Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (22 page)

“You know, if you coordinated your moves, even the high-speed, midair stuff would be safer—and would look better too,” I said tentatively.

“What do
you
know?” She’d abandoned the cheerleader smile—probably because it hurt. Apparently scowling at me also hurt, because she winced and pressed the ice pack more tightly against her face.

“I know that synchronization isn’t a dirty word—on the floor or in the air.”

“Oh, get over yourself. *NSYNC is dead and so are you.”

“You will be, too, if you get hit by another cow in the air.”

“I’ll take care of her.” She moved her pinkie, just the barest twitch, and the clumsy flyer tumbled into the stands. Not an approved move, even for witch school.

“If someone catches you—”

“No one ever does.” She clutched her ice pack, eyes closed, looking the picture of helplessness as everyone scanned the court for the culprit.

Clumsy Cow was screaming something about evil magic from across the way, but since she’d sidelined Tara and two of her own squad, I guess the coaches weren’t interested in finding out who had saved the rest of them from injury.

“One day that nasty temper of yours is going to come back and bite you,” I said, shaking my head in awe.

“Right. And one day you won’t be in remedial magic class. Keep telling yourself that if it gives you hope, sweetie.”

I was spared trying to out-nasty the Queen of Nasty because halftime ended and the flyers dove back to the bench, exuberant from being center stage. I missed that feeling. There is nothing like it. I hoped that the next time we played a magic team, I’d be ready to go out on the field with the squad. And I wouldn’t let anyone run into me.

To that end, I called on Prudence, Queen of the Type A’s, and made Tara an offer she couldn’t refuse: “What if I show
you how synchronization could improve your air work and your floor work?”

“You can’t even do air work,” Tara replied, sounding bored.

“What would it take for you to let me show you?”

Her narrow little eyes said nothing. And then, as if she’d been smacked on the bottom by Mr. Phogg, she got the “lightbulb on” look. “Is it true you have a car?”

“Hey, 666 Girl, I hear you survived your first witches-only game.” Daniel caught me just as I was going into the cafeteria. Right as I stepped into the room, the doors swinging open before me—and staying open as he snapped his fingers, grinned at me, and everything stopped except us.

You know how, in mortal movies, they try to capture that moment when time seems to stop? They do a pretty good job of it, because the movie time-stop is pretty much like real time-stopping.

I could see Daniel grinning at me, moving toward me. I could see outside the circle of us, where Tara and the other cheerleaders were stopped cold, mid-whatever. Interestingly,
the whatever did not seem to include eating. One was putting on mascara, two were looking up at Tara, and three were talking to one another, tuning Tara out. I could so relate.

I looked at Daniel, who had that bad-boy gleam in his eye. As usual. I ignored the pull I felt toward him and stopped walking. I wanted him to think I was cool. He probably guessed I had a crush, but I didn’t have to confirm it by acting easy. “Weird. How did you do that?” I would have asked him why, but it seemed obvious—because he could.

“You said you couldn’t be alone with me without breaking into hives. And I didn’t think you’d let me kiss you in the hallway in front of everyone. Plus, the little witch’s room has an unbreakable warding spell keyed to all males, even rats and mice.”

“So.” I tried to smile seductively, but I may have just come off as nervous. He was a clever, clever boy. He hadn’t broken my mother’s spell, he’d found a way around it. “Do you think I’m the kind of girl who’ll kiss you in public?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. So long as you’re a girl who’ll kiss me in a time bubble with no one looking but us.”

He leaned toward me, and our lips touched. His were warm, mine were surprisingly compressible. He flicked my lip with his tongue, and I shivered. “How much trouble are we going to get in for this?”

He kissed me again, lightly. “If they catch us? Detention. Or maybe they’ll expel us.”

For some reason, when Daniel said it, being expelled sounded like a good thing. Or maybe it was just the effect of the time bubble, magnifying everything I felt standing there kissing him without having to worry about my sixty-second limit. I leaned into him for another kiss.

He grinned. “Some things you don’t learn in school, hunh?”

“Like what?”

“Like kisses aren’t supposed to end quickly.” Our mouths pressed together for my first ever longer-than-sixty-second kiss. At last. It was wonderful.

And then, all hell broke lose. Figuratively, but in a literal way too. The bubble around us started to glow, alarms sounded, and a big flash of flame and smoke drove us apart—and deposited Agatha between us.

I don’t know what I hoped for, except, of course, to disappear, which I had not yet learned to do on purpose (definitely not a remedial skill—the teachers would hate having to look for students all the time).

I quickly decided on my course of action: I’d plead innocent. I opened my mouth, but one quick jab of Agatha’s finger and I couldn’t speak.

“Daniel. I know this is all her fault. You just had to impress an empty-headed female again, didn’t you,” she snapped.

My fault? Empty-headed? Again?
I would have said … if I could have talked.

“G. Don’t get so bent out of shape.” Daniel was grinning at Agatha as if she were not still wafting a chilly mist from the folds of her robes—and maybe from her nostrils, too, it was hard to tell.

“Don’t ‘G’ me, young man. I’ve warned you. You have to tread the straight and narrow. Your family legacy is not one of brigandage and rule breaking.”

“G, that’s not for me. I’ve told you before—“

At that moment, a horrible monkey-screeching sound drowned out anything Daniel had to say.

When the sound stopped, both Agatha and Daniel looked worried. “They’re coming,” Agatha said, her words releasing two little puffs of steam into the air.

