The Hex Breaker's Eyes (15 page)

“I’m sure you
know that last term Tam got into a fight with Sydney,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says
like I’m wasting his time.

“Well last
Wednesday somebody did something really bad to Tam and we think it
was Sydney retaliating. But Sydney says she has an alibi. You.”

He looks
confused. “What exactly do you think she did?”

“It doesn’t
matter. What matters is that she said she was with you, on
Wednesday, at eleven thirty. Can you confirm that or not?”

Even though
I’ve done all the talking, he looks at Tamara. “I don’t know what
you have against Syd but leave her alone. It’s bad enough that Dina
told all the girls they shouldn’t hang out with her anymore, now
you’re going around slandering the poor girl.”

Tam scoffs. “I
can’t use my arm because of that bitch and she’ll do worse to me if
she gets a chance.”

“Whatever.”

I interject.
“Were you with her or not?”

Wayne looks at
me with anger in his eyes and then he softens, raises a finger to
his lips. “I asked Angela to the Valentines dance. I can’t have you
going around saying I was with Sydney.”

“We aren’t
saying, we’re asking, yes or no?”

“No. I was at
home, in my room, watching Letterman. Ok?”

Tam shakes her
head. “Knew it. Lying witch.”

Before I can
think of what to do next, I’m chasing Tam down the hallway toward
the music room. It’s obvious she’s going to go right after Sydney,
but that won’t do us any good. Even if Sydney admits that she lied,
she still has a talisman hidden away somewhere that we won’t be
able to find. Getting her mad will only fuel the hex, which will
only hurt Tam.

But before we
can even get there, the sound of a girl shrieking echoes down the
hallway. We were walking very fast before, but now we run. When we
get close to the music department we see the door burst open and
two girls push through the door, holding onto each other in a mess
of flailing arms, wild hair and kicking legs. They cross the
hallway and slam against a locker, both girls screaming and
swearing at each other. It’s only when we get close that we can see
that the one being slammed against the locker is Sydney, who
screams in pain each time the other girl slams her into the steel
lockers.

The other girl
is masked behind a mess of hair, but when she talks I can tell who
it is.

“I won’t let
you do it again! Not Again!” she shouts, slapping and grabbing at
Sydney. Sydney swings her arms up and down, trying to block
incoming blows, but she doesn’t seem to know what to do and she’s
really taking the worst of the beating.

“You almost
killed me,” the other girl screams. “I was in a cast for two months
because of you.”

Even Tam is
frozen by the sight of our new student council president slamming a
student into the lockers and slapping her in the face, even though
Tam probably wants to do something similar.

Since there are
still classes happening in third period, one of the nearby doors
opens and Mr. Stevens, an old guy with a short grey beard comes out
and sees what appears to be Dina mugging a defenseless Sydney. He
shouts for the girls to break it up, running over to pull Dina off
of Sydney. When he finally gets them apart, Sydney’s got some red
marks on her face that will likely turn into bruises by tomorrow,
and Dina finally pulls her hair back to show that her face is
bright red with anger and there are lines on her cheeks where tears
burrowed through her makeup.

Mr. Stevens
tells them that they’re going to follow him to the office right
now, then tells his own students to get back in the class and
continue their reading. As he begins to lead the pugilists away,
both Dina and Sydney notice us standing there. Dina looks
apologetic, the look on her face seeming to say ‘I tried to help.’
Sydney looks at us like we must have put Dina up to this. She looks
at me with pure loathing and when she passes us, she bumps Tam with
her shoulder.

I see a student
I recognize, Kim Kubert, who’s in the marching band and hangs out
around the music department a lot, emerge from the music room door.
“What was that?” I ask.

“I dunno. That
other girl just came in and started accusing Syd of all kinds of
things, and then she was shouting all this stuff like how Sydney
tried to kill her and how Sydney was dangerous. Then Syd tried to
tackle her and after that the other girl just beat her up. Wasn’t
that the girl from the student council?”

“Yeah,” I say.
“At least she used to be. Not sure if she has much of a career in
politics after this.”

After a couple
minutes of standing around, stunned that Dina would suddenly decide
to vent her anger at Sydney, we decide to head to the front offices
and spy on what’s happening. We linger just around a corner,
looking through the large windows from the hallway into the front
office, where Dina is waiting. The secretaries occasionally shoot
her a disapproving look, but nobody seems to say anything to
her.

After a couple
minutes, one of the vice principals, Mrs. Grey, comes out of an
office with Sydney trailing behind her. Mrs. Grey tells Sydney to
sit down and wait, and then brings Dina into the office, and closes
the door. As soon as she’s alone in the waiting area, Sydney leans
forward and hides her face behind both hands.

The bell rings,
ending lunch and starting fourth period. “Shouldn’t we go?” I ask
Tam.

“Hell no. I’m
staying right here and watching what happens.”

“If Mrs. Grey
sees you out here she might think you’re involved,” I say.

Tam uses her
left hand to point at the sling that holds her right. “I am
involved,” she says.

The hallways
flood with students as hungry kids are set out on lunch and others
return to class after their own break. For five minutes we have to
stand against the wall just to avoid the flood of bodies, but as
half the students find classrooms and the rest find a place to
socialize, we are able to get back to the corner to spy on Sydney
some more.

Mrs. Grey comes
out and sits Dina on a chair right next to Sydney, at which point
Sydney sits up straight again, revealing a flushed face and red
eyes. Mrs. Grey starts to lecture them both. I’m not able to read
lips or anything, but I can tell she’s really laying on a guilt
trip. I’m sure it’s not ideal to have the student council president
beat up another girl, so it’s no wonder that most of Mrs. Grey’s
attention is focused on Dina.

