Dancing on the Edge (14 page)

After school, while I was unlocking Etain from the bike rack, some of the girls came back up to me and asked about the ceremonies. By then I had had time to think. I told them how each generation of women in my family had one of the supernatural talents. My grandmother could contact the dead, my mother could see into the future, and I could cast love spells, spells that would make someone fall in love with you.

The girls were laughing and their voices got high and squeally again. They had turned to each other, ignoring me and talking about Cash Franklin, the hottest guy in school. One of the girls mentioned another boy's name and they all laughed, imagining him under their spell. More girls gathered around me and they told one another who they wanted for their “love punkin” and laughed some more and pretended to be under a spell themselves, and some of them missed their bus but they didn't care.

Etain and I stood at the center of the crowd almost forgotten and then someone asked, “But what if more than one person likes the same guy? Then what?”

Everyone got quiet and turned to me, waiting for my answer.

I tightened my shawl, making a double knot, keeping my fingers busy and trying to think fast. My knees were shaking. “Oh, well,” I said, still busy with the knot, “I do a spell that only lasts a couple of weeks, and whoever comes to me first gets the spell. Because, uh, in order to make the spell permanent, the guy who's under the spell must come to me and request the girl who put him under the spell. If he does that, then it becomes permanent, but permanent means forever, so I'm very careful about doing permanent spells. Permanent can be a disaster.” I tried to give them a knowing look to show them I had had plenty of experience with disasters.

They asked me more questions, like how long does it take for the spell to work, and when could I do it, and could I do it there in school? The questions were all coming so fast I couldn't think, and I was getting scared. I pushed Etain through the crowd of girls and said I had to get home, that we'd talk some other time, and the girls let me go.

Then, after I'd climbed on Etain, before I pedaled away, I saw a girl standing under a tree just beyond the crowd. She was watching me, and it made something inside me squeeze up tight. She reminded me of the wig heads watching me at home.

I
COULD FIND NOWHERE
to hide, nowhere I felt safe. That was the problem with Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole's house. They didn't have a basement, a cave I could tuck myself into surrounded by Dane's books. I couldn't hide in my bedroom with all those wig heads watching me all the time, keeping me awake at night. I couldn't even hide in the bathtub because they didn't have one, just a shower stall with an old mildewed shower curtain hanging from it. The curtain felt slimy and smelled bad the way Etain's saddle did whenever it got wet.

I needed to hide. I knew those girls at school would expect me to cast spells and give them potions. I knew they'd be waiting for me when I went to school the next morning. I wanted to hide under the covers in my bed and never come out. I took off my shawl and put on Dane's robe and climbed onto my bed. I closed my eyes and strained to get to my fairyland, but even that had disappeared—melted. I blamed it on the wig heads. They were waiting for me, lined up on the shelf, laughing their nasty laugh. “What do
you
know about love?”

I got under the covers, but I could feel the wig heads behind me, wanting an answer, waiting for my answer. I curled up tight, barely breathing, sweating beneath so many covers. What did I know about love? Why did I tell all those girls I could cast love spells? Why not contacting the dead or reading auras or palms even? I couldn't breathe. I threw off the covers, gasping for air. I sat up and faced the wig heads. “I don't believe in love,” I told them. “It's not real. It's not a live thing.” I stood up and went to the shelves. “That's what I know. I know all about it. I'm wiser than anybody. I'm an expert on love because I know the truth—there's no such thing.” I turned one of the heads around so just the back of the wig faced me. “You can't touch it, can you?” I turned another one around. “You can't hold it in your hand, can you? Can you? Can you?” I turned them all around, facing away from me. “Love is make-believe. It's all make-believe, and I can make believe I'm the world's greatest spell caster. So what do you think about that?”

The wig heads didn't answer.

“I didn't think so. You're not real. You can't watch me or tell me anything.”

