Don't Drink the Punch! (10 page)

Kayla shot her arm out, eager for the pill, but then hesitated. Matilda let out a low chuckle. “I'm afraid you don't have a choice, my dear,” she said. “Either take this or lose your voice forever.”

Kayla took the pale-orange, oval-shaped lozenge from Matilda's box and popped it into her mouth. It tasted bitter—terribly, awfully bitter. She gagged and retched. It tasted worse than anything she could imagine, worse than a spoonful of instant coffee, or sucking on the stems of a handful of dandelions. Her mouth twisted up, and she gagged again, trying not to throw up. But as she gagged, a small sound emerged from the back of her throat. As she swallowed, careful not to swallow the lozenge itself, she felt a sharp pain in her throat that reminded her of the time she'd had strep throat.

“I—can I—spit it out now?” Kayla rasped. She felt like she'd swallowed a handful of jagged glass.

“No. Suck the whole thing till it's gone,” said Matilda
with a smug gleam in her eye. She seemed to enjoy watching Kayla's distress.

At last, Kayla felt she could talk without throwing up. “What's going to become of all those frozen people?” she gasped out.

Matilda raised an eyebrow. “All?”

“Yes,” Kayla replied. “See, it's not just Alice, Pria, and Jess. Alice gave the punch to everyone at the party—even the parents. Everyone in that house is frozen, except for me . . . and well, Tom.”

Matilda smiled slightly at the mention of Tom's name. “Nice boy,” she murmured. “As for the others, it all depends on the dosage they took. I told that nasty friend of yours, Alice, to be very careful with the proportions, but did she listen? Doubtful. Anyway, the older you are, the more susceptible you tend to be. It works more quickly on older people. Still, pretty much everyone who drank the punch should be in an irreversible frozen state by the morning. Even I won't be able to help them. They won't be dead exactly. Just in a permanent state of vegetation. Their vital signs could continue indefinitely, but they'll never wake up.”

Kayla's eyes welled up with tears. “My mom. My
mom is there, and she's frozen. She's all me and my brothers have.”

“Then you'll be just like me, won't you?” said Matilda, her voice suddenly husky, almost quavering. “I don't have anyone. Now you'll see how it feels.” She sniffed loudly.

Kayla felt her hysteria growing. She pulled out her phone. “I'll call the police,” she said. “They'll come. They'll be able to help.”

“There's nothing they'll be able to do,” said Matilda. She stood up. “Now it's time for you to go.”

CHAPTER 15

But Kayla couldn't move from fear. She thought about her mother, about her little brothers, about her classmates and her classmates' parents. She couldn't fail them. Everything now depended on her and her ability to reason with this strange, vindictive girl. She had to make Matilda understand just how much she would hurt so many people. She turned.

“Matilda, I'm sorry about your parents. I'm sorry that I made that prank call. You have every right to be angry with me. I know my friends weren't nice to you. You're right about them. They aren't true friends. They aren't even nice people, especially to anyone outside their clique. Sometimes they make
me
feel awful, so I can only imagine how they must make you feel. I
understand what it feels like to be left out. Kids can be really mean.”

Matilda shook back her bangs and glared at Kayla. “What do you know? You don't know the
half
of it,” she spluttered. “You're as much to blame as the rest of them. Do you think I'm going to undo two years of work? I've plotted this revenge very carefully, and it worked perfectly! I'm sorry you got in the way, but what's done is done.”

Matilda went on. “Sure, you're a nice enough person, but you're so worried about belonging, about fitting in, you let them push you around. You let them talk you into doing things you shouldn't do. You're
smart
, too. I see your name on the honor roll every semester. You should appreciate what you have.” She put out a hand to stroke Jinx. He let her pet his back once, twice, and then he jumped off the counter and trotted over to where Kayla was standing near the door. He wove himself around in a figure eight between her feet, purring loudly.

Matilda stared at the cat. “All right, all right! I get it!” Then she raised her head and looked at Kayla. “Come. Sit.” She pointed toward two chairs that were arranged side by side in the shadowy back corner of the shop.
They had matching worn-out red upholstery with gold-painted wooden trim. They looked as though they had once been very fancy chairs.

Despite her panic, and her feeling that time was running out fast, Kayla did as she was told. She knew the only way to help her mother and the others was if she could win over Matilda.

Matilda sat, looking lost in thought, as though debating what she wanted to say. Finally she leaned in to whisper something to Kayla. “I am not what I seem,” she confessed.

Kayla nodded. She didn't dare distract Matilda with questions.

“I don't just work at this store. I own it. There is no ‘owner,' other than me.”

Kayla raised her eyebrows, but still said nothing.

“I was once a mean girl. Just like your friend Alice. I was pretty and spoiled, and the boys all flocked around me like hogs to slop. I loved being the center of attention. I loved how other girls tried to look like me, to dress like me. But that was seventy-five years ago.”

“Seventy-five—”

“Yes. Close your mouth,” Matilda snapped.
“Seventy-five years ago, when I was twelve years old. I may still look as though I'm twelve, but I am, in fact, an old lady of eighty-seven. Heaven knows I have all the ailments of old age—bad eyesight, sore feet, aching hips. Seventy-five years ago, I was given a potion without my knowledge, a potion that caused me to appear to never age. I had been haughty and cruel and horrid to a girl at my school day in and day out. She was a mousy little thing, so easy to torment. My friends and I tortured her with our sarcasm, our teasing, our tricks. The teachers never had any idea. Well, I chose the wrong person to pick on. She was smart. If she'd been born today, she'd have been a Nobel Prize–winning chemist. But back then, girls didn't think that way. They didn't dream of careers in science.”

