Wicked Cool (The Spellspinners) Read online

  This was not a way to blow off steam or distract me from my psychic meltdown or whatever. We do it every year.

  Maybe I have to explain the sitting-on-the-roof thing. From my bedroom’s front window, the dormer window, you can climb right out onto the porch roof. So that’s what we do every year, me and Nonny. And for the past couple of years, Megan too. We crawl out my bedroom window onto the roof, spread a quilt on the shingles, munch on butter toffee peanuts—Nonny’s totally into healthy eating, but she can’t resist butter toffee peanuts—and watch the fireworks. It’s awesome. The high school is almost two miles away and the wind goes the other direction, so we can’t hear anything, but the nights are really dark out here in the country. So they look terrific.

  I’d been wound up for days but I almost relaxed sitting out on the roof, it was so much fun. And so comfortable, being with the two people I love best in the world.

  Actually the only two people I love, come to think of it. But it was nice. And then it was over, and that Feeling came back.

  Nonny yawned and said that the nursery would be full of people tomorrow, buying stuff to plant over the long weekend, so she had to call it a night. We helped her crawl back in the window—she’s not old, but she’s getting there—and then Megan and I stayed out on the roof and talked until almost midnight. Then we scooted up the roof on our butts to my window, hauled the quilt and everything back into my room, and put the screen back up (so we could leave the window open and listen to the crickets). And Megan flopped on the trundle bed and was asleep in three minutes, as always. And I lay in my bed, higher off the ground than Meg, and stared out the open window at the moon.

  It’s hard to brace yourself when you don’t know what you’re bracing for.

  Sixteen is a momentous birthday anyway, if you ask me. Meg can be flip about the sweet sixteen thing, because that’s her style. But sixteen is a milepost, no matter what Meg says.

  All I could think was, I wasn’t ready for sixteen. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Bleah. Of all the things I did not want to be.

  Too late now. I was there.

  It was kind of nice to fret about something a normal teenager might fret about. Restful, after fretting for days about humongous, sword-of-Damocles-type problems full of magic and mystery and danger. Because those aren’t the only problems I have. Face it, I have regular problems, too. And this is one of ’em.

  I should have taken care of that first-kiss thing. I should have gone down to the stadium for once in my life, instead of sitting on my own roof like a zero. There were probably hundreds of boys at the stadium on the Fourth of July. I could have lain in wait and grabbed one. I could have said, “Quick, kiss me while I’m still fifteen.”

  Yeah, right.

  With my luck, I’d grab a gay guy, and he’d refuse to do it. Or somebody who knew me, and I’d never live it down. And there’d be no way to be safe with a thing like that, because even if I chose a complete stranger, he could turn up in my homeroom in September and recognize me. How embarrassing.

  Not that I have any interest in boys.

  And that’s one of the things that nags at the back of my mind, worrying me—not lately, because I’ve been so weirded out. But normally, this bugs me. Shouldn’t I be interested in boys?

  Meg sure is. She’s interested in a different boy nearly every week. I can hardly keep up with the revolving door in her heart. She’s no raving beauty, but she’s been kissed. Not by the boys she gets crazy about, mind you. She’s never had a boyfriend. But she’s been kissed, and more than once.

  Come to think of it, this is also a problem fraught with magic and mystery and danger.

  I stared at the moon. The moon stared back. What’s wrong with me? I asked it silently.

  As my eyes drifted closed, I almost thought I heard an answer. Your time is not yet, the moon whispered. Soon, Zara. Soon.

  Was I dreaming? I still don’t know.

  Sweet sixteen. Give me a break. Whatever my sixteenth birthday was going to be, I figured sweet was pretty far down the list of possibilities.

  But get this: I’m writing this in the wee hours of July 6. It is now, officially, the day after my birthday. And guess what? Nothing extraordinary happened.

  I didn’t get kissed, either.

  And guess what else? I still have that Feeling. The sense that I am somehow on the cusp of something. That something huge is coming.

