Witch Twins (6 page)

“Bye!” said Claire. “See you at lunch!” Claire got upset in a different way from Luna. Her face turned red, like their dad’s. And she seemed to get very pointy all over, as if a thousand porcupine quills were poking off the surface of her skin. Now, even though she was smiling, she looked pointy as a sword.

She slammed the door to 5A so hard that the floor trembled.

Luna drooped. She went to her desk. She looked across the aisle. Instead of Claire, she saw Adam Chow. Adam was Luna’s cleanup partner and could copy any drawing perfectly. Luna really liked him, but he wasn’t Claire.

Luna’s way of getting upset was to crawl back into the smallest corner of herself, and that’s what she did. She could not pay a second of attention to concepts in math, or reading comprehension, or science. In fact, if the school started to sink into the ground, Luna might not have noticed.

All she knew was that Claire was gone, and she hated it.

In computer lab, which 5A and 5B took together, only at different ends of the lab, Luna sent Claire an e-spell. An e-spell is just like e-mail, only it’s magic. It was one of the few spells Grandy allowed the girls to cast unsupervised. Most hackers can do it without magic, anyway. An e-spell is like a regular e-mail, only written in invisible computer pixel so that nobody except the receiver can read it. Luna’s e-spell went like this:

Dear Clairsie,

I’m so miserable I could die. Who does Fleegermonster think she is, switching you out of 5A? Tonight let’s ask Mom if we can change schools. I wouldn’t mind going to Overbrook Middle. I heard they sometimes have eggrolls for lunch. Love, Luna

A few minutes later, her e-spell reply came in.

Loooon, if we change schools now we miss mayfair & book fair & the lady who’s coming next week w/ her pet trick monkeys. u r the lucky one—i got rosenthal all day & he smells like sower milk!! ! ! ! !

It was not the reply Luna had expected.

“You are staring very intently at that blank screen, Luna Bundkin.” Ms. Fleegerman’s voice barked loud behind her. “I wish you would focus as hard on the assignment at hand. Please insert your CD-ROM and down-load the ‘fun with fractions’ file.”

After computer lab, 5A and 5B rotated. In the hallway, Claire waved and made a sad face. Luna made a sad face back, but Claire did not see it because now she was whispering with Xander Wessels, the new kid whom Claire once said was a jerk. Claire must have decided he was not such a jerk, after all.

The day went from miserable to devastating. At lunch, Luna sat with Adam Chow and in music appreciation, she stood between Frieda Gunderson and Helen Polinski. She realised that she didn’t know Adam, Frieda, or Helen very well at all, although all three of them had come to the twins’ last birthday party. Luna was so used to having Claire at her side that it had never seemed important to make friends with other people in their grade.

First no Mrs. Sanchez, now no Claire. It was that horrible old Ms. Fleegerman’s fault. Luna closed her eyes and imagined all the spells she would cast on Ms. Fleegerman once she took her GSTs and became a one-Star witch. She would cast the Twisted-Toes and Toads spell. The Erase-Facecream spell. The Expanding Wart-Picker’s spell. Thinking of all the good spells made her laugh out loud.

Ms. Fleegerman glared. “Is there some thing so amusing about chorus, Miss Bundkin, that you would like to share it with us?”

“No, thanks, Ms. Fleegerman.”

She could feel the whole class staring. How embarrassing! With no Claire on her side, and Ms. Fleegerman singling her out, Luna sensed that the other kids of 5A were beginning to view her differently. Maybe they were thinking that she was dumb twin, or the weird twin. The not-as-good-as-the-Other twin.

It was awful.

“How was your first day in Five B?” she asked Claire as they walked home together.

“Not as bad as I thought. Alexa and Courtney and I made up a club. We named it the Mariposa Club, because butterflies are our club symbol, and
mariposa
is the Spanish word for butterfly. Isn’t that a great word? Courtney even markered a mariposa on the bathroom stall door. You can be in our club, too, if you want. And look!” Claire rolled up her arm to show the pink-and-purple butterfly just above her elbow. “Alexa drew that on me. Doesn’t it look just like a real tattoo?”

“Not really,” Luna answered. She could hardly even talk from sadness.

“How’s old Ms. F? Luckily, I only have to see her for natural history class and computer sciences.”

“Gee, thanks for rubbing it in,” said Luna.

