Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 02 Competition's A Witch (3 page)

I’d forgotten that the school grapevine in witchworld was even better than the one in Beverly Hills. Everyone knew I’d been to see Agatha. And everyone knew why—because I’d told them. And they were waiting for me to spill the beans because, even though we all love cheering, any diversion from the grind of practice is always welcome. Especially when it was as juicy as whether or not the head-mistress would bend the rules for the new girl.

I didn’t want to tell anyone what Agatha had said. Not even about my adoption of a mortal-free lifestyle. Call me chicken, but I’d known a girl, back in Beverly Hills, who had announced that she was a vegan. Everyone who hadn’t paid any attention at all to what she ate before that suddenly became the meat and dairy police. I didn’t want anyone at school, never mind my teammates, noticing any slipups on my part. Habits are hard to break—ask any cheerleader whose coach took shortcuts.

But I couldn’t skip practice. And even if I did, I’d still have to answer the questions tomorrow.

I spent a few moments wondering if I could weave a spell that would convince Coach and the other girls on the team that I was no longer in remedial magic. But the whole not-very-good-at-magic thing kind of worked against my confidence in casting a school-wide spell in a place that was wired to prevent kiddie magic from turning things haywire.

Back home, I wouldn’t have hesitated to rally the troops for an all-out diss-fest on the unfair practices of school officials. Back home, however, I wouldn’t have been worried that I was a poser who deserved what I got and shouldn’t have asked for special consideration in the first place.

Of course Tara, as head cheerleader, was the one who asked the question they all wanted to know the answer to. “So, how’d it go, Pru? You out of Magic for Dummies yet?”

When I looked at all the faces turned toward me—including Coach Gertie herself—I knew I had to put on my good cheerleader attitude and make the most of the disaster. “She said she’d think about it. No rule bending for me right now.” I tried to sound upset about it. Not that I wasn’t upset. I was upset, all right. At the possibility I’d
never
be able to pass a test to get out of remedial magic, even if Agatha decided to let me take it.

“Too bad.” Coach Gertie didn’t look surprised. “But at least you won’t be focused on passing the test now, and you’ll be able to put all your energies into creating a great routine for the squad when we go to the regional competition.”

Right. Regional competitions. That was the whole reason I’d made the team in the first place. I had been on a competition-winning squad—mortal, of course. Which wasn’t a big minus, since all competitions were mortal. And now I needed to create a routine that would make the Witches turn into competition winners, too. Sigh. One more thing on my
schedule, which was already full of tutoring and catch-up sessions that I wasn’t sure I could handle. Whipping this squad into competition-worthy material wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, either. These were cheerleaders hooked on magic. Routine floor moves bored them stiff, and it showed.

I dug up my last shred of positive attitude to smile at everyone. “That’s a great way to look at it, Coach. I did feel guilty about asking, though. She was so unhappy with me. I guess she’s still mad.”

“Too bad.” Tara wasn’t as sympathetic as a good team member should be. But that wasn’t surprising—she was head cheerleader and Coach was paying a little too much attention to the newest, weakest member of the squad. I couldn’t really blame her. Although I wanted some big-time squad-level sympathy right now.

Fortunately, the other girls were ignoring Tara’s lead. I suppose they wanted the details badly enough that they couldn’t pretend not to care. “What happened? Did she give you another detention?”

“No.” Just a few hard truths that made me feel like I’d tried to crash the Oscars wearing Kmart sweats. Good thing too, I had had a taste of witch detention—buried up to the neck in a vat of sand—and I definitely didn’t want more of that. “She just said no test right now and popped my mom and me back home before we could blink.”

#8220;Wow! Your mom, too?” That was impressive to meek little Sunita, who apparently had a slightly hidden streak of bloodthirstiness. “I bet she wanted to expel you. Daniel was—is—the apple of her eye.”

I nodded, going with the flow of sympathy. “How can Daniel’s magic hacking and habit of running away be my fault?” Not to mention his ability to send me anonymous messages via ghost mail. But somehow I suspected that if Agatha ever found out, she would find a way to
make
it my fault.

“I wouldn’t have passed up a kiss in a time bubble with that boy.” Whoever said that had projected her voice from the other side of the gym to preserve her anonymity, but several of the girls were nodding vigorously at the sentiment.

Coach frowned at the way the conversation was going off the subject. “Sometimes I think we made a mistake when we decided to teach boys and girls together. We’d get a whole lot more learning into you girls if you weren’t mooning after boys half the day.”

That didn’t sound fair to me, although it seemed like all the parents and teachers thought it at one time or another-even back in Beverly Hills there had been grumbling about mixing the sexes being more volatile than nitroglycerin.

Sure, I hadn’t run screaming from the bad boy who’d teased me and flirted with me during my first weeks of school. One, he was cute, and two, he was … Daniel. He
had treated me as if I were kewl from the first day, when he sent erasers flying at my face, to the last, when he made a time bubble to get around my mother’s protective spell, which set off alarms if I was alone with a boy for more than a minute.

A part of me wished Daniel
were
still here, that he hadn’t run away. But the sane part of me knew I’d have zero chance of ever catching up on my magical education if I had Daniel around to nudge me into breaking rules and taking chances that nobody as unskilled at magic as I was should risk.

“Maybe it’s the kiss she’s steamed about.” I couldn’t see who had said that, but since everyone giggled, I figured it was something they were all thinking. Funny how rumors could spread around school when there wasn’t anyone who actually witnessed Daniel kiss me. Or me kiss him back.

I shrugged. “The kiss, okay. But last I checked, that’s not a punishable offense. All the good that logic does me, since Agatha doesn’t have to be reasonable about the grudges she holds.”

