Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (7 page)

He indicated the entire class. “Open your books to the section on summoning.”

Everyone busily paged through. I just sat there, trying to decide how far into social suicide I would sink if I raised my hand and asked for a book. Unfortunately, I debated just a touch too long. “Miss Stewart. Please take out your spell book.”

There were lots of answers that crossed my mind. But only one popped out of my mouth. “I don’t have one.”

“What?” The entire room fell silent. You’d think I’d said I didn’t have a brain.

“I just started here—”

“I know that,” he said, and waved impatiently. “But you should have your family spell book. Didn’t your mother give it to you?”

“No.” Another omission of my mother’s. What was up with this? Did she want me to fail? Did she want me to cement a reputation as a scud in my very first class?

A spell book appeared in front of me and flipped open to a page about a third of the way through. “Use mine for now.”

“Thank you.” I knew I needed to be polite, but the big, dusty book that now sat in front of me smelled funny. Like it had been buried in a grave until sometime just before class started. The thought of touching it was …

“You’re welcome. The staff has been warned that
allowances must be made for you.” He didn’t sound happy about it. But then, I wasn’t either—especially now that he’d said it out loud in front of a room full of remedial students. “But I must warn you, Miss Stewart, if your mother has misplaced your family spell book—”

“My mother doesn’t misplace anything. I’ll have it tomorrow, I promise.” I hoped I didn’t sound like too much of a suck-up. Just enough that the teacher would no longer think of me as “the girl who was late to her first day of class and didn’t bring her spell book either.”

“None too soon, I warrant.”

The other students giggled, although I don’t know why. They were in the remedial class, too, and they didn’t have the excuse of a mortal father like I did. I had a not very good feeling that gossip traveled faster in witchworld than it did even in Beverly Hills. Which was bad. Very bad.

It didn’t take long to notice my classmates, remedial or not, staring and whispering about me. There was a girl blowing huge bubbles with her bubble gum (in witch school, gum stuck under a desk can be waved away). After the third time she popped her bubble loudly, though, Mr. Phogg lifted a bony finger and waved it away.

“Hey!” she protested.

He merely said, “Today we’ll work on summoning a single object.” Suddenly, a dozen erasers appeared to hover in a neat row in front of him.

A boy behind me said, “Again? We learned that last year.” Troublemaker. I could tell because the deep voice wasn’t a whine but a calculated mix of boredom and impatience meant to make Skeletor angry. Which it did.

“We work on it until we get it right, boy.” Oooh! Skeletor had this troublemaker’s number. “So do us all a favor and get it right today.”

The class giggled, and for a moment I felt like I was in Beverly Hills High again, and my life wasn’t in ruined tatters all about me.

Anonymous Boy said, “Sure thing.” And then the erasers began to fly around the room. I had no time to duck before one hit me square in the face.

“Halt!” The teacher’s eerie echoing voice gasped out an order, and the erasers stopped where they were. The one that had hit me had bounced off my forehead and was now suspended in midair in front of my eyes.

“I assume we all know that is not how we get it right.” He turned his milky eyes on me. Oh, joy. “Miss Stewart, do you know how to summon an object?”

“I think so.” Before witch stuff became a free-for-all in Salem, we had been allowed to do a little in the house—as long as my dad wasn’t looking.

“Arrange all the erasers neatly on your desk, if you please.”

I didn’t dare try to move them all at once, so I carefully
moved them one at a time until they rested in a pyramid on my desk.

“Excellent.”

“I moved them all at once,” said Anonymous Boy. I just knew he had meant to hit me, but I didn’t turn around to give him the satisfaction of knowing I wasn’t confident enough to summon more than one object at a time.

“At least she managed to get them all in the correct location. Unless you were intentionally aiming your eraser at her face?”

“I’m not used to anyone sitting there,” Anonymous Boy muttered. Creep.

Right. I fought desperately against the urge to turn and give him the stink eye I usually reserved for the Dorklock. If I’d had my old Beverly Hills squad to back me up, we would have made sure he knew he’d dissed the wrong girl. But I didn’t. And, as far as I knew, being snubbed by the new girl meant exactly zip. So I decided I’d better be more subtle than that. As we left the classroom, I’d linger for a moment, let him pass me, and then memorize his features for future payback. That’s one thing I’ve learned watching the new kids in my old school: You can’t let anyone get anything over on you or you’ll be scraping gum from under desks forever. Although I guess in witch school, you’d be popping gum off desks forever.

MADDIE: Survive D day?

ME: Just

MADDIE: Sux

ME: Big time

MADDIE: Oops Jericho Jake is eyeballing me No txtin in class C U

I smiled at the phone. Trust Maddie to know how scared I was that she’d even risk having her phone confiscated to check in with me during the middle of her history class. If only I had her here, in my room, so we could put our heads together and figure out my best plan of action to get out of new-girl hell.

Remedial summoning and spells wasn’t that bad, although I’d never say that aloud! At home, I’d been the girl who could somehow clean up a mess in a whirl when no one was looking. Here, I was the baby who could barely summon one object at a time, and had no clue how to do anything more ambitious.

The family spell book was like a key to unlock the school, and I wasn’t too stupid to know it. I had to wonder how my perfect mother could have forgotten to give it to me. If I couldn’t do what the other kids did, I’d never succeed in being one of the kewl kids. I would have been kewl if I’d stayed in Beverly Hills. I was not going to let all that hard work go to waste, even if it meant not sleeping until I had learned every spell in the remedial, regular, and advanced spell books.

Besides, that would give me the means to make sure Anonymous Boy never sent an eraser at me ever again. Assuming I found out who he was. At the end of class, Skeletor waved his thin, bony hand and was gone. Before I could blink, a new teacher had taken his place, new students sat around me, and the room had changed from the remedial spells classroom to introductory calculus. Taught by the locker room god, Mr. Bindlebrot.