“You’d actually expel me for this?” He didn’t look happy, especially when the loud screeching came again, this time accompanied by what sounded like a flapping of wings. Big wings.

“A time bubble in school is an automatic expulsion hearing. I can’t do anything about it. You’ve gone over the line now, Daniel. Our bloodline can only protect you so far.”

Our bloodline?
Hold up. Were they related? Is that what ‘G’ meant—Grandma?!

He shrugged, but I could see a bit of worry in his eyes as the screeching sounded again, closer this time. Then he grinned, kissed Agatha on her wrinkled cheek, said, “Catchya later, 666 Girl,” and disappeared. As the monkey screech
started again, and the bubble began to dissolve around us, words appeared in the air. “You can’t expel me, G. I quit!”

Agatha and I suddenly stood under the watchful eyes of all the other students as the horrible screaming things arrived. They not only sounded like monkeys, they looked like monkeys. Those evil winged monkeys from
The Wizard of Oz
that scared me off the couch and into Mom’s lap when I was three. You know, the ones that almost ate Toto.

They came at us with sharp claws stretched and reaching. Or rather they came at me, because Agatha was headmistress and Daniel was … gone.

I couldn’t help it: They were scary. I screamed. Nothing came out, which may, in the end, have saved my life … or at least one of my limbs.

Agatha stopped the marauding monkeys one nanosecond before they reached me. I swear one of the lead monkey’s claws left a faint scratch on my chin.

“Leave her. I’ll deal with her,” she commanded.

The monkeys weren’t happy, or so their lower decibel, but still ear-blasting, screeches indicated.

“She isn’t eligible for immediate expulsion.” Agatha didn’t sound completely happy about that. “Miss Stewart didn’t cast the spell. She couldn’t tie her shoelaces with magic, and she certainly couldn’t conjure a time bubble. I’ll hold a regular hearing at the school and inform you of
our decision.” Agatha didn’t wait to hear out the protests. She just whisked me away to her office.

“Why couldn’t you just leave him alone?” A frosty mist was coming thick and heavy from her robes. “He was doing so well this time.”

Okay. So Agatha apparently had a big-time blind spot for her great-to-the-nth-power grandson. Who hadn’t mentioned that Agatha was G, his great-great-great-great-grandmother. Where was the rumor mill when I needed it most?

I considered how to answer. But I couldn’t think of a single thing that would make her see Daniel as anything more than an innocent in the grip of a scheming female. Apparently that charm of his worked on girls from sixteen to sixteen hundred, and there wasn’t any getting around it.

There was really only one question. I hadn’t meant to ask it, but as soon as Agatha gave me back my power of speech, I did. “Are you going to expel me?” It was scary how much of me hoped the answer was yes. As long as I didn’t have to deal with those monkeys ever again.

Agatha frowned at me. “We’ll discuss that when your parents get here.”

Great.

Once I was home and safe in my room, I turned on my phone to call Maddie. I was grounded, of course. I didn’t know whether I would be expelled, have my powers bound, or get a big, fat scarlet L—for loser—to wear on my forehead. And, really, I didn’t care.

I mean, if Daniel could run away, why couldn’t I? The Dorklock would pop me to Beverly Hills if I asked him. And I had over two hundred dollars in savings that I could spend on gas to drive there if Tobias suddenly decided he’d had enough troublemaking.

The phone beeped in my hand to indicate I had a message.

Look whos canoodlin

I hadn’t heard from Maddie in a while, but with the detention, the game, and Cousin Seamus, I hadn’t made much effort to contact her, either. So when the message came in with a picture, it took a minute to realize it wasn’t from Maddie. It was from someone else—someone who had masked the incoming number. I sensed trouble, but what was new? Since I’d been in Salem, I’d been a trouble magnet.

The picture on my cell phone was of Maddie and Brent. Holding hands.

No wonder she hadn’t been text messaging me much. She had a way guilty conscience.

I hid the phone under my pillow and blew off steam by creating a little tornado in the center of my room. Neat trick Cousin Seamus taught me to get rid of excess anger so I didn’t do anything stupid in school and earn myself another detention. Hah! The tornado, he said, comes and goes without permanent disruption of anything. Unfortunately, it also did not disrupt the questions shooting through my mind. Why was Maddie dating a boy she knew I liked? Well, maybe I knew the answer to that one. But, then, why hadn’t she just told me? I would have understood. I think.

I had to see Maddie. The problem, of course, was that I could not pop myself more than three feet yet. And even that skill was spotty. Asking my mother to pop me to
Beverly Hills—especially after being caught in a time bubble with a boy and facing a possible expulsion—would be more trouble than it was worth. Not to mention that it would raise questions that would last longer than the echo of her very definite no. I didn’t want her to know about Maddie and Brent. Or how much it hurt.

I’d been scared when the monkeys were flying at me, and highly annoyed with Daniel for leaving me to face the consequences alone. But seeing Maddie and Brent in a clinch? My heart just squeezed up into a hard ball thinking about it. How could she? We’d been friends forever. Best friends. Why hadn’t she told me? I had to know.

I thought of asking Samuel for help, but again, questions that might reveal my lingering crush on a mortal boy seemed like dangerous territory. He’d send me, but he’d want me to come back. And I wasn’t sure I could do that. Even if Maddie turned out to be my best enemy, I wasn’t ready to face the humiliation at Agatha’s after what had happened.

There was really only one choice. True, it was a horrible choice, but it was the only one I had. So I asked the Dorklock to send me to Beverly Hills. And I offered the only bribe that I knew would work: I told him I would take the blame for his next big goof-up.