All-Season Edie (6 page)

“YES!” I say.

Everybody frowns and tells me to shush.

“I
must
go to the public library,” I announce to Mom when I get home from school.

“
Must
you?” she asks. “Well, maybe this evening. I can't drive you right now because I have to take Dex to the mall for shoes. Coming?”

“No!” I say, shuddering.

“Don't answer the phone and don't answer the door.”

“I know,” I say.

“I know you know, but it makes me feel better to say it anyway,” Mom says, giving me a hug.

The big difference between me and girls in books is that they're allowed to go outside. Those girls live in small towns surrounded by hills and babbling brooks and red-gold deciduous woods. Coquitlam, the suburb of Vancouver where I live, is paved as far as the eye can see, and the trees are huge, lone, unclimbable firs and cedars dripping rain. Those girls live in towns that have one of everything: one church, one school, one haunted mansion, one movie-house, one street of stores, one zoo, one library, one museum. You can get anywhere you want by walking, and you know everybody, and you can go places all on your own, even if you're only eleven. In Coquitlam there are three Safeways and a Save-On-Foods, five swimming pools, three skating rinks, ten schools and two shopping malls, but nobody walks anywhere. You don't walk home from school; you get a ride in somebody's car pool. You have to take the car to buy a Popsicle or mail a letter. In those storybook towns, in the fall there are apple trees with crispy leaves, and mysterious strangers arriving at dusk, and candlelight flickering in the windows of abandoned houses. In winter there's snow and ice-skating and caroling and sleigh rides. In spring there are flowers, and in summer there are more flowers and swimming holes and homemade lemonade.

In Coquitlam, it rains or it doesn't. Those are the seasons. And even if it's sunny, eleven-year-old girls absolutely do not play outside by themselves. That's just how it is.

I wait until after supper, when Mom has done the dishes, tidied up the living room, put on a load of laundry and sat down in front of the
TV
, to remind her about the library.

“Oh, Edie,” Mom says. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I think I'm going to explode.

“I'll take you,” Dad offers.

That's just ridiculous. “You have never been to the library, and you don't even know where it is,” I object.

He frowns, like I've made a good point. “You can drive.”

“This is serious!”

“It is?” he says. “Okay. If we're not back in a week, send a search party.”

“Better make it two weeks,” Mom says. “If it's serious.”

They're laughing at me. Now, if I were a witch, what would I do with them? I would point my finger and—what?

“What?” Dad says, because I'm standing still, staring at him, struck by a whole new idea.

Going places with Dad is different from going places with Mom. He plays the radio in the car, for one thing, and he's always trying to be funny. Sometimes I'm in the mood for this, but sometimes, like tonight, I have more important things on my mind.

“What did the elephant say to the gas-station attendant?” he's saying now.

“Yes,” I say, distracted. If Grandma is a witch, doesn't that make me at least one-quarter witch? Or is it one-eighth? And even one-eighth ought to be enough for a spell or two, oughtn't it? There was that Great Scientists book on the guy who grew sweet peas, Mendel, who figured out whether you would have blue eyes if your grandparents did, or something. Genetics that's called. I'll have to find that book too.

“‘Yes'?” Dad says. “The elephant said ‘yes'?”

At the library, I ditch him immediately and go straight to the computer terminal to check the online catalogues. Then I hit the shelves, list in hand. It's a great relief, finally, to be where the information is, getting some real work done.

Fifteen minutes before closing, I stagger over to Dad with a stack of books that comes up to my chin. He's sitting in the Mr. Grasshopper Reading Corner, reading a newspaper. “Help,” I say.

“You're kidding,” he says. I drop a few books and he picks them up, glancing at their titles. “
Macbeth
?” he says. “
The Salem Witch Trials
?”

“School project,” I say.

“Is that a cookbook?”

“It's a herb book,” I say warily.

“Can you check my book out on your card too?”

His book is a hardcover, about four inches thick, with no pictures. It's called
Disraeli
. Almost all of my books have a green dot on the spine, meaning they're for younger readers. His book has a fancy letter B on it.