I was ecstatic. Not only because I was good at math and even Agatha couldn’t deny it, but because my dream man was standing in front of the class writing an equation. It was a simple algebra equation I had learned in eighth
grade. No problem for me. I could do it in my sleep.

What threw me was that Mr. Bindlebrot was writing in the air with his finger. And all the other students were also busy writing the same equation in glowing letters on their desktops. With their index fingers. Apparently, only remedial classes needed mortal chalkboards.

I pointed my index finger at my desk and concentrated hard. My equation looked like a kindergartner had written it, and it didn’t glow. But you could see it. I solved it as quickly as I could, but the writing slowed me down. I was the last to finish.

Mr. Bindlebrot looked carefully at each person’s solution and then zapped it gone with his pinkie if it was right. When he got to me, he didn’t comment on the lack of glowiness. Or mention our morning meeting in the locker room. He did, however, zap the non-glowy equation away quickly, before anyone else had noticed that I air-wrote like a five-year-old. My hero.

“Very good! You have a mind for math, Miss Stewart.” He said it in a kindly way, as if being able to do the equations was more important than writing them well. I think we both knew that wasn’t true, but it was nice of him to pretend.

I’d know how to write my equations neatly in the air by tomorrow’s class, with extra glowiness, I vowed. I wanted him to think I was special, not “special,” if you know what I mean.

After calculus came lunch. In Beverly Hills, that meant fighting the starving mobs to get a decent place in line so there would be time to talk as well as eat at the varsity cheerleaders’ table. At Agatha’s, the classroom popped away and we were left in a big hallway with lockers. There was a set of doors that led to the lunchroom. I didn’t look for my locker—I didn’t have anything to put in it or take out of it. Besides, lunch was one more time when I wasn’t stuck with the remedial label on my forehead. I knew how to eat. Time to scope out what was what. And let them scope out what I had to offer: kewl to burn.

I faced the doors, prepared to pick a nonthreatening person to go through line with and charm out a table invite. A little gossip, a little safety in numbers. Perfect for the first day of a kewl coup.

The strategy would have worked in a mortal school. But lunchtime was no different from the rest of the day at Agatha’s. Everything was just enough off from a mortal school day that I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I waited until the hallway emptied enough that I would have some choice as to whom to sit with (the worst thing new kids can do is sit down at an empty table only to find no one else will sit there). I spotted a nice-looking girl to get in line behind—not too pretty, and not ugly. I stepped through the doors prepared to turn around my no good, very bad, horrible day.

As if. Agatha’s didn’t need a cafeteria that served up overcooked, underflavored food, or a line to pay for the privilege either. Instead, the room was set with small tables and comfy chairs, and it was filled with the scents of exotic cuisines from all countries and regions. The cultural diversity at Agatha’s seemed to include a few cultures that had died out in the mortal world. I spotted at least two guys wearing togas and one in what I swear was bear—not stylish fur, mind you, but the whole bearskin, head and all. More like a declaration of war on fashion than a statement.

The girl I’d followed in sat with friends and evaporated from possibility to impossibility. I did a quick scope of the room to see where I should sit. All my instincts were scrambled, though, because I couldn’t tell what group was what in witchworld, except of course for the A-list tables of girls and the A-list tables of boys. They stood out, even dressed in the wide range of styles that passed for fashion sense at Agatha’s.

I knew I couldn’t try to get in with that group: the kewl girls who sat laughing and chatting over salads. I pegged them for varsity something, probably a mix of mostly cheerleaders, soccer players, and basketball players.

I looked around, trying to figure out the groups. The first thing I noticed was color. It was funny, but one corner of the room had a blue theme going, while the opposite corner was definitely going with browns and greens, then there
was the blacks and reds and the silvery blues and grays shimmering in the last corner. The middle of the room contained all the colors, but everyone seemed to have some white element to their outfit, whether it be a white belt, purse, or bleached-white hair. Interesting, but what did it mean? Worse, what did it mean that the varsity tables were a total mix of styles and colors? At least in the street clothes.

Just when I was afraid I was going to have to eat alone—which would have been tricky since I didn’t see any extra chairs—I noticed the perfect group. Two girls and a guy.

They weren’t scuds (the lowest of the low in any school, even a witch school, I’m sure). But they weren’t even remotely kewl. Fringies, no doubt. The kids who deliberately didn’t belong to any group, including the one to which they’d naturally belong. My old high school had had its share of fringies. I’d even had one as my lab partner in freshman biology. Doria had been very sweet, very good at taking lab notes, but she hadn’t had a clue that she was a fringie by dint of her thick glasses and her habit of walking away without explanation halfway through a conversation. She wasn’t a nerd or a geek, she just sorta floated along without any one group.

Speaking of nerds and geeks, the guy at the table I was thinking of crashing was wearing these weird glasses that had three lenses-green, red, and yellow—one on top of each other. I’m not sure what kept him—or the girls he was with—from
falling over the line from fringie into scud territory, but I trusted my instincts. I had to—they were all I had right now.

Anyway, these three seemed harmless and potentially helpful. That was the great thing about fringies. They were just openly curious in an accepting way. They’d talk to anybody without any thought of personal rep. Perfect for a first day lunch that should net me the scoop on my fellow students.

“Mind if I sit here?” I didn’t see a chair, but I figured I could deal with that if they agreed.

“You’re the new girl.” The chubby girl, who was sitting next to the boy with the glasses, smiled as she said it, no nastiness intended. “I’m Maria.” She raised her chili dog and took a bite without answering me. Yep. Definitely a fringie.