  I don’t get it.

  Breakfast: normal. If anything, more pleasant than normal. Nonny fixed whole wheat pancakes with sliced bananas, my favorite. Sunshine streamed across the kitchen floor and lit up the orange juice glasses. Megan and Nonny laughed and kidded each other. There were flowers on the table. My new bike was parked on the porch. Actually, my new old bike. I definitely perked up when I saw that. It is, in fact, a genuine 1954 Schwinn and I love it. It has whitewall tires and steel fenders, and it weighs a ton. When I’m done with it, I’ll donate it to the Smithsonian.

  But where was my Huge Event?

  Meg and I went riding in the cool of the morning, she on her Huffy and me on my Schwinn. We cruised all the way to the mall, in fact, which is a long haul for a bicycle newbie. It was worth it, though. Fun. We hung out there during the hottest part of the day, then cruised back to Megan’s house for supper—since Meg promised me that Donald wouldn’t be there. He has a summer job at the gas station. (I am avoiding Donald at the moment.)

  And nothing happened.

  I was really on edge riding the last mile and a half from Meg’s house to mine after supper, because I was alone for the first time that day. This is it, I thought, and the feeling got stronger. The air around me seemed to hum with expectancy. And for the first time ... I wasn’t afraid. Whatever was coming, I welcomed it. I opened myself to it.

  And then I was home, and dragging my saddlesore body off the bike. And nothing had happened.

  Tres was waiting for me on the porch. I wonder how long he had been there? Anyway, he gave me the coolest thing: a wooden rhinoceros about four inches tall. You wouldn’t think that would be so cool, but it was. He had carved it himself. It was signed, too … he had nicked a tiny “3” into the sole of the rhino’s foot.

  Good old Tres. I sure hope he doesn’t have a thing for me.

  Anyhow, here I sit, on my window seat in the moonlight, writing. And writing. And writing.

  And if anything, the feeling is stronger than ever. The night wind is tugging at the peach tree and I seem to hear voices in the rustling leaves. Soon, Zara. Are you ready? Soon.

  But when?????? And ready for what??????

  And why didn’t it happen today???????????

  I just don’t get it.

  4

  Okay, now I get it.

  It seems so obvious, now, that I feel like an idiot for never, not even once, thinking of this. DUH.

  July 5 isn’t my birthday.

  !!!!!

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself. On any normal day, that would be the big news. Today, however, was not a normal day.

  Today was my sixteenth birthday.

  Not July 5 ... July 7th.

  Meg and I got to the mall just before lunchtime. There’s only one mall within reach of Cherry Glen, at least on a bicycle. This means that once you get there, you have a pretty decent shot at encountering others of your local species subgroup. Teenagers, I mean. And about half of them are likely to be male. Needless to say, that was the half Meg was looking for. I was sort of along for the ride, since boys have never fascinated me the way they do Meg.

  Until today. Today, the penny finally dropped.

  The mall was choked with people and buzzing like a hive. There’s not much else to do in these parts, for the social-minded. We strolled through the throngs, Meg doing that thing where she talks to me but doesn’t look at me because she’s scanning the crowd for boys. She walks a different way when we’re at the mall, kind of swaying more or something. And she talks more loudly than usual. And, now that her braces are history
, she smiles a lot.

  This totally sucks, by the way. It’s like she’s duck hunting and I’m the decoy—just a prop she brings along, to make her intentions look innocent.

  Frankly, I don’t think she’s fooling the ducks.

  But it’s none of my business. I just walk, and concentrate on the window displays. It didn’t even annoy me today, the way it usually does, because I was so distracted by that Feeling. It was like sensing the approach of an electrical storm. Zara Norland, human barometer. My hair, streaming down my back, felt full of invisible sparks. My skin was tingling.

  And then it happened.

  I was studying a pair of Jack Purcells in the window of Foot Locker when I saw a face reflected in the glass. It was just a flash, gone before I could make it out, but the sight of that face made me stop breathing. I stared at the place where the face had appeared, then whirled around, trying to see him in the crowd.

