Jinx (15 page)

But by that time, he was too far gone to believe me.

So I snuck out of town. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want it turning into some kind of
Endless Love
scenario, where the guy tried to burn my house down or something (and, given my luck, that was exactly what was going to happen).

Why I couldn't manage simply to fall in love with a guy and have him love me back in a nice, healthy, normal way was just another indication of how badly the stars were aligned the night I showed up on Planet Earth. I mean, having to flee to the other side of the country to get away from an obsessive boyfriend might be Lindsey's idea of romance.

But it sure wasn't mine.

And now I had the pleasure of knowing that I hadn't even managed to do THAT successfully (flee to the other side of the country, I mean). Because here he was, at my new school's spring formal.

Nice. Very nice.

Why couldn't Tory have just shot me and gotten it over with? It would have been a heck of a lot less painful. And embarrassing.

“So all this time, when we thought she was doing so well,” Zach said, taking his seat beside me at Table Seven, “Tory was planning this.”

“I guess,” I said. “And you don't have to say ‘we.' You were right. Oh, Zach. I'm so sorry.”

“
You're
sorry?” Zach shook out his napkin and laid it across his lap. “What have you got to be sorry for? It's not your fault.”

“It is,” I said, my stomach feeling worse than ever. “Believe me. It is.”

“What, that some guy's crazy for you? Or that your cousin's got it in for you for some reason? Trust me, Jean. Neither is your fault.”

But he didn't know the whole story. Not then, anyway.

“So what do you want to do, Jean?” he asked me. “Because I'm thinking it might be best if we just leave.”

“Oh!” I said. “No, Zach. Not on my account. Or his, I guess. It'll be all right. Really.”

It
had
to be. It couldn't possibly get any worse.

“Oh, hey!” Chanelle showed up at the side of the table, holding a little ivory card she'd picked up from the seating chart. “Table Seven?”

“Table Seven,” Zach said, indicating the centerpiece, from which a number 7 stuck out. “Welcome.”

“Goody,” Chanelle said. “I'm so glad we're not stuck
with a bunch of dweebs. Sit down, Robert.” Robert sat down next to Chanelle, who'd taken the empty seat across from Zach. “Look at all this silverware. What do we need all this stuff for? Oh my God, a fish fork? I hate fish. Who decided to have fish at a dance? Everyone's breath is going to reek.”

And then, suddenly, just when I'd started to think I might be right, and things couldn't get worse, they did.

“Hi, everybody.”

I heard the voice, but I didn't look up. I didn't have to.

“Isn't this fun?” Tory took the seat beside Zach. I felt the chair beside mine move, and knew Dylan had taken it. “Everything looks so pretty. The dance committee really went all out, huh?”

“They're serving
fish
,” Chanelle said disdainfully, holding up her fish fork.

“I'm sure it will be delicious,” Tory said, lifting her napkin and snapping it open expertly, before spreading it across her snowy white lap. “I can't wait.”

“Neither can I,” Dylan said. “This sure beats the Hancock Prom, doesn't it, Jinx?”

The sound of his voice, which had at one time thrilled my every nerve, now made me feel as if something were crawling up my back. That's how much I didn't love him anymore. I wondered if I had
ever
loved him, if I could feel this way about him now.

“Yeah,” I said, in a voice completely lacking enthusiasm.

I couldn't believe it. This wasn't supposed to have happened. I was wearing my pentacle! And in my evening clutch, I had a little bag of spices—like the one the nice lady from Enchantments had made me for Zach. Wasn't that supposed to protect me from stuff like this? And what about that binding spell I'd done on Tory? She wasn't supposed to be able to hurt me.

Then I realized all of those things—the pentacle, the charm, and the binding spell—could only protect me from magic. What Tory had done tonight wasn't magic.

There was nothing magic about it at all. All it had taken was a little investigative skill and a major credit card.

“I'd like to propose a toast,” Dylan said, lifting his water glass as soon as the waiter had come around and filled all of ours from a crystal pitcher.

I was positive I was going to throw up.

“To old friends,” Dylan said, looking directly at me.

