Just Add Magic (11 page)

“Sure is,” Frankie looked at her strangely. “No soccer tryouts?” His face was flushed and it looked like he was getting sunburned.

I said, “Not today.” I gently nudged Hannah with my elbow.

She managed to ask, “Uhh . . . are you thirsty?”

Frankie wiped sweat off his forehead. “Do I look thirsty?”

“Yeah . . . ,” Hannah said. Her mouth clearly wasn't working right.

“We made Bug Juice,” I said.

He hesitated. “Whoa, I'm not thirsty enough to drink bugs.”

This made Hannah smile, but she was still too nervous to talk.

Darbie filled in the conversation. “It's not actually insects. It's cold and sweet, very yum-o-licious.”

“Well, in that case.”

Hannah still held the Thermos close to her. I gently bumped her arm, guiding the Thermos closer to Frankie's hand. Just then Tony, Frankie's twin brother, walked over, iPod buds buried in his ears.

It was odd how Frankie and Tony could look so much alike and so different at the same time. In a word, Tony was sloppy. His hair was mussed and needed a cut. And he slouched, hiding the fact that he was about a head taller than Frankie. Teachers always told him to pull up his pants. Frankie, on the other hand, kept his hair buzzed short and even now, working outside, it seemed he'd made some effort to tuck in his dirty T-shirt.

Frankie was the life of the party, whereas Tony kept to himself. I didn't really even know him. But here he came. He reached over Frankie's shoulder, took the Thermos, and chugged a big gulp before Frankie playfully elbowed him in the stomach. “Get your own, dude.”

Tony returned the affection by making an armpit fart in Frankie's ear before jogging over to the landscaping truck.

“Real mature!” Frankie called, but Tony didn't seem to hear him.

At the truck, Tony ducked his head under the spigot of a cooler, letting water flow into his mouth, onto his face, and into his hair.

Meanwhile, Frankie put the silver rim of my dad's camping Thermos to his lips. He drank. “Wow. You were right, it's sweet.” He looked right at Hannah and took another sip. “Why do you call it Bug Juice?”

Her mouth decided to work. “Ahh, umm, it's an opposite thing. You know, like the baseball player who pitches with his right hand and they call him ‘Lefty,'” she said. “Or the shortest kid that people call ‘Stretch,' or you call the chubby guy ‘Slim,' or—”

Now maybe her mouth was working a little too much. I discreetly stepped on her foot and she closed her lips.

Frankie finished her thought. “So, you call the sweetest drink Bug Juice. It's weird, but I get it.”

“FRANKIE!” His dad called over the growl of a chain saw. “Coffee hour is
finito
, back to work!”

“The boss,” Frankie said with a nod. “Gotta go.” He handed the Thermos back to Hannah. “Thanks, guys, I mean, girls.”

“Honey! Dinner's getting cold!” Mom called out the back door to my dad, who was examining the tree in the Barneys' yard.

“It's a nice night, huh?” Dad asked when he came in.

I took my seat next to Bud and put my napkin on my lap. When I looked up, I saw my dad had poured the rest of the Bug Juice out of the Thermos and into a glass. He took a sip.

Ruh-roh.

My mom pulled the pizza slices onto plates. Dad hugged her. “That drink was scrumptious,” he said.

“Oh, I didn't make that, Kelly and her friends did.” Mom took a drink of the juice too.

Double ruh-roh.

“Well, it's yum-o-licious, as Darbie would say.” He sat down, smacking his lips. “Looks like the cooking club is rockin' and rollin'.”

Mom laughed. “
Secret
cooking club,” she corrected.

I ignored her. “It's going well,” I said cautiously, watching for my parents' reaction to the love potion. Actually, I'd forgotten that Bud drank some too. It seemed like I was the only one at the table who
hadn't
tried the Love Bug Juice.

I carefully surveyed the three of them. They looked normal. Well, as normal as my family could look.

“Remind me, who's in this club? Dad asked.

“Darbie and Hannah,” I said.

Bud lifted his eyebrows up and down. “Hannah. Hubba, hubba!”

