The Popularity Spell (13 page)

“Okay, now remember, we have to concentrate as hard as last time. Even harder,” Sam says.

Since we want Terri (and her entire body) to stay away from Dad, Sam puts the pin in the doll's middle. We sit down on top of the gravestone. I can feel the coldness on my butt even though I'm wearing jeans. I look down but don't want to close my eyes in this creepy graveyard. I don't believe in ghosts of dead people, but I never thought I believed in voodoo either, and look how that turned out. Best to keep my eyes open, stare at my wine-stained voodoo doll, and concentrate on Terri. I think about her brushing my hair…rolling pigs…sitting with Dad on the beach…but these aren't the right kind of thoughts, so I focus on her with a big sack of money from her new job making graphics for a huge TV station. She's moving out of her little house in our neighborhood and into a big mansion with a patio far away at the beach. I imagine her with her new rich boyfriend, and they're making dinner together, only it's in our kitchen and I'm there too. This is strange, and it feels like it's taking longer than usual. I can't help squirming a little.

I'm glad when the five minutes are over. Sam looks up, pleased. “Awesome, huh?”

“Yeah, that was fun,” I lie, getting on my feet. A breeze blows across my sweaty arms and I shiver. The leaves make crinkling sounds above me and I look up. The trees look darker now, with their gnarly branches blacker than the purple sky. “We'd better go, though. We've got to walk back to your condo, climb through the window, and have dinner, and hope your mom and my dad aren't finished eating already.”

“Stop worrying so much,” Sam says. She takes her time putting the doll back in my backpack. “We have to give them time to keep falling in love. Plus, my mom says worrying gives you wrinkles and it's not a very attractive quality.”

Paige would know things like that. She's going to be good to have around as I get older.

“I just don't want to get in trouble. Can we go?”

Sam zips the voodoo doll back up in my backpack and throws it over her shoulders. “Okay,” she says. “Let's go.” I can tell she's annoyed, but sometimes sisters act that way so I guess it's okay.

I wonder if there's always this much compromise involved with having a sister.

We walk back quickly. I can smell that the barbecues in the neighborhood are mostly over. I still see TVs in the windows, but I don't hear as many kids making noise inside. My heart is pounding when we go back through Samantha's bedroom window.

Sam must be hungry from all the walking too, because she sits right on the floor and opens the pizza box. We chow down finally, but it's not as delicious as I hoped it would be, not after all this time.

A little later there's a knock at Sam's door. Dad and Paige's date must be over.

“Hey, Cleo,” Dad says. “Time to go.”

Usually I'd beg to stay longer, but tonight I'm still jumpy from sneaking out and doing a hex in a graveyard, so I'm ready in no time. In the car on the way home, I hear my phone ding with a text. I'm expecting it to be from Sam, but it's not.

It says,
Hey, it's Terri. Heard you went to Samantha's tonight. Hope you had as much fun as these two!
Underneath there's a link to a cartoon that looks like she put it together herself. It's a super-cute monkey dancing with an even cuter millipede.

Since I've only ever gotten texts from Dad and Samantha, this is a really nice surprise. I didn't even know Terri had my phone number. Now when I think about her moving away or getting a new job or dating another guy, I feel a little bad.

But just a little.

I
wake up in the middle of the night. It's completely dark out and my brain can only compute one thing: stink! Something smells, reeks, and is offensive to my nostrils! There's only one thing in the world that smells like this—at least only one thing I've ever smelled in my almost twelve years—
skunk
! One of those nasty black-and-whiters might as well have come into my bedroom, lifted its tail, and sprayed right up my nose; that's how close it smells.

Los Angeles is one of the biggest cities in the world, but sometimes in our neighborhood we see animals you wouldn't expect, like coyotes and possums…and skunks. It's not so bad if we're driving in the hills and we smell it far away, but when it's right in your bedroom, whew! Disgusting!

First there's the smell; then there's a yell. It's Dad. “Oh, no! Cleo, is Toby in your room?”

The smell just filled up my nose so I haven't had time to look around. It's pretty dark, but I see Toby on the floor right next to my bed, his tongue hanging out, and I'm not kidding when I say it looks like he's
smiling.
Right away I figure out what must have happened. Toby went out through the dog door in the middle of the night and got himself into an argument with a skunk. Knowing Toby, he was probably just trying to make friends, but a skunk wouldn't understand that.

Dad opens my bedroom door. The hallway light is on, so I can see he's in a T-shirt and his underwear and his face is red like he swallowed hot sauce. “Toby!” he yells, putting a couple of curse words in there too. “Cleo, go take a shower and wash your hair as fast as you can; then go wait in the car so I can take you to school.”

I look at my clock. It's 4:35 in the morning and school doesn't start until 8:30. I say this to Dad but I guess I shouldn't have, because he yells, “Would you rather sit in the house until then?”

I wouldn't rather do that, so I jump out of bed. Dad pulls Toby out of my bedroom by his collar. Toby's not smiling anymore. Now he looks ashamed.

In the shower, I almost feel like throwing up a couple times because the smell doesn't only fill my nose, it fills every part of my entire body, including my stomach. And I can't get rid of it, no matter how much soap and shampoo I use.

When I'm dressed and out of the bathroom, Dad goes right in so he can wash off. I start to walk out of the house, but I hear Toby bumping around behind the closed door of the laundry room. Dad must have put him there so he doesn't get his smell all over more stuff. “Toby, are you okay?” I ask.

Whimper whimper whine.

“Did Dad put food and water in there for you?”

Whine whimper whine.

I don't want Toby to spend hours in the laundry room without anything to snack on, so I open the door a teeny bit to look inside. In the one second it takes me to spot his bowls, he pokes his nose through the crack of the door; then pushes through and jumps up on me.

“No, Toby! No, no, no!” I shout, pushing him back inside and closing the door. He definitely got a little more smell on me, but I zoom to the kitchen sink and wash my hands and arms with dish soap. Hopefully Dad won't notice.

I run down to the car and pretend like I've been there all along. Dad gets in a few minutes later. His hair is wet and he smells mostly like soap, but with a skunky aftersmell.

“Well, that was an adventure,” he says. He actually doesn't sound so mad anymore. “So how about we go to the store to buy tomato juice and vinegar so I can clean Toby up later, and then we go to Wingberry's for breakfast?”

This sounds great! “Okay!” I say, and Dad pulls out of the garage.

At the grocery store, we push a cart down the aisles until we find what we need. When we unload the cans and jugs onto the counter, the lady knows our dog got skunked. “From what we're buying?” Dad asks.

“No, from the stench!” She laughs and we do too.

We get to Wingberry's, which is my favorite restaurant in all of California, at least since we moved here three months ago. It's a diner with fun pictures and cartoons all over the walls, and waiters and waitresses who always seem happy. Wingberry's has the biggest, most delicious juicy burgers and salty fries, and Dad once told me that it's open all day and all night long. But I've never been here at this hour. It's 5:52 a.m.

The waiter at Wingberry's knows we've been skunked too, but he thinks it's funny and asks what we want. Dad lets me have a burger even though it's breakfast time, and he orders cheesy eggs with onions and peppers. He also orders a ham, cheese, and egg croissant, and I figure that all the early morning excitement made him extra hungry. But before the food arrives, I see why he ordered so much. Of all the people in Los Angeles and the world, who walks past the front window and into the restaurant but Terri?

“What are you doing here?” I ask as she sits down next to Dad.

“Oh, I was just up at the crack of dawn and I got hungry and thought, Wingberry's is open, I'll go there.”

“Really?” I ask.

Dad and Terri stare at me like I'm a skunk at a tea party. “What do you think?” Dad asks.

The answer is obvious but it seems too crazy to believe. What kind of lady comes out to breakfast at five in the morning with her boyfriend and his dumb kid? She must really,
really
like Dad. And after her text last night, I'm starting to think she likes me too.

“Wow,” I say. “I wonder if Samantha's mom would ever do anything like this.”

“Why?” Terri asks, with a glance at Dad. “What kind of stuff does Samantha's mom do?”

“Oh, she orders dinner from fancy restaurants, and has long red nails, and wears high heels, and tells Dad his cooking is scrumptious and stuff. She's got really pretty hair—I already told you about that—and all her clothes look like they're from Beverly Hills. And she's always wearing makeup, even at the pool.” Then I realize that Terri doesn't even know Samantha's mom, so what does she care? In Focus! class, Roberta teaches us to consider how what we're saying affects other people, and to pay attention to whether they seem interested or not. So I change the subject back to Terri. “Why'd you come to breakfast?”

“Well, I don't have to be at work till nine, so maybe I'll go back to sleep afterward,” Terri says. “After all,
my
house doesn't smell like skunk!”

“You're lucky,” I tell her. “Because it stinks!”

“Actually,” she says with a sniff, “I can smell it on you two a little.”

“We know,” Dad says, pretending to be ashamed like Toby. “But do you still like us?”

“You're buying me breakfast, so I like you fine!” Terri jokes, messing up Dad's wet hair with her hand. The food comes a few minutes later. I dig into my tasty burger as the sky gets lighter outside and it becomes morning for real. I'm having a pretty good time, but this is the opposite of what Sam and I concentrated on. In our hex, we wanted Terri to spend
less
time with Dad.

Did something go wrong? Or do we just have to wait a little longer?

At school, Samantha meets me at our classroom door. “So, did anything happen yet?” she asks.

“Not…exactly,” I say, speaking slowly because lots of thoughts are suddenly coming into my brain.

“What does that mean? Has your dad heard anything from Terri?” Before I can answer, she keeps going. “No, wait, it's better if he
doesn't
hear from her. Do you know if he talked to her this morning?”

“Yeah, Dad's talked to Terri. We've even seen her.”

“Before school? Why would you see Terri this early in the morning?” Samantha asks. “And why do you smell so weird? If you've started using deodorant, that is
not
the right brand. It smells like…”

“Skunk,” I tell her. “Toby was skunked this morning. It woke me up at four-thirty. And Dad was mad at first, but then he invited Terri to breakfast and he felt better. But Dad
is
mad at Toby. He closed him in the laundry room so he can clean him up later.”

“Did he jump on you after you got dressed?” Sam asks, picking something off my T-shirt. “You've got red hairs all over you.” She holds a strand up to her nose. “Oh yeah, that's skunk!” she sneers, tossing it to the ground.

At that moment, I understand what went wrong. It all comes to me like a light turned on in the middle of the night. We concentrated on keeping Terri and Dad apart, but instead Dad got separated—this morning anyway—from someone else whose name begins with a
T.

There's someone in our bathroom a lot more than Terri is. Someone with long red hair…who lies on the floor…and sheds.

The hair on the bathroom floor wasn't Terri's at all.

Now I just have to tell Sam.

I take a breath and work up the courage. “We used the wrong hair,” I say.

“What do you mean ‘the wrong hair'?” Then she looks down on the ground where she threw the hair she picked off my shirt.

Sam looks back at me. I can tell she understands.

Before I can say anything else, Lisa Lee and Kylie Mae push past us to get into the classroom. They obviously get a whiff of me, because they each make a face and Lisa says, “The piggy from Ohio smells like a skunk today!” With Madison gone, I guess she decided to take over her duties. Great.

“How did that happen? Toby's hair?” Sam asks.

“The bell's gonna ring,” I say.

“So tell me fast.”

Talking fast is my specialty, so I do it. “I didn't pick the hair off Terri's head, I picked it off the bathroom floor. It was long and red like Terri's so I thought it was hers, but it was Toby's. I didn't do it on purpose.”

Sam looks at me and doesn't say anything. We both know I screwed up. Finally she says, “That sucks.”

And before I can say anything back, the bell rings and we rush toward our seats.

“Well, you're going to have to get the right hair, and we're going to have to hang out after school again this week,” Sam whispers as we sit. “I'll text my mom and tell her to work on it.”

Kevin starts talking, so I can't discuss it with her anymore.

But I'm not listening to Kevin. I'm busy wondering how I'm going to get a piece of Terri's hair.

Her
real
hair.