The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams

by Rhonda Hayter

  From what I’d gotten to know about Tom the last few weeks, I had no doubt at all that the hyper little kitten trying to squirm out of my grasp to jump down onto the keyboard right now was the famous Thomas Edison himself.

  I learned a lot about him from the computer search. Did you know that Thomas Edison, who was one of the smartest guys ever and one of the most amazing inventors of all time, had teachers who didn’t like the way he was always asking them questions they couldn’t answer? They told his parents he was thick-headed and hyperactive. I guess teachers weren’t always so understanding back in the old days either. Are you listening, Miss Linegar??? Anyway, Tom’s mom, who knew he wasn’t thick-headed, took him out of school and taught him herself.

  I was amazed to see how correct a lot of my impressions were about Tom. Just as I thought from some of the images I got, Thomas Edison was the youngest in a big family. I even figured out that first creepy statement I heard in my head about the dimes. It seems that Thomas’s dad used to pay him a dime for every book he read.

  Tom made so much money from all those dimes that he started his own little business selling snacks on a commuter train, even though he was still a young kid. He used the money he made from that to buy equipment to do scientific experiments, and once he actually burned down his dad’s barn with an experiment that went bad.

  As I got to the part about the barn fire though, Tom suddenly buried his furry little face against my chest as if he were really upset. I had been reading out loud but I stopped as soon as I realized what was written there. Listen to this. It seems Tom’s dad publicly thrashed him for burning down the barn.

  Fast as I could, I scrolled down a couple of pages of information and I could see that Tom was relieved to skip over that part. I was still a little shook up though, to have read it.

  Gee. I’d just been thinking how great Tom’s dad was with the dime thing and everything and then he goes and thrashes Tom . . . beats him, in front of other people even. I bet his mom didn’t like that Tom got thrashed. There’s no way my mom would let something like that happen. Not that my dad would ever dream of it.

  Now, I guess you probably know that Edison perfected the long-burning lightbulb, but did you know he invented the first recording device too? No wonder he got so excited when he heard my CD player, he’d never heard recorded music before. It wasn’t invented in his day, because he hadn’t invented it yet.

  Edison also invented the first motion picture . . . the first movie. How’s that for something amazing? Or, did you know that he worked running a telegraph machine when he was young and knew Morse code and everything?

  Oh, listen to this. This is funny. I guess Tom had the night shift at the telegraph office and he was supposed to telegraph a message in to his boss every now and then, so that his boss would know he was paying attention to the job. But Tom invented a way for his check-in message to go in automatically, so that he could spend his time reading and doing experiments. And it worked great too—until the night his boss dropped in and found out that Tom wasn’t even in the office. Ooops.

  That reminds me of the time last year when Munch tried to send a duplicate of himself to school so he could hide out and play in his room. The spell was a little too hard for a kindergarten witch though, and when the duplicate walked into the kitchen for breakfast . . . Well . . . Let’s just say that Mom had no problem figuring out that a two-foot tall kid with no ears wasn’t Munch.

  As I looked down at Tom, focusing with absolute attention on the computer screen, I realized that the story about the telegraph office was new to him too. That incident happened later in his life when he was well into his teens, and he was only about thirteen now. In fact, Tom seemed pretty surprised by that telegraph story.

  He sure was interested in reading this biography of himself though, and I thought about how fantastic it would be to be able to read about what sort of things I was going to do when I grew up. Problem is though, if we couldn’t get Tom back soon, none of this was going to happen, and within a year or two, if we logged onto the computer to look him up, we weren’t going to find any mention of him at all. Who knows if we’d even have computers?

  I don’t know much about the math of time travel, but according to my parents, there’s always a little lag time before some change in the past affects the future. If there wasn’t some leeway in the time line like that, there’d be laws against witches going back at all. We’re supposed to leave everything exactly as we found it and not make our presence known, which is why I have to do stuff like pose as a pillar. Every now and then though, you get a rogue witch who goes back and tries to make things different. It was starting to look as if Tom may have had the bad luck to run up against one of those witches.

  The more I read about Tom, the more I felt as if we had a lot of things in common . . . well, except maybe for that genius inventor thing. He was misunderstood at school and he got in trouble all over the place just like I do. Except for the fact that my main trouble is magic and his was his amazing brain, our childhoods seemed to have a lot in common. Um, not including that thrashing business, which made me pretty glad that I’m a twenty-first-century kid, where that kind of thing is frowned on.

  As I read more, something else got explained to me too about how sometimes Tom didn’t seem to hear me unless he was looking right at me. This is really sad but it seems Tom was pretty deaf as a kid and got even deafer as an adult. Some people think this made it easier for him to think so clearly, because he had fewer distractions.

  It makes sense to me, especially when I think about those times when I’m trying to read, while Munch pretends to be a rock star and conjures up the sound of a roaring crowd. Just try concentrating on a boring spell technique chapter when somebody in the next room keeps screaming, “For those about to rock, we salute you!” over the sound of thousands of screaming fans.

  Actually, Munch has a little bit of a lisp, so when he says it, it’s more like “For thoth about to rock, we thalute you!”

