Hex, A Witch and Angel Tale Read online

  Her face lit up like the Fourth of July pyrotechnic display Mom had insisted on last year. Turns out you can actually set trees on fire if you’re a lawyer unused to handling firecrackers and yet willing to give in to your harebrained wife’s every whim. Dad knew that now.

  “That’s it! You have to touch him.”

  “By candlelight or what?” It was my turn to smile.

  J tsk-tsked me. “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure, I’ll just walk up to him and say, ‘Hey, Ryder, I need to hold your hand real quick, think nothing of it. And don’t even worry about my thrashing around in pain, happens quite often.’”

  Her lack of response offered me another chance to glance at him. He was wearing what he always wore, a layered outfit consisting of a T-shirt pulled over a long-sleeved shirt, and was still decisively ignoring everyone. My eyes met Chrissy Glenn’s, since she was basically gawking at him, too. It made me wonder about the number of times I’d stared at him before today. Of course, until today it had been different. At Rosemound High, watching him was pretty much a given among us girls. We could’ve started a secret society based on that alone: The Dribblers: Perfecting the Art of Drooling over Ryder Kingscott in a Ladylike Fashion. Still, the girls’ interest was merely similar to the enthusiasm people show for, say, a piece of art. They eyed him the same way someone looks at a painting — in awareness of its beauty, sometimes touched by it, sometimes simply wanting to own it. But a potential boyfriend? Ryder was so good at being distant. He never gave anyone the time of day. So why me? Why now?

  “I know what this is,” J said, interrupting my train of thought, ogling and all, and sounding off-puttingly serious. “You like him, really like him, so you’re doing that thing you do again.”

  “Thing? What thing?”

  “Chickening out. Using his calling you ‘special’ as a reason not to go out with him. You put so many walls around you, I’m surprised you can still breathe behind them. And I get why you’re being so careful, but this is more than that. You think no guy will ever see past your freak rep. So you won’t even try.”

  I swallowed hard. “Tell you what, J. You should reconsider that medical career of yours. Your bedside manner stinks.”

  “It’s called tough love, Lil. I’ve watched you do this for years. You know I’m right.”

  In all honesty, she probably was. I got that. What I didn’t get was the blame. Seriously, was I wrong in assuming that guys were interested in normal girls? Picture this: possible boyfriend X takes normal girl versus freak girl, namely me, home to meet his mother. After a handshake, normal girl comments, Oh,what a pretty manicure, Mrs. X. My comment? After I wipe away the foam at my mouth and I’m finally done convulsing, Mrs. X, you’ll die in a car crash two weeks from today. You may as well take care of the arrangements because I’m never wrong. And we live happily ever after? Fat chance.

  “You’re going to have to try it sometime, Lil,” J went on. “Might as well be with him. I mean, he’s gorgeous and he likes you. What more could you want?”

  Ah, what indeed!

  Chapter: Three

  To J’s profound, and loudly declared, annoyance, nothing much happened over the next couple of weeks. Every day I returned to school, thinking, Okay, today I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him I decided to … And that’s where it got sticky; some days I wanted to tell him yes, some days I wanted to say no, but mostly I just swung from one end to the other, incapable of stopping at either.

  As for the object of all my trials and tribulations, he seemed to be doing the same things he’d always done: showing up at school on occasion, working at Dave’s Garage, ignoring everyone, and still generating vast amounts of gossip. Some said he was now looking at a suspension after being caught doing something really scandalous, like drinking on school grounds. Others said he’d won the right to come back to classes via a bet in some sort of game, pool or poker, against Principal Turner himself. Of course, one of the stories widely circulated around the school claimed that, following an ugly bike accident, he’d been marred so badly, it took hours of plastic surgery to patch him up; that essentially his face wasn’t his at all. Which was just crazy, the way gossip usually is.

  But if, on the subject of him, the school was buzzing as usual, the topic of us, should such a thing actually exist, was as silent as the grave. At the end of that day when he had asked me to prom, I’d almost fainted at the sight of him waiting by my car after classes. When you’re ready to go out with me, you let me know, okay? had been his one and only message to me. Since then, we’d say hi when and if we passed each other in school, but nothing more. Never once since that day had he tried pressuring me for an answer.

