The Popularity Spell

by Toni Gallagher

  I tell her I will, and I keep eating my panini.

  When it’s time for the audition on Thursday, I’m surprised by one person leaving Kevin’s class. Of course Scabby Larry gets up, but so does Madison! I never thought a semi-professional actress like her would want to be in a school play with a title like Healthyland.

  Scabby Larry walks next to me on the way to the Focus! room. “Isn’t Samantha trying out?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, walking ahead in case Sam sees us.

  “That’s too bad.” He’s clearly not noticing that I’m trying to keep our conversation short. “We were in a play together in second grade and we had a great time.”

  Wow. Sam never told me anything about that! “You did?”

  “Yeah, it was a lot of fun and we were, like, good friends. I don’t know what happened after that, but she was really great in the play. We were pilgrims, and she was my wife and said something about crushing cranberries for Thanksgiving.”

  Maybe that’s why Samantha didn’t want to try out. She wouldn’t want to be Scabby Larry’s wife again!

  When we get to the Focus! room, Roberta has pushed all the tables and chairs to the side so there’s a big empty space on the floor. There are pillows, instruments like a tambourine and a xylophone, and old-fashioned toys like a wooden train and a stuffed animal horse head on a stick. Healthyland looks like an even weirder place than I thought.

  Roberta tells us to sit on the floor. I look around at all the other people. They’re just kids in school like me, but for some reason I’m getting nervous. Right then, Roberta says no one should be worried, that this will be a “nontraditional” audition, which means there will be a lot of play and silliness and that everyone should just have fun.

  First Roberta puts on music and tells us to “let loose,” meaning we can kick, dance, do jumping jacks, or whatever we want. No one does anything too wild at first, but then Scabby Larry does a cartwheel! He’s really good at it, but I’d be scared to do something like that in case I messed up and fell over and everyone talked about it forever. But in a few minutes everyone is laughing and whooping, and no one seems so worried anymore. So I do a goofy dance move my dad does that makes him look like a chicken who had too much high-fructose corn syrup, and I’m not embarrassed at all.

  After that we do “vocal exercises,” which for Roberta means opening your mouth really wide, making strange noises, and not being afraid to look stupid, which everyone does—including Madison, who doesn’t seem to mind how she looks. But I decide right then that I’m not going to tell Samantha too much about this. Everybody looks equally dopey and it wouldn’t be fair to single someone out for Sam’s enjoyment. Even sisters don’t have to share everything.

  After our bodies and mouths and vocal cords are “loose,” Roberta says people will pair up and do scenes, but not with lines written on a page. It’s called improvisation, which is a fancy way of saying that you make things up as you go. I can’t believe it when the first two people Roberta calls are me and Madison.

  We both stand up, taking our time. As we walk toward the middle of the room, I realize that we’ve never had a real conversation. Even when she gave me her forced apology, I never actually spoke directly to her. This is a very odd way to begin.

  “Let’s pick a place where these two characters could be,” Roberta says to everyone else. A girl I don’t know yells out, “A farm!” Uh-oh. This could be bad. Piggies live on farms.

  Madison and I look at each other, not sure what to do. Roberta says one of us should pretend to be a character that might be on a farm and start talking. So I do. “Howdy, pardner,” I say in a Southern sort of voice, though I sound more like a cowboy than a farmer. “Welcome to Rassafrassa Farm!”

  Madison gets down on her hands and knees. I wonder what she’s doing…and then she moos! “Howdy, farmer,” she says back. “I ran away from my last farm and I’m looking for a place to stay. Mooooo!”

  I look at Roberta and the other people in the room, but they’re just watching. So I look back at Madison on the floor and say, “Oh my garsh! A talking cow! I bet I can make money with you!”

  Roberta and the kids laugh—in a good way. So Madison and I keep talking like a farmer and a cow, making a business plan to entertain the people of Ohio (I added that!), and people laugh the whole time—especially when I tell the cow to follow me back to my farmhouse, and I grab the horse head on the stick and pretend to ride off on it, with Madison following and mooing.

