Don't Drink the Punch!

by P. J. Night

  Matilda went on. “Sure, you’re a nice enough person, but you’re so worried about belonging, about fitting in, you let them push you around. You let them talk you into doing things you shouldn’t do. You’re smart, too. I see your name on the honor roll every semester. You should appreciate what you have.” She put out a hand to stroke Jinx. He let her pet his back once, twice, and then he jumped off the counter and trotted over to where Kayla was standing near the door. He wove himself around in a figure eight between her feet, purring loudly.

  Matilda stared at the cat. “All right, all right! I get it!” Then she raised her head and looked at Kayla. “Come. Sit.” She pointed toward two chairs that were arranged side by side in the shadowy back corner of the shop. They had matching worn-out red upholstery with gold-painted wooden trim. They looked as though they had once been very fancy chairs.

  Despite her panic, and her feeling that time was running out fast, Kayla did as she was told. She knew the only way to help her mother and the others was if she could win over Matilda.

  Matilda sat, looking lost in thought, as though debating what she wanted to say. Finally she leaned in to whisper something to Kayla. “I am not what I seem,” she confessed.

  Kayla nodded. She didn’t dare distract Matilda with questions.

  “I don’t just work at this store. I own it. There is no ‘owner,’ other than me.”

  Kayla raised her eyebrows, but still said nothing.

  “I was once a mean girl. Just like your friend Alice. I was pretty and spoiled, and the boys all flocked around me like hogs to slop. I loved being the center of attention. I loved how other girls tried to look like me, to dress like me. But that was seventy-five years ago.”

  “Seventy-five—”

  “Yes. Close your mouth,” Matilda snapped. “Seventy-five years ago, when I was twelve years old. I may still look as though I’m twelve, but I am, in fact, an old lady of eighty-seven. Heaven knows I have all the ailments of old age—bad eyesight, sore feet, aching hips. Seventy-five years ago, I was given a potion without my knowledge, a potion that caused me to appear to never age. I had been haughty and cruel and horrid to a girl at my school day in and day out. She was a mousy little thing, so easy to torment. My friends and I tortured her with our sarcasm, our teasing, our tricks. The teachers never had any idea. Well, I chose the wrong person to pick on. She was smart. If she’d been born today, she’d have been a Nobel Prize–winning chemist. But back then, girls didn’t think that way. They didn’t dream of careers in science.”

  She shook her head and looked out the window, lost in thought. Kayla resisted the impulse to leap from her chair, to scream, Get on with it! She sat and waited for Matilda to continue.

  “Unbeknownst to me, this girl had taught herself how to make potions. Strong potions. It was she who did this to me, who gave me an antiaging elixir. She laced some chocolates with it and left me a box of them for Valentine’s Day, with a note that said the gift was from ‘a secret admirer.’ One piece of chocolate was all it took. I never grew up. I never got to live my life.”

  “I’m sorry, Matilda,” whispered Kayla. And she meant it.

  Matilda’s jaw tightened. “When I figured out what had happened to me, I vowed to learn the craft as well. I was smart too! My parents removed me from school when they realized something was wrong with my development, and they hired a tutor to teach me. They were embarrassed by me.”

  “What became of the girl?” asked Kayla.

  “Died,” said Matilda flatly. “She fell from a window, although to this day I wonder if it was an accident, or if she took her own life. After all, I had made her so miserable with my bullying, and then she must have felt some guilt for what she did to me.” Matilda pulled a large handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose loudly. “From that day on, I vowed to stop all the mean girls I encountered. That’s why I froze your friend Alice, along with her awful friends.”

  “Matilda,” said Kayla gently, “I am so sorry for what you have suffered. But surely you don’t want to do harm to so many people, people who never did you any wrong. And even Alice—do you really want to wipe out so many lives? My own mother works so hard. She’s a single mom with four kids. Think about who she’d be leaving behind. I have a little brother named Timothy. He’s only seven, but you should see what a great little hockey player he is. He has curly brown hair and—” Kayla began to sob.

