Season of the Witch (22 page)

“Oh, God.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. She says this is a time we should be together, like, support each other, and I’m like, Now? Now we have to do this?”

“Okay, calm down. Cassandra can’t do anything to you in front of your folks.”

“It freaks me out just to be in the same building as her. Imagine the same table. My stomach hurts.”

“Just pretend she’s not there.”

“I feel her, I swear, even when I can’t see her.”

I have a nasty memory twinge of how Chloe said the same thing about me the night she died.

“Bring your phone and text me the whole time,” I tell Ella. “That’ll keep your mind off your family.”

She laughs a little. “My mom would kill me.”

“Well, better her than Cassandra.”

Saturday night, I eat early, then go to my room and take up position on my bed. Ella said the dinner would start at seven. At six-thirty, I send her,

COURAGE!

Which must remind her of the Cowardly Lion because she texts back,
I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks
.

Quit it
.

Text from Ella at 7:05.
Okay, this is 50 shades of hell
.

I text back,
I’m right here
.

At 7:12, Ella texts,
Bread’s here, yay!

I text,
Saved by the carbs!

At 7:18,
Whoever invented mozzarella, I love you
.

I text, :)

7:23.
The waiter’s hot. I think you’d like him
.

I type back,
Down, girl
.

Then at 7:26.
Oh, crap, they remembered I exist …

I text
COURAGE!
again and set the phone down. If Ella’s family is talking to her, it might take a while for her to answer me.

After ten minutes, I check the phone. Nothing from Ella.

I text,
Did you go off with that waiter?

No answer. Obviously, Mom and Dad made her put the phone away.

At ten o’clock, I text,
Hey there. I need a weirdness update. How’d it go?

No answer.

10:15.
Did you survive?

Still not getting her.

10:34.
Ella, seriously. I’m worried. Give me a sign of life
.

But nothing comes.

On Sunday, I call. There’s no answer.

Monday morning comes, and I race out of the house. When I see Ella standing on the corner, I feel bone-deep relief. Mom and Dad clearly flipped big-time and took her phone away for the weekend. That’s why she couldn’t text or call.

Normal survives, I remind myself. Normal is more powerful than you think.

I bounce up to her. “Hey, there!”

Ella says, “Hi” back. But her head is down, eyes away from mine. Her voice is quiet, withdrawn.

I prompt, “So?”

“Hm?”

“The dreaded dinner, how’d it go?”

“Oh.” A dark ripple of memory across her face and she starts walking.

I press. “Was it okay with Cassandra?”

“Uh, yeah. It was fine.”

“Well, good,” I say, for lack of anything else.

I want to ask, What happened with the phone? Did you get in trouble? But there’s something about Ella’s expression that tells me questions are not welcome.

I’m trying to think of a way to say, Ella, I can tell something happened, when she says abruptly, “Sorry, I’m just really not up for talking this morning.”

Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out some earphones.
Putting one in each ear, she tunes me out for the rest of the walk. She doesn’t even take them out when we get to school, giving me a little wave good-bye as she heads up the steps.

It’s started, I think.

Later, I ask Ella if she wants to have lunch.

She hesitates. “I have a major exam coming up. I should use the time to study.”

“You can’t think on an empty stomach.”

“I brought my lunch.”

“Oh—cool.”

I try again the next day, but she says the same thing: she has to study. Half joking, I say, “Okay, where’s the real Ella? What have you done with her?”

“Maybe I’m trying to change a little bit,” she says, and walks away.

It’s important to stay close to Ella, and I can’t do that if we fight. So for the next few days, I act completely clueless that she’s … well, avoiding me. One afternoon, I ask if she wants to do coffee, she says no. Another day, I try lunch again. She says no.

At the end of the week, I catch Ella by the lockers. “This weekend, want to watch a movie and order Chinese food?”

Not even looking at me, she says, “My family’s got me super busy this weekend.”

Ella’s parents are often busy, but never with Ella.

I’m about to ask straight out what’s going on when she suddenly looks up. “Why do you always ask me to eat?”

“What?”

“Do you think that’s all I like to do?”

Startled, I say, “No, I just—”

Ella is actually glaring at me. I stammer, “I-it’s what
I
like to do. I’m sorry, we can totally do something else.”

She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“Ella, tell me what’s going on, please.”

“Nothing.”

“Something happened at the dinner.…”

Her jaw tenses. A flicker of anger in her eyes. “Nothing new, believe me.”

“Or maybe you’re pissed at me. Tell me—what did I do?”

Frustrated, she slams the locker door. People around us jump.

“It’s nothing you’ve done,” she shouts, on the verge of tears. “It’s me, okay?” She turns, starts hurrying away. “It’s
me!
”

Helpless, I watch her go.

Then I hear behind me, “The tubby ones are always so temperamental. It’s the imbalance of bodily energies.”

I turn, see Cassandra. She’s standing by the windows, the sun behind her. She’s in darkness, but the immediate space around her is radiant, as if all her energy is shooting outward.

“What did you do to her, Cassandra? What did you say?”

“Nothing that wasn’t true,” she says innocently.

“This isn’t funny; there’s something not right with her.”

“And I believe that’s all that I said,” she says, and walks past me.

I watch and wait, hoping Ella will crack and tell me what’s going on. We say almost nothing on the walk to school now. Claiming she doesn’t feel well, she brings her music and plugs it into her ears. Meanwhile, I walk beside her, praying she can at least hear my friendly thoughts.

