Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (13 page)

“Lights out, Prudence.” Mom stuck her head in the door, even though she could have just projected her voice into my room with magic. She saw the glass of iced tea on the table and asked, “Need any help with your home-work?”

“Nope. All done.” I drank the iced tea. Yuck. Too sweet. “Mr. Phogg seems to think you should have been called Impatience, not Patience, when you were young.”

“He said that? Out of the blue?” Mom always asked the right questions. Usually I hated that. But this time I’d counted on it.

“I asked about extra credit and he tried to get me to go back to ninth-grade magic classes!” I hoped the juxtaposition of my two comments would serve to tickle her motherly guilt. Maybe Mr. Phogg wouldn’t have had it in for me if it wasn’t for Mom. Maybe.

She frowned for a minute, as if she’d tasted something bitter. But then she put on the false-cheer smile moms are so good at. “Mr. Phogg can be a bit methodical, Prudence, but there’s no one better to learn spells and summoning from.”

I could think of at least three. In order, from least horrible to most: Samuel, Mom, and Dorklock. I wish I could think of a spell that would make sure the studying with Samuel would pay off quickly enough that I wouldn’t need to resort to the next two options. Because time and space are converging, and a place on the team—and in the school—are on the line.

I’d nearly had a heart attack when I finally read the rules on the postcard that appeared when I signed up for cheer-leading tryouts. It was only dumb luck that had made me look at them at all. After all, I’d been a cheerleader—and a very good one, according to all my coaches—since sixth grade. But here in the witch realm, everything was just a little bit different. Including the rules and regulations for cheerleading tryouts.

They hadn’t made sense at first read: no flying over ten miles per hour, no turning the opposition into toads during a toss, and no double spell casting (apparently it has a great effect when it works, but leaves a big mess when it doesn’t—and it only works about 10 percent of the time).

A little research at the school library told me all I needed to know—theoretically. Definitely not the way I want to make my splash—unless it looked like I wasn’t going to make the team, of course.

But I figured that was unlikely. If I could make the
team at Beverly Hills High, where even the second stringers had had a nose job, a boob job, and spent the afternoons with a personal trainer, I should be able to manage here, where most of the cheerleaders had a little extra padding that suggested they didn’t work out as much as they should.

Tryouts were in the girls’ gym. I wasn’t sure what the girls would be wearing (sounds silly, but cheerleaders are made or broken by what they wear even more than how they look—all those fancy moves mean nothing if the people in the stands can’t see how the body moves). So I covertly eavesdropped on the cheerleaders’ table at lunch, in hopes of overhearing something that would give me an edge, but all I heard about was how the complexion-clearing spells could be overused to the point of turning skin to alligator.

So when school was over and the girls’ locker room doors appeared in the hallway, I held back. Normally, I like to be first in line, but this time I decided to take a peek and see what the other girls were wearing so I could zap a rad outfit for myself before I committed to the gym and the scrutiny of all the others.

To my relief, it seemed to be general cheerleading practice type stuff—shorts, belly shirts, sneakers in a rainbow of colors. I popped myself into my blue shorts and green belly shirt. Just to stand out, I changed the color of my sneakers
to match my shirt and turned the laces the same blue as my shorts.

And then I went in to face the greatest challenge any high school junior ever faces: the cheerleading triumvirate—coach, last year’s head cheerleader, and this year’s head cheerleader.

The funny thing was that I had the potential to be a hottie here (I’m not bragging, just the facts). Back home, I’d been okay in the looks department, but nothing to break out the cameras for. I’d even been worried I’d be cut from the team when Dad refused to let me have any work done, but fortunately, I was a good flyer (no one knew I was really flying) and, after Katie Williams landed on her fake boobs and they burst, I got top spot.

So, instead of work, I had a few magic tricks that let me compensate for the times when my support faltered, or didn’t have the muscle to throw me high enough in the air. As Mandy, the head cheerleader my freshman year, said to anyone who dared to sneer at her “improvements”—“Some of us are blessed by nature, and some of us are blessed by American Express. However you got it, honey, make the most of it.” (I think she stole that line from someone else, but she sure made it her own. I heard a rumor that she’d had it engraved on her cell phone. Normally I didn’t believe outrageous rumors, even in Beverly Hills, where a lot of them were true. This one, I thought was highly possible.)