  Other kids do improvisation scenes too. Some are funny and some are dumb, but it doesn’t really matter because we’re all having a fun time, and Roberta was right: it doesn’t feel like the scary auditions I’ve seen on TV.

  When we’re finishing up, Roberta says everyone is invited to come to callbacks, which will be held next Monday after school. She hands us all a few pages from the script and tells us to read them and decide on the parts we might like to play. As I get up, I realize I don’t even care if I get to be in the play or not, because that was a new and interesting experience.

  “See you at callbacks!” Scabby Larry shouts as he runs to get picked up from school. “Actually, I’ll see you tomorrow first!”

  I wave, just a little, and take my time walking across the courtyard. I don’t realize until a minute later that Madison is right next to me. I look at her for a second, and I think she looks at me, but we don’t say anything until we’re almost at the parking lot.

  “How did you feel about the audition?” she asks. Outside of our goofy little scene, it’s the first time Madison Paddington has ever spoken to me like a real person.

  “It was cool,” I say, then wonder if “cool” is a cool word to use around her.

  “I thought so too,” she says. “You were good.”

  I almost stop walking, I’m so shocked. She gets a step or two ahead of me. “Thanks,” I finally say. “You were too.”

  I’m not sure, but Madison and I may have just had a friendly conversation. Our first ever.

  It makes me wonder if there will be another one.

  That night, instead of memorizing the countries of the world on the map, which we’re going to have a test on, I’m in my room with Millie and Toby, reading the pages from the play script. I decide I don’t want the role of the little girl who hits her head and ends up in Healthyland. She’ll have too many lines and too much memorization, and I don’t want the pressure. I want to be one of the people she meets along the way. “Would you like some kale? You can add it to your smoothie!” I say out loud, as if I’m the character called Healthy Eater. I try to make it sound somewhat realistic and even watch myself in the mirror as I say it.

  I hear Dad’s phone ring down the hall. It’s not a real ring; it’s an old song that Dad sings in a funny low voice when he’s acting silly. “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.”

  It’s Terri’s ringtone, but it doesn’t sound like he’s talking to Terri. “Yes, this is he,” he says, all formal and serious. He never says “This is he.”

  I creep to my doorway so I can hear better. “Where is she? Is she okay?” When I hear that, my stomach suddenly twists and churns and flops upside down like a fish with a hook in its mouth, and my heart gets a cramp in it, like my leg sometimes gets in Recreational Wellness.

  “I’ll be right there,” Dad says, and clicks off the phone. “Cleo!” he yells. “Put on your shoes!”

  I know I should just do it but I still ask why, shouting down the hallway.

  “We’ve got to go!” I can hear him moving around, maybe putting on his shoes, definitely grabbing his car keys. “I’m leaving,” he says. “Are you coming or not?”

  I’m not sure I want to go wherever he’s going, but the idea of staying home and wondering is worse, so I grab my sneakers and run down the hall. He’s already at the front door and doesn’t even notice that my shoes are in my hands.

  “What happened?” I ask, following him down our front path, trying to skip lightly so I don’t hurt my fee
t on anything.

  “Terri was in a car accident.”

  My heart gets even tighter and I could almost throw up, but I know I’d better not because Dad is in a hurry because his girlfriend was in a car accident and it’s all my fault. This isn’t what we wished for. Sam and I only wanted Terri to be apart from Dad; we didn’t want anything bad to happen to her! But after everything that’s happened with all the other hexes, I probably should have known better.

  As I’m putting on my shoes in the car, I ask Dad what happened. He says “I don’t know” in a real nervous, short way, so I don’t ask him more. I look out the window and try not to cry. If he saw me crying, would he know this was my fault? Or would he just think I was sad, like when Marty died?

  I watch the scenery pass by for a long time: a sign for a garage sale, a building with Mexican-sounding music coming out of it, little houses with paint peeling off, a store with Asian characters on it. I don’t know which country they’re from because I haven’t memorized all the Asian countries yet, and there are a lot of them, and…

  “Please stop singing,” Dad says, a little harshly.