Eventually Mrs.
Grey goes back to her office, this time leaving the door open, and
Sydney are Dina are left sitting in the office. After a minute or
so, Dina moves a couple chairs over so they aren’t sitting right
next to each other, but I don’t think either of them actually said
anything before she moved.

The main doors
to the school open and a woman enters. With her brown hair and
tall, lanky frame, it’s obvious this is Sydney’s mom. She heads
into the office, says something to Sydney, and then talks to one of
the secretaries. Sydney doesn’t say anything, or even look up to
see her mother. She just stares at the floor and waits. Mrs. Grey
comes out and talks to Sydney’s mother, and after a couple minutes,
Sydney and her mom leave the office. Once they’re out in the
hallway, both women see us standing around the corner watching
them.

“Is that the
same one?” Sydney’s mother asks. Sydney nods, and immediately her
mother is marching over to us, looking straight at Tam.

“It wasn’t
enough to attack my daughter once, you had to get your friend to do
it again?” she accuses.

“I didn’t do
anything,” Tam says weakly.

“And this one,”
she says, looking at me, “must be the one that broke into my home
and climbed out a window like a little thief.”

I can’t say
anything. Even though I heard her voice when I was inside the
house, I’ve never seen Sydney’s mom up close before. She’s
beautiful despite the big chin, with long wavy brown hair and high
cheekbones, but what’s striking are her eyes. This woman has eyes
that seem to be brown with flecks of red. There’s one guy in town
who works at the grocery store, who has pure red eyes, but he’s
kind of freaky looking and that guy’s legally blind. Sydney’s
mother’s eyes are more normal than that, and we know that she
drives so she can’t be blind, but the little hint of red makes her
seem very unusual, and I find it very hard to look her in the eye,
or to say anything at all.

“Well?” she
demands.

“I, um, don’t
know what you mean.”

“Of course you
don’t.” She holds Sydney’s hand and starts toward the doors. “You
two stay away from my Sydney or I’ll file a restraining order, got
it?”

We say nothing
as they leave, and even after they’re gone, Tam and I just stand at
the corner, not sure how to react. “I guess breaking into her house
again is probably a bad plan,” I say after the silence becomes
unbearable.

“Yeah.” Tam
agrees. “But now we’ve got no proof, no confession, and we
definitely can’t break in and find the charm. What are we going to
do?”

“We’re gonna go
back to class, and deal with this later.” Tam looks annoyed that I
still expect life to go on even though she’s hexed, but there’s
nothing we can do until we know for sure that Sydney has the
talisman that made the hex.

When we get
back to our lockers, Tam’s leg buckles and she falls to the floor.
I let out a short, automatic yelp at the sight, and then I try to
help her up. She tries to climb to her feet, but can’t get up, even
with me pulling on her good arm.

“My leg doesn’t
work,” she says. I look in her eyes and all I see is terror. “I
can’t feel it at all!”

They call an
ambulance to take Tam to the hospital for more tests, and I just
know that she’ll be staying at the hospital overnight. This thing
is still spreading, getting stronger each time we confront Sydney.
We know she lied about where she was when the hex was cast, and
every time her emotions flare up, Tam gets worse. That’s enough
proof for me. Sydney’s guilty.

“What can we do
to help?” Ryan asks me. It’s after school and Ryan and Marlene came
to my locker straight away, as if both of them heard a call to
arms.

“We have to
find the talisman and destroy it, but we can’t just break into
Sydney’s house and get arrested,” I say. Although now I’m thinking
it might come to that if Tam gets any worse. I know I’d break the
law to save her, but I just don’t know what kind of resistance
Sydney and her red-eyed mother would pose if they found me breaking
in. Not to mention the fact that if I get locked in jail or
something then I’d be useless to help Tam.

“There’s only
one thing left to do,” I say. “I have to boost my power.”

“How do you do
that?” Ryan asks

“There’s a
potion we can make, that might let me see who’s doing this. Maybe
even show me where the talisman is hidden.” Even as I say it,
Marlene is shaking her head at me.

“So why haven’t
we done that already?” Ryan asks, knowing there must be a
catch.

“I just didn’t
think it was necessary until now.”

If I told Ryan
that the potion might drive me insane, he’d tell Tam, and they
wouldn’t let me do it. But without the potion we’ll never stop the
hex, so I won’t tell him the risks. I grab Marlene by the shoulders
and look into her eyes. “Tell me what we need to make Seerseye
Potion.”

It turns out
the potion contained a lot of things not commonly sold in Blue
Ribbon’s IGA grocery store. For example, one of the things we need
is called ‘black root,’ and another is apparently ‘eye of a rat.’
When Marlene showed me the book I couldn’t believe that things like
that were actually required for working spells. I suppose I was
thinking of it as chemistry; you put the right elements together to
trigger a reaction. But this is the world of magic, where you put
things together that should not react, and then they react anyway.
So by boiling a concoction of herbs, roots, and animal parts, while
reading the right spell out loud into the pot, we should be able to
create something that will make my sixth sense much more
sensitive.

Marlene tells
me that this is how magic works: you take a human emotion or
desire, and then you filter it through a connection to the physical
world. There are two types of hexes: spells and potions. Spells are
tied to the physical world through talismans, and potions have to
be made of things tied to the earth: plants, animals, stones, etc.
A spell is tied to its victim because something they own is
included in the talisman, while a potion also has a talisman, it
only works if it is actually ingested by the person you’re
targeting. You can’t get away with making a potion out of
artificial ingredients, it all has to come from the Earth
naturally. We need to find the real ingredients somewhere.