Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (15 page)

“You’re still a little …” He stared at me as if he was trying to put an image too big for words directly into my brain.

But I was clueless. “A little what?” Unhappy that he could have told me how to get into my locker any number of times? Darn right I was.

And then his meaning crushed in on me. “Mortal? Do you mean I’m still living like I did in the mortal world?” Low blow. “I see ghosts all the time. There are some in this house! What about Goody Deering—she greeted you at the door. Didn’t you see her pat my cheek?”

He held up his hands as if to push my growing rage away. “It takes time to adjust. There’s nothing wrong’”

For a minute I almost flipped out. Almost. But I needed him to help me get out of remedial spells. So all I did was levitate like we’d practiced all afternoon. Straight to the ceiling. “Good. Then if there’s nothing wrong with me, I guess
you won’t mind coming back to help me study again tomorrow.”

“I can’t come tomorrow, but I can come Monday.” He said it so fast, I knew he was way into me—even when he knew my mom wasn’t ever going to let him get close enough to kiss me.

“Great.” I smiled like all was forgiven. After all, he hadn’t once mentioned asking Maria and Denise to join us. I’d expected to have to explain how I was too shy to look stupid in front of so many people.

Probably lightning should have struck me then and there for being so mean to him. But it didn’t. “I have final tryouts Monday. Come Tuesday. You can stay for dinner again.”

I didn’t have much time to celebrate Dad’s yes to the Mercedes. Well, to a car. He’d downsized me from a Mercedes to a Jetta between the orange juice and the pancakes at breakfast on Monday morning.

I swallowed the bite of pancake I’d just taken and checked that my hearing hadn’t gone out on me overnight (Dad kept saying it would if I didn’t turn down the volume on my tunes). “You want me to get a job?”

“Calm down. You have experience as a babysitter, and you could always—”

“Babysitting? Don’t you want me to do well in school? Not to mention all the practice it takes to be a good cheerleader.”
If I made the cut at tryouts today, which didn’t bear thinking about while I was eating breakfast.

“A mortal car requires mortal insurance and mortal gas. In order to pay for them, you have to earn money.”

“Mom?” I thought she would help. “Can’t I just zap a policeman if he stops me? Put a spell on the car so it looks registered?”

“No.” Mom was not going to be supportive. “If you have a mortal car, using mortal streets, you need to pay for the privilege.”

“But—”

“No buts, young lady.”

“Why do you need a car?” Dorklock, as usual, was clueless. “You can zap yourself anywhere you want to go.”

“You wouldn’t understand, you’re just a kid.” The gifted-and-talented program was probably wasted on him. But I didn’t say so because it might make Dad mad enough to take the car back. Besides, the little brat had been learning to zap himself through time and space while I was stuck learning to move erasers one by one.

I tried one more round of mega-guilt. Last chance, all guns ablaze. “I wouldn’t have this problem if you hadn’t moved us here.”

I think Dad was almost ready to give in, but Mom wasn’t so easy. “Nice try, but it won’t work. If you want the car, you earn the money.”

“How much does it cost?”

Dad, happy to be useful, leaped onto the Internet, made a quick phone call to his car insurance agent, and handed me the bad news just before it was time to pop out for school.

Looked like I’d be babysitting twenty-four hours a day if I wanted the car. “Deal. But can you pay the first month’s payment as an early birthday present?”

Dad said yes before Mom could object. Now I just had to find babysitting gigs for children who liked to sleep, read, and play Barbies by themselves. Maybe I could learn to cast naptime spells.

I had plenty of time to earn enough to keep the car. Grandmama would be proud of my haggling abilities. Now all I had to do was figure out how to use the car to boost me out of new-girl status into kewl-girl status.

The problem with going to a witch school is that you pop in and out. No parking lot to show off your rad ride. No driver’s ed class. Bringing up the subject wasn’t as easy as I had hoped.