  And at first, that worked for me; there’s only so much pressure you can put your bike under before blowing the tires, right? But as the days flew by, the utter lack of pushing got me wondering. Had he changed his mind? After all, how patient can a boy be? Worse still, I wasn’t without theories and possible explanations, and the more I thought about it, the deeper I settled into, well, madness. Before I knew it, my daily schedule started to look a lot like this:

  Monday:Woke up, thought of Ryder; went to school, stared at Ryder; had lunch with J, gaped at Ryder; went to PE, brooded over Ryder’s absence; went home, thought of Ryder; took a drive, “accidentally” passing by Dave’s Garage, spied on Ryder; came home, thought of Ryder; had dinner, no appetite due to lack-of-Ryder; went to bed, tossed and turned thinking about Ryder.

  Tuesday: See above, with minor adjustments.

  Wednesday: Ryder wasn’t in school, my world collapsed.

  Thursday: Same as Monday and Tuesday.

  Friday: See above.

  Saturday: Nightmarishly long, boring. Drove by Dave’s Garage twice, hoping to see Ryder.

  Sunday: See above, minus the drive-by. But, yay, tomorrow I’ll see Ryder in school! God bless Mondays.

  Ryder, Ryder, Ryder. Every blasted second of every blasted day! It wasn’t like I enjoyed walking around as this stalker-y version of myself. In fact, having him in my head, non-stop now, was sure to drive me apoplectic with exasperation. But could I kick him out of my thoughts? Not a rotten chance.

  So what did playing Nancy Drew bring me? Well, first off, an absolute assurance that he hadn’t, in fact, taken an interest in someone else, which, not surprisingly, had kept me awake on more than one night. Other than that, the more I learned about him, the less I actually knew.

  He had no friends, I concluded, since he hardly ever talked to anyone at school. Clearly he liked books because he was always reading, in and out of class. As far as I could tell, he paid zero attention to whatever he put on, but still managed to look impossibly hot every single day; that was just unfair and annoying. In class he always acted regally bored, and I was beginning to suspect it wasn’t an act. Classes really did put him to sleep and, judging by those few times he’d actually graced a teacher with an answer to some question, his boredom seemed justified. Because he was smart, no doubt about it. He would’ve made honors classes, if only he’d cared enough. But, after Inspector Clouseau-ing him for weeks, my conclusion was that he didn’t care, about anything, in fact, except maybe his bike and the books he always carried around.

  “Please tell me today is the day,” J begged, as she and I found each other in the school parking lot and headed for the entrance.

  Smiling angelically, I tried distracting her by pointedly noticing her outfit. This was tribute-to-Jackie-Kennedy week and she had on a pink dress that flaunted an elegant boat-neck cut and a three-quarter-length flared skirt, pale lavender kitten heels, gloves in the same color, and of course the emblematic pillbox hat. My BFF sure loved her hats.

  “Looking hot, J.”

  She held out a hand, displaying cotton-clad fingers.

  “Uh-uh! Don’t change the subject, Lil. Prom is three weeks away and I still don’t know what I’m going to wear. You need to make up your mind already.”

  Before Ryder had asked me, the plan was t
hat J and I would go together. She’d wear a tux with no heels and basically be my date, as that was our typical way of doing things. But if I went with him, then she’d don a dress; we had already found this purple and black corset-tutu number online, which we agreed would look gorgeous on her. However, since I had yet to decide how I wanted things to play out, she had neither bought the dress nor rented the tux. She was not a happy camper.

  Arching my eyebrows pleadingly, I tried for the old homeless-kitten-inneed-of-a-hug trick and bombed. She just ignored me.

  “This whole thing is crazy. You spend your time staring at him when he’s in school and pining for him when he’s not. So what’s the point in delaying it? You know you want to go out with him.”

  Standing before the two-level red-brick construction that was Rosemound High and arguing about how very insane my behavior had become wasn’t exactly how I wanted to kick off my day. Stopping in front of the double door entrance, I allowed her to go in first, less out of politeness than to give myself extra time to produce some semblance of an answer.

