Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (19 page)

The compliment had a curious effect. Besides blushing bright red, his eyes turned gold near the irises. Interesting.

I put on the glasses and immediately felt dizzy. Lights, colors, even sounds seemed to come at me as if I were in a tunnel with a dozen trains rushing toward me. I took them off and gave Samuel a shaky smile. “Great. Where’d you get these? Maybe I’ll pick up a pair for the Dorklock.”

“My mom and I made them … before she died. They’re the only pair in the world.”

My already high respect for his abilities went up a notch. But I tried not to show him that. “I guess you letting me use your glasses means I have to let you ride in my car.” I paused a beat for his response and was not disappointed.

“A car?” Samuel didn’t even put his glasses back on, he was so interested.

“A yellow Jetta.” Dad may have downsized the car, but I wasn’t letting him change the color.

“You’d really let me ride in it?” he asked eagerly.

Great. Samuel had given me the answer I was looking for:
a car was cool, even in the witch world. Better, the mention of the car had completely driven away his insecurity that I hadn’t taken his picture. Am I good or am I good? Disaster averted once more. I was starting to get the hang of the witchworid. At least, so I thought until I got to cheerleading practice five minutes late the next day.

Tara, as head cheerleader, had the right to call me to order. But, in my opinion, she didn’t have the right to enjoy it so much.

“Hey! Prudence. You’re late,” she sneered.

“I had to talk to Mr. Phogg.”

“The remedial teacher? Are you failing?” She glommed on to that pretty quickly. I guess she was hoping I’d say yes and she could legitimately get me off the team.

“No. I just wanted to arrange moving up to regular magic classes,” I replied patiently.

Which was true. And it was a pleasure to see her frustration that she still had me on her squad—and at her lunch table. That I had been late because of a desperate, and unsuccessful, attempt to convince Phogg to move me up was another story. One that I wasn’t going to tell her. Especially after she made me do a hundred pushups as punishment for tardiness. The weeyotch.

I did tell Maddie, though.

ME: This teacher hates me

MADDIE: Not U Ur the student with the mostest

ME: Right But he doesnt even give me brownie points 4 out of class tutorin

MADDIE: Wassup?

ME: I think its cause Im diff He doesnt think Im good enuf

MADDIE: Diff? How?

ME: Probably cause Im from Cali Hez not fond of newbies

Right. Sometimes it was a pain trying to explain things to Maddie while keeping a healthy distance from the truth: I’m half mortal, and my teacher is seriously old school. Like Plato and Socrates old school. Which had never been clearer than when I tried to ask him—practically begged him—to kick me upstairs.

“You’re making excellent progress in my class, Miss Stewart,” he said. Which was a promising beginning.

“Thank you, sir. Do you think I’m ready for the regular class?” I tried not to look too desperate for a yes, but I suspect I failed, because he recoiled a bit.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“But I’ve mastered summoning—I can do twenty things at once. With control.”

“Summoning isn’t everything, Miss Stewart.”

He’d been saying this to me all month. Despite the fact I’d been adding magic tricks to my repertoire at the rate of two per night. Some teachers just label you and you can never escape their label. Apparently, I was labeled remedial, and remedial I would stay if it was up to this teacher.

Which it wasn’t. My mom could eat him alive—or at least summon a lion to eat him alive. But I didn’t want to drag Mom into this. I just wanted to get out of the remedial classes. I had no doubt that the regular spells class would be tougher to pass, but I was tired of learning the same thing over and over. I needed to learn faster than molasses in wintertime.

“What can I do to prove to you I’m ready for regular spell class?” I asked.

He seemed surprised. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. “It’s usual to finish out the year and then take your placement test for next year—”

“I don’t want to wait until next year!” I wailed, feeling like a two-year-old. But I knew it was the one thing Skin and Bones hated worse than passing someone out of remedial spells when the school year had barely begun.

With a desperate little gasp, he said, “Fine, fine. If you want to prove you’re ready for regular spell class, you’ll have to—” I could see his glassy little eyes spinning as he thought. “You’ll have to summon a thousand objects at
once, turn your classmates into toads and back again without letting them know, and build the Empire State Building with LEGOs without touching a piece with your hands.” He sat back, rubbing his eyes as if they were tired from all that spinning, and then fixed the beady things back on me with a smile. “By the end of December.”

“By—” I protested, knowing instinctively that what he was asking was unfair.

“Otherwise, you’ll be in remedial all year, Miss Stewart.” The little toad thought he’d won. For a long moment, I fought the urge to turn him into the toad he was. But that was baby stuff. And I wasn’t a baby. I was a high school junior who didn’t want to be in remedial spells any longer than necessary.

I stood up and smiled brilliantly, just to confuse him. “December? Excellent. You won’t mind if I aim to make that before Christmas, do you? I enjoy the holidays so much more when I don’t have a test weighing on my mind.”

Which is when I popped out of his classroom, five minutes late to practice and right into the slavering jaws of Tara the Terrible. Life is so unfair.

MADDIE: Whats with the fashion faux pas? Who is that guy?

ME: The kids at Agathas have a really umm unique sense of style

MADDIE: Fur? I can appreciate a good mink But that dude looks like he clubbed his clothes

ME: LOL U should see what he eats 4 lunch

MADDIE: Still Maybe U should show ur mom ur pix That might send her home fast

ME: As if When my mom commits shez rabid

MADDIE: LOL! Gtg Where are the rest of those pix?

ME: Incoming

MADDIE: Kewl Wish me luck on my basket toss Ive finally lost enough 2 B a flyer

ME: Fly high anorexic chick! N send pix!

Maddie’s not really anorexic. She’s just wanted to be a flyer since fifth grade. But she’d never quite been able to ditch the ice cream and cookies that kept her fifteen pounds too padded for the job of being lifted into the air.

