Crush Control (36 page)

Mom hugged me tightly.

The room was filled with the same silence that had penetrated Mia's hospital room earlier—the waiting for affirmation.

I looked over at Grandma. She was still leaning against the table looking completely staggered. “I'm so sorry, Victoria,” she whispered. “I've been so”—she struggled not to cry—“unfair.”

Mom broke free from my hug and reached across the table toward Grandma. “The thing is—I still may not be the ideal version of the daughter you always wanted. I'm never going to be a country club member or want to garden or go to the ballet. But”—Mom got a little teary—“I'm finding the ideal version of who
I
want to be. And you just have to decide whether that's good enough for you.”

“We're flawed,” I said. “We make mistakes. The best thing we can do is try and learn from our mistakes and move on. But we're never going to be perfect. But that's who we are. Take it or leave it.”

“Oh, I've made so many mistakes, too,” Grandma cried. She looked over at Mom. “All I ever wanted was to give you the perfect life.”

“Maybe your perfect life wasn't perfect for me,” Mom said quietly.

I thought about Mia's beach photo and realized that maybe there was no perfect model family. Maybe the more you try to mold and create something, the more likely it is to crack. Maybe, instead, we all had to find our individual best selves and that happiness would bond us together as a whole.

“Well,” Mom said, spooning a heaping serving of sesame shrimp onto Grandma's plate, “if we're really going to make this thing work, you can start by calling me Vicki. I hate Victoria.”

“But Victoria is such a beautiful name,” Grandma insisted, smiling.

Mom huffed.

Grandpa shook his head. “Women,” he grumbled, and we all laughed.

Grandma smirked then gave in. “Okay,
Vicki
.” She took a tentative bite of her food. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Hey,” she said. “That's not bad.”

“In this house,” I said, teasingly, “I was taught not to talk with my mouth full.”

We all burst out laughing.

“Well,” Grandma said after swallowing her food. She smiled. “Your mom taught you well.”

For the remainder of the night, Mom and I smiled and joked around—happy to be accepted, happy to be part of Grandma and Grandpa's life again. After we cleaned the dishes and Grandma and Grandpa left, I plopped down on the couch, exhausted from the very long day. Mom sat down next to me with a more serious look on her face. “Do you understand now why I didn't want you fooling around with hypnosis?” she asked. “It can be fun, sure, and it can be very useful, but it's also very powerful and not something to be taken lightly.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

She sunk further into the couch and flipped through the channels until she found
Love Actually
just starting on a movie channel. And for a minute I thought it was all over. That all the chaos from my bad decisions was rectified—forgiven—but I couldn't rid myself of the lingering situation: Quinton. I wanted to think that Mom would forgive me for that, too. That she would help me out of the mess. But it was so hard to say the words, to admit more mistakes, to acknowledge my desperate need for her help. Would she think of me differently—not just because I'd done the hypnosis, but because I'd looked her in the eye and lied about it?

On TV, Hugh Grant's familiar voice narrated in his comfortable British accent:
It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters ...

And suddenly I was crying. I needed her help. But mostly, I needed to know she still loved me. Through heaving gulps, I told her everything about the love spell from the innocent start to Quinton's spiraling obsession. I told her how I tried everything to undo the hypnosis to no avail.

Mom sat stone still but put her hand on top of mine. And that was all I needed. “It's okay,” she said reassuringly. “We'll figure it out. Tell me everything.”

I calmed my tears and told her about Georgia's and my escapades in attempting to break the love spell.

Mom sat frozen. “You did
what
?” she asked, troubled.

I repeated the list of things we had tried—the cleansing potion, voodoo, banishment, and the Cut the Mojo love charm. “We tried everything to break the love spell,” I repeated slowly, watching her mouth pop open in surprise.

“
Break the love spell?
” Mom stood up, putting her hand to her temples like she was in pain. “Willow, you didn't
cast a spell.
You're not a witch! You did hypnosis! It's totally different! There's science behind hypnosis—why do you think I've been studying so much? Why do you think it bothered me so much when Grandma called it ‘new age voodoo' ? You didn't cast a spell; you gave him a hypnotic suggestion!”

“Okay, okay,” I said, cowering back a little. I had never seen her so worked up. “Well, what do I do then? How do I stop it?”

Mom inhaled deeply and ran her fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. “You need to put Quinton under hypnosis and de-suggest the attraction.”

I nodded. “I read that.” I explained how Quinton didn't think he needed any more hypnosis because his sleepwalking had stopped.

Mom sat down next to me. “There is a method called rapid induction where you use a quick-jerk handshake and if the person has previously been hypnotized the handshake method will put them under almost instantaneously.”

I nodded and told her I'd read that in her textbooks but that I had tried it to no avail.

“I'll teach you,” she said. “So invite Quinton over tomorrow. And let's fix this mess once and for all.”

