The Rosemary Spell (5 page)

Adam looks from Mr. Cates to the diary to me. His face is set.

“Our secret?” I offer my pinky.

Adam wraps his pinky around mine, and we move our locked fingers from my forehead to his, adding this promise to a long line that stretches back beyond my memory.

I shift the bookmark out of the way, and the strong scent of rosemary brings with it flashes of the island, where that piney smell infuses everything. Long, desperate games of Capture the Flag. Shelby lifting me up so I could hide the flag in the crook of a tree. Adam throwing and throwing and throwing the boat rope until he could lasso like Indiana Jones. Shelby reading aloud from
The Golden Compass
and then all of us playing that we were hiding from the Gobblers, who snatch children and, worse, snatch their souls, even though Shelby was technically too old to play pretend by then.

“Listen to this.” Adam pulls me back to now.
“The rosemary thrives.
” His eyes are wide, and his voice is just louder than a sigh. “Do you think the book is really writing back?”

I want to say yes, but a more practical response comes out. “Constance and her dad lived on the island before the '24 flood. He's the one who planted the rosemary, remember?”

“Still, you, like, moved the bookmark, which is rosemary, and I mean, you actually
are
Rosemary, and then the book says—”

“The book doesn't ‘say' anything. It was written a long time ago. Look.” I use my most matter-of-fact voice. “It's weird the island has rosemary growing on it, as our science teachers always point out. But it's exactly because it's weird that it makes perfect sense she would mention it in her diary.” I don't know why I'm working so hard to stifle the thrill that wants to rise up.

Adam gives me a long look. “Okay.”

Mr. Cates sets down his book, holds out his arms like a preacher, and summons our attention. “Class, the bell will ring in two minutes. Next session we'll be in the library so you can start to research your poet's biography. You'll need to select your poet by then.”

Adam and I look at each other, and we don't need to say anything. Of course our poet will be Constance Brooke.

Mr. Cates continues, “Get down your last thoughts before the bell chases away the muse.”

I turn back to Adam. “We can't write—”

“We already did,” Adam reminds me, turning ahead to the middle of the book. “This page is blank.”

I peer at it closely to make sure. No faded writing appears.

I take a breath like I'm jumping into cold water and write,
Words outlast stone. Poems are words.

“Very clever,” Adam snorts.

“Fine. You do it.”

Rosemary remembers,
he scrawls.
Rosemary is an herb and a person.

“You started off well,” I say.

We watch the page, waiting to see if the book will write back. It doesn't, of course. How could it?

My brain is still untangling equations from algebra when Adam grabs my arm and steers me toward the library. “Let's look at the diary over lunch.”

I fall into step beside him. “We can try to read more of what Constance wrote on that one page.” What if she wrote on more pages?

We walk through the metal detector, and Adam calls out, “Hey, Mrs. W! It's cool if we eat in here, right?”

“Just clean up after yourselves.” She smiles behind the big checkout counter.

“I thought you weren't supposed to eat in the library,” I mutter, as we wend between tables over to a sunny corner in the biography section.

“Yeah. At some point, there was a big reversal on that. I guess they figure we can take the books home and slobber all over them.”

I set the diary between us and open to the page with writing—Constance's, not ours.

Adam arranges the components of his lunch according to some system. He has one of those lunchboxes that's a set of small containers, and each compartment holds something different. Grapes. Baby carrots tucked in a tidy row. Finally a sandwich, which he extracts from its box.

He catches me studying him. “What?”

The way he sorts everything helps hold the huge, messy shapelessness of life together. But I don't say that because it would be weird. “You're weird,” I say instead, but he knows I don't mean it.

He starts to summarize what happened with the diary. “You wrote the rosemary line from
Hamlet
. . .” he says.

I repeat the line:
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

He continues. “And then we noticed Constance's writing.”

“Which is really faint,” I add.

“So we didn't see it before,” he says. “Even though we looked pretty carefully.”

“But we should have seen it.” I say what we both know. “It isn't that faded.”

“You think there's actually something strange happening with this book?” His voice is just louder than his breath.

“Don't you?”

He nods. Once.

We both lean over the book, careful to hold our food away, and read together:
Father says we . . .

The next word is blotted, like it got wet. The letters are frayed around the edges, tiniest hairs of ink reaching out into the roughness of the page.

Need.
Adam works it out.

Father says we need the rosemary so that we can remember.

“Remember what?” I wonder, as I turn the page.