  Okay, I admit it, it’s cute.

  Tom and I spent the rest of morning in front of the computer and when my mom came home at lunch-time, we were still at it. At first she got that kind of tired-looking expression she gets when she sees me doing something she’s asked me not to do (not that I do it all that often . . . well, not if I can help it). Her expression changed quickly though when I told her I had found out who Tom was.

  CHAPTER 18

  Egg on My Face

  Well, Mom got on the phone to Dad right away and he zapped home to talk about it.

  Apparently, once the enchanted person’s identity is known, there’s a lot that can be done about tailoring a spell to free them. In fact, Dad got so excited that he kept accidentally levitating up a few feet into the air. Mom had to yank him down by his doctor’s coat, so she could talk to him eye to eye.

  Once Dad calmed down enough, he picked up Tom and brought him really close to his face. It was funny, but I almost started to cry when he looked straight into Tom’s eyes.

  “It’s a very great honor to meet you,” he whispered. “And I promise you that we will do everything in our power to get you safely home to your family.”

  You know, I hadn’t thought about it, because a big part of me still thought of Tom as my fuzzy little pet, but I guess it really was an honor to have Thomas Edison staying at my house. I hoped we’d be able to start communicating better soon so I could see what it was like to have a genius for a friend. I mean, when you’re a witch, you get to see a lot of famous types and to listen to them, but it’s not often that you actually get a chance to get to hang out with them and be buddies.

  So. Let me ask you this. Have you ever been in class and the teacher asks a question and you get all excited because you know the answer? You wave your hand in big, huge circles trying to be the one who waves it hard enough to get called on. Inside, you’re going, “Me! Me! Ask me!” because it feels so good to have the answer and you just can’t wait to be the one to say it. Well, al
l of a sudden, that’s exactly how I felt because I had an absolutely brilliant idea. It was the solution to the entire Tom problem.

  Being very modest as you know, I tried to downplay it a bit, because when you suddenly realize that you are possibly the smartest kid on the entire planet, witch or human . . . you try to act a little humble, so as not to look big-headed or anything.

  “Mom,” I said very quietly, taking a deep breath before I continued. “Tom knows how to use the computer now. He can type out the name of whoever ENCHANTED HIM!!!”

  Okay, maybe I didn’t manage to look quite as humble as I’d hoped, because by the time I’d finished that sentence, I was yelling at the top of my lungs and jumping up and down and grinning from ear to ear and . . . well . . . okay, I’ll confess. I ran around the room yelling, “I’M A GENIUS!!! I’M A GENIUS!!!”

  Mom and Dad let me run around for a moment or two and then Mom said, “Abbie, sweetheart. You’re certainly a very bright girl, and we’re all awfully proud of you. However, it’s clear to me that you are way, way behind in your Witch Studies and we are definitely going to have to do something about that.”

  Ouch. I felt like I was a big balloon that somebody popped a pin into. So I thought hard . . . and then I thought harder . . . and then with a sinking feeling in my stomach, I finally recalled . . . that way back in the third-grade textbook on enchantments and spells . . . oh yeah . . . There was a whole section that explained that forced enchantments always come along with a companion spell. And guess what that spell does. It stops the enchanted person from being able to reveal who was responsible for their enchantment. It’s that communications barrier thing.

  Ooops.

  Do you know that expression “Egg on your face”?

  I had a dozen eggs on mine.

  Mom and Dad started dragging heavy volumes out of their spell library in the basement and piling them up in the living room. Tom continued tap-tap-tapping on the computer because, after watching me, he knew how to surf the Internet. He was doing Google searches on everything imaginable, while I made peanut butter sandwiches for everybody. Well, except for Tom, who seemed to prefer cat food despite having started off as a human.

  And it wasn’t until we actually sat down to eat that my mom suddenly got a really startled look on her face as if something had just occurred to her. She turned to me.

  “Abbie. What on earth are you doing home from school in the middle of the day?”

  The bite of sandwich I’d just wolfed down so happily felt as if it had turned into a big lump of cement in my stomach. My brain seemed to freeze so that not a single thought popped in. I know I must have looked as if somebody had zapped a paralysis spell on me, because I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.

  Mom quietly put her sandwich back down on the plate and took a slow breath. “It’s all right, Abbie. You can tell me,” she said.

  But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Hey, don’t get me wrong, my mom’s a very understanding person. I think she’d be okay about the fact that I broke school rules and brought Tom to class because I was trying to do something nice for him. Even the fact that I got sent to Principal Oh for the third time this year might be all right because that was about Tom too. Still, I was pretty certain that she was going to have a really, really hard time accepting that I did something as selfish and immature as casting a spell on unsuspecting people: not to protect my little brother, not to keep my witchiness a secret, and not to help anyone else, but to just save myself from a consequence that I pretty much deserved.

  I knew she’d be really disappointed in me, because I was disappointed in myself. And I hate disappointing my mom.

  And so what did I do? Did I tell the truth and let my mom know what a big jerk I’d been? Did I make things better by accepting responsibility for my mistake and facing up to whatever consequences there might be?

