Dancing on the Edge Page 11

  They asked me more questions, like how long does it take for the spell to work, and when could I do it, and could I do it there in school? The questions were all coming so fast I couldn’t think, and I was getting scared. I pushed Etain through the crowd of girls and said I had to get home, that we’d talk some other time, and the girls let me go.

  Then, after I’d climbed on Etain, before I pedaled away, I saw a girl standing under a tree just beyond the crowd. She was watching me, and it made something inside me squeeze up tight. She reminded me of the wig heads watching me at home.

  Chapter 15

  I COULD FIND NOWHERE to hide, nowhere I felt safe. That was the problem with Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole’s house. They didn’t have a basement, a cave I could tuck myself into surrounded by Dane’s books. I couldn’t hide in my bedroom with all those wig heads watching me all the time, keeping me awake at night. I couldn’t even hide in the bathtub because they didn’t have one, just a shower stall with an old mildewed shower curtain hanging from it. The curtain felt slimy and smelled bad the way Etain’s saddle did whenever it got wet.

  I needed to hide. I knew those girls at school would expect me to cast spells and give them potions. I knew they’d be waiting for me when I went to school the next morning. I wanted to hide under the covers in my bed and never come out. I took off my shawl and put on Dane’s robe and climbed onto my bed. I closed my eyes and strained to get to my fairyland, but even that had disappeared—melted. I blamed it on the wig heads. They were waiting for me, lined up on the shelf, laughing their nasty laugh. “What do you know about love?”

  I got under the covers, but I could feel the wig heads behind me, wanting an answer, waiting for my answer. I curled up tight, barely breathing, sweating beneath so many covers. What did I know about love? Why did I tell all those girls I could cast love spells? Why not contacting the dead or reading auras or palms even? I couldn’t breathe. I threw off the covers, gasping for air. I sat up and faced the wig heads. “I don’t believe in love,” I told them. “It’s not real. It’s not a live thing.” I stood up and went to the shelves. “That’s what I know. I know all about it. I’m wiser than anybody. I’m an expert on love because I know the truth—there’s no such thing.” I turned one of the heads around so just the back of the wig faced me. “You can’t touch it, can you?” I turned another one around. “You can’t hold it in your hand, can you? Can you? Can you?” I turned them all around, facing away from me. “Love is make-believe. It’s all make-believe, and I can make believe I’m the world’s greatest spell caster. So what do you think about that?”

  The wig heads didn’t answer.

  “I didn’t think so. You’re not real. You can’t watch me or tell me anything.”

  I stayed up all night reading the book of spells Gigi sent me, and it didn’t matter that I couldn’t read Greek. I studied the words, the shapes of the letters, and I studied the picture on the page opposite the words and a feeling would come over me. Each page left me with a different feeling, a different idea for casting spells and creating potions. And while I read and turned myself Into the world’s greatest spell caster, Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey were in their bedroom across the hall, fighting.

  Uncle Toole claimed Aunt Casey wasn’t the woman he had married anymore. He said she’d changed and he didn’t like the change one single bit. He said there wasn’t one sexy thing about her left now that she was all into the college life, and her head was filled with so much garbage there wasn’t any room for him.

  Aunt Casey said Uncle Toole hadn’t changed enough. She said he was stuck in adolescence, refusing to grow up, and she knew for a fact he hadn’t been just working too hard lately. She said he was up to his old tricks, and that’s when Uncle Toole said, “That just shows what you know. I have too changed, you just aren’t around enough anymore to notice.”

  They slammed a lot of doors back and forth and Uncle Toole had to sleep in the living room on one of his busted-up sofas. Love wasn’t real. If they just realized that, if they could just understand that very simple thing, they’d never fight again.

  MARY LOUISE and her friends waited until lunchtime before coming up to me. I had my shawl on and I carried an old sewing bag of Aunt Casey’s filled with plants and a few dead bugs I’d collected on my way to school. They found me waiting in the cafeteria line and they pulled me out of it.

