Rhymes With Witches

  plainjain: no shit

  bayBdoll: hey, i gtg. i’ve got a freakin huge english assignment.

  plainjain: yeah, ok. only can i ask one more thing?

  bayBdoll: what?

  plainjain: that other stuff. the bitch stuff. god, i feel retarded even saying it. but blah, blah, blah, the little stealing ritual and all …

  bayBdoll: oh god. we’re going there again?

  plainjain: no. no, never mind.

  bayBdoll: jane. r u happy being a bitch?

  plainjain: mary bryan! u KNOW i am.

  bayBdoll: then don’t worry about it. just enjoy the fact that life is good.

  plainjain: ur totally right

  bayBdoll: of course i am. and now, gbye!!!

  One of the feral cats sprayed Alicia’s locker. It stank to high heaven, and on Monday morning everyone made “pee-ew” sounds and waved their hands in front of their noses. “Piss Girl,” they called Alicia, and it didn’t matter that it made no sense.

  “What’d you do, Piss Girl?” Stuart Hill taunted. “Leave some chicken guts in there?”

  “Shut up,” Alicia said. “I didn’t leave anything, you asshole.”

  “Not even your books?” Stuart said. He guffawed as if he were actually being funny. “Not even a chewed up pencil for your nasty old tomcat?”

  The janitor shooed them away. He doused Alicia’s locker with Odor-Out, aiming his spray nozzle at the slats and seams as well as the smooth gray exterior.

  “Wait!” Alicia cried, but the janitor took no notice. When she opened her locker, a sodden spiral slipped to the floor along with her cheerleading Pep Manual. The stench of cat pee wafted into the air.

  I strode toward the other end of the hall. I hoped Alicia hadn’t seen me, but two yards from the stairwell, I heard her call, “Jane, where are you going? Jane!”

  My heart felt sick. I let the flow of students carry me forward.

  During Algebra I thought of one of my Ramona books, of a scene in which Ramona was doing a kindergarten worksheet. Only instead of “circle cat, cross out bird,” Ramona substituted the name of a despised fellow kindergartner, Susan of the boing-y curls. As in, “circle Ramona, cross out Susan.”

  It wasn’t that I despised Alicia—god, no. It wasn’t even on purpose, despite the guilt that was making me feel swampy and wrong.

  Still, there it was, crazy or not: circle Jane, cross out Alicia.

  Six, sin, and sorcery,” intoned Lurl the Pearl. “All three words come from the same root, which, once celebrated, has now become vilified.”

  I copied the words into my notebook and tried to convince myself that it was purely academic, her use of the word “sorcery.” That she was just going off on her favorite tangent about how female folk healers, drawing on the life force of the goddess, were later denounced as witches. Blah, blah, blah. She’d shown the film The Burning Times twice already. She’d quizzed us on the real meaning of the word “wicca,” and she’d told us that many women today have formed their own worship circles as a way to create a sacred space. More interesting than Ms. Bainbright’s English class, but hardly the stuff of midnight terrors. At least, as long as I didn’t connect it with anything else.

  Still, when I’d first taken my seat—after dislodging a gray cat with a torn ear—I could have sworn Lurl looked at me funny through her rose-tinted glasses. Then again, she looked at everyone funny through her rose-tinted glasses. The T strap on her forehead didn’t help.

  What had she done with Alicia’s lip balm?

  A flutter kicked up in my stomach. Don’t, I told myself. What’s done is done.

  “Yes, Miss Goodwin?” Lurl the Pearl asked, interrupting her explanation of “six” as the number of the creatrix.

  I jumped. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You have a concern?”

  The rest of the class turned to stare. Friendly stares, Hi, do you like me? stares, but stares all the same.

  “Um, I don’t.” I tried to smile. “Doing fine, thanks.”

  Lurl smiled back. It was a loose, smeary smile that made her face look as if it were coming unhinged. “Then let’s pay attention, shall we?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Hey,” Bob Foskin whispered. He’d gotten up from his seat at the front of the room and was now crouching by my desk. “Hey.”

  “What?” I said. “I’ve got to pay attention.”

  He leaned closer. “Want me to knock her around for you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wait for her after school. Give her a scare.”

