Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts (8 page)

The other girl, who was skinny and pretty enough to be sitting at the kewl table if she hadn’t been wearing a dress that looked like it was made out of a potato sack, just smiled at me faintly, as if she was trying to look past me without being completely rude.

Clearly not an invitation to sit yet. I felt like everyone’s hot little eyes were on me, but there is a lot of truth to the saying my mom likes that goes “If you knew how little people thought of you, you’d be shocked.” Or something like that.

The boy took a sip of his soda and fiddled with his glasses for a minute before he said, “Is it true you were raised in the mortal realm? That you went to a mortal school?”

“Yes.” Was that a good thing or a bad thing? All I knew was that it was true.

Apparently the truth can set us free. Sometimes. A chair appeared in front of me. Duh. Magic lunchroom means magic chairs. I grabbed it and sat for a moment, unsure what to do about the actual eating part of lunch.

I could probably conjure up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or maybe a hot dog like the two girls were having—with mustard and onions. Probably. But I’d rather have what the boy with the weird glasses sitting across from me was having. It looked like a curry. I love curry.

Trying to look like I was just making conversation and not fatally interested, I asked, “Is that from the menu? It looks good. Where’s the kitchen here?”

“Curried chicken and peanuts.” He didn’t sound friendly, but he didn’t sound unfriendly, either. I decided to take it as a good sign.

“Looks good.”

“Zap yourself up some.”

From a few tables away, in a sea of anonymous faces, someone yelled, “She can’t. She’s waiting for someone to cook it for her, like they do in the mortal realm.” I couldn’t see who’d said it, but the voice was familiar. Anonymous
Boy from remedial spells. Was this guy going to haunt me for the rest of my life? What a worm. Maybe I’d have to ask Dorklock how to get rid of a pest.

I did what any self-respecting girl does: I pretended he didn’t exist.

“You don’t know how to use magic?” Curry Boy suddenly looked interested. Figures.

“I’m just rusty—not exactly fair to use magic against mortals, is it?” I had a hunch fairness mattered to this guy. Happily, I was right—or I might just have been skipping lunch from now until the end of the school year. Which would mean figuring out how to get a bathroom pass in this place.

“So you had to do things the mortal way—like cook and stuff? In an oven? Or did you use a microwave?” I recognized the fatal signs of a mortal groupie. I had a few among my mom’s side of the family. Annoying souls who thought it was quaint the way mortals (and my family, up until now) did things. I hated being quaint.

“Never mind. I …” I wasn’t going to get into a session where I had to answer stupid questions like how many mortals does it take to screw in a lightbulb. My grandmother delights in such nonsense, but I
have
to put up with her.

“Let’s trade. I’ll pop you up some of my trademark curry if you share the secrets of the mortal world with us.” The boy stopped fiddling with his glasses. He waved his hand,
and another dish of curry appeared on the table, as well as a can of soda so cold that I could see the sweat running down the side.

Interesting. He could handle two acts of magic at one time with relative ease. I wondered if that was normal for kids our age, or if he was one of the advanced students. One of the advanced students who could be a shortcut to my learning everything I needed to know to take this school by storm.

Taking my hesitation for refusal, he added, “I’ll put a quietatus bubble around us, too. That way, they”—he glanced at the crowd at the table where Anonymous Guy was anonymously sitting—“can’t hear us.”

I sat. Maybe if we exchanged annoying questions, they wouldn’t be so annoying. And maybe I’d learn how to whip up some handy quietatus bubbles. Maybe.

The curry was delicious, and Curry Boy (real name Samuel), Maria, and Denise (Potato Sack Girl) made me feel welcome by adding a big brownie with nuts and whipped cream to my lunch.

First things first, I asked the most important question. I cringed a little inside before I dared to speak my questions out loud, thinking that even fringies could recognize a scud. But there really wasn’t any choice. I didn’t have time to wait to figure out which was the in group to join—or what I needed to do to join it.

“What’s with those guys?” I tried not to be too obvious, just cutting a quick glance to one corner. “They look like they were dressed by Mother Nature herself.”

Maria laughed. “You’re funny, Pru.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to learn about what makes a girl get ahead here at Agatha’s.”