  Uh. No.

  I made things about a million times worse by doing something I’d always sworn I would never do. I lied to my mom.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I didn’t feel well at all when I got to school. Queasy, you know? But then I came home and took a big nap and I felt much better.”

  “Strange that I didn’t get a call,” said my mom, looking annoyed that the school would just send me home without letting her know.

  She put her hand on my forehead and you know what? I was so flushed and uncomfortable about all the horrible lies I’d just told that I actually felt hot to her. So she gave me an aspirin and tucked me back into bed.

  If you think you might ever feel bad about lying to your mom, try lying to a mom who fusses over you with cool cloths on your head and serves you pineapple juice and brings a TV into your room, to turn on your favorite TV show, even though it’s not a TV day, and brushes back your hair from your forehead to give you kisses. You don’t even know how bad bad can feel, until then.

  CHAPTER 19

  It All Catches Up with Me

  Even though I was feeling so guilty, I ended up having a really nice afternoon because the old Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was playing on the classic channel. Isn’t it a funny thing about a really great movie or book? You could be having the worst day ever but while your mind gets involved with Char-lie and his grandpa’s troubles, you forget about your own. I lost track of the time completely.

  Dad was busy with Tom and the disenchantment spells, and I was all snuggled up in my bed in front of the TV, happily engrossed in watching Willie Wonka dancing around with the Oompa-Loompas. Then, at 2:45, my mom walked out the front door to go get Munch at school . . . and to pick up my homework from Miss Linegar!!!

  Well, I never found out exactly what happened when my mom dropped by Miss Linegar’s classroom. I figure she probably went in there pretty cheerfully and asked Miss Linegar how she was. Maybe she said something about how I was feeling much better and that I’d be at school tomorrow. I’m not sure that’s how it went, but I did get some information later from Callie, who happened to be in the schoolyard, waiting for baseball practice, as my mom arrived.

  Callie said that shortly after my mom walked into the bungalow, Miss Linegar came sailing out, with her hand on my mom’s arm. Then she steered Mom right across the yard to the school office, at about eighty miles an hour.

  In the office, I would guess that the office ladies—or Principal Oh—probably said that they hadn’t seen me all day and didn’t know that I’d been sent there in the first place.

  Now, another mother might have assumed from the evidence that I’d chickened out of visiting the principal and gone straight home. But unfortunately, my mom can sense when there’s been a spell recently cast and she could smell my time freeze/forgetting spell from about a mile away.

  Willie Wonka was just winding up when I heard the front door close. There was a big whoosh of wind as Munch came swooping up into my room at top airspeed.

  “Abbie, Abbie,” he whispered. “Watch out. Mom’s really mad.”

  My heart froze in my chest and it finally sank in that not thinking about what I did wasn’t going to make it go away.

  Munch wisely went zipping around the corner to his room so he could get the heck out of the way.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, listening to the murmur of Mom and Dad talking downstairs. I’ll bet you can guess the subject of their conversation. I got even more worried when they didn’t come up right away, because that usually means that my mom is giving herself a little time-out, to cool off before she confronts us about something we’ve done. She seemed to be needing quite a bit of cooling off this time.

  What had I been thinking? I mean, if I was going to do something as wrong as slapping a forgetting spell on a whole office full of people, you’d think it might have occurred to me that if I didn’t want to get caught for it, I should slap one on the teacher who’d sent me to the office in the first place. Then I felt guilty for thinking that—because of course I shouldn’t have been doing any hexing in the first place.

  BOOM!!!

&n
bsp; Suddenly the Schnitzler boys came crashing into my room, right out of thin air, fighting over a TV remote. It practically gave me a heart attack, since as you can imagine, I was in a very nervous state as it was. By now of course, I had the spell to send them home right at the tip of my fingers. After I recovered from my fright, I zapped them right back . . . just as my mom and dad came into the room looking very, very serious.

  “Abbie,” said my mom. “We need to talk.”

  From the look on my mom’s face, I could tell that Munch had been wrong about her. She wasn’t mad. No. It was much, much worse than that. She was surprised at me and very, very disappointed.

  You know, it’s a funny thing. I thought the disappointment would be the worst thing, but it turns out that her being surprised at my behavior was actually way worse. That’s because it meant Mom had a whole different idea of how mature I was, an idea I really liked her to have, and now it was gone.

  Dad was looking serious too. He sat in my desk chair. “So, Abbie Dab,” he said. “Can you explain to us what happened at school?”

  “I guess you know already,” I said—hoping not to have to actually say it out loud.

  “Well, honey, we’ve heard Miss Linegar’s side of things, but now we’d like to hear yours,” he said.

  Mom was very quiet, but as I sat there all miserable and afraid to speak, she did something so unexpected and so great that it makes me cry just telling you about it right now.

  She sat on my bed and she put her arms around me and she gave me a really, really big hug. And then I remembered something I’d always known but had forgotten about for just a while, that no matter what I did, how bad it was, or how poorly thought out, that my mom was always going to be on my side. And I started to cry . . . big-time . . . big huge sobs.