  My eyes flew to Lurl, then back to Bob. “You’re not serious.”

  “As a heart attack,” he said, crossing himself. “Ganging up on you for no reason. No respect, that’s what.”

  “Oh god,” I muttered. Lurl the Pearl was now roaming the room, and I did not want her coming over here. I straightened my posture and scribbled the number 666, along with Lurl’s labored analysis that just as six stood for the creatrix, 666 stood for the holy trinity of maid, matron, and crone. That it was only as people grew threatened by female power that the number took on more sinister meanings.

  “No thanks,” I told Bob. “You better get back to your seat.”

  “You sure?”

  Lurl was two aisles away. One. She paused at my aisle, and my body went stiff. Bob stood up, but he didn’t return to his desk. Lurl didn’t even look at him.

  “Very nice,” she said to me in her gravelly voice. “Very nice. But we can never ease up, can we? Not when the stakes are so high.”

  My scalp prickled. A force radiated from her, something I couldn’t describe, and I got the uncanny sense that she wanted to eat me. To gobble me right up.

  “So we’ll have your assignment by the end of the week?” she asked.

  My assignment. As in another stolen item—was that what she was talking about? But I was in a classroom with twenty-three other students. She couldn’t be.

  “What assignment?” Bob butted in. “We ain’t got no assignment.”

  Lurl came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. I wanted to jump out of my skin.

  “Miss Goodwin is a good little pet,” she purred. “Miss Goodwin is earning extra credit.”

  “Aw, man,” Bob complained. “Why don’t I know about no extra credit?”

  Lurl bent over so that her lips were at my ear. She smelled like tuna. “By the end of the week for best results.”

  She tightened her hold on my shoulders, then let go.

  During LIFE, my entire class surprised me by singing “Happy Birthday” at the beginning of the period. Roly-poly Mrs. Parmigian sang loudest of all, clapping her hands and swaying at the front of the room. When they were done, Tina Knowles walked to my desk with a yellow-and-white sheet cake, one of those fancy ones with edible flowers and candied ribbons. In the center was an airbrushed picture of me. I looked really young.

  “Wow,” I said. “I mean, wow.”

  Fifteen faces beamed. Tina nudged Hannah Henderson, who nudged her back. They both looked tickled pink.

  “Only, it’s not my birthday,” I said.

  Tina waved her hand. “That’s okay. We figured, you know, what were the odds?”

  “We just wanted to celebrate anyway,” Hannah said. “Who cares when the actual date was?”

  “Happy birthday!” cried Arnie Aughenbach.

  “Happy birthday!” echoed fourteen others. Hands patted my back and ruffled my hair.

  I grinned. “You guys are crazy.”

  “Heck, it’s better than following the lesson plan any day,” said Mrs. Parmigian. She waddled across the room to give me a hug. “In LIFE, there’s always cause for celebration.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “So … do I get presents?”

  “Presents!” Tina exclaimed. “Of course!” She ran to her backpack and pulled out a brightly wrapped box. Other kids dug into their packs and reached under their desks.

  “Mine first,” Arnie said, plunking down a
lumpy package tied with yarn.

  “I don’t think so,” Tina said. She bumped him out of the way. “Jane asked me, remember?”

  “Wait,” I protested. “I was kidding. I was completely kidding!”

  The stack of presents grew on my desk. I tried pushing them back into their owners’ hands, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

  “Open them,” Tina insisted.

  So I did. I got the new Spayed CD, a pocketknife engraved with my name, a framed picture of Arnie. Four pairs of earrings. From Tina, a sky blue container of stress therapy bath beads (“Not that you need them. What do you have to be stressed about? But they’re so cool, because the water gets all fizzy when you put them in!”). A leather bookmark, a mauve feather boa. A tiny tub of lip balm.

  “Thanks, you guys,” I said. I fingered the lip balm, then pushed it behind the boa. “I mean it. I was having a really crappy day—”

  “You were?” Hannah said. “Poor Jane!”

  “—but you guys totally made it better.” I smiled at them, so easy to do because they all smiled back. “And I love my presents. Thank you so much.”

  A chorus of “aww”s filled the air. Arnie gave me a hug, then Hannah did, too. Melina, who was shy, just touched my hair.

