Vacations From Hell (7 page)

Kathleen wiped angry tears from her cheeks. “You
ruined
him!”

The truth hit Cecily. “You didn’t just make him like you. The enchantment altered his personality too, so he’d be the perfect guy for you.”
Or for me
, she thought, remembering how Scott had seemed so ideal when he was with her—and how his personality had seemed to change the moment Kathleen walked into the room. Why hadn’t she seen it before? The real Scott was this guy: slack-jawed, stupid, and completely unconcerned with anything around him. He wasn’t even paying any attention to their conversation.

“If you had the guts to borrow your mom’s Book of Shadows, you’d know how to do real magic too,” Kathleen jeered. She advanced upon Cecily, who pressed her back against the deck railing. What other evil spells could Kathleen have learned? What else might she be willing to do? Cecily wanted to think she could defend herself, but more than that she wanted to run for help. Yet Kathleen stood between her and any escape. “Scott was perfect, and he can be perfect again, because you’re about to get out of my way.”

“No, she isn’t,” Mrs. Pruitt said sternly. She stood in the doorway of the deck, with all the mothers standing just behind her. Their faces were grave. “Kathleen, come talk with me.”

Kathleen’s face changed then, from its default setting (evil) to something Cecily had never seen before:
real fear. Obviously the mothers had recognized the breaking of an enchantment; just as obviously they’d overheard enough to realize what Kathleen had done. Nobody was wielding any magic; they didn’t have to. The moms’ power eclipsed anything Cecily or Kathleen could do.

And at long last the evil reign of Kathleen Pruitt had come to a crashing end.

“What will happen to her?” Cecily asked later as she and her mother walked on the beach.

“Kathleen will never be allowed to practice magic again. She’ll never be given the right incantations to start a Book of Shadows, and her supplies and instruments will have to be destroyed. We can’t erase what she already knows, but from now on she’s cut out of this or any coven. It’s going to be hard on her mother, but rules are rules.” They went on silently for a few steps before Mom said, “I’m proud of you for not gloating.”

Cecily was pretty sure she’d get in some quality gloating later, but the shock of it all was too new for that. “All that smoke, the boom—Dad has to have seen it.”

“We told the guys the Jacuzzi shorted out. No more hot-tubbing on this trip, I’m afraid.”

It would be a long time before Cecily could look at
a Jacuzzi the same way again, so no loss there. “And Scott?”

“Doesn’t know what hit him. Or care, I think.”

They looked together toward Ocean’s Heaven. Scott sat with Theo on the front steps that led to the sand. He chugged half a can of root beer then belched Theo’s name, which made Theo laugh and applaud. Cecily sighed.

Mom said, “You tried to warn me about Kathleen last night. I should have heard you out. In future I will.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Which means you will never again have any excuse for laying hands on my Book of Shadows without my permission.”

“Understood.”

Mom tugged fondly at the end of Cecily’s ponytail. “You took a big risk, you know—and not just attempting the spell on your own. If Scott were any more—let’s say
inquisitive
, he would have realized that he had been under an enchantment. He would have realized that magic is real. Covering our tracks at that point would’ve been hard work. That you couldn’t have done alone.”

“Why do we have to lie to them? Don’t you ever wish Dad knew the truth? Don’t you think he’d love you even more when he realized what an amazing witch you are?”

For a moment Mom was silent. The only sound was the roar of the ocean. At last she said, “Today of all days I’d think you would understand the importance of obeying the rules.”

That wasn’t an answer, but Cecily knew it was as close as she would get. She hugged Mom before jogging down to the shoreline. The waves were cold and foamy against her toes.

Someday
, Cecily thought.
Someday I’ll find a guy who can live with the truth. Just because that’s not Scott doesn’t mean a guy like that isn’t out there.