“To old friends,” Chanelle echoed. “Aw, that's sweet. And to new ones, too, right, Jean?”

I lifted my water glass. “Yes.” I was amazed I managed to get the word out.

I glanced in Zach's direction and saw he was looking at me. He lifted an eyebrow. His expression clearly read,
Come on. This isn't
so
bad.

And he was right. It wasn't.

And then it was.

“So, Tory,” Chanelle said, as a team of waiters placed our first course in front of us…a mesclun salad with a vinaigrette dressing. “How do you know Dylan?”

“Oh, it's a funny story, actually,” Tory said, after swallowing a bite of her salad. “I knew Jinx had gone out with a guy named Dylan, but I didn't know his last name, or anything. So I called her sister Courtney, who was only too happy to tell me all about him.”

That was it. When I got back to Hancock, the first thing I was going to have to do was kill Courtney.

If I lived through tonight, that is.

“So I gave Dylan a call, and we chatted”—Tory paused to flick a brilliant smile at Dylan…who, somewhat to my surprise, smiled right back at her, almost as if…well, almost as if he liked her—“and I thought what a fun surprise it would be for Jinx—who, though I know she probably hasn't mentioned it to all of you, has been pretty homesick—to fly him out here for the dance. So I did. Unfortunately, his plane was late, or he'd have met us at the house. But I think this worked out even better. Don't you, Jinx?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, moving the bits of mesclun around on the plate in front of me. No way could I bring myself to eat. “This worked out great.”

“I thought it was the least I could do,” Tory went on, in the same conversational tone. “Flying Dylan out here, and all. To show Jinx how grateful I am for all the things she's done for me since she got here. Like stealing my best friend. Oh, and narcing on Shawn. Oh, and snatching Zach out from under my nose.”

Chanelle dropped her fork. Everyone else at the table—including Dylan—was staring at Tory in shock.

Robert was the first one to break the silence.

“You said you didn't narc on Shawn,” he said, looking at me accusingly.

My eyes had filled with tears. I had thought this was as bad as it could get. Little did I know it would soon get much, much worse.

“I didn't narc on him,” I said. Then, like a bolt from the blue, it hit me. “But I have a pretty good idea who did,” I added, narrowing my eyes at Tory.

“Oh, right, Jinx,” Tory said, with a laugh. “Like I'd narc on my own boyfriend—”

“Your own boyfriend who'd already put a down payment on a limo for tonight,” I said. “And who might not take it too kindly if you ended up coming to the dance with someone else.”

Robert's accusing gaze now swung toward Tory.

“You narced on Shawn so you could come here tonight with this Dylan guy?” he cried.

Tory, however, never took her eyes off me.

“You,” she said, “are so going to wish you'd never been born.”

“All right,” Zach said, putting his napkin on the table, and standing up. “That's it. Jean, we're leaving. Now.”

“Oh my God,” Tory said, with a laugh. But she was still looking at me, not Zach. “You've even got
him
eating out of your hand now. It wasn't enough you had to steal my best friend and my own parents. You even had to go and steal the guy I love.”

I felt myself turning as red as the carpet. Tory hadn't exactly spoken in the world's quietest voice, either. Everyone—at least, all of the people seated nearby—was staring at Table Seven now.

“Jean didn't steal anyone from you, Tory,” Zach leaned down toward her chair to say in a low, steady voice. “Why don't you and I take a walk outside, all right? I think you need a little fresh air.”

“Look at him,” Tory said to me, with a sneer in Zach's direction. “So ready to do anything for you. Just like Dylan here. You should have heard how excited he was when I called and told him where you were. He could barely contain himself. I don't suppose either of these two ever bothered to consider
why
they might be so besotted with you.”

The shiver that passed down my spine at that moment was ten times as strong as the one I'd felt when Dylan had spoken to me. Then, I'd just felt disgusted. Now, I felt as if someone had just walked over my grave.

Because I knew what Tory was about to do. I knew it as surely as I knew she'd been the one who'd turned in Shawn.

“Tory,” I said, in a voice that sounded nothing like my own, it was so thin with fear. “Don't.”

