Still holding hands, Mo and Larry stooped down a little too. “I’m Larry and this is Mo,” said Larry.
“Maureen,” said Mo.
“We made him pour lemonade on his head,” said Larry, trying to get on her good side.
David thought he saw Mrs. Bayfield start to smile, but her face quickly returned to its stern expression as she focused on Ricky. “Is that your dog?” she asked.
Ricky shook his head. “It’s hers.” He pointed at Mo. “I’m his brother.” He pointed at David.
“I see,” said Mrs. Bayfield. “Well, come inside. All of you. Bring the dog, too.”
“His name’s Killer,” said Mo, by way of a warning.
33
IT SEEMED to David that all the faces on the wall were staring at him; the man with the scar, the woman with the double chin, the half-man, half-lion. He tried not to look at the face of the ordinary man with the wire-rimmed glasses, but his eyes kept being drawn to it. The man’s face had a very slight smile. David didn’t remember seeing that smile the last time.
Felicia Bayfield rubbed her long, skinny hands together. “So, Mr. Ballinger,” she said. “You want me to remove the curse, do you?”
He anxiously waited. He felt Tori squeeze his hand, and he squeezed back.
There was a couch, a love seat, and two large chairs in the living room, but he and his friends were all bunched together on the couch. Killer lay in Mo’s lap.
Mrs. Bayfield sat in the chair across from them. “Well?” she demanded.
“Oh,” said David. “I didn’t know you wanted me to answer. I thought it was one of those questions, you know, that you’re not supposed to answer.”
“Rhetorical,” whispered Tori.
“Rhetorical,” said David.
“Hrrmph,” muttered Mrs. Bayfield.
“He brought back the cane,” said Tori. “You said you’d remove the curse if he brought back the cane.”
“Silence!” ordered Mrs. Bayfield. “I don’t like children trying to tell me what to do. In my day children were taught to respect their elders.” She rose from her chair. “Stand up, Tori!” she commanded.
Tori let go of David’s hand and stood up.
Mrs. Bayfield grabbed her elbow and said, “Come with me into the kitchen.”
David leaped to his feet. “She didn’t do anything,” he said, taking hold of Tori’s other arm. “She was just—”
Felicia Bayfield’s cold stare silenced him. He sat back down on the couch and watched Mrs. Bayfield lead Tori through a door at the end of the room.
“What do you think she’s going to do to her?” whispered Ricky.
“I wonder how she knew her name was Tori,” asked Mo.
“I hope she doesn’t steal her face,” said Larry.
“What?” asked David.
“I hope she doesn’t steal her face,” Larry repeated.
“No, what were you saying, Mo?” David asked.
“Tori never said her name,” said Mo. “I wonder how she knew it.”
“That’s just part of her powers,” David explained. “She’s been watching me for the last few weeks. She knows everything I do. She’s seen me with Tori. Still—”
“What?” asked Mo.
“She called her Tori, but she called me Mr. Ballinger.”
“So?”
“I don’t know,” said David. He looked at the faces on the wall. The ordinary man was no longer smiling. The face hadn’t really changed, but it just didn’t seem to be smiling anymore. Maybe it never was.
Larry gasped.
David turned around to see Tori step back into the living room holding a mask over her face. She was followed by Mrs. Bayfield. Each step Tori took was very slow and deliberate. Her hands rigidly held the mask in front of her.
It was a mask of her own face.
The shape of the nose, the mouth, everything was the same. Every freckle.
Mrs. Bayfield was holding a glass filled with a cloudy yellow liquid. “Stop!” she commanded.
Tori stopped and stood perfectly still, like a statue.
Mrs. Bayfield stepped past her and held out the glass to David. “Here.”
He hesitated a moment, then took the glass.
“Drink it,” she said.
For just a second he considered throwing it in her face, but that was how he got into this mess in the first place.
“If you want the curse to be removed,” she said, “you better drink.”
