Crush Control (29 page)

Quinton nodded. “Yeah, it's awesome.”

“Want to watch it?”

“Sure.”

I slid the new disc into the player. I returned to the couch and took Quinton's hand. He smiled down at me. The first preview started. I wrestled my way out of our interlocking grip and grabbed the remote. “Come on, come on,” I said as I fast-forwarded through the coming attractions. “Okay, there.” I put the remote down and snuggled into him. I took his hand in mine and replayed in my mind the text I had read. The handshake needed to be quick and abrupt, with a jerky flick of the wrist.
Okay. I can do this. I have to do this.

Suddenly the creepy music began to play—the telltale sign of impending horror. I held his hand tightly. The music got louder. On-screen, a girl screamed.

Quick as I could, I yelled. “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” I yanked his hand and wrenched his wrist as hard as possible.

“Shit!” Quinton gasped, pulling his hand away from my grip. His elbow flailed out in the sudden movement, colliding with one of the five burning candles on the end table.

“Oh no,” I screamed as one of the candles toppled off the table and fell onto the ground. The circulating fan blew the flames just enough for them to ignite the edges of the glossy
People
magazine stashed next to the couch

“Shiiiiiiit,” Quinton yelled. Definitely. Not. Hypnotized.

I stood up, panicked, as
People
continued to burn.
What to do?
I ran toward the kitchen to get water. I grabbed the first container I saw—Mom's coffee mug—and filled it up from the tap. I darted back into the living room to find Quinton, shirtless, patting out the flames with his Worthington High Football T-shirt. I set the coffee mug down on the coffee table and slumped in exhaustion.

Quinton stood up, holding the charred T-shirt in his hand. If I wasn't so dejected, I might have noticed his rock-solid chest and abs. As he turned, I saw a tiny little scar on the small of his back. Evidence of our very first encounter, when things were just silly and embarrassing. Before all the madness took over.

Above us, the fire alarm began to sound.
Shriek. Shriek. Shriek.

“What a night,” Quinton groaned.

He only knew the half of it.

Quinton got a chair to climb up and disengage the alarm. With each pulsating blast of the siren, I felt the clock ticking, warning me, that if I didn't fix Quinton's head soon, things would only get worse.

Sunday morning I stared up at the loose wires dangling down from the dismantled fire alarm. I wished it were as easy to break whatever connections were misfiring in Quinton's brain. Wires I could deal with, but Quinton's brain was turning out to be an incomprehensible challenge. I called Georgia and replayed the night's disaster.

“We'll figure something out,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, she arrived at my doorstep holding a small plastic bag. She handed it to me. Inside was a wad of tangled necklaces. “You work on those and I'll search for ideas. Where's your computer?”

I brought the laptop from my bedroom and set it up on the kitchen table. “I've searched for everything,” I said, but Georgia sat down and started typing with determination.

I sat down across from her and pulled out the first tangled bundle of chains. Georgia clicked away on the computer, occasionally huffing in frustration or cocking her head in fascination while I used the sharp point of a safety pin to create a small window of separation between the two tangled chains.

“I think maybe we need to investigate other options,” she said.

I looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, obviously getting Quinton back under hypnosis no longer seems like it's going to happen.”

I sighed. “But what else can we do? It said if unbroken, a hypnotic suggestion can be lifelong. LIFELONG!” I was beyond trying to camouflage my panic.

“Right, but listen, I have an idea. In
Midsummer's Night Dream
, the fairy puts a love spell on Lysander to make him fall in love with Helena, right?”

“Right,” I said, uncertain where she was going.

“Well, essentially you used hypnosis to put a love spell on Quinton.”

Hmmm.
“Okay, so?”

“So rather than focusing on undoing the hypnosis, maybe we need to explore how to undo the love spell.”

Interesting. “A love spell? Is there really such a thing?”

Georgia nodded and smiled. “Oh, there is. And look, I think I might have found our answer.”

“What?” I scooted to her side of the table and peered at the screen. “ ‘Head Cleaners'?” The page was an eerie shade of plum purple, with sparkling yellow stars twinkling all over the site. In the upper right corner was a candle with the flame's pixels twitching. “What kind of website is this?” I asked suspiciously.

She clicked on a link. “Look, it says she's the number one–rated spell caster for authenticity and honesty and glorious results.
Glorious results
, Willow!”

I leaned in over her shoulder while she read out loud.

“It claims she can formulate a cleansing drink to reverse any spell gone wrong.”

“I don't know,” I said, leery. “This seems so . . . weird.”

“Well”—Georgia threw her hands up in the air—“what other options do we have?”

I looked up at the dangling wires of the fire alarm and recalled the suspicious look in my mother's eyes. The clock was ticking. Quinton was spiraling. It wouldn't take much longer before Mom figured out what I had done. And if she did . . . “Okay.” I turned to Georgia. “How does this Head Cleaner thing work? How do you get the cleansing drink or whatever you called it?”

“Well . . .” Georgia puckered her mouth. “It's forty bucks to get a custom-built potion.”

I thought about the maxed-out credit card. “I can't use my mom's credit card for this,” I said. “She'll figure it out. But I have cash saved that my grandparents send me for my birthday every year . . .”

Georgia thought for a moment. “I have an emergency credit card my mom gave me that I've never used. I could just be on the lookout for when the new statement comes in the mail and grab it before my mom sees it.”