  Matilda sighed, and Kayla looked up. The other girl’s expression had softened ever so slightly. “You’re right. I can’t go through with it,” she said solemnly. “I may be a bitter old fool, but I can’t actually do this. I guess I really didn’t think of all the other people I’d hurt, only those nasty girls. I’ll give you a vaporous compound that will reverse the paralysis condition. Wait here.”

  She stood up and went into the back room. Kayla wiped her eyes, leaned back, and breathed.

  “Take this,” said Matilda, upon returning. She handed Kayla a thick black candle. “Burning it will release the antidote fumes into the air. As soon as the frozen people inhale it, they’ll begin to revive. It may take fifteen or twenty minutes for a full recovery—assuming they haven’t ingested too much of the potion and its effects can still be reversed. There’s certainly that danger.”

  Kayla leaped out of the chair, clutching the candle to her chest. Then she stuck it into her jacket pocket and zipped it securely. “Thank you, Matilda,” she said. “Thank you. You’ve just done a merciful thing.”

  Matilda opened the door for Kayla. “I’d advise you to hurry,” she said matter-of-factly.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kayla flung herself back out into the whirling, windy snow and took off running. By clenching her toes inside her boots, she managed to keep them from slipping off her feet, and the thick layer of snow gave her more traction now than when she’d come the other way. Her own footprints from half an hour before were the only ones visible on the sidewalk, and the snow was so heavy, they were already nearly filled in.

  Her fear, panic, and determination to get back as quickly as humanly possible were so strong that it seemed only a few seconds had passed before she caught sight of Alice’s house, looming dark and gray against the black night sky. With a sudden burst of adrenaline, she broke into a flat-out sprint up the driveway. One of her boots slipped off her foot entirely, but she barely noticed, covering the last twenty yards with one of her feet completely bare. She didn’t feel the cold until she’d flung open the door and stepped inside.

  Tom was there at the door when she burst in, and he helped her pull off her coat. She stomped her one boot and bent her other leg up so that she could brush away the worst of the snow clinging to her icy-cold foot.

  “No change,” he said. “No one has moved, and there’s still no phone service. What did you find out?”

  He had a pad and pen ready for her, but she pushed them away. “I can talk,” she said. “I’ll explain how I got my voice back later. But I have a way to reverse their condition. We have to burn this candle. There’s no time to lose. Can you help me find some matches?”

  The two might have been a comical sight under other circumstances, Kayla with one booted foot and one bare one, Tom with one bandaged ankle, hopping mostly on his good foot, opening drawers and lifting lids on decorative pots. As they searched, Kayla explained to Tom that the candle smoke would reverse the effects of the punch, or so she hoped.

  “Got some!” yelled Kayla, who was over by the fireplace. She’d found some long matches in a cardboard cylinder, meant to light fires in a fireplace. She struck a match and held it to the wick. The black candle flashed and sputtered, like a Fourth of July sparkler, and then turned into a deep purple flame. Purple smoke rose from the flame in curling tendrils, almost as though it had a will of its own.

  “Oh, man!” said Tom, coughing and scrunching his nose. “That smells awful!”

  It did. It smelled acrid and sulfurous and reminded Kayla of a musty old kitchen sponge, her baby cousin’s diaper pail,
and a pot of soup she had once forgotten about and had left on a burner until it blackened and smoked.

  “You can move faster than I can,” said Tom. “You take charge of the candle. I’ll go dump out the punch bowls.”

  Although the room was dark and it was difficult to see, Kayla noticed that the purple smoke didn’t seem to dissipate the way an ordinary candle’s might; it twirled and coiled, remaining suspended in rings and curlicues around the room. Choking and half gagging at the smell, she first carried the candle into the area with the coats, where her mother was still sitting, halfway through pulling on her boots.

  Kayla wafted the candle as close as she could beneath her mother’s nostrils, taking care not to get it close to her hair, and watched and waited anxiously.