But it was too late. It was much too late.

Because Tory was already drawing her purse and reaching into it. I'd thought it was much too big for an evening accessory.

A second later, she had tossed a doll onto the middle of the table. A doll I recognized only too well. And I'm sure everyone else at Table Seven recognized it, too.

Since it looked exactly like Dylan.

The doll had Dylan's eyes.

It had Dylan's build—the broad shoulders, the long legs.

It even had on Dylan's football uniform, in Hancock High's school colors of green and white. Dylan's number—number 12—was emblazoned on the doll's chest. Though perhaps Dylan and I were the only ones at the table who knew that. Except for Tory, who had obviously guessed.

The doll even had Dylan's hair. His REAL hair; hair that I had gone to a great deal of trouble to get way back when I had first set out to make Dylan fall in love with me. I had had to tell him we were taking hair samples from all the members of the football team to stitch onto a good luck pep quilt.

A pep quilt, for God's sake.

And then I'd had to go ahead and actually make a pep quilt, on account of not wanting Dylan to find out it was
just HIS hair that I'd wanted.

Of course, if I'd known the spell was going to work as well as it had—a little TOO well, actually—I wouldn't have bothered making the quilt. Because no sooner had I finished the last stitch on the doll's face when the phone rang, and it was Dylan asking me out for that first, historic Blizzard.

I knew all that, of course. And, I had a feeling, so did Tory. Or most of it, anyway.

But no one else at Table Seven knew. Particularly not Zach. There was still a chance. There was still a—

“Did you ever wonder, Dylan,” Tory asked in a sweet voice, “why it was that you fell so hard, and so fast, for a girl you didn't even have a single thing in common with?”

Dylan hadn't taken his gaze off the doll. He went, “Number twelve. That's my jersey number. What IS that thing? Is that supposed to be me? Is that my HAIR?”

“Yes,” Tory said. “Yes, Dylan. That's the doll Jinx made of you, to make you fall in love with her. You see, originally she sewed some of
her
hair onto its head as well, so you wouldn't be able to get her out of
your
head. And it worked. Didn't it?”

Dylan looked from the doll, to Tory, to me, and back again.

“What
is
this?” he wanted to know. “Some kind of voodoo thing?”

“No, Dylan,” I said. I could feel my world—which, let's face it, hadn't been a particularly great one, but it
was the only world I had—slipping away from me. “It was just a game. I found this spell book at school, see, and…well, our grandmother always told us—”

“—that one of the daughters in our generation would turn out to be a great witch,” Tory finished for me, for the benefit of the table. “One guess as to who that witch turned out to be.”

Every eye at Table Seven was upon me. Not just Table Seven, either, but Tables Six and Eight were watching me pretty intently, too.

“It was just a game,” I said, with a nervous laugh. “A silly game. I mean, no sane person could believe that you can make someone fall in love with you just by making a DOLL that looks like them.”

“Yeah,” Tory said. “Except that in your case, it worked, didn't it, Jinx?”

I shook my head, hard. “Come on,” I said. “Let's be reasonable. That kind of thing just doesn't happen. It was just a coincidence, Dylan. I mean, that I made that doll, and you happened to ask me out. I mean, probably the only reason you noticed me in the first place was because I made up that story about needing your hair for that dumb quilt—”

Dylan looked perplexed. “You made up the story about the quilt? The pep quilt? But I saw it. All the guys donated their hair, too….”

“I guess I could believe it was a coincidence,” Tory said thoughtfully, “if it had only happened once.”

I tore my gaze from Dylan's and stared at Tory's hand,
which was dipping, once more, into her bag.

Oh, no. Oh, for the love of God, no—

“But then you did it again,” Tory said. “Didn't you, Jinx?”

And she threw the Zach doll down onto the table beside the Dylan doll.

I should have known that if she'd found one, she'd find the other. The first one—the Dylan doll—I'd hidden in what I thought was a brilliant location the very first night of my arrival in New York. I had brought the doll with me because I hadn't wanted one of my little sisters to find it in our room. And I hadn't thrown it away for the same reason I'd fished Tory's doll from the trash…I couldn't let it molder in some landfill. This was a doll of someone I'd once loved.