  I had no idea. I guess when I heard the Mexican-sounding music, I started singing a song we learned in Spanish. It’s about a mother hen who has to feed her babies, and it has all kinds of words we’ll never need to use in real life, like chicks and wheat and…

  “Oh my God,” Dad says as he stops the car. I turn—and I see what he sees.

  Terri’s maroon car is on the other side of the road, and it looks like another car made a big metal fist and punched it in the side. It’s not my fault; it’s a coincidence, I say to myself. I don’t believe it, but I’m thinking it so hard, I’m afraid I may say it out loud. Now I remember that I even thought of Terri driving—driving to her new house with her new boyfriend and new job. No matter how much I say the opposite in my head, this is my fault.

  There’s a police car with its lights flashing and a big fire truck, even though nothing’s on fire. The super-loud whoop of a siren suddenly hurts my ears. I turn around and see an ambulance pulling up. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Does Terri need to go to the hospital because she’s hurt…or because she’s dead?

  Don’t be dead, I think. It might’ve even come out of my mouth, but Dad doesn’t hear it because he’s getting out of the car and yelling at me to stay where I am.

  He rushes over and talks to a police officer, who points down the sidewalk. I follow his hand and notice Terri the same time Dad does. She’s not dead! She’s sitting on the curb and staring at nothing, with a scarflike thing tied around her neck, holding her arm against her middle.

  Dad sits down with Terri and tries to hug her, but he can’t because of her arm. So he gives her a kiss on the cheek and pushes her hair out of her eyes.

  I keep watching as Dad takes Terri by her other arm and helps her step into the back of the ambulance. He stands behind her, making sure she gets in okay (I bet he says “fingers and toes, fingers and toes”), and he doesn’t turn away until the doors are closed.

  He should walk back to our car now, but he doesn’t. He stands there for a minute, his head and shoulders down. I start quietly singing the Spanish song about the mother hen, and I’m halfway through it before Dad finally turns and walks back to me.

  He gets in the driver’s seat and I ask how Terri is. He answers slowly. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine. They think she broke her wrist and her nose. And she might have a concussion.”

  “What’s that?”

  He’s still talking slow. “It’s, um, if a person hits her head, her brain gets scrambled a little.”

  “What?” I ask. If Terri’s brain is scrambled, I would never, ever forgive myself. I was the one who put the pin in the doll’s head!

  “It’s not too serious,” Dad says. “It usually goes away pretty quickly with rest.” He starts the car. I stay quiet for once in my life, and it pays off, because Dad finally tells me what’s happening. The ambulance is taking Terri to the hospital, and after the doctors take a look at her, we can say hello.

  I’ve never been in a hospital before. It’s not like it is on TV. It’s not so clean and sparkly, and there aren’t a bunch of beautiful people running around yelling “Stat!” The long thin lights on the ceiling make the place shadowy, and the people in their blue tops and pajama pants, even though they’re doctors and nurses and stuff, look sickly as they shuffle down the ugly hallways. It feels like the real hospital shut down and was taken over by zombies.

  A lady—a nurse, I guess—is leading us to the room that Terri’s in. The lady’s white sneakers make squishy sounds against the floor, and it’s really annoying. I almost want to ask her if she can take them off and walk in her socks, but I’m sure she can’t do that with all the needles and whatever germs are probably crawling around.

  I can’t hear everything the nurse and Dad are saying because they’re too far in front of me, but I hear words like “bone” and “fracture” and “recuperation.” Then we walk into a big room. There’s a lot of whispering, a couple of coughs in the distance, and a buzzing from the lights that’s even more annoying than the nurse’s squishy shoes.

  Terri is in a bed inside a little “room” made from pink curtains that hang from the ceiling. Instead of her usual pink cheeks and perky smile, she has bandages across her nose and black bruises under her eyes. She’s got a cast on one arm, so she lifts the other one to wave a halfhearted hello.