Hubba hubba?
Okay, totally scratch what I said about normal. As creepy as my little brother usually was, I'd never heard him use the phrase “Hubba, hubba.”

I was not the only one surprised by this comment. “What was that, mister?” Mom asked.

Bud took a big bite of the top triangle of his pizza. “Sthee thure is perrtie,” he said with a mouth full of food.

I caught my dad trying to hide a laugh.

“You leave your sister's friends alone.” Mom wiped Bud's mouth with a napkin.

“But she is pretty. And have you seen her play soccer? She's, like, the best one on the team,” he added.

When Dad thought no one was looking, he winked at Bud.

After dinner my dad unbuttoned and rolled up his sleeves. He placed dirty dishes in the sink. Mom watched him. “Since when do you help in the kitchen?”

“You go relax,” Dad said. “I'll clean up in here.” But Mom didn't relax, she sang along with the jazz on the radio.

Confirmed.
Things were definitely NOT normal.

I retrieved my backpack and observed my dad with his soapy hands. He wiggled his body to the music and sang, “Hubba, hubba.”

I left the kitchen, then turned back. “Mom, did Mrs. Silvers call today?”

Mom giggled at Dad's horrible dancing. “No, she didn't. Maybe that orange juice did the trick.”

“Maybe.” I thought maybe I had more positive data with Mrs. Silvers.

Then she added, “Do you have some homework to do?”

I fled Crazytown and hid in the safety of my room, where I called Darbie.

I told her what happened with my family at dinner after they drank the Love Bug Juice.

“Your family has always been a little strange,” Darbie said. “Let's wait and see what happens with Frank—oh crap! Ouch!” I heard the phone tumbling.

“What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

Darbie came back on the line. “I fell off the side of my bed and hit my funny bone on the dresser. There's nothing funny about it.”

“What's with you lately? You're like a falling disaster.”

“I don't know, but it sucks.”

“Try to be more careful, Shoobedoo,” I said before we hung up.

Then I jumped on my bed to get my journal out of the ceiling tile. I turned back a few pages and reviewed the past couple of days. I studied the warnings and called 1-800-Hannah. “Hey, pal, it's me.”

Hannah said, “Hey, Kell, what's up?”

“I wanted to double-check the translation of
Quien siembra vientos recoge temtestades
.”

“Like I said, it's some kind of old Spanish saying. Just a sec.” I heard her flip through a book. “This year instead of
getting you a cookbook for your birthday I'm getting you a Spanish/English dictionary. Then you won't have to call me every time you need to know a word,” Hannah said.

“Sure, but I really like calling
you
,” I said. “Besides, sayings like this are hard to find in a dictionary.”

“I know. I have a list of phrases in this book. It means ‘You reap what you sow.' That's what this book says.”

“Great, only now I need a translator for the English version, too. What does that mean?”

“It's what I told you before, you get what you deserve,” Hannah said. “Kind of like ‘what you do comes back to you' or ‘what comes around goes around.'”

Slowly, I said, “Or it
returns
to you.” Maybe I was onto something. “Hold on.” I set the phone down and flipped through the heavy pages pasted into the encyclopedia and looked for the slip of paper that had fallen out. “Hannah, remember the scrap of faded paper that flew out of the Book? It said, ‘Remember to Beware of the Law of Returns.'”

“So what?”

I said, “Señora Perez said practically the same thing as what was written on that old note!”

“I guess,” Hannah said. “That's weird.”

“It's more than weird. It's
another
freaky coincidence. And you know my theory?”

“Don't remind me. ‘There's no such thing as coincidence.'
Look, I gotta go. I'm pooped—oops, sorry. I know poop is a touchy subject for you lately.” There was a giggle in her voice.

Everybody wants to be a comedian
, as my father would say. In Hannah's case, I liked it when she joked. It reminded me of the good ol' days when she used to be a lot more fun. Before she was so worried about how she looked, what she wore, or what she ate. I can't imagine worrying about so much stuff.

“Actually, I think the poop issue might be solved,” I said. “No call from Silvers today.”

