The Hex Breaker's Eyes (6 page)

She looks at me
like I’m completely nuts. Her face is showing what I can only
describe as disgust. I almost expect her to hit me. “You are such a
freak,” she says. “All you weird goth kids who sit in the hallway
and don’t have any friends, you all have nothing better to do than
dream up fantasies about people who actually matter.”

“That’s not—” I
try to say something but she’s on a full-blown rant now. I guess I
deserve it, since I did offer to let her vent.

“You see that
I’m not a fatass and that boys actually like me and I’m on student
council and that I’m going to go to college and get out of this
town and you dream up stupid magical crap to try to make yourself
feel better. ‘Oooh, Dina’s not a cool person who’s going to go on
to a life of success, she’s actually cursed by magic gypsies to
fall down the stairs!’ You even realize how stupid you sound? Get
lost!”

I want to say
something to her. I want to tell her that I’m trying to help her,
that I don’t know anything about all this magic stuff, that I’m not
goth and not fricking
fat
. But everything about this girl is
so damned irritating that I can’t even find words. Her tantrum has
completely gutted me. Is that what people see of me? I’m not a girl
with a couple really good friends, I’m a loser who other people say
is fat? I know I’m close to breaking down in front of Dina and I’m
not going to let her see me crack.

One of her
tentacles is holding onto the cold water tap, making it glow just
like it made her shoe glow, just like it make that binder on the
stairs glow. I could warn her about it, but why bother? I slump,
shrinking my shoulders in, and leave the washroom. As the door
closes behind me, I hear a blast of water hitting the sink, and I
know it’s coming out so fast that it probably sprayed all over
Dina. She shrieks so loud other people in the hallway turn and look
at the washroom door.

“What
happened?” Tamara asks when I return to our lockers, my face red,
eyes wet. Ryan has joined her, and they’re sitting against the
lockers, snacking on their bagged lunches.

“I hope the
bitch is soaked,” I say.

Tam looks
shocked, but also entertained by my angry mood. “What?”

“She doesn’t
deserve help. She’s awful. No wonder someone hexed her.”

“What
happened?” she repeats.

“She yelled at
me. Insulted us, told me I’m a weird fat goth freak.”

Ryan makes a
face. “You’re not goth. You don’t even wear black.”

“Not the point,
Ry.” Tam says as she pats him on the knee like he’s a dumb dog.

“Gotcha. So
what are we going to do?”

I slump to the
floor beside them. “I’m gonna let the yellow thing make her life
miserable until it fades away. Why should I try to help someone
like that? She deserves to fall on her face a few times.”

We manage to
eat our lunches in the remaining few minutes of the lunch period,
our investigation closed on the grounds that the victim deserves
it.

I spent all of
my lunch break still fuming over the things Dina said to me. To
think I tried to help that girl. I should have investigated whether
or not she was a monster beforehand.

Now in fifth
period, I’m sitting in chemistry class, the last class of the day,
at my lab station with Marlene. I filled her in briefly before
class about my encounter with Dina and how I let the hex make the
faucet spray her with water. Mrs. Cole is using an overhead
projector to show us some equations, but most of the class is using
the darkness as convenient cover to lean on their desks and close
their eyes. Only a few students are doing anything more than
sleeping in the dark.

There’s Bryan
Johns, the perfect student, taking notes at the front of the class,
switching between four different pen colours. By the window, Viola
Arnason is looking at her own reflection in the glass. Viola is
gorgeous, because her own face is Viola’s only concern in life. I
swear I have never, ever, noticed her doing anything other than
looking at her own reflection. At the other side of the room, poor
Janelle Haas is trying to pay attention, but her lab partner is
Melanie Woods, the attention-starved class clown. Melanie has taken
to wearing a red bow-tie around her neck and is currently folding
binder paper into origami and trying to make Janelle notice. As I
look around, suddenly engrossed in this little bout of
people-watching, I wonder what it’s like in Dina’s senior classes.
Do they have the same mix of goofballs, vain princesses and
studious nerds? Is there someone in another room of this same
building, staring at Dina and feeding the anger that powers the
hex?

I snap out of
my daydream when the overhead projector dies, and the lights in the
hallway also cut out. For a second or two, there’s no power in the
school at all, and then it comes on again. The overhead hums as it
comes back to life, the fluorescent lights in the hall flicker a
bit before staying on. Mrs. Cole carries on, making some lame joke
about electrical conductivity.

I can hear a
siren coming. It’s still far away, but it’s coming closer. I try to
tell what type of siren it is, but I’m not really good at that.
Police, fire, ambulance, I don’t remember the difference.

At the side of
the class near the window, every kid who has a view to the outside
is peeking under the blinds to see. Even Viola seems to be looking
through the window rather that at her own reflection. The siren has
pulled right up to the school, and then it cuts out with a final
blurp of sound.

“What’s going
on?” Mrs. Cole asks.

“Ambulance,”
says Sarah Santana, one of the students who had been napping
through the lesson. “The EMT guys just took a stretcher into the
school.”

Mrs. Cole
shrugs. “Well, I’m sure they can handle it. If this was anything
that concerned us, there would have been an announcement. Eyes up
front.”

We all go back
to looking at the screen (where Mrs. Cole’s precise penmanship on
the overhead sheets is really quite impressive,) except for the
kids who sit by the window, who are still staring outside for any
sign of the emergency responders.

There’s a
murmur at that side of the class.

“What now?”
Mrs. Cole asks.

