Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 02 Competition's A Witch (12 page)

We got all the invitations prepared before it was time for Samuel to go home. Just before he left, I popped an invitation bubble I’d made all by myself in front of him. It glowed properly, just like I’d practiced. At least I could handle an invitation spell. For one, anyway.

“What’s that?” He looked at it suspiciously, even though he’d already helped me make fifty others. Sometimes I wonder about how smart a geek he actually is if he’s always missing the obvious.

“Duh.” I wiggled my eyebrows like my mom always did to me when I asked a silly question. “
Your
invitation.”

“Thanks.” He took the invitation, but he didn’t open it in front of me.

“If it says something funny, don’t hold it against me, okay? I’m new to this whole magic thing, you know?”

He smiled. “So, when do you turn sixteen?”

“Already turned, actually. In August.”

“Oh.” He seemed a little surprised by that. “So why are you having the party now?”

“Because I’ve been dreaming about a sweet sixteen party since I was a very little girl. Not to mention that I had to celebrate my birthday on the road between Beverly Hills and here. Now that I know enough kids from school to invite, Mom’s giving me a do-over.”

“And you’re inviting me first?” He looked pleased, but then he frowned. “What about Maria and Denise?”

“I—” I opened my mouth to make some lame excuse and give it a plausible polish, but he flipped his glasses at me.

“I can’t come if they don’t. That’s what friends do.”

I switched gears. “Of course I’m inviting them, silly.” I owed it to them, anyway—they’d helped me out those first few scary weeks before I’d made the squad.

“Great.”

He was so happy, I didn’t mention that I was only planning to give Maria and Denise the guy invitation—the one that didn’t include an invite to the sleepover after the bash. That was squad-only. Anyone else would make the bonding moment less prime.

H! U! S!
T! L! E!
Hustle!
For victory!

Coach Gertie had two whistles around her neck rather than one, which indicated exactly how nervous she was about taking the sixteen of us on a field trip into the mortal realm. “Line up, girls! Straight lines, please.” She sounded confident, and her brisk walk showed no hesitation. Still, her attention was darting here and there, and her left hand kept reaching up to touch one of the whistles, as if to be certain she hadn’t lost it.

Excited to be getting out of the ever-fun stretching and
stunt practice, we girls lined up as straight as we could manage. I suppose I should admit I was the only one not particularly excited. Sure, it was great to skip the hard practice moves for a day. But it was much harder to think of having to go back to Beverly Hills and face my old squad. Not that they would see me, of course. But I would see them—and worse, I’d be surrounded by sharp-eyed witches who were watching to see how I reacted to my old team in front of my new team. Joy.

Field trips are interesting in the witch world. They don’t require parental permission slips, but they do require permission from the witches’ council. Apparently, it’s one thing for a witch or two to pop themselves somewhere, but when you get sixteen cheerleaders and their coach, you need permissions, permits, and a lot of coordination between individual invisibility spells and the big group invisibility spell we would use to travel to and from the gym.

The best thing about field trip magic, for me, was that the teacher—or Coach Gertie, in this case—was in charge of it. I didn’t have to demonstrate publicly how little control I still had over my personal invisibility spell. Sure, I could turn invisible when I was really scared and upset. But invisibility on demand was still far beyond my meager skills.

On a scale of one to ten, though, looking like an invisibility spell loser was a six, compared with a solid platinum ten for the whole “can’t go home again” thing. I know it was
evil of me, but I held on to a faint hope that we’d find my old team had fallen apart without me.

Naturally, we managed to pop in and find the team productively training, despite my secret wish to find them at a loss without “Pru the Magnificent” as they had sometimes called me when I’d created a particularly fun routine. But, no. My old coach had broken the cheerleaders into small groups to practice different skills.

I could see Maddie in a group working on a cheer/flip combo. “That’s right!” Pom-poms shook. “Yeah!” Pompoms on hips. “Spirit is the key, we’re pumping it up for”—backflip to a perfect landing: feet planted, pom-poms in the air, arms in a sharp V—“a victory!”

I looked away, my stomach churning with a hungry clawing sensation. Maybe it was just that I hadn’t eaten much for lunch. Or maybe it was because I had taught her that move. We had practiced it in my pool and learned to do it on the diving board too.

My old rival, Chezzie, was the new head cheerleader. She was leading a group of newbies in a cheer. “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, hold the V, dot the I, and rock that C-T-O-R-Y!” The new girls moved together, held their poms-poms at the same height, and shook them in sync.

In short, the newest cheerleaders were nearly perfect, after only a few weeks of practice. So Chezzie was good. Another sweet-and-sour truth.

I suddenly realized that, despite my deep, dark wishes earlier, I didn’t really want the squad to fail. But did they have to be so good without me? It was so hard to watch them without feeling like I should be there, standing where Chezzie stood.

Elektra came up behind me. “So what’s so great about them? They’re practicing, just like we do. Big deal.”

“Look how tight they snap their moves.” I pointed at the girls as they went through a simple but beautifully clean warm-up lineup of bucket, U, V, and L’s. “Look how they work together.”

Coach Gertie herded the other girls close so they could hear what I was saying. One of them said, so low that I couldn’t tell who it was, “They look like robots the way they move together.”

“Not robots! Look at those smiles. They like what they’re doing, even though it’s hard. Look at that leg bruise! That comes from challenging yourself to be better every time you practice. And the practice shows when you compete.” I hadn’t expected the resistance, but I probably should have. Witches were not encouraged to be impressed by mortal things.

It hurt to see Maddie so happy, and to see the squad complete without me. I thought I had kicked the dust of Beverly Hills off my feet completely when Maddie betrayed me, but I guess I hadn’t.