My hand flies to my mouth. Adam and I recoil. The new page just says
Wilkie.
Over and over and over and over. The whole page. Filled with the name Wilkie, written neatly at first and then more and more messily. And then it's blotchy, like rain fell on the page, drops of water, staining the cursive with pale brown blots.
Wilkie. Wilkie. Wilkie. Wilkie.

Adam whispers, “So that we can remember
Wilkie.
”

W
E BOTH LEAP UP,
and Adam yanks me away from the table. My wooden chair pitches backwards and clatters to the floor.

“Everything okay?” Mrs. Wallace calls.

“Yup!” I squeak. Adam gives an awkward thumbs-up. It's good that Mrs. Wallace isn't looking too closely, because all the color has drained from Adam's face except two weird red blotches low on his cheeks.

I take a steadying breath. “It's just a name. Written over and over.”

“That's the creepy part.” Adam hugs himself. “You can tell something was wrong.”

“But whatever was wrong was a long time ago. It's not wrong anymore.”

“You don't know that,” Adam counters. “If Wilkie, like, died, then he's still dead.”

“Yeah, and that's sad, but everyone from history is dead. The tragedy is over.”

“So why are you standing over here and not sitting with the perfectly harmless, not-at-all-weird diary there on the table?” he challenges.

“You pulled me!”

He reaches for my hand. “Together?”

“Together.”

Before we can sit back down, the bell rings, and we automatically start stowing our lunch stuff.

I stash the diary in my backpack, where the bright colors of my other books shout, “Everything is fine here. Nothing to see. Move along.”

We merge into the traffic of bodies moving every which way in the hall. “Who do you think Wilkie was?” Adam asks, dodging a tiny sixth-grader with a supersized backpack.

“How would I know?” I wave at Aileen. “Someone gone, I guess, otherwise they wouldn't have to worry about remembering him.” I want all those Wilkies burned in my brain to go away. “Let's just put it out of our heads.”

We walk together into social studies and slide into our seats.

Adam's not putting it out of his head. I can tell because his tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth, which means he's puzzling through something.

I speak fast and low. “Since the book is so old, Wilkie's obviously dead. There's really nothing we can—”

He cuts me off. “We can show Shelby.”

It's like the ground was crooked and just righted itself. Shelby will know how to respond to
Wilkie, Wilkie, Wilkie.

Adam looks at me closely. “You don't mind, do you?”

“No! Why would I? Besides, we already showed her.”

“Yeah, but we thought it was blank. Plus, you didn't want to show your mom.”

“That's different. She has her own thing with books, but Shelby's thing is the same as our thing.”

I move through the rest of the school day, listening and discussing and smiling. But Wilkie won't leave me alone, and I can't wait for Shelby to explain him away.

Adam and I stand under the overhang at the front of the middle school, staring at his phone, waiting for Shelby to text back.

Nothing.

I try
Need your help. Pick us up?
She can't ignore that.

But she does.

I call her. It doesn't even ring before her recorded voice trills happily, “Hey, this is Michelle. I'm busy right now. Leave a message.”

Finally, Adam calls his dad at work. He turns away from me while he talks, but the slump of his shoulders means his dad is being short in that I-don't-have-time-for-you-now way.

“He thinks she has rehearsal for the musical,” he reports. “She's probably not allowed to have her phone on.”

“At least she's not ignoring us,” I sigh.

We amble toward home in a comfortable silence. We don't talk about the diary. We don't talk about how Shelby is always so busy, and instead of always being three, we're usually just two now.

On my wall, on the hook where Dad's stupid Escher print used to be, is the picture of the three of us that Adam gave me when we were nine. He painted down one side of the frame,
For My Best Friend,
and across the bottom, he painted
From Adam the Great,
and Shelby added
And His Super Sister
in little letters underneath because she took the picture, or actually her auto-timer thing took it. It's a close-up of the three of our faces. Shelby and I are cheek to cheek, with my brown hair and her blond hair all tumbled together. Adam's chin rests on top of my head, and his head tilts toward his sister's. We'd just finished doing a pajama march from my house to theirs, and we were proud of how silly and brave we were. On the two sides of the frame without any writing Adam drew sprigs of rosemary. For me.

Adam's house comes first. We both check our phones again.

“We'll come over when she gets home,” he says. “If it's not too late.”

It will be too late. It's already too late. I can't even remember why I thought it was so important to talk to Shelby. The book is really old and used to belong to a really famous poet, but it's mostly blank and not actually all that interesting.

I head home alone, and for no reason at all, I think about when you pretend to throw a ball for a dog and it runs and searches and looks up, expectant and confused and just a little betrayed.