“They’re taking
a girl out,” Sarah tells her. Mrs. Cole heads over to the window to
look out, and a lot of students take that as permission to head
over to the window and look for themselves. Soon, most of the class
are standing by the windows, pulling open the blinds to look down
at the front parking lot, where a paramedic is rolling out a
stretcher with a brown-haired girl on it. The girl is moving her
arms, and from here it looks like she’s trying to get up, but the
paramedics keep telling her to lie down. They load her into the
back of the ambulance, close the doors, and pull away.

Mrs. Cole
orders us back to our seats, but the bell rings and school is over,
so we all just start packing our backpacks.

“Did you see
that?” Marlene asks me.

“Yeah, I
saw.”

We both saw
that the girl on the stretcher was Dina Jennings.

Five minutes
later the word has spread throughout the school. We hear it from
Ryan at our lockers. Dina was asked to unplug the extension cord
for the TV after her class watched a video. But there was something
wrong with the outlet, and Dina was electrocuted.

Eventually, I
realize the truth; the undeniable consequence of this development.
The hex is going to kill her.

“Min, I know
you said that she was mean, and that you don’t want to help her,”
Ryan says. “But after this, what if it keeps getting worse? You
might want to stop, but I’m not going to. We have to do
something.”

“Yeah,” says
Tam. “We have find Mason Charles and figure out why he would do
this to her.”

“OK,” I agree.
“Let’s find him right now.”

And the
investigation is back on. Dammit.

We find Mason
Charles in a downstairs hallway. He’s on his way toward the side
doors with one of his friends, and Ryan waves at him, “Mase, can I
talk to ya?”

His friend
seems to be in a hurry, so Mason waves for his buddy to leave and
comes over to us. Mason Charles is a big guy, very wide in the
shoulders. He’s got a thin chinstrap of facial hair and dark bags
under his eyes. With his large backpack on, he looks gigantic.

“What’s up?” he
asks.

“My friend was
wondering,” Ryan say, gesturing at me with a nod of his head, “you
heard if Dina’s gonna be OK?”

“What it matter
to you?” he asks me. “I don’t even know you.”

“I’m Mindee, I
live close to her. We’re sort of neighbors. Just thought maybe you
had heard something.”

Mason shakes
his head. “No, I wasn’t in that class so I heard the rumors same as
everyone else. Hope they just took her away as a precaution. If
she’s really hurt…” he looks away and there’s a shimmer of water in
his eyes. He seems really worried about her.

“My class faced
the ambulance. She was moving around, looked like she didn’t want
them to take her away. I bet she’s OK,” I say.

Mason seems to
take comfort in that. “That’s good. I mean, I know we’re not going
out anymore, but still. It would suck if anything happened to her.
Hopefully she can make it back to school tomorrow.”

“Why? What’s
tomorrow?” I ask.

“It’s the first
day of the campaign. Election for next semester’s student council
president is in a couple weeks and Dina wanted to win it. She
thought it would look good on college applications.”

“I’m sure
she’ll be fine, man,” says Ryan. Ryan’s a good guy. He manages to
say this in a way that seems to actually reassure Mason instead of
just being a platitude.

“Just tell her
you’ll give her your vote,” he says. “She’ll jump out of the
hospital bed for three votes.” We chuckle a bit at the joke and
Mason nods a goodbye. We wait until he’s gone before we talk about
him.

“Seems really
broken up that she’s hurt,” Ryan says. “I don’t think he’s your
hexer.”

“Maybe he feels
guilty. He could have cast it not expecting that to happen,” I say,
thinking out loud.

“If that’s
true, then his anger sure seems like it’s gone now. If he did place
the hex on her, it should be gone now,” says Tam.

“Then we’ll
wait and see. If his anger faded and the hex is gone, then
everything’s fine. But if she’s still hexed tomorrow, I have
another suspect,” I say and point at something on the wall.

There’s a small
poster taped to the wall beside the doors. It says
‘Re-Elect
Wayne Shepherd as SC President. Blue Ribbon Pride.’

“Wayne
Shepherd?” Tam asks. “Never trust a politician, right?”

“Dina could
beat him if she tried. Seems like he might have a pretty good
motive to cast some bad luck her way,” I explain. “Plus, every day
the election gets closer, he could be getting more desperate to
win.”

“And that would
explain why the hex is getting stronger instead of weaker,” says
Tam, realizing what I mean. “If this was about a break-up, the
feelings would fade. But if it’s building toward election day,
it’ll get worse each day.”

“If she’s still
cursed tomorrow,” I say. “We might just have to express an interest
in school politics.”

Dina’s back at
school this morning, with small groups clustering around her locker
before the first bell, everyone wanting to tell her how much they
care and ask if she’s OK. I will not be one of those people. After
yesterday, I’d much rather avoid talking to Dina, even if I am
still trying to save her life. Plus, I don’t need to get close to
see that she’s still trapped inside that yellow aura. If Mason had
cast the hex, and his feelings of anger powered it, then his
remorse yesterday should have broken the hex. That she still glows
yellow means that either Mason wasn’t guilty, or that he deserves
an Oscar for playing concerned so believably.

“So,” said Tam
when she saw me looking down the hall at Dina. “What’s the
prognosis?”

“Still
infected,” I deadpan. “Looks like we’ll have to operate.”

“Feel like
asking Wayne some questions?” she asks.

“No,” I say,
turning my back on Dina. “I want to join Wayne’s campaign.”