Spellbound

“Oh. My. God. Brendan. Is. Staring. At. You.” She tried her hardest not to move her lips, but failed miserably. Wow, this girl has absolutely no future as a ventriloquist.

“I know,” I replied, trying to look cool as I met his eyes. He continued to stare at me, his gaze unbroken, with those bright emerald eyes peering at me from his messy black hair, until his teammate tossed him the ball. For someone not paying attention, he caught it easily, turning away to make the next basket. Brendan caught the ball as it swooshed through the hoop, holding it under his arm and turning around. He gave me a sly smile, tilting his chin up in a small greeting. I smiled back, taking note of an unfamiliar feeling in my stomach. Holy crap, this must be what butterflies feel like.

I broke his gaze, pretending to root around in my backpack for something.

“Ashley, let’s go,” I whispered.

“No way! Seriously, you should stay and talk to him.” She grinned devilishly and wagged her eyebrows up and down.

I grabbed her arm. “No! Please!” I hissed, feeling panicky. “Let’s go.” Within seconds, we were out of the quad, walking home.

“Look, Emma…I don’t pretend to know what you’ve been though…” Ashley started on the walk home. Oh, no. Please. Don’t make me talk about this.

“Ashley, look,” I began, a little harsher than I intended, and I instantly felt terrible. The truth was, today would not have been as easy as it had been without her.

“What?” She looked at me with wounded eyes.

“I don’t…feel comfortable. At all. A lot of the time,” I mumbled, picking at my dark nail polish and peeling the paint off nervously. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to start crushing on some guy who I have zero chances with. I don’t even know how I’m going to do on the friend front. Kristin Thorn already hates me for some bananas reason. Don’t you understand? It hasn’t worked out all that well for me—being close to someone.”

Ashley looked at me with more wisdom than I’d ever given her credit for. Suddenly, I felt stupid for denying her the knowledge of her fourteen years.

“Emma,” she said, softly. “I get it. And it’s okay if you want to feel a mess. But if you start to feel normal again, and if something makes you happy, it doesn’t mean that you don’t miss your mom or Ethan. It doesn’t mean the last few years didn’t suck. But remember, this is your chance to just be Emma. Not Emma with the wicked stepfather, Emma with the terrible home life, Emma the whole school is talking about. You’re just Emma. Your mom would want you to be happy. So would your brother.”

“I know, Ashley.” I sighed, wincing as I always did anytime I thought of my mom and brother, Ethan, lost within a year of each other.

“Why on earth my mom decided to marry Henry when she knew she was sick, I’ll never know.” Henry had been asking my mom to marry her forever, and I never understood why a cancer diagnosis made her finally say yes.

“She wanted to make sure someone was around to take care of you,” Ashley said quietly. “I get it. She didn’t want you to be alone.”

I am anyway. I pursed my lips, willing myself to keep a strong front as I shuffled along the concrete sidewalk.

“Emma, I’m serious,” Ashley said, coming to a full stop. “Give yourself a break. If not for you, then for them.”

I sighed. “I know, Ash, in my head. I’ll work on convincing myself, you know, here.” I pointed at my chest.

“In your boobs?” She hooted, giving me a devilish look, and I laughed, relishing the break in the somber mood. “Hey, you never showed me your ID. Lemme see,” she said, pulling at my backpack. Glad for the change of subject, I reached in my backpack and pulled out the small white card.

“Jeez, Emma.” Ashley let out a low whistle. “Seriously, this sucks.”

“That bad?” I grabbed it back. “Let me see.”

Oh, great.

I looked like the “before” picture on one of those makeover shows. I hadn’t been paying attention to the gray lady, so she caught me looking up, startled, my mouth kind of open and slack-jawed. The too-bright flash had given my skin a tone that could only be described as yellow-gray. Zombie girl, at your service. Still, it was a nice picture of my necklace. It caught the light nicely—you could really see the crest on it.

“Sorry about the bad ID, Emma,” Ashley said.

“You’re a bad ID!” I said, laughing.

“Oh, you’re still doing that?” she asked, rolling her eyes at my stupid little joke. Anytime I couldn’t think of something clever to say, I just told the person they were whatever we were talking about. Ethan and I used to spend hours annoying our mom with it.

“It’s dinnertime, kids,” she would call from the kitchen. “Turn off the TV.”

“You’re a TV!” we’d call back in unison. Mom would just chuckle and shake her head, chalking it up to one of our random twin idiosyncrasies.

“Eh, it still makes me laugh.” I shrugged, smiling at the memory.

“Yeah, you’ll be fine,” Ashley said dryly as we reached the front door of my aunt’s building. “See you tomorrow!”

One day down. 168 to go.