So I'd put the Dylan doll where I thought no one would ever think to look. And I'd put the Zach doll in the same place, a few weeks later.

Too bad I hadn't realized Tory had been spying on me the whole time. Or did she, too, like to hide things up the flue of that non-working fireplace in my bedroom?

Zach, staring down at what Tory had just thrown onto the table, asked, in a voice that sounded extremely distant, “Is that supposed to be me?”

“Zach,” I said, feeling as if I were choking. “I did NOT make that one. I swear to God. I made the one of Dylan. But that was a long time ago, and I realized right away it was a horrible mistake—”

“Wait.” Chanelle lifted her gaze from the two dolls to
my face. “Then you ARE a witch?”

I swallowed. How could this be happening? I mean, I realize it's me, and this sort of thing is bound to happen to someone like me.

But not anything THIS bad. My bad luck had never been quite THIS awful before.

“I cast a spell,” I admitted. What else could I do?
Embrace that which you fear.

That's what Lisa had said. And I certainly feared admitting to anyone what I'd done. Maybe, if I came clean now, things would get better. “I thought I was doing white magic. I didn't realize that white magic is NOT about trying to force people to do anything against their will, or manipulate their emotions. I didn't know that when I made that doll of you, Dylan, and I'm really sorry. As soon as I realized, I tried to undo the spell by taking my hair off it. But…but I guess it didn't work.”

Robert, across the table, looked from the dolls to me and went, “Dude. This is freaking me out. Is she a witch, or what?”

“She's a witch,” Tory said firmly. “I just thought all of you should know. First she made poor Dylan fall head over heels in love with her. And then I guess she decided having one guy completely bananas for her wasn't enough, so she came to New York and immediately set her sights on poor Zach here—”

“I didn't make the Zach doll!” I shouted, standing up. “Tory did! She showed it to me the first night I got to New York. She thinks SHE's the witch Grandma was always
talking about, and she made this doll and tried to get me to join her coven. And then when I said I wanted nothing to do with it—because I'd learned, the hard way, what happens when you mess around with magic—she got mad.”

Breathing hard, I looked around the table at the stunned faces of Dylan and my friends. None of them looked as if they believed me. Zach couldn't even look me in the eye.

“Zach,” I said, appealing to him. Because it was his opinion, out of everyone's, I cared about most. “You've got to believe me. I mean, just look at this doll.” I picked up the Zach doll. “It looks nothing like the doll I made. I mean, a…a…monkey could sew a better doll than this.”

“I think,” Tory said quietly, when Zach didn't respond right away, “that you had better go, Jinx. No one wants you here.”

I looked at her then. I mean, really looked at her.

And I realized just how brilliantly she'd managed to pull off this little scheme of hers, down to the smallest detail. In her white ballgown and virginal makeup, SHE actually looked like the preacher's daughter—the one who, naturally, would be telling the truth. Whereas I, in the slinky black dress she'd picked out for me and my wild red hair, looked every inch of what she was claiming I was…a practicing witch, who had set out to win the heart of not one, but two of the most popular boys in
both schools I had attended that year.

I had to hand it to her. She had succeeded, and probably even beyond her own wildest dreams.

But she wasn't finished yet. The coup de grace was still to come.

“I really think,” Tory lowered her voice to say, as if it were “just us girls” talking—though of course by now, the whole room was listening…even the waiters, who'd started coming around with the fish course—“that you might want to take a lesson from our great-great-great-great-grandmother Branwen, Jinx. Because, you know, she was burned at the stake for witchcraft. We wouldn't want that happening to you, now, would we?”

I couldn't believe she was repeating back to me what I'd told her about Branwen. I couldn't believe she'd even be willing to bring in the horrible way Branwen had died, just to make me look bad in front of Zach.

But I shouldn't have been surprised. I mean, if she was willing to lie about the doll, she'd stoop to anything.

“Fine,” I said, in a voice that shook. “That's just fine, Tory. You won. Because you know what? I…I don't even care anymore.”

And I got up and turned away.

