The Hex Breaker's Eyes (4 page)

“Some psychic,”
I say. “I can’t believe I almost fell for it.”

“Excuse me?”
she asks, indignant.

“Listen to my
mother? How can I do that?” I’m absolutely seething that this phony
psychic almost made me believe her. How dare she? I shout, which I
don’t like to do, but I just can’t help it. “My mother’s dead!”

I storm out of
the trailer before I have to listen to another word from Madame
Fraud. Tam and Ryan follow right after me, and we’re twenty feet
away before Marlene comes out of the trailer, running to catch up.
There are tears in my eyes but I’m holding them back. I’m not gonna
let some trailer trash fraud see me cry. We get to the car and Ryan
uses his remote to unlock it so I can get in. Tam climbs in the
back next to me.

“I’m so sorry I
made you come,” she says.

I just want to
go home. Not even Ryan, the eternal optimist, tries to say anything
to lighten the mood. We ride back to Blue Ribbon in silence, except
for the radio, which none of us are listing to.

My mother died
three years ago. When I was little she was a great mom, the sort of
person that happy kids remember when they grow up. Then she
changed. Actually, maybe she never changed, I just became smart
enough to see what she was really like. By the time I was nine, I
realized that other adults were uncomfortable around my mother, and
that they often talked behind her back. Pretty soon I figured out
that my mother had a reputation as the town’s crazy lady, and soon
I started to see it too.

I know that she
definitely got worse that year. She went from being a doting mother
who sometimes spaced out or said strange things, to deliberately
going out to harass people. We had the cops called to our house a
lot. I don’t recall any police visits when I was little, but in the
year I was nine they came seven times. The neighbours saw it, and
soon enough I was hearing about it at school. I went from being
just like any girl to being the daughter of the crazy woman.

Eventually, my
mother harassed somebody enough that she had a restraining order
put on her. (An order which Mom broke repeatedly.) Eventually, her
harassment of this other woman got so bad that she was arrested and
jailed. Soon enough, the doctors were saying she was insane, and
they locked her in a facility a couple hours south of here.
Something about being locked up must have just killed her inside,
because every time I went to visit her, she was thinner, paler, and
crazier. She went from being a healthy, round-faced woman to a
skeleton with wild eyes. For the first little while, she’d hold it
together when we visited. She’d smile and ask about school and read
stories to Devon. But after an hour or so, she’d start to get
twitchy, irritable, and angry with the nurses. Our visits never
lasted long after that.

By the end, she
wasn’t able to put on the normal face at all anymore. She couldn’t
play sane for me and Devon when we came to visit. She was just
crazy all the time. The insanity turned into rage, and she would
often direct that rage at us. I was about to graduate eighth grade,
and my mother was descending into complete madness so severe that
she terrified me.

The summer I
turned thirteen, she died one night, in her sleep. Whatever it was
that drained her, and made her refuse to eat, it finally caught up
and killed her. For the last three years that I knew her, she was a
wide-eyed maniac, and in the end she barely knew me. I spent the
last years of my mother’s life making excuses not to have to see
her because I was so scared of her, and the two years since then
feeling like the world’s worst daughter because of it.

So when Madame
Knight in her trailer-park robe tells me to listen to my mother,
all I hear is the sound of the kids who have taunted me for the
last five years, telling me I’ll be just as crazy as her.

I’ll never be
that way, crystal ball be damned.

I’m back at
school, hoping to forget all about Madame Tracksuit and get back to
normal. There’s only one problem: Dina is still glowing. Her aura
now has seems to have two tentacles and they never fade back into
the blob of light around her. They just exist, all the time. I’m in
the upstairs hallway by my locker, and she just came around the
corner. She’s still pretty, but it seems like she isn’t getting
much sleep. She has bags under her eyes, she looks pale, and
instead of styling her hair today she just pulled it into a
ponytail. I don’t want to look at her, so I stuff my binder into my
backpack and head in the other direction. This is actually the
longest possible way to get to my first period class, but at least
I won’t have to walk through those tentacle things.

And just to be
clear: seeing tentacles does not mean I’m crazy like my mother.
It’s something wrong with
her
, not with me.

I have to head
back to my locker after second period to swap a different binder
and textbook into my backpack. I’m running up the stairs, making
good time, when I see the yellow haze heading my way. Our school is
two floors, and the stairs between the floors have two flights. You
go half-way, reach a wide landing, turn around and head up the
second flight to reach the second floor. I’ve just made the turn
when I see that Dina Jennings is at the top of the stairs, heading
down toward me. Those yellow snakes are still flailing around her,
and if I pass her on the stairs, those things will pass right
through me. That just seems gross, so I’m going to pause on the
landing for a moment, and let her pass by. If I keep my back flat
against the wall, she should go past me without the tentacles
getting close.

But then I see
one of the tentacles shoot straight out from her. It seems to latch
onto a binder tucked under a boy’s arm. The boy is talking to his
friend, rushing up the stairs like everyone else. And like all
those other kids he doesn’t see the invisible snake of light that’s
now making his binder glow. He reaches the landing and turns with
everyone else, heading up the second flight of stairs to the top
floor of the school, and he passes close by Dina.

That’s when the
tentacle yanks back on his book. To everyone else, it would look
like the plastic binder just slipped out of the kid’s grip. After
all, it was just tucked under his arm; not like he was holding it
tightly. The binder falls to the steps, and bounces downward. As it
falls, it flies open, and the thin plastic cover manages to bounce
directly under Dina’s foot. She steps on the binder, it tips and
slides under her weight, and pitches her forward. She’s only four
steps from the landing, not enough for this to kill her, but it
will be a bad fall if she lands the wrong way, and I bet her aura
will make sure that she does.