Coach shook her head. “Prudence, I know you are disappointed, but I assure you that our headmistress does not let grudges factor in when she makes serious educational decisions.”

“Right.” A whisper had been directed to my ear only. It was Tara—I recognized her voice even at a whisper.
Apparently she had gotten sucked into the sympathy-fest, but she wasn’t going to admit it in front of Coach. “And rumor has it she never lets grudges go, either.”

Yvette—a cheerleader with some promise, if she could just control the fact that she frowned rather than smiled when she was happy—asked, “What are you going to do?”

Not a question I wanted to answer. But I knew what I had to say, no matter how I felt right now: “Study hard and try again.” Which was not only the truth, but also the only right answer for someone who wanted to be head cheerleader next year. So I didn’t tell them about the hardest part, which was turning my back on all things mortal. They were witches, and it would be like telling fish I was going to turn my back on air. No-brainer—unless you were used to being a fish out of water, or a witch living without magic.

“Good for you!” Coach raised her fist in a solidarity cheer.

“Sooner or later, she has to let me test out.” I said it with conviction, but the girls surrounding me didn’t echo the sentiment with a confidence-boosting murmur of affirmation. In fact, they looked worried. I spent a horrible few seconds thinking they believed I was too magically deficient to take the test.

Until Tara said, “Sometimes you just have to accept that a teacher—or the headmistress—has it in for you.”

The other girls all nodded, and I realized that they didn’t
have a clue how incompetent I was at magic. They just thought Agatha hated me too much to ever bend the rules for me.

I felt a solid-gold moment of team solidarity, especially when Tara said, “But don’t let it affect your attitude in practice and at games and it won’t be a problem for us.” She smiled at me, and I was, for one second, a team member like every other girl. Until she said, “Ten laps for being late.”

Sigh. At least ten laps was better than two hundred pushups. And the advantage of doing laps at witch school was that they’re flying laps, not running. Which I remembered right after I started into a jog. I covered well enough by pretending I’d used the jog to jump-start the leap into flight. I hope. Because when kids said Agatha could see through walls, they weren’t entirely kidding.

Agatha was right. As I struggled every second to stop doing things the mortal way, I realized just how much I thought like a mortal. I didn’t mind doing things the mortal way. How hard was it to pull on a pair of jeans or tie a pair of sneakers? For me, it was ten times easier than to remember to use a fashionista incantation or a tying spell. And we won’t go into the little glitches that occurred when I tried to use magic. Like the time I accidentally tied my bra strap and my thong together instead of my shoelaces. Ouchie.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have anything against mortals. I mean, my dad is one. The trouble with mortals isn’t that they don’t have mega-lifespans (witches don’t live forever,
but compared with mortals, we’re an order of magnitude more long-lived). It’s that they can’t do magic, so they refuse to believe it exists. They’re pretty much clueless. And so was I, for my first sixteen years. Which meant I had a lot of clues to gather up and put together, pronto.

When I left Agatha’s office, I thought it wouldn’t be that hard to close my eyes to the mortal realm—except for dealing with my dad and cheering at the regionals. But it turned out to be as easy as going clubbing after a day of liposuction and a full-body lift.

You see, I’d forgotten that moving to a new state, a new town, and a new neighborhood meant new neighbors. And sometimes it meant neighbors who liked to roll out the welcome mat, whether you liked it or not.

Just to be clear, I’m not referring to the ghosts who live in our house, and lived there way before we moved in. Or the witches, like Grandmama, who popped in and out. No. I mean the mortal neighbors who lived in the nicely cared for houses next to ours.

Mom and Dad had picked this new house because it just happened to exist in a nexus between both the mortal and witch realms. So the Dorklock and I could pop off to school without a lot of transfers and delays, and Dad could take his Beemer to the train station and commute to the city, while Mom stayed home and did … whatever it is she does. You know, the typical routine for a half-witch, half-mortal family.

Until my promise to cut out the mortal stuff, this wasn’t difficult—even Agatha couldn’t complain if we occasionally waved at our mortal neighbors if we happened to be leaving when they were coming home, or vice versa. But I hadn’t factored in one little neighborly botheration: A smokin’ guy. Mortal, naturally. The casserole in his hands was a dead giveaway.

Back in Beverly Hills, when I was living among mortals, finding out that a hottie lived next door would involve a lot of text messaging and a few pictures taken on the q.t. with the cell phone. Now I’m in witchworld and not doing the mortal thing, I guess I should be glad my best friend, Maddie, took advantage of my absence from Beverly Hills High to make a move on my longtime crush. I got so mad when someone sent me a picture of them together, I gave my phone to the geek who’d been tutoring me. He was obsessed by all things mortal (he could afford to be—no one at Agatha’s had a better handle on magic than he did), and I didn’t want a reminder that my old life was sooo over. But every now and then, I did miss my phone.

So with no cell phone to snap a picture, and no best friend to text about this neighbor, plus the knowledge that even wanting those things was bad (how mortal of me!), I stood there in my living room smiling at him and really hating my vow to turn my back on all things mortal.

He’d come in tow behind his mother, who had made him
carry the big welcome-to-the-neighborhood casserole she’d cooked up for us. At first I didn’t even notice he was more than cute, because his mother was one of those annoyingly bigger-than-life people who took all the oxygen out of a room the second they start to speak.

Which she did as soon as my mother opened the door. It was late afternoon, after practice, so everyone was home except for my dad. “Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get over and give you a proper welcome, but my husband and I took a little vacation to France to celebrate our anniversary and we’re just now back.”

Mom just stood there, looking like she wished she hadn’t opened the door wide enough that the neighbor had been able to walk right into the living room and start assessing our stuff. “Thank you. But you didn’t have to—”