And then one day, I walk out to the corner and Ella isn’t there. No Scream bag. No bubble curls. No Ella.

I check my phone for a text.
Sorry, running late!
But there’s no message.

I wait five minutes. Ten minutes. Then I text,
Hey there. Are you coming?

As I stand there, I gaze at the three other corners that make up Eighty-Ninth and West End. One is empty and quiet. At another, a mom takes hold of her little girl’s hand before they cross the street. A man checks his phone at a third.

I check my phone. No answer from Ella.

Maybe she’s sick, I think, reluctantly starting to walk. Maybe she was up all night hurling and she’s just too exhausted to get in touch. That happened to me once. It’s not impossible.

But it’s not what happened, and I know it.

All day, I keep checking my phone—even in class, which is an absolute no-no. In English, Mr. Rhinehart threatens to confiscate it if he sees it again. I like Mr. Rhinehart a lot. But I want to scream, My friend could be in serious trouble, okay? Steinbeck can wait.

A text from Nina about Peter Lilly picking his nose. One from my mom about dinner. Adam Zamora asking if we had to write three pages or five on the Federalist Papers. Nothing from Ella.

Then at the end of the day, I get a message from Cassandra. There are no words. Just a picture. It’s an image from
Snow White
, the old Disney movie.

Snow White in her glass coffin.

I DITCH MY LAST CLASS AND head straight to Ella’s building, a thousand hideous visions in my head. She lives just a few blocks up from me; I’ve been visiting her since fifth grade, so the doorman knows me. I slow down as I approach, in case he has something terrible to tell me. But he just touches his hat and waves me through. I hurry to the elevator, count silently as it climbs to the tenth floor.

Ella lives in one of those old Upper West Side buildings that has a maze of hallways leading to each apartment. I’m so desperate to get to her, I turn the wrong way and end up at the garbage chute. So I have to retrace my steps, start all over, make the right turn, before I find her apartment.

Probably I ring the buzzer way too long. When her mom answers the door, she looks annoyed. But annoyed is good, honestly. Way better than sobbing and hysteria.

Ms. Schaeffer is blocking the door. She doesn’t have much to block it with: she’s tiny. Like her sister, I think. Her brown-gray hair is frizzy, it brushes the shoulders of her jacket. Maybe it’s my
imagination, but I’m always a little intimidated by Ella’s mom; I worry she thinks I’m some shallow, boy-crazy bimbo.

Now she says, “Hi, sweetie. Ella’s asleep right now.”

“Is she okay?”

Ms. Schaeffer looks surprised. “Oh, I think so. She woke up this morning and said she felt ‘tired.’ Between you and me, it seems like a case of ‘I don’t want to go to school–itis.’ ”

“So she’ll be back tomorrow?”

“I would think so.” She starts closing the door. “But I’ll tell her you stopped by.”

No, I think, I can’t leave yet. No matter what her mother says, I know Ella’s in trouble.

Stepping directly in her mom’s line of vision, I say, “Happy birthday, by the way.”

Startled, she lets go of the door. “Oh—thank you.”

I fish. “Ella said it was quite a dinner.”

“She did?” Ms. Schaeffer raises an eyebrow. “Was that what she was texting you?”

I make a guilty face. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“I told Ella—and I’ll tell you too, Toni—I really don’t like all this”—she waves her hands in the air, exactly like Ella does—“constant, meaningless chatter. Sometimes I think you girls don’t even know what comes out of your mouths half the time. You just
bee, bee, bee, bee, bee
.” She makes high-pitched chipmunk noises. “In Ella’s case, she’s often talking about people she doesn’t even know. I said to her at dinner, I can’t imagine why you care about these things. Talk to your family, we are
right here
.”

I’m starting to get a picture of this dinner. “I’ll really try and text less,” I promise her.

“That would be nice,” she says archly.

I turn to go, then have an idea. Looking back, I say, “Ms. Schaeffer?”

She was just about to close the door. Now she stops, irritated. “Hm?”

“I just want to say, I think what Cassandra said was wrong.”

It’s a total gamble. I don’t know for a fact that Cassandra said anything. But from the look on Ms. Schaeffer’s face, I know I’m on to something.

She says defensively, “I don’t think she said anything untrue. We sent Ella to that clinic to learn ways to cope with stress other than eating. The night of my birthday, it was very clear she hadn’t, and I think it was frustrating for everyone.”

I imagine it: Ella surrounded by her family, scared of Cassandra. Once the phone was forbidden, food would have been her only distraction—her only defense. I can see her taking bite after bite after bite in that compulsive way she does when she’s nervous.

Then Ms. Schaeffer says, “At any rate, her cousin simply asked Ella to tell her about her experience at the clinic.”

Of course she did, I think.

“It was my sister who asked if the clinic had helped her understand the feelings behind her overeating. My brother-in-law suggested swimming as exercise. And her father and I said we were concerned for her. Now, I don’t think that was terribly mean of us. But I suppose Ella feels we ganged up on her.”

I have a memory of Chloe, Isabelle, and Zeena all crowding in on me that first day of school. I’ll bet that’s exactly what this dinner felt like to Ella. I had wondered how Cassandra could operate without allies. But she had her family. In one dinner, she took all
the unhappiness and anxiety about Eamonn’s death and turned it right on Ella. She made the family her coven.