Somehow,
without really thinking about it, I’ve stepped a little closer. I’m
basically right under her now, and since I use my backpack to carry
everything, my hands are free. Dina Jennings is fully airborne,
launched over the steps, legs flailing beneath her but finding
nothing to stand on. I hold my arms out, and she thumps into me.
Her elbow hits me square in the middle of my chest and knocks the
air out of me, but I break her fall and she lands on her feet.
Thankfully neither of us has done an embarrassing face-plant in
front of everyone here. I want to say something to her, but I’m
trying to catch my breath. She looks at me, realizes that I saved
her from embarrassment and injury, and then sees that everyone has
stopped to look at us. She blushes, nods to me, mutters a weak
thanks, and takes off down the next flight of steps. I’m still
catching my breath, gasping and rubbing the spot where her elbow
hit me. Wayne Shepherd, a senior who’s head of the student council,
is coming down the stairs. Wayne’s got a good face for campaign
posters: square jaw, dimples, blue eyes. (Is he smiling at me?) He
pats me on the shoulder.

“Nice catch,
Vefreet,” he says as he passes. I’m absolutely shocked that he
knows my name, but maybe learning every student’s name is some
skill he has practiced to get people to vote for him.

I retreat to my
locker and start to swap out books in my backpack, but my chest
still hurts and my mind is racing. Dina’s aura is still there. It’s
getting stronger. It tried to trip her down the stairs. Maybe
Madame Knight was a fraud, but she probably backed it up with some
basic knowledge of the supernatural. So even though her prediction
for my future was a bunch of vagaries and lies, she might have been
right about Dina.

The poor girl
really is hexed.

The hallway is
mostly empty now. Half of the kids are in their third period
classes, and the other half are lining up in the cafeteria. I stuff
my backpack into my locker, deciding I don’t need it. I’m going to
skip third period history class today. I head back to the stairs,
to go down to the library. I need to start looking into hexes.

As third period
turns into fourth, Marlene, Tam and Ryan find me in the library
after I wasn’t in the usual hallway spot for lunch. I’m on a
computer near the back of the library, looking up the occult,
witchcraft, and trying to find specifics on hexes. After asking
what I’m doing and listening to me explain why I missed lunch,
everyone sits down and we pull our chairs into a huddle.

“Someone is
doing this to her,” I say.

“And it’s
getting worse. Their bad feelings are getting stronger each day,”
Tam adds.

“Maybe she’s
got an angry ex-boyfriend?” Ryan wonders aloud.

“I have a
plan,” I tell them. “Marlie, I need you to figure out how to break
a hex. Get into your weird websites, we want
real
details
about what has to happen. Nothing vague or theoretical. I want
instructions or a recipe or whatever.” I turn to Tam and Ryan and
keep talking. “The three of us need to figure a way into this Dina
girl’s life. Figure out who’s mad at her, who’s into the occult,
stuff like that. Once we know how to break the curse we’ll have to
know who’s responsible.”

Marlene
interrupts me. “I already looked it up,” she says. “After Madame
Knight told you all that, I went home and checked out hexing on
some Wicca websites.

“So what do we
do?” I ask.

“A hex requires
four things. An item belonging to the victim, an item belonging to
the caster, a spoken incantation, and the willpower to sustain the
hex over time. The stronger your will, the stronger your bad
feeling, the more powerful the hex. There are other things that
boost the strength of the hex, too, but I don’t know what they do
exactly.”

“What do they
do with the objects?” Tam asks.

Marlie blurts
it out, unable to contain this exciting knowledge: “Bind them
together. A hex is a connection between a witch and a victim, so
the personal belongings are bound together to create a talisman. If
you can destroy the talisman, separate the items, I think that will
break the connection between the witch and the victim.”

“So if we can
figure out who’s behind this hex,” I say, “we can find the talisman
and destroy it.”

“Yeah,” says
Tam. “That, or cast your own incantation that’s even stronger than
theirs, to cancel it out. I mean, that should work, right?”

“I don’t know.
The websites never mentioned that but I can look up
counter-spells,” says Marlene.

“So what’s the
plan, Miz Spellbreaker?” Tam asks me.

I shrug. “It’s
like on a TV detective show. We need to know who has motive and
opportunity. Talk to people in the girl’s life, find suspects, and
flush ‘em out. People with motive are the ones who don’t like her
and people with opportunity are the ones who know about magic.”

I might not
have a choice about seeing the hex, but at least I can do something
about it. From this moment on, I’m on the case. I
will
stop
this thing.

I’m at home,
sitting at the kitchen table across from my dad and Devon. Dad made
macaroni and cheese tonight, and I’m having some carrots so it’s at
least a little bit healthy. We don’t have a lot to say. We’ve had
some form of pasta every night for the last week, or at least seems
that way to me. Dad makes some small talk with Devon about school,
but I’m not really paying attention. I’m just staring at my cheap
little phone and absentmindedly shoveling noodles into my mouth. I
should stop waiting for the phone to ring. It’s not going to ring
just because I’m staring at it. (
Ugh, I’m still staring
).
You might have guessed I’m waiting for a call.

Ryan is a year
older than us, so he can be on senior sports teams. He plays on the
basketball team, even though by “play” I mean he sits on the bench.
Tam goes to see every game, and I go too sometimes. Tonight I
didn’t want to go, as I knew I’d just be distracted the whole time.
After the game, we have a plan where Ryan will talk to one of the
senior guys on the team and see if anyone is going out with Dina
Jennings. It might be awkward for him if word gets out that he’s
asking about a senior girl, but he said he wanted to help us
investigate, plus everyone knows he’s with Tam so they’d assume he
was asking for a friend. Now I’m just waiting for Tam to call and
tell me what Ryan said.