Mirrored (6 page)

“Ah, but Cinderella’s prince wanted to marry her. That’s why he searched the kingdom. Svetlana did not wish to marry the blacksmith’s boy, and when she heard her father’s declaration, she ran sobbing from the room. Indeed, all her sisters did. They wept all day, but, that night, the first of the royal guests were to arrive, and their father commanded the princesses to dry their eyes and come down to greet them. When I was fixing Manya’s hair, I asked what was wrong.”

“‘Don’t you see?’ she asked. ‘We don’t want to marry the blacksmith’s boy or anyone of Father’s choosing. We do not wish to be auctioned like cattle. Svetlana was—is—in love with the groom. That is why she went with him to the blacksmith’s shop. In fact, we all have secret loves, commoners we visit at night. But now that we are discovered, we will be married to princes. We shall go far away and never see our darlings again.’ She sighed. ‘If only I could dance with Viktor just one more time.’ And, again, she began to weep.”

The spider was within inches of me now. I reached out, and it
crawled onto my hand. I stared at it, marveling at its coffee-bean-shaped body, its sunburst of legs. I had done that, changed one thing to another. I turned away so that Kendra would not see my smile.

“And so it came to pass,” she said. “Svetlana married the blacksmith’s boy, and each of her sisters also married a man she did not love. The end.”

Mesmerized, I reached out to touch the spider.

“Ouch!” It bit me on the knuckle.

“What is it?” Kendra asked.

“This spider. It bit me.” Already, I could feel the venom seeping into my system. “Help me, please.”

Kendra looked at it. “Oh, don’t be silly. It’s a daddy longlegs. Humans aren’t affected by their bites.”

“But it’s not a daddy longlegs. It’s a brown recluse. I . . . changed it. Unless you’re saying it’s turned into a real daddy longlegs. Then it won’t hurt me.”

Kendra reached out toward the spider, and then, with a tiny tap, changed it back to its true shape. She placed it on the ground and shooed it away. Then she glanced at my hand.

A small, white blister began to form, but with the touch of her finger, that too was gone. “No. It is still a brown recluse. You can change a thing’s appearance, but not its nature. Perhaps that, along with my story, is enough learning for today.” She nodded at me. “Run along.”

And I did what she said. What I had learned was valuable indeed: Any harm I did to myself, I could undo.

As I walked toward the door, I made certain to stomp upon the spider until it was just a brown blot on the floor.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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That night, I decided Kendra was crazy. Oh, sure, she’d recognized what I was, taught me magic, and made me the powerful witch I was becoming. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t also crazy. Or senile. How could she say magic wasn’t a positive thing? Even in the story she’d told, magic had ended the carnage.

Of course, Kendra was still my best, my only friend. I needed her. And I needed her to teach me too.

I thought about what I’d done with the spider. I’d been able to change its shape, if not its nature. I could do that to people. Changing their looks would be enough. That way, I could keep Gennifer and Jennifer the same shallow girls they were—trapped in fat, bacne-ridden bodies.

If you can’t change their nature,
something mean inside me
whispered,
you can’t make someone fall in love with you. Greg never will; you will find out the hard way.

Stupid.
I told myself I didn’t need to change anything. Greg had loved me for myself all along, all the time we were friends. He just got sidetracked. He was shallow. Boys were. He wanted a prettier girlfriend. Since I was going to be the most beautiful girl in the world, he’d have to love me. I’d just have to get beautiful Jennifer out of the picture, to be sure.

I knew I’d have to change her appearance as I did my own, slowly, gradually, so it wouldn’t be obvious, even to her.

As I drifted off to sleep, I made my plan. I would put it into action in language arts, the one class I had with Jennifer and not Greg.

The next morning, I stood by my locker, brushing my hair. I’d recently installed a stick-on mirror, so I could admire myself between classes. My classmates still didn’t notice the difference in me, but I did. I straightened up. Greg was passing by, alone for once. I met his eyes with confidence, then looked away on my own terms.

Maybe that’s what I needed, to be on my own terms. Probably Greg would eventually get tired of Jennifer on his own without any help from me. She was really stupid. It was silly of me to want to hurt her. After all, if Greg didn’t like me for me, what good was he? Maybe I should—

“Hey, watch it, ugly!” Someone slammed into me.

“Sorry.”

