Once a Witch (3 page)

“Oh! I am so–” I begin, just as a seriously annoyed male voice interrupts me.

“Maybe you could watch where you're going?” The injustice of this stings, and before I can stop myself I say,

“Maybe you could watch where you're standing?” Belatedly, I become aware that I am still lying on top of this person and I scramble to my feet. It's so dark I can't see the full damage, but I can feel mud coating my right arm and there's a painful tingling in my left knee. I brush away a piece of gravel that's embedded itself into my skin. Great. I can just imagine the looks I'll be getting as I walk into Rowena's party. My front wheel is still spinning as I reach for my bike.

“Here,” the guy says.

“Let me–”

“No, I've got it.” Our shoulders bump together as we both struggle over the bike, and I bang the handlebar into what feels like his hip. Beside me, he lets out a sudden exhalation of breath. At least I hope it was his hip.

“Okay, then,” he says brightly, in a gritted-teeth kind of voice, and I'm suddenly glad for the darkness that's hiding my face.

“I'm going to keep a few feet between us. Maybe about six.”

“Sorry,” I murmur as we walk toward the house. My bike is making little clicking sounds that can't be healthy. And just then it occurs to me that I've forgotten to pick up the ice cream. I try not to sigh too loudly. My only consolation is that Rowena will have expected me to have forgotten. Which isn't much of a consolation at all. When we reach the porch, I lean my bike against the rail, turn to him, and open my mouth to say something like I'm sorry again, but the words evaporate in my throat. The guy standing next to me is undeniably beautiful. He has dark shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a lean face. His long, supple mouth quirks up in a smile as he says,

“Who knew you'd turn out to be so klutzy, Tamsin?” I make a futile swipe at the mud crusting along my forearm while staring at the blue moon tattooed on the right side of his neck. Who knew you'd turn out to he so hot?I swallow and say only,

“Hi, Gabriel” As soon as we enter the house, Aunt Beatrice sweeps down on us.

“I've lost it,” she moans and clutches at Gabriel's wrist. She examines their clasped hands for a moment and then peers up at him.

“I know you,” she whispers.

“This is Gabriel, Aunt Beatrice,” I say loudly. In addition to her memory, which has been dicey for about ten years now, Aunt Beatrice also seems to be losing her hearing. Then again, at 101, she's the oldest member of the family. And she really is family, too, being my grandmother's sister. I never knew her husband, Uncle Roberto. He died shortly before I was born, and according to my mother that's when Aunt Beatrice really slipped her anchor.

“I know who he is,” she replies, and her long nose quivers as if she is actually sniffing at me before she adds,

“And I know you” I nod. She's been proclaiming that she

“knows” me for the past three years now. Never mind that I've seen her every day of my life with the exception of the past year when I've been away at school.

“Oh,” she whimpers and releases Gabriel's hand.

“I truly lost it.”

“Lost what?” Gabriel asks patiently. ”Isn't it on your wrist, Aunt Beatrice?” I suggest, and when she gives me a distracted look, I motion to her bony wrist and the diamond bracelet hanging off it. Sometimes she can be fooled into thinking you really did just find whatever it is that she thinks she's lost. Then she'll be happy for a while, before her face collapses again and she starts wringing her hands. She examines the bracelet with bright eyes for a moment, then shakes her head sadly.

“No, dear,” she quavers.

“I've lost it” She smiles at me, a sweet smile that pulls at the millions of wrinkles on her face. Then she bestows a distracted kiss smelling of talcum powder and sherry on my cheek and I hug her with real affection. I feel some sympathy for Aunt Beatrice. Apparently, she used to be a powerful witch who could stop people from moving with just the touch of her finger. Something happened, though, long before I was born, before my mother was born, even, but no one talks about it. Now she spends most of her time wandering through her own private world searching for whatever it is she's lost.

“There you are,” says Silda, my cousin, coming to stand next to us. She rolls her eyes briefly at us before saying in a bright voice,

“Look what I brought you, Aunt Beatrice. Your favorite” In the cup of her palm she holds a tiny fruit tart. Aunt Beatrice makes a small huffing noise.

“I like chocolate,” she says. Silda blinks, closes her hand, and opens it again to display a large cookie bulging with chocolate chips.

“Your favorite,” she says again, a slight wheedle in her voice.

“And there's more where that came from.”

