A Snicker of Magic (2 page)

My introduction to the sixth-grade class at Stoneberry Elementary went every bit as horrifically as I’d expected. As soon as I opened my mouth to speak, I saw these words shoot up like rockets from bookshelves in the back of the classroom:

Dork

Lonely

Loser

Clutzerdoodle

I tried to blink the words away, but they only ballooned up bigger. After two painful minutes of silence, I managed to mumble, “My name is Flea …” And the same girls I’d seen earlier at the pencil machine, who were now sitting in the front row of my classroom, giggled. So much for a new beginning.

As I stared down at my wordy-sneakers and took a stumbling step toward my seat, two hands pressed gently against my shoulders, freezing me in place.

I looked up into the smiling face of my new homeroom
teacher, Miss Divinity Lawson. Miss Lawson was most assuredly the youngest teacher I’d ever had. She was the prettiest, too. Her hair tumbled down her shoulders in long, loopy curls. Put a crown on Divinity Lawson’s head, and she’d look just like a storybook princess. “May I have the honor of introducing you to the class, Felicity?” she asked. I managed to nod.

Miss Lawson kept her hands on my shoulders while she talked about me. She even made me sound almost interesting.

“Felicity has been on some marvelous adventures. She’s lived in six different states with her family!”

I was nearly smiling by the time I settled into the empty seat in the front row, right beside a boy doodling chickens on his notebook. There hadn’t been enough magic in the room to stop my stutters, or to make me feel confident in front of a room full of people. But I was
smiling
, just barely. Which meant Midnight Gulch was already different from all the other places I’d been.

Miss Lawson walked to the chalkboard and scrawled out a familiar word:

Stoneberry

Which didn’t make much sense. Even I knew the name of the school, and it was only my first day. Everybody else had already been in class a few weeks, so surely they knew the name of their own educational institution. Next, Miss Lawson took a stick of yellow chalk and cut a squeaky line down the center of the word, making it two:

Stone/berry

And that got me to thinking about the spider egg that Mama found in the way-back seat of the Pickled Jalapeño. None of us knew anything about spiders or their eggs, and while we didn’t have anything against them, Mama didn’t want them crawling through the van or nesting in her hair. So she squashed the egg with her rhinestone flip-flop and we soon discovered that’s probably the worst thing she could have done. Because about a million baby spiders exploded out of the egg and scampered across the backseat. Mama screamed and whopped at them with her flip-flop, but I think most of them got away. If they’re still in the van, we don’t see them very often. Spiders don’t make much fuss.

When Miss Lawson made two words out of
Stoneberry
, it became a spider word to me. Suddenly, those two words split apart and new words creep-crawled out of them, across the walls and under the door and out into the hallway:

Ton

TurboBoy

Note

Ruby

Ruby
’s the only word I wanted to keep. I pulled my shoe up in my lap and scrawled
R-U-B-Y
across the toe. I hoped somebody out in the hall snatched up
TurboBoy
.
TurboBoy
wasn’t a real word, as far as I knew. But it sure did sound good.

“Here’s the truth of it!” Miss Lawson hollered, spinning around to face us all. Her sudden burst of energy surprised
me so much that I jumped. But nobody else seemed to notice. I guess they’d had a few weeks to get used to Miss Lawson’s energy. Even though she stood tall and smiled, I could see:

Jitters

Impressions

Impressionable souls …

STEP LIVELY

All those words were blooming up like flowers out of her glossy black hair.

Miss Lawson said, “Every person you will ever meet, and every place you will ever go, and every building you set your foot in — has a story to tell.”

“In fact!” she exclaimed. “One of my most favorite stories happened in
this exact place
.” Miss Lawson’s eyes sparkled in such a pretty way when she spoke. I wished I could put words together as easy as she could. Everything about her seemed bright, even her clothes. She wore a polka-dot sweater and a green skirt that swirled like a lily pad when she spun toward us.

She walked across the front of the classroom while she talked, her purple heels
click-clack
ing against the tiles. “As I’m sure you know, Midnight Gulch, Tennessee, is famous for two things: The first is Dr. Zook’s Famous Ice Cream Factory. For those of you who are new to town” — Miss Lawson winked down at me — “you’ll be happy to know there are forty-five marvelous and mysterious flavors of ice cream for you to try. Cake flavored, bacon flavored. You name it, Dr. Zook’s makes it.”

I might have been in Midnight Gulch for less than twenty-four hours, but I already knew about Dr. Zook’s Ice Cream. I knew because Aunt Cleo’s freezer was packed full of it. Cleo’s partial to the Chocolate Chip Pork Rind flavor.

“But!” Miss Lawson clapped her hands. “Midnight Gulch isn’t only famous for ice cream. Midnight Gulch is famous because it used to be a magical place. And the most magical people who lived here, the most famous duo ever to call Midnight Gulch their home, were the Brothers Threadbare.”

Yes,

Yes,

Yes!

I pressed my hand hard against my ribs so my drumbeat-yes heart might calm down enough for me to hear the story. But it wasn’t just my heart screaming
Yes!
this time. Even though I was certain I’d never heard anything about those magical brothers before, my ears tingled as though I’d been told some wonderful secret.