“Your face is sorry.” It was Jennifer, Jennifer with brand-new highlighting and a face full of makeup. “You just exist to get in my way, don’t you?” She shoved past me toward Greg, who’d stopped to wait for her.

Okay. Game on.

In class, we were reading
Animal Farm
aloud, painful because Mr. Cameron had students take turns reading and, apparently, some
still couldn’t. I read ahead, pages ahead, but then he’d stop to discuss it, and I wouldn’t remember where we were. So, instead, I just zoned out as Colby Buckner read, “Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is ab . . . ol . . . ished forever.” I thought about pigs. The pigs in the story were supposed to be like the people in power. People were like pigs. If only the people who were like pigs could
look
like pigs.

I contemplated Jennifer, who sat two rows to the side of me. She wasn’t even pretending to read. Her eyes fluttered closed, then open. Her forehead drooped forward. Her nose was adorable, slim, and turned up. What if it turned up a little bit more . . . ?

She saw me looking at her and mouthed,
Pig
.

I thought of everything Jennifer had ever done to me, the insults, taking Greg, the snickering, taking Greg. Then I thought of everything anyone had ever done to me. All my life, I’d been an outcast, a pariah, and why? Because I wasn’t pretty enough? Because I was too smart to matter but not smart enough to play stupid? I closed my eyes, but I could see Jennifer’s face, Jennifer’s perfect, blue-eyed, laughing face, her enviable nose. Then, in my mind, it morphed into a pig nose. She squealed in horror, just like a pig, and held her lively, nail-polished fingers up to hide it. She squealed again, then started to cry. I smirked in satisfaction.

In the room, Colby was still reading. I put my head down, looking at Jennifer so she couldn’t see me.

She was still whispering to Gennifer. Her nose was still perfect.

Why hadn’t it worked? Guess I hadn’t done it right. Maybe it was harder to work magic on others. But hadn’t Kendra cured her brother the first time out? Hadn’t I gotten the birds to fight off Nick and Nathan? I leaned my hand on my face and looked up.

Huh. My face felt different. My nose felt . . . piggy.

What? How could that be? I’d seen it so clearly in my mind,
Jennifer’s face changing, not mine. Not mine!

Even as I held my hand up, I felt my nose hardening, my nostrils spreading even more. MY head was heavy, and I remembered reading that a pig’s snout weighed about a pound. I cradled my head in my hands like I had a headache, leaning to cover myself with my hair.

“Violet, will you read next?” Mr. Cameron asked.

I began to cough, still holding my hands over my face. I managed to gasp out, “Bathroom!” Around me, everyone was laughing. Without waiting for Mr. Cameron’s response, I bolted to the girls’ room, still coughing. I looked in the mirror and saw . . . my snout.

It was pinkish-white with black spots and stood at least three inches from my face!

What . . . the . . . ?

I ducked into a stall, shaking, and tried to bring up the magic. My thoughts were racing. How would I get out of here? What would Mr. Cameron say? Could I put my face back? I realized that, while anger had been an awesome motivator, fear was a terrible one.

Breathe. Breathe. Stop thinking about how you can’t leave the building like this. Forget how you left your backpack in Cameron’s class. Breathe.

Breathe!

I remembered the spider. How I’d changed its shape, slowly. If I could do that, I could do anything. Anything. Anything except give Jennifer a pig nose. I’d ask Kendra about that. Clearly, I still had a lot to learn about magic. Thank God for Kendra.

Finally, I felt my heart rate slow. And my breathing. It was hard to breathe through the snout. I sat on the toilet, breathing. Breathing. Breathing. Imagining my nose—not my nose, but Michelle Pfeiffer’s nose, Diane Lane’s nose, or model Brooke Shields’s adorable, famous nose. Yes, that was it. Perfectly upturned with not too much nostril. I’d once read that it was nearly impossible to achieve this surgically. But magic surgery had to be better. The breathing, the heavy pig
snout, the concentration made me feel weak, almost light-headed, and the metal stall walls began to blur around me. I held my hands up to my face and felt the snout shrink beneath them. Relief! I straightened my neck, held my head up, opened the door.

Even though I knew I was late, I couldn’t resist a glance in the mirror.

It was perfect, almost too perfect. No, there was no such thing as too perfect. I would be perfect, all of me!

After school, I ran to Kendra’s house.

“I tried to use magic, and it backfired on me.”

