The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  Together we remove the floorboard and set it aside. Adam steps back, and I use two hands to lift the book from the hiding space. I hold it out to Shelby.

  She stares at the cracked burgundy cover, brighter since Adam and I wiped away most of the dust. She pushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “It looks just like—”

  “Seven-Day Magic,” Adam says.

  “Riddle’s diary from Harry Potter,” I say.

  “Something from a book.” Shelby smiles.

  The three of us sit on the floor. We show Shelby where Diary of a Poet is written, and she leans forward to squint at the list of herbs while Adam and I translate the faded letters for her.

  “But how do you know it belonged to Constance Brooke?” she asks.

  I show her the inside cover.

  “You wrote in it?” She is aghast.

  “It’s mostly all blank, so we figured . . .” Adam knows this is a lame excuse.

  I go defensive. “We found it. In my room. If it was valuable, it would be locked up somewhere, so . . .”

  “It was locked up here,” Shelby protests, enunciating each syllable in that way adults do when you willfully misunderstand them.

  I take the book from her. “Yes. Here. In my room.”

  “Your new room.”

  “Whatever.” I shrug.

  “Look.” Adam tries to make peace. “It probably is old and maybe even valuable, but all that’s in it is the list, so we figured Constance abandoned it.”

  “And someone else abandoned it even before her,” I add. “So Constance double-abandoned it.”

  “Right,” Adam agrees, relief in his voice. Even Mom might agree that a book double abandoned is fair game.

  “You have to be on our side.” My voice comes out in a whine. I add in a more solid tone, “It’s going to be our poetry journal.”

  Shelby uncrosses her arms and runs her hands down her sides as if smoothing away better judgment. “Mr. Cates will love it,” she concedes. “I forgot how he makes partners share a journal. ‘So your ideas can stand on each other’s shoulders,’” she remembers. “Come on, Adam. Mom actually cooked dinner. We need to go.” As we file down the stairs, Shelby asks, “Does he still talk about the muse all the time?”

  “I think Mr. Cates gets kickbacks from muses,” Adam says.

  Shelby laughs. “That was such an awesome class.” She reaches the front door but stops. The laugh is gone. Her eyes dart from Adam to me. “Does it . . .” She stops, crosses her arms again. “Does it do anything? The book? Does the book do anything?”

  Adam and I shake our heads.

  “Oh, well. I mean I didn’t really think . . . You put the idea in my head with Seven-Day Magic and whatnot.” She laughs again, hollowly this time. She pulls her hair out of its clasp, and it sheets down her back. She and Adam disappear down the street.

  I stand alone in the foyer. The air shivers with the question. Does the book do anything? To even ask that . . . in real life . . . and Shelby asked it . . . The air shimmers with possibility. Joy swallows me whole.

  Three

  WE HAVE CREATIVE WRITING TODAY, so I have the diary in my backpack. It waits under my seat during Spanish, where we practice the verb escribir, “to write.” Escribo. Escribes. Escribe. Shelby said Spanish was better than French because the teacher was more fun and did all sorts of cool games to help learn the language, but then that teacher switched to the high school. Sigh. Escribimos. We write.

  Finally, I drop my backpack next to my seat in Mr. Cates’s room. He’s changed up the desks again. A couple weeks ago, they were in a big circle facing the middle of the room. That was when Mr. Cates started doing the poem of the day. The first one was by Emily Dickinson and began I dwell in Possibility. We had to all write about what we thought that meant. Then the next day, the desks were in the same circle but all facing out, and we read this Wordsworth poem about daffodils, and we had to look inside ourselves and find a memory to write about. Last class, we were in pods of five. Today, the room is dotted with pairs of desks set side by side.

  “Partner up,” Mr. Cates calls, as everyone hurries into the room.

  Most classes, kids kind of straggle in, but in Mr. Cates’s creative writing class, everyone comes right in and sits down.

  I sit near the front, and Adam slides into the seat next to me.

