Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (3 page)

Mom would have quickly zapped us all to Salem, but Dad had made her compromise. Dad always made her
compromise. Which should make living in witch central really interesting.

Rather than traveling in the blink of an eye like the witches we were, we went off for a long car drive across the country. Education, Dad called it. Family time, Mom said.

I would have called it torture, man’s inhumanity to witches, and death after life. But if I did, annoying harp music would play. So instead I put on my headphones and turned on my tunes. The pounding lyrics of Disturbed help me tune out the lunacy of my parents. Not to mention the Dorklock.

I’d thought locking him into a moving SUV for long hours would be guaranteed to turn my parents around. But he’d embraced the new “witchcraft is okay” mood in the house. He had tucked away his Game Boy and pulled out his travel chess. Then he’d animated the players so that they moved around the board, mostly brawling and not playing any game I could recognize.

Naturally, that made Dad a little nervous. He kept looking over his shoulder and asking, “Can those people in the van see into our car?” or “Is that trucker watching you or the road?”

But Mom only laughed and said it would be fine, people would just think he had one of those new 3-D games. Right. Okay to animate the chessboard, but we have to drive to our new house. Salem, here we come—the mortal way. Three witches and an uptight mortal.

Under my breath, I had said a little spell. After all, if my brother could bewitch his chess pieces, it seemed only fair I could use magic to make the trip as bearable as it could be.

“Roads be clear of traffic today,
Inns be wired for HBO.
Home is where I wish to stay;
Cure Dorklock without delay.”

Although we didn’t hit major traffic, and every place we stayed had HBO, the trip was still as painful as I had imagined it would be. Twelve states in two weeks, with a hyper-active little brother and parents who can make the most interesting things sound as boring as oatmeal without brown sugar or raisins.

The Grand Canyon was kind of neat, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland was lame. My brother tried to take a barrel over Niagara Falls, but Mom stopped him with a spell that made him chirp like a bird every time he had an impish impulse. He chirped a lot. Loudly. By the time we got to Salem, we were all a bundle of nerves.

Mom had wanted to zap us to our new house, but Dad insisted on driving. You’d think that would be a no-brainer since we’d already driven cross-country. But the whole witchworld thing really complicated the process. Witches
zap, mortals drive. And the witches in Salem don’t live in those cute little houses that all the mortals live in. Except for us.

Dad had to go to work every day, and he couldn’t zap himself there. So we had to live in a mortal neighborhood and drive a mortal car into a mortal driveway. Which meant we needed some really tricky real estate. Like a house that existed on both planes. There aren’t many, and the one we could afford was about four hundred years old and looked like it hadn’t been renovated since at least the turn of the century.

“Wowie zowie. This house is cool.”

My brother’s idea of cool was the twisted, snaking iron fence with gargoyles on the top points. Mine was the pool and the one-lane bowling alley inside. A prerequisite for making the right friends is having a house you can invite them into. This one qualified. Of course, I couldn’t do it too soon. Definitely not a good idea to look desperate, no matter how desperate I happened to be.

“How did you guys afford all this? Rob a bank? Or just pop in and borrow some spare cash?” Okay. So I wasn’t gracious. But they were lucky I hadn’t just walked away on one of the many bathroom stops we took across America. What respectable sixteen-year-old wants to spend two weeks driving from California to Massachusetts “seeing the sights” and being force-fed history?

“We were lucky,” my dad answered happily. “The most recent owner was a well-known horror writer who decided to move to Florida permanently.”

Dorklock’s eyes bugged out. “A horror writer lived here?” The only thing that might have made him happier would have been if Dad had told him there were ghosts his own age in the place. But what Dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. So no one said a word about the ghosts, who had come to greet us at the front door. Dad’s not the most paranormally sensitive guy around, luckily for us.

Unaware that there was a four-hundred-year-old ghost patting him on the back, Dad continued telling us what a great deal he’d gotten on the house. “He was anxious to sell and gave us a great price. Really great guy.”

I glanced at my mom, but she was busy greeting one of the ghosts, a younger woman, as if she’d known her forever (while simultaneously trying to convey that they should not bother Dad). Except for her nervousness that Dad would notice the ghosts, Mom showed no signs that she’d been meddling when she shouldn’t.

She did that, you know. Even though she told me not to. I could usually make her squirm by asking innocent-sounding questions. Such as, So, he decided to leave a place like this, which is perfect for writing horror novels, to go to Florida, which is, like, what? The old lady capital of the USA?”

Did Florida even have ghosts? Mom says, next to L.A., it’s the least paranormally sensitive spot in the world. Except the North and South Poles. Even horror writers had more sense than to move there.

Dad was not falling for it. He was too happy about finding a house within his budget to question why the horror writer had just up and decided to move. I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately ignoring the fact that Mom was talking to thin air, or if he seriously didn’t notice. With my dad, sometimes it’s best just not to ask.

“Let’s say we were lucky,” my mom said, breaking off her conversation with the lady ghost, who politely disappeared to let us settle in. I’m not positive, but I thought I detected a faint hint of squirm in her words. “Go pick out a room.”

The inside was creaky, but freshly painted. Our furniture was all in place already, thanks to the wonders of witchcraft. It should have made it more comforting to see our belongings in these new walls. But it didn’t. Not at all. It was more like visiting the home of thieves who stole our stuff and then used it for themselves. Yuck.

In the car we’d talked about who would get what room. Or, rather, Mom had tried to get us excited about the new place by talking up the rooms. But I hadn’t committed. After all, until we actually saw the place, who knew where we’d want to be?

Mom had assured me that there were six bedrooms and I
could pick any one to be mine before I’d taken to nodding without listening whenever she talked to me. (Word of warning: Don’t try this at home—one night I ended up with some truly horrific Mexican food because I wasn’t paying attention.)

