Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 03 She's A Witch Girl (16 page)

Mom was having a little trouble figuring out how to get rid
of her when Mrs. Kenton glanced out to the driveway and said, “I have no trouble taking my turn at car pool, either.”

Oh. Car pool meant sharing the driving. Apparently, Mom saw the problem at the same moment I did, and she had an answer ready. “I’m working at the school, so I have to go every day, anyway. It’s no trouble to add an extra person to the commute.” The commute. Cute, Mom.

Mrs. Kenton was not to be budged, however, until Mom, Angelo, Dorklock, and I climbed into my little Jetta (which I’ve been neglecting for studying, practice, and extra-credit projects) and drove away. She stood at the curb and waved until we were out of sight. At which point, Mom pulled over to the curb and then popped us back to garage.

Angelo looked a little shell-shocked. I smiled at him in sympathy. At least I’d known I was a witch when I started school at Agatha’s. “We don’t drive to Agatha’s. We pop.”

He shrugged. “When in Rome . . . build a coliseum. Right?” He smiled and I noticed, really noticed, that the warm buzz I usually got being near Angelo was gone. His smile actually gave me a slightly negative reaction, as if I’d caught sight of a piece of spinach stuck between his teeth. The council’s spell had seriously bound his Talent. I didn’t want to be shallow, though, so I made myself remember how nice Angelo had always been to me.

“Right.” I took his hand and popped us both to the school office. “You’re going to learn to do that soon, and
once you’re in school, they take care of all the popping.” I moved aside to let the school secretary welcome Angelo like she had me—with a cold finger on his forehead.

He looked at me a little nervously. “That finger just put your whole schedule on record. You’ll be automatically popped to classes, to the main hallway so you can use your locker, and to lunch. Handy, huh?”

One day I’d have to tell him how lucky he was to have me escort him to the office. When your magic is shaky, you can mis-pop and embarrass yourself horribly. Like I did my first day at Agatha’s when I mis-popped into the broom closet of the boy’s locker room, where I had a view of Mr. Bindlebrot (math teacher/Dragon Ball coach) in a towel. Somehow, though, I don’t think Angelo is ready to appreciate how lucky he has it here. Yet.

“Sure.” By the time Angelo had replied to my comment, we’d been popped into the main hall with our lockers.

Tara was standing next to my locker, the fateful number 666 that had given Daniel the nickname he used for me when I first came to school. “Angelo! Pru told me you’d be here this morning.”

Angelo lifted his hand in a weak wave. “Hi, Tara. This is some school you’ve got here.”

“Yeah.” She looked at him, smiled in sympathy, and then slowly stopped. “What happened to you?”

“I just found out I was a witch. Isn’t that enough?” He
seemed a little annoyed at the way she was staring at him like he was a stranger.

I witch-whispered to Tara, “He has binding spells on his Talent, for obvious reasons. I
told
you that.” Not that I had understood how different Angelo would seem with the binding spells in place.

“Oh.” She smiled at him. She was so over him, it showed from her head to her toes. “Good luck with that.”

The bell rang, a familiar sound to anyone who has been to school, mortal or witch. Before I could explain the drill, Angelo disappeared to his first class, probably remedial magic with Mr. Phogg, if his schedule was anything like mine was when I came to Agatha’s. I hoped he didn’t hate the remedial classes as much as I had.

I took To-Do out of my pocket. “Add action item: Help Angelo get into regular magic classes ASAP.”

Instead of being popped into my first class, I ended up in the gym. I thought it was a mistake until I saw that the rest of the squad was there, along with our coach. And then my stomach started doing dive rolls. Coach Gertie looked grim. Which, on a normal scale of grimness was about a 5, but for Coach Gertie a 5 was off the scale. She didn’t even try for a smile. Her hair, which was a bird’s nest normally, looked like the birds had had a big fight.

“Girls, I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to compete
in the National Competition. In fact, I’m afraid our awards ceremony is cancelled. As is our cheering at the magic game on Friday.”

“What?” We practically cheered the question, with pompoms raised. We were all on the same page, it seemed—the outraged page. “Why can’t we cheer at the magic game?”

Coach Gertie shook her head and lifted her arms in the air. Our angry babble silenced—our mouths were moving, but the sound had been banished to some other dimension.