“Lost,” Aunt Beatrice mutters feebly, but she allows herself to be led away. I shake my head.

“Can't you–” I begin to ask.

“She hasn't lost anything that I can find,” Gabriel answers, lifting his shoulder in a little shrug.

“I tried earlier. It was something about a pocket watch. But when I found a pocket watch in a drawer, it wasn't what she wanted.” I scrape at my arm.

Mud flakes swirl onto the threadbare rug. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my mother standing at the far end of the room. Her head swivels my way and suddenly I'm very conscious of the holes in the knees of my jeans and my faded My Little Pony T-shirt, my favorite thrift-store score from last spring.

“I should go change,” I say.

“And you should go mingle. Probably not a good idea for you to spend too much time talking to the family misfit,” I add lightly. Gabriel raises his eyebrows at me.

“Family misfit?” I shrug.

“You know the deal,” I say, because I'm sure everyone's told him by now.

“No. And now you've got me curious” He takes a step closer to me. The level of chatter in the room remains high, but suddenly I feel as though we're on display.

“Come on, Gabriel. You've been back all of what, forty minutes? You must have gotten the lowdown on everything that's happened since you've been gone.”

He looks thoughtful for a minute and I'm expecting him to say something pseudo-consoling. But instead he says,

“Maybe I would have if you had filled me in over the years.”

“What?” I say, scrunching my face into confused lines. But I know what he means. Apparently, Gabriel thinks I do too, because he echoes,

“You know what I mean. What was with never writing me back? What was with the radio silence from you?” His eyes narrow in on mine as if daring me to look away. And I do. When Aunt Lydia announced that she was leaving for California, Gabriel and I tried everything we could to convince her to leave him behind. Rational arguments, screaming fits, hunger strikes (I lasted all of five hours before I caved), and silent treatments. Nothing worked. On the day they left, I extracted a promise from a mute, white-faced Gabriel that we would write each other every week. Then they drove off, Gabriel's face turned away from the house and from all of us gathered on the lawn. Instead, he stared steadily at the back of his mother's head in the passenger seat as if hoping to bore a hole through her skull. Good thing for her that wasn't his Talent. Two months later, he sent me a cool hand-drawn map of his new town, full of skulls and crossbones on all theplaces where he swore there was buried treasure, since we were crazy for buried treasure stories. But by then my infamous eighth birthday had come and gone and I was in a state of prolonged shock. A few weeks after the map, he sent me a long letter all about his new school and how it was nothing like our old one. Then he sent me a note asking only,

“Why haven't you written back???” with the three question marks all in red. Then nothing after that. I still had all the letters. But now I shrug.

“Listen, Gabriel, we were just kids. Go. Mingle. Really” I step back, trying to ignore the look he is giving me, the old familiar what are you up to look that seems not to have changed at all. I melt into the crowd.

“Tamsin,” my mother says, materializing in front of me,

“have you congratulated your sister and James yet?”

“I just got here,” I remind her, even though I know she knows this perfectly well.

“How was the store? Busy?” Suddenly, Alistair's earnest face comes swimming back to me. I had forgotten all about him, what with running Gabriel over with my bike. I shake my head a little to get rid of the image. He'll get over it after a few weeks, I remind myself.

“Not really.

“She takes in a breath, puts her hand on my arm.

“Will you try to be nice to your sister tonight?”

“I always try to be nice to her.” My mother shakes her head. One silvered strand springs free from the knot she's imposed on her normally wild hair.

“Try harder,” she says, and that persistent groove between her eyebrows deepens.

“Yes, Mom” I sigh, aware that I sound like a textbook case of the angsty teenager. If only.

“Anything else? I was about to go change,” I add. My mother looks relieved.

“Oh, good,” she says hopefully, and I resist the urge to laugh. She smiles as I move away, but I can feel her watching me. A few feet away, Uncle Morris blinks in and out of sight for the amusement of a baby, who shrieks and laughs in her mother's arms. She keeps reaching out to pull at Uncle Morris's little gray tuft of a goatee, and he lets her get just so close before disappearing again. I can't help smiling. I remember him playing the same game with Rowena and me when we were little. I trudge past piles of other aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of the family. Everyone smiles and/or waves, and I smile and/or wave back but don't stop. I know the looks I must be getting behind my back–the lifted eyebrows, the overly expressive shrugs, the whispers of sympathy. Poor Camilla–her daughter, such a waste, so unbelievable. Hasn't happened in the family since who can remember. And she was supposed to be, supposed to be, supposed to be…

