Mirrored (5 page)

She shook her head and still didn’t speak.

Finally, she said, “You should go home. Your mother will miss you.”

I doubted that, but I said, “Can I come back tomorrow?”

“Best to wait a little. Thursday, perhaps, so as not to excite
suspicion. I will see you then, my dear.”

And suddenly, she wasn’t there. The air felt chilly as, one by one, the objects in the room disappeared too, and I was all alone in the old, abandoned house.

I touched my cheek.

I wondered what else I could do.

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I stepped outside. The door slammed shut. The sound echoed down the silent street. I trudged through the weedy yard. The sun had been shining when I’d entered Kendra’s yard. Now the clouds blocked any sign of it.

Other than the brief, magical time when I’d had Greg, I had always been lonely. Yet the realization that Kendra was the only person
voluntarily
to speak to me in months chilled me. What was wrong with me? It couldn’t just be that I was ugly. Yet it had to be. What else could it be? It had to. If it wasn’t about my appearance, then changing it wouldn’t change anything. And I wanted to change everything.

Everything.

Down the block, I saw a lone, white cat playing by the roadside. I remembered hearing that most white cats were blind. Or was it
deaf? The cat was scrawny, maybe a stray, and, suddenly, I wanted to pick it up, take it home with me. I’d never asked for a pet. Could my mother really say no? I walked faster, suddenly wanting the cat, hoping it didn’t have a collar.

Suddenly I heard a rumbling behind me. A car! I jumped, then ran under a tree, feeling the whoosh of air as the car sped by.

My heart was pounding. I screwed my eyes closed. Then, I heard a dull thud. My eyelids flew open. The cat! The cat, crushed under the wheels of some Mustang.

I waited for the car to stop, but it roared on as if the driver hadn’t noticed. Or just didn’t care.

Then, I was screaming, “Stop! No!” But the words were lost in the motor’s roar, and the pounding of my footsteps on black pavement.

There was surprisingly little blood, only a bit coming from the kitty’s mouth. Black tire marks marred its white coat. I held my hand to its chest, feeling for a heartbeat. There was one, but only faint. I knew it wouldn’t last long.

I gathered the cat in my arms, hating the driver. How could people be so uncaring? He didn’t even stop.

Something, a jagged, broken bone, penetrated the cat’s coat. The loneliness and sadness rose up in my throat like bile, then came spilling out of my mouth in words like vomit, words I didn’t understand. I just sat there in the road, rocking the cat back and forth, saying I didn’t know what, and suddenly, the pointy bone retreated inside its body. The cat’s heartbeat quickened, and then its whole being began to vibrate.

It was purring! Purring and rubbing up against me! I knew I had fixed it, my magic and I had. If my magic only did one worthwhile thing, saving the cat was enough. More than enough.

I picked up the cat and carried it home. To my mother’s
questioning look, I said, “I found a cat. I’m going to keep it.”

“Were you going to ask me?”

“No. I’ll take care of it.”

I stared at her, and maybe there was something in my eyes—or my new eyelashes—that made her say, “Okay. We’ll have to get cat food tomorrow, but I have some old tuna tonight.”

I fed the cat—whom I named Grimalkin after a witch’s cat in a book—and took her to my room. She curled up on my bed and purred while I did my homework. She loved me already.

“The cat will have to stay outside while you’re at school,” my mother said the next morning. “We don’t have any litter. It will pee all over the place.”

“
She
will run away if I leave her outside.” The cat had slept on my bed all night, between my legs, her purring lulling me to sleep. I’d awakened more rested than I’d ever been and had spent most of the morning admiring the cat’s blue eyes and white whiskers. I had to keep her.

“If you feed it, it will stay.”

“We don’t have any cat food. Can’t I just leave her in the bathroom?”

“Violet, do you know what cat pee smells like?”