  “How are you?” Dad asks, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  “It could’ve been worse.” She seems sad, but I guess that makes sense.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  Terri talks slower than she normally does. “I was driving down Fountain, and a car that was making a turn hit the side of my car, hard. My wrist,” she says, lifting the cast off the bed a few inches, “hit the door on my side. And I don’t know how I broke my nose. Maybe my face hit the steering wheel or something.”

  I can tell Dad doesn’t like hearing any of that. I don’t either. Especially when I remember pushing the pin into the voodoo doll’s face, even though deep down I didn’t want to.

  “Did it hurt when it happened?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “I guess I was in shock. That means you don’t feel the pain even though it’s there.”

  “Shock is good then,” I say.

  “I guess so.”

  We all sit quietly for a second, looking at each other with nothing to say.

  This is bad. Really bad. This is much worse than farting or cursing or even being suspended from school for two weeks. It would have been fine if Terri just went away somewhere, but no matter how much we want Samantha’s mom and my dad to get together, we didn’t want Terri to get hurt. At least I didn’t. I feel worse than I did when Marty died, even worse than when I realized I didn’t have a mom. I never knew my mom, and nothing I did ever hurt her. So this may be the worst I’ve ever felt in my life.

  I have to text Samantha, or call her, or even see her somehow tonight and tell her that this is over. We can’t do any more hexes, no matter how great we think they’ll be for us.

  “They told me you can leave soon,” Dad says. “Do you want to stay with us? That way Cleo and I can help you. Make you food, help you get changed…”

  “Brush your hair!” I chime in, way too loud and happy for an ugly zombie hospital.

  “Thanks, Cleo,” Terri says with a small smile. “But my parents live forty-five minutes away. I’m going to stay with them for a day or two.”

  So that part of the hex worked too. She’s moving farther away—at least for a while.

  “Hey, Cleo, could I talk to your dad alone for a little bit?” Terri asks.

  Dad says sure without asking me, but I don’t complain. “I hope you feel better,” I say as I leave the pink-curtained room, but I don’t go far; I just sit on a plastic chair by a sink right outside. I can hear pretty much everything they’re saying. Terri says she doesn’t
need Dad’s help; her parents will come to the hospital to pick her up. She says Dad’s been “preoccupied” for a while now—with work and me and my friends and my friends’ mothers—so maybe it’s time for them to have a little space from each other.

  I start a video game on my phone and turn up the volume. I don’t want to hear anything else. And sound effects on a game are a lot more fun to hear than people coughing and barfing, and lights buzzing and sneakers squishing, and Terri telling Dad that she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.

  Back home, Dad is as quiet as I am. He asks if I want to watch TV with him, but I say no, I’d rather go to bed. Dad is surprised, but he lets me go, saying it’s been a long day for both of us. I think it’s going to be a longer day—and night—for Terri. I wonder if she’s still at the hospital, waiting for her parents. I wonder if her shock has worn off and if her nose and wrist are hurting her. Most of all, I start to wonder if she and I were ever friends. Or if someday we could be friends. Is that even possible?

  Before I turn off my light, I pick up my phone and send Samantha a text.

  No more hexes.

  In the morning I don’t want to get out of bed. It’s just like the times before the voodoo doll, when I didn’t like going to school and Dad would have to yell two or three times before I’d get up.

  When he finally says, “I’m not kidding, Cleo; I am not in the mood for this,” I roll onto the floor. My foot lands on my phone, which I tossed on the ground after texting Samantha last night. When I pick it up, I see that she wrote back. All her text says is: What?!

  I can tell from the frowny face that her text is extra serious. We’ll have to talk about it at school.

  I’m waiting for Sam in the courtyard before class when Scabby Larry walks up to me. “Hey, are you excited about callbacks?” he asks. “You were really good at the audition.”

  While I appreciate the compliment, I can’t enjoy it. I have bigger things on my mind right now. “Thanks. You too,” I mumble.