Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 03 She's A Witch Girl (11 page)

And perfection is when we all end a routine with a moment of stunned silence, and then leap around and scream, “We did it.”

Synchronicity. No doubt about it.

“Excellent practice, girls.” Coach Gertie even replayed it for us in slow motion, although she blurred her own form out, saying, “Don’t need to see that, now, do we?”

We had a brilliant routine, a few bruises, and mucho excitement.

“Now,” I said, and stepped up to the next part of my plan. “We do this as witches.”

This was not news to Tara, but I still caught her by surprise. “What do you mean?”

I probably should have warned her, but the whole Charity thing had really rocked me. “I’ve written up some great routines for Saturday’s magic game.”

“Saturday?” Tara didn’t like my taking the polish off her happy crown. “We don’t have time to add new routines.”

“They’re simple—they just need us to show this same kind of timing. They’ll be great.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we can try them, can’t we?” Sunita whispered her question, but we all stared at her, amazed she had volunteered any opinion at all.

Coach Gertie smiled. “That’s the attitude I’m looking for in my champions.”

We started getting the buzz back. Champions. After nailing the practice with three new routines, we were ready and almost willing to believe.

Celestina looked at me, and then, quickly realizing her mistake, turned to Tara. “Do you really think we can win?”

Tara looked at me, her eyes narrowed, and I knew she was going to hold a grudge against me for a little while. “Maybe.”

Oh well, Tara could hold a grudge, but I wasn’t about to let it bring me down. “Hey, no maybes allowed until after the competition!”

Tara wasn’t happy with me setting any rules or pronouncements. “What do you mean? Maybe is maybe.”

“From now until after competition, maybe is for losers, like Chezzie’s going to be.” I wasn’t a complete fool; I reminded her what the stakes were. “Winners know they’re going to win. They don’t say maybe.”

Celestina, rather unhelpfully, asked, “What do winners do when they lose?”

I looked at her an extra-long second before answering, hoping to discourage any other loser-type questions. “Figure out why and make sure it doesn’t happen again, of course.”

She smiled a little shakily. “Of course.”

I didn’t like the lack of enthusiasm. “Let’s try that again. Are there any maybes left after that practice?”

“No.”

“Are we going to win?”

“Yes!” All of us, at the same time, set off streamers, confetti, a few fireworks, and glimmering lights. Synchronicity. What a beautiful thing.

The practice had gone pretty well. There had been just one teensy glitch: I’d missed my makeup exam with Mr. Bindlebrot. And he wasn’t happy about it.

“I’m sorry, Pru. The term is over. I have to have grades in today, and any corrections or updates in a week. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Extra credit?” I begged. I pleaded.

He relented. “You could create an exhibit to explain sine/cosine to future classes.”

Sure. I had lots of time to do an exhibit. “By Friday?”

He rubbed his eyes as if he were tired, despite the fact that it was only nine in the morning. “By Friday.”

“Great!”

“Pru.” He looked at me seriously, like he was going to drop a bombshell. “If the exhibit is good, you’ll pass. But until then, you have a failing grade for the term.”

Kaboom.

“I understand.” Sure, I did. I’d have plenty of time to make an A+++ exhibit. I was suspended from the cheerleading team until I’d cleared the F from my permanent record.

I put the whole suspension thing out of my mind as soon as I put the extra-credit project in To-Do. Tara hadn’t been too happy when I’d broken the news to her—until I pointed out that I could still write routines for the team, I just couldn’t go to practice until Mr. Bindlebrot approved the extra credit project.

“Just hurry up,” she warned. “We need the whole team in form. Especially you.”

It was nice to hear that, but this me versus me battle of the cheering giants was getting on my nerves. I had created a few new routines, but would they be good enough? I hadn’t had a chance to pop in and spy on Maddie and Chezzie again. To-Do was a bully when it came to action steps being performed on time.

