Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 03 She's A Witch Girl (3 page)

I had to do something about the serious lack of respect I was getting. I was the girl who’d had Beverly Hills High School wrapped around my little finger. Everyone listened to me. Here? It was like my voice was the whistling wind.

Okay. It may only be the end of November, but I, Prudence Stewart, am making my New Year’s resolutions early. It’s crunch time, and I don’t have any more squirm room. Like Yoda says, it’s “Do or not do. There is no try.”

First resolution: Stop wishing I wasn’t a witch. Cold turkey on that one.

Not that I haven’t been trying to buy into the being-a-witch-is-great idea since my parents moved us here just in time for me to begin my junior year of high school.

No. It’s the mortal-life-is-over part I’m having trouble with. I know I’m a witch. I may not have manifested that darned Talent that all the other witches have manifested by my age. But I will. I know it just the same way I knew I would get boobs eventually. And I did (the real kind too, not silicone like some of my more impatient former classmates).

But I’m having trouble doing the “just say no” thing to
practically everything I’ve ever known and done my whole mortal life. Solution? A new, uber-self-disciplined Pru.

I had to study 24/7 to pass my classes before? Fine. I’ll make it 48/14 for my new schedule of regular magic classes. No problem.

Agatha, the headmistress of the school, hates me because my mortal ways are disruptive? And maybe a little because her great-great-great-great-grandson Daniel ran away right after kissing me? Okay. I’ll show her I’m the best little witch in the world. No more problems from the Pru-ster.

My cheerleading team doesn’t get what it takes to win a national competition? Fine. I’ll make them listen if I have to use a hair straightener as a weapon . . . or an incentive.

Boys? My luck is bound to change on that score. It was just bad luck that the first boy I had a crush on in my new school ran away. And even worse luck that the second, my hottie neighbor Angelo, is sadly off-limits because he’s a mortal. Third time’s the crush-charm. Or I’m meant to be happy alone. Whatever. I can’t think about that right now.

My mom is going to be the new librarian at my school? Hmm. I’ll have to brainstorm that one. Maybe I just won’t ever go to the library. Yeah. That should work.

So I have a few obstacles to winning the Nationals, mastering magic, and finding my true Talent and a date for prom. But I can handle it. All I need is to make a list, make a plan, and trust myself, even if no one else will.

I was nervous enough on Monday morning—
I had a new-and-improved plan to implement, after all—so it didn’t really help when I came down for breakfast and found Mom in the kitchen, dressed for work, with her purse, a battered, beat-up old thing that only a bag lady would love, over her shoulder.

I sighed and felt my stomach slump to my toes. “I guess you weren’t kidding about the job thing?”

Dorklock looked up from his pancakes and examined Mom’s wardrobe as if he was just noticing that she was a little dressed up for breakfast with the fam. “Is today your first day at Pru’s school?”

“It is.” Mom smiled at me absently as she whirled the
breakfast dishes away, including my cereal bowl and cereal.

I saved my bowl from the whirlwind of dishes and summoned it to me. “Why couldn’t you get a job at Tobias’s school? Or at McDonald’s? Anywhere but Agatha’s.”

“I know, honey. But you’ll survive.” Mom seemed sure of it.

“Let’s hope.” I gave up. There was no hope of changing her mind. And who knows what Agatha would do if her new interim librarian didn’t show up?

“I was wondering,” Dorklock said. “Can you check out some of the high school books for me? They won’t let me have them at my school.”

“What books?” Mom knew him well enough to be suspicious of the Dorklock asking about anything that wasn’t video game-related.

“Metaphysics for the New Millennium.”
He looked so innocent, I knew he had to be up to something. But I was too busy trying to figure out how to do well in school when I couldn’t go to the library for the foreseeable future to waste time worrying about it.

Mom didn’t seem to know what the scam was either. She patted her hair, as if she cared what she looked like, and said, “I’ll see. I haven’t heard of that one.”

“It’s new.” Tobias looked so angelically innocent that I knew the book must have something in it that Mom was going to hate, especially as the new high school librarian.

My mom was going to be a librarian. Interim. I wonder what that meant about the regular librarian. I sent my untouched cereal bowl spinning to the sink. I was no longer hungry. “What happened to Mr. Munjoy?”

“Nothing. He just heard about this very interesting artifact on Atlantis, and he’s taken a sabbatical to go study it.”

Atlantis? That sounded fishy to me, pardon the pun. “I thought Atlantis wasn’t real.”

Mom looked at me and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if Agatha is right, and I have neglected your education. Atlantis is perfectly real, and I’ll make sure to plan a vacation there this summer so you and Tobias will both understand how important it is to our history.” She opened her hand and summoned a small mirror to check that her makeup was okay.

“Great.” I think my sarcasm meter was dialed up pretty high by the stress of knowing everything I had to accomplish in the next few weeks, because it got through to Mom.

She looked up from the mirror just long enough to give me a halfhearted smile. “Don’t worry. I promise to treat you just as I would any other student if I see you in the library.”

“Don’t
you
worry,” I shot back. “I don’t go to the library.” And I wouldn’t either, as long as my mom was there. Gah!

The rest of the day matched my morning. Sure, the hallway with the lockers was exactly the same. But the first day of
real magic classes made me question why I’d been so sure it was a good idea to test out of remedial—against the advice of Agatha and Mr. Phogg (aka Skeletor and/or Skin and Bones). Remedial classes are small. Regular classes are . . . not.