  But there wasn’t anything left to say in my defense. J was well aware of why I hesitated, but she’d also watched me working myself into a frenzy over going for it. And she was right; the delay was just me being a coward. Me being pathetic. So, before my mouth could seal itself off the way it did sometimes, I said it.

  “I’ll talk to him today. Maybe we’ll go out this weekend.”

  Her face relaxed in a huge grin. “Really? Promise?”

  I nodded in agreement, my throat already constricting in silent agony. Sure, talking to him would be easy-peesy. Heavy on the lemon-squeezy, though, seeing as the mere thought of it sent waves of nausea through my stomach already. It sucked being me today.

  Focused on keeping my breakfast down, I noticed nothing and no one on our way to class. It was there, right by the door, that J’s screech brought me back in an alarming way.

  “Holy cow!” she yelped.

  A thin stream of blood leaked from her nose, threatening to ruin her beautiful pink dress.

  “J, are you okay?” I quickly fished a Kleenex from my messenger bag and handed it to her.

  “Peachy. I’m going to the bathroom. Tell Mr. Evans I’ll be right back.” She was already hurrying away.

  “Hey, don’t you want me to come with you?”

  “I got it.”

  That left me walking into the classroom alone, in yet another case of easy-peesy. I’m not going to look at him, not going to look at him, not going to … oh, shoot! Of course my eyes refused to see anyone but him. Next came the heat in my cheeks, the clammy palms, the shirt instantly sticking to my sweaty back. Entering the class alone? Oh yeah, real easy!

  He, on the other hand, was the picture of cool. Ubiquitous book in one hand, he lifted those silver eyes from the pages and, with an irresistible quirk of lips, gave me a nod and a lazy going-over. I had on my favorite jeans with a baseball jersey and sneakers, as usual going for casual comfy, but the way his stare dragged slowly over every last scrap of fabric covering my body left me wishing I’d dressed more like a girl. It wasn’t just a first for me, but also vaguely annoying.

  Shifting my weight uncomfortably, I fingered the strap of the bag carelessly slung over my shoulder and ground my teeth in aggravation, unable to break the eye contact. Long seconds passed before I recovered; I could’ve stared into those silver eyes for hours. With a great effort, kicking myself for spazzing out like that, I eventually turned my back on the source of my pain and the rest of the class, focusing instead on conveying J’s situation to our young, offbeat English lit teacher.

  When Mr. Evans dismissed me, I swiveled with the grace of a partly paralyzed sumo wrestler and proceeded to my desk, examining my sneakers with painstaking intent. Yep, with or without a clown hat, I was still frontrunner for village idiot.

  After tripping over my feet once and finally plunking myself down on the chair, I was forced to face up to one sad but obvious truth: I didn’t have a choice anymore. I had to go out with him, if only to get rid of some of the tension that was turning me into a cartoonish character from a TV show. I was one orthodontist-stop away from becoming Ugly Betty. Ironically, if he hadn’t talked to me, if he hadn’t waited for me in the parking lot that day, none of it would’ve happened. I would have been fine just watching him from a distance with the rest of the crowd. I knew Ryder Kingscott would be trouble from the day he first showed up in Rosemound, when he literally stopped my world. But I was seventeen and had had plenty of time to perfect my avoidance technique. People, topics, even random thoughts, I was so very good at steering away from all dangerous items. People adapt; we learn to live with virtually anything, and I’d made it through a whole year without incident, a whole year of pretending that he was nobody. That my Zen moment had only been a fluke. If he hadn’t talked to me that day, I would’ve been safe. Safe from him being … not nobody, anymore.

  “Okay, ducklings,” Mr. Evans’s voice rose above the lively chatter. “Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, broadly known as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Who can tell me what about the man?”

  “He was born in Minnesota.”

  “Expelled from high school.”

  “Was an alcoholic.”

  “The Lost Generation.”

  “Married the wrong girl.”