  “Howdy, pardner,” he says in a bad cowboy accent.

  “Hi, Adam.”

  “Do you have the book?” he whispers.

  I tip my head toward my backpack.

  Mr. Cates perches on his desk. He runs fingers through his curly hair to get it out of his face. He adjusts his glasses. “Page one hundred seventeen, people,” he says, carefully turning pages, like the book is really special, even though it’s just a paperback poetry anthology.

  He started the pods-of-five day with a poem by E. E. Cummings that didn’t make any sense at all, but then somehow it did, and we all had to write without rules, which was surprisingly hard. Especially for Adam.

  Today’s poem is by Shakespeare.

  “Going traditional today,” Adam murmurs.

  “This one will have rules,” I whisper. “You’ll love it.”

  Mr. Cates starts to read in a rich, layered voice that lifts the poem off the page and delivers it personally to each of us.

  Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

  Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme . . .

  “Powerful rhyme!” he repeats, and the corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles.

  But you shall shine more bright in these contents

  Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.

  “Sluttish!” Josh Baum snorts.

  Mr. Cates stares at Josh over his book, managing to communicate disdain without looking unkind.

  “Sorry,” Josh mutters.

  Mr. Cates raises the book again.

  When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

  And broils root out the work of masonry,

  Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

  The living record of your memory.

  He stops. “That syntax is tricky. Let me paraphrase. Shakespeare says neither war nor ruin can destroy the record of your memory. And what’s the record? Josh? Miranda?”

  Miranda flips her hair. “Uh, the record is the poem? Is that right?”

  “Sure is.” Mr. Cates beams. “Nothing will destroy your memory because it lives forever in rhyme. This. Powerful. Rhyme. Next line.”

  ’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

  “What is ‘all-oblivious enmity’?”

  No one speaks up.

  He prompts, “Enmity?”

  “Like enemy?” Micah suggests.

  Mr. Cates nods. “Yes. It’s a feeling of hostility. So then, what is ‘all-oblivious’? Adam?”

  “Something about forgetting,” he says. “Like oblivion.”

  “Right. So . . . forgetting is the enemy, and what defeats forgetting? Memory! Yes?” He looks around the room to make sure we’re all following and continues.

  ’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

  Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

  Even in the eyes of all posterity

  That wear this world out to the ending doom.

  So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

  You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

  He lets the silence hang in the room before he asks the now-familiar question: “What does it mean?”

  I say, “It means the person he loves will, like, live forever in the poem.”

  Adam adds, “And the poem lasts even when other kinds of monuments are gone.”

  Mr. Cates cocks his head to one side. “You said ‘other kinds of monuments.’ Is the poem a monument?”

  Adam sits forward. “Yeah, isn’t it? The poem is a way to . . . to hang on to the person, even though they’re gone. That’s what monuments do.”

  “But it’s kind o
f dumb,” says Kendall. “Monuments are, you know, stone and stuff that would totally last longer than a poem. I mean, a poem is just a piece of paper.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Cates replies. “If Shakespeare carved his lover’s name in stone, it would certainly outlast a piece of paper.”

  “But paper lasts,” Adam protests. He avoids looking at my backpack, and I know he’s thinking about the ancient book in there.

  “Yeah,” Aileen chimes in. “Adam’s right. I mean, look at the library. It’s practically all paper.”

  “But it’s not just the paper,” I say. “It’s the words. They’re kind of bigger than the paper.”

  Mr. Cates takes a step toward me. “Go on,” he prods.

  “So, Shakespeare didn’t write on these actual pages,” I explain, and I thwack my book for emphasis. “His poem is just reprinted here and in lots of other books—”

  “And it’s been in print for about four hundred years, right?” Micah adds.

  “Right,” I agree. “So, it’s the poem itself—the words, not the paper—that lasts longer than a stone.”

  “Nice.” Mr. Cates smiles encouragement at all of us. “This. Powerful. Rhyme.”