“I could give you the cash right now,” I offered.

“Deal.” She dug into her wallet and plugged the numbers into the computer.

Instantly an online chat box appeared and a prompt asked:
Tell me exactly what kind of cleansing potion you require.

So I typed in a thorough description of the problem. A little hourglass appeared on the screen, telling me whoever was on the other side was hopefully thinking long and hard about my predicament. Finally the response appeared.

“O-kay.” Georgia clapped her hands together. “Let's see, we need oil and water and salt. . . .” She started rummaging through the cabinets.

I stared at the words. It seemed crazy. A wacky anti-love potion, seriously? But at least it was a plan, and I had run out of any other options. So I read it and joined Georgia in the preparation. “Do you think we should wait and do this tomorrow? Mom's yoga class ends in, like, twenty minutes.”

Georgia looked at the clock. “It's up to you. Do you want Quinton's love spell to linger any longer?”

I clenched my jaw and grabbed the laptop. “What else do we need? A sprig of cherry blossoms for new beginnings,” I read. “Cherry blossoms?”

“Hmmm,” Georgia thought, sitting on top of the counter as she pulled things off a shelf. “Well, all the cherry trees bloom in the spring. Maybe just pull some leaves from a cherry tree?”

I shrugged. “I guess that'll work.” I walked outside to the end of our driveway and reached up to pull some drying leaves off the branches from our cherry tree. When I went back inside the house, Georgia was holding a large chili pot in the air.

“Do you think this constitutes a ‘suitably large vessel'?” she asked.

“Looks good to me.”

She measured out the water, oil, vinegar, and salt and added a pinch of thyme.

I crinkled the yellow and orange leaves into the pot; then we placed it on the stove. I turned the gas flame on and waited until the mixture came to a boil. I held my hand over the pot and read off the computer in a deep, solemn voice. “
Fire warm, fire bright, fire glows in the night.
”

Georgia giggled.

I hushed her and continued. “
Fire shines like the sun. Now the transformation has BEGUN!
”

The front door swung open with a whoosh and Georgia and I screamed. “AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!”

“AAAAHHHHHH!” Mom shrieked in return, clutching her hand to her chest. She stared at us. “What are you doing?”

“Science experiment,” Georgia answered quickly. “Look.” She turned to me, all serious. “The leaves
did
disintegrate under a certain amount of heat.”

“Right, right!” I reached over to the computer and clicked it shut inconspicuously. “So, um, here, let's pour the um,
scientific evidence
into this Nalgene bottle to um, bring to school tomorrow.”

“Right,” Georgia said, carefully pouring the potion from the chili pot into a Nalgene bottle “Just be careful,” she said slowly, “not to mix this up with
Quinton's Gatorade bottle at lunch
because who knows what would happen if he
drank it
.”

“Hmm,” Mom said. “I don't ever remember doing science labs at home,” she mused, grabbing a Ding Dong from the basket. “But maybe that's because I missed most of my chemistry labs. I was too busy making out with Tommy DeVito behind the art building!” She chuckled then slipped off into her room.

Georgia handed me the plastic bottle. “Guard this with your life.”

We nodded in unison both of us hoping for a good outcome.

The next day I wrestled Quinton's blue Gatorade from his backpack while he was busy unloading his football uniform from the trunk of the car. I poured out half of the blue liquid and added our cleansing potion. I shook it vigorously then returned it to his backpack.

At lunch, when he sat down at our table, he had a cup of ice water on his tray along with his pizza. My stomach got all twisted with anxiety. The potion needed to be consumed within twenty-four hours or it supposedly lost its magic. If he waited until football practice, it might be too late. I glanced down at his backpack. Quinton took a bite of his pizza. Mia asked me something, but I didn't hear her, I was too distracted, willing Quinton to get his Gatorade.

Then suddenly he reached down, pulled out the blue bottle, and placed it next to his tray. I sighed relief.

“Are you okay?” Mia asked me. “You're acting kind of . . . strange.”

“Oh, I'm fine. Good,” I said as I dropped my banana. “Ooops.”

Quinton squinted at me. “You're kind of jumpy.” He reached for his cup of water.

In desperation, I shot my arm out and knocked the whole cup out of his hand. “Oh, shoot,” I said. “Sorry, sorry,” I said as ice landed in his lap. I grabbed some napkins and just sort of tossed them into his lap. “No sense in getting X-rated, ha-ha-ha,” I blabbered.

Mia screwed up her face. “Did you drink too much caffeine or something?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I lied. I sat back down and tapped my toe nervously.

When Quinton had dried himself off, he took another bite of pizza but didn't reach for the Gatorade. So I crafted a quick distraction.

“Look!” I pointed. “Sadie cut her hair into a pixie!” Everyone at the table turned and I swiftly sprinkled some salt onto Quinton's pizza.

“That's not Sadie,” Jake said. “It's Mr. Robertson.”

“Oh gosh, really? My mistake.” I innocently took a bite of my turkey sandwich.

Quinton took a bite of his pizza. His mouth puckered and he reached for his Gatorade. He chugged half of the bottle in one giant gulp.

He ran his tongue over his teeth, then reached into his mouth and pulled out what looked like a bit of leaf. “What the . . . ?” He stared at it.

Cherry blossoms,
I thought,
please do your magic.