“The magic game is a one-time ban.” Coach Gertie frowned. “There’s been some concern that the”—she glanced at me and then looked away quickly—“disruptions we’ve experienced the first part of the year need to be straightened out. Therefore, our headmistress has put a moratorium on all things mortal.”

“All things mortal?” The other girls looked at me. Charity was the only one who smiled. The rest of them looked mega unhappy. I decided to take it as a sign that my life was not over. Yet.

“All
things,” I said slowly. Coach Gertie didn’t look at me.

“Why? Is it because of the bruises—or is it that new guy, Angelo? It’s not our fault he got switched at birth.” Elektra had jumped to the wrong conclusion, but I didn’t imagine it would take too long before the whole school knew the truth. The new mortal ban was due to me, Prudence Stewart. Like it was my fault that my family had moved next
door to a witch switched at birth with a mortal. Sigh. I didn’t think it was going to be a popularity booster.

“Of course it’s not the squad’s fault.” Coach Gertie shook her head and raised her whistle, but didn’t blow it. “Things like this happen when we’re not careful about how we proceed in the mortal realm. We don’t want to take it for granted. We don’t want to forget how dangerous it can be. Do we?”

“Competing’s not dangerous,” Tara argued with the exact words I was too afraid to say with the mortal bull’s-eye Agatha had painted on my forehead. “None of us are going to accidentally get lost in the mortal realm. We know what we’re doing. We’ll be careful.”

There was a wail from meek little Sunita. “If we don’t compete, we’ll be losers.” Who knew she had such a competitive streak?

“Nonsense.” Coach Gertie frowned more deeply. “That’s the kind of thinking that Agatha is worried about. That’s mortal talk—losers, winners. Those are the concepts of short life spans and limited magic ability.”

Sure, it was. Tell that to my grandfather—who enjoyed “playing” in Vegas, and definitely wanted to win, not lose, at the poker table.

“We’ve done all the hard work.” Elektra wasn’t buying the witch party line. “Never mind being losers. We won’t get a chance to prove to ourselves that we’ve improved ourselves.”

“That’s simply not true.” Coach Gertie was trying to sound reassuring, but she couldn’t put out a raging inferno with a cup of white lies. “Your work in magic cheering has been greatly improved by your work at mortal routines. You will reap the benefits at every magic game.”

Tara asked the next logical question. “Does that mean we can’t play mortal teams anymore? What about the football team?”

Coach Gertie looked troubled. “Agatha has said so, but we coaches are not happy. We are appealing the ruling. Agatha has granted permission for the football team to play in this weekend’s game, but without cheerleaders.”

Tara was shocked enough that she practically whispered, “So sports can compete, but cheerleaders can’t even cheer, never mind compete?”

“Unfair,” we all murmured.

Coach Gertie shrugged. “Sports are—”

“More important,” we all finished for her. It wasn’t like we hadn’t heard it before.

“Girls!” Coach Gertie was not happy. But she was the kind of grown-up unhappy that meant she wasn’t going to make a fuss. Witch grown-ups stick together just like mortal adults do, I guess.

“Agatha has spoken. I’ll hear no more.” Coach Gertie put another silencing spell on us. We waved our arms in protest, but she was not going to give in. Instead, she crossed her
arms and stood tapping her toe, waiting for us to stop protesting.

What signs was she looking for, since she couldn’t hear a word out of our mouths? Well, after we stopped flapping our gums, hopping up and down, and crying—basically stopped everything except breathing and blinking—she lifted the binding spell.

We just stood there, stunned into silence. Stunned into a place cheerleaders fear to tread: the no-compete zone. I mean, sure, cheerleaders are there to get the crowd on the team’s side, to cheer the team on and all. But let’s get real. What we most want to do is make the other team’s cheerleaders look clueless, uncoordinated, and apathetic. I mean, really, why else do we polish our routines and risk our necks if it isn’t to have the crowd think we are the best cheerleaders ever to cheer? I was deeply disappointed in Coach Gertie for not understanding that.

If you’ve never been in a room full of teenage girls when they’re all upset, you may not understand the way the atmosphere gets heavy and crackly at the same time. In a room full of teenage witches? Umm. Let’s just say that anything not nailed down got caught up in a whirlwind and turned into confetti.