At least her summer vacation wasn’t entirely ruined. Cecily had a few days left to enjoy herself, which she felt she richly deserved.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT GOALS: REVISED

During my remaining vacation time I will:

• resist gloating over Kathleen’s downfall, at least while there are witnesses around
  
• swim for at least two hours a day
  
• see if the moms now respect me enough to teach me some serious Craft mojo
  
• beat Theo at foosball just once for the sake of my personal dignity
  
• walk three miles on the beach each morning
  
• see about tennis lessons
  
• see about horseback riding lessons
  
• basically, stay outdoors as much as humanly possible
  

Then thunder rolled in the distance, and raindrops began to spatter onto the sand.

Cecily groaned as she ran for shelter.
Well, maybe next year.

MAUREEN JOHNSON

“I
hate vacation,” I said.

My sister, Marylou, was in the rocking chair by the window, twisting her short, rust-colored hair around her finger absently, her
DSM-IV
open in front of her. The
DSM-IV
, in case you’ve never heard of it, is
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (Fourth Edition)
. Marylou had just finished her first year as a psychology major, which meant that her favorite time waster was diagnosing me with every ailment in the book—literally. So it was a mistake saying this kind of thing to her.

“Lack of interest in things normal people find enjoyable,” she said. “That’s depression, Charlie.”

“‘Normal people’?” I repeated.

“Well, that’s not the term we like to use, actually….”
she said, even though she had just used it.

“Who is this
we
?”

“Mental health professionals.”

The last thing Marylou was was a mental health professional. She was a barista with two semesters of intro psych under her belt.

“I see,” I said. “A mental health professional. You
also
serve lattes. So are you
also
the president of Starbucks? Is that what that means?”

“Shut up, Charlie.”

Page flip, page flip, page flip.

“And why are you so busy trying to diagnose
me
?” I asked, swatting away a fly that kept trying to land on my nose. “You were reading that on the plane when that guy next to me tried to stab me with his fork. You didn’t give
him
a label.”

“That’s because he didn’t try to stab you,” she said placidly. “You were lying.”

See, this is something that haunts me. I used to lie a lot. Or, I exaggerated a lot. I guess I was bored, and my little embellishments made the world so much more interesting. I have to say, I was really good at it. I could fool anyone. They were harmless lies too. I didn’t hurt anyone with them. The little dog that chased me down the street could be bigger, perhaps rabid. I didn’t just drop my ice cream while it was windy—I was hit by a freak tornado.

But lying is bad. I know this. And even though my lies weren’t evil, they still caused all kinds of problems and made some people not trust me, so I gave it up, cold turkey, at the start of freshman year. I’ve been on the wagon for about three years now.

But do I get any credit for this? No. I guess it’s like having a criminal past: no one ever really trusts you again. Like, if you were a robber, and you stopped robbing and totally re-created yourself and everyone knew it…still, no one will let you carry the big cash deposit to the bank.

And the guy in seat 56E really
did
try to stab me with his fork. I think this was because he thought I stole his Air France headphones while he was napping, which I didn’t. The stewardess didn’t give him any because he was sleeping. Marylou and I just used our own headphones on the flight, and she ended up sticking her Air France pair in my seatback pocket when she got up to go to the bathroom, so when Mr. 56E snorted himself awake halfway over the Atlantic, he stared at the two pairs of headphones I had in front of me. His mouth said nothing, but his eyes said, “Thief.” When his tray came, he got out his fork with a lot more force than necessary and narrowly missed my arm. He was weird the entire flight. He got up about a dozen times to do yoga in the back of the plane by the exit door. And he was reading a book on
yogurt making
for most of the time.

But did Marylou spend any time on this paragon of sanity?

No.

Just me.

To be fair, we had nothing else to do at this particular moment when we had cycled through the disorders and gotten around to depression. Maybe I was depressed. I had every reason to be.

Marylou and I had been in France for three days, and it really wasn’t going according to plan. Our mother is technically French, but her parents moved to America when she was only four. As a result, we had lots of French relatives who had been badgering my mom for years and years to send little Marie-Louise and Charlotte to see the land of their ancestors. Our cousin Claude, in particular, wanted us to come. Claude was some kind of big man in advertising in Paris and had done this ad that had babies in little suits of armor that apparently everyone
loved
. He had an apartment in the middle of town, and he wanted nothing more than to show his young cousins around.