I didn’t answer, assuming the question was rhetorical. In fact, I did know, and I hoped my mother wouldn’t notice the smell on a pair of jeans that had been crumpled on my desk chair. I’d stuck them into the washing machine and planned to wash them after school.

“The cat can come in once we get litter, but for now, it will have to stay outside.”

I drew the cat into my arms. Most cats—I knew from painful experience—didn’t like being picked up, but this one began to purr and rub her head against mine. “I can’t just throw Grimalkin outside!”

“Uck, why give it such an ugly name? Call it something pretty like Tiffany or Courtney.” My mother turned back toward her room. “It has to go out.”

I went back to my own room. I considered skipping school, but there was a test in social studies, and I knew Mom would never write a note for me. Too much trouble. I shut the door, thinking perhaps I could hide Grimalkin outside. But she started to meow.

Finally, I waited until Mom was engaged in the delicate contour drawing that was her morning beauty ritual, then I took the cat outside.

“Stay there.” I placed her on the step.

The cat looked at me as if she understood. She blinked once, then again in the morning sun.

“Stay there,” I repeated.

She lay down on the step, curling herself into a ball.

“Perfect,” I said, even though I knew the cat would probably be gone when I got home, and the loneliness was like a paper cut on my heart. Why couldn’t Mom just get some litter? Be a human for once? But I knew she wouldn’t, so I started toward school.

The cat stood and followed me.

“No,” I said. “Stay.”

But the cat kept following me, like Mary’s lamb.

I remembered what I’d learned about channeling my emotions. The cat could not leave. She couldn’t. It was completely unreasonable for me to get all involved with a cat, but I had. My loneliness made me unreasonable.

I picked the cat up and held her close, willing her to stay there, wanting her too. I was facing east, and the sun was already high and at the perfect angle to get in my eyes. I shut them, still feeling the warmth on my eyelids, on my cheeks, the purry warmness of the cat, who was not struggling in my arms. She nuzzled me, and I knew I couldn’t go to school and leave her. I held the warm, fluffy, vibrating
ball, rocking her like an infant. Behind my eyelids, I could see the sky changing colors, blue to red to purple and a burst of bright pink like fireworks. Stay.
Stay.

Then, suddenly, I felt the cat’s back feet digging into my stomach. She wanted to leave. You can’t hold a cat who wants to go, and this cat did. I dropped her and opened my eyes.

The sun had gone behind a cloud, a cloud that hadn’t been there before. I’d stood there longer than I’d realized.

I looked at the cat. She was chasing a squirrel. It went up a tree that overhung our neighbor’s property. Grimalkin followed it. I knew she would be lost. The squirrel would go further and further, and she’d go with it.

“Stay,” I said.

She did not, of course, look back at me. She followed the squirrel across the branch, toward the neighbor’s yard.

But when the squirrel entered the neighbor’s yard, Grimalkin didn’t follow. Instead, she stopped, as if realizing she could go no further. She looked insulted, as cats do. Then she turned and ran down the tree trunk and stood at my feet. She began to lick her right front paw.

I glanced at my watch. Five minutes until school started. I had to leave, and I had to run. I gathered my books and lunch box, dropped in my trance. I patted Grimalkin’s head, then started toward school.

When I looked back, the cat was still sitting under the tree, unmoving.

When I returned that afternoon, she was still there, waiting for me.

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I visited Kendra after school the following day and the day after that and every day for the next two weeks. She taught me things, magic things. While she cautioned me not to alter my appearance too drastically, I did alter it some, straightening my teeth so much that my orthodontist declared, with a shocked expression, that I no longer needed braces. I also gave my hair a wavy, just-out-of-the-salon perfection. Finally, people noticed. At least, my mother complimented me on finally taking an interest in my appearance. Mom was great at making a compliment sound like an insult.

But Greg didn’t notice.

Or, more likely, he didn’t care.