It was critical that I know what Maddie and Chezzie were planning. But I also needed to study, practice, and come up with some killer competition routines for the squad. I knew what I needed. I just didn’t have a second to spare in my already full schedule. I wished, not for the first time, that turn-back-time spells were not prohibited for use by minors without adult supervision. Still, there must be some magic, somewhere, that could help me. That’s where Samuel came in.

When Samuel arrived to tutor me, I had the family spell book in front of me. I had discovered that when I did that, he would always say . . .

“Hi. What do you need in there?”

Like clockwork. Beats searching through a dusty spell book, which I’ve found is kind of like looking for a typo in a dictionary.

I tried to look as innocent as possible without looking so innocent, I morphed into guilty-by-reason-of-innocence. “I need a tracking spell.” I held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t say they, too, were out-of-bounds for minors.

Happily, he said, “Piece of cake.” He stopped for a second, looking puzzled. “For what class?”

“An extra-credit project.” I’d made the excuse up in advance. I did have extra-credit projects, but not this one.

The wrinkles in his forehead went away, and he moved on to yet another question I wished I didn’t have to answer. “What do you need to track?”

Oooh. Trickier question. No way was I going to tell him I wanted to track mortals. Who would he be less likely to do a red alert on? Aha! “Dorklock.”

“Why would a teacher want you to-”

“I’m just supposed to track his movements for twenty-four hours straight. You know, video games, dinner, school-that stuff. A kid is safer to track than an adult.”

“Either’s a piece of cake.” “For you, maybe.” I frowned at him. Sometimes I hated that he always knew so much more than I did and never even tried to hide it from me. Geek. “Besides, you need a new saying. That one was old before our mothers were born.”

He winced a little, reminding me that his mother was dead. Oops. I tried to pry my foot out from between my teeth. “How about ‘piece of tritium’?”

His eyes lit up at my use of a scientific word. I hoped he didn’t think that was going to become a habit. “That could work. But really, you’d need-”

Oh, no. If I didn’t stop him, we’d be talking science for a year. I grabbed To-Do out of my back pocket and held him up. “Stop!”

To-Do blinked and said, “Action step: Tutoring session with Samuel; remaining time fifty-six minutes.”

I stuffed To-Do back into my pocket. “Let’s keep focused here, okay? I need a tracking spell for Dorklock.”

It was, like Samuel had said, a piece of cake. Or tritium, maybe. We created a charm with one of Dorklock’s dirty socks. I figured I could copy the charm with an old lip gloss of Maddie’s I had stuck in a purse and had never thrown out. That way, he’d never be the wiser that it was Maddie I
really
intended to track. I didn’t fall off the pyramid yesterday, by any means.

The spell we attached to the charm was pretty simple:

After the spell was bound to the charm, I could tap the sock and it would instantly show me wherever Dorklock was. It would even buzz helpfully if he was close by. “You were right. This wasn’t hard at all.” Although, next time, I’d have to consider my charm source more carefully.

Dorklock’s sock really reeked and was no doubt toxic to the touch. Good thing I didn’t really want to track him.

“It’s harder with people you don’t know,” he said, flipping his glasses at me, which meant he was nervous. “I thought you might have meant to track Daniel.”

“I don’t have anything of his,” I said quickly, to shut down that whole jealous thing Samuel has going about Daniel. But then I remembered the card Daniel popped into my room on Thanksgiving. No way did I want to get into how intriguing I found it to think I might actually be able to track Daniel down somewhere. Not that I needed any more action items on my to-do list right now.

“Right.” He looked relieved. “Good. Because he’s nothing but trouble.”

I frowned back, annoyed. Why did boys have to be so possessive, even when they were just best friends? “Thanks, like I couldn’t guess that since he nearly got me expelled from school. I’m interested in honing my own skills, not finding some Prince Witchling to save the day for me. I
would
like to be able to figure out this stuff on my own, one day, you know. Unless you plan to keep tutoring me until I’m, like, five hundred and sixty.”