  It was like that sensation I’d had on the porch that day with Meg—that if I whipped around, I might catch somebody in the act of watching me. Except that this time, it was true. I was sure it was true.

  But I didn’t catch him.

  I moved so fast that I made Meg jump. “Yikes,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know.” I strained my eyes, trying to find the features I’d seen in the glass on any of the faces around me. Had he been on the other side of the mall? There were people everywhere, all in motion. None of them were him.

  Beside me, Meg was following my lead, looking around with a puzzled expression. “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. “Nothing, I guess.”

  Bad Sign No. 1: Lying to Meg. I don’t lie to Meg. But I didn’t know what to tell her, and saying I had seen nothing was easier than explaining what I had seen—and how it made me feel. And besides, maybe I had seen nothing. Maybe I was imagining things.

  No. No way. I knew, even then, that I hadn’t imagined it.

  Meg and I ate pretzels. We window-shopped. We tried on tops at Forever 21. We—or, rather, Meg—flirted with a group of four semi-cute boys neither of us recognized, whom we kept running into with suspicious regularity. Meg was thrilled by the possibility that we were being followed.

  We were being followed, all right. Everywhere we went, I sensed him. I would catch glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye, but whenever I turned to look at him, he would be gone.

  I knew only this much: He was male. He was a creature of power. And he had come for me.

  I wasn’t afraid—not really. Maybe a little. Excited, more like. But wary, too. I didn’t like the way he hid from me. Why not show himself? Was he waiting until I was alone?

  And if so ... why?

  See, that was the scary part.

  I didn’t say a word about him to Meg. Even though it was Megan who had figured out that my sixteenth birthday would be a turning point. Even though I tell her almost everything. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But the instant I saw him, I knew he was a secret. And I knew he was also my Huge Event, the thing I had been waiting for.

  Meg and I left the mall about mid-afternoon and went home, biking first to Megan’s house—she’s about a mile closer to town than I am—for a snack. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary, except for the fact that I was phoning it all in. Mentally, I wasn’t even there. It was like I had entered some weird dream ... a dream I almost recognized, as if I might have had this dream before.

  Too bad I couldn’t remember what happens in the dream, or how it ends.

  I wasn’t looking for him out of the corner of my eye anymore. I knew he would show himself eventually, whether I looked for him or not.

  I chatted with Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, ate my apple, drank my Cowabunga. Shared a bag of chips with Megan. Laughed with her about some of the stuff we had seen at the mall. Listened to her talk about the four boys who may or may not have followed us. Helped her decide which of the four boys was the cute one, which one was the hot one, which one was the loser. I forget what the fourth one was supposed to be. None of it seemed important. None of it seemed real. What seemed real, to me, was the boy, or man, or being, I had not quite seen and not quite met.

  The shadows were long when I headed out on my Schwinn toward home. As it had on July 5, the air around me seemed to hum with urgency and anticipation. And a little bit of dread, too. I knew this was the day. I knew my wait was almost over. But I still didn’t know what, exactly, to expect.

  Supper with Nonny: vegetable frittata. I helped her clean up while the shadows outside on the back stoop grew longer and longer and the light outside turned golden. I was putting away the last dish when I finally gathered my courage in both hands and asked her.

  “Nonny. Is my birthday really July 5?”

  She was wiping down the counter when I said it. My question stopped her in mid-swipe. Her body went completely still. If I hadn’t known the answer to my question before, I sure knew it now.

  So I helped her out. “I don’t think it is.”

  Trouble doesn’t sit well on Nonny’s face. Her features were made for smiling. I didn’t like to see her forehead puckered with distress. “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I just think ... I just think I should be told.”

  Her hand started moving again, rubbing the dish towel back and forth across the already-gleaming tile. “Well,” she said. She took a couple more swipes. “Sweetie, I really don’t know for sure.”