Marylou and I were all in favor of the idea, because who doesn’t want to go and stay in Paris for four weeks? That was the plan: the entire month of August. Marylou had just finished her first year of college, and I was about to be a senior in high school, so it seemed like we were old enough and young enough, and the Time Was
Right, and there was a special on Air France tickets.

So finally we were sent, and we landed in Paris, and there was Claude, who was about six foot eleven and blond and friendly. We spent one night in his apartment in Paris, sleeping off our jet lag in the guest room. We woke up expecting to take on the city and see the Eiffel Tower and ride down the street on scooters eating cheese. We wanted to embrace the life our fabulous French cousin wanted so much to show us.

Except that Claude said
non non non
, no one in Paris stays there over August. It was too hot and horrible and didn’t we want to go to the country? We didn’t, but we said we did to be polite. It really didn’t matter what we answered, because Claude had already rented a house in Provence to show us real French life. We were leaving that afternoon. And then Claude got a call. Something had gone wrong with the babies in the little suits of armor, and he would have to fix something, and we could just go, and he would catch a later train as soon as he could, and the landlord would be there to meet us and hooray for France!

So, less than twenty-four hours after our arrival, Marylou and I were put on a train to the French countryside, with no Claude. It was a nice enough ride, which we spent staring out the window and ordering small glasses of wine for seven Euros each because we were allowed to, and we still had jet lag, and we almost missed our stop.
We were that confused and dopey. But Marylou, being Marylou, made a heroic leap for our bags, and we actually made it off the train instead of riding on until we hit Italy or the ocean or the end of the world.

Outside the station, a man in a small blue car was waiting for us. He was white-haired, looked furious, and spoke no English—but seemed to know who we were. That, and the complete lack of other possible landlords around, was enough for us to go with him. Our enormous suitcases didn’t really fit in his car, so we had to get in first, and then they were piled in on top of us, pinning us to the molten-hot seats.

Along the ride he thrust a government ID at us and we learned his name was Erique. Erique had a terrible cough that would shake him so hard he would lose control of the car for a second and we would weave hilariously around the road. Marylou and I both knew about three dozen French words between us, not enough for any kind of meaningful sentence, but every once in a while we would try to charm and entertain Erique by saying things like “hot” and “train” and “Paris” and “tree” in no particular order or context. He looked at us sadly through the rearview mirror whenever we spoke, so we stopped.

We passed through the village itself, which was as quaint and beautiful as anything you could possibly want from the French countryside. People were coming
out of the bakery with long loaves of bread, drinking at tables outside of a café with a red awning. There were tiny French children circling on bikes, old men sitting by an ancient central fountain, hills in the far distance. The only things that disrupted the tranquil, language-textbook perfection of it all were an ambulance and police car with silently blinking lights parked in front of one of the picturesque houses. A small cluster of paramedics and officers placidly smoked and talked by an open front door, some leaning on an empty gurney. In this town even the emergencies were handled with languid grace.

We drove right through the village, off the nice paved roads onto much bumpier ones that passed through olive groves. Then we went off the pavement entirely and onto a pitted dirt road to nowhere and nothing. We were hot and crushed and shaken around for another fifteen minutes, when Erique turned down an even narrower nonroad and a house materialized from between the branches.

The house was made of a creamy white stone, with massive duck-egg blue shutters on all the windows. It stood alone against a backdrop of trees, trees, and more trees, along with the occasional rosemary or lavender bush. Walking down the gravel path that led to it, you were pretty much knocked over by the sweet smell of the herbs baking in the sun, and then you went under the
thick canopy of green that shielded the house. Off to the side there was a stream that actually gurgled and had about ten million tiny black frogs hopping around.