  The noise was standard procedure. Mr. Evans gave us a week’s notice before we’d start on a new book, in which time we were expected to research the author. Not their work, but their lives. Mr. Evans believed that understanding how writers lived was the key to understanding what they and their work were about. It was fun, almost like a contest, the way we all did our best to dig out little-known facts about the authors. The empty names became actual people who lived, loved, and struggled, just like the rest of us. All around, it was an interesting exercise.

  It was in the middle of this familiar pandemonium that the door to the classroom opened, revealing the whopping frame of a blond stranger. There were about two hundred and fifty students in Rosemound High; a new face, like that of the guy standing at the door now, didn’t go unnoticed. It was a newsworthy fact.

  So the entire classroom grew instantly silent.

  “May I help you?” Mr. Evans asked the towering figure.

  Spread over more than six feet of spare but naturally muscular build, the new guy seemed entirely comfortable with the attention and the fact that every pair of eyes was aimed at him. Sporting a short, messy haircut and the kind of smile that said I’m-too-confident-to-give-a-hoot, he answered in a strangely tuneful voice.

  “My name is Lucian Bell. I’m new. You’re Mr. Evans?”

  He walked as he talked, halting in front of the teacher’s desk and handing him a piece of paper. And … hello, weirdness! While Mr. Evans read the slip, the guy turned to the class, steadily and with calculated nonchalance, his eyes perusing the various faces cursorily until he found me. And, as if I had been the object of his search all along, once our eyes met, he froze. He simply gaped at me, without moving, without smiling, without seeming to notice anyone else anymore. All of a sudden, it felt as though we were alone, not just in the classroom, but in the whole darn world. It wasn’t privacy, either; it was more like being locked up. I felt like an animal caught in a trap, with no hope of escaping.

  He was the one to break away first, his eyes leaving me to deliberately zero in on … Ryder? Even more bizarre, something seemed to pass behind his sharp blue stare once he and Ryder first speared each other visually. It was a recognition of sorts, something that was immediately followed by an unpleasant twitch of his lips. He smiled at Ryder, raising his eyebrows in an unspoken challenge, and even if it lasted only a second, it was enough to raise goose bumps all over my skin. Who was this guy? What was his deal with Ryder? Did they know each other?

  I was trapped in a bad Western, expecting one of them to pull a gun and blow the other to smithereens any minute now. Very Deadwood. At last, Mr. Evans spoke, bringing the freaky duel-thing to an end. />
  “Alright, Lucian, why don’t you sit down?”

  The back of the class was empty, offering plenty of seat-taking opportunities. What does he do? Stops right next to me and sets his bag on the empty chair belonging, in fact, to J.

  “No, you can’t —” was all I could say, before Ryder just materialized next to me.

  The duel resumed, verbal effects to be added momentarily for sure. Oh, for Pete’s sake! I checked out the rest of the class, pointedly eyeing Mr. Evans in particular. Everybody scoped out the scene, but with a kind of glazed look on their faces, a look impossible to achieve without the aid of potent narcotics.

  With eyes like pits of angry storm clouds, Ryder hissed, “You’re not getting anywhere near her!”

  Lucian smiled calmly. “I’m sorry, is she your girlfriend? Because I just assumed that since she’s sitting alone —”

  “She isn’t.”

  “Not your girlfriend?” An ideally arched eyebrow shot up.

  Ryder’s face was a guarded, smooth mask, but for a moment something flickered in his eyes — hurt, was it?

  “Not sitting alone,” he clarified quietly.

  “The chair next to her is empty.”

  “And I’ll bet you know exactly why that is, don’t you?”

  Lucian seemed confused.

  “You’re too early,” Ryder added.

  The newcomer glanced at the clock above the blackboard.

  “Am I? I think I’m kind of late, actually.”

  Smiling in a way that made me doubt he was talking about the current time, he picked up his bag and split. Their verbal face-off thus completed, extremely fast, in the space of mere seconds, I was finally able to snap out of it, close my mouth, and proceed to ask for an explanation with all the tact of a mentally impaired chimpanzee.

  “Wh-what the heck was that all about?”

  Ryder’s nostrils flared anxiously. “I’m sorry.”

  “Mr. Kingscott? Is there a reason you’re not seated?”

  Great timing, Mr. Evans. Now he was alert.