A Snicker of Magic (3 page)

“Except we won’t duel with magic tricks. The Weatherlys took all the magic with them when they left town. We still have the Beedle of course.” She winked at us. “Which is just as wonderful, if you ask me.”

Before I could ask her what in the world was a beedle, Miss Lawson said: “Our duel will be a talent show. You can sing, play a musical instrument, share an art project, shoot free throws —”

The blond pencil-machine girl gasped and waved her hand in the air. “I can turn fourteen cartwheels in a row!”

Of course she could.

“That’s the spirit!” Miss Lawson clapped. And then she tilted her head and looked down at me, at the blue book on my desk. “Maybe some of you write poems, or stories. You are welcome to share those, too. Your words are pure magic, after all. Your words are necessary enchantments.”

My heart agreed with her and so did the rest of me: from the tip of my ponytail to the inked-up toe of my sneaker. Plus, I liked the sound of free cotton candy. I thought of how that might look, if words spun up out of a candy machine:

Sugar-flossed

Pink and sweet

Love
was the only word I’d ever found with a flavor to it;
love
tasted as sweet as cotton candy when I said it. When I thought about love and cotton candy, I thought about Mama and Frannie Jo and Biscuit and my aunt Cleo, too, who was most likely sitting at home watching soap operas and smoking a cigarette. She claims this is how she solves the world’s problems. I love her for that reason and a thousand more besides.
Love
is too heavy a word, though, which is exactly why I don’t like to say it.

“Any questions?” Miss Lawson asked.

The boy on my other side spoke up for the first time. He asked, “Why’d they call themselves the Brothers Threadbare?” His voice crackled like an old set of radio speakers. Or maybe like a thundercloud that rumbled and mumbled but couldn’t quite work itself into a full-blown storm. If I had a voice that sounded as cool as that, I’d never shut up.

“That’s a fabulous question, Toast.” Miss Lawson grinned. “But I want you guys to figure out the answer on your own.” She turned off the projector. “Sign-up sheet for the Duel is on the door. Step lively!”

Nobody moved.

Miss Lawson sighed. “Did I mention the winner gets one hundred dollars cash-money and a year’s supply of Dr. Zook’s?”

A wild stampede of students stormed past my desk and penciled their names on the sheet.

Miss Lawson clapped her hands and bounced up on her toes. “We’ll duel all afternoon and make Stone and Berry very proud indeed.”

Realizing this could very well be my opportunity to make my first friend in Midnight Gulch, I smiled at Toast and said, “That’s a fancy robo-chicken you drew.”

He sighed, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. But he never looked back at me. “It’s a
space llama
,” he thunder-mumbled. “Not a
chicken
.” And then he moped up to the sign-up sheet, scribbled something down, and wandered out into the hallway.

This is a fact I know to be true, thanks to all my world-weary travels: Making new friends, in a new place, when you’re the new girl, is harder than fractions.

The bell
bing-a-ling
ed through the speakers, and kids ran down the hall so fast you’d think the school was on fire. I stood up slowly, held my blue book against my chest, and walked to the list on the door. So many names, all smudged and sparkling. Here’s the crazy part: My heart told me to sign my name. But my head told me that I’d only make an idiot out of myself. Sometimes I daydreamed about sharing my words with people; I wanted to string them together until they became poems. I wanted to stir them into stories. But I’d learned the hard way that the words I caught were for me, and nobody else. My words would come out a mess if I tried to say them.

At my last school, in Kentucky, I tried. I wrote a paper called “Great Farm Artists of Kentucky” and my teacher enjoyed it so much that she asked me to read in front of the whole school at our weekly assembly. I managed to say my name fine, but in my introduction, I accidentally said “Great Arm Fartists of Kentucky” on account of being so nervous.

And you’d think
fartists
was the funniest word that had ever been spoken, because people started laughing so hard that the bleachers in the gym shook. Suddenly, the skin above my mouth got cold and sweaty. My nose hairs started tingling. My vision blurred around the edges. One of the eighth-grade girls sitting in the front row pointed to my face and laughed, probably because she saw my mustache of sweat.