At home, Luna dragged herself upstairs to their mother’s room and closed the door. Their mother’s room was very peaceful. It had a feather comforter and scented candles and many framed pictures of Justin, Luna, and Claire. But right now, Luna did not want to look at any pictures of herself. She turned them all facedown. Then she spied one of her mother’s fuzzy slippers on the floor. It looked a little bit like a kitten.

Luna picked up the slipper, stretched out on the bed, and pulled the comforter up to her neck. She hugged the slipper, wishing that she had a real little kitten for a lonely time like now. She let a tear plop onto the pillow. And another. She closed her eyes.

“Luna?”

Luna’s eyes opened. The room had gone dark. Her mother was sitting next to her on the bed. “Are you all right?” Her hand was cool against Luna’s forehead. “You don’t feel feverish. Is that my slipper you’re holding?”

“Sorry Mom. I’m okay. I didn’t mean to fall asleep in here.” The pillow smelled spitty. Luna raised her head, handed over the slipper, and wiped her cheek.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?” Now her mother reached over to the bedside table and stood one of the pictures upright. Luna looked hard at the photograph, taken at the beach after she and Justin and Claire had spent the entire afternoon digging a hole. She and Claire were standing in the hole on either side of Justin, so the picture was of Justin’s entire face but only the tops of the twins’ heads to their noses. It was almost impossible to know that Luna was the twin on the right.

Seeing the picture made Luna’s eyes fill up again. “Claire got moved into Five B,” she said.

“I know. She told me. She said that apart from missing you, it wasn’t as bad as she expected.”

Luna sniffled, then put her face in her hands. “When we’re apart, Claire gets to keep her whole self, but I’m only half of me.”

“Oh, Luna!” Her mother hugged her very long. Then she said, “Let me tell you a story. When you and Claire were little, nobody could tell you apart except for your dad and I. Do you know how? Because Claire was awake all day, and you were awake all night.” She smiled to herself, remembering. “So we always knew you from Claire, because Claire shone with the sun and you shone with the moon.”

“But we don’t go to school at night!” Luna wailed.

Her mother smoothed back Luna’s hair. “What I mean to say is, you both shine in different phases. Wait until the glare wears off this change and you feel more comfortable with it. Then you’ll shine, too, in your own special light.”

“What if I don’t shine?”

Her mother’s eyes narrowed in thought and then she spoke seriously. “If you
really
feel that you need to be with Claire, then I’ll have a talk with Ms. Fleegerman. As far as I’m concerned, children don’t need to switch rooms midyear for their own or anyone else’s good. But will you promise to think of it as a challenge, and give it a try?”

Luna nodded, although the only thing she wanted to try was to put Claire’s desk, and everything else, back to the way it was.

The next day was just as lonely, though, and so was the next. Claire, however, was going to a Friday-night pizza party with other members of the Mariposa Club.

“You can come, too, of course, Loon,” she said, but Luna said no thanks. She didn’t know Alexa and Courtney that well.

By the middle of the next week, Luna was wondering when her mother was going to have that talk with old Ms. Fleegerman. Recess was especially lonely. She had used to have recess with Claire, but now she always took a book to read on the tires. Today she had forgotten to bring out a book. Some of the other kids were playing Destroyer, and a few were doing gymnastics. Luna was not good at either of those things.

When Claire had been around, they had used to do gymnastics, too, with Luna spotting for Claire and then scoring her from one to ten. Without Claire, Luna realized that she didn’t love-love -love gymnastics so much, after all. In fact, without Claire, Luna wouldn’t have minded indoor recess.

Luna sat on the tires and kicked her legs. Then she walked out to the blacktop to watch kids get slammed out of Destroyer. After a few minutes, she picked up a rock and started to draw on the blacktop. It was a good rock, with a sharp part for details and a blunt part for shading.

First she drew Grandy’s cat, Wilbur. She drew him sitting in the branches of a shaggy cypress tree. After a few minutes, some of the kids who had been slammed out of Destroyer began to creep and then to clump around her, watching.

“Hey, look what she drew!”

Behind the tree, Luna drew a sliver of moon. She shaded in some clouds.

“That’s really good, Luna.” Some of the gymnasts had stopped their front flips and back flips to watch.

Soon almost a dozen kids, including Mr. Dooley, the recess monitor, had made a giant circle around her.