She shook her head and looked out the window, lost in thought. Kayla resisted the impulse to leap from her chair, to scream,
Get on with it!
She sat and waited for Matilda to continue.

“Unbeknownst to me, this girl had taught herself how to make potions. Strong potions. It was
she
who did this to me, who gave me an antiaging elixir. She laced some chocolates with it and left me a box of them for
Valentine's Day, with a note that said the gift was from ‘a secret admirer.' One piece of chocolate was all it took. I never grew up. I never got to live my life.”

“I'm sorry, Matilda,” whispered Kayla. And she meant it.

Matilda's jaw tightened. “When I figured out what had happened to me, I vowed to learn the craft as well. I was smart too! My parents removed me from school when they realized something was wrong with my development, and they hired a tutor to teach me. They were embarrassed by me.”

“What became of the girl?” asked Kayla.

“Died,” said Matilda flatly. “She fell from a window, although to this day I wonder if it was an accident, or if she took her own life. After all, I had made her so miserable with my bullying, and then she must have felt some guilt for what she did to me.” Matilda pulled a large handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose loudly. “From that day on, I vowed to stop all the mean girls I encountered. That's why I froze your friend Alice, along with her awful friends.”

“Matilda,” said Kayla gently, “I am so sorry for what you have suffered. But surely you don't want to do
harm to so many people, people who never did you any wrong. And even Alice—do you really want to wipe out so many lives? My own mother works so hard. She's a single mom with four kids. Think about who she'd be leaving behind. I have a little brother named Timothy. He's only seven, but you should see what a great little hockey player he is. He has curly brown hair and—” Kayla began to sob.

Matilda sighed, and Kayla looked up. The other girl's expression had softened ever so slightly. “You're right. I can't go through with it,” she said solemnly. “I may be a bitter old fool, but I can't actually do this. I guess I really didn't think of all the other people I'd hurt, only those nasty girls. I'll give you a vaporous compound that will reverse the paralysis condition. Wait here.”

She stood up and went into the back room. Kayla wiped her eyes, leaned back, and breathed.

“Take this,” said Matilda, upon returning. She handed Kayla a thick black candle. “Burning it will release the antidote fumes into the air. As soon as the frozen people inhale it, they'll begin to revive. It may take fifteen or twenty minutes for a full recovery—assuming they haven't ingested too much of the potion and its effects
can still be reversed. There's certainly that danger.”

Kayla leaped out of the chair, clutching the candle to her chest. Then she stuck it into her jacket pocket and zipped it securely. “Thank you, Matilda,” she said. “Thank you. You've just done a merciful thing.”

Matilda opened the door for Kayla. “I'd advise you to hurry,” she said matter-of-factly.

CHAPTER 16

Kayla flung herself back out into the whirling, windy snow and took off running. By clenching her toes inside her boots, she managed to keep them from slipping off her feet, and the thick layer of snow gave her more traction now than when she'd come the other way. Her own footprints from half an hour before were the only ones visible on the sidewalk, and the snow was so heavy, they were already nearly filled in.

Her fear, panic, and determination to get back as quickly as humanly possible were so strong that it seemed only a few seconds had passed before she caught sight of Alice's house, looming dark and gray against the black night sky. With a sudden burst of adrenaline, she broke into a flat-out sprint up the driveway. One of her boots
slipped off her foot entirely, but she barely noticed, covering the last twenty yards with one of her feet completely bare. She didn't feel the cold until she'd flung open the door and stepped inside.

Tom was there at the door when she burst in, and he helped her pull off her coat. She stomped her one boot and bent her other leg up so that she could brush away the worst of the snow clinging to her icy-cold foot.

“No change,” he said. “No one has moved, and there's still no phone service. What did you find out?”

He had a pad and pen ready for her, but she pushed them away. “I can talk,” she said. “I'll explain how I got my voice back later. But I have a way to reverse their condition. We have to burn this candle. There's no time to lose. Can you help me find some matches?”

The two might have been a comical sight under other circumstances, Kayla with one booted foot and one bare one, Tom with one bandaged ankle, hopping mostly on his good foot, opening drawers and lifting lids on decorative pots. As they searched, Kayla explained to Tom that the candle smoke would reverse the effects of the punch, or so she hoped.

“Got some!” yelled Kayla, who was over by the
fireplace. She'd found some long matches in a cardboard cylinder, meant to light fires in a fireplace. She struck a match and held it to the wick. The black candle flashed and sputtered, like a Fourth of July sparkler, and then turned into a deep purple flame. Purple smoke rose from the flame in curling tendrils, almost as though it had a will of its own.

“Oh,
man!
” said Tom, coughing and scrunching his nose. “That smells
awful
!”

It did. It smelled acrid and sulfurous and reminded Kayla of a musty old kitchen sponge, her baby cousin's diaper pail, and a pot of soup she had once forgotten about and had left on a burner until it blackened and smoked.