Rhymes With Witches (12 page)

“You know why you're here,” Keisha said.

I did, but I wasn't so dumb as to say it out loud.

“We're very careful whom we pick to join us,” she said, “and we're impressed with your qualifications.” She ticked off points. “You're a freshman. That's essential, of course. You're not in any remedial classes. Your looks meet the minimum requirements.”

“Which is to say you're not a dog,” Bitsy said. She winked.

“But mainly, we like your attitude,” Keisha said. “You appreciate what we represent, and we know you'll make us proud. Am I right?”

“Um, yeah,” I said.

“Because we'll be investing an enormous amount of energy in you, Jane. You'll have to work hard to be worth it.”

I felt silly, but I nodded anyway. “I will. I promise.”

Bitsy leaned forward. “And everything we tell you remains secret. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

She arched her eyebrows. “Once you're in, you're in. It's a forever kind of thing, luv. So think about it before you give your answer, because you better be one-hundred-percent sure.”

I gazed at their faces. They all looked so serious. Mary Bryan smiled encouragingly, but she was gripping her Perrier harder than she needed to. For no good reason I thought of cats. Of black magic and girls who were dead. Fear twanged in my stomach, and I had an out-of-body sensation of standing over a pit, about to fall in.

Don't you dare
, I told myself.
Don't you dare wimp out now.

“I want in,” I said. “I want to be a Bitch.”

Time stopped. And when nothing happened, I had a moment of panic.
Is that it?
I thought.
What happens next?

Keisha picked up her backpack from the floor and withdrew a small box. She walked to my sofa and stood in front of me. I stood, too.

“In that case, we ask you to be one of us,” Keisha said. “Do you accept our invitation?”

Hokey
, whispered a voice inside me, but I embraced it, because hokey was better by far than the other.

“I do.”

“And do you swear to keep all our proceedings secret and confidential, or face the consequences?”

“I do.”

She opened the box and took out a key. It was dull with tarnish. She placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it.

“This is your key,” she said. She gave me a meaningful look, but I didn't know what the meaning was.

“Okaaay,” I said. I felt its weight and wanted to open my hand and look at it. But I didn't know if I was allowed.

Keisha's expression softened. “Congratulations.”

For no reason, my eyes filled with tears.

“Oh no,” Mary Bryan said, “now you're going to get me going, too!” She jumped up and hugged me. “This is so awesome, Jane! You're one of us!”

“For real?” My lips wobbled into a grin.

Bitsy unfolded herself from the sofa. She strolled to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of champagne. She popped the cork, and foam bubbled out.

“Cheers,” she said. “You're officially a Bitch.”

T
he fly, the fly. The fly in the ointment. The fly in the ointment was this: The key Keisha gave me was to Lurl the Pearl's private office. Not her classroom, where she held office hours and gave tutorials, but a separate office in Hamilton Hall. And the Bitches had instructed me to go there with an item from the girl whose popularity I was willing to suck away, because for me to rise, I had to knock down someone else … or something like that. My memory of Keisha's instructions was more than a little muzzy. But anyway, only then would I become the Jane I was meant to be. Uber-Jane, with bonus molecules of charisma bouncing from my cells.

It was crazy, of course. Crazy enough to make my skin prickle. Although of course I'd hidden my reaction.

I had slept hard after yesterday's induction ceremony, but
this morning I replayed it all over again. How Keisha had explained the rules with a straight face, and how she frowned when I kept giggling. But I couldn't help it. It was either giggle or fall into the pit, and I chose to giggle. Because it made me feel better … and because by that point I'd had two glasses of champagne.

“So it's like an initiation,” I'd said. “You want me to steal something from someone to prove I'm, like, loyal.”

“It can be a Chapstick,” Mary Bryan said. “Or a ribbon. It doesn't have to be something big.”

“But it's not to prove your loyalty,” Keisha said. “Like I said, it—”

“Close enough,” Bitsy intervened. She smiled to show that she knew Keisha was going a little overboard. “Jane gets the picture. Right, pet?”

I didn't, because I refused to. “The thing is, there's really no need, because I'm totally yours already,” I said. “So we can skip the rite of passage dealie, okay?”

Keisha looked pained. Bitsy blew air our of her cheeks. She went to replenish the soy nuts. Mary Bryan bit her lip, then grabbed the bottle of Veuve Cliquot Grande Dame and topped off my glass.

“The thing is, you kind of have to,” she said. She grimaced, like,
I know it sucks, but what can we do?
“I know it's a drag. I do. But it's not like we want you to
hurt
anyone. Like I said, you can take something so small it doesn't even matter. A Lifesaver, even.”

“Can I just ask someone for one?” I said. I could do that, ask whoever for a Tootsie Roll or a stick of gum.

“No, you have to take it,” Keisha said wearily. “You have to pick a girl, someone different every week, and take something that belongs to her—”

“
Steal
something that belongs to her,” Bitsy said. She'd returned with more nuts, which she picked through with one hand. She widened her eyes at Keisha's scowl. “What?”

Keisha turned back to me. “And then you have to deliver it to Lurl the Pearl. If you want to be one of us for real, that's what you have to do.”

“Ohhh,” I said. The giggles started up again. “So let me see if I'm getting this. I'm ‘officially' a Bitch, but I'm not officially a Bitch until I pass the test. Is that it?”