“I didn’t even know you could draw, Luna,” said Adam Chow. “Why aren’t you helping us with the scenery for our play?”

Luna shrugged. Claire was awful at drawing, so they both had signed up for stage-managing.

“Think about it,” said Adam. “I’m sure it’s not too late.”

“Okay,” said Luna.

“I saw your nice drawing at Five B recess,” said Claire that afternoon as they walked home from school. “Now Courtney and Alexa really want you to be in our club. You’d draw the best mariposas of all. All you have to do to join is hold your breath for one minute and eat a handful of grass. Think about it.”

“Okay” said Luna.

After a couple of days of thinking about it, Luna decided not to be in the Mariposa Club. Instead, she switched over from stage-managing to painting the play scenery with Adam Chow. The play that year was The
Princess and the Pea.

“It’s mostly drawing palaces and forests,” said Adam.

But palaces and forests were Luna’s specialty. And she noticed that every time she picked up her paintbrush, other kids put theirs down to watch.

Soon she was giving them tips. “If you use a lot of water, then you can always go back for a do-over.” Or, “Sometimes a dot of white here and there can make a surface look shiny.”

One afternoon, during A and B’s hall rotation, Luna found herself in a debate about whether
The Princess and the Pea
was a girl play or a boy play or both. Adam Chow was on Luna’s side (they thought it was both) and Jeb Myers disagreed (he said it was a girl play), but it was a good kind of argument. Luna was surprised that she had so much strong opinion inside her. She felt for a minute like one of Grandy’s buddies. It took a nudge from Adam to look across the hall.

Claire was waving to her.

Luna waved back.

“You don’t have to have that talk with old Ms. Fleegerman,” Luna said that night to her mother when she came in to kiss the twins good-night.

“Have things become a little easier for you?” asked her mother.

Luna thought for a minute. “Let’s just say, I think I’m phasing into it,” she answered.

“M
OM, ARE YOU SAD
about Fluffy?” asked Claire.

She and Luna and Justin were all sitting in the living room, trying to help their mother close her suitcase. She was leaving for Arizona to speak at a medical convention. She would be away until late the next night. “Long after all you munchkins are in bed,” she told them.

“Now why would you ask a thing like that?” Jill Bundkin raked her hands through her hair so that it spiked like a cactus. “I have an idea. Girls, sit on the suitcase. Justin, you push down from one side, and I’ll push from the other.”

The twins sat. Justin and their mother pushed.

The suitcase would not close.

“Just because,” Claire continued, “if you and Dad were still married, then he would be going with you to Arizona for company.”

“Girls, off. Let’s flip the suitcase.” The twins got off. They flipped the suitcase. “One of the interesting things about divorce,” said Jill Bundkin, “is that it makes a person independent.” She sat down hard on the suitcase. It still would not close. “Besides, I don’t mind going to Arizona alone. I’m looking forward to it, actually. The air is thin and easy on my sinuses.”

“And Mom could always take Steve, stupid,” said Justin. “She wants to be a lone wolf on this trip.” He let out a fantastic wolf howl. The twins covered their ears.

“Justin,” said their mother, “don’t call your sister stupid. Anyway, Claire, to answer your question, no, I’m not sad about Fluffy. I am happy with Steve and your dad is happy with Fluffy. In my opinion, she seems like a levelheaded woman, in spite of her name.”

“I like her, too. She gave me a disposable camera, last time I was over,” said Justin. “She’s always getting cool stuff from her job.”

“Hey, we didn’t get any camera,” said Luna.

“That’s because you never go there, stupid.”

“Don’t call your sister stupid,” said their mother. “Now, watch this!” She gave a back-ward leap into the air, then landed hard on the suitcase. The locks snapped into place.

Everybody applauded, then Justin picked up the suitcase and hauled it to the door.

“You girls need to find a way to build an understanding with Fluffy,” said their mother, pinching each of their noses. “But right now, I’m more concerned you understand that Grandy is the boss while I’m gone. Okay, pile on the kisses and hugs, because I won’t see you for two whole days!”

They attacked, even Justin, who acted more like himself when nobody from school was around to see him.

Outside, a checkered cab pulled up with a beep, and everyone watched through the window as Grandy and Wilbur leaped out. In one hand, Grandy held her flowered overnight bag; in the other, she grasped a dragon-handled walking cane. (The cane was not magic. It was meant to shoo pigeons.)