Jinx (12 page)

The chimes over the shop door tinkled as I walked in. The woman behind the counter looked up from the book she was reading and said, “Blessings—”

Then she recognized me, and her face broke into a smile. “Oh, it's you,” she said kindly. “How are you, sister?”

I approached the counter tentatively. I'd come alone this time, maneuvering the New York City transit system without Zach's help. It had been scary, taking the train by myself—especially when the subway cars came thundering into the station, roaring so loudly I could hear nothing else.

But I'd done it. And now I stood in the shop on Ninth Street, feeling like I'd been foolish to come. Magic couldn't help me.

And neither could this woman.

No one could help me.

The woman put down her book. I glanced at the
cover. It wasn't, as I might have expected, a book on witchcraft, but a plain old science-fiction novel.

“What is it, sweetheart?” the woman asked in a sympathetic voice.

I looked around. Except for the cat, who lay on a pile of books in the corner, busily washing herself, there was no one else in the store. I swallowed. I felt ridiculous. And yet…

“Someone I know is casting a spell,” I said, in a rush. After all…what could it hurt? It might even help. “All I know about it is that one of the ingredients is some kind of fungus that grows on headstones, and the, um, person who is casting the spell had to collect the fungus at midnight, under a waxing moon. I was wondering if you had any idea what kind of spell that might be.”

The woman, who looked to be in her thirties, with perfect skin and long, dark hair, knit her brow thoughtfully. I was worried she was getting ready to give a speech about how the practice of witchcraft was really all about empowerment, and that spells were just a witch's way of focusing her energy on solving a certain problem, when instead, the woman said, “Well, a waxing moon is when the moon is getting fuller, so a spell done in that period would indicate growth of some kind. It's a good time for new beginnings.”

“So…it could be a good spell, then?” I brightened. “I mean, new beginnings are good, right?”

“Not always,” the saleslady said, looking at me sympathetically. “Is this person angry, by any chance?”

I swallowed again.
I have a very special thank-you I've been saving up, just for Jinx
. “Yes.”

She nodded and said, “That's a problem, then. But nothing you shouldn't be able to handle.”

I gaped at her. “
Me?
Hardly.”

The woman looked amused.

“I can tell just by looking at you that you're a natural witch…and powerful, too, I sense,” she said.

I shook my head so hard my curls slapped my cheeks. “No. No, you don't understand. Any power I have…it's bad. Everything I touch gets messed up. That's why they call me Jinx.”

The woman smiled, but at the same time, shook her head. “You're not jinxed,” she said. “But I do sense…pardon me for saying it, but I do sense that you fear it. Your power.”

I couldn't help staring. How did she—

Oh. Right. She was a witch.

“I cast a spell once,” I said, my throat suddenly very dry. “My first spell. My only spell, really, except a binding spell. That spell—my first one…it went wrong. Really, really wrong.”

“Ah.” She nodded knowingly. “Now I see. It frightened you, this power you discovered in yourself. That might be what's causing your so-called bad luck. You're bringing it on yourself, through your fear.”

What? I
was causing my bad luck? Impossible. Why would I do
that
?

“I understand how it must be for you,” she went on
sympathetically. “And you're right to be cautious. A power as strong as yours…it
is
a lot of responsibility. You should never use it lightly. And never, as I'm sure you learned, to manipulate the will of another. Because it could go wrong…badly wrong, as your first spell seemed to. But that doesn't mean you should be frightened of it. Careful, yes. Frightened, no. Because your power—your gift—is a part of you. A good part, not a bad part. By not embracing it, you are denying a part of yourself. It's like saying you don't like yourself. And that's wrong. Surely you can see that's what's happening, why you have a sort of…well, as you put it, jinx?”

I found myself nodding. I didn't trust myself to speak.

“The magic you possess,” the woman went on gently, “is very old, and very strong. I would guess that whoever it is that is casting this spell against you—the one with the mushrooms—she doesn't have the slightest idea what she's up against. You will defeat her…but not unless you embrace that which you fear.”