“What about her?” he asked.
“Only one thing can save her now,” said Mrs. Bayfield.
“What?”
“First you have to drink.”
He drank the liquid. It was sweet, but at the same time very sour.
“Ahhhhhh …” said Mrs. Bayfield as if she had been the one who drank it. “I feel a lot better. We are both now rid of the horrible curse.”
“You?” asked Mo.
“The curse was just as painful for me as it was for Mr. Ballinger,” she said. “Maybe even worse for me.”
“What about Tori?” asked David. He looked at her, rigid like a statue, her face in front of her face.
“Kiss her,” said Mrs. Bayfield.
Tori seemed to move just a little bit, then became perfectly still again.
David got up from the couch and stood directly in front of her. He could feel his own heartbeat and he could see Tori’s body tremble just a little bit. She had a beautiful face, even if it wasn’t attached to her head.
He no longer believed any of this. Besides, he never believed in curses in the first place.
He kissed the mask gently on the lips. He was surprised by how hard and stiff it felt.
“Oooh.” Tori swooned behind the mask. She dropped to the floor in a faint. Her mask still covered her.
“Okay,” said David. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
Tori removed the mask. She still had her face behind it. She blinked her eyes. “Where am I?” she asked.
“You can stop pretending,” said David.
“I assure you, Mr. Ballinger,” said Mrs. Bayfield, “no one—”
“Why do you keep calling me Mr. Ballinger?” he asked.
“That’s your name.”
“Except you call her Tori,” he pointed out. “You two know each other. You call me Mr. Ballinger because that’s what she always used to call me!”
Mrs. Bayfield and Tori looked at each other. Then they both laughed.
“What? You mean she’s not a witch?” asked Larry.
“She’s my aunt,” said Tori, getting up. She hugged Felicia Bayfield and they both laughed again. “My great-aunt.”
David looked at the two of them together and wondered why he hadn’t noticed it sooner. They looked very much alike. If nothing else, their green eyes should have given it away. He wondered if Mrs. Bayfield used to have red hair, too.
He glanced at Ricky, who was still sitting petrified on the corner of the couch.
“We had you going,” said Tori. “You thought that drink was my face juice, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I knew it was lemonade all along,” said David.
“Then why’d you kiss her?” asked Ricky.
He felt himself blush as he shrugged his shoulders.
Tori also blushed. “That caught me by surprise too,” she said. “I didn’t know she was going to tell you to do that.”
“Wait,” said Mo. “I don’t get it. If you’re just a normal person, how’d you put a curse on David?”
“I never said I was a normal person,” said Mrs. Bayfield.
Tori laughed.
“But no, I did not put a curse on him,” she continued. She turned to David. “When you and your compatriots attacked me, one of them said something like, ‘Watch out, the witch might put a curse on you.’ So I made up a curse. I don’t even remember what I said.”
“ ‘Your Doppelgänger will regurgitate on your soul,’ ” said David.
Mrs. Bayfield laughed. “It’s not very
good, but I didn’t have a lot of time to think of something better.” She waved it off. “I had completely forgotten about it until you suddenly appeared at my door ranting and raving about curses and lemonade and your pants falling down. I had absolutely no idea who you were or what you were talking about. And then, to my utter astonishment, I realized you were one of the boys who had attacked me, and that you really believed I had put a curse on you.” She held out her hands and smiled. “But I certainly didn’t know you were the famous Mr. Battinger.” She looked at Tori.
Tori blushed again.
“But you did know my name,” said David. “And my phone number. I saw it written on a pad of paper.”
“I wrote that,” said Tori. “I called you from here. You probably don’t remember. I heard you answer the phone and then I got scared and hung up. I just wanted to find out … I mean, you had been so nice to me and then you suddenly just started ignoring me. I just wanted to find out why. I thought maybe it was something I said, or maybe Maureen was your girlfriend and she didn’t want you talking to me.”