Basically, I figured since I’d already been using witchcraft secretly to help my cheerleading, it would be a small adjustment to use it openly.

I know, I know. The fact I was in remedial spells should have been a clue. But what can I say? I’ve always been a witch in the mortal world. Kind of like the seeing man in the land of the blind that my dad loves to lecture about. Now I was more like Mr. Magoo in a world of people with x-ray vision. Sucks. Big-time.

But hey, I’m not one to complain unless I think it will get me my way. So I kept my fingers crossed that my learning curve would be more like a straight line up.

The tryouts were not very different from back home … at first. I didn’t stand out too much. Sure, everyone knew I was the half mortal, but they’d started getting used to it. Hardly anybody stared openly anymore. It wasn’t like I had horns, and the wardrobe changes helped me blend in with all the kids who had better things to do than worry about what the half-mortal reject was up to.

Coach Gertie, a witch with flyaway red hair and a strong Irish brogue, had a whistle, which was annoying in a normal, mortal way. Coach Riley had been so addicted to hers back in Beverly Hills that someone once tested it for crack cocaine as a joke.

Another familiar thing was the way Coach Gertie put us through our paces: Ready Position, Buckets, High V, K
motion, Spankies, L motion. For the first time since I’d been forced to start a whole new life, I felt like I knew what I was doing in Salem. It was my time to show Coach I could snap out the sharpest moves on the team.

But it quickly became clear that my standards were higher than the coach’s. At first, I just thought everyone was rusty after a summer off. The floor moves were sloppy, to say the least. The best V’s looked like U’s, and the rest looked like they were being arrested by the fashion police.

Back home, these girls wouldn’t have had a chance at JV, but Agatha’s was a small school and evidently Coach Gertie wasn’t a stickler like Coach Riley had been. Of course, Riley’d had nothing on our last year’s head cheerleader, who’d made us practice in the mirror until we could do the moves right in our sleep. Agatha’s head cheerleader, a bleached blonde named Tara, looked the part … as long as she was standing still. And then she looked like she needed sleep—or lots of high-octane coffee. Worse, she looked like that while she was trying to lead us in our tryout moves. Not a good sign for the regional competitions, never mind me showing up Chezzie at Nationals. Bummer.

I snapped out my moves, tried not to collide with the girls on either side of me, and put on my innocent cheer-leader smile while I asked some questions to try to figure out why all the girls—even the seniors—were so lax about floor moves.

When the girl on my left (one of the girls whose V looked like she was being arrested) smacked me with an untidily extended arm, I took the opportunity to catch her eye. “Which cheerleading camp did you go to this summer?”

“Are you kidding? My mom’s really into snorkeling, so we went to the Seychelles for the whole summer. If I never see another piece of coral again for my whole life, I won’t mind.”

Unfortunately, Tara overheard my question and flew over to us (literally). “No talking, girls. Concentrate on those moves.” She was looking at me, like I wasn’t letter perfect. As if.

The girl I’d tried to turn into an ally shouted out, “Hey Tara, did you know they have cheerleader camps in the mortal realm?”

“Of course they do,” she sneered, as if cheerleader camps were where mortals went to die. “If you can’t fly, you have to practice harder.”

Everyone laughed. Okay. So that was one answer as to why these girls didn’t take floor moves seriously. Camp really helps you focus. And there was no focus on this floor, unless it was in the little “pick me” spells the wannabes were whispering under their breath.

I’m not trying to be immodest, but really. I was the only one who could snap a tight set of moves. And timing. Everyone seemed to have their own beat going in their
heads—not the best way to get in synch for killer movement.

Coach clapped her hands loudly at the end of the two-hour tryouts. “Great job, girls.” I could see she really meant it. She thought those sloppy moves were fine. “I’ll see you again Monday for the second half of tryouts. Make sure your parents sign the permission slip for me to remove your binding spells, or you’ll be disqualified. I don’t have time to track parents down all over the world.”