They all three stared at me for a minute while they digested that I was serious.

And then Samuel said, “They’ve manifested their Talent, and it has to do with the earth.”

Oh. The Talent thing again. Great. “Does everybody know their Talent?”

“No. Not everyone.” They all looked to one small table, the witch equivalent of scuds. Five people. Even though I couldn’t see any difference betweem those five and the rest of the kids, I so did not want to be one of them.

“This whole Talent thing is so weird for me,” I said.

Maria nodded. “Yeah. When I found out I could summon fog, I wasn’t sure whether to be bummed or happy.”

“Why? Fog is handy sometimes, isn’t it?”

Maria shrugged. “The Water Talents are not the most respected. But I like that I’m a Water.”

“Me too,” Samuel said, smiling at her. “Earth and Water make a good team.”

“So you’re an Earth Talent? What’s that?” And why wasn’t he sitting over there with the other Earth witches?
Not that I would dare ask that one aloud. I guess it was the fringie thing, lucky for me.

He shrugged. “I’m just grounded.”

Denise clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Don’t be modest. You already have control over metals and glass.” She pointed to his glasses. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you one day learned to control magma.”

He blushed. Cute. Hard to believe he might one day be able to toss lava at an enemy. More likely that he wouldn’t, even if he could. “You’re not a slouch yourself. I’ve never seen anyone grow a black orchid overnight.”

It was Denise’s turn to blush. “That was just lucky timing. The ground was perfect chemically to support that orchid.”

That’s another thing about Fringies: They appreciate everyone’s unique qualities and say so, whether there’s anything to gain or not. I just ducked my head and ate my lunch. Wonderful. I’d picked a table with kids who had all manifested their Talents.

“Don’t feel bad. Now that you’re at Agatha’s, you’ll probably manifest any day now.” Denise said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

“Wow. It’s like you read my mind.” I said it partly as a joke, and partly to check if she really could read my mind.

“Reading minds is for Air Talents.” She laughed. “All that being an Earth Talent gives me is the ability to read emotions.”

Lovely. Apparently, my fear was seeping out. I glanced at Samuel. He smiled. “Don’t worry. You
will
manifest soon. Maybe you’ll even manifest a Magic Talent. That’s the best.”

“Why?”

“You can control other people’s magic in some way.”

“What other kinds of Talents are there?”

Samuel quickly cataloged them. “Magic, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.” He smiled. “Sometimes they run in families, but not always. My dad is an Air Talent, and my mother was a Magic Talent.” Definitely a geek.

“Cool.” I came back to earth real quick. “How many half mortals manifest a Magic Talent?” And then, a horrible thought occurred to me. “How many don’t manifest a Talent at all?”

They all looked embarrassed for a second, and then Maria shrugged. “Not many. Don’t worry about it.”

Of course I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d just obsess. What can I say? It was my nature.

Unfortunately, for every one question Samuel answered of mine, I had to answer two of his. While they weren’t completely lame questions, they were mostly classified as “silly myths.” Did mortals really have to drink milk or their bones would turn to mush? Did mortals have six toes? Did mortals sleep with their eyes open? Sigh. It was like looking at a fledgling version of my mother’s relatives—my grandparents and
my aunts and uncles all refused to believe my father wasn’t some bizarre creature who belonged in a zoo. Sometimes I felt that way, too, but not because he was mortal.

“Do mortals mind that they die so young?” Samuel asked.

My father’s mother was ninety and going strong, but I knew that was nothing compared with my own mother’s youthful witch age of 346. “They don’t think about it. It’s just the way it is.” Although, if I were to be honest, I’d have to admit that there was an awful lot of literature around death and dying. They even made impressionable ninth graders read
Romeo and Juliet
.

So I asked a question that my mother and her family avoided when my brother asked (after I put him up to it, of course—he’s an easy patsy). “Do witches ever die?” Maybe that would explain why my grandmama calls the bard’s teenage lovers “incomprehensible puppies.”

Samuel goggled at me. I’d never seen anything but a cartoon goggle before, but there’s no other word for the way his eyes popped out of his head.