The mutual temper tantrum lasted about sixty seconds. And then we stopped—in synch. We restored everything and went back to our regularly scheduled classes without
protest. Anyone watching might have thought we had accepted the inevitable. Hah! Agatha had created a monster, and I don’t think she had a clue.

I hadn’t expected to get much sympathy from the fringie side of the fence when I stopped by their table at lunch to explain that Agatha had finally found a way to really punish me for Daniel having run away from school. After all, no one expected her to be fair, or even reasonable. That would be like Milan haute couture models suddenly having healthy appetites.

But I was pleased to see that they got why it
was
unfair. So many people don’t understand that cheering is hard work, not just shaking a little pom-pom at the crowd. Samuel even suggested we stage a sit-in.

“Sure. A sit-in. For witches?” I tried to picture it, but the mind-film stopped short at witches ever doing anything together. Not to mention that the only student I knew who was willing (and able) to break the school rules at will had been Daniel. “This school is so spelled and charmed to keep us from doing much more than breathe, you really think we could carry out a sit-in without Agatha blowing us out of her hair with one frigid breath?”

It was Denise who broke the awkward silence by commenting, “You don’t sound like you, Pru. Where’s the insane optimism you usually show?”

“Everything I’m trying to do is falling apart. The headmistress thinks I’m infecting her school with mortal cooties. I almost failed math—which used to be my best subject. I’m just barely unsuspended from my cheerleading team. And now we can’t cheer in mortal games—or compete.”

Samuel looked at me seriously. “If you were suspended from your team, and you couldn’t play, would you still fight for the cheerleaders to be able to cheer?”

“Of course.” Because he was my friend, and a clueless fringie, I tried to keep too much “duh” out of my tone.

Denise shook her head. “Such dedication over something so superficial.”

Okay. So I
thought
she got it, but I was wrong. “Since when is supporting, encouraging, and rallying around your team a superficial thing?” I really hate it when people, even my friends, diss cheerleading. “Do you know how hard it is to keep your spirits up when your team is losing fifty to two? And the quarterback is a butterfingers?”

They looked at me blankly. None of them were sports fans. “Okay, how annoying has it been for you to support me in sitting at that cheerleading table? Annoyance factor of ten, right? But you understood why I needed to bond with my team. You understood it was important to me. And you were there for me. So who’s superficial now?”

I stalked off to the cheer table without another word.

Never underestimate the power of an annoyed fringie.
Or a good sit-in (picture witches hovering midair, though, not grubbing on the ground—oh, and no long hair or bell-bottoms).

Apparently, my friends knew how to come through big-time. At first it was a little trickle—Maria at the jocks table, whispering until they were frowning. Denise over with the black-loving/death-worshipping crowd, making them breathe hard enough that they got color in their normally pale cheeks. And Samuel. Samuel had saved the best group for himself: the science, math, and all-around geeks.

It was the geeks who made the sit-in possible, of course. They were the ones who countered the school spells that would normally send us to our classes automatically. The counterspells would keep us all sitting in our places when the bell sounded—the bell that normally sent us back to the hallway with our lockers, and the second bell that sent us back to classes.

The goths took the protest to another level. They understood that it wasn’t enough to just sit in the lunchroom. They had a handle on the importance of presentation. Hence the floating-in-air thing, and the glowing, hovering protest signs done in our school colors of black, orange, and red—a red the color of fresh, dripping blood.

Agatha’s decision had made the square pegs decide to drum their edges against the round holes. It was amazing to see the protest come together with whispers and questioning
glances that quickly turned into motion and sound and light. The scariest thing was that everyone was looking at me—even Tara.

“We’re not being unreasonable.” I spun in a slow circle so that I could address everyone in the room. If I learned anything growing up in Beverly Hills, it was that you had to take advantage of the spotlight while it was still on you. “We deserve our chance to do what we do best, to do what we love. We’re not hurting anyone. Right?”

“Yeah!” Even the jocks agreed, although I couldn’t help but be suspicious that they were only in it for the time-off-for-bad-behavior perk.

When the bell sounded—the one that usually had us heading toward our lockers before the second bell, which popped us all automatically to our classes—I held my breath. No one moved. We all looked at one another, and then we grinned. Totally kewl. Until Agatha—probably alerted by school alarms—popped in, trailed by a swirl of white mist.