That was possibly the worst three minutes and twenty-four seconds of my life. For six weeks after that, right up until the day we moved to Tennessee, people made fart noises when I walked down the hall. When I finally told Mama about it, her solution was the same as every other time I’d had a problem at school: She said it was time for a new beginning. So we packed up the Jalapeño and zoomed out of town. And while leaving all your problems behind and starting over sounds like a fine solution, it never really worked for me. My heart’s a lot like Frannie Jo’s blue suitcase: I can’t seem to help packing up all the bad memories and taking them with me no matter where I go.

So I would never, nohow, no way, share my words again.

As I pushed my way out into the hall, a wad of paper whopped me in the forehead.

I might have walked off and left it there if I hadn’t looked down and seen so many words spinning around the paper, thin as wire rings around a clay planet. The paper had a noise to it, too. Most words don’t sound until they hit the air. But the paper hummed like an electric wire, right up until the second I touched it. I fanned it open and read:

I sighed and shook my head. I might as well have stood up and introduced myself by saying, “Hello, my name is Dog Tick.”

LONELY

The word slithered across the cafeteria table, which didn’t surprise me at all.
Lonely
had followed me around for as long as I could remember. I never caught that stupid word in my blue book, but it kept showing up anyway. I knew it didn’t make much sense to see
lonely
in a place like the Stoneberry cafeteria, because there was a constant clatter of noise: forks and spoons clanging, lunch trays smacking down against the tables, and people yelling things at each other like “Save me a seat.” There were hundreds of people in there, or at least fifty, so I shouldn’t have been lonely.

But there it was. I’m fairly certain
lonely
’s most natural habitat is a school cafeteria.

I tried to ignore it. I settled into the last seat at a corner table and took a tiny bite of my apple slice. Just as I figured, the apple wasn’t sweet. Some words have a taste, and
lonely
is one of them. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating apples or
chicken fingers or peanut butter cookies — once you see
lonely
, everything tastes like sand.

I pushed the tray away and pulled my blue book out of my backpack. I caught some of the other words I saw skittering across the room:

Pocket

Bubble

Cage

Confine

Isolate

“Felicity!”

I stopped writing. I could have sworn I heard somebody yell my name. I knew my ears must have made it up, though. Nobody in that school remembered my name, probably. Except for Frannie Jo and Miss Lawson.

And some character called the Beedle.

I slipped the Beedle’s note from the pocket of my hoodie and flattened it out over the table.

When the note first whopped me in the forehead, I figured somebody was playing a joke on me. Had to be. What if the Beedle was fake, and once I ran outside and found the bird-poopless table, all I really found was a bunch of kids standing in a circle laughing at my idiot stupidity? But even Miss Lawson had said the Beedle was the most magical thing in Midnight Gulch. I needed magic like that, the kind that made people want to stay in one place. The kind that made people want to stay together.

My shoulders slumped as I thought about Mama and what she might be doing right then. Her shift didn’t start until late in the afternoon, which meant she had all day to roam around in the Pickled Jalapeño. That’s exactly what she’d be doing, too, just roaming. That’s all she ever wanted to do. She couldn’t stop.

I tried not to think about what I’d do if she up and decided to go without me.

“Felicity!”

I did a quick glance around the room. Nobody was looking in my direction.

LONELY
crawled out from underneath my tray.

I slammed my hand down fast and hard against it, as if it were some pesky bug I could smash. The sound was so loud that the kids at the table beside me stopped chattering and looked over at me. I didn’t look back at them, but my cheeks felt warm under the weight of their stares. I pulled my hood up over my head and pretended not to notice.

Fact: I’d give away every word I’d ever collected to have a friend. Just one. Maybe it’s impossible to make a friend unless you stay in a place long enough to memorize somebody’s name. I doubted I’d ever get to find out. It’d take a miracle to make a bunch of gypsy Pickles finally settle down. A big miracle.