Kendra taught me some party tricks, moving stuff with my mind like witches did on television shows like
Bewitched.
She didn’t
say anything about casting spells on other people, and I didn’t ask. I knew she’d disapprove since she’d told me several times that my magic could backfire.

“Backfire how?” We were at her house, which was now decorated in some sort of British colonial, dark furniture and stuff with elephants on it.

Kendra adjusted her linen blouse. “Oh, sometimes the unexpected will happen, or you’ll realize the magic you thought you wanted, you didn’t want at all.”

“All I want is to be pretty. And have friends.”

“All?” Kendra asked.

Well, no. Not all. I wanted Greg to love me. And I wanted Jennifer to contract a bad case of leprosy, to help that along. But I didn’t say that. Across the room, a brown spider crawled up a dining room table leg that looked like a lion’s paw. I liked spiders. I never killed them. Unlike most people, I knew they weren’t harmful, not usually. In fact, they killed mosquitoes and flies, bugs that spread disease.

The spider lifted first one leg, then another. Was it a brown recluse? Those could be harmful, resulting in skin death and terrible scarring. But even they didn’t usually bite. People who got bitten by spiders brought it upon themselves. They weren’t careful.

“Can you give me an example of backfiring?” I wondered if I could get the spider to come toward me. Kendra had taught me many tricks, but since the day of the cat, I hadn’t used my magic on another living creature. I wanted to. It would be cool to be able to manipulate others, like maybe make Jennifer scratch herself like a gorilla. But, of course, I’d have to be able to do it so no one knew it was me.

“So hard to think of just one example,” Kendra said. “I have been alive hundreds of years, and I seldom get the opportunity to tell my stories.”

I laughed. That was obvious. For each bit of magic I learned,
there was at least an hour of talk. But Kendra’s stories were fascinating. She looked my age, so she was like a friend. Yet she’d lived hundreds of years. Someday, I’d be as experienced and smart as she was. “I’m sure it will be a great story.”

Kendra leaned on an umbrella stand shaped like an elephant’s foot and stared out the window into the waning light. “I once knew a tsar who had twelve beautiful daughters.”

“A tsar? So you lived in Russia?”

“I’ve lived everywhere. But yes, this particular tsar was in Russia, and he had twelve daughters, each with so many suitors that the tsar could not decide—which was a high-class problem to have. He planned to have a month of balls and events and invited them all to a huge house party—or, rather, castle party. I was employed as a maid, so I knew of all the preparations.”

“A maid? Why would someone with your powers want to be a maid?”

“A maid is an easy job for someone with my powers. A blink of my eye, I can clean the silver, fluff a hundred comforters, and try on all the jewels in the house. But a maid is where the action is. As a maid, I traveled on the finest ships, including the great
Titanic
, lived in palaces the world over. And people say things when the maid is in the room, secret things.”

“So why aren’t you a maid now?”

“Alas, there are few palaces and even fewer kings. The world has become more democratic, but also more boring. What happened in the tsar’s palace could not happen today.”

“What happened?” Across the room, the spider still crawled.

Kendra continued. “Many great preparations were made. Every stick of furniture was dusted to gleaming. Every sheet was washed in lavender to stimulate restful sleep. I was a lady’s maid to Manya, one of the middle daughters. It was my job to make certain her clothes
were in order and to do her hair. She had lovely titian hair.”

“What is titian?”

“Oh, I am sorry. I forgot that people of your generation know so little. Titian is a dark red shade favored by an artist also named Titian who painted many red-haired women.”

I nodded. Titian sounded so much prettier than my own carroty red hair. Perhaps I would change my hair to titian sometime.

“Anyway, Manya had red hair, so she liked dresses in blue and green with satin slippers to match. Since the party would last a month, I made certain she had thirty gowns (it would not do for a princess to repeat) and six pairs of dancing slippers, three each in green and blue. I took great pride in the hairstyles which I—or, rather, my magic—could accomplish. But one morning, the princess had a terrible illness.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I had no idea. It seemed like a sleeping sickness I’d seen on my travels, but there was no fever or cough. The princess simply couldn’t stay awake. And worse, when I left her chamber to get help, I found that all her sisters were similarly stricken. They did not want to leave their beds, and when the governesses forced them to, they dragged around the floor as if half dead.”