“You have to steal something and give it to Lurl,” Keisha repeated.

“But why Lurl the Pearl?” I said, remembering how she scolded me for my Internet hanky-panky. “Anyway, she'll turn me in. Unless she doesn't know the thing isn't mine, in which case she'll be like, ‘Why is this freak giving me her Chapstick?'” I covered my mouth with my hand. “Oh my god, she'll think I'm hitting on her.”

Mary Bryan sighed.

Bitsy wiped salt from her fingers onto her jeans. “This is getting extremely old.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” Keisha said. “If she doesn't come through, you're screwed, too, you know.”

Mary Bryan leaned back on the sofa so that her head was resting on the cushion. She stared at the ceiling. “It's been a long summer,” she said. “I feel like I'm changing.”

“Well, you're not,” Bitsy snapped.

“That's what I tell myself, but …” She lifted her hands, then let them drift back to the sofa.

“Oh for crap's sake,” Bitsy said. She put down the bowl of nuts and stood before me. “Look, Jane. You'll take someone's bloody Chapstick and you'll give it to Lurl. Got it?”

“Bloody Chapstick,” I said. “Ick. Bad image.”

“Unless you're afraid to,” Bitsy said.

I grinned. This was classic. “Afraid?
Moi?
” I went mock-solemn, pressing the tips of my fingers together in prayer. “Just tell me one thing. You guys aren't going to make me kill a—” I almost said “cat,” but changed the word at the last second. “A dog, are you?”

Mary Bryan shot a swift, startled look at Keisha.

“Of course not,” Keisha said sharply.

Mary Bryan trained her blue eyes on me. “I love dogs,” she offered. “I wish I could get one, but my mom won't let me.”

Bitsy studied me. I couldn't read her expression. “Come on, luv,” she said. “Throw us a bone.”

I downed the rest of my champagne, which really was delicious. Like fat yellow bumblebees. “Oh o
kay
. As long as I don't have to kill a dog to get it.”

Bitsy half-smiled, then selected a soy nut from the bowl. She held it, but didn't eat it. “Quite the dark horse, this one, isn't she?”

I buzzed with pleasure, as if she'd seen the secret me. Uber-Jane, ready to take on the world.

But today, as I trudged to my locker, the giddiness was gone. In its place stirred an unsettling confusion. Because hahaha, great joke and all that, only they'd never broken character. Not once. No smirks to show it was all a game, no shared looks when they thought I wasn't watching. They were good, those three. Either that, or …

No. A girl couldn't really siphon away someone else's popularity. Could she?

It didn't escape me that Lurl the Pearl did, in fact, have a sideways connection with all that was spooky. Her early religions course, for one, with its focus on age-old rituals and mythologies. And she herself was weird as hell.

Then again, if the Bitches wanted to shroud themselves in mystery—while at the same time putting me through the paces—then Lurl was the obvious choice. I'd read more than just Ramona books, and I knew how this stuff worked. The crusty old man in an antique store; the wizened librarian with owlish features; the pale, silent comic-book collector living forever in his parents' basement—this was the stuff that rumors were made of. Lurl the Pearl was Crestview's creepiest option, and of course the Bitches were willing to take advantage.

That didn't mean I wanted to give her a stolen offering, though. But what choice did I have if I wanted to be accepted by the others?

Through my headache, I noticed all the shit girls lug around every day. Lipsticks, cell phones, compacts. Little plastic makeup pouches attached to the loops of backpacks. Clippies shaped like butterflies. Jewel-studded barrettes. Tubes of body glitter. Gum.

But I couldn't actually
steal
anything from anyone. For starters, someone was sure to see. Her eyes would lock with mine, and I'd yank my hand from her backpack, leaving the body glitter behind. “Sorry,” I'd say with a burning face. “I was just wondering what kind it was.”

I twisted the dial on my lock. Beside me, Sally Howarth's locker stood open while Sally chatted with Leila Hobbs. Sally had decorated the inside of the door with colorful magnets, some holding up pictures, but some on their own, serving no purpose whatsoever. Just wasting space.

Sally fished around for the notebook on top of her stack of books. She slammed her locker and headed down the hall with Leila.

“You look like hell,” Alicia informed me, pulling off another of her great sneak-ups. “Seriously. You look even worse than I do.”

I whipped around, my pulse in overdrive. “Gee, thanks,” I said.

“I'm just being honest.”

“Uh-huh. And thanks again.”

She leaned against the lockers on my other side. She'd trimmed her bangs, and they lay in a straight, black line over her eyebrows. “Anyway, if you're worried that I'm still mad at you, I'm not. Which I would have told you if I could have found you at school yesterday. Or if you ever answered your damn phone. You're like this lady of the night now, always off on some mysterious adventure. What's up with that?”

I closed my eyes. I needed to tell her.
Had
to tell her. But I knew she wasn't going to like it. I opened my eyes. “Um, actually I—”

“Yeah, whatever,” she said. The hall was filling up, and some guy knocked her off balance as he passed. “Meet me in front of Hamilton after math, all right? I've got big news. Bigger even than cheerleading. See you!”

Okay, then
, I thought. Saved by the bell, which hadn't yet rung. I shoved my French books into my backpack and closed my locker. I scanned the floor, hoping to spot a wayward pen. A paper clip, even.

But there was nothing there.