Jinx Read online

  I thought about hitting her. I really did. Not so much because of the geek thing—let’s face it: I am an orchestra geek (I’m not knock-kneed, though). But because of the thing about my family being white trash. I mean, my parents totally make enough money to get by. Okay, maybe we don’t get Rolexes for Christmas like the kids around here do.

  But my parents have never taken clothes for us from the church donation box. It’s true Courtney’s sick of getting all of my hand-me-downs. But not everyone can afford to buy their kids an all-new wardrobe every year….

  But I didn’t. Hit her, I mean. I’ve never hit anybody in my life, and I wasn’t about to start with Tory, however sorely she might tempt me.

  I wanted to hurt her, though. Seriously hurt her.

  Which was horrible, because I could tell she was already hurting. On the inside, from completely self-inflicted wounds. I had no idea why Tory was so insecure, but that had to have been why she’d lashed out at me like that…why she would do—or try to do, anyway—what she had to Petra.

  This witch thing—this story she’d heard about our ancestress, Branwen—it had gone to her head. She was clinging to it, like a life raft, because she felt as if she had nothing else to hold on to. She didn’t like herself enough to…well, just be herself.

  The thing was…I knew the feeling.

  I also knew, only too well, where it could lead.

  But what I couldn’t understand was how she’d gotten this way.

  “What happened to you, Tory?” I asked her. “You weren’t like this five years ago. What happened to make you so…mean?”

  Tory narrowed her eyes at me. “Five years ago? You mean when I was the most unpopular girl in school, because I was a fat, boring doormat who let the other girls walk all over me and the only thing boys wanted from me was help with their homework? I’ll tell you what happened, Jinx. Grandma told me about Branwen. And I realized that the blood of a sorceress runs through my veins. I realized that I had power…real power, to make people do what I wanted them to do…or crush them if they didn’t. I just had to take control. Of my life. Of my destiny.”

  “Oh,” I said sarcastically. “Is that what you’re doing in the boiler room with Shawn during your free period every day? Taking control of your destiny?”

  Tory looked at me coldly. “God,” she said. “You’re such a child. I should have known you wouldn’t understand.”

  It was pointless. I realized that now. I took my book and Petra’s photo, and turned to go.

  At the doorway, however, I hesitated, and gave it one last try. “About Zach…”

  Tory glared at me. “What about him?”

  I knew I should have just dropped it. It wasn’t worth it. And it wasn’t going to make any difference.

  Still, that thing she’d said about my parents…it had gotten to me. A little.

  “Just don’t stick any more pins in that doll’s head,” I said.

  Tory cocked a hip. “And what if I do?”

  “You’ll just be wasting your time.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Tory’s voice was no longer derisive. Now it was filled with hatred. Pure and simple. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? We’ll see how big a waste of time you think it is, when Zach ends up with me—not Petra, and certainly not you. Because you know what? No matter how much you two hang around together, talking about freaking Seventh Heaven, or whatever, he’s going to be mine. I’ve willed it. I’m the one with the gift, Jinx. You may have gotten the red hair, but I got the magic. I realize that now. Branwen meant Grandma’s granddaughter, not granddaughters, would have the gift. And that granddaughter is me. Because I’m not afraid to use her gift, the way you are. What do you think of that?”

  I thought fleetingly of the woman behind the counter at the witch store, of her gentle greeting—“Blessed be!”—and the kindness with which she insisted I take the pentacle necklace, which I now wore. So different, so starkly different, from the kind of witch Tory thought she was. Or wanted to be.

  “I don’t know that I’d go around bragging about what you think you’ve inherited from our great-great-great-great-grandmother, if I were you, Tory,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t Grandma mention how she died?” I asked.

  Tory shook her head, looking curious, in spite of herself.

  “She was burned to death at the stake,” I said. “For practicing witchcraft.”