I saw one word appear across the wall of the classroom, the letters even taller than Miss Divinity Lawson, stretching all the way from the floor to the ceiling:

T H R E A D B A R E

I heard a steady chorus of yawns and sighs, most likely coming from people who’d heard the story once or twice or ten thousand times. But somehow I knew, before I even heard a single word, that this story would matter to me.

“Many years ago,” Miss Lawson continued, “this schoolhouse didn’t exist and this land was only an empty hillside. And on this very hillside” — she stomped her high-heeled shoe on the tiles to make sure we understood — “on September 15, 1910, the Brothers Threadbare had their famous duel.

“Like most people in Midnight Gulch, the Brothers Threadbare were simple, easygoing folks … who just so happened to have a little magic in their veins.” She grinned. “Their real names were Stone and Berry Weatherly. The Weatherlys were farm boys, the same as some of you.”

Miss Lawson crossed her arms over her chest. I wondered if her heart was pounding as loud as mine.

“Every family in Midnight Gulch had a different kind of magic. The Weatherly Magic was a particularly wonderful kind, though, because their magic had to do with music. Whenever Stone and Berry played their songs, the whole world seemed to dance. At the first strum of Berry Weatherly’s banjo, the wind would roar over the valleys. The wildflowers would wave from the hillsides. The trees would shake their limbs and clap their leaves. When Stone played his guitar, the clouds swirled into a thousand different shapes: cloud lions, cloud tigers, thunderheads that ran like wild horses across the sky.”

Desks squeaked and popped as people leaned up in their seats, trying to get as close as they could to the story Miss Lawson was telling. If the right person tells a story, I guess it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard it. Your
heart still hears it brand-new. And Miss Lawson was an A+ storyteller.

“And the townspeople!” She clasped her hands together. “They
all
took to dancing whenever the Weatherly boys played music; their wicked, wonderful, magical music.

“Even when the Brothers Threadbare were out of town, doing shows in other cities, you could hear their music in Midnight Gulch. The music got caught in the trees and echoed all through town and through the woods. People danced down Main Street all day, every day, back then. They couldn’t help it. They say that Midnight Gulch was the happiest place in the world, back when the magic was still here. Back before the Brothers Threadbare left town and never came back.”

One of the pencil-machine girls tucked a swirly-twirl of blond hair behind her ear and asked, “Where’d they go?”

“Excellent question.” Miss Lawson clapped excitedly. “At first, the Weatherlys left town together, on a tour. They traveled from the country to the city, hoping they could make enough money from their music to send back to the farm. They always started their concerts with a few magic tricks. Anybody with magic in their veins can do simple magic tricks, so that was easy enough. But soon, the brothers realized people were more interested in their magic tricks than in their singing. So they focused on the magic: They charmed mountain lions and made fire puppets. They flung handfuls of coal dust into the air and watched the ashes turn to butterflies. They were young and handsome
and talented. People couldn’t get enough of them. But sadly,” Miss Lawson sighed, “their fame and fortune became a dividing line between them.”

She tapped the line on the chalkboard again. “The brothers became jealous of one another. They got so jealous, in fact, that they finally decided to have a duel. Whoever won, they decided, could keep all the money and fame and fortune they’d earned. But the loser would be cursed forever with a wandering heart. The loser would leave town, never return, never settle down. And
never
do another magic trick.”

The room felt especially icy all of a sudden, like somebody had turned the air conditioner to “freeze out.” Miss Lawson felt it, too; she leaned against her desk and rubbed her arms.

“The brothers met right on this hillside,” she sighed. “Newspapers from seven different states sent reporters to cover the event. At nine fifteen in the morning, on September fifteenth, the Brothers Threadbare began their duel. Their magic was wild and powerful by then. So they dueled for three whole days: sweating, shouting, always trying to outdo the other. Finally, it was Berry who cast the winning spell.

“And poor Stone Weatherly.” She circled his name on the board. “He left town, cursed forever with a wandering heart. Nobody knows what became of him.

“Soon after he left, Berry discovered that, without his brother, his magic didn’t work anyhow. Eventually, he
disappeared from town, too. After that, people got restless and sad. They said Midnight Gulch used to be their favorite secret, their favorite place … but Midnight Gulch didn’t feel like home anymore. People started leaving, breaking apart from their families and heading out in search of what they’d lost.”

By this time, I had the fabric of my T-shirt all bunched up in my fist. I was even trembling, just a little bit. Because I knew what it felt like to have a family broken apart. And I knew what it was like to always be searching for a home.

“There were no more songs caught in the trees,” Miss Lawson continued. “No more people dancing down Main Street. Even folks with other types of magic started using it less and less and less. And before people knew it, the magic was gone completely. And Midnight Gulch became the same as any other town.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the kind of town Miss Lawson described — a place where people stayed in one place. Where families stayed together. I’d give anything to find a magic like that.

“And so,” Miss Lawson said, “when the town built this school, they named it after both of the brothers — Stoneberry. I think it’s time we had a special event to commemorate our tragic namesakes.”

Miss Lawson spun around and pulled a white chart down over the word she’d hacked apart. She turned on a projector that whirred as loud as a helicopter.

These were the words lit up on the screen: