Under a Spell (19 page)

“Absolutely.” Sophie grinned as she hugged her assignment close to her chest. Her friend was right. For the last four years all she had dreamed of was her dad coming home, and now it looked like all of her positive thinking and affirmations were finally paying off. In fact, everything was completely and utterly perfect—

“Earth to Sophie,” Kara's voice suddenly cut through her thoughts. “Jonathan is looking this way. Are you going to talk to him?”

Apart from the whole Jonathan Tait thing.

Sophie groaned as she glanced over to see Jonathan standing next to his locker looking grim. It wasn't exactly that she had forgotten about what had happened last week—she had just kind of hoped that if she ignored it enough, it would go away. But judging by the lack of a smile on Jonathan's gorgeous face, she was guessing that it hadn't gone very far.

Well, that sucked.

Especially since, despite the fact that she had a very good explanation for why she had been covering her eyes every time she saw him, it wasn't exactly one that she could tell him. Sophie licked her lips and took a deep breath. She should probably go over and talk to him and say, well…actually, she had no idea what she should say, but hopefully she would figure something out. And if he didn't want to have anything to do with her on account of the fact that she was a freak who had avoided him just because his twin sister had told her to, that was the chance she would have to take.

She cautiously smiled at him. The minute she did so, Harvey, Kara, and Malik melted away (well, Kara and Harvey melted, Malik made a loud snorting noise and then declared that if this was how it was going to end, he would prefer to go watch
High School Musical
, and then he disappeared from sight).

Sophie checked her hair as she made her way across the hallway to where Jonathan was standing. It was as flat
as ever, and she quickly made a wish to give it a bit more body. (
What?
If fixing your hair when you were about to talk to your crush, who probably hated you, wasn't necessary and appropriate use of djinn magic, then she didn't know what was.)

Too soon she was standing in front of him. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, and his hands were thrust deep into the front pockets of his jeans. Sophie couldn't help but notice that he was also clenching and unclenching his jaw as he rocked back and forth on his feet. Suddenly, she wished that Harvey was still there to tell her what jaw clenching and rocking meant. Was it a nervous thing? An “I'm mad as anything at you” thing? Or something else entirely?

She also wished that she had come up with an explanation for why she had been acting like a total freak for the last few days. Because unfortunately, right now she had nothing.

“Hey, Sophie,” he finally spoke as he stopped the jaw clenching.

“Hey,” she gulped in reply before nervously licking her lips and avoiding eye contact. “Look, I'm not really sure how to explain what happened last week.”

“Yeah.” He nodded his head before he finally looked at her. “Okay, so here's the thing. If you like Ben, then just tell it to me straight up.”

“What?” Sophie, who had been desperately trying to
figure out what to say next, paused for a moment to check that she had heard right. “You still think that I like Ben? Didn't you see him and your sister on Saturday morning?”

Jonathan shrugged, still looking a bit pained. “Just because he likes someone else doesn't mean it stops how you feel.”

“I guess not, but I absolutely don't like Ben. How can you even think that?”

“It's not really that crazy. Every time I saw you, you were talking to him, and to make it worse, you kept covering your eyes as if you were cutting me dead. And”—he stopped for a moment and did more jaw clenching—“you took off the guitar pick. I guess when I saw that you weren't wearing it anymore, it just kind of hit me. This is going to sound dumb, but when we were at the concert and Eddie Henry gave it to you, it felt to me like we had a moment—”

“It did? Because that's exactly what I thought,” Sophie exclaimed in an excited voice before realizing that people were starting to look at them. She lowered her voice. “I mean, about having a moment. I thought that, too.”

“Really? So why did you take it off then?” he wanted to know, his dark eyes now steadily staring into hers.

“It's a long story.” Sophie chewed at her lip as she tried to ignore just how tempting it was to put Melissa right in the middle of it. Unfortunately, her better half won out,
and she just shrugged. “But the short version is that I lost it.”

“It's not lost.” Jonathan shook his head as he awkwardly pulled something out of his pocket and held it up. Sophie gasped as she realized he was holding up a delicate silver chain with the familiar-looking guitar pick hanging off it.

“You found it?” Sophie continued to stare at it as he carefully started to undo the tiny catch. “I don't believe it. I didn't think I'd ever see it again.”

“I found it last week before school. It was in a trash can near my locker,” Jonathan admitted. “I just wasn't sure if you wanted it back or not. In fact, I was pretty certain you didn't, but then on Saturday at basketball, when you got me to listen to the third song on the playlist? I guess I hoped you'd changed your mind.”

“My mind never needed changing,” Sophie assured him as she realized he had opened the clasp and was waiting to see if he could put it back around her neck. “It was just a series of freak-crazy things that happened, and I swear that if I have my way, they will never happen again.”

“I'll second that. No more freak-crazy things.” He grinned as he tentatively walked around behind her to put the chain on. Even better, because she was so short he easily slid it around her neck and carefully did the clasp. The minute the delicate silver chain touched her
collarbone, Sophie started to smile. She spun around to face Jonathan again, and they headed down the hallway together. As they went, he nudged her with his elbow. She nudged him back and continued to smile.

Magic or no magic, things had ended up turning out just the way she had wanted them to. Now that's what she called positive thinking.

S
OLOMON'S ELIXIR.

Sophie Campbell's fingers tightened around the tiny vial of amber liquid, which shimmered and sparkled like the sun rising over the Sahara Desert. Well, okay, so Sophie hadn't ever seen the sun rising over the Sahara Desert, but Malik, her ghostly djinn guide, had assured her that it was completely identical, minus all the locusts. Not that it really mattered what the liquid looked like; the important thing was that it was not only the most sought-after magic in the djinn kingdom, it was also the key to freeing her father from the binds of Sheterum, an evil sahir. The idea made Sophie feel giddy, because the sooner her dad was freed, the sooner they could be a proper family again.

Her smile faded slightly.

Unfortunately, there was one small chink in her very good plan. In order for the elixir to free her father, she needed to find out where he was being held, and that was
proving to be a problem. A big problem. Thankfully, Sophie was a positive person and she was sure that the Universe wouldn't have helped her find all of the ingredients to make the elixir (including eel-tail oil extract, which, for the record, stank worse than gym socks) if it wasn't going to help her find out where her father was being held.

And so Sophie slipped the precious vial back into the pocket of her jeans as she made her way through the crowded backstage area of the Robert Robertson Middle School auditorium on Monday afternoon.

“Sorry, I'm late.” She puffed as she came to a halt alongside her two best friends, who were standing next to a papier-mâché flying monkey called Colin. Sophie widened her eyes. “Wow, he looks amazing.”

“I know, right,” Kara agreed as she flipped a strand of long dark hair out of her face and carefully inspected one of the wings to make sure it was okay. Kara, who was the artist of the trio, had spent the last couple of weeks up to her elbows in glue and newspaper making props for the upcoming musical,
The Wizard of Oz
.

“Well, I just hope that they're using lots of ropes on him, because if he falls someone is going to get seriously splattered. I saw this movie once where that exact thing happened,” Harvey, the movie buff of the three, said as he knit his brows together.

“Colin isn't going to be splattering anyone,” Kara cut him off before he could talk about anything too gruesome.
Then she turned back to Sophie and wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, where have you been? The dress rehearsal starts in five minutes. I was starting to think that you'd forgotten about it.”

“Of course I didn't forget about it.” Sophie looked horrified as she wiped the sweat away from her brow and silently concluded that if she had to keep running around school like this, she was going to have to get a lot fitter. “You know that I would never let you down like that.”

“Well, that's good.” Kara looked relieved as she fiddled with one of Colin's monkey ears. “I'm so nervous about Colin's big day.”

“She's not exaggerating,” Harvey confirmed as he held out his arm. “She's been pinching me for the last ten minutes to help her calm down. I'm sure I'm going to have a bruise tomorrow. So what happened? Did you get distracted by Jonathan?”

At the mention of Jonathan Tait's name, Sophie let out a happy sigh, since she thought the seventh grader, with his tanned skin and blond hair, was the most perfect guy in the whole entire world. Plus, he loved Neanderthal Joe almost as much as Sophie did and they had sortofkindofmaybe been hanging out together ever since she had started sixth grade last month. Then she realized her two friends were looking at at her expectantly, so she lost the dreamy expression and gave a quick shake of her head.

“No, it didn't have anything to do with Jonathan,” she
assured them. “It's just that on my way here I noticed that the cafeteria was serving meatloaf.”

“Meatloaf?” Kara squeaked, her normally relaxed face suddenly looking far from happy. “You nearly missed Colin's first proper rehearsal because of some meatloaf?”

“Well, in Sophie's defense, the cafeteria here does make very good meatloaf,” Harvey offered. “Much better than what we got at Miller Road Primary, that's for sure. Apparently they've got a special secret.
What?
” he protested as he suddenly realized the two girls were staring at him. “It's true.”

“We believe you,” Sophie quickly assured him before she turned back to Kara, who was glancing nervously around the backstage area. “But what I mean is that I've been looking for Malik. He promised he would be here by now, so when I saw that the cafeteria was doing meatloaf I thought he might've snuck in there to steal some.”

Her friends both nodded knowingly—stealing meatloaf from the cafeteria was exactly the sort of thing that Malik was likely to do. Unfortunately, ever since Sophie herself had become a djinn, she had been stuck with him as her djinn guide. Not that he did much guiding. Instead he spent most of his time watching YouTube clips, eating Cheetos, and getting Sophie into trouble. Usually all at the same time. Unfortunately, he was also the only hope she had of finding out where her father was.

“So, I gather that Malik wasn't there,” Kara said, her voice full of understanding.

“No.” Sophie let out a frustrated sigh. “I even checked behind the deep fryer where they were cooking the meatloaf, but there was no sign of him.”

“Ah, so that's the secret to the meatloaf. Deep-frying. Nice.” Harvey, who was a big fan of eating, nodded his head in approval before he realized they were staring at him again, and so he coughed. “
But so not the point.
So have you tried clapping him?”

“I've been clapping him all morning,” Sophie said, since according to Malik, clapping was like ringing a doorbell and when she did it he would appear. However, if this was true, then all she could conclude was that Malik's doorbell was broken. Very, very broken. “What if something's happened to him? What if—”

Before she could finish, Patrick Dutton, an emo-looking seventh grader with aqua eyes and Justin Bieber hair, strode toward them. He had a clipboard in one hand and what looked like part of the yellow brick road in the other. Kara immediately started to blush.

“Hey, Kara. The rehearsal is just about to start, but you can watch it from the front. And don't worry, I'll take good care of Colin for you,” Patrick said with a wink. But instead of replying, Kara began to fiddle with her hair as she mumbled something that sounded very much like
mwhooahwwh
. Then, as Patrick carefully moved Colin over to the left side of the stage, Kara dropped her head and hurried to the front of the auditorium as fast as her long legs would take her. Sophie and Harvey
exchanged a surprised glance before they raced after her.