I mean, I knew I shouldn’t be so petty. After all, I wasn’t
likely to attract the attention of Brent, my former crush, from a zillion miles away. But, worse than setting her sights on my interest, Maddie hadn’t ’fessed up about it. That was unforgivable in my book—we had been best friends since kinder-garten. Sure, technically, we hadn’t been on the same squad when she went crush poaching, but that wasn’t my fault—or choice—and she knew that. She knew my heart was with the team I’d been on for so long. The team where I was a great cheerleader, not the one where I’d made the cut by the skin of my teeth. She knew I had hoped to convince my parents to move back to Beverly Hills so that I could resume my interrupted life. She knew the team was everything to me.

As I watched my former squad practice and hit almost every complex move they tried, I could see the competition choreography coming through in everything they did. They wanted their fourth win. Wanted it bad. No team had done it. Ever. Only three teams had ever gotten to the point where they had won three national championships in a row.

Even invisible, and standing with my new team, I felt like I used to feel when I belonged to them. A rush of blood to my head that sounded like a “Win!” chant in my ears. I wanted them to take that fourth championship. At the same time, I wanted success for the Witches. And that success wasn’t going to happen if I couldn’t make them see what my old team had that they didn’t.

It wasn’t an easy shift to make, especially here. Faced with
my old team, working cooperatively and looking like contenders, my new team looked … like junior amateur hour, with a bad attitude to boot.

I had to change that. And it had to start with the attitude about magic being better than anything. Sure, it was kewl. But it wasn’t allowed in mortal competition. And I was the only one who understood that completely. Even Coach Gertie didn’t always get it.

“I don’t get what’s so great about all that precision,” said Yvette. She didn’t say it meanly. But she meant it from the bottom of her toes.

And that’s what I needed to show them—in a spectacularly witchy way. But how? I had one idea. The only problem was, I couldn’t do it. It was magic, and it was way beyond my skill level. So I’d have to ask someone else to do it. And I’d have to ask in such a way that no one’s first thought would be that I was asking because I didn’t know how to do it myself.

“Coach Gertie,” I whispered, even though I knew that we were in a bubble that made us not only invisible to the mortal cheerleaders but also inaudible. “Do you think that a freeze spell might allow us to go a little closer, so I could be more specific about what they’re doing?”

“Excellent idea, Prudence. Please do.” Unfortunately, Coach Gertie had only understood half of what I had wanted her to.

Never fear, though, I was prepared for that. I looked down, as if I hesitated for any other reason besides that I couldn’t possibly pull off the freeze spell on an entire squad of mortal cheerleaders. “Agatha may not approve of my using magic against mortals during school hours.” Which really, when you stop to think about it, doesn’t sound that bogus. Agatha hates my guts, and everybody knows it.

Coach Gertie paled a little. “Oh my, there are so many rules for a field trip, aren’t there?”

Amen to that, sister.

Coach Gertie raised her hands and quickly chanted,

“Dancing, twirling, leaping, cheering Freeze for me squad of Beverly Hills Freeze in perfect form and drills That we may see skills we are fearing.”

I was a little surprised at the insight that Coach Gertie’s spell revealed. The witches were fearing what they didn’t know about mortal cheering. I could so relate.

The Beverly Hills cheerleaders froze where they were as soon as Coach Gertie finished her spell. Perfect for show-andtell, without the embarrassing need for a mind-wipe later on.

Coach Gertie released the group invisibility spell and said, “Let’s go see what we need to do for our first regional competition, girls.”

Tara gave me a little shoulder as she brushed by me to examine the team close up. She didn’t look happy, and I wasn’t sure why until I heard her mutter, “I’m not afraid of any mortal cheerleaders.”

My bracelet tingled, letting me know she was telling a big fat lie. I learned three things from that: One, Coach Gertie knew her girls well; two, be careful how you frame a spell or incantation because it can make someone mad; and three, Tara was afraid of the mortal cheerleader moves I was trying to teach them. And if
she
was, the rest of the girls were too. Duh. They weren’t used to working without a magical safety net.

I churned over how I could use that information as I walked toward Maddie, who was poised in a classic hamstring stretch using a Splitflex very much like the one the team had given me as a parting gift when I left Beverly Hills for Salem. The witches were afraid. But there was no reason they had to be. We could use spells to help break falls and avoid collisions during practice. And we could use them to help monitor our moves, too. That would give us all the advantage we needed over our mortal counterparts—at least for practice. For the actual competition, we wouldn’t be able to do more than protect ourselves from grave injury.

In the mortal world, I’d learned that a good aide, like the Splitflex, could improve your work when all else failed. Why wouldn’t the same thing hold true for the magical world? Use
what you have. Use what you know. How many times had I heard that in cheering practice? Too many to count.

So I went up to Maddie and pointed at the Splitflex. “This helps her stretch her muscles so that she can do a perfect split time after time.”

“Who cares?” Elektra wasn’t about to hide her contempt for all things mortal.

I looked at them, and then at Maddie on the floor in her perfect split. I slid down the floor until I was beside her, my split just as perfect, even without the stretching aide. And then I rose in the air three feet, raised my arms over my head gracefully, and rotated around the axis of my perfect split. Some of the girls oohed and aahed. It looked great, and I knew it. I could see myself in the full-length mirrored wall of the practice room.

I pointed to the mirrors. “You try. And watch yourself.”

They did. And they weren’t happy when they compared their moves to mine. Tara squealed when she stomped her own toe.

I smiled. “Bruises are good, remember? Witches aren’t wimps, are they?”

“No!” They all tried again. More heart, but no more coordination. Oh, well. It takes a season to make a championship team.

As we all gathered together to leave Beverly Hills behind, I said to Coach. “Have you asked the headmistress
for permission to put mirrors in the practice room?”