“Am I allowed?”

“We'll just slip it in with these others.” Dad squints and shifts his eyes around like a spy. “Tell no one,” he says. “If I am captured, eat your library card.”

“Dad,” I say.

“They won't take us alive!”

“Dad!” I say.

At the counter, the librarian says, “Wow.”

“Act normal,” Dad says, winking and waggling his eyebrows.

“What are you doing?” the librarian says.

“Research,” I say grimly, pushing Dad through the security arch.

Eye of newt, I decide, is going to be a problem.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog
...

On second thought, maybe I should start with something easier than a “charm of powerful trouble,” which makes me feel queasy anyway. I get into enough powerful trouble without dragging dismembered amphibians into it, and I like dogs—even their tongues.

I sit on my bed, surrounded by books. So far, the herb book seems the most promising. It tells you how to cure a headache, ease a cough and purify the skin with things like peppermint and marigold. Fine. But it doesn't tell you how to make things happen— how to
cause
a headache, for instance, not to mention how to break a wineglass. But then, if you could find out how to do it from a book, surely people would be casting spells more often. So there has to be some secret element, something I'm missing. Not knowing what else to do, I keep reading. I read about gathering plants by midsummer moonlight. Well, that's out— it's September, and my bedtime is nine o'clock sharp. I read about the town in America where they burned witches at the stake four hundred years ago. But the book thinks they weren't real witches, just smart annoying women who got on people's nerves, and what killed them was not fire so much as smoke inhalation. “Come
on
,” I say, impatient. I read about curses. That seems more promising, but the books are maddeningly vague. There's something about burying the hair of your enemy in a secret place, along with a cherished object, and whispering a secret formula.

I look up “cherished” in the dictionary. Then I go to the bathroom.

Dexter's hairbrush lies on the counter next to the sink. People think Dexter is pretty, and Dexter thinks so too. She spends hours in front of the mirror, brushing her hair and looking at her teeth and watching herself blink and breathe. She leaves grungy spots on the mirror, that's how close she stands. Normally this is very aggravating, especially when I have to pee, but the advantage for an apprentice witch is that it leaves an awful lot of useful pale yellow hairs in the brush. I pick out a few long ones, wrap them in a piece of toilet paper and put them in my pocket.

My thinking is, I can't make any mistakes on Grandpa, but I can practice on Dexter. Isn't that reasonable?

The next step, a cherished object, is trickier. That means a dangerous journey to a dark, forbidden land: Dexter's bedroom. I slip from the bathroom, stealthy as an assassin, and glance up and down the hall. The coast is clear. At the entrance to the Cave of Doom I pause, pressing my ear against the door, but all is silent. It's now or never.

BRATS AND CATS KEEP OUT!!!!!!!!!! The sign on the door is plastered at Edie-height. I ignore it. I turn the handle as quietly as possible, in case Dex is lying on the bed with the headphones on, oblivious to intruding witches. But the light is off and the room is empty. She must not be home from school yet.

Dexter's room is tidy, like mine—we're sisters, after all—and one wall is completely lined with books. But there the similarities end. First of all, the walls are pink. Pink! There's a full-length tilting mirror on a fancy iron stand in one corner, ruffled curtains, tasseled cushions on the bed and three pairs of ballet slippers in a row under the window, silk ribbons tucked neatly inside.
CDS
line the sill. But the biggest difference is the closet. One door, its catch broken, swings slightly open, revealing Dexter's greatest preoccupation of all: clothes. The closet's stuffed, as stuffed and bulging as a burger on a
TV
commercial. These, surely, are her most cherished objects, but somehow I can't imagine stealing and burying one of Dex's umpteen sweaters. Maybe something smaller?

I've barely taken a step toward the closet when I hear voices.

“You know who is cute?” says a voice: Mean Megan. Oh no. “Tyler is cute.”

“He is not,” Dexter says. The voices are coming closer. Dexter's middle school lets out later than my elementary. Mean Megan must have come home with Dex to hang out for a while. That means, usually, sitting on her bed, listening to music, having long private discussions and telling me to get lost.

