Super Freak (4 page)

It was a mistake. A terrible thing to do to anyone. But it was the only way.

I keep telling myself that. I have to. Maybe we’re no better than her. We deserved the words she threw at us. Poor William won’t realize what’s happened, and I cannot stop what she has done. I can only prepare now.

Only if I forget Hecate Bay can I be certain of his safety. I will erase any mention of this from my family’s history. Soon, only she will remember. No one will have ever heard of our troubles.

No one will remember the reasons why
…

The letter stopped at the bottom of the page, the writing obviously continued elsewhere. The pages must have been torn from someone’s diary. What had happened? Who was William? Was the writer a woman? I felt very strongly that it was, but I couldn’t explain why, except for the flowery script. I mean, boys didn’t usually keep journals.

I wondered where the rest was stashed. Maybe the writer left other pieces scattered around the house, like breadcrumbs for someone smart enough to look. No one really wants a secret kept forever.

Rolling the paper back up, I slid it into the drawer of my desk under a notepad. My parents never went through my room before, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Where should I begin to look for more diary entries? I would search the house, but that would be hard to do with Mom and Dad around. There was always the library or the town records. But a thirteen-year-old hunting through dusty record books would attract a lot of attention. I had enough of that already.

Dad’s voice echoed up the stairs, telling me to come down and help with dinner. I fished the papers I needed signed from my bag and headed down. For now, the mystery would have to wait. I had to come up with a plan before I started anything.

***

“Diana, you won’t believe what I found,” I said, flopping into the bus seat next to my new friend. I couldn’t find out all the answers I needed on my own, and Diana was the best choice. Maybe the only choice, but I liked her, and she was a reporter’s daughter. How much more perfect an opportunity was I going to get?

She pushed hair out of her face and raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“A page from a diary. From someone who used to live in my house, I think.”

Diana’s eyes lit. “Really? That is so cool! Did it say anything good?”

Her enthusiasm hyped me up even more. “Oh yeah, it–” Kevin’s head showed over the top of the seat in front of us. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I’d be willing to bet he was eavesdropping. Diana followed my gaze and frowned.

“Can you come over after school?” I asked.

“I have to check with my dad, but I’m sure he’ll let me bike over. I only live a couple blocks away.” She rubbed her hands together and bent her head closer to mine. “This is so awesome. Finally a mystery I’ll know about before Dad.”

I laughed. “I thought the same thing.”

“Great minds think alike, you know.”

Kevin popped up over the back of the seat. “You two are such girls. Mysteries? Pages from diaries? Do you really think anyone actually buys that?” He snorted. “And you, Diana, falling in with that human? What are you thinking? She’s dirt. Lower than dirt because at least dirt has a purpose.”

I was surprised at how much the words cut. My skin was pretty thick, but he attacked me for no apparent reason. Leo popped up beside his brother, and waited for him to join in. Instead, he whacked the back of his brother’s head. “You are such a jerk, Kev. Get over yourself.”

He turned to me, extending a hand over the seat. “Sorry, but he thinks he knows everything because he was born two minutes earlier than me. Ignore him.”

I shook his hand slowly, weighing his sincerity. Yesterday he followed Kevin around without saying anything. Today, it seemed he’d decided to be an independent person. I didn’t understand the change. It must have shown on my face.

“Leo always likes to take on the lost causes.” Kevin sneered. “It’s his hobby.”

“Kind of like yours is being a jerk?” I asked.

Kevin sat back down with a huff. Leo rolled his eyes.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said.

Diana watched him, her face thoughtful. “Why do you want to be nice to her now?”

He smiled, and I thought a bit of a blush sprinkled across his nose. Which was impressive, considering his supernatural category.

“Well, I like you, and you like her, so she’s all right by association.”

I slid a glance to Diana, who blushed in earnest. I quirked an eyebrow at her and she cleared her throat. “Yeah, well, everyone knows I’m awesome. It rubs off. Why don’t you sit with us at lunch?”

