Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 03 She's A Witch Girl (8 page)

“She didn’t steal my routines—I gave them to her.” But I hadn’t given her Brent. She’d definitely taken him without my blessing.

“Seems a shame you’re just going to let her walk all over you.” Tara was clearly unhappy with me. No doubt she would have created a spectacular failure for the team if she’d been the one feeling the way I was feeling at the moment.

I watched Maddie and Brent walk away arm in arm. I’d done this once before. I’d been invisible then, but not by choice. I’d wanted Maddie to see me, but I’d been too hurt, too scared to face what that confrontation would do to me, so I’d turned invisible without wanting to. Fear can do funny things to a person. I can attest to that first-hand.

Anger can too, apparently. Because, without even thinking hard about it, I raised my arms in the air, fixed my eyes on the departing couple, and chanted:

“A breakup spell?” Tara chuckled—an evil chuckle much favored by horror-movie sound guys. “I didn’t think you had it in you. Good girl.” Great. Tara was back to being happy now that I’d used my magic for revenge.

I thought about reversing the spell. Instead, I played the rationalization game. “It won’t break them up if they don’t mind fighting a lot.” I smiled. I’d cast the spell knowing it wasn’t a full-on breakup spell. I couldn’t do that. A little trouble? Why not. Everyone knows teen love is puppy love and your first love never lasts. You could almost say I was doing them both a favor.

Tara wasn’t buying my rationalization. “Yeah, well, maybe when we win it, you can deliver the final blow to that relationship without using a single whiff of magic.”

“What? Run up and kiss him in front of her?” I liked the idea, but it had one flaw. “You’re forgetting my crush on Brent is so last summer, know what I mean?”

“Winners don’t have to want what they get, you know.” She shook her head as if she were instructing a neophyte in the art of social truths.

I, however, knew exactly what she was talking about. I had been a winner. I knew what it took so much better than Tara. But she was head cheerleader, and she could make or
break my transformation of the Witches. “Winning without magic is going to be tough, you know?”

Tara shrugged, her eyes following Chezzie, who was holding the trophy. She was hoisted up on her team’s shoulders in triumph. “Like you say, no pain, no gain.”

I had done it! I had convinced Tara that winning
Nationals was a goal worth winning. I would have been much happier, except I kept wondering what had made Maddie change so much in the short time I’d been gone. I mean, this was a girl who gave half of her sandwich to the smelly boy in fourth grade when he forgot his lunch.

After Tara had left my room—Mom none the wiser (maybe the new job wasn’t such a bad thing after all)—my curiosity grew unbearable. It didn’t take me long to realize that, as a witch, I could spy on Maddie anytime I wanted. In no time at all, I found myself in her closet—the very same closet she’d offered to hide me in when my parents yanked me out of my Beverly Hills life.

As I’d expected, the door was ajar. Maddie was always a mess, even when her parents were together and she had a maid to clean up her room every day. I’d never seen her room so messy, though. I don’t think she had any clothes on hangers. Well, maybe the stuff she’d bought and then realized she hated.

I’d come alone, because I didn’t know what I was going to find out. If Maddie was dissing me to everyone she knew, I’d rather some of the dirt missed Tara’s ears. I didn’t need two people knowing the worst of the worst about me.

Maddie was on the phone, natch. I’d always joked she’d be first in line when they made phones that could be implanted. From the way she was lying splayed across her bed, swinging her feet and giggling, I was pretty sure it was Brent on the line. Great. Just what I needed—to hear Maddie cooing with her boyfriend when I couldn’t seem to find any boy interested in me as more than a friend. At least, no eligible boys, anyway.

There was only one interruption to the love-fest while I was watching. Maddie’s mom came to the door with a younger man behind her. He had his hand on her back, so I guessed he was her boyfriend.

Her mom said, “We’re going out for dinner, Maddie.”