  “Forget about lunch,” Mary Louise said. “Come on, we’re going to my office.”

  Her office was underneath the bleachers that lined the quarter-mile track overgrown with grass and weeds, back behind the school. She said almost no one ever came down there during lunch unless it was to see her or one of the other girls in her group.

  “I’m going to go first,” she said. “If it works, then the rest of us will give you their business. If it doesn’t work . . .”

  “No! It works like this,” I said. I couldn’t let her take over, tell me what to do. This was mine.

  “I choose who gets the spell. There are all kinds of curses if it’s not done right. It has to be done right. I have to receive a message from—from Asklepios. Asklepios chooses the person. And there is a payment.”

  “I knew it,” one of the girls said. “I told you it costs. What a racket.”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “You must bring me one empty wine bottle and one white unused candle exactly seven inches long.”

  “That’s what it costs? No money?” Mary Louise asked.

  “No money. Now, I brought one candle bottle with me today for the first spell, but after this you must bring me the candle and the bottle, or the spell I cast today will be broken and you will never know love again.”

  “So, so who’s that Ask—Aski person going to choose?” Mary Louise was bouncing on the balls of her feet, anxious to get on with it.

  “Asklepios,” I said. I sat down on the grass and crossed my legs in front of me. “I must contact the great god of all wisdom in love. Everyone sit down and hold hands around me.”

  The girls formed a circle around me and held hands. I closed my eyes and hummed and stayed the way Gigi always did. I hummed louder. I could feel the warm bodies of the girls around me. Around me! I concentrated. I thought about Mary Louise, the prettiest, the leader, and that other girl, quieter, not as pretty but nice looking. Boys would like her. I would choose her.

  I opened my eyes and pointed at the girl. They said her name was Cara. I told her to sit in front of me, and I reached into my bag and pulled out the candle bottle and a small pocket mirror I’d found in the kitchen one day that past summer when I was making myself a lunch of hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. I was still afraid of mirrors. Gigi said mirrors could rob you of your soul. She said she used to contact the dead through mirror gazing, before she became an expert and didn’t need mirrors anymore. It scared me to think of my soul being robbed, or worse, discovering I had no soul at all. I still never looked in mirrors, but I told Cara to stare into the pocket mirror and think of her true love. All the girls giggled when I said the words “true love.” I gave them a serious look and they hushed.

  I lit the candle bottle and told Cara to keep looking in the mirror and to imagine her true love gazing back at her. I held the candle bottle above her head and asked for her true love’s name.

  She turned red in the face and looked around at the other girls. I reminded her to keep gazing in the mirror. I asked her again, and she said his name was Justice Lee Halley.

  I circled the bottle above her head and chanted the magic words: Kambok, Lovage Zweibach Zim Cara, Koombek Levege Zweindol Zim Justice. Then I set the candle bottle down by her feet and danced around her the way I had wanted to do for Gigi. I recited the words again, only louder this time and then again but softer, then softer. I did my old melting dance in front of the candle bottle and Cara, and I heard one of the other girls whisper, “She’s a real professional.”

  I smiled inside myself and kept melting. They were all watching me, just the way I used to imagine it would be. I melted all t
he way down into the ground and lay still for so long someone asked if I was all right. I sat right up, clapped five times—five being the number of love and marriage and fire—and blew out the candle. I told Cara to hold her hand over the rising smoke and recite Justice’s name five times. Then I dug back into my bag and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag filled with five blades of grass, five leaves from a dogwood tree, one dead cockroach, and a branch from an azalea bush.

  “Gross, what’s this for?” Cara asked.

  “In order for the spell to work,” I said, “Justice has to unknowingly carry the things in this bag home with him, but only after you have touched each object and said the words ‘Zim Cara, Zim Justice’ five times.”

  “I have to touch the cockroach? No way.”