Embrace what I feared? She had to be kidding. I mean, it was easy for
her
to say. Maybe if she walked around in my shoes for a day—just a day—she'd see there wasn't anything to embrace…only stuff to run from, screaming. Headless rats and bike messengers reeling out of control and dolls with pins in their heads and…

The woman smiled at me. “You don't believe me,” she said. “I see that. And I don't mind. But this binding spell of yours—did it work?”

I thought about Petra…and Willem winning that
trip to New York, and her A in her Glyconutrition class.

“Y-yes,” I said hesitantly. “Actually, it seems to have worked. So far.”

“You weren't frightened of your power then, were you?”

“No,” I said. “I was angry.”

“See? Anger can be healthy. When the time comes—and it
will
come—remember that. And what I said. Embrace your powers—love yourself the way Nature made you, and you will prevail. Always.”

I
wanted
to believe her. But how could I embrace something that for my whole life had just been screwing things up for me? It was impossible.

Still, to be polite, I smiled.

“Um,” I said, “the thing is, I'm not so worried about myself. I'm more concerned about…about a friend of mine.” I didn't want to admit out loud that I was afraid Tory was going to try to do something to hurt Zach. Not on purpose, of course—but I couldn't get the picture of that doll with the pin in its head out of my mind's eye. I knew—only too well—how a spell could backfire and end up hurting the one person the caster never meant to harm. “I'm worried this…person…who's doing the spell with the mushrooms might try to do something to him. I was hoping you might have something here that could protect him…without his being aware of it, if possible.”

“He's not a believer?” the woman asked, with a wry smile.

“Um…not exactly.”

The woman's blue eyes crinkled. “I see,” she said. “Well, as a matter of fact…”

And then the woman—who really was, I realized by now, an honest-to-goodness, practicing witch, although she wasn't wearing a stitch of black, just a Wonder Bread T-shirt and blue jeans—slipped off her stool and came out from behind the counter.

“A little bit of powdered lemon rind,” she said, going to the far wall of the shop. It was lined with shelves, upon which were the kind of glass jars with the metal lids you lifted up to get at what was inside, like in an old-fashioned candy store. “That's for cleansing.” She lifted a lid and spooned out a little bit of yellow powder into a small cloth bag. “Then some ginger, for energy.” She added a few slivers of a root to the bag. “Clove, for protection, of course—” A few sticks went into the bag. “And let's not forget a little rosemary.” She turned and winked at me. “For love, as in ‘love thine enemy,' impossible as that might seem at the moment. There.” She gave the top of the sack a twist, then tied it closed with a bit of red ribbon. “With luck, any spell that is cast against him,” she said, handing the bag over to me, “will bounce harmlessly off, and end up right back at the caster, as long as he carries this.”

With luck.
I swallowed and took the bag. “Kind of like that thing you say when you're a kid? ‘I'm rubber, you're glue, anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you'?”

The woman laughed, her blue eyes crinkling at the
corners again. “Exactly like that.”

I opened my backpack, and put the fragrant-smelling sachet inside it, wondering how on earth I was going to sneak it onto Zach's person without his knowing it…especially considering the fact that he didn't seem to be speaking to me at the moment. “Well, thanks a lot.”

I failed, however, to see how a bunch of dried herbs was going to protect anyone from Tory's wrath.

On the other hand, I had once failed to see how a different spell was going to work, and look where it had landed me.

“How much do I owe you?”

The witch laughed. “Nothing! It's my pleasure to help you. I'm Lisa, by the way.”

“Jean,” I said, reaching out to shake the witch's hand. “But you're going to go out of business if you keep giving me things. You already gave me this.” I touched the pentacle at my neck. “Remember?”

Lisa smiled. “I remember. Wear it in good health. Come back in a few days, and let me know how everything turns out.”

I shouldered my backpack again and said, “Well, all right. Thank you.”

“And don't forget,” Lisa said, as I was leaving. “Embrace your gift, Jean. Never fear it. It's a part of who you are, after all.”