A little knot of disappointment curled in my stomach. We couldn’t talk about the mystery if Leo was around, despite his sudden separation from his brother. But as I continued to chat with Diana and Leo, I realized my new friend had a crush. And I wanted to know more about this curse. Letting him sit with us might make both of us happy. If we could get Leo to talk about the house, it would be worth it.

True to his word, Leo sat with us at lunch, his brother glaring at me as if he could rip my hair out with his eyes alone. I didn’t know what I did to make Kevin dislike me so much.

I discovered, as lunch moved on, that I liked Leo. He drank lukewarm A positive from a basketball-themed water bottle while Diana and I ate our sandwiches. I didn’t even do more than a couple of crossword questions, where normally I lose myself in the puzzles during lunch. It was a change actually having someone to talk to.

Dessert was a set of fruity snacks, which Diana and Leo teased me over. I had a system. I sorted each color, eating least favorites first, until I got down to the coveted red jellies. They may have been an elementary school snack, but I adored them. Diana shared a sip of something in her thermos with Leo. It smelled very metallic to me, and I suspected it was a blood drink of some kind. It would make sense, since she was half-vampire.

“So,” I said, popping a grape snack into my mouth. “What is this curse your brother mentioned yesterday?”

Leo sighed. “Your house is called Harridan House because a few years after it was built the woman who lived there disappeared. Some people insisted she was really a witch that kidnapped children and ate them for breakfast. Others say she was trying to get enough power to live forever and rule the supernatural world. But it backfired, and now she haunts the house, scaring everyone out. There’s a million stories now.”

“But why all the superstition? The house is old, and she’s been dead a long time. I suppose she walks the halls at night, holding her head under one arm and rattling her chains to scare away the living?” I shook my head. Ghost stories, at least the made up ones, really didn’t have too many variations. When you’d heard one, you’d heard them all.

“That’s where the curse comes in,” Leo started. But the students around us began to get up and leave. A glance at the clock said it was time to pack up for class. Leo looked far too relieved to be cut off.

“Listen, you can sit with us anytime you want,” Diana said. I hid a smile behind a cough at the cherry red splotches blooming on her cheeks.

“Awesome. I’ll see you guys later then.” Leo flashed a bright grin and a thumbs-up, and then headed away from the table to catch up with a couple of other friends. The guys whispered something and then roared with laughter. Leo pushed at a couple and marched ahead of them.

He had a much better personality than his brother.

“So, have you known Leo long?” I asked, trying to be casual.

She balled up her trash and tossed it into the large bin next to the exit as we filed out of the double doors. “Long enough. I always liked him better. Kevin has no sense of humor, and he’s always got his nose in the air.”

I didn’t push any more. “I’ll see you after school, right?”

She nodded and I grabbed her hand, scribbling my phone number on the palm with my pen. “Call me if you can’t come.”

“Sure. But it shouldn’t be a big deal,” she said, and headed down the other hall with a smile and a wave.

I couldn’t wait to sit down and show her what I’d found.

***

But wait I did. A stomach bug was going around school, and Diana got it. She called me that afternoon, but wasn’t on the phone long before she had to go back to hang her head over the toilet. You’d think supernaturals wouldn’t get sick, but apparently the flu wasn’t discriminatory. I spent the time after school back to my old pursuits–finished my latest book of cryptograms and started a book talking about the code breakers of World War II. Nothing says nerd like a history book on codes. But I admired them. They knew how to do something most people couldn’t and they saved the world doing it. Those were my kind of people.

When I wasn’t reading or messing with puzzles, I was nosing around the house, looking in any spot that seemed likely for more diary pages. Nothing appeared.

Then, exactly a week later, Diana returned to school. She collapsed next to me in Paranormal Ethics with a moan. “I could really get used to this week in school, week out. But I would skip the whole barfing bit.”

“Are you better?” I asked. We’d talked on the phone, but the mystery had taken a back seat.

She nodded. “Have you found any other notes?” Her eyes twinkled. My surprise must have shown on my face. “You think I forgot!”

I shrugged. “Well, you never said anything about it, so yeah. Maybe.”