He flipped his glasses at me, speechless.

Oops, I’d been joking and accidentally got myself into dangerous territory. I quickly added, before he could weigh in on whether or not he’d like to be tutoring me for half a
millennium, “I hoped part of the reason why I got it so quickly was because I was getting better at this whole magic thing.” I kept going, waiting for the red flush to leave his cheeks. Neither one of us really wanted him to say something embarrassing. “It’s bad enough that I have to scramble and rely on a Troll doll to keep up right now. But to spend my whole senior year studying and worrying about grades? What a waste of the last year of high school.”

He relaxed a bit, and grinned. “The way you’re going, you’ll be the one tutoring me next year.”

I laughed. It was funny, and exactly the sweetly absurd thing Samuel would say. The only thing I could tutor him on was dressing well and having just a little bit more social polish. We both knew that—and we both knew he wasn’t interested in that kind of tutoring.

Besides, I didn’t want him to know I hoped he was right, that I wouldn’t need him as a tutor next year. Boys were a confusing issue right now. There was Daniel, Agatha’s great-to-the-nth grandson, who had run away but still occasionally sent me anonymous notes that weren’t anonymous to me. There was Angelo: mortal, off-limits, and totally scrumptious. And Samuel: geek extraordinaire and all-around nice guy. Sure, there was some mystery there, about how his mom died and why he lived with his dad, but he was just my best friend. Nothing more, even if he did kind of get under my skin with those puppy dog eyes of his.

I couldn’t afford to explore any of those possibilities, though. Not if I wanted to pass all my classes and make sure the Witches crushed my old team at the national competition. Better just to smile and avoid all the boy-girl traps that are set everywhere—school, home, and in the daily conversations of my team members.

Okay, truthfully, it wasn’t better. Better would be to run away from school and spend all my free time learning everything I could about boy-girl dynamics. The only downside to that would be that I wouldn’t get to see the Witches beat my old team.

So maybe I could wait to run away until after Nationals.

But first—I waved my hand and made the beginning of my extra-credit math project appear in the air. A sine symbol. “I forgot to tell you. I need to get this extra credit done for Mr. Bindlebrot ASAP. Can you help?”

Mr. Bindlebrot stared at my extra-credit project.
“Very impressive, Pru.”

“So? Do I pass?”

He smiled and rubbed the bridge of his nose, like I do when I have a headache. “Let me take a look and see. I’ll let you know.”

“But—”

He sighed. “Pru. Give me a week. Your extra credit wasn’t in my schedule any more than it was in yours. Okay?”

“Okay.”
Not.
But he was the teacher. And I needed that grade.

I showed up at practice a few minutes late. Not that it mattered. Tara spotted me right away and flew over with a smile. “Bindlebrot pass your extra credit?”

“He wants a week.”

“A week!” She settled to the floor next to me. “What are you doing here, then? You can’t come to practice if—”

“I know.” I handed her a stack of routines I’d sketched out. “I just wanted to give you the 411 and these new routines.”

I looked at the girls practicing. “And don’t worry. If I can’t practice with the team, I can spy for you.” I told her about my tracking spell for Maddie and Chezzie.

“What have you found out?”

“Nothing yet. I’ve been too busy doing the extra-credit project.”

Like a good HC, she nodded and flicked her hand at me. “Well, get to it, then.”

Unfortunately, the tracking spell was a dud. When I touched the charmed lip gloss, I got . . . a thin film of purse lint on my fingertip. Samuel wasn’t one to do poor magic, though, so I figured I was doing something wrong.

I would have tried to figure it out, but To-Do whistled, to remind me that it was time for my scrying homework. I was tempted to see if I could spy into the future and see if Mr. B was going to give me a passing grade, but I only had enough time to do the assigned homework: gaze deeply into the crystal and find out whether it would snow in Tahoe at 10:43 p.m. tonight. Sigh.