Or a little bit of magic.

Before I knew it, the day was over and I was on my way to the playground to find a mysterious someone called a Beedle. As I rounded the swing set and made my way toward the tables circled around the edge of the field, the part of me that wasn’t half afraid was half excited. Until I found the bird-poopless table.

And then all of me was confused.

“Uh … the Beedle?” I asked. And then I immediately felt stupid for asking, because nothing about this kid looked like a Beedle. I hoped a character called the Beedle would at least have a cape and a mask and a mustache that twirled into curlicues at the edges. I expected a dastardly villain of some sort.

But the boy sitting at the bird-poopless table looked … normal. He was reading the newspaper and twirling a red pen in his fingers. He had narrow shoulders and a head full of messy-spiky blond hair that reminded me of a crown. He didn’t look at me.

“Pumpernickel?” I whispered.

The boy glanced up then. His eyes were the greenest green I’d ever seen, like somebody had taken a neon marker and colored them in just before I walked up to him and called him a Beedle.

He sighed. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”

I glanced around nervously. “Do what?”

He folded his newspaper and smiled at me. My heart kicked
YES!
as strong as a mule kick. My heart had never said yes over a smile before.

“Most folks call me Jonah Pickett,” he said. “That’s what you should call me, too, from here on out.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “But I’m the Beedle, too, sometimes, to those who need me. You definitely need the Beedle, Flea. You got time to talk?”

“Not exactly.” I shuffled the heavy backpack strap around my shoulder. I wished I had time to talk, though. My heart seemed to like Jonah Pickett an awful lot. I wanted to find out why. But I did
not
want to be left behind at Stoneberry Elementary School. Mama’s shift at the ice-cream factory wasn’t over until midnight and Aunt Cleo drove like she’d just spilled hot coffee in her lap.

“I don’t want to miss my bus,” I said, surprised by how easy my words came out. “And my sister will start screeching something awful if I’m not on the bus before she is.”

“Which bus?” The Beedle cocked his head at me.

“Bus 5548 — Day —”

“Grissom!” Jonah hollered. “Day Grissom’s my bus driver, too. Since you’re new here, I’ll lead the way.”

Instead of standing up as I expected, Jonah Pickett backed out from underneath the table in a motorized wheelchair. He clicked a button on the armrest, then clutched a handheld gear and sped forward, bumping across the playground so fast that I had to take extra-long steps to keep up with him. When we got to Bus 5548, Jonah zoomed around to the back of the vehicle and knocked his fist twice on the side of the bus. A metal lift lowered, clanging as it hit the sidewalk.

“Hop on,” Jonah said to me. And then he knocked twice on the side of the bus again and yelled, “There’s two of us, Day! Beam us up!”

“
Yeeeee-up!
” somebody hollered back.

The lift whirred as it lifted us off the ground. Once I stepped into the aisle behind Jonah, the lift folded up into the bus with a:

Clang

Boom

Pffff

“Thanks, Day.” Jonah waved toward the front of the bus.

Our bus driver, Day Grissom, looked the way I would imagine Santa Claus looked if Santa forgot to trim his beard and got real skinny and started wearing plaid shirts and overalls. Day Grissom saluted us in the rearview mirror. Then he turned up the radio and bopped his shaggy head to the rhythm of the song playing: a feisty tune full of banjos and guitars that had a dancing beat to it. Bluegrass music, Aunt Cleo’s favorite.

As I slid onto the seat, I saw Frannie Jo climb on the bus. The little girl holding Frannie’s hand chattered as fast as a songbird, but I could tell Frannie wasn’t listening. Her eyes darted frantically around the bus until she saw me waving. She smiled at me and waved back and settled into the seat beside her new friend. The words swirling around their hands were snappy:

Snickerdoodle

Dump truck

Alphabet soup

I let out a happy sigh of sweet relief. Frannie was already making friends in Midnight Gulch. Maybe the magic was working fine, for one of us. “Your sister looks like you,” Jonah said. “Different hair color is all.”

