Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (9 page)

My mom spoiled my dad by marrying him—he doesn’t get that geek is a rare taste for most girls. Everyone says my mom was a kewl girl before she got married to a mortal and had my brother and me. Everyone on my mother’s side, that is—my father’s family does find my mother’s family just a touch … bohemian, I think my grandmother says.

Samuel had only enough time to unswallow his tongue and say “Where—?” before we popped back into our classes—me, remedial, of course. I didn’t have a clue what he was doing—starting fires and practicing putting them out in the Black Forest, for all I knew. All the while simmering the dinner invitation in the back of his mind and probably making it into something bigger than I’d meant it to be. I’d have to slip in a mention of my boyfriend back home—even
if that was a slight case of once upon a fairy tale.

This being popped in and out of classes was getting really annoying—a very bad sign for the first half of the first day of the school year. I couldn’t wait to ask Mom if all the restrictions and rules eased up in senior year. Not to mention find out about the family spell book she had forgotten to give me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what her Talent was. She might say Air, and I’d have to worry that she’s been reading my mind for the past sixteen years.

Sigh. Only a half day left before I find out what she should have told me before I left this morning.

MADDIE: NE hotties 2 ease ur pain?

ME: Teachers count?

MADDIE: Like Duranti?

ME: Better

MADDIE: Whoa! Subject?

ME: Math

MADDIE: Brainiac Only U!

ME: Girls gotta crush Speaking of howz my boy Brent?

MADDIE: Oops Practice startin C U

I hadn’t lied to Maddie. Exactly. The boys at the new school weren’t anything special. But I didn’t want to give
her any ideas about me being ready to ditch my boy back home and find someone new here. I was still hoping Dad would come to his senses and take us home, after all.

Which didn’t make school any easier to live through. After remedial levitation, my next class was history. Still no Samuel. I didn’t know whether it was good that I didn’t have classes with him (easier to keep him from getting the wrong idea) or bad (harder to pick his brain).

I did know it was good to have history in the witchworld. My ninth-grade history teacher, Mr. Duranti, who was such a hottie all the girls crushed on him madly, had liked to dress up in cheap costumes to “make history real” for us. The boys had made fun of him, but we girls just drooled. He could have put a clown suit on and we wouldn’t have noticed anything but his gorgeous brown eyes.

Mrs. Goode didn’t bother to dress up. Nope. She still wore her Puritan gray. Not an inch of skin showing except her round, pink face. Even her hands were covered in thin, gray gloves. Living history in a sense no mortal could ever understand.

We were starting with the Salem witch trials, apparently, as there was a large burning stake in the middle of the classroom.

“If I ever hear of you talking about how witches were burned at the stake in Puritan England or America, I will sentence you to a day in the stocks.” There was laughter
from the other students, but since actual stocks were in the corner of the room—a Puritan punishment device that looked hundreds of years old and probably delivered terminal splinters—I decided to see whether they were laughing because they knew she was joking or because they were sickos who looked forward to seeing fellow classmates tortured.

“The preferred method for killing witches at that place and time was being hanged by the neck until dead. Only the medieval Europeans made a sport of burning witches. Barbaric, these mortals, but they did find our weak spots. We do need to breathe.”

A girl sitting behind me laughed. “What about splashing water on us?”

“I’m melting! …” The Wicked Witch of the West appeared in the air above us for a moment, and we all laughed.

“
The Wizard of Oz
is a mortal work of fiction.” Mrs. Goode sighed, but didn’t look as though she was about to sentence the offender to the stocks. “I cannot believe that you are susceptible to that drivel, Miss Martin. But let me assure you that the world will benefit from you taking a shower once in a while.”

The class laughed more loudly. I looked at Mrs. Goode closely. Her authentic Puritan dressed-to-overkill style couldn’t quite disguise her jolly nature, which was reflected
in her round cheeks and twinkling blue eyes. The stray white curls escaping her tightly tied bonnet made me suspect that she’d lived in Salem during the witch trials, and not as a child, as my mother had, but as an adult who’d lived through the mortal madness. Even though Mom didn’t like to talk about it, I’d picked up quite a bit just listening to the grown-ups when they thought I was busy watching TV.

It was mainly mortals who suffered the persecution, I hasten to add. But a few witches were swept up in the nonsense. Those who had infections that prevented the use of their powers. Or maybe those, like me, who didn’t have a clue how to use their powers to full effect.

It always got me that the mortals couldn’t look past their hatred to see that if the witches they tried had the power they claimed, they would have escaped. But I’m not claiming that only mortals suffer from a lack of reason. My mother’s family proves that to me on a weekly basis. Which was why it was no surprise when I popped home, tired enough to sleep on a bed of nails, to discover that my grandmother had come to visit.

Grandmama was in the kitchen with Mom when I appeared, fresh from the locker corridor, where yet again I had not been able to locate my locker.

Mom looked worried. “How was your day, honey?”

“Oh, don’t ask silly questions, Patience. She was at
Agatha’s and mercifully unprepared after that pitiful mortal education you subjected her to.”

Mom opened her mouth to object. Probably she was going to say I was a strong young woman. So I struck first. “I didn’t have the spell book. They almost sent me home.”

“You forgot to give her the spell book?” Grandmama scolded. She looked delighted at my mother’s error.

Mom looked horrified, which was somewhat gratifying. “I completely forgot. You’ll have it tomorrow, I promise.”

“First day of school and you’re already making certain she looks a fool.” Grandmama says things that, coming from other people, would be offensive. Somehow, from her, they just seem like those fake slaps in the movies: lots of sound, but no actual contact. I don’t know how she does it. But she does. Usually. There are times when she connects with a verbal slap that makes your ears ring. But usually that’s just with Mom.