  Then I left her room, closing the door behind me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I cannot believe it.” Petra’s hand was shaking as she dropped a stack of pancakes onto my plate. “I still cannot believe it. In a week he will be here. Just one week! It is too good to be true.”

  Carefully avoiding Tory’s sullen gaze, I picked up the syrup pitcher and said, “Well, I think it’s great, Petra. I can’t wait to meet him.”

  “Willem,” Teddy said, shoveling a forkful of pancake into his mouth, “is cool. How long’s he staying, Petra?”

  “Ten days.” Petra’s blue eyes had not stopped dancing since she’d put down the phone. “Ten days, all travel expenses paid! Do you know how much a ticket from my country to New York costs?”

  Alice said, “Maybe I should start listening to the radio. Maybe I could win a new bike. I really need a new bike.”

  Petra, despite her euphoria, was still Petra, and she said with gentle asperity, “Alice, you have a lovely bicycle that you got only last Christmas.”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “But it’s a baby’s bike, with pedal brakes. I want a grown-up bike, like Teddy’s, with handlebar brakes. Maybe I could win one over the radio, like Willem won a trip to New York.”

  Tory glared sourly at her little sister over the cup of coffee she’d poured herself. “Just ask Dad, for God’s sake,” she said. “He’ll buy you a damned bike.”

  Petra flicked Tory a glance, since both Teddy and Alice began chortling at the mention of the D word, but she didn’t say anything. I hastened to change the subject.

  “If you want to take a day off to spend with Willem, and you need someone to watch these two,” I said, giving my giggling little cousins a mock stern look, “just let me know.”

  Petra gave me a glorious smile. “Thank you, Jean. I will.”

  Tory made a face and mouthed, Brown nose, at me.

  I ignored her.

  Then later, as we were leaving the house for school, Tory snapped, “Don’t think, Jinx, that Petra’s boyfriend winning this stupid trip has anything to do with your taking that photo out of Mouche’s box. Or with your dumb binding spell.”

  I kept my face carefully blank. “I wouldn’t dream of thinking any such thing,” I said.

  “Because I did a little binding spell of my own last night,” Tory said. “We’ll see how well your little country-bumpkin magic works against the real thing.”

  “I guess we will,” I said, wondering how it had gotten to this: my cousin and me, fighting over who was the more powerful witch. I mean, talk about stupid.

  I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. In a way, Tory had a right to be angry: to her, I probably did seem like the world’s biggest hypocrite, pretending not to know what she was talking about, that first night I’d arrived. When I had known. I’d known perfectly well. Grandma had told me the same story—about how into my generation would be born the next great witch in the family. It had just been a bedtime story, told to entertain.

  But it had made quite an impression on me when I’d heard it—the same impression it had obviously made on Tory. Because, like Tory, I’d been convinced I knew who the witch of my generation was:

  Me. Of course it was me. My name was Jinx, wasn’t it? That, coupled with the red hair and the story surrounding my birth…I had to be the witch. I was the freak. I was the unlucky one.

  To everyone else in my family, though, it was just a story Grandma told, to get us interested in our family tree. She clearly didn’t believe it herself. She always laughed as she told it, like it was the most hi
larious thing ever.

  But she didn’t laugh when, the last time she came to visit us, I told her that I had found out what happened to Branwen, her great-great-grandmother. Grandma had conveniently left off the part about Branwen being the last woman to be burned to death for witchcraft in Wales, the country she was from—a fact easily confirmed on the Internet.

  I had looked up the name on a lark, bored in computer lab one day. I’d stared at the screen, feeling my blood run cold. Because suddenly, it wasn’t just a story. It really was true. I was the descendant of a witch.

  Grandma had been philosophical about it.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “I’m sure Branwen was a good witch. She was a healer, you know. She probably did a better job of curing people than the town alchemist, so he got jealous and accused her of witchcraft. You know how things were back then.” Grandma had just finished The Da Vinci Code. “It was all politics.”

  Politics or not, a relative of mine had been killed—killed!—for witchcraft. It was clearly nothing to mess around with.