I stayed up all night reading the book of spells Gigi sent me, and it didn't matter that I couldn't read Greek. I studied the words, the shapes of the letters, and I studied the picture on the page opposite the words and a feeling would come over me. Each page left me with a different feeling, a different idea for casting spells and creating potions. And while I read and turned myself Into the world's greatest spell caster, Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey were in their bedroom across the hall, fighting.

Uncle Toole claimed Aunt Casey wasn't the woman he had married anymore. He said she'd changed and he didn't like the change one single bit. He said there wasn't one sexy thing about her left now that she was all into the college life, and her head was filled with so much garbage there wasn't any room for him.

Aunt Casey said Uncle Toole hadn't changed enough. She said he was stuck in adolescence, refusing to grow up, and she knew for a fact he hadn't been just working too hard lately. She said he was up to his old tricks, and that's when Uncle Toole said, “That just shows what you know. I have too changed, you just aren't around enough anymore to notice.”

They slammed a lot of doors back and forth and Uncle Toole had to sleep in the living room on one of his busted-up sofas. Love wasn't real. If they just realized that, if they could just understand that very simple thing, they'd never fight again.

 

M
ARY
L
OUISE
and her friends waited until lunchtime before coming up to me. I had my shawl on and I carried an old sewing bag of Aunt Casey's filled with plants and a few dead bugs I'd collected on my way to school. They found me waiting in the cafeteria line and they pulled me out of it.

“Forget about lunch,” Mary Louise said. “Come on, we're going to my office.”

Her office was underneath the bleachers that lined the quarter-mile track overgrown with grass and weeds, back behind the school. She said almost no one ever came down there during lunch unless it was to see her or one of the other girls in her group.

“I'm going to go first,” she said. “If it works, then the rest of us will give you their business. If it doesn't work . . .”

“No! It works like this,” I said. I couldn't let her take over, tell me what to do. This was mine.

“I choose who gets the spell. There are all kinds of curses if it's not done right. It has to be done right. I have to receive a message from—from Asklepios. Asklepios chooses the person. And there is a payment.”

“I knew it,” one of the girls said. “I told you it costs. What a racket.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “You must bring me one empty wine bottle and one white unused candle exactly seven inches long.”

“That's what it costs? No money?” Mary Louise asked.

“No money. Now, I brought one candle bottle with me today for the first spell, but after this you must bring me the candle and the bottle, or the spell I cast today will be broken and you will never know love again.”

“So, so who's that Ask—Aski person going to choose?” Mary Louise was bouncing on the balls of her feet, anxious to get on with it.

“Asklepios,” I said. I sat down on the grass and crossed my legs in front of me. “I must contact the great god of all wisdom in love. Everyone sit down and hold hands around me.”

The girls formed a circle around me and held hands. I closed my eyes and hummed and stayed the way Gigi always did. I hummed louder. I could feel the warm bodies of the girls around me. Around
me!
I concentrated. I thought about Mary Louise, the prettiest, the leader, and that other girl, quieter, not as pretty but nice looking. Boys would like her. I would choose her.

I opened my eyes and pointed at the girl. They said her name was Cara. I told her to sit in front of me, and I reached into my bag and pulled out the candle bottle and a small pocket mirror I'd found in the kitchen one day that past summer when I was making myself a lunch of hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. I was still afraid of mirrors. Gigi said mirrors could rob you of your soul. She said she used to contact the dead through mirror gazing, before she became an expert and didn't need mirrors anymore. It scared me to think of my soul being robbed, or worse, discovering I had no soul at all. I still never looked in mirrors, but I told Cara to stare into the pocket mirror and think of her true love. All the girls giggled when I said the words “true love.” I gave them a serious look and they hushed.

I lit the candle bottle and told Cara to keep looking in the mirror and to imagine her true love gazing back at her. I held the candle bottle above her head and asked for her true love's name.

She turned red in the face and looked around at the other girls. I reminded her to keep gazing in the mirror. I asked her again, and she said his name was Justice Lee Halley.