“Me?” exclaimed Mo.
“Yeah, well, what about you and Randy?” asked David.
“That was … Okay, I sat next to him at the movies, but I didn’t go there with him. It was just a coincidence. We shared a box of Milk Duds.” She shrugged. “Is that why you stopped talking to me?”
“No. I was afraid of the curse,” explained David. “Larry had a plan to remove the curse.” He glanced at Larry. “We tried it, and then we had to wait three days to see if it worked. I was afraid to talk to you during those three days. I guess I acted kind of weird. But that night you called me, I was going to call you, except I didn’t know your phone number.”
“Oh,” said Tori, disappointed he hadn’t called. “I wasn’t home anyway. I was here.”
“So that’s why you poured lemonade on your head!” exclaimed Ricky. “That was Larry’s plan.”
“You got a better one?” asked Larry.
“Did you say David’s pants fell down?” Mo asked Mrs. Bayfield.
“He has the cutest purple shorts!” exclaimed Tori. She and Mo laughed.
“You said you closed your eyes!” said David.
“I lied.”
“I assure you, David,” said Mrs. Bayfield. “If I’d known you’d come back with your face so badly bruised, I would never have asked you to bring me my cane. I’m very sorry about that.”
“Me too,” said Tori. “I didn’t know what to do when you said you had to fight Roger. I didn’t know how to stop you. And then he just kept hitting you over and over.” She shivered.
David shrugged. He was glad he’d brought back the cane, even if there was no curse. He was glad he stood up to Roger, too.
He had gotten his face back. So what if it was a little bruised? At least he could feel it was there.
34
“YOU SEE that mask there,” said Tori, pointing at the face of the ordinary man with the wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s Herbert Bayfield. She made that for him on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”
“Wow,” said Mo. “He looks so real.”
“She’s actually a very famous artist,” Tori bragged. “She’s got masks hanging in museums all over the world. One museum offered her a lot of money for Uncle Herbert’s mask, but she won’t part with it. It’s famous for its smile that seems to appear and disappear depending on how you look at it. It’s been compared to the smile on the Mona Lisa.”
“Do you think she’ll make a mask of me?” asked Mo.
Tori shrugged. “She looks for interesting faces. But I never know what makes a face interesting to her. Course, she also makes masks of everyone in our family.” She looked at her own mask, still on the floor. “It’s actually not finished yet,” she said. “That’s why it was still in her studio.” She picked it up and held it next to her own face. “See, it doesn’t have all the freckles.”
“Did she count your freckles first?” asked David.
“Huh?” Tori smiled. “No. You can’t count them because some are so light it’s hard to tell if they’re really even freckles. That’s why she’s such a good artist. She can do all that.”
Mrs. Bayfield returned from the kitchen with cookies, a pitcher of lemonade, and some glasses. “Would anyone like some face juice?” she asked.
She poured everyone a glass.
“What about you both saying I looked like a Greek poet?” asked David.
“What?” asked Felicia Bayfield.
“We went to the foreign film festival last weekend,” Tori explained. “There was a movie about a Greek poet. You were dressed just like him.”
“Was it a Greek movie?” asked Mo.
“No, it was French,” said Tori. “But it was about a Greek poet.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I saw it when I lived in France,” said Larry.
“Is that somewhere near Indianapolis?” asked David.
Larry ignored him.
“Okay,” said Mo. “How about this? Maybe you thought you were just making up some words, but maybe you happened to say the words just right and really did put a curse on David without even knowing it.”
“That means he’s still cursed,” said Larry. “And you don’t know how to remove it.”
“How else do you explain all the things that happened to him?” asked Mo.
“Tell me more about this curse,” said Tori’s famous aunt.
“I don’t know,” said David. “I’ve never believed in anything like that, but it was just so weird. Everything that those guys did to you happened to me. There were too many coincidences.”