“No way, man. I just didn’t want to get too excited in case I couldn’t come over to see it. I figured you’d find something and I’d have to sit at home, waiting until I was better, and by then you’d have it all figured out. And that would suck.”

A smile spread over my face. “Well, I’ll show you whenever you can come.”

“Ladies, unless you’d like to share with the class, I’d suggest you turn around and pay attention,” Ms. Widdershins said.

She hovered over the back of my chair. My skin crawled as I looked up into her monocle and gave a weak smile. I don’t know how I missed the smell of perfume that clung to her purple dress. “Sorry.”

She sniffed then moved on. But I thought I caught a strange expression on her face as she walked past. I watched her so intently that I wasn’t quick enough to catch when everything on my desk started to slide off. It ended up all over the floor. Ms. Widdershins turned around, helping me scoop it all up and put it back on my desk.

Kevin snickered on the other side of me. I glared. He’d probably used some sort of charm to be obnoxious. Ms. Widdershins handed back the last stack of papers, her eyes scanning the pages.

“You might want to think of organizing your things a little more, dear,” she told me. Her lips pulled into a tight, annoyed line.

I nodded, heat rushing to my face. It had been organized before it fell off the desk. My gaze slid back to Kevin’s smirk. I wanted to point a finger and yell, but it wouldn’t do any good. Ms. Widdershins had already proved over the last week that she didn’t care for me. I knew she thought I lied about being magic-free. She already made me take the aptitude test once. When I failed, she immediately scheduled a second one for next week. “A different version,” she’d said. She was nothing if not persistent.

I kept my mouth shut as she stalked to the chalkboard. I dumped the stack of papers I didn’t need into my book bag. I’d sort it all out again later.

“What have I done to that pain?” I whispered to Diana, jerking my head towards Kevin.

She snorted and started to take notes on the scrawl Ms. Widdershins wrote on the board. “He’s always been like that. And he’ll be worse now that Leo decided to take our side.”

“Diana,” Ms. Widdershins interrupted. “If you please, tell me in the case of Rumplestiltskin versus The Weaver’s Guild, who was the plaintiff and who was the defendant?”

Diana and I cracked open the huge volume for ethics. While I took notes, I doodled. Everything ended up being question marks and sketches of the house. Harridan House. I kind of liked the name, despite the doom and gloom everyone kept talking about.

Today wasn’t my day. Just when I thought I was safe, the teacher appeared at my elbow again. She snatched my spiral notebook, covered in more doodles than notes, from the desk. One long fingernail tapped the sketch of the house.

“I suppose that until I tell you about the curse you aren’t going to pay any attention.”

I opened my mouth, but she shook her head. “No. We’ll use it as a discussion point.”

She dropped the notebook back onto my desk and I slid down on the seat, wishing the plastic chair would eat me whole. Ms. Widdershins was going to be the instigator of my social death.

“Who wants to relate the story of the Harridan House curse?” She asked the question, but she looked straight at Kevin, whose hand already waved in the air. “Kevin.”

“An old witch cursed the house and the town founders caught her and destroyed her. She haunts the house now, looking to take out her anger on anyone who lives there.”

A ghost of a smile flittered over Ms. Widdershins’ mouth. Her eyes were shiny, hard points of black. I couldn’t tell if she was irritated with me or angry about something else all together. “That is the abbreviated version, but I suppose it captures all the appropriate points.”

Another girl, Angela, who had gorgeous olive skin, slightly pointed ears, and a willowy figure that said she could be a supermodel someday, raised her hand. “That can’t be all there is to the story. Couldn’t you tell us the actual history of the legend?”

Elves, even at my age, wanted to get the truth of everything. Some people said it was because they were wise. Whatever the reason, I was glad I didn’t have to be the one to ask her to explain the whole thing. She probably would have refused me, and I needed to know more.

Ms. Widdershins pursed her lips and then pulled out her chair and sat. “The original builder of Harridan House was a witch. And she did have some sort of plot that involved some sort of power gain. Some say it may even have been an attempt to rule all supers. Others say it was unrequited love. A few even rumored that black magic rituals were taking place.