury, and then sees that everyone has stopped to look at us. She blushes, nods to me, mutters a weak thanks, and takes off down the next flight of steps. I’m still catching my breath, gasping and rubbing the spot where her elbow hit me. Wayne Shepherd, a senior who’s head of the student council, is coming down the stairs. Wayne’s got a good face for campaign posters: square jaw, dimples, blue eyes. (Is he smiling at me?) He pats me on the shoulder.

  “Nice catch, Vefreet,” he says as he passes. I’m absolutely shocked that he knows my name, but maybe learning every student’s name is some skill he has practiced to get people to vote for him.

  I retreat to my locker and start to swap out books in my backpack, but my chest still hurts and my mind is racing. Dina’s aura is still there. It’s getting stronger. It tried to trip her down the stairs. Maybe Madame Knight was a fraud, but she probably backed it up with some basic knowledge of the supernatural. So even though her prediction for my future was a bunch of vagaries and lies, she might have been right about Dina.

  The poor girl really is hexed.

  The hallway is mostly empty now. Half of the kids are in their third period classes, and the other half are lining up in the cafeteria. I stuff my backpack into my locker, deciding I don’t need it. I’m going to skip third period history class today. I head back to the stairs, to go down to the library. I need to start looking into hexes.

  As third period turns into fourth, Marlene, Tam and Ryan find me in the library after I wasn’t in the usual hallway spot for lunch. I’m on a computer near the back of the library, looking up the occult, witchcraft, and trying to find specifics on hexes. After asking what I’m doing and listening to me explain why I missed lunch, everyone sits down and we pull our chairs into a huddle.

  “Someone is doing this to her,” I say.

  “And it’s getting worse. Their bad feelings are getting stronger each day,” Tam adds.

  “Maybe she’s got an angry ex-boyfriend?” Ryan wonders aloud.

  “I have a plan,” I tell them. “Marlie, I need you to figure out how to break a hex. Get into your weird websites, we want real details about what has to happen. Nothing vague or theoretical. I want instructions or a recipe or whatever.” I turn to Tam and Ryan and keep talking. “The three of us need to figure a way into this Dina girl’s life. Figure out who’s mad at her, who’s into the occult, stuff like that. Once we know how to break the curse we’ll have to know who’s responsible.”

  Marlene interrupts me. “I already looked it up,” she says. “After Madame Knight told you all that, I went home and checked out hexing on some Wicca websites.

  “So what do we do?” I ask.

  “A hex requires four things. An item belonging to the victim, an item belonging to the caster, a spoken incantation, and the willpower to sustain the hex over time. The stronger your will, the stronger your bad feeling, the more powerful the hex. There are other things that boost the strength of the hex, too, but I don’t know what they do exactly.”

  “What do they do with the objects?” Tam asks.

  Marlie blurts it out, unable to contain this exciting knowledge: “Bind them together. A hex is a connection between a witch and a victim, so the personal belongings are bound together to create a talisman. If you can destroy the talisman, separate the items, I think that will break the connection between the witch and the victim.”

  “So if we can figure out who’s behind this hex,” I say, “we can find the talisman and destroy it.”

  “Yeah,” says Tam. “That, or cast your own incantation that’s even stronger than theirs, to cancel it out. I mean, that should work, right?”

  “I don’t know. The websites never mentioned that but I can look up counter-spells,” says Marlene.

  “So what’s the plan, Miz Spellbreaker?” Tam asks me.

  I shrug. “It’s like on a TV detective show. We need to know who has motive and opportunity. Talk to people in the girl’s life, find suspects, and flush ‘em out. People with motive are the ones who don’t like her and people with opportunity are the ones who know about magic.”

  I might not have a choice about seeing the hex, but at least I can do something about it. From this moment on, I’m on the case. I will stop this thing.

  5

  I’m at home, sitting at the kitchen table across from my dad and Devon. Dad made macaroni and cheese tonight, and I’m having some carrots so it’s at least a little bit healthy. We don’t have a lot to say. We’ve had some form of pasta every night for the last week, or at least seems that way to me. Dad makes some small talk with Devon about school, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m just staring at my cheap little phone and absentmindedly shoveling noodles into my mouth. I should stop waiting for the phone to ring. It’s not going to ring just because I’m staring at it. (Ugh, I’m still staring). You might have guessed I’m waiting for a call.

  Ryan is a year older than us, so he can be on senior sports teams. He plays on the basketball team, even though by “play” I mean he sits on the bench. Tam goes to see every game, and I go too sometimes. Tonight I didn’t want to go, as I knew I’d just be distracted the whole time. After the game, we have a plan where Ryan will talk to one of the senior guys on the team and see if anyone is going out with Dina Jennings. It might be awkward for him if word gets out that he’s asking about a senior girl, but he said he wanted to help us investigate, plus everyone knows he’s with Tam so they’d assume he was asking for a friend. Now I’m just waiting for Tam to call and tell me what Ryan said.

  We can’t afford a cell phone plan, and even though I’ve applied for some jobs around town, I’ve never been able to get one. We’re a small town, so the only real jobs are mom and pop stores, waitressing, or working for the hockey rink. I’ve applied for them all, but so have every other teenager in Blue Ribbon. Last year my dad gave me a phone for my birthday, and every once in a while I save allowance or birthday money to buy some prepaid minutes. I only have about ten minutes left now, and I could have just told Tam to call the landline, but for some reason I insisted she call my cell. I guess maybe I’m taking this all personally, like I only want to hear it through my own personal phone, but now I’ve got the phone on the table next to my plate and I’m staring at it. A watched phone never rings.

  After my macaroni’s gone I munch on two more baby carrots bef
ore I excuse myself from the table and flee with my phone to my bedroom.

  Tam calls me up just as I pass through my door. I close the door tight before I answer, and given my limited phone minutes, I get right to the point.

  “So what happened?” I say, plopping into my bed with the phone against my head.

  “Her boyfriend did it,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Well, her ex-boyfriend. She dumped the guy last week. Think about it, she breaks the guy’s heart a few days ago and then suddenly she gets cursed? Obviously it was him.”

  “OK. Probably—”

  “Probably? You mean ‘awesome job Tam and Ryan, way to crack the case,’ right?”

  “Just tell me what Ryan got. Who did he talk to, who said what?”

  “He asked Chris, you know that really tall guy who can’t make a free throw? He’s a senior and he’s cool to the juniors, so Ryan talked to him. He said that someone was asking him to find out about Dina and see what her situation was.”

  “OK, so what did Chris say?”

  “She was dating a guy named Mason Charles, and they were together for six months, and then last Thursday she dumped him... with a text message. I guess he was really mad about it, she completely blindsided him. Seems like the sort of thing that would cause someone to get magic-cursing pissed, eh?”

  “For sure,” I say. “I only have five more minutes and I gotta call Marlie. T.T.Y.L.”

  “Later!” she hangs up.

  I quickly dial Marlene’s house. Marlene also doesn’t have a real cell phone, so I have to call her landline. Thankfully, she answers. It would suck to waste my last five minutes waiting for her mom to tell Marlie there was a call.