The boyfriend smiled and looked friendly, but I’d seen that look way too many times before on the faces of my friend’s mother’s new boyfriends. “We’d invite you along,
but your room is much too messy. Perhaps when you are not a pig, we will take you to a nice place.”

“Oink, oink,” Maddie snarled back. “Who says I’d want to go to a restaurant with you, anyway?”

“Maddie, please!” Maddie’s mom had that caught-between-a-rock-hard-ab-and-a-daughter look. “Armand just wants to encourage you to do better, darling.”

“Right. I’ll take frozen pizza and a messy room, thanks.” Maddie went back to her phone call with Brent before they had even shut her door all the way. I had a feeling this scene replayed nightly at the Maddie Bedroom Theater. Her voice was so sweet and cooing with Brent, I would have thought I was dreaming the whole scene if I weren’t still leaning against an old tennis racket in her admittedly piggy closet.

Unfortunately, the cooing quickly turned to snarling. Maddie practically threw her phone down after a disgusted “If you’re going to be like that, I’m not going to talk to you. Good-bye.”

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and I’ve seen it served both hot and cold back in Beverly Hills. But what I hadn’t realized before was that revenge is a dish best served in total ignorance of the taste. Because after I saw a little slice of Maddie’s life—even though I was still mad at her—I knew it was much crappier than mine. Sometimes you forget that while you’re struggling with the crappiola in your own life, someone else’s life is handing them a pair of
shoes that’s one size too small and two sizes too narrow.

Maddie’s mom had been happy with the role of wife and mother. She’d been unhappy when her husband walked out. And she had done one of the ten stupid things women do when they get divorced: She’d found a young, buff jerk and made herself fall blindly in love with him. Said jerk, not wanting to share the benefits of child support with the child (Maddie), was working hard to make her unwelcome in her own home.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, now her mom was telling Maddie to stop trying to mess up her opportunity for true love with a real soul mate this time.

Yeah, Maddie’s life was way worse than mine. Which didn’t mean I didn’t want to hate her. It just meant I couldn’t. Life was dishing back to her in a blockbuster way what she’d dished to me.

I thought about removing the fighting spell I’d cast on her and Brent. I would have done it then and there, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to reverse it. You’d think I could have made something up, but one thing magic school has taught me is that you better get your spells right or the consequences may be way worse than you’d ever foreseen. And I didn’t want to cause another problem trying to erase the first one. After all, I wanted to get revenge on the little poach-crusher with a clear conscience.

That was kind of hard to plan, though, watching her cry
her eyes out on the bed where we’d talked about boys and passed countless secrets between us.

It did help when Maddie’s phone rang again and she stopped crying. “Hey, Chezzie. Whassup, girl?”

Whassup, girl?
Maddie
was
in bad shape to be so lame.

“Sure, come on in.” Maddie sat up and wiped her eyes. “My mom’s out with the boy toy. Just punch in the code and come straight up.”

She hung up and ran into her bathroom. I could hear the water running, and I knew she was trying the cold-water trick to get rid of the signs of crying. When she came out of the bathroom, she looked perfect—just like the old Maddie with a mom and dad who lived together and thought she hung the moon.

Chezzie took my old place on the end of Maddie’s bed and sprawled out like she’d always had that spot. Like I’d never existed. “We need to start getting ready for Nationals. Do you have any more of Pru’s old routines lying around?”

“I gave you her notebook. They were all in there.”

Chezzie sighed. “But what if she tries to use the new ones?”

“She won’t.” Maddie was sure of me. “Pru likes to stand out. To be different. She won’t use any of those routines because she knows we might.”

Okay, so she was right. I had always tried hard to be fresh and Prutastic—one reason I would have been the first junior
head cheerleader at my old school. So Maddie still knew
me
well enough, even if I didn’t recognize her.

To-Do started to struggle out of my back pocket. “Action step required: Study for transubstantiation test for the next two hours.”

I looked at him. With a regular PDA, I could reschedule something. I’d forgotten to ask Samuel how to reschedule To-Do.