  He claps his hands together. “Shakespeare—the Bard, the Bard—is our inspiration for today. Take out your journals. You can start with a line or two from the poem we just read, or you can use any Shakespeare lines you know . . .”

  Josh cuts in. “What Shakespeare would we just know? We don’t all sit around memorizing poems.” He sort of laughs and looks around for support, but when it comes to giving Mr. Cates a hard time, he’s on his own.

  Mr. Cates puts his hands on his hips, his feet shoulder width apart, like he’s about to start exercising. “What Shakespeare do you know?” he asks the room.

  “To be or not to be?” Miranda offers.

  “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” Kendall says.

  “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

  “All that glitters is not gold!”

  “To thine own self be true,” Aileen says. “Or is that Jesus?”

  Mr. Cates laughs. “It’s Shakespeare. See, Josh, most people know Shakespeare. He inhabits the English language like oxygen inhabits air. We breathe him in even when we don’t know it.”

  The energy in the room is practically vibrating. I don’t know if it’s Shakespeare or Mr. Cates who’s gotten us so inspired, but I can’t wait to begin writing.

  Mr. Cates drops his hands to his sides. “Just copy down any Shakespeare you like, and then write what comes to you.”

  I pull the diary from my backpack like I’m lifting a fragile, living thing. I place it on the desk between Adam and me and open to the first blank page.

  I angle my hand for cursive and carefully unspool the Hamlet quote Mom took my name from:

  There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

  “Good choice.” I hear the grin in Adam’s voice.

  Mr. Cates circles toward us. I take a breath. “Mr. Cates? We found this old-looking blank book. Is it okay if Adam and I use this for our journal?”

  Mr. Cates frowns ever so slightly. “It looks very old—” he begins.

  “I know!” I try to strike a tone somewhere between mildly pleased and a little shallow. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Where did you find it?” He steps closer.

  If he really sees the diary, he’ll know it’s not pretend old. He’ll know we shouldn’t be writing in it.

  “Mega Mart,” I lie. It’s an insult to this book to even think about it and Mega Mart together.

  Mr. Cates backs off. “Sure. Use whatever inspires you,” and he circles on to another pair.

  “So what are you inspired to write?” I ask.

  “Funny,” Adam says, his fingers resting lightly under the line from Hamlet. “You are writing about herbs, like the list.”

  “As you pointed out yesterday, poems about herbs would be pretty boring. How about the remembrance part?”

  “Okay,” Adam agrees. “That’s good, since the sonnet was about memory too.”

  “Sonnet?”

  “The powerful rhyme poem Mr. Cates just read?” Adam looks at me like I’m slow.

  “He didn’t say it was a sonnet.”

  “He didn’t need to!” Adam returns. “It had three sets of four lines and then two rhymed lines at the end. That’s how sonnets work. Or at least Shakespeare’s sonnets. I think there’s another kind with a different structure.”

  “I guess I was right about you and the rules.” I smile to show I think it’s cool he knows this.

  Adam scoots closer to the diary. “Do you have any ideas?”

  I read the Hamlet line aloud and close my eyes, waiting for inspiration to strike.

  “A blank page is an invitation,” Mr. Cates intones.

  Invitation. Party. Memories of parties? Inspiration isn’t striking.

  “Rosie.” Adam’s voice cracks. “Look at the page.”

  I follow his gaze to the blankness below the rosemary line, but it isn’t blank. Faint writing trails like tendrils down the page.

  Is the book finally writing back? It can’t be. My brain races, trying to make sense of what I see.

  Adam says in a low voice, “We didn’t see it before because the ink’s so light.”

  He’s right. It’s barely darker than the page itself.

  I tip the book to get a better look, and for once I’m grateful for the harsh fluorescent lights in the classroom.

  The letters slowly resolve into view. It’s as if my eyes are adjusting to the dark, recognizing shapes where before had been nothing but grainy blackness. “Is it even English?”

  “It’s not the same writing as the herbs,” Adam says. “It’s more modern, like Constance’s.”