“Of course we do. But what’s the point of talking about it when it won’t happen for forever?” Denise shook her head, and I felt like I’d stepped in some deep doggie doo somehow.

“Unless we’re killed—usually by mortals,” Samuel added darkly. For a minute I thought my curry and my chair were going to disappear.

“She’s new, she didn’t mean anything.” Maria put her hand on his arm.

“No offense.” I held up my hands in the universal gesture, wondering if it applied in witchworld. “I just had to test with Agatha herself to get into this school, and I was beginning to think my fate would be to look like her forever—unless she banished me back to the mortal realm for being hopelessly unmagical.”

Apparently Samuel recognized my truce-flag gesture. He relaxed and smiled. “You really are new at this, aren’t you?”

“I did magic at home, of course,” I exaggerated. “My mom homeschooled us in magic, you could say.” No way did I want him to know how unprepared I was.

A bell sounded faintly. All the tables and food vanished, and we were suddenly back in the hallway lined with lockers. I thought wistfully of the few bites of curry remaining on my plate.

“They really don’t give you much slack here, do they? At least at home they only ring the bell, not make the room disappear.”

Samuel, Maria, and Denise looked surprised at the thought of having to move through hallways on your own. “Wow. Don’t you get lost that way?”

“Umm, hello? It’s a school building. Even if you get lost, you just turn around and try again.”

They didn’t get it, but they just shrugged and the girls
peeled away to get stuff in their lockers. The clang of lockers opening and closing made for a familiar sound with a real twist. Just like my old school. If we popped from classroom to hallway to lunchroom without any choice, that is.

I took a chance, since Samuel and I had been engaged in mutually assured questioning. Every new kid has to face this moment, usually several times until they know the layout of the most important things—lockers, bathrooms, and classrooms.

“How do I find out which locker is mine?” No way would I ask a boy how to find the bathroom. That question I would save for a girl—and only in an emergency. I glanced around the hallway, wondering vaguely what the other kids were getting out of their lockers. They were witches, they could pop anything they wanted, couldn’t they? But I wasn’t going to ask. Not on my first day.

“Can’t you tell?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“I’m not psychic.”

He flipped his glasses at me for a moment, as if trying to decide if I was serious, or teasing him. I suppose he got a lot of that. But at last he realized I was not about to yell gotcha. “Well, neither am I, and I can home in on my locker.”

Great. Another thing I didn’t know how to do.

“Home in. Oh. Of course. I didn’t realize,” I lied. Well, not really lied, but the way I said it sounded like I knew how
to home in on something. And that was a pure, charcoal-colored lie.

Which he was very likely to find out, given that he didn’t seem to need anything from his locker, because he just stood there staring at me.

“Thanks,” I said, hoping he would walk away. No luck. I could see he wanted to say something. For a minute I hoped he wouldn’t, but then, when I realized he was going to get the courage up, I changed to wishing he wasn’t going to ask me for a date.

Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes what you get is worse. “I’d like to know more about mortals.”

Right. Mortal groupie. At least he wasn’t gross about it. He even looked like he was a little embarrassed to admit his addiction to knowing all about mortals. I shrugged to show him I didn’t hold it against him. “I’d like to know more about magic.” Which, I realized as I said it, was very true. I wanted to be able to do what these kids could do when they were in kindergarten.

“We could—” He couldn’t seem to get the words out. It was kind of cute, in a fringe geek crush kind of way. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of experience—guys aren’t always so smooth with a girl they like. As cute as it was, I didn’t want to encourage him. Really, I didn’t. I just wanted to pick his brain while he picked mine. Fair is fair. “Would you like to come to dinner at my house?”

He looked stunned.

Too late I realized my invitation sounded like encouragement, but really it wasn’t. Trust me. Dinner at my house would mean I could pick his brain to my heart’s content, and all he’d get was a close-up look at a mortal who changed from his three-piece suit to faded blue jeans when he came home for dinner.

“You could meet my father—a real, flesh-and-blood mortal who knows all about witches,” I explained, trying to derail any stray hope he might have of doing the boyfriend-girlfriend thing. I knew my mother would approve and my father would freak.