Because I’d changed my class schedule, I had math first. I still had my hottie math teacher—but my crush on him had been seriously cooled off by the 411 that he’d been at school with Mom. Talk about TMI. But I’m over it now. Math was a subject that translated well from the mortal realm to the witch realm, so Mr. Bindlebrot’s class didn’t figure large into my new plan of attack—as long as I didn’t have to shortchange studying for math tests because I was studying for my magic classes.

Which, I realized about ninety minutes into my first day out of remedial classes, was a total possibility. My first “real” magic class was transubstantiation. In remedial class, I’d become an expert at the whole rabbit-out-of-the-hat thing— although sometimes the rabbit was blue, or maybe a gerbil. And once, the hat was a baseball cap.

Not that any of that small stuff I sweated meant a thing today. Mr. Phogg looked a little more alive in a classroom of motivated students. He smiled at us in a creepy teaching-dead kind of way. I actually had some small hope of liking this class, until he pointed toward a big jar filled with clear liquid and dead frogs. “Today, you will dissect a frog.” He
materialized data sheets in front of each of us. “Record every organ, muscle, and bone, please.” Then he clapped his hands. “You have one hour. Begin now.”

Everyone else hopped to, forgive the bad pun. I took a moment to shake away the paralysis that comes with knowing that I was, once again, clueless. I’d done the whole dissection thing last year in Beverly Hills, so I wasn’t as freaked out as I might have been. Mainly, I was puzzled. What did transubstantiation have to do with dissection? Was I going to have to take chemistry all over again? I thought my credits from Beverly Hills should have transferred, but since Headmistress Agatha hated my guts, I could be wrong.

But then, as frogs began to float toward our lab tables, it became horribly clear to me: We were supposed to dissect our frogs with magic. The tiny little organs, muscles, and bones were supposed to be removed one by one without benefit of a scalpel or minute forceps.

Oh, goody. This is what I get for testing out of remedial magic classes: a chance to fail spectacularly in front of my classmates.

Somehow, I managed to get that frog apart—and back together, too. I’m not sure how I did it, though, and I’m really hoping no one ever asks me to do it again.

The rest of the day was full of equally fun revelations about the rigors of regular magic classes. For one thing, I suddenly was seeing a lot more of Mr. Phogg than I was
used to. He was teaching the potions class, too. The odd thing was that even though seeing him reminded me of my torturous sojourn in remedial classes, he was starting to grow on me. In a noncreepy way. In front of students who were able and motivated to learn, he wasn’t quite as grumpy or mean. I realized, despite the fact he looks like a walking skeleton, he knew his magic.

Lunch was the one time of day that was absolutely normal. Pretending to be oblivious to the frowns of my fellow cheerleaders, who were waiting for me at “our” table, I stopped by the fringie table to say a quick hi to Samuel, Maria, and Denise. They were the ones who’d let me join them on the first day of school, when no one else could be bothered. It didn’t matter to me that I got ribbed for talking to them once I got to the cheerleaders’ table. I had no intention of wiping the snipe bull’s-eye off my back by hurting the three people who’d been my only friends in those first horrible days at my new school, when I thought I might sink to the bottom of the social pool and drown in invisibility.

Samuel, as usual, popped a chair for me. Even though he’s a mega-genius and I’ve explained (at least once a week) the whole bonding-by-meal process necessary for good team dynamics, he likes to pretend I’m going to sit with them.

I looked at the chair, then at him grinning at me. “Very funny.” I popped the chair away.

“How are you doing?” Maria was the kind one. “Are the regular classes much harder for you?”

“Not too bad,” I lied. “I haven’t made a fool of myself yet.”

Denise laughed. “That’s what you think. The look on your face when the frogs came floating at you? I don’t think I was the only one who noticed.” Note, Denise is not the tactful one of my three fringie friends.

“Hey!” I raised my eyebrows, hoping she’d understand the universal girl sign for “back off.” “I got the dissection done, didn’t I?”

“Sure, you did.” She grinned so wide, the freckles on her cheeks were really noticeable.

I didn’t like her smirk. “What do you mean?”

She stopped smirking and looked a little surprised. “Didn’t you notice a few of those itty-bitties lifted themselves out for you?”

“You
helped me?” I wasn’t going to admit I hadn’t noticed the magical helping hand.

Maria patted Denise on the shoulder. “That was nice of you.” Yeah. Especially since we all knew Denise was not the nice one.

Denise glanced at Maria. “First day. It’s not going to be a habit.”

Samuel flipped his funny tri-lens glasses at me. “Don’t worry, Pru. You’ll catch up. It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it.” This would have been more reassuring if he
hadn’t already aced chemistry a year early and hadn’t been enrolled in senior metallurgy this year. Like I said, he’s on the mega-wattage side of brilliant.

“I know what I have to do—the problem is the mega-to-do list I’ve got going on. Back in Beverly Hills, I’d have used the PDA function on my cell. What do kids in Salem use to keep track of the impossibly huge list of things to do to keep from getting flushed down the grade drain?”

They all three looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Then Samuel smiled. “I have some ideas. Let me play with them in my lab for a while, and I’ll see what I can do to help you keep on track.”

“And the cavalry arrives,” Denise said snarkily.

Maria giggled. “The geek cavalry, at least.”

“We cheerleaders don’t know how to do geek.” I sighed. “Gotta go join my squad. I see the laser eyes of disapproval being aimed at me. Later.”

Like fringies everywhere, they shrugged off the idea that I could get in trouble with my fellow cheerleaders for talking to them. That’s what I liked about them. That, and that after I talked to them, I felt better about getting the hang of regular magic class. Samuel has come through for me before. I knew I could trust him when he said he’d find a solution for me.

Geeks can be a girl’s best friend, you know. Even if the girl in question is a cheerleader who only half understands geeks herself.