  I focus on one letter at a time. “This is a W,” I murmur, tracing the slanted cursive with my pinky nail.

  “That’s an i, and so’s that.” Adam points.

  “Wilkie!” I read triumphantly.

  “What’s a wilkie?” Adam frowns.

  “It’s a name,” I reply as I move on to the next word. “You know, like ‘wee Willie Wilkie.’”

  “It’s ‘wee Willie Winkie,’” he scoffs.

  “Whatever. Wilkie is a name. The next word is says. Wilkie says . . .”

  Adam picks up the thread. “Wilkie says I should . . .”

  “I should write down . . .” I continue.

  “Write down my thoughts . . .” Adam stops.

  “If I want to be . . .” I whisper.

  We finish together. “A poet.”

  “It’s definitely Constance,” Adam says.

  “I feel bad now,” I confess. “We shouldn’t’ve written in it. I just . . . I just wanted it to be ours, and I didn’t think . . . I mean, I hoped, but I didn’t really believe . . . And now . . . It should be in a museum or a library. The diary of Constance Brooke. I can’t even get my head around how I’ll tell my mother that we—”

  “We didn’t damage it,” Adam says firmly. “We just wrote our names. And one Shakespeare line. The diary part is fine. Plus, she can’t blame us for thinking it was blank.”

  He frowns again.

  The ink seems much darker now. I can’t see how we missed it before.

  “We’re just getting used to it,” I suggest.

  But the possibility of the book writing back surfaces again . . .

  Mr. Cates appears behind us. “How’s it going?”

  “Great!” I gush, slapping my arm across the page. “We’re writing about memory.”

  He nods as if to say, “Of course you are,” and pounces on the next pair of desks.

  “Do you think we should turn the book in?” Adam whispers. He looks the way he did when we were eight, terrified to confess that we’d erased Shelby’s history project off the computer.

  I bite the inside of my cheek. Yes, we should turn it in, but I say, “No,” and I force myself to sound confident. “Like you said, maybe Constance left t
he diary for someone to use. Anyway, it’s ours now, and possession is half the law.”

  “Nine-tenths.”

  “Whatever. No one’s looking for this.” I’ve convinced myself. “No one wants it.”

  Neither of us points out that just because no one knows the diary exists doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. That the right thing would be to hand it over to my mom. Or to Mr. Cates, who has perched on his desk again and is reading a poem to himself. He’s smiling.

  I smile too. “He said to use whatever inspires us.”

  Adam looks from Mr. Cates to the diary to me. His face is set.

  “Our secret?” I offer my pinky.

  Adam wraps his pinky around mine, and we move our locked fingers from my forehead to his, adding this promise to a long line that stretches back beyond my memory.

  I shift the bookmark out of the way, and the strong scent of rosemary brings with it flashes of the island, where that piney smell infuses everything. Long, desperate games of Capture the Flag. Shelby lifting me up so I could hide the flag in the crook of a tree. Adam throwing and throwing and throwing the boat rope until he could lasso like Indiana Jones. Shelby reading aloud from The Golden Compass and then all of us playing that we were hiding from the Gobblers, who snatch children and, worse, snatch their souls, even though Shelby was technically too old to play pretend by then.

  “Listen to this.” Adam pulls me back to now. “The rosemary thrives.” His eyes are wide, and his voice is just louder than a sigh. “Do you think the book is really writing back?”

  I want to say yes, but a more practical response comes out. “Constance and her dad lived on the island before the ’24 flood. He’s the one who planted the rosemary, remember?”

  “Still, you, like, moved the bookmark, which is rosemary, and I mean, you actually are Rosemary, and then the book says—”

  “The book doesn’t ‘say’ anything. It was written a long time ago. Look.” I use my most matter-of-fact voice. “It’s weird the island has rosemary growing on it, as our science teachers always point out. But it’s exactly because it’s weird that it makes perfect sense she would mention it in her diary.” I don’t know why I’m working so hard to stifle the thrill that wants to rise up.