“Backfired?” Kendra looked bemused—and maybe a little amused too, arranging herself on a red bench that looked like it belonged in the Museum of Modern Art. “How could it backfire?”

“Um, I don’t know, turned my nose into a pig’s snout. That’s all.”

Kendra chuckled. She was wearing a black lace ball gown that had barely made it through the door. “So you were trying to change your nose into this stunning creation—Diane Lane’s nose, I believe—and it turned into a snout instead? Is that exactly what happened?”

“Not exactly.”

“I didn’t think so. Perhaps you were trying to give someone else a pig’s snout?”

“How did you know?” Kendra seemed to know a lot of things—even knowing I’d copied Diane Lane’s nose. Could she read my mind? Or was she spying on me with that mirror?

“It’s about discretion.” She pulled me by the arm to sit beside her.

“Discretion?”

“‘Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout, is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion.’ That’s from the Bible.”

“You didn’t strike me as the religious type,” I said.

“I have nothing against religion. Since I’m never going to die, I don’t have to worry about impressing God for the afterlife, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to use my powers for good. Also, if you go around turning your enemies’ noses into pigs’ snouts, you’ll get caught. That’s why it’s impossible to do.”

“To do what?”

She waved her hand and produced two plates. “Gingerbread?”

“No, thank you. What’s impossible?”

With another wave of her hand, the plates were gone. “Rules of magic. It is impossible to change someone without their knowing.”

“You changed me the first day. You changed my nose.”
Not as well as I changed it.

“Ah, but you knew about it at the time. It was your choice. Once, I turned a proud, cruel boy into a beast, but he knew about it. To work magic on someone else, you must reveal yourself. It keeps others from being blamed. But had you changed your classmate’s nose, she wouldn’t have known how it happened. That’s not allowed by the rules of witchcraft.”

“So I can’t even give her . . . zits? Diarrhea? A bad SAT score when she’s a junior?”

Kendra shook her head. “Not without also giving those to yourself. It keeps you from abusing your power—and from making everyone suspect you. But you can do wonderful things for yourself, travel the world, give yourself incredible talents, never pay for cute new clothes.” With a wave of her hand, she changed her dress to fuchsia. “You should hear me sing opera—I’m like a mermaid.”

“All I want is for Greg to love me again. I don’t care about that other stuff.” I sort of wanted the gingerbread back. It was comfort food.

“Then you will have to win him back with your own looks and abilities—not by harming Jennifer. But it will be a difficult task.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, my dear, he never really loved you in the first place. He was friends with you because he was lonely. With Jennifer, he has a whole circle of friends.”

I remembered Greg and me, walking to his house after school, doing crazy science experiments like putting Mentos in Diet Coke so it would explode, checking our birdhouses daily. I’d had my first wren of the year last week, and I’d so wanted to tell Greg. But I knew he wouldn’t care anymore. I guessed he’d never cared. I nodded, knowing Kendra was right.

“It’s so unfair. Why do they hate me, Kendra? I always thought it was because I was ugly. But now, I’m not that ugly, and they still hate me. What’s wrong with me?”

Kendra frowned. “I think you chose to like the wrong girl’s boyfriend.”

“But that’s not fair. I saw him first.”

“Since when are bullies fair?” Kendra asked. “Do you think they issue some sort of Bully Code of Conduct—only pick on people who deserve it?”

In truth, I guess I felt I had deserved it. Why would they pick on me if I didn’t? I’d deserved it because I was an ugly freak. But now I knew they’d picked on me because they could, and maybe because I cared. Some part of me had once longed to be friends with Jennifer, to sit at her lunch table and go shopping at Dadeland after school. I couldn’t explain
why
I wanted that. She was horrible. But part of me wanted to deserve them, the beautiful girls.

“I don’t know why no one likes me. I thought it was my looks, but now, I don’t know.”

“I like you.” Kendra put her arms around me. The dress was taffeta, a stiff fabric that felt like hundreds of Pringles chips when I hugged her. But I sunk into her embrace. She was the absolute
coolest friend in the world.

“There, there,” she said, “I love you. And, someday, others will too. You’re going to be an incredible woman. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to be an incredible woman,” I sobbed. I knew I was no better than anyone else. I’d only been happy to be smart because I was ugly. Really, I wanted to be beautiful and be loved. “I only want Greg!”