I nodded and left the store after thanking her again. There was a part of me, of course, that thought the whole thing was silly. Embrace my gift? Surely she couldn't
mean the gift Great-Great-And-So-On-Grandmother Branwen had left me…or us, if you wanted to include Tory. The gift about which Tory had said, so mockingly, that she wasn't afraid to use, though I might be. The gift of magic. How could that woman have even known about Branwen, let alone her gift?

Did
I have some kind of power—really and truly—as the lady seemed to think?

And was I really causing my own bad luck, by fearing and not embracing it?

There was only one way to find out.

I may have chronically bad luck—possibly brought on by my own insecurities—but I'm not dumb. I wasn't about to tell Tory's parents where she'd gotten the drugs. I was having a hard enough time fitting in at my school—considering the headless rat showing up on my locker door, and the rumors about my stalker back home—without also being labeled a narc.

So how Shawn ended up getting expelled, it had nothing to do with me.

When, during third period on Monday morning, word went around that school administrators were searching people's lockers, I didn't think anything of it.

But when, during fourth period (U.S. History, which I happened to have with both Tory and Shawn, though Tory wasn't in school on Monday, due to having to go to follow-up appointments with both her therapist and her doctor), the principal actually showed up at the
classroom door and said to Mrs. Tyler, “May I see Shawn Kettering, please?” even I knew it wasn't a good sign.

Then, at lunch, word got out he was gone. Booted. Done.

“Well, I for one am glad.” Chanelle was philosophical about the whole thing as she licked the filling from her Devil Dog. “Like, Robert will have a much harder time getting hold of it now. You know. Weed. Sure, he could go down to Washington Square to buy it. But half those dealers are undercover cops. He won't risk it. If he gets busted, his parents'll kill him. Now maybe he'll even be straight for the formal. That'll be a change.”

“I'm gonna have to be straight for the formal?” Robert actually looked a little queasy. “Dude, that's just not right.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” Chanelle said. “It'll be good for you to see how the rest of us live.”

“How the rest of you live sucks,” Robert said.

I was laughing over his chagrin when a familiar, gravelly voice very close to my ear went, “Laugh it up, NARC.”

I nearly choked on my chicken finger. I turned in my seat to see Gretchen and Lindsey scowling down at me.

“Are you happy now, narc?” Gretchen wanted to know. “Like it wasn't good enough to steal Zach out from under Torrance's nose? You had to get her boyfriend Shawn booted from school, too?”

I stared up at the two girls. “I didn't steal Zach from anyone,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “He and I aren't going out. And I don't know what you're talking
about, with Shawn. It wasn't me who told.”

“Oh, right,” Lindsey said, making a face. “Preacher's daughter? Of course it was you.”

“It
wasn't
,” I said.

“Whatever you say,
narc
,” Gretchen said. And then she and Lindsey took their trays and headed toward the far side of the cafeteria.

When I turned, distressed, back to the table, Chanelle was wearing a sympathetic expression.

“Oh, Jean,” she said. “Don't let those witches get you down. We know it wasn't you. And even if it was, who could blame you, after what happened to Torrance?”

Because, of course, news of Tory's suicide attempt had spread like wildfire across the school—though I hadn't said a word about it.

“It
wasn't
me,” I said fiercely.

“Don't worry about it.” Robert look bored. “No one listens to those two skanks anyway.”

But he was wrong. Either that, or Gretchen and Lindsey weren't the only two going around saying I was the one who'd told on Shawn. Everywhere I went, people started whispering, and only stopped when I looked their way. By the time fifth period P.E. rolled around, I had taken about all I could handle.

There was only one other person at Chapman whose reaction to the Shawn thing I cared about. And he'd been avoiding me like the plague since Saturday night. I hadn't been near enough to Zach to exchange a single word with him, let alone slip Lisa's sachet into his backpack.

Not that I blamed him. Between my troubles with Tory, and then the witch thing—and now this—I must have seemed like the great big bad-luck magnet I knew myself, in actual fact, to be.

Coach Winthrop had us doing softball again. It was no miracle that Zach and I ended up on the same team. Coach Winthrop, in a rare moment of good humor, apparently decided it would be hilarious to appoint a music geek—and rumored narc, although I'm pretty sure the coach didn't know about that yet—like me a team captain. Zach was, of course, the first person I chose for my team. Hey, it might turn out to be the only way I'd ever get him to talk to me.