  “Now cake,” Tina announced. “Oh! Shit! And I completely spaced the band! Arnie, run to the hall and see if they’re there!”

  The cake was delicious. The band, decked out in full red-and-black Crestview regalia, was awesome. In addition to the school’s alma mater, they played a fabulous jazz piece composed in my honor, with an amazing solo on the flageolet.

  “Have you gotten it yet?” Mary Bryan asked the next morning.

  “Gotten what?” I asked.

  She looked at me in a not-fun-and-games kind of way. “You know. To give to Lurl.”

  A sick feeling clutched my stomach. I fiddled with one of my new earrings, which were shaped like tiny doves.

  “Do you like my earrings?” I asked. “Hannah Henderson gave them to me.”

  “Yeah, they’re great,” Mary Bryan said impatiently.

  “My whole class threw me a party. It was so sweet.”

  “Terrific. And if you want them to keep doing stuff like that—”

  I cut her off. “I know, I know.”

  “Then just do it.”

  “Fine,” I said. I sighed and leaned against the row of lockers. I gazed down the hall. “Will this be the last time?”

  Mary Bryan snorted, for a second sounding almost like Bitsy. “Hmm, let me think. This’ll be the last time until next week. And then that’ll be the last time until, let’s see, the next week.”

  “What?!” I said. I vaguely remembered an “every week” clause from the day of my induction, but it was all so blurry.

  “Jane. Keisha told you all of this already.” She raised her eyebrows. “And it’s not just you, you know. We all have to do it, so you can quit acting like such a martyr.”

  I went back to staring down the hall. I watched a girl try to shoo a feral cat from her locker, where it perched placidly on a thick blue notebook. The cats were everywhere these days. During homeroom, one had coughed up a hairball on Trish Newman’s backpack, and rumor had it that a pack of three had killed a swan and deposited the carcass on Mr. Van Housen’s desk. Of course, nobody had been there to verify it, and some claimed that Mr. Van Housen had made it up. Still, the fact remained. The cats were getting more brazen.

  “Hey,” I said. “Once I … you know. Will that mean Alicia’s off the hook? She’ll go back to the way she was?”

  “Back to her usual charming self, you mean?” Mary Bryan said.

  I faltered. I got the sense that maybe she was being sarcastic, only I wasn’t sure. “Well … yeah. She’s really not that bad when you get to know her.”

  “Which is why I was the only one who was nice to her, that day at lunch. Which is why you’ve basically treated her like a leper since the moment you hooked up with us.”

  The surprise of it tightened my lungs. “But that’s because … I mean, come on. That’s because—”

  “Because we’re all just walking bags of shit, waiting to unload?”

  I drew back. Mary Bryan, I was finding, was not all sweetness and light.

  Down the hall, the cat leaped nimbly from the locker onto the girl’s shoulders. The girl crouched and cried out.

  Mary Bryan watched, then pushed her fingers against her forehead. After a moment, she dropped her hands. “But yeah, Alicia will go back to the way she was.” She half laughed. “Cats will stop pissing on her stuff. The world will adore her.”

  Our eyes locked. Her expression was weary, despite her glittery eyeshadow and rosy cheeks.

  The girl stumbled our way, the cat still lodged on her shoulders, and I had to step to the side to avoid being bumped. Before I could stop myself, I snapped at her to watch where she was going.

  She halted and turned around. “Oh god, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “You about made me trip,” I said.

  The cat meowed, digging its claws into the girl’s shirt. The blood drained from her face. She gestured at her back and said, “Do you … do you think you could … ?”

  Irritation mounted inside me. I yanked the cat off her shoulders, using my hand to free its claws.

  “Thank you,” the girl babbled. “Thank you so much.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. The cat squirmed to the floor with a thump.

  I turned to Mary Bryan, but she was gone.

  Lunch with the drama kids—no Alicia, where was Alicia?—and then PE. Not my favorite class on the best of days, but today it was horrible. Sure, Coach Shaw exempted me from doing the rope climb, and sure, Anna Maria and Debbie, who were total soccer studs, told me I should try out for the team. Never mind the fact that I sucked at soccer, and that just two weeks ago Anna Maria had shoved me accidentally on purpose with her shoulder during a game of battle ball. I’d gone sprawling, and Anna Maria had hissed, “Stay down, you idiot. Tell the coach you sprained your ankle.”