I’d thought Daniel might understand, but he wasn’t in class when I popped into remedial summoning and spells. Disappointing. I had rehearsed thanking him for his help with Hi. I also wanted to quietly brag that I’d found out Hi enjoyed brownies. A brownie a day for easy access to my locker (666 or not) seemed like a small price to pay to an oversensitive ghost.

About halfway into learning how to find a simple rhyme to improve our spells, Mr. Phogg aimed a Skeletor glare at a spot behind me. “Nice of you to accommodate the last half of my class in your busy schedule.” He held out his bony hand. “Your pass?”

“Must have lost it.” Daniel shrugged. I never would have thought you could hear a shrug, but I heard his, even though I didn’t dare risk Skin and Bone’s wrath by turning around to give him an encouraging smile. Not even when an eraser came out of nowhere and landed on my shoulder.

Turning around in Mr. Phogg’s class earned you a demerit. Ten demerits meant you got a full grade lower on that month’s work. I would simply die if I failed remedial magic.

It’s funny, but I never would have guessed that remedial classes would be harder than the gifted classes. But they are. Loads. Instead of going for the big picture of how to create a great spell, we recited general spells over and over until we sounded like an overgrown kindergarten class reciting a mega-weird alphabet. We even had a big, old-fashioned chalkboard. Mr. Phogg didn’t actually touch the chalk, he just kind of waved at it and it started writing spells and incantations on the board.

“Lost it,” said Mr. Phogg dryly. “How unfortunate for you. Two weeks’ detention.”

There was a gasp in the classroom, and everyone (except me) looked at Daniel. Who shrugged again as Mr. Phogg
recorded a storm of demerits. (No, I didn’t turn around. I heard him shrug, I swear!)

In the hallway, just before lunch, there was a lot of murmuring that had Daniel’s name drifting along in it. I ignored the gossip as I bribed Hi with more brownies and he spun my lock open for me.

I tried desperately not to picture Daniel buried in a vat of mud for two weeks straight after school. That thought alone made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I wondered if he’d run away again. I know I would if I were facing two weeks’ detention at Agatha’s.

A sudden hush in the hallway was my only warning before Daniel’s hand came to rest on my locker door. “Glad to see you’re treating my girl well, Hi.”

My
girl? A little presumptuous, but who was I to argue? “Hi and I have reached an agreement—free-and-clear access to the locker in exchange for an unlimited supply of brownies.”

“Always pays to bribe the ghost, 666 Girl.”

I almost didn’t hate the nickname when he said it this time. “Skin and Bones likes to torment you, doesn’t he?”

He grinned, as if two weeks of detention were two weeks on the beach. Which I guess they were, in a way, given how cold Massachusetts was even though it was only early fall.

“Why do you provoke him?” I asked. I genuinely wanted to know.

Daniel shrugged. “It’s fun. Almost as much as sneaking out of class to play hooky.”

There wasn’t much to say about that. Even a pebble-strewn beach and a forty-degree wind gust were better than remedial spells.

“I hear you know a bit about playing hooky the mortal way.”

“Me? I’m not a detention-type girl, myself.” Especially with tryouts this afternoon and making the team on the line. Who had blabbed? Couldn’t have been Samuel, since he’d practically growled whenever he’d said Daniel’s name. Probably Denise or Maria.

“I’m going to skip all of next class. Want to come with and see how we do it here in the magic realm?”

My heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest as I thought of detentions in vats of quicksand and the grounding of all groundings. Come with? Yes … except. My heart went from pound-pound-pound to full stop in one beat. We’d be alone together if I went with him. Alone. With my mom’s triple-strength protective spells binding me.

“I have to go.” And go I did, right into the safety of the crowded lunchroom. Leaving Daniel with a look of surprise on his face that still didn’t erase his hottie looks.

MADDIE: Chezzie made HC U were robbed

ME: Well I cant lead cheers a continent away Did she sleep with coach?

MADDIE: Tee hee Nope lost 25 lbs and her dad bought the uniforms

ME: Oh The usual way HC gets filled in BH

MADDIE: U got it

ME: I find out Monday if I made the team

MADDIE: Head?