And as I watched her, a feeling of reassurance washed over me. Mia had survived crashing out of a triple flip with a few broken bones. We had survived our reconciliation with Grandma and Grandpa, and were on the path to mending our family. Surely we could undo my control on Quinton's mind as well.

Sunday I invited Quinton over for lunch. He showed up promptly on time with a batch of brownies he made for me. We ate turkey sandwiches and talked about Mia's recovery, then ventured over to the couch with the brownies to watch a movie. I sat stiffly next to him, knowing this was my opportunity.

My heart beat nervously and I swallowed my fear. I reached for Quinton's hand and he looked over and smiled at me adoringly. With a quick, jerky flick of the wrist, a move that I had practiced a hundred times the night before on the enormous stuffed teddy bear Quinton gave me, I wrenched his hand, leaned in close to his ear, and spit out, “Sleep!”

Honestly, I hadn't fully believed that it would work, although Mom insisted. But sure enough, Quinton's head flopped over to the side like a scoop of ice cream tipping off its cone.

Mom leaned her head around the corner eagerly. “Progress?” she asked.

“He's under,” I said.

She nodded. “Get to it, then.”

So I turned back to Quinton and looked at his beautiful face. I tried to create a perfect boyfriend, a perfect relationship. But sometimes when you try to get everything, you walk away with nothing. I took a breath and tried my best to keep my voice steady. “Quinton Dillinger, when you see me, Willow Grey, you will think,
Willow is a nice girl. We had a nice relationship. But I need to move on. I need to focus on my academics and football. If someone else comes along, I've learned that too much obsession is unhealthy.
” I took another breath and brought him back.

He stretched out lazily on the couch. “Oh man, I think I dozed off,” he said apologetically.

“It's okay,” I said. “Boring movie.”

He smiled and looked at his watch. “I better run,” he said, and I walked him to the door. He gave me a funny look, but then shook it off, kissed me good-bye, and left.

Monday morning Quinton picked me up as usual and held my hand as we walked from the parking lot into school, but he seemed a little distracted. Something looked different in his eyes. We reached my locker. He kissed me good-bye and left.

Georgia scurried up next to me. “Any evidence that it's working ?” she asked.

“Hard to tell,” I said, grabbing my books and slamming the metal locker door.

“Did you hear?” Georgia asked.

“Hear what?” I asked tentatively, thinking,
Please don't make it be another Facebook fan page or some other insane display of Quinton's love.

“Max broke up with Minnie.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

We stated to walk down the hallway. I thought about the look on Max's face at the hospital—disappointment. And he hadn't called or texted me since. I wanted to talk to him, ask him what had happened, but I felt so unsure of what our relationship even was anymore.

The bell rang and Georgia and I darted into our respective classrooms.

Later, in English class, it was my turn to do my oral report. I walked up to the front of the room and everyone's eyes found me. I felt so exposed, like people had too much insight into my life lately and this report would be just another eyeful. I shuffled my stack of index cards and cleared my throat. “The topic for my oral report was to discuss three themes from
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
” I glanced over at Mrs. Stabile and she smiled at me, indicating that I should start. “
The course of love never did run smooth,
the character Lysander said.” I flushed a little. Truer words were never spoken. “This highlights one of the play's most prominent themes: the difficulty of love and romance. Although the tone of the play is lighthearted, poking fun at the troubles the lovesick suffer, it demonstrates that when love is out of balance—when one person loves the other more—there can never be harmony in the relationship.” I looked up from my notes and caught Quinton's stare. He was fixed on me, but not with a look of enchantment—rather, with a look of curiosity and interest.

“A tangled love affair,” I continued, locking eyes with Quinton, “can only be resolved when symmetry in love is achieved. True love will always triumph in the end—but only if you've found the right person. And it's never an easy road to find them.”

There was a romantic sigh from somewhere in the classroom. I looked up, half expecting it to be Mia, but her chair was vacant and obvious—like a missing tooth.

“Of course Shakespeare also touches on a theme of magic,” I continued. “The fairies' magic brings about hilarious and entertaining situations, but the misuse of magic creates . . . chaos.” I choked a little on the last word, unable to stop looking at Mia's chair or feeling Quinton's stare on me.

“Finally,” I said, “appearances are deceiving. Thanks to Puck's pranks, reality wore a deceptive mask. Things were not always as perfect as they seemed.”

I stacked my cards together, smiled one quick smile at Mrs. Stabile, then found my way back to my desk, putting love triangles and magical control behind me. All this time, Mia and I were both looking for something we thought we wanted, but maybe we underestimated what we already had. All the controlling and plotting toward what we thought we wanted left us only with broken bones and broken dreams. What's funny is that even though Mia was laid up with a cast on her leg and no cheerleading scholarship and I was alone with no perfect boyfriend and no spotlight, maybe what we found—families that loved us for the very things we were trying to change—was really what we needed all along.