  Some of the smoke seemed to reach her mother’s nose, as though her mother was inhaling it. Kayla’s every instinct told her to wait and watch her mother, but she knew there were a lot of people’s parents who needed her help, and timing could be critical. She hurried into the other room, the candle at arm’s length, trailing purple fumes as she moved around the frozen people.

  Tom, meanwhile, had picked up the punch bowl. He held it cradled to his chest and looked toward the kitchen, and then toward the front door. “I’m not going to be able to step over that dude,” he called to Kayla, gesturing toward the man she had knocked over, who was lying across the doorway to the pantry. “Front door’s closer.”

  As Kayla continued wafting the candle smoke beneath the nostrils of the frozen parents, she watched Tom hobble awkwardly toward the front door, sloshing himself with the punch. He opened the door, looked outside, and shrugged. Then he pitched the entire bowl outside. Even from the other room, Kayla could hear a dull thud and then the crack of the bowl.

  “Oops,” said Tom with a shrug.

  “I need to check on my mom,” said Kayla, hurrying back to the room with the coats.

  Her mother was beginning to stir. Her eyes were now closed, and rather than leaning forward, she was starting to sink backward, ever so slowly, against the coats draped over the back of the couch. Her head began to move from side to side, and a low moan escaped her lips.

  “Kay, she’s going to be all right,” said Tom gently but urgently. “We need to get downstairs right away.”

  Kayla nodded and led the way toward the basement. She stepped gingerly over the fallen man, who was slowly beginning to stir, then turned and helped Tom hobble over him as well. Then they made their way through the pantry, into the kitchen, and down the basement stairs.

  CHAPTER 17

  The power went back on before they’d gotten to the bottom of the stairs. With eerie suddenness, the music resumed playing. The movie, which they could see through the far doorway, started back up, and the strings of red, heart-shaped lanterns lit up the room in a rosy glow. The frozen kids looked all the more eerie in the sudden festive party atmosphere.

  Kayla hurried down the remaining stairs, holding the candle out in front of her, cupping the flame so it wouldn’t blow out. She moved from kid to kid and tried to waft the smoke with her free hand so that it floated beneath each kid’s nostrils. The sulfurous smell grew even worse down in the basement, where the rooms were less well ventilated and the ceilings lower. It was easier to see the purple fog now, coiling and twining and then slowly wafting upward, forming a smelly purple cloud near the ceiling.

  Tom hobbled over to the table with the punch bowl on it, picked it up, and half walked, half hopped toward the door to the laundry room, where Kayla had told him he would find a sink. He left a trail of red punch on the carpet behind him.

  As she continued to move around the room, wafting the candle’s fumes under people’s noses, she heard a loud splash, and then a thump and the shattering of the other bowl.

  “Uh-oh!” she heard Tom’s muffled voice say.

  Soon he had rejoined her in the main room. They stood, staring from person to person, searching for a sign of movement, the flutter of an eye. But there was nothing. The kids all remained frozen.

  “Are we too late?” wailed Kayla, clutching Tom’s arm and looking at him wild-eyed. Smoke continued to pour off the candle.

  Tom looked grim. “Keep waiting. It’s got to happen. The grown-ups took a while. Maybe kids take even longer.” But he didn’t sound sure.

  They stood, watching, waiting, listening to the music change from one upbeat dance song to another.

  And then Kayla heard a cough.

  “What is that smell?” said someone across the room.

  “Gross!” said another.

  Kayla’s eyes were on Alice. As though someone had unpaused a DVD, Alice suddenly began moving again, running her hands through her hair, continuing her movement from earlier. Then her head snapped to attention, and she looked around. “Yuck! Ick! Did someone try to flush, like, their coat down the toilet or something?”

  She crossed the room, looking like she was planning to go upstairs to find her mother, when she skidded to a stop in front of Kayla and Tom. She stared at the smoke that was pouring and swirling from the candle. Her hand flew to her nose.

  “It’s that candle!” she cried, half-disbelieving, half-furious.

  Kayla had forgotten that she was still holding the burning black candle. Hastily she blew it out.