ME: Noway! New girl here Ill be lucky if I make it at all

MADDIE: The new uniforms are cheap Coach is mad Were buyin jock itch powder

ME: Tell Chezzie 2 show her dad her rash Maybe he will spring 4 a vat of powder

MADDIE: Id rather tell SuSu If her dad gets the powder Coach will make her HC If he buys new uniforms she makes her Queen of the Cheerleaders

ME: U plannin 2 be a princess?

MADDIE: Im her best friend

ME: U are?

MADDIE: After U of course

I was determined to ignore the little click that went off in my head at the news that Coach had finally named Chezzie head cheerleader. It was like a lock had been set on my old life and I didn’t have the combination to reopen it. Before, I could daydream about Mom and Dad coming to their senses and bringing us back home. I would show up at practice and reclaim my place as leader, natch. Maddie would hug me. Coach would have a tear glistening in her eye behind her wire-rims.

Now that Chezzie was officially head cheerleader, going back would be … interesting. To be fair, I’d probably have to wait until senior year to get named head cheerleader again. Which would mean pretending to think Chezzie knew what she was talking about when it came to a good cheer routine.

I could do it, though. I knew I could. I’d survived—so far—at Agatha’s, hadn’t I? If only Mom and Dad would come to their senses.

I was glad that Maddie had been willing to really chat. For a while her texts had been so short that I thought maybe she had back-burnered me. Except for the best-friend comment, this was the most normal our texts had been since I’d moved. I’m counting the days until her grounding is over and I can call her again.

Still, she couldn’t know what it meant for me to make the team. She probably thought it should have been a done deal before I walked into the tryouts. But I couldn’t explain the differences between witch tryouts and mortal tryouts to her. I’m not even sure that I knew all of them. Yet.

While I knew I didn’t have a shot at head cheerleader, I’d been fairly confident that second tryouts would leave me with a place on the squad. That is, until Coach Gertie finished putting us through our floor warm-up with an earblasting set of whistles and said, “Okay. Preliminaries over with the mortal routines we worked on last time. Let’s get to the good stuff, girls.”

The mood in the room picked up. Everyone smiled, even the teensy girl with the ice pack on her chin.

“Follow Tara’s lead, one at a time.”

I confess, I hadn’t been too impressed with Tara’s floor
moves at the last tryouts. She really didn’t seem to think sync mattered. But when Coach pointed to Tara, and she began to rise into the air while making the same movements we’d all just done on the ground, I had to give her cred. In the air, the sloppiness wasn’t quite as noticeable. And there were a lot more ways to wow the crowd in the air.

Tara’s big finale was putting both hands over her head and somersaulting backward, coming to a tiptoe touchdown on the ground. Great. Midair gymnastics. Not my specialty.

I stood about midway through the line and tried frantically to calm myself as I watched girl after girl do this move. It must be pretty simple, if everyone could do it. One thing I knew about cheerleading was that it was like every other sport: You weeded the great from the merely good by pushing the limits until you had more failures than successes. Frappiola.

Coach pointed to me. I raised myself into the air and began sweating from the effort of moving through my routine with no floor to support me. When my hands went up and I flipped backward, I smacked down on the ground. Hard.

Everyone laughed. For a moment I thought I was doomed to be a scud forever. I tried to make a rep-saving joke. “Wow, I’m glad I didn’t try that move at the Nationals last year or Beverly Hills High would never have won.”

You’d have thought I’d stuck an electrical cord up Coach’s sweater. “Right, Miss … Stewart. Of course. I had forgotten that you were on a mortal team.”

Tara said, “Mortal moves aren’t enough here, though. Sorreee. Maybe after you figure out what your Talent is … if you have one … and you’re out of remedial classes—”

Coach interrupted her. “Now, now, Tara. Let’s not be hasty. That was a little rusty, Miss Stewart. That’s to be expected since you’ve been at a mortal school. But if you’ve competed at Nationals, I’m sure … Why don’t you try again.”