Another thing I was beginning to understand was that witch parents are really a lot like the rich parents of my former classmates. Lots of time spent pursuing fun and special interests. But at the same time, witch parents are seriously more protective of their kids. They never leave them alone without a bunch of protective and/or binding spells. Mega annoying. It was bad enough back home when we had the “always charged and ready rule”: cell phones nearby and turned on so our parents could hear our happy voices and know we were okay at random moments of their choosing. Here in the land of witches who could fly, read minds, cast spells, and transubstantiate, alarms were always going off because some parent had set their antismoking spell so ultra sensitive that it went off when the Bunsen burner was turned on in chem lab.

I’d asked Samuel about this after two days of jumping at the ear-shattering whine that seemed to come from nowhere
at the worst times. “What’s with the alarms? Do witches have a big weapons-to-school problem?”

He shrugged, obviously used to it. “Don’t mortal parents put restrictions on their kids? You know, curfew, and grounding, all those metal detectors? And speaking of metal detectors, does it hurt to go through one?”

“No. It doesn’t hurt to go through a metal detector any more than it hurts to walk through a door,” I said patiently. “Besides, those restrictions don’t mean anything as long as you don’t get caught.”

“How can you not get caught?” There was more than shock on his face—there was a definite layer of curiosity. Well, well, well. Geekoid Samuel had a little taste for the bad-boy rep. Whodathunkit?

“Take curfew. If you set the clocks back a little, you can give yourself an extra twenty or thirty minutes past the time the ’rents want you home. Unless they notice, you’re set. And if they do notice, you can always plead you set your watch by their clocks. And grounding—nobody ever puts up with grounding. That’s what windows were made for—leaving the house and getting back in undetected.”

Samuel was sensitive about my criticism, I found, when he began to defend ‘rents and restrictions. “Well, mortal kids can only get into car wrecks or burn down a house. Witch kids … remember Chernobyl?”

“Are you telling me a Russian nuclear power plant went melty because of a witch?” I asked, horrified.

Samuel nodded. “A witch kid who was manifesting a major Water Talent. His parents had been studying the climate changes of Siberia through the years, forgot to put a protective spell on him, and voilà, he got mad and—accidentally—boiled the water from the core. The council had to make it seem like the humans had done it by being careless, because not even a turn-back-time spell could fix that disaster.”

Denise nodded, a French fry dangling from her lips. “That was quite a meltdown. My parents double charmed me from then on.”

Great. And I just happened to live with the Dorklock, who was going to manifest his Talent in as annoying a way as possible if his past history was anything to judge by. No wonder Mom had convinced Dad to move here. “Jeez. And I thought having a party for two hundred of your closest friends when your parents were out of town was a silly idea.”

“We have a few more restrictions than mortal teens,” Samuel agreed. “But when you consider that most of our parents have spent centuries seeing what kind of trouble they can get into, it makes sense that they’d want to protect us from the worst of our mistakes for a while.”

“Even grown witches don’t always know when to avoid trouble,” Maria had chimed in.

“Don’t worry, Maria. Your mom’s still young. They’ll go easy on her.” Denise, ever sympathetic, patted her hand and popped a big square of chocolate next to Maria’s half-eaten hot pastrami sandwich.

“She never learns. She always thinks this husband is the right one. She’s almost two hundred!” Maria took a big bite of chocolate, and two tears made tracks to her chin.

“Love makes us all crazy, mortal and witch,” I offered, not knowing what else to say. Maria’s mother had been summoned to the high council for her unauthorized wedding. Nobody knew what was going to happen to her. “Look at my mom. She married a mortal and lived in L.A. for twenty years with practically no magic.”

Maria was much more heartened by that than I would have been. But then, she knew something I didn’t. “Thanks for reminding me. Your mom survived a visit to the council for her unauthorized wedding, so I guess mine can too.”

My mom survived a visit to the council? I churned those words for a few minutes. Why hadn’t I known that? Even Grandmama never threw that at Dad when she complained about his fuddy-duddy mortal ways. It couldn’t have been that bad, though, could it? Because no one ever talked about it at our house.

By the time I got back to the conversation at hand, Samuel was saying, “I mean, think about it. Mortals live,
what, seventy or eighty years? And they think twenty-five is young. So your mom is only a teenager in witch terms.”