“Frannie has Mama’s hair color. I have my dad’s red hair.” My throat got tight, but this time it wasn’t my nervousness. My throat always closes up that way when I talk about Roger Pickle, so I changed the subject.

“So,” I said. “You gonna tell me why the hayseed you call yourself a Beedle and what that has to do with me?”

“Shhh,” Jonah said as the bus rocked us side to side. “Most people don’t know I’m the Beedle. That’s my business moniker, and it
has
to stay secret.”

I liked
moniker
. The word dangled monkeylike down from the ceiling.

Jonah said, “I figured, considering what I need to tell you, it was best to go ahead and mention … pumpernickel. But only like four people in the whole world know about my alias. You’ve got to keep it all secret. Okay?”

There were approximately fifty-seven questions sitting on the tip of my tongue about the Beedle, but the one I asked was: “Why would you tell me an important secret if you don’t know me?”

Jonah shrugged. “Maybe because I know what we got in common. My family’s busted all to pieces right now, too.”

My throat felt tight again. “My family’s … busted?”

“My dad’s not here, either, not right now. He’s a soldier. He’s been deployed for eleven months and fourteen days.”

“All we have in common is the ‘not here’ part,” I said. “My dad isn’t deployed. He’s just gone for a while. Work stuff.” My voice broke a little bit over the words. I cleared my throat and said, “He’ll catch up with us eventually, though.”

“Do you miss him?” Jonah asked.

I nodded.

“Then we have that in common, too. And I’ve moved around a bunch, same as you. We’ve been in Midnight Gulch for a few years. My dad grew up here. But before that, I lived all over the place.”

I narrowed my eyes at Jonah the Beedle. “How do you know so much about me? My family just moved here yesterday.”

“My mom does your aunt Cleo’s hair,” Jonah said, taking special notice of the too-long bangs hanging down over my eyes. “She does everybody’s hair in Midnight Gulch.
People tell her all sorts of things. Mom says you’d be amazed what people tell you when you know how to give a proper shampoo. She’ll snip those bangs for you.”

“Maybe,” I said. But maybe not. I felt hidden behind my bangs and I liked the feeling.

“Mom told me to search you out when you showed up at Stoneberry. But even if she hadn’t, I would have tracked you down the minute I saw you staring at the sign-up sheet on Miss Lawson’s door. Because my know-how kicked in.”

And then he smiled as if he’d just handed me a Christmas present. As if the words he said made perfect sense. “What’s a …
know-how
?” I asked.

Jonah leaned in close to me and said, “It’s not easy to explain … but I got this
way
about me. I know how to fix what’s ailing people. My granny’s the one who first called it my know-how. I see something wrong. I know how to make it right. Before Granny passed on over, she made me promise I’d never waste my know-how.”

“I’m sorry she … passed on over.” I clutched my blue book close to my heart. “I’m sorry she died.”

“Died?” Jonah laughed. “She didn’t die. Granny Effie’s a bounty hunter. She passed on over the state line to track down some rascal who stole money from Trixie’s Tanning Salon. She’ll be back soon enough. But what matters now is
you
— something big is bothering you. And lucky for you, I know how to make it right.”

Jonah’s face was so close to mine that I could count the small cluster of freckles across his nose. Ten freckles, that’s all. Just a small constellation. His eyes looked even greener up close.

First thought: I hope I don’t have anything crusty dangling from my nose.

Second thought: Jonah the Beedle might be the only person I’ve ever met who’s as weird as me.

“Okay, then.” I scooted back in the seat just a little bit. “What’s your
know-how
over me?”

Jonah smiled triumphantly. “It’s the Duel. That’s when the know-how first stirred up, when you were staring at the sign-up sheet on Miss Lawson’s door. Felicity Pickle, I’m going to help you win the talent show.”

I gripped the seat in front of me. “That is a spectacularly bad idea.”