She held out her arms to me. “Come here, sweetling, I have a surprise for you.” I was glad to see her. Beside the fact that she usually made life interesting, she had deflected Mom’s questions. Always a good thing.

“What about me?” The Dorklock had appeared and, as usual, immediately had begun demanding his share of whatever our grandmother had brought.

“Not yet. When you’re older. This is just for your sister.”

I couldn’t help being pleased. Just for me? I couldn’t
remember a time when … and then, with dread, I did.

When I got my period. I had to go to this horrible witch’s camping trip to the top of Mount Vesuvius. Yuck. Bad enough to suffer PMS for the first time.

“What is it?” I smiled as I asked, because Grandmama had been known to turn people into toads, rabbits, or frogs when she was displeased. Even older witches watch out for her temper. Especially when she’s just enjoyed hundred-year-old brandy, her poison of choice at family celebrations.

Mostly she did the transfiguration bit on my father, but there was a time when she turned me into a rabbit for spitting up on her. I was only a year old, and my mother made her promise never to do that again … but promises and Grandmama never seemed to last. She always assured me that I was a cute little bunny, white with an adorable pink nose.

Disturbingly, that does make me feel better.

She’d promised never to turn Dad into a frog again—but the next time she was mad at him, she turned him into a mule. Technically, I guess, that wasn’t breaking her promise. Which is why we’ve all learned to be careful around Grandmama.

“Come here first, and give us a hug.”

I love to hug my grandmother, even though she is all sharp angles and bright colors. When I was a child I thought she
was some huge toy that my mother occasionally conjured up to amuse me. “Hello, Grandmama.”

“Pet.” She hugged briskly, leaving a lingering scent of jasmine in my nostrils. She shook the folds of her latest fashion creation, a bluish-green sea-foamy thing and I suddenly understood why she always says she likes to flow like water. I would have asked her if she had manifested a Water Talent, but just then she waved her hands in a wide, magnanimous circle. A set of keys appeared in the air between us, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

“Grandmama!” I reached for them, my heart in my throat. A car would almost make up for being uprooted from all I knew and loved. A car would mean—

“Mother, what are you thinking?” Mom casually summoned the keys to her hand and glared at my grandmother.

This was normal behavior for them, but today the stakes were huge for me. I wanted whatever went with those keys. Although I did wonder what kind of vehicle Grandmama would think was right for a sixteen-year-old.

“I’m thinking that the child needs something to make her stand out to her classmates in a way that being in remedial magic will not.”

My mother began, “Perhaps in L.A.—”

Grandmama waved her silent. “Oh, pooh. In L.A., everyone had a car. Here, it’s exotic.”

“I’d expect you to think it was tainted with the whiff of
mortality.” Which really wasn’t fair. Grandmama adored mortal gadgets and had collected at least a dozen traffic tickets driving very fast around L.A. when she decided to visit in “mortal drag.”

“Well, that’s why I chose a Mercedes SL600 Roadster.”

“A Mercedes!” I looked at my mom, willing her to see what this meant to me—even though I wasn’t completely certain myself. My grandmother had excellent instincts when it came to knowing what would make one popular (although, surprisingly, she didn’t always choose to be the most popular one in the room).

Wise to my mother, as always, Grandmama asked me sharply, “So? We know you were left appallingly unprepared without the spell book. How complete was your humiliation today?”

“Complete.” I knew what Grandmama was up to and I was willing to play along. “I popped into the boys’ locker room instead of the main office, I couldn’t do a basic summoning spell, and at lunch I didn’t know how to conjure up an appetizing meal. Everyone thinks I’m a complete dork.”

My mother sighed. “You two always gang up on me. But very well. You can have the car.”

I didn’t rejoice right away, because I could see in her eyes what was coming next. “As long as your father agrees.”

Dad said no at first. Duh.

Grandmama had decided the S Class I needed was bright
yellow, with caramel-colored leather upholstery and a really crank sound system. In L.A. I’d have been kewl plus, for sure.

In L.A. Here, I wasn’t sure that I’d be much more than barely cool.

You see, in my experience, there are clear levels in high school. The top of the heap are the “it” kids. They’re like the movie stars of high school. Everyone knows who they are without asking, wants to talk to them, and secretly wants to
be
them. Usually these positions are reserved for sports stars and cheerleaders.

The next level is the übercool kids. These kids dress fine, are active in something, and have personalities that work like magnet spells. You can’t help but like them, even when they’re making fun of you.

Next come the cool kids. They dress well, but aren’t active. You like them and want to dress like them or have your hair cut like them.

Next are the geekoids. No one wants to look like them. But we recognize that they are the ones who speak the language of the tech gods. Without them, computer viruses eat our term papers, and cell phones get stuck calling the North Pole.

Then there are the rebels. From the fifties icon James Dean on, they’re always the same. They dress like they want to stab you in the heart and take being a loner to
absurd heights. The rebels are not fringies, just to be clear. The fringies could belong to any of the groups, but they just don’t try. They’re missing the “flock together” gene, I guess.

Last, and least, the scuds. They might be on a sports team as towel or water bearer, or sometimes even bench warmer. They might occasionally get straight A’s. But they’re individually invisible. Groups of them scud through the halls, into classrooms, and onto buses.

I didn’t want to be a scud—or whatever they called the equivalent in witch school (which I didn’t even know yet—not a good thing). I mean, it was really cool that Wonder Woman could make herself invisible. But she controlled it. Scuds not only have no life and no shape, they also have no control.

Right now, I’m on the cusp. I could become a scud. The thought is scary. The temporary notoriety that protects me from being relegated to the scud faction—caused by living like a mortal for sixteen years—could fade. Will fade. And when it goes, I need to make sure I end up standing out. Even the Mercedes isn’t enough.