But in the end, I was wrong. Again. He came over and spoke to me of his own free will while we were waiting for our turns at bat.

“So, Cousin Jean from Iowa,” he said. “You weren't lying when you said you have chronic bad luck. You seriously have the worst luck of anyone I've ever met. Now you're a narc, I hear?”

It was all I could do—seriously—not to burst into tears right there behind the chain-link fence, even though we all know there's no crying in baseball. Or softball, either.

“It wasn't me,” I said, a little too loudly. Everyone else on our team looked over at me.

Zach's smile was gentle. “Relax, Jean,” he said. “I know it wasn't you. Interesting that that's what the rumor should be, though, huh?”

“It makes sense,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, she's
my cousin. I'm new here. I'm—”

“—a preacher's daughter,” Zach said. “Yeah, I know. I heard them all, too. So. What are you going to do?”

I shrugged again. “What
can
I do?”

“You can go to the dance with me,” Zach said.

I looked up at him owlishly. “Are you crazy? That'll just make things worse. Gretchen and Lindsey are already going around saying—”

“Exactly,” Zach said. “Gretchen and Lindsey are the ones feeding fuel to the fire. And why do you think they're doing that?”

Because I won't join forces with Tory and help them to become the most powerful coven on the eastern seaboard. Only I couldn't say that. So I said, “Because they hate me.”

“Right. But why do they hate you? Because Tory told them to.”

I shook my head, confused. “Are you saying Tory told them I was the one who got Shawn expelled?”

“Does that seem so out of the realm of the possible, given what you know about your cousin?”

I thought about it. I really did. I just couldn't see Tory doing something
that
underhanded. Faking a suicide attempt—given that she was such a drama queen—yes. But spreading a rumor she knew wasn't true about me?

On the other hand, she HAD been IMing an awful lot lately….

Still.

“I don't know, Zach,” I said. “I don't think even Tory would stoop that low.”

“Fine,” he said. “But just in case you change your mind…the invitation still stands.”

“The invitation…to the
dance
?” I'm sorry to say that my voice rose to a squeal at the end.

“Yeah,” Zach said, looking bemused, I guess by the squeal. “That one.”

“But—” The truth was, though I had said the words two nights ago—the ones telling him I couldn't go to the dance with him—they still hurt…they hurt even more than my offer to Tory's parents to go back to Hancock.

But I knew I couldn't hold him to an invitation that he might regret having made. I mean, that wouldn't be fair. No one—not even a guy as great as Zach—wants to associate with a rumored narc.

“Seriously, Zach,” I said. “It's all right. You can take someone else. I won't mind.” It would kill me. But I wasn't going to let him know that.

But to my surprise, instead of arguing some more, he said, “Look, you're taking U.S. History. Has Mrs. Tyler gotten to the different styles of government yet?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering what on earth this had to do with the dance.

“Has she gotten to the laissez-faire approach of governing…of letting things take their own course?”

“Abstention by the government from interfering with the free market,” I said.

“Right. I guess you could say I have always taken a sort of laissez-faire approach to Tory. As long as she didn't bug me, I wasn't going to bug her, know what I mean? I suspected for a while that she had a crush on me, but—”

“But you liked Petra,” I finished for him. “And so long as you remained on friendly terms with Tory, you had an excuse to see her. Petra, I mean.”

He actually looked embarrassed.

“Well,” he said. “Yeah. Basically. For a while, anyway. But here's the thing: I don't plan on taking the laissez-faire approach to Tory anymore…or anyone else for that matter. I think it's time I took a stand.”

I said carefully, “But Zach, if you and I go to the dance, and Tory gets mad, and then I”—I swallowed, but carried on—“I go back to Hancock, you won't have an excuse to see Petra anymore. Tory won't forgive you, you know.”

“I know,” Zach said. “That's what I'm trying to say. I'm prepared to make that sacrifice.”

I looked at him curiously. “But why? Why would you do that? Don't you love Petra anymore?”