  Under the circumstances, I wasn’t exactly surprised. But still, it struck me as pretty odd. “How come? I mean, how can you not know?”

  She sighed and faced me. Her forehead was still puckered, and her eyes were full of anxiety. “I know we never talk about it, but you know this much, don’t you? That you and I aren’t really ... that you’re not my ...”

  Her voice kind of trailed off.

  I felt like someone had just poured ice water down my back. “You’re not my what?!”

  She looked like I’d just slapped her. But I probably looked the same way. We stared at each other, shock writ large on both our faces.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “Knew what?” My voice sounded half-strangled.

  But I did know. It was obvious what she was about to say. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? What else could she mean? And all the little, niggling doubts I had suppressed, over the years, slid neatly into place—like the tumblers of a lock when you finally find the right key—as Nonny gave voice to the inevitable.

  “Oh, Zara, honey. I love you like you were my own. I couldn’t love you more if you were my daughter or—or my niece. But you’re not.”

  “Not.” My mind tried to grapple with this new reality. “Not your niece? But my mother … Jenny …”

  I had heard the stories. I had seen the pictures. Helga Norland and her precious little sister, Jenny. Jenny, the wild one. Jenny, the runaway. Jenny, my mother … tragically killed in a motorcycle accident two weeks after I was born.

  The room was starting to swim. Tears of shock were gathering in my eyes. I dashed them away with one hand, impatient to see. I had to see. I had to watch Nonny’s face as she unmade my world.

  “Oh, honey, I can’t believe you didn’t know. I thought you guessed a long time ago.” Her voice was starting to crack. “You stopped asking questions.”

  “You never wanted to talk about it!”

  Her face completely crumpled. I’ll skip the next part. It involved a lot of hugging and crying. It ended with heartfelt assurances that we couldn’t love each other more if we really were related, and all that. But underneath the shock, I think … I think I blame her. I think I'm really, deeply angry.

  How could she keep something so important from me?

  How could she tell me all those lies?! She was so fricking convincing. And she’s never been any good at keeping secrets, let alone outright lying.

  I bet that after so many years of living out this deception, she half-believed it, herself. Yeah. That would be the only way she
could keep it up.

  We both wanted it to be true.

  And here’s the biggest question of all, really … why am I not surprised?

  I'm shocked. I'm stunned. I'm hurt. I'm angry. I'm having a terrible time adjusting. I can’t let go of Jenny, in my mind, thinking of her as my mother. And yet …even as it unfolded … Nonny was telling me something I had already braced myself to hear. Had spent years, in fact, bracing myself to hear.

  She was giving voice to my deepest, darkest fears.

  My origins are a mystery. My parentage unknown. Not just my father, but my mother, too. I'd made peace with the unknown father, but Jenny … I can’t believe I have to let go of Jenny.

  Nonny made tea. That’s her reaction to every crisis. I sat at the kitchen table and watched as compact, efficient, so-different-from-me Nonny moved through the familiar ritual. She told me the story while she worked.

  Water sang against metal as she filled the teakettle at the tap. “We lived in a commune for a while. You’ve heard me talk about that.”

  Images surfaced in my brain. A cavernous dining hall with long, wooden tables. Rain drumming on a corrugated tin roof, loud as thunder. Yurts and quonset huts. Rows of dusty vegetables, taller than my head. “I remember the commune.”

  “I suppose you would. Although you were still pretty little when we left.” The kettle clattered down onto the burner and the gas lit with a soft foonf. Nonny headed for the cupboards. “Anyway, at the commune, everybody shared in the child care. There were quite a few children there, and they sort of ... they sort of belonged to everybody. The children were well cared-for, but there was a sort of a ... a looseness about it.” She pulled out the tea canister and sighed. “I suppose it must have seemed the perfect place to drop off a baby.”

  I felt my jaw slacken. “Are you telling me I was dropped off? Like a bag of old cans?”

  She shot an anxious glance my way, then busied herself with the teacups. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m glad you were.”