Season of the Witch (18 page)

Isabelle says, “I told her, This girl is not thinking about you,
you
are thinking about her. And you need to stop. Because it’s getting ridiculous and a little sick. If you want to be mad at anyone, be mad at Oliver.” Isabelle drops her head. “Nice, right? The poor girl’s been twisted in knots for months. And her supposed best friend screams at her to just get over it.”

Tentatively, I say, “Well, maybe you had a reason.”

“Yeah, sure. I was sick of hearing it. That was my big reason.” Her mouth twists. “I just felt like you were all we were talking
about. I thought once she and Oliver got back together, she’d be over it. No. So we sent you our little messages before school started. Did that stop the obsessing? No. We have to pull our crowd routine on you the first day of school. That’s not enough. We have to convince the entire school that you’re …”

She glances at me and I supply “A slut ho.”

“Yeah,” she says unhappily. “After a while, it was all we would talk about: how to get you. We spent hours making plans. At first, it was exciting. You know? In this very warped way. I mean, we always spent a lot of time bitching about people. But this time we were actually doing something. It made us feel … dangerous, I guess. Super cool,” she says sarcastically. “God, we were such little bitches. Then one night, we were hanging out with Jackson, Zeena’s boyfriend.”

Hey, I got five minutes before class
. Showing me his soft belly and hairy nipples.

Isabelle continues. “And he was like, ‘Oh, you shoulda heard what I did to the slut today. She totally wanted to, man.’ And Zeena and Chloe are laughing and giving him high fives, and I’m like, Uh, seriously? This is okay with you? By the way, Zeena, your boyfriend is scum? And I don’t know, maybe we’ve all gotten a little scummy?”

When Isabelle says this, it all comes flooding back: Chloe’s nastiness and viciousness, the way it felt like it would never end, that people wouldn’t be satisfied until I had a total nervous breakdown.

And Isabelle has told me something else: Chloe was having fun.

Then Isabelle says softly, “The whole thing with the bathroom …”

“Yeah,” I say. “What about that?”

“Well, you know, Zeena saw you talking with Oliver.” Isabelle rolls her eyes, like,
Big crime
. “So she was totally hyping Chloe up. ‘We have to do something big, we have to show her we’re serious.’ I was not into it. The whole thing was starting to creep me out. I thought for sure you’d go to the school and we’d all get kicked out.”

“Did you ever say ‘Uh, this is wrong? I’m not doing it’?”

“No,” she says bitterly. “I just whined and said things like, ‘Guys, are we sure we want to do this? We could get in trouble.’ They just called me a weak-ass loser. Which I was, but not the way they meant.”

We’re quiet a while; then Isabelle says, “I tried to hold back. I don’t know if that registered at all.”

“A little.” And that’s all, I think.

Isabelle stares at her hands, folded in her lap. Then she says in a rush, “Anyway, I’ve been meaning to say if you want to go to the school now and tell them … what we did … I would go with you. I would totally admit to it and back you up in any way.”

I was not expecting this, for Isabelle to actually offer to do something.

“Like you said, they’d kick you out,” I tell her. “And Zeena. And I don’t think Zeena would be too thrilled.”

“I know. It’d be bad with Zeena and I’d have to deal with that. But for me?” She kicks at a piece of gravel on a lower step. “I almost want to be kicked out. I feel like it’s what I deserve. I hate being in that building. I hate knowing I did those things. It makes me sick. Like, yeah, you think you’re this basically nice person, but you’re not. This is who you really are: a mean, spineless, shallow
jerk.” She looks at me, tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to be that person. But I don’t know how to get away from what I did.”

Isabelle starts to sob. I put my arms around her. But I don’t know what to say or do. I can’t undo what Isabelle did. And I can’t undo what I did. All we can do is sit here and feel horrible.

Finally, Isabelle chokes out, “Well, gosh.”

“Yup.”

She sniffs, wipes her nose with her sleeve. “Now what do we do?”