“Is too.”

“Is not.”

“Is!”

“Not!”

The difference between friends and sisters, I reflect as I hurriedly tuck myself inside the closet—there's nowhere else to go—is that friends enjoy the arguing.

“Close the door so my little brat sister doesn't come poking her nose in,” Dexter says. They're in the room now. I can't see a thing, but I hear something heavy land on the bed. Knapsack maybe. “She is
so
annoying.”

“The next time she bugs you, you should steal her night-light,” Mean Megan says. They giggle. “Shred her precious peacock feathers!” Mean Megan says, as Dexter shrieks with laughter. “Poison her cat!”

That's it. When I figure out my powers, these two are toast.

“Don't make me laugh so hard,” Dexter says. “It makes my stomach hurt even more.”

“I know what you mean,” Mean Megan says. Half listening, I start quietly feeling around in the closet. Something small, I think.

“You know how to get someone to like you?” Mean Megan says. I hesitate. My hand has just closed over something hard in a coat pocket. “First, you need something of theirs, something they've touched or carried around a lot.”

WAIT A MINUTE HERE.

“And three candles and a small mirror.”

“What
ever
,” Dexter says doubtfully.

Breathlessly, I stick the little hard thing, whatever it is, in my pocket. The clothes around me rustle with my movement, making the closet door creak.

“What was that?” Mean Megan says.

“Closet,” Dexter says. “It doesn't close right. It always does that.”

“I know who already likes you anyway.”

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

“Not!”

“Too!”

“Let's go get a snack.”

“Okay.”

OH FOR PETE'S SAKE, I think. What about the spell? And how does Mean Megan know a spell anyway, even if it is just a lame love spell? Still, I don't have time to think about it now. As soon as I hear their voices fade off down the hallway, I slip from the closet, ready to make my escape. But then I hesitate again. On the bed, half unzipped, lies Mean Megan's blue denim pack.

If that isn't fate bopping me on the nose, I don't know what is. A few long hairs cling to the straps like long black threads: perfect. I also take a bright red felt pen that, even capped, smells strongly of cherries. I don't know if Mean Megan cherishes it, but something about “cherry” and “cherish” makes it seem appropriate enough. And (borrowing from the interesting new information I've just picked up) she certainly carries it around all day and probably touches it a lot too. My pocket isn't big enough for the pen so I stick it in my sock, where it digs rigidly into my ankle, like a splint. I'm bending down to adjust the hem of my jeans over it when the back of my neck starts to prickle. Slowly, I turn around.

Dexter and Mean Megan are standing in the doorway, holding glasses of juice. Dexter is also holding three swirly-striped cupcake candles.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?” she says.

“LOOKING FOR DUSTY!” I say. Both of us tend to get loud when we're surprised.

“Tell you what,” Mean Megan says as I sidle toward the door. “If I see your buggy, mangy, flea-bag, rodent-breath cat, I'll let you know. I'll drown it in the sink and leave it on your pillow.” She pushes the knapsack onto the floor and sits down on the bed. So she hasn't noticed anything. I feel the cherry pen slip over the knob of my ankle-bone and poke at my pants. Dexter is still glaring.

“Why do you have candles?” I ask innocently, to distract her. “Did Mom let you?”

It works. “If you tell, I will kill you.”

“Ooh.” I've made it out the door. “Scary.”

“I'll bake chunky cat cookies and make you eat them,” Mean Megan says. I see her flip her long black hair over her shoulder just before Dexter slams her bedroom door. Although I can't feel them, I know I hold a few of those same hairs in my tightly clenched fist.

Up in my room, Dusty lies dozing in a lozenge of sunlight on the quilt. “Wake up,” I tell him, dumping my loot onto my little desk. “You have to help me. You're my familiar.”

Dusty gives his rumbling purr, a loud noise from a small cat.

“That's right,” I say busily, getting organized. “You're a witch's cat now.”