“I’m on it, To-Do.” I materialized my notes, but I was paying more attention to what was going on outside the closet than on studying.

To-Do pinched my hip, unconvinced by my pretense at studying. “Action step required: Study for transubstantiation test for the next one hour and fifty-nine minutes.”

“Fine!” I popped back to my room, knowing I needed a new plan. Another new plan—this one for finding time to create routines so killer, they’d get a standing O to beat all standing O’s.

I was getting really good at coming up with new plans ever since we’d moved to Salem. But I was getting darned tired of it.

It was all too soon, after practicing like mortals until we were bruised and battered, that we got the chance to feel the competition magic all over again. This time, we were competing, though, not sitting in the stands. Talk about
the witch-mortal divide? That’s nothing compared to the spectator-performer divide. Spectators feel about one-zillionth of the adrenaline rush the performers feel. Of course, they don’t-usually-end up bruised and battered, either. Thank goodness for endorphins-they keep us from feeling any pain until the day
after
the performance.

Tara clapped her hands. “Okay, Witches, I need your attention, please.” After every squad on the floor knew she was head cheerleader-and only after-she turned to me and nodded. “Okay, Pru, run the girls through the drill again.”

It felt great to be trusted, finally. I pulled out the book I’d done for the routine-we’d been using my drawings during practice, but they’d been bigger, glowing, and suspended against every wall in the gym so they’d be easier to read. Magic really does have its uses. But we had to use the book here in the mortal realm.

I opened the book to the first page and flipped back and forth between the first and second pages. “This is what we have planned. Everybody know what they need to do?”

It was gratifying to the max to see that everyone’s eyes were on me. Tara’s willingness to back the mortal practice routines had turned me from gold-plate to gold.

I’d created a few new routines for us, but there were only two that we could do reliably. Celestina still couldn’t be counted on to hit her triple backflip. Which, of course, not being head cheerleader, I left to Tara. I witch-whispered to
her, “You want to see how solid Celestina feels before we make the final decision on the triple-triple?”

“Hey, Celestina, how are you on the triple?” She wasn’t subtle, but then again, we didn’t have time for subtlety. It was competition day.

Celestina shook her head, her big brown eyes full of tears. “I don’t think I can.”

“Fine. You think you can hit the double-double, then that’s what we’ll do.” Tara had decided not to risk her flubbing it. If I’d been head cheerleader, I’d have done the same. We’d like to win this, but what we really needed was the invitation to Nationals. Top five would give us that, and a triple-triple that wasn’t solid could lose it for us.

“That’ll make the triple-triple even more spectacular when we use it at Nationals,” I said. It wouldn’t be good for Celestina to feel like a loser for much longer. We had to compete with everyone on full-speed self-esteem mode.

Some of the team members might have been inclined to argue, but not here, with the crowded bleachers and the buzz of excitement that was everywhere you looked and in everything we heard.

We all felt the rush again when we got to the floor and lined up to wait for the team ahead of us to finish up. A before-competition rush is made up of five parts impatience, three parts eagerness, and two parts sheer ego. We were through the roof on the ego meter, I could see it on
everyone’s faces. I probably shouldn’t have felt that we were golden. Whatever. I did.

“We’re here again,” I said, looking for even more juice. “Are we going to do it?”

Oops, I hadn’t been looking at Sunita’s face. She needed a boost on the ego meter, because she dared to introduce a downer vibe when it was least needed. “Maybe, if Celestina would just—”

Tara showed her head cheerleader chops with a sharp, “Hey! No negativity. Save that for Skeletor’s class.” Everyone laughed. Again, I felt a rush—we were in everybody mode. Which meant if I pulled my uniform skirt up and mooned the crowd, everyone on my team would laugh and think it was the kewlest move ever—until the judges tossed us out. There was nothing greater—or more dangerous—than the team phase of “everyone thinking.” I was so glad we were there. I think it might have been a first for the Witches. Yay me.