I think. “Uh, say, ‘Okay, that sucked. Let’s not do that again.’ ”

Isabelle laughs. Then looks sad. “I just really, really wish I hadn’t left Chloe alone that night. You know the last thing I said to her? When she was going on and on about how you hated her? I said, ‘We did a terrible thing to her. No wonder she hates us. Stop being such a paranoid bitch.’ ”

Isabelle says softly, “Alison made her promise to get a cab. She said she would, but—” She shudders. “I think she had decided, ‘Let me step off the curb, let me not look, who cares? Nobody cares about me.’ ”

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

“You can’t say that.”

“Yes, I can,” I tell her. “Yeah, you could have done things differently, but so could she and … so could I … and so could all of us.” I fall silent, then finish, “But we didn’t, and this is how it is.”

Isabelle nods. Glancing back at the church, she says, “I don’t want to go back in there.”

“Then don’t.”

She stands up. “I meant it, what I said about going to the school. I want to make this right.”

I don’t know how to tell Isabelle that might not be possible, that we may have all gone too far for that. So I say, “Can I think about it?”

“Yeah, of course. And if you ever want to talk more”—she waves her hand awkwardly—“that’d be cool with me. Also totally understand if you don’t.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Well, see you.”

“ ‘See you’ back,” I say.

When she’s gone, I sit for a moment. I remember the time Chloe came over to my house when we were doing the history thing. I put out a plate of cookies, and her eyes went wide. I said, “I need a major butter-sugar boost to kick-start the brain.”

She took one cookie out of politeness. I think she ate half of it.

When she left, she said to me, “God, you’re lucky.”

I was like, Luck? What? Excuse me?

“You can eat that stuff and it doesn’t count.”

I realized she meant the old bod. Embarrassed, I said, “Ah, check out the butt. You’ll see where it goes.”

She shook her head. “I could never get away with that in a million years. I’m that kind of person. Unless I totally keep it together, it all falls apart.”

I realize now, I had Chloe wrong. She always seemed so powerful to me, but Isabelle was telling the truth when she said Chloe was scared. I could see it when I laid the hex on her. She was losing Oliver, losing the respect of kids at school, maybe even getting expelled. I could make her feel weak because she felt weak already. One wrong move and that would be it for her. No wonder she freaked out so bad over that stupid history project. No wonder she turned everything into a war. That’s what life felt like for her.

Ah, Chloe, I think. You should have eaten more damn cookies.

Mourners are starting to come out of the church. I am not the first person people should see, so I go down the block to wait for Ella. If she’s with people, I won’t press it. But if she’s alone, she might want company.

Ella is easy to spot with her bubble hair and Scream bag. She hurries down the steps. No one follows. Her head is down; she seems lost in her thoughts.

I tap her on the shoulder as she passes by. She glances up, seems confused. “Hey. Were you inside? I didn’t see you.…”

“I stayed out here. But I thought maybe you’d want some company.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” She looks around nervously. “Are you with Cass?”

“No,” I say, puzzled that she would ask.

Ella nods to herself. Then in a dark, bitter voice that sounds nothing like her, she says, “Right—why would
she
come?”

For an instant, I feel terrified that she knows absolutely everything that’s gone on between me and Cassandra. Then I remind myself: Ella and Cassandra may be cousins, but they do not get along. That’s all that is.

“Come on,” I say, straining to keep my voice light. “I thought you might be in the mood for Pinkberry.”

PINKBERRY IS FUNNY. IT ALWAYS makes me think of a doll-house, with the pink walls and the white plastic tables and chairs. I feel like I should be ten years old when I’m there.

I get regular doused with strawberries. Ella gets the same, only with chocolate chips. We sit and I wait for her to burst out talking. Normally, Ella would be full of details about a big event like this. “Oh, my God, so-and-so was freaking out, I felt so bad for her.” “I could not believe when so-and-so said this and that.”

But she doesn’t say a word. Instead, she concentrates on scraping the chips off the side of her yogurt, as if it’s the only truly important thing in the world right now.

There are two kinds of silence. The “I have no idea what to say” kind and the “I have something to say but I’m scared to say it” kind. This feels like the second kind.

I have the hideous sense Ella knows what I did and she’s afraid to look me in the eye. The longer we sit, the guiltier I feel. As if
Chloe’s ghost rose at the funeral and whispered to Ella, “To-o-ni, To-o-ni did this to me.”