  But today they’d loved me. Great. So really, class itself was fine. It was what happened afterward that screwed with my mind.

  Everyone except me was changing out of her gym shirt and shorts. I was still in my normal clothes, since Coach Shaw hadn’t made me dress out. But I’d filed into the locker room with the others so they wouldn’t think I was a snob.

  “Hey, Jane,” Anna Maria said, pulling a blue-and-white rugby down over her head. “You going to the Fall Fling?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I lounged against a wooden bench. “You?”

  She stepped into her jeans. “Hell, yeah. Jodi’s mom is on the planning committee, and she says there’s going to be all kinds of cool shit like bungee cords and climbing walls. You know I’m going to be there.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Some of the girls will be, ‘Ooo, it’s too scary,’ ‘Ooo, I’ll break a nail,’ right? It’ll be hilarious. But the people who matter will be, like—” She broke off and turned to Debbie, who’d come up behind her. “What?!”

  Debbie jerked her chin toward the end of the locker room. Camilla, a towel wrapped around her waist, was heading from the showers to the nearest row of lockers. Water dripped from her hair onto the back of her T-shirt.

  Anna Maria’s face hardened. “Whore.”

  “Why is she even here?” Debbie said. “She’s not in our PE class.”

  “Bet she’s been using the weight room again, fucking ballerina princess,” Anna Maria said. “Stuart Hill can’t use it, noooo. But our fucking little Camilla can.”

  I frowned. The girls’ weight room was separate from the boys’, which meant that Camilla doing her weight training wouldn’t take anything away from Stuart. But I, too, felt a surge of repugnance at the sight of Camilla, and it scared me.

  Anna Maria caught my expression. “She’s the one responsible for getting Stuart kicked off the team, you know. Lying whore.”
br />   I tried to cleanse my impure emotions. “I thought he was just on probation.”

  “And the crap she told Mr. Van Housen? Lies. Every single bit of it.”

  “Huh?”

  Debbie stepped closer. Looking at me significantly, she said, “We heard it from Bitsy.”

  My stomach clenched. What had Bitsy told them?

  “But, um … how would Bitsy know?” I asked. “She wasn’t there, was she?”

  “Bitsy knows everything,” Anna Maria said. “And she’s not scared of telling the truth.”

  “She’s not scared of anything,” Anna Maria said. “Especially not a slut in a tutu.” She took a step toward Camilla’s locker. “Come on, Little Debs.”

  I got a bad taste in the back of my throat, but I followed anyway. It was as if my feet were on some sick sort of auto-pilot.

  They caught her unawares. Anna Maria lunged forward and grabbed her towel, leaving Camilla in just her T-shirt and panties.

  “Hey!” Camilla cried.

  “You think you’re so hot,” Anna Maria said. “But you’re not. Everyone hates you, you slut.”

  “You’re such a lesbo,” Debbie contributed. “Prancing around like a freaking ballerina.”

  Camilla grabbed for her towel. “I am a ballerina, you idiots.”

  “So dance for us,” Debbie said. “Show us what you can do.”

  I knew I should do something, stop them, but part of me thrummed with desire. Part of me wanted to join in.

  “—and don’t go running to Mr. Principal, because he doesn’t give a fuck,” Anna Maria was saying. “He hates you as much as we do.”

  Oh god. Mr. Van Housen. The last thing I needed was to be dragged to his office again, a witness for the second time. What would Bitsy say to that?

  I made myself turn away, telling myself it was none of my business. Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone was actually getting hurt. Coach Shaw would come soon to hurry everyone to their next class, and Debbie and Anna Maria would drop the game. Camilla would be fine.

  I felt like throwing up.

  I returned home to another of Dad’s guilt offerings, this time a silver pendant from Macedonia. The pendant hung from a black silk cord, and it was in the shape of a J, for Jane. Because clearly, in Dad’s mind, I was still learning my letters—or at least still wearing them around my neck, as the fad had been in elementary school.