Chapter 3

The next two and a half weeks kind of plodded on—although crossing them off in the back of my notebook as if I were serving a prison sentence sure didn’t help the time fly. Jenn, I assumed, was afraid of losing favor with Kristin, since some days she was warm and friendly—and others, she just kept her head down and ignored me. Cisco and I were becoming fast friends, and at least, I always had someone who talked to me at lunch. (Well, Austin did, but he was just trying to get me on the winter dance committee.) Angelique, my chemistry partner, refused to eat in the cafeteria, so on sunny days we’d just grab something to go and walk around the neighborhood.

I could tell that my friendship with her was not going over well with some of my classmates, who were put off by her quirky ways. (Once, she blamed her missing homework on the moon.) Angelique was also on scholarship, so of course the snobs at the school treated her like she lived in a mental hospital, not in an apartment building on Tenth Avenue. I, personally, thought she was a trip. Besides, these were people who had yet to even say three words to me, and Angelique—one of the best students in the class—had generously offered me all her notes to copy. Finally, Angelique admitted to me one day that she did play up her beliefs to get a rise out of everyone.

“They don’t understand anything that doesn’t conform to what they believe, or what they think, so of course I do whatever I can to make them uncomfortable,” she confessed to me over knishes on a bench in Central Park. “I, truly, am a witch. My mom’s a witch, too.

“It’s not like you see in the movies. Sure, there are some bad witches, those with evil intentions—my mom’s met a few,” Angelique whispered conspiratorially, flipping her jet-black hair back. “But not all are bad. And truly, I do see auras, and I really can see and sense people’s energy. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the best feeling to make these look-alike sheep so uncomfortable. I make stuff up sometimes just to annoy them.”

That afternoon, she expertly completed an experiment in acid/base properties, and loudly announced that the chemicals spoke to her, winking at me out of the corner of her eye.

Thanks to Angelique, I caught up on schoolwork pretty quickly. But things weren’t necessarily hard at this new school…just competitive. Still, I threw myself into my studies, telling myself that I was trying to get on the Principal’s List, to make my aunt happy. I hated to admit the truth: I was trying to distract myself from a growing, nagging interest in Brendan. (A regular name on the honor roll? Brendan Alexander Salinger. So much for being a dumb jock.)

He strode into English class on my second day, and all I could think was, “Damn.” He put the hot in “hot mess.” And the mess. His black hair was sticking out like it had exploded, his shirt was untucked and his tie barely knotted. But the disheveled look worked on him, like he had just rolled out of bed and onto the set of a jeans commercial.

Brendan turned his vibrant green eyes on my light brown ones, and I took that as my cue to say, “Hi.” He gave me a curt nod, then flopped down in his desk without so much as a polite “Hey” in response. I felt like I had been slapped. After that, when he came into class (always late, and always going un-scolded by the teacher), I would, invariably, look up at the wrong moment and catch his eye briefly. My eyes would dart back down to my Shakespeare text, reading the same line over and over again, toying with my necklace—a nervous habit that had gotten a lot worse. It was like a whole new level of Hell, one that Dante had forgotten about.

I didn’t know why I was so drawn to him. But fortunately, apart from English class, it was easy to avoid Brendan. I begged off watching the pickup games in the quad after school, telling Ashley that I was thinking about joining the track team after all and needed to get my stamina up by jogging in the park.

“It’s not a team. They don’t compete,” she drawled. “It’s a club. The Running Club. Seriously. They just go to the park and, like, run around.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, incredulous. I pictured the glossy girls at the school, teetering about the park in heels. Okay girls, there’s a Louis Vuitton bag in here somewhere. Go find it! And they’d scatter, fluffy Pomeranians clutched in their arms, as their little club scurried around.

So I was a running club of one, leaving the school through the gym exit so I could avoid Brendan and his friends in the quad. Well, I was avoiding Brendan and Anthony, for different reasons. I was afraid I’d lose control: I’d throw myself on Brendan—or throw up on Anthony.

After two and a half weeks of “Lookin’ good, newbie,” and “When are you gonna give me your number?” Anthony finally cornered me in the doorway of English class.

“What’s a hot piece like you doing hanging out with a freak like Angela?” Anthony’s frosty blue eyes looked me up and down, and he rested his hand on the polished wooden frame of the doorway, blocking me in the hallway.

“Angelique,” I corrected, recoiling at being called a “piece.” “And she’s not a freak.”

“I know who your aunt is, Emily. You need to associate with people on your level,” he purred. “She is on my level,” I snapped. “At least she knows my name.”

“Come on, you’re really not going to pass up a chance at all this, are you?” he asked, running his hand down his muscular chest before brushing my bangs out of my face. I smacked his meaty hand away.

Anthony’s smile quickly turned into a sneer. “You better keep your hands to yourself if you know what’s good for you. Just remember—I’m not the one whose parents dumped me at my aunt’s house so they could go out of town. You should consider yourself lucky that I’m even talking to you.”