“It is?” Jonah’s smile faded. He raked his fingers through his blond hair. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I appreciate your … know-how. But did you hear me today when I tried to introduce myself to Miss Lawson’s classroom? I got so nervous I nearly upchucked. Besides that, I have no talent.”

“Everybody has talent.” Jonah gave me a searching look.

I shook my head. “There’s not much I’m talented at. Except climbing trees. And I can drink a milk shake real fast and not get brain freeze.”

I lowered my voice to a whisper and said, “And I like words; I collect them. I like poems, songs, stories … everything. But words never sound right when I try to string
them together and say them out loud. They’re just for me to keep.”

Jonah’s forehead crinkled. “Explain.”

Since Jonah’d told me his secret, I figured it was okay to tell him mine. “I’ve always seen words,” I said. “I see them as clearly as I see you. Sometimes they have wings and sometimes tap shoes and sometimes zebra stripes.”

That sounded ridiculous when I said it, so I hushed. But Jonah didn’t laugh at me. “Keep going,” he said.

“Sometimes I see words hovering around people,” I told him. “Most people, anyway. The more interesting the person, the more fantastic the words. Words come in all sorts of shapes: stars, spaceships, pretzel words. Some words glow and some words dance. Sometimes I think I see words people are thinking about, or the words they want. The words that circle around my aunt Cleo’s head are usually words I’m not allowed to say.”

Jonah laughed at that. Making somebody laugh, without them laughing at me, felt a little bit amazing. So I kept going. “Most of the time, I figure I see the words that a person’s mind doesn’t have enough room to keep. I keep them, though. I collect them. You know how some people collect rocks or hedgehogs or belly-button lint?”

Jonah’s forehead wrinkled. “Who collects hedgehogs?”

“Aunt Cleo.” I nodded. “Not real ones. Plastic ones and porcelain ones and wax ones and stuff. I collect words, is the point. I keep them in my blue book.”

I handed the book over to Jonah. It only occurred to me after he’d reached for it that I’d never let anybody touch that book before. My ears burned and my fingers prickled, but my heart said
YES
. So I didn’t snatch it back.

“Mama calls me her poem catcher,” I said. “I know how to catch words and keep them. But I can’t get them to come out of my mouth exactly right.”

“But you will.” Jonah smiled. He didn’t open my book, but he handed it back to me as gently as if it were a newborn kitten. “Obviously, your talent has to do with words.”

“Words aren’t a talent on their own,” I added quickly.

Jonah tapped his forehead. “My know-hows are never wrong, Flea. You see the best words floating around crazy people, right?”

“Interesting people,” I clarified.

“Same thing.” Jonah chuckled. “Midnight Gulch is full of …
interesting
people. I’m friends with pretty much everybody….”

That didn’t surprise me.

“I’ll introduce you to the most interesting people I know. You’ll collect their words, and then you’ll be so excited that you’ll be jumping to share them at the Duel.”

Before I could thank him politely and tell him
nohow, no way
would I do the Duel, Jonah spoke up again. “When Miss Lawson was talking about the Brothers Threadbare, you seemed really interested….”

“Wait … you were in that class?”

He nodded. “I have lunch the same time as you, too. Did you hear me yelling your name? Probably not, since it gets so loud in there. Anyway, you seemed interested in the Threadbare boys. Am I right?”

As soon as Jonah said their name, the same wondrous feelings came rushing up inside me: the kick-thump of my heart and the catch of my breath. I tried to rub away the tingly sensations rolling up and down my arms. It seemed as if the air all around me was full of static electricity. I nodded. “Do you know much about them?”

Jonah smiled. “I know people who do. And when we start asking questions about the Brothers Threadbare, you’ll definitely see awesome words.” He leaned in close again and whispered, “I know how to help you, Felicity. I’d like to be your friend, too.”

When Jonah Pickett called me his friend, my heart might have grown legs and crawled up into my throat. The word
friend
looked buggy, too, when it wriggled through the air —
FRIEND
grew six sets of legs and six sets of arms, and all the letters danced together, then kicked, then danced, then kicked again.