He told her everything that happened, from breaking his parents’ bedroom window to his pants falling down. He even told her about the flour falling on his head.
“Well,” said Mrs. Bayfield, “I have an idea. But I don’t know if it’s right.”
“What?” asked Tori.
“If you are cursed, Mr. Ballinger—David,” said Mrs. Bayfield, “it is only because you are a sensitive, caring human being.”
“Him?” asked Larry with a laugh.
“I imagine David felt very guilty about what he and the other boys did to me. Didn’t you, David?”
“I thought you were just a lonely old lady,” said David. “I didn’t know you were famous.”
Mrs. Bayfield smiled. “You probably felt you should have been punished for what you did,” she said. “And when nobody punished you, you punished yourself.”
“You mean I broke our window on purpose?”
“You or your subconscious.”
“And I purposely didn’t tie my pants tight enough because I wanted them to fall down?”
“ ‘Fraid so.”
David shook his head. “I’m really weird, aren’t I? I mean Roger and Randy and Scott didn’t punish themselves.”
“They obviously are not as sensitive as you are.” Mrs. Bayfield smiled warmly at David. “You’re a caring, thoughtful, considerate human being. Maybe that is a curse in this cold world we live in. You have the soul of a poet.”
Tori beamed at him.
David looked at all the faces on the wall. Little did he know that someday his face would be up there with them.
35
DAVID THOUGHT a lot about what Tori’s aunt had said. He really never did believe one hundred percent that he was cursed. But on the other hand he also found it hard to believe that he did all that stuff to himself on purpose.
Or maybe his subconscious did it to him.
Or his Doppelgänger.
But why else would he flip off his mother if he didn’t want to get punished? Then his mother didn’t even punish him for that, he remembered, so he had to keep punishing himself.
In the end, he realized, all he had to do was tell Felicia Bayfield he was sorry. The whole time his subconscious, or Doppelgänger, kept doing stuff to him, trying to make him do that. At last he didn’t tie his pants tight enough and that finally did it. He ran to tell her he was sorry
and the curse never struck again.
Or, on the other hand, Mrs. Bayfield could be wrong and he still might be cursed. Or maybe that was just what life was all about. Maybe everyone is cursed, one way or another. He remembered Larry and Mo saying that they sometimes felt like there was a curse on them too. Everyone steps in dogshit once in a while.
It was like Mrs. Bayfield said: We all try to act like we’re so important—doctors, lawyers, artists—but really we know that at any moment our pants might fall down.
The bell rang. David walked out of math, put his books away in his locker, and headed out for recess.
He felt himself tense up when he saw Roger and Scott heading toward him even though they had pretty much stopped bothering him. Scott had his arm around Ginger.
I guess not everyone’s cursed, David realized. Scott Simpson didn’t seem like he was cursed at all. He always got everything he wanted. He was popular. He got all A’s. He was a good athlete. He was handsome. It hardly seemed fair.
Scott walked by without even glancing at his former best friend.
But then again, thought David, Scott Simpson didn’t have the soul of a poet.
He checked to make sure his fly was zipped, then headed out to join his friends.
“DID YOU see what David gave me?” asked Tori. “He made it in shop class.”
“His apple-cheese board!” exclaimed Mo.
“It’s not an apple-cheese board,” said Tori, somewhat offended. “It’s a heart.”
“Oh, uh, that’s right,” Mo said very quickly. “It’s a heart. I don’t know why I said it was an apple.”
“I think it looks more like an apple,” said Larry. “Not the kind of apples you get in here in America, but the kind of apples I ate when I lived in Zambia.”
150 years later …
36
“HERE COMES the drooble!” said Harley.
His buddies laughed.
Willy tried to ignore them.
“What’s the matter, drooble?” asked Harley. “Your underwear too tight?”
Harley’s friends laughed again, and so did a couple of girls.
Willy reddened. At least he didn’t hear Maria laugh. He would have recognized her laugh. It was almost musical.