Erique walked us all around our new French home, opening doors, turning on fans, picking up the occasional spider or frog and flicking it out the window. The house looked like it had been redecorated once every decade, starting in maybe 1750 and ending around 1970. The furniture was all big and heavy, like something out of
The Hobbit
. Some of the rooms were wood paneled, but mostly they were wallpapered. One room was covered in a bright yellow, sixties, psychedelic swirl, another in a plasticky representation of wood paneling, another in dull arrangements of brown-tinted apples and pears. Our bedroom had the most bearable pattern—a delicate one of bluebells and intertwining vines. I wouldn’t have wanted it in my own room at home, but at least it didn’t give me the shakes like the yellow room or depress me like the rotting-fruit room.

The main decorations were old, framed maps of France, all with creeping yellow stains in the corners from where moisture had gotten under the glass. There was a framed ad for Casio keyboards in the bathroom—one that looked like it was from the mideighties, with a guy in a big orange suit and a mustache with a keyboard tucked under his arm. I spent a lot of time staring at this, trying to figure out why someone had taken the time to
remove it from a magazine, frame it, and hang it next to the sink.

Erique loaded up the tiny fridge with food, stacked loaves of bread and warm Orangina and bottled water on the shelf, and then putt-putted off in his car. We looked around for something to do. For entertainment there was a shelfful of French romance novels, detective stories, guidebooks, and history books—all in the early stages of pungent old-book smell. There were also some old board games and a television with antennae and no cable that got only one station, which showed only American cartoons dubbed into French, mostly Bob l’éponge, who lived in a pineapple under the sea.

To be fair to the place, I think most French people who rented it rolled up with their own bikes and kayaks and Casio keyboards or whatever else they needed. Claude had indicated he would be bringing all these things just as soon as he could get here, so all we had to do was “relax”—which, as everyone knows, is another way of saying “sit around and wait and feel the creeping hand of time run its fingers up your back.” I couldn’t stand it, all woody and quiet and smelling of rosemary and thyme. It was like being in a spice rack.

We walked around outside, but the smallness of the frogs freaked Marylou out a lot, mostly because they kept jumping across the path when we were least expecting it, and she stepped on one by accident, and
she went through all five stages of grief about it. Marylou is famous for her squeamishness and her nonviolent nature. Spiders, silverfish, roaches, even flies…she’s helpless against them. At home she would make someone else, often me, come and deal with the problem. So killing a frog almost did her in. The rest of the afternoon was spent calming her down. That night we had dinner, read all the books we’d brought, and waited.

Two days went by like this. Erique came every afternoon and brought us delicious and rustic-looking French groceries and looked at us helplessly, sometimes pointing at the clock or shaking a bottle of milk in a meaningful way. We never had any idea what he was trying to say. The only time we could ever understand was when he showed us a tiny dead scorpion, laughed, then took off his shoe, and shook it. This baffled us at first, but since he did it every time he left us, we slowly began to realize that we had to shake out our shoes before we stepped into them because they might be filled with scorpions.

We were safe and well fed and generally looked after, but slowly going crazy. Or so Marylou thought, from the number of times she diagnosed me from the rocking chair in our bedroom. Over those days and nights I had: generalized anxiety disorder, ADHD, body dysmorphic disorder, adjustment disorder, and borderline kleptomania (because I kept using her brush).

And then I was depressed. Now you’re all caught up. This was day three.

“You aren’t enjoying this either,” I said. “So I guess either we’re both abnormal or we’re both depressed. And why’d you bring that with you? That’s not exactly vacation reading.”

“It is if you want a four point oh. And what else is there to do?”

She had a good point. I was staring at an issue of French
Vogue
from 1984. I mean, it was fun looking at the big hair, but you can only do that for so long. I set it aside and picked up the useless little pay-as-you-go French cell phone Claude had gotten us (because our American ones didn’t work right and would have cost about a million dollars a second if they had).

“Maybe it’s the house that’s messing up the phone,” I said, not believing that for a second. The last time I had seen a signal, we were at the train station, ten or more miles away. “There’s got to be
somewhere
around here where a cell phone works. I have to find out.”

“Feel free,” Marylou said, flicking her hand but not looking up. “Go try.”

“Doesn’t this freak you out at all?” I said. “Three days. He said it would take him, like, one.”