I wondered how all the princesses would have been so close in age. Were they sextuplets? Octuplets? But I figured Kendra wouldn’t appreciate the interruption.

She continued. “We all ministered to the princesses, but none got any better. On the third day, though, I noticed a startling change. A pair of Manya’s dancing slippers was missing.”

“How strange.” A missing pair of slippers wasn’t my idea of high intrigue. My eyes wandered again to the spider. It had moved to the underside of the table and was starting to make a web. As Kendra talked on, I concentrated on the spider, the bit of thread emanating
from its spinnerets. I wanted it to come over. Could I make it do so by just wanting it? To do magic without Kendra noticing was my goal.

“I looked everywhere for the lost shoes,” Kendra said. “The princess had gone nowhere, so nothing should have moved. Finally, I asked one of the other ladies’ maids if she had seen them. To my surprise, she reported that a pair of her princess’s shoes was missing also!”

She paused when she said this, as if expecting some reaction. I had none, so I said, “Hmm.” I was still staring at the spider, willing it to come toward me, concentrating all my love and hate, joy and longing into that one task.

“After polling the other maids,” Kendra continued, “we found that, indeed, each young lady was missing shoes. A search ensued, and finally, we found a pile of slippers down the rubbish chute. Each pair had been danced into rags!”

I saw the spider’s thread disengage itself from the table to which the spider had attached it. I tried to contain my excitement, to concentrate.

“It was so strange,” Kendra said, “because Manya and all her sisters had done nothing but sleep. And, a few days later, another pair of shoes disappeared from each closet.”

The spider raised a tentative leg and started the long journey down the table.

“The tsar was so concerned about his daughters’ illness that he offered a reward: Any man who found the cause of his daughters’ malaise could choose a princess to marry. Many young men came to take the test, but none could solve the mystery. Those who failed were brutally dispatched. Meanwhile, another twelve pairs of slippers were danced to rags.”

The spider reached the ground and began to traverse the gleaming marble floor.

“One day,” Kendra said, “I was out in the garden gathering flowers when a young man approached me. ‘You are the maid to one of the princesses, I believe?’ he said.

“I nodded, for I recognized him as a boy I saw sometimes in town, a boy who worked in the blacksmith’s shop. He said, ‘Then, perhaps, you can help me. It’s about the princesses. The challenge the tsar has made. I want to try.’

“‘You shouldn’t,’ I told him. ‘It’s a good way to lose your life.’

“But he told me he was very much in love with Princess Svetlana. He knew this could be his only chance to marry her. I asked him how he could be in love with her. He would barely have seen her. Svetlana was the oldest daughter and thought to be the most beautiful.

“But he told me I was wrong. Svetlana was an avid horsewoman. When her horse needed new shoes, she came with the groom. In fact, she came when any of her sisters’ horses needed shoes also. ‘She is so kind,’ said the blacksmith’s boy, ‘so modest, not a haughty princess at all. She even has smiles for the lowly groom whom she accompanies. She treats him as well as a lord. Perhaps if I could win her, she could love a poor peasant too. This is my only chance.’”

The spider lifted first one leg, then the other, walking toward me, getting closer as Kendra continued with her story.

“I told him I didn’t understand how he expected me to help. After all, if I knew what was making the princesses sick, I would already have solved the mystery. But he said, ‘I think you have other skills that would help me.’

“I knew,” Kendra said, “what skills he must mean, my witch skills. But how had he found out? I had done everything in my power to hide my abilities, for if I was discovered, I would be at best run out of town, at worst, tried as a witch. ‘I do not know what you mean,’ I said.