“Move,” I say, booting a small boy out of the way as Ibegin to climb the massive oak staircase. He scuffles closer to the wall but glares at me with narrowed hazel eyes. I can't remember his name, but I do remember that he's the son of one of my particularly annoying second or third cousins, Gwyneth, who can cause a rime of ice to grow on anything with one flick of her finger. A stuffed teddy bear is floating near the vicinity of my hip, its glassy eyes whirling back in its head as a small toddler reaches desperately for it. Her fingertips just brush one paw before the bear flips lazily out of reach. I glare at the boy with new loathing.

“Just like your mother, you little brat,” I snarl, snatching the animal out of midair and whacking it over the boy's head.

“Ow,” he whines, reaching up to rub his forehead.

“That didn't hurt,” I answer witheringly.

“We were playing a game,” he mutters. This used to be one of Gwyneth's favorite defense lines whenever the adults found any of us coated in ice, our lips blue with frost.

“You were playing,” I snap.

“She wasn't” I present the bear to the tear-stained child, who regards me doubtfully with big brown eyes.

“You're just jealous,” he mutters.

“Because you can't do anything.” Before I can stop myself, I whip the toy back from the toddler's hesitant fingers and mash it over the boy's head a few more times.

“Ow!” he cries again.

“I was just playing,” I say pointedly before holding out the bear to the little girl again. This time she snatches it away from me.

“You're welcome,” I say and stomp up the rest of the stairs. A vision of New York City in the summer–trash bags piled on the cracked sidewalks, glittering streams of traffic, and hordes of people trundling along with Century 21 shopping bags–slips through my head. A brief and lovely oasis. I've got to get back to school.

IN THE TEMPORARY SANCTUARY of my room, I pause for a minute before the small gilt-edged mirror above my dresser to smile at a snapshot of Agatha in a pink frilly smock shirt. The words I MISS YOU. CHICAGO SUCKS! are written in black Sharpie across the bottom of the photo. I run my hands through my curly dark hair, make a brief search for my brush, give up, and jab a couple of glittery pins into the mess instead. I finger the hem of my My Little Pony T-shirt, frown, and search out my emergency pack of cigarettes that I wedged into the gap between my night table and the wall. Yanking up the window sash, I blow smoke rings through the holes in the tattered screen.

“Oh, gross, Tam,” my sister's cool voice comes from behind me. My last smoke ring comes out crooked, tearing itself into jagged wisps before I turn around.

“Don't you know how damaging that is to your health?” I widen my eyes.

“Really? I wish they printed warnings or something on the package. So irresponsible of them.” My sister shakes her head, somehow managing to keep every single strand of her gleaming blond hair anchored in its elegant chignon.

She's wearing a knee-length sleeveless black dress, black heels, a string of pearls, and no makeup beyond a slick of pink gloss on her lips. It amazes me how Rowena, amid all the debris of chipped plates, cracked tiles, peeling wallpaper, and uneven floorboards, manages to look so refreshing every day.

She's all polished surfaces and glimmering reflections, someone who doesn't need makeup and probably never will. In addition to all of her extraordinary Talents, she also happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful. I feel grubby just looking at her. Now her large green eyes, fringed with thick lashes just a shade darker than her hair, narrow at me.

“Is that what you're wearing?” I look down, shrug.

“Yeah, I just changed. Like it?” I inhale and exhale, ignoring my sister's pointed little cough.

“Shouldn't you be downstairs receiving congratulations and everything?”

“I came up here to see if you were coming back down” There is just the faintest lift to her voice that I almost don't catch. But I've learned to follow every intonation of my sister's voice. Rowena is extremely Talented in the art of speech.

Her voice is like pure honey mixed with cinnamon and wine. She can mesmerize when speaking, her voice looping and twining through people's heads until they would walk off cliffs into the sea if she asked. As if that's notenough, she can also give the power of speech to inanimate objects. When we were younger she used to delight me for hours by making the statues in the garden speak, their voices full of stone and dust. Then, when I turned eight and everything didn't happen the way it was supposed to happen, the usual sisterly cracks between us grew to canyon-size chasms. Any time she tried to use her power on me after that, she would catch herself, give me such a searching look that I could hardly stand it, and hurry away.