Now she had finally lost the weight. And I wasn’t there to see her fly. Or to make sure the other cheerleaders were there to catch her when she fell. Or even to see her go out on a date with the now acceptably cute Danny Trimball. I couldn’t even get her to come along on my first ride in the car. Or on the first babysitting job to pay for said car.

Babysitting is not what it’s cracked up to be. I’d agreed to watch our (mortal) neighbor’s baby because (besides needing the forty dollars they promised me) I figured that a kid who couldn’t even turn over in her crib would give me lots of time to practice my spells homework.

Wrong! The baby cried from the moment she woke up (five minutes after her parents left with big smiles and a long list of numbers where they could be reached) until five minutes before they came home, just shy of midnight. Baby radar.

Despite disastrous baby caper #1, I was pleased to deposit the check into my car fund, as well as act delighted that they wanted to make this a weekly deal. But I did decide to check out the spell book for a “soothe the baby” spell for any and all future babysitting expeditions.

There was a whole section, it seemed. At last I understood how Mom had always gotten the Dorklock to stay in the corner during time-out. This spell was written in her own hand, which meant that she’d created it—out of desperation, no doubt.

I wondered if I’d ever see my own handwritten spells here. Somehow, the family spell book had made my being a witch more real than the fact that I could summon objects or fly. There were spells in a spidery handwriting so old that Grandmama said it was from her own grandmother. Mindboggling. I couldn’t even read them, because they were written in Old English. Grandmama said it was a translation from something older. Sanskrit, maybe. She wasn’t sure. Those family scrolls had been lost in the years after the translation was done.

Generations and millennia of witches had added to the spell book. But if I couldn’t learn what I needed to know, and manifest a Talent, I would not be one of them. Skin and Bones didn’t want to let me go, and at the rate he taught magic, I wouldn’t ever learn what I needed to know to cheerlead in a real magic game. Or pass the Wisdom Test.

Even Dorklock was better at simple spells than I was. Hecate, he was better at complex spells too. Mom had recently discovered that he’d been popping himself home for visits with his friends. He’d been grounded in every way—magic and mortal—my parents could think of. Poor Dad had turned gray when he realized that Tobias could sneak around Mom like that already.

I could just see it now: Samuel, like his mother before him, being the youngest to pass the test, with the Dorklock right behind him. And me, raised by mortals, being the oldest.

As if I wasn’t facing a life of living in the magic slow lane, I was blowing it in math, too. I never had trouble in math. Until I started trying to stuff eleven years of magic instruction into a month.

I had noticed that Mr. Bindlebrot no longer automatically approved my equations—sending the glowing letters fading into the air. Several times, in fact, he had stood there clearing his throat while I noticed an error and fixed it.

This time, he didn’t give me a chance to notice. He smiled his great Bloom-quality smile, bringing back memories of the towel and drops of water on bare skin. And then he said, very kindly, “Your math is slipping.” My respectably glowing equation did not disappear. Instead, it pulsed red.

“Oh, criminey. I forgot to square x.”

I fixed the equation quickly, but it didn’t disappear as Mr. Bindlebrot stood there, staring at me. “Do you need some extra help, Prudence?”

“No.” I denied, and then kicked myself. “Maybe.” I realized I had a primo excuse to try out a scientific hypothesis of mine-whether I could be alone with a male witch for more than sixty seconds without breaking into hives. “I’ve just been so busy. Perhaps I could speak to you after school?”

My equation finally disappeared.

He seemed puzzled, but he agreed. “Certainly.”

I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the class. Although I did make note of the homework assignment when he gave it. It helped that he summoned a gong and rang it to get our attention right before he gave homework. I wish all my teachers did that.

True to his word, after my last class disappeared, instead of being popped to the hallway, I found it was, at last, just me and Mr. Bindlebrot (sadly, I don’t think that would make a good song lyric). “How can I help you get back on track, Prudence? Would you like to arrange some afterschool tutoring sessions?”

Right. Not even if he promised to wear the towel! After school I had practice—and I needed every minute of it to convince Coach I should come off probation status. “I’m
just a little tired. If you could assign me some makeup work, I know I could—”

“Do you realize you have dropped from an A to an F on your daily quiz?”

“An F?” Umm, no. If I’d realized that, I’d have done my math homework instead of going online to find the answers. Blastini! I didn’t need my math aptitude to go belly up on me now.

I had schemed all class on how to keep the conversation going for at least two minutes. But it didn’t look like it would be hard now. We were seventy-five seconds in, no sign of hives, and my grade was on the line. The only thing worse would be for the hives to pop out right now.

They didn’t. However, ninety seconds into this rather abysmal experiment, my mother did.

Mr. Bindlebrot didn’t seem too surprised. “Good to see you again. Prudence and I were just discussing her math.” His natural magnetism didn’t have the same impact as when he was only wearing a towel, but I did see Mom blink before she smiled back.

Good to see you again? When had they met before? Had Mom been checking up on my grades?

“How wonderful to see you after so long.” She glanced around the classroom, where equations were glowing in the air all around us. “You’ve done well.”

He shrugged. “Teaching at Agatha’s is a challenge, but I
always liked challenges, as I’m sure you remember.”

Was he flirting? With my mother? I wanted to die.

He turned to smile at me, but the wattage was dimming and the jolt failed to reach my heart. “Did your mother tell you that she was my first girlfriend?”

Yuck. Another crush bites the dust.

“Don’t you have to make practice, honey?” Mom smiled at me, and I knew that she intended to stay there, talking about me with Mr. Bindlebrot. Which would have been okay, now that my crush had dried up and blown away like powdered makeup in a desert wind. Except that it meant she was going to find out about my slipping math grades way before report card time. Bummer.