I set my Spanish translating aside, went to the kitchen, and did some schoolwork, but it didn't take long for the sound of sizzling ground beef to fill the room. Little dots of hot grease jumped out and onto the stove top. I took my position and used a spatula to move the bits of meat around. When the meat was all brown, I drained off the fat and carefully scooped the beef into the pot with the rest of the chili ingredients.

Now that Mom and I had nailed down the recipe we were using for this year's chili contest, we moved into mass production mode. We needed to manufacture enough fantastic chili for everyone in town to have a taste.

Mom zipped around the kitchen, chopping onions faster than a food processor. “Maybe you can bring a little pot of this over to Mrs. Silvers,” Mom said. “Since you and she are, like, buddies now.”

“I don't know if I'd go that far, Mom.”

“Well, there's no such thing as too much good karma.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Good karma?”

Mom explained. “Karma is when you get what you give. So, if you do nice things for people, nice things happen to you. Likewise—”

“If you do something bad, something bad will come back to you?”

Mom said, “You said it.”

Karma?
Sounded like the Law of Returns and the
Quien siembra-
thingamabob.

I stirred and let out a mammoth yawn.

“I'll finish up here,” Mom said. “Why don't you go to bed, honey.”

I didn't argue.

Lying in bed with Rosey wrapped around my legs, I couldn't stop thinking.
If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.

This idea made me a little nervous, because maybe the girls and I made my little brother lose his voice, and maybe we gave Charlotte painful blisters on her feet. I mentally examined the last few days: Darbie had Rollerbladed to my house a million times, and this week she wiped out. In fact, she couldn't stop wiping out. And me, I had to carry Charlotte's books. But why hadn't anything bad happened to Hannah?

Before drifting off to sleep, I got out of bed and approached the computer. I googled “Law of Returns.” The online dictionary defined it exactly as Señora Perez and Hannah had. And it sounded a lot like karma. After surfing around, I found some info I didn't like about karma. I read that it was a phrase used by witches. Some scholars even believed that the Salem Witch Trial hangings in 1692 were actually the Law of Returns punishing those witches with death. Suddenly, carrying Charlotte's books didn't sound so bad.

My eyelids felt heavy. After a while, I fell asleep at the computer and dreamed. . . . I was walking to the bus stop, but when I turned around, my house had disappeared. Charlotte was on my shoulders and she was very heavy. I saw Bud in the distance. Behind him was a group of Gypsy-people dancing barefoot. I felt hot air on my back and turned to see a dragon chasing me. I ran as fast as I could, but Charlotte got heavier with each step. I called to
Darbie, but my tongue was gone. I thought Coach Richards was yelling at me to do sit-ups.

I woke up sitting at the desk.

The clock read four a.m.

Kelly Quinn out.

Get:

1 bad dream

20 bricks

1 case of the heebie-jeebies

1 love-potioned seventh-grade boy

Directions:
Whisk together in Home Ec class until
everything is completely mixed up.

The next morning her majesty knocked on the back door.

I sighed and got my stuff for school.

Apparently Charlotte had chosen to bring bricks to school, just to make sure I suffered. And of course she couldn't even carry her own stupid red umbrella. Charlotte was talking and talking about her cousin's wedding . . . a dress . . .
blah blah blah.

I saw a woman about my mom's age in a tennis outfit strolling down Mrs. Silvers's driveway toward the newspaper. Ever since we've lived across the street from Mrs. Silvers, I've never seen another person at her house.

“Good morning, girls,” the woman said cheerfully.

“Hello,” I said. Charlotte kept walking and talking, not even noticing that I had stopped. “Umm, who are you?” I asked.

“I'm Joanne Silvers, Regina's daughter. I'm staying here while she's in the hospital.”

“Did you say ‘hospital'?”

“Kelly Quinn, if we miss the bus, you're going to be sorry,” Charlotte yelled from the end of the block, hands on her hips.

Joanne said, “You better get going.” And she disappeared into the house.

At that precise moment everything became clear. We had been warned, we hadn't listened, and now we were cursed.

If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.
I gave Mrs. Silvers the Fresh Citrus Squeeze to cause her strife, so that she would stop calling me to scoop her poop. And now she was in the HOSPITAL!

What will the payback be?