  By now all the kids appeared to be unfrozen, moving around, and seemingly fine. Nearly everyone was coughing, sputtering, and saying, “Eeeeeew!”

  “Oh, sorry about the candle, Alice,” said Kayla, smiling weakly. “I can explain, but you might not want me to right this second. It’s about—”

  “What’s that you’ve got all down your shirt?” Alice demanded of Tom, pointing. “Are you an ax murderer or something?”

  He glanced down at the front of his yellow sweater. It was soaked in red punch. He looked back up and grinned sheepishly. “Punch?” he said.

  Alice looked around the room slowly. Then she turned back to Kayla and Tom. “What did you do to the punch? It’s not there!”

  Pria and Jess emerged from the other room. They came and stood on either side of Alice and crossed their arms.

  “I know where the punch is,” said Pria.

  “Me too,” said Jess.

  “They dumped it out,” said Pria.

  “It’s sloshed all over the laundry sink,” said Jess.

  “And the bowl is broken,” said Pria.

  “Yeah, sorry about the bowl,” said Tom. “It kind of slipped out of my hands. I was trying to dump it out while standing on one foot.” He pointed apologetically down at his sprained ankle.

  “Alice, we can explain,” said Kayla.

  “I know just what you were up to,” Alice said to her in a steely voice. “You told him to dump it out because you saw him talking to me and you were jealous. You knew what would happen, didn’t you? And you couldn’t deal with your crush crushing on someone else, namely me!”

  “No, it’s not like that,” said Kayla quickly.

  She felt Tom turn to look at her. She couldn’t meet his eye, but she could tell he was grinning, no doubt psyched about being called her crush.

  “I’ve had it up to here with you, Kayla,” said Alice.

  Jess and Pria nodded vigorously in agreement. “So have we!” they said, nearly at the same time.

  Then Alice noticed Kayla’s feet. “You’re wearing my boot!” she said. “Where’s the other one?”

  “Oh. Right. The boots.” Suddenly Kayla realized that the boots she’d taken from the front closet had been Alice’s. She’d been with her when she’d bought them! “I think the other one is . . . outside somewhere.”

  Alice’s mouth fell open. She leaned toward Kayla, her eyes narrowed with fury. She looked like she was about to bellow at the top of her lungs. But then she appeared to think better of it. She looked around the room at the kids, who had resumed what they had been doing before they’d been frozen, as if nothing had happened. They were dancing, eating, and drinking. One boy was standing on a chair, trying
to fan the last of the foul-smelling fumes out of an open window. Kayla knew Alice would do anything not to cause a scene, not to disrupt her party.

  “That is just beyond belief,” said Alice in a low voice. “I know you wish you were me. I know you don’t have nice clothes and you wish you had my stuff, Kayla. I was so nice to you. I let you into my group.”

  Pria and Jess nodded.

  “We let you sit with us in the cafeteria,” Pria chimed in.

  “We put up with your geeky studying,” added Jess.

  “And your ugly clothes,” said Pria.

  “And your refusal to do anything about your hair,” said Alice. “And then how do you repay me? By stealing from me! Taking my boots without permission and then losing one is—”

  “I didn’t steal them!” said Kayla.

  Alice kept going. “And let’s not even get started on your mother. I mean, honestly. Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen pulling into places in that sloppy jalopy she drives, with a backseat full of bratty little brothers? And please. That accent?”

  “You leave my mother out of this,” said Kayla in a tone cold as ice.

  Alice blinked, surprised.

  Kayla flashed with anger. After the horrors she’d suffered that evening, the fears and anxieties, the dreadful race through the storm, the pleading on their behalf . . . she wasn’t going to stand for Alice’s attitude one minute longer.

  “Listen, Alice,” she said in a loud, clear voice. “And you listen too, Jess and Pria. It’s time you learned that you are not the center of the universe. Your mean behavior has terrible consequences, consequences beyond anything you can imagine. Your hateful words to other people don’t just hurt others, although they certainly do, but they can cause terrible consequences to you, too!”

  Alice flipped her hair and rolled her eyes.