I circled the bottle above her head and chanted the magic words: Kambok, Lovage Zweibach Zim Cara, Koombek Levege Zweindol Zim Justice. Then I set the candle bottle down by her feet and danced around her the way I had wanted to do for Gigi. I recited the words again, only louder this time and then again but softer, then softer. I did my old melting dance in front of the candle bottle and Cara, and I heard one of the other girls whisper, “She's a real professional.”

I smiled inside myself and kept melting. They were all watching me, just the way I used to imagine it would be. I melted all the way down into the ground and lay still for so long someone asked if I was all right. I sat right up, clapped five times—five being the number of love and marriage and fire—and blew out the candle. I told Cara to hold her hand over the rising smoke and recite Justice's name five times. Then I dug back into my bag and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag filled with five blades of grass, five leaves from a dogwood tree, one dead cockroach, and a branch from an azalea bush.

“Gross, what's this for?” Cara asked.

“In order for the spell to work,” I said, “Justice has to unknowingly carry the things in this bag home with him, but only after you have touched each object and said the words ‘Zim Cara, Zim Justice' five times.”

“I have to touch the cockroach? No way.”

I adjusted my shawl. “Suit yourself, then.” I started gathering my things together.

“Okay, okay. I've gone this far.”

Cara took the bag, and all the girls gathered back around and examined the goodies I had collected.

The bell rang then and the group of us ran back toward the building. It was the first time I ever ran when the group behind me wasn't chasing me, and I smiled inside myself.

M
Y SPELL WORKED
! Justice Lee Halley invited Cara Johnson to the first dance of the school year.

After that, girls throughout the whole middle school wanted me to cast spells, and undo spells, and redo spells, and it didn't seem to matter that the spells failed as often as they worked. I collected so many candle bottles it was getting hard to hide them all in my room. I never ate lunch anymore, and I was always late getting home from school because of my new business. By the middle of the year, word of my abilities as a love magician reached the high school and I began to get their business as well. Everyone knew me, knew my name. I was Miracle, the love magician. It was wonderful to hear people call my name without having eggs and rocks hidden behind their backs. It was fun saying things that I knew no one understood, but because I was the love magician, they all laughed as if I had told a joke. It was fun when the girls all did what I said. If I said they had to sleep out in a tree in front of their beloved's house all night, they did it. If I said they had to sing a love song in the boys' bathroom, they did it, and it seemed that they had so much fun wondering what I would ask and watching others do silly things, it didn't matter whether the spells worked or not.

Then it all changed. It all turned sour, bit by bit. I had decided I wanted the girls to invite me over, let me go to their parties. I wanted them to call me up on the telephone. Every day before I left for home I'd say to someone, “Now you call me up, okay? You have my number? Don't lose it, it's not listed in the directory. Call me, okay?”

They always said they would, but no one did. Then I made it part of the instructions for one of my spells. Tilly Ann had to call me and speak to me for fifteen minutes if she wanted Timmy Riggs to be hers. Tilly Ann called me, and I could tell she was nervous. She asked me what she was supposed to say to me for fifteen minutes. I told her to say whatever it was she said to her other girlfriends. Tilly Ann just giggled and hung up. She had been on the phone with me for twenty-nine seconds.

That's when I realized the truth. None of the girls liked me. They were afraid of me. They never spoke tb me except in a group and only during lunch or after school, and only about love potions. No one else ever called me up on the telephone, or rode home with me, or spent their Saturday afternoons with me. I didn't know the TV shows they watched and I didn't have my period yet and I didn't have a boyfriend. The more I was with them, surrounded by them, the more separate I felt, not just from them but from myself. And the girl I shotted watching me under the tree that first day still watched me.

I found out her name was Juleen Presque. They called her the brain and said she was stranger than snake's feet. I'd see her sometimes watching me surrounded by a group of girls, casting spells, and it seemed as if she were waiting, wanting something. I wondered if she wanted me to cast a spell for her, but she always stood apart, and when I tried to go up and speak to her, she walked away.