  I adjusted my shawl. “Suit yourself, then.” I started gathering my things together.

  “Okay, okay. I’ve gone this far.”

  Cara took the bag, and all the girls gathered back around and examined the goodies I had collected.

  The bell rang then and the group of us ran back toward the building. It was the first time I ever ran when the group behind me wasn’t chasing me, and I smiled inside myself.

  Chapter 16

  MY SPELL WORKED! Justice Lee Halley invited Cara Johnson to the first dance of the school year.

  After that, girls throughout the whole middle school wanted me to cast spells, and undo spells, and redo spells, and it didn’t seem to matter that the spells failed as often as they worked. I collected so many candle bottles it was getting hard to hide them all in my room. I never ate lunch anymore, and I was always late getting home from school because of my new business. By the middle of the year, word of my abilities as a love magician reached the high school and I began to get their business as well. Everyone knew me, knew my name. I was Miracle, the love magician. It was wonderful to hear people call my name without having eggs and rocks hidden behind their backs. It was fun saying things that I knew no one understood, but because I was the love magician, they all laughed as if I had told a joke. It was fun when the girls all did what I said. If I said they had to sleep out in a tree in front of their beloved’s house all night, they did it. If I said they had to sing a love song in the boys’ bathroom, they did it, and it seemed that they had so much fun wondering what I would ask and watching others do silly things, it didn’t matter whether the spells worked or not.

  Then it all changed. It all turned sour, bit by bit. I had decided I wanted the girls to invite me over, let me go to their parties. I wanted them to call me up on the telephone. Every day before I left for home I’d say to someone, “Now you call me up, okay? You have my number? Don’t lose it, it’s not listed in the directory. Call me, okay?”

  They always said they would, but no one did. Then I made it part of the instructions for one of my spells. Tilly Ann had to call me and speak to me for fifteen minutes if she wanted Timmy Riggs to be hers. Tilly Ann called me, and I could tell she was nervous. She asked me what she was supposed to say to me for fifteen minutes. I told her to say whatever it was she said to her other girlfriends. Tilly Ann just giggled and hung up. She had been on the phone with me for twenty-nine seconds.

  That’s when I realized the truth. None of the girls liked me. They were afraid of me. They never spoke tb me except in a group and only during lunch or after school, and only about love potions. No one else ever called me up on the telephone, or rode home with me, or spent their Saturday afternoons with me. I didn’t know the TV shows they watched and I didn’t have my period yet and I didn’t have a boyfriend. The more I was with them, surrounded by them, the more separate I felt, not just from them but from myself. And the girl I shotted watching me under the tree that first day still watched me.

  I found out her name was Juleen Presque. They called her the brain and said she was stranger than snake’s feet. I’d see her sometimes watching me surrounded by a group of girls, casting spells, and it seemed as if she were waiting, wanting something. I wondered if she wanted me to cast a spell for her, but she always stood apart, and when I tried to go up and speak to her, she walked away.

  I didn’t like her watching me like the old wig heads. Every time I saw her I got scared, and I felt this cold spot harden in the center of my chest. Any joy left in playing the love magician game died whenever she was around. Then later, toward the end of winter, the joy died altogether. I had replaced it with fear. That dark fear-shadow that had been with me for so long no longer hovered over and around me but had moved inside me, had taken over my whole insides so that I feared everything—the dark cracks in the sidewalk and tree branches broken off and lying dead on the ground. I was afraid of thunder and lightning and steep stairwells. I was afraid of choking on my food. Most of all, I was afraid that there was someone pushing me, or drawing me forward to someplace I didn’t want to go, someplace dangerous, and every day I played the love magician game, every time someone fell for my tricks, it brought me closer to the edge of that dangerous place. Juleen Presque knew this. She was waiting for me to fall off that edge.