“But he told me his aunt was a witch. He knew how they
functioned. He had seen how things changed when I was about, the way the crows followed me and the horses reacted around me. And he said, ‘I saw how Ivan Vangeloff’s horse went lame when Ivan angered you.’

“There he had me. Ivan had been my beau, my ex-beau, a shopkeeper’s son. When he had glimpsed pretty Katrina in the town square, he called upon me no more. I had seen his horse in the blacksmith’s shop, and, forgetting myself, I had bewitched it. Now I was paying the price. I would have to help the boy.”

The spider came closer and closer. If I could perform spells upon animals unnoticed, I could probably do the same on people. A very interesting possibility.
Come to me
, I told the spider with my thoughts.
I have no wish to harm you. Not you
.

“So it was settled,” Kendra said. “I would use my magic to give the blacksmith’s boy—his name was Alexei—the power of invisibility.”

I gasped. “You can do that?” It was all I could do to hold my gaze on the spider, for this seemed the most wonderful power of all. To go anywhere, spy on people, even.

“Of course,” Kendra said. “It is just another way of changing shape. If one can shift one’s own shape, it is nothing to change the shape of another, even to nothing.”

“Wow.” I sighed in amazement. The spider walked still closer, and I wondered if I could change its shape. If I made its legs longer, altered the color a bit, would it be a harmless daddy longlegs instead of a poisonous brown recluse? Could I transform its nature by shifting its appearance?

And, if so, could I change who I was, become an outgoing, happy girl, a winner instead of a loser? I’d have to ask Kendra sometime, maybe later, after I’d listened to her boring story about how having magic powers was somehow a
bad
thing.

“That night,” she continued, “Alexei arrived, announcing that he would solve the mystery of what was happening to the princesses. The staff snickered, for the boy was small and pathetic. He was put up in a guest room, but as soon as the castle had gone to bed, I snuck him into Manya’s room. Then, I made him invisible. The next morning, when the castle woke—except for the princesses—Alexei declared that he had the answer.”

Kendra paused, and I knew I was supposed to say something.

“What did he tell you?” The spider was close enough now that I could make out details. Its legs were short and wide, bent like a crab’s. I remembered a daddy longlegs I’d seen. Its legs were slender, arched like the supports on a bridge. I didn’t know how to change one to the other, but I’d try.

“The blacksmith’s boy said he had followed the princesses through a secret trapdoor hidden beneath one of their beds. He did not say how he’d been able to do so without being seen, and of course, no one knew.

“Under that door, he said, was a staircase, and down that staircase was a canal. The princesses, dressed in their best gowns and dancing slippers, traipsed down the staircase and entered the gondola. The gondolier took the princesses (and, unbeknownst to him, the blacksmith’s boy too) down the canal to a secret dock, where they were met by twelve young commoners who escorted them to a secret ballroom where they danced the night away. At dawn, the princesses boarded the gondola again and went back to their rooms to spend the day in sleep.

“‘Impossible,’ said the tsar. ‘Why would my daughters sneak out at night to dance with commoners?’

“But that night, we stayed up to watch the princesses. On my watch, one of the princesses got up, as if looking for something. But when she saw me watching, she fell back into fitful sleep.”

Kendra’s words got lost as I concentrated on the spider, then on the magic words I had learned and the ways I could use them. My vision blurred, but I struggled to remain focused. Just as I was about to give up, one of the spider’s legs began to stretch, then another. The spider wobbled on its path, but finally, all eight legs matched. It skittered toward me, its body elongating as it went, the violin marking leaving its back. Success!

“The next morning,” Kendra said, “we reported what we had seen. The tsar had the room checked and found the hidden door. The canal. ‘It seems you are right, young man,’ he said. The young man chose to marry the princess, Svetlana.”

I tore my eyes away from the spider. “What’s wrong with that? You said your magic backfired, but that’s a happy story. A poor blacksmith’s boy marrying a princess—it’s like Cinderella.”