Then I think, Stop being such an egomaniac. Ella’s just been to a funeral of a girl she’s known her whole life. Of course she’s freaked out and upset. But she doesn’t know how to say that without sounding like she’s siding with Chloe.

I tell her, “You can talk about the funeral, I don’t mind.”

“No, it’s okay,” she says in a listless voice.

She carefully digs a single chip off the top of her yogurt, nibbles it; it’s an old dieting trick. Make it last longer so you feel like you’ve eaten a lot.

Then, suddenly, she sticks the whole spoon in, pulls up an enormous bite of yogurt, and swallows it. She grimaces as it goes down, as if it hurts her throat.

“Pinkberry has to be allowed,” I say. “It’s yogurt, good for you.”

“I don’t know,” she says fretfully. “I don’t feel like anything’s allowed.”

“Ella, really. It’s all right. I came to be here for you. Talk, already.”

She looks at me, not sure I mean it. “It just—”

I nod encouragingly. “It just.”

Ella hesitates. Then she blurts out, “I don’t know, I guess I never saw anyone dead before.”

“Must be so hard.”

She kneads her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Not that I
saw
her, it was just the coffin, but …”

“Sure.”

She glances at me. There’s something else she’s feeling, we haven’t hit it yet. I stay quiet, determined to let Ella talk.

And she does, finally. “I was late, of course. So I ended up sitting right near Chloe’s family.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, my God …”

This is part of my punishment, I tell myself. Having to hear what Chloe’s loss means to people. “They’re pretty destroyed, huh?”

Ella’s eyes pop open. “Her little sister never stopped crying. You could hear it all over the church. All these … I guess cousins? Tears down their faces. Shoulders shaking. And her mom was a drugged-out zombie. I don’t know what they put her on. Her dad looked like he wanted to
kill
. He kept clenching and opening his fists. His face was like this.” She makes her jaw rigid, sinks her teeth into her lower lip.

“Oh, man. That’s really hard.”

“It was, it was hard. I felt totally useless. I kept thinking that because I was near them, I should do something for them. I know what they’re going through, right? Someone in my family died. I’ve been through this.”

“Right.”

“But I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. I felt like such an idiot.”

“Oh, Ella.”

She shakes her head abruptly. “But that’s when I realized.”

“What?”

“I actually haven’t been through this.”

I shake my head. “I lost you.”

Ella’s hands flap in the air. “No, just … when I saw Chloe’s family, how wrecked they were, how they were putting their sadness right out there, because they couldn’t help it? I realized, Oh, this
is what a normal family looks like. Normal people actually
admit
when they’re sad. It really made me think about my family. And how we are
totally
not dealing.”

Careful because I don’t want to shut Ella down, I say, “But you didn’t go to Eamonn’s funeral, right? You didn’t find out until you came home.”

“Right!” Suddenly, she’s all fierce. “I was at Costa del Porco, and my mom was worried Eamonn’s death would be a ‘stress trigger.’ Like I would shove a whole Entenmann’s into my face if I knew. Right away, there was a whole secrecy thing going on.”

“Well—or your parents are control freaks when it comes to your weight.”

“Okay, but even now.” Ella leans forward. “Even now, nobody’s talking. Eamonn’s name
never
comes up. My whole family’s like, Oh, yeah that happened—but don’t talk about it. There’s no crying. No, Oh, my God, we miss him. Everything’s so-called normal, except my aunt and uncle are like—” She widens her eyes and sways like the walking dead.

I think of Cassandra’s mom that day I met her, how it felt like she was going to fall apart any second. “Maybe it’s just too difficult,” I say helplessly.

“Maybe,” says Ella. “Or maybe nobody wants to talk about it because we’re all thinking the same thing and not saying it. Maybe it’s because—”

But then she stops. Taking up her napkin, she starts to shred it.

“Because what?” I ask.

Wiping her mouth with the shreds, she mutters, “Forget it.”

“Say it.”

“No, you’re her friend now, I forgot.”

Her friend. So all this is about Cassandra.

“I’m your friend too,” I remind her.

Ella looks into my eyes, as if checking whether I’m telling the truth.