  Then in the spring, Uncle Toole moved out on us, exactly one week before my fourteenth birthday. The last few days he had been with us, the house was quiet. They had stopped fighting. He and Aunt Casey had agreed that they had drifted apart. It was best they went on their own separate journeys, followed their own bliss. That’s what Aunt Casey told me. Uncle Toole said, “Casey’s just plain no fun anymore. My philosophy is you only go around once in life so drink your beer first.”

  Aunt Casey told him he had to move all his junk—the broken furniture and appliances—out of the house. I had hidden the overflow of candle bottles under those stacks of furniture and had to wait until they went to bed to dig them all out again. I spent most of the night searching for them and taking them in bags out to the garage, and even then I wasn’t sure I’d found them all.

  The next afternoon when I came home from school the house was so empty, so quiet. The old clutter had been comforting, like the voice of a radio in an empty house. It held its own noises, its own busyness. I always had to work my way around it to get anywhere. It took concentration not to stub my toe on a protruding leg, or to find my way to the kitchen and dig up a clean dish. The house was bare, exposed, stripped naked. I started to shiver. I stood in the living room, staring down at the only thing left: three candle bottles. Three. Bad things always happen in threes. Uncle Toole had moved out. One down, two to go. I grabbed up the candle bottles and brought them to my room. I pulled out the ones I had stashed under my sofabed, set them up around me on the floor, and lit them. I was still shivering. I put on Dane’s bathrobe, but it didn’t help. I brought the candle bottles in closer, but I was still cold. I climbed into the bed and huddled under the covers, but I couldn’t stop the shaking. My teeth were chattering. I felt cold from the inside out instead of the outside in. I stayed huddled in my blankets and watched the candles melt. I grew colder still.

  Aunt Casey came home at night and called out to me. Her voice sounded far away. She came to my bedroom and knocked on my door.

  “Can I come in?” She opened the door without waiting for an answer. She saw the candle bottles. “Hey, what’s going on? What are you doing with all those candles?”

  Then she saw me shivering in the bed.

  “What—are you sick? I’ve never known you to get sick before.”

  She set her backpack on the floor and moving to the bed reached out her hand to touch my forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever. Maybe I should take your temperature.”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  “How ’bout I fix you some hot tea?”

  “Okay.”

  Aunt Casey turned to leave. On her way out of the room she said, “I thought we lost all those bottles in the tornado.”

  She returned with the tea and some toast and I sat up. She set the tray on my lap, but I was shivering so much the tea was slopping out of the mug.

  “I’ll just move the tray onto the bed here, oka
y? I brought you some toast.”

  I nodded and reached for the mug. I had to concentrate hard to keep my hands from shaking the tea out again. I took a sip and I could feel the heat traveling in a thin stream down the center of my body. I kept drinking, but the heat wouldn’t spread out to my arms or legs or feet. I took a bite of the toast.

  “I always liked tea and toast when I was sick,” Aunt Casey said, standing over me and watching me eat and drink.

  The toast had mold on it. I could taste it. I drank down the rest of the tea and by the time I had finished it, the tea inside me had gone cold and I was still shivering.

  “I can’t eat the toast,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “You want some more tea?”

  “No, I just want to lie down.”

  “Okay, but I’m blowing out these candles. We don’t want a fire. Did you notice the living room?”

  “Yes.” I huddled back down under the covers again.

  “My voice echoes in it. The house hasn’t been this clean since I was a kid.”

  I lifted my head. “You lived here when you were a kid?”

  Aunt Casey nodded and picked up her backpack. “Yup. I’ve always lived here. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Mama—Sissy lived here?”

  “This was our bedroom, sure. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No.” I rolled over and faced the wall. I didn’t want to know any more. I could feel myself getting close to that dangerous place again. I could almost peer over the edge. I didn’t want to see what was there. I didn’t want to find out any more. I was afraid to even think about Dane or Mama because I just knew if I did Aunt Casey would leave, too. That’s how it worked. That was the connection.