After a tour of the house (I have to admit, it is big … if that’s a good thing), I picked the room with the turret tower. The curved windows were kewl, as my fellow cheerleaders would say. Or is that used-to-be-fellow-cheerleaders?

It was little consolation that Maddie would be jealous—she’d always wanted a turret room—because I knew she wasn’t likely to see it. No one from home was going to be visiting me. Not only because of the distance, but also because trying to keep the witch secret from them would be so much harder here. If I made friends at the new school, at least they would be witches and I wouldn’t have to worry about spilling the beans accidentally.
If
I made friends.

Despite Maddie’s almost-certain jealousy over my room, I decided to keep it from her for now. The last thing I wanted was her turning traitor and thinking I had a good deal in this move. I’d have to send her a pic soon, though, or she’d never forgive me.

Fortunately, Dorklock didn’t want to wrestle me for the room I wanted—he wanted the room that overlooked the porch roof. When I pretended for a minute that I’d changed
my mind and I wanted it, too, I thought he was going to turn me into a toad then and there. He really does look like a mini-grandmama sometimes.

Despite the danger, it’s too much fun to tease him for me to give it up completely. But I usually don’t keep it up for too long. Unless he’s really ticked me off. “Relax, Tobias. I want the turret room. You can have the roof … ummm, I mean room.”

He glared at me again, but then grinned when neither Mom nor Dad said a word. They were too busy hoping we’d accept this change with happy smiles. Right. If my parents weren’t clever enough to realize why he’d want a room with easy egress to the outside world, I wasn’t going to tell them.

It didn’t take long to get my furniture the way I liked it. I tried the bed over in the curve of the turret, and then against the wall opposite. Mom had offered to buy me new stuff, to commemorate the new room (she could have popped me new stuff, but Dad would have had a cow—bad for the economy, he says). I said no, thank you (don’t be so surprised—not saying thank you in my house tends to bring down nuclear winter from the ’rents).

Normally, I like buying new things as much as the next girl. But throwing away everything I’d collected in my Beverly Hills life just seemed cold. Not to mention final, somehow. What if things didn’t work out in Salem and
we went home in a few months? No. I didn’t want a new school or a new house, but I couldn’t do anything about those. I could, however, refuse new things in
my
room. So my yellow comforter glowed in the sunshine from the curtainless windows. It would have looked pretty if all the light didn’t show the stains from when I’d had a sleepover and we’d spilled an entire bottle of red nail polish on it.

Mom would have just zapped the horror-novel-red streaks away. Except that all thirteen girls at my slumber party had seen the stains. Since I didn’t want to lie, and Mom didn’t want to have to wipe anyone’s memories, the stains stayed.

“You could zap them away now. There’s no one to see.” Mom came in as I prepared to shove my bed back to the turret, where the stains would be mostly hidden.

“You mean I have no friends left, so what difference does it make?”

“Things change, Prudence.” Mom’s voice had that annoying hushed sound she got when she knew I had a reason to be upset. “Even mortals accept that, and they don’t live nearly as long as we do.”

“I don’t mind change—when it’s a good change.”

“This is a good change. You’ll see.” She stood up, her voice getting brisker to signal that she was done humoring me. Of course. She didn’t leave behind her life in Beverly
Hills. She was a witch and could pop in to see her friends anytime she wanted.

She pointed to the big heavy pieces of furniture I’d been scooting all over the floor by the sweat of my brow. “For example, one good change is that you can zap them now, you know.”

Duh. I’d been using muscle power without a second thought. But I didn’t want her to know. “I like feeling the weight as I move stuff,” I lied, as I deep-breathed the bed across the broad pine planks once more. “It helps me think.” True—of how much I hated this place. But I was wise enough not to say that aloud.

“Suit yourself,” she said, turning away. But then she turned back. “Prudence—”

“Yes?” Omigod, here it comes—the whole “give the place a chance, part deux” speech. Part one was bad enough.

“I’d like you to practice your magic before school starts.”

I hadn’t seen that one coming. Or the scalding rage that welled up at one more überunfair life event. “Great. For sixteen years it’s ‘Prudence, don’t zap that,’ and now you
want
me to do magic?”

“I always meant to teach you. It just never seemed the right time. But now it is.”

I sighed heavily and zapped the bed into the turret. Maybe my anger made me overshoot, but the bed hit the wall and bounced off. Mom waved her hand and fixed the
damage to the wall. Great. I’m not even any good at magic now that I’m finally allowed to do it.

“What’s next? Are you going to tell me it’s time I learned how to sleep with boys and experiment with drugs?” It was a low blow, but I was so furious. All I could think of was how “witchcraft is not to be used in the mortal realm” lectures were right up there with the abstinence and sobriety lectures parents are so good at lobbing at you the minute you leave the house for a simple trip to the mall or a harmless school dance. At least in my house, they were. Until now.

All the sympathy left her face. Good. “Don’t think those protective spells I’ve put on you will be any different now that we’re here—they’re not. In fact”—she closed her eyes and lifted her hands in a careless circle—I’ve just triple-strengthened them, young lady.”

You’d think I’d learn to keep my mouth shut when I’m mad. But, no, I have to make things worse.

Mom wasn’t finished. “And now I’m going to find my spell book so I can put a “gratitude” chime on you to remind you that you have it pretty good for a sixteen-year-old.” She marched out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

For a minute I stood there boiling, wanting to follow her down the stairs. My mom slammed my door. She hadn’t done that in … ever. And she said this move would be
good for us, that it would make us closer as a family. Right.

I went over and opened the door she had just slammed shut. “I can’t tell you how
grateful
I am to be a sixteen-year-old
witch
who was never allowed to use magic and now
has
to!” I yelled after her. And then I slammed the door shut again. Hard. Without magic.