And, in front of all those people, with all those stares boring into my back, I stalked from that ballroom, hoping against hope I'd have the strength to get out of there before I started crying.

I thought I heard a guy's voice call my name, but
whether it was Dylan or Zach, I couldn't tell.

All I knew was that, whoever it was, I couldn't face him. Not then. Not without bursting into tears.

I made it out of the revolving doors and onto Park Avenue. There, to my relief, the doorman asked, “Need a cab, miss?”

I nodded, and he flagged down a cab for me. I crawled into the backseat, grateful I'd thought to bring enough cash with me to get myself home, if I needed to…a lesson my preacher mother had drilled into me since childhood.

“Where to, miss?” the cabbie asked me.

I wanted to say the airport. I wanted to say Penn Station, or Grand Central, or any place that would get me on a plane or a train out of New York and back to Iowa.

Only I didn't have THAT much money on me.

So I just said, “Three twenty-six East Sixty-ninth Street, please.”

And the cabbie nodded, and turned the meter on, and took me home.

I didn't cry until I got to my room. Fortunately, I didn't run into anyone in the hallway or on the stairs. Alice was already in bed, and Teddy was away at a sleepover, and Petra and Willem, babysitting while Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted were at one of the many parties they are constantly invited to, were in the den watching a movie. No one heard me come in.

And no one heard me weeping into my bathwater after I'd shed my finery and crawled into the big marble tub. I wept until my eyes were red and swollen, until I couldn't squeeze out another drop. I kept the water running the whole time, so if Petra did come up to check on Alice, she wouldn't hear me crying.

How could it have happened? I'd been humiliated in front of the entire school—made to look like a bigger freak than they already thought I was. I didn't care so much about what Robert or even Chanelle thought about me. But Zach! How could she have done it in front of Zach? I mean, I know she'd liked him. I know she was upset that my spell on Dylan had worked and hers on Zach hadn't.

But did she HAVE to do that in front of Zach?

And then, even as a fresh new wave of tears seemed to appear, they suddenly dried up.

Because a new thought had occurred to me, one I'd never considered before.

Was THAT what this was all about? Was it less about a boy, and more about the fact that MY spell had worked and hers hadn't? Was Tory really jealous because she knew
I
was the witch Branwen had promised would come along? Was she jealous because she thought it should be HER?

Because I'm not afraid to use her gift the way you are.
That's what Tory had said to me.

It seemed so stupid. I mean, what did it even matter?
My powers, such as they were, had only brought me misfortune and heartache. Sure, I'd saved Zach from that bike messenger. But that hadn't been magic. I had merely been in the wrong place at the right time.

And the power going out the night I was born…that had just been a thunderstorm.

And Willem winning that trip to see Petra…that had just been a fluke. It had nothing to do with the binding spell I'd cast against Tory, or the protection spell I'd put on Petra.

And Dylan…poor Dylan. He had just felt like falling in love, and I had come along, with this enormous crush on him…of course he'd fallen in love with me.

None of this was proof I had the makings of a witch.

Except, I guess, to Tory, who'd probably bragged to her coven about her witch ancestry, and her destiny as the one true witch of our generation.

And then I'd had to come along and ruin it all for her.

It all made perfect sense. Really, it was no wonder she was so mad.

But if being the witch in the family meant so much to her, she could have it. I'd lift the binding spell, and—

What was I even TALKING about? THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC.

Because if there were, what had happened tonight would never, ever have happened. My necklace—that stupid pentacle necklace the lady from Enchantments
had given me—would have protected me.

But it hadn't. It hadn't because the whole thing was a crock. There was no such thing as magic. Any more than there was such a thing as luck. At least such a thing as good luck. Because that was something that had never once come my way.

And I was so furious over the whole thing—so sick of it all—that I yanked off the pentacle and threw it across the bathroom. I tried not to look where it landed, either, so I couldn't go back later to pick it up. Let Marta find it and think it was trash.

I wished I could throw away my life as easily.

 

It must have been an hour later—I was already in bed, in my most hideous pajamas, the pink flannel ones with the butterflies on them—when there was a tap at my door.