Zach had the strangest look on his face. It seemed to be halfway between frustration and amusement. He opened his mouth to say something in reply, only to be interrupted by Coach Winthrop, who bellowed, “Rosen! You're up!”

Giving me an apologetic smile, Zach went off to grab a bat.

I leaned back against the bench, wondering what he
could possibly have been about to say. Could Zach's feelings for Petra have changed? Had seeing her so excited about Willem's impending visit finally made him realize he really never had a chance with her?

What was going on?

I never got the chance to find out, though, because later in the game, someone hit a pop fly that collided with my head (typical) and I had to sit on the sidelines until Coach Winthrop was finally convinced I didn't have a concussion and let me go back to the locker room to change.

 

But if Zach's feelings for Petra were history, they weren't the only ones, I discovered when I got home from school that day. So, it turned out, were Tory's feelings for me. Her feelings of animosity toward me, anyway.

Or so she claimed.

I was in my room practicing when I heard the tap on my door.

“Come in,” I said, lowering my violin. I knew it had to be something important. I had drilled it into Teddy's and Alice's heads that during my hour-long practice every afternoon, I wasn't to be disturbed, no matter what had just happened on
SpongeBob.

I should have known it couldn't have been either of the younger Gardiners, who really were good about not bothering me when they heard Stravinsky coming out of my room. Instead, it was Tory.

“Hey,” she said to me, after closing the door behind
her and leaning against it. “Got a minute?”

I stared at her. There was something…different about her. Really different. At first I couldn't put my finger on just what exactly.

Then it hit me. She wasn't dressed in black. She had on jeans—ordinary ones, not the ones she sometimes wore that she'd decorated all over with ankhs and pentacles in black Magic Marker.

And she wasn't wearing a ton of makeup, either. An incredibly striking-looking girl, Tory had never needed all the eyeliner and mascara she slathered on, anyway. Without it, she looked just as pretty…only in a different, more vulnerable way.

Something else was different, too. It took me another minute to realize what, but then it hit me. She wasn't glaring at me. She actually looked…well, as if she were glad to see me.

“I just wanted to apologize,” she said, “for the way I've been treating you since you got here.”

I nearly dropped my violin, I was so astonished.

“I know I've been a real pscyho lately,” Tory went on. “I don't know what's been the matter with me. I guess it just all got to be too much—school, and the pressure to be popular, and the thing with Zach, and…and the witch thing. And I ended up taking it out on you. Which isn't fair. I realize that now. My therapist—you know, the one I've been seeing—has really been helping me with that. So I just wanted to say I'm sorry for the way I've been acting, and thank you for what you did the other
night—with the drugs, and all. I know you just did it because you were worried about me. I'm lucky to have so many people in my life who care about me so much. That's been a real wake-up call for me. So…thanks, Jinx. And…if it's okay with you…I'd like you to give me another chance.”

I couldn't stop staring at her. I've heard of therapy working miracles, but I'd never expected anything like this.

“I…” What could I say? I was thrilled to have the old Tory—the one from five years ago—back. If it was really true. “Oh, Tory. Do you really mean it?”

“Of course I mean it,” Tory said, with a smile. Even her hair looked different. She had pinned it up, out of her eyes, so that she looked almost…well, preppy. And happy, for a change. “And I don't want to play at being witches anymore, either. That whole thing about Grandma, and Branwen…that was just silly. So was the stuff with Zach, and the doll—” She heaved a shudder. “God! I can't believe I ever did that. It's so embarrassing! I put that stupid doll in the trash and forgot about it, like you said to. I really want us to be friends again, Jinx. Do you think we can?”

“Of course we can,” I said. But something was nagging me…and it wasn't the tiny knot in my stomach, either. “But what about…Shawn?”

“Shawn?” Tory looked confused. Then she laughed. “Oh, Shawn! I know, can you believe that? I can't believe someone turned him in like that. But he'll be all right. I
heard his dad already pulled some strings to get him into Spencer. Although Dr. Kettering had to lock up all his prescription pads.”

I stared at her. “Your friends—Gretchen and Lindsey—seem to think I did it. The whole
school
seems to think I did it.”