  Something I’d learned the hard way when, despite what I knew about Branwen, I’d cast my first spell and watched it go so tragically wrong.

  Which was why I knew Tory—whether or not she had “the gift” Grandma promised one (or both) of us had inherited from Branwen—had to be stopped.

  So while Petra had been putting Teddy and Alice to bed the night before, I had snuck down into her basement apartment, and furtively placed a penny, heads up, in each corner of Petra’s bedroom. Then I’d sprinkled some sea salt over the threshold of every door leading to and from Petra’s apartment.

  Finally, I’d written Tory’s name down on a sheet of white paper, and buried it beneath the ice cube trays in Petra’s refrigerator. Petra would puzzle over this, surely, if she ever found it, but at least she’d be safe….

  But it was going to be hard, I could tell, to convince Tory that what she was doing was wrong. It was Grandma’s fault, really, for filling her head—not to mention mine—with all that talk about our destinies. If I had never heard I was descended from a witch, I might never have picked up that first book on witchcraft, the one I’d found in my school library back in Hancock, the one I’d used to cast that first spell, the one that had so completely changed my life…

  …and, unfortunately, someone else’s, as well.

  But if I’d never cast that first spell, then, of course, I never would have come to New York.

  And I never would have met Zach.

  Really, when I thought about it, all of it—the thing back home, and the pain and loneliness of being away from my family and starting over at a new school—seemed worth it, when I took into account that it had enabled me to meet Zach.

  Zach, who, it was true, was in love with someone else. But who also, without prompting from any magic, white or black, was still my friend.

  And that was something. That was really something.

  Still, taking everything that had happened between us into account, I wasn’t particularly surprised when Tory started giving me the cold shoulder. I’d actually been wondering why it hadn’t happened before now. The only rational explanation was that Tory liked having someone around she could pick on mercilessly. And since I try not to take Tory’s snide remarks to heart, I hadn’t really minded being that person.

  But when I approached Tory’s lunch table the morning Petra announced Willem’s contest win, she looked up at me and said, “Don’t…even…think…about…it.”

  Well. Even a country girl like me can take a hint.

  I took my tray and went to sit at the table where I’d frequently seen my fellow orchestra members sitting. There were none there yet, but I hoped that, when they did show up, they wouldn’t choose to sit somewhere else when they saw me there. In order not to look so conspicuously friendless, I pulled my U.S. History textbook from my bag and flipped it open.

  I had barely made it through a page on Alexander Hamilton when another tray slammed down next to mine. I looked up and saw Chanelle slide into the chair beside mine.

  “God,” Chanelle said, prying open a can of diet soda. “Your cousin is such a bitch.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It apparently wasn’t necessary for me to reply, since Chanelle went right on talking.

  “Like, I can put up with the partying. I love a good party myself. But not every night.” Chanelle widened her brown eyes meaningfully. “A girl’s got to get her beauty sleep. I can’t be out past midnight every night. First of all, my dermatologist would kill me, but secondly, bags.” She pointed at her eyelids. “See them? They’re there. Bags. Bags. And I’m only sixteen years old.

  “But that’s not the only thing.” Chanelle gnawed on a carrot stick. “It’s these new friends of hers. Those so-called witches, Gretchen and Lindsey? Look, I am totally open to new things. I even went to one of their meetings. You know, a witch meeting. It was so bogus. All these girls in black running around, summoning the spirit of the East…I was like, Uh, could someone please tell me what happened on Grey’s Anatomy last night?” Chanelle’s voice dipped dramatically. “But nobody there knew. Now what is up with that?”

  I sipped my own soda and then said, “Maybe it’s just a phase. Maybe she’ll get tired of it soon.”

  “Not her.” Chanelle started to unwrap a Hostess cupcake. Chanelle’s theory, apparently, was that if she ate nothing else for lunch but diet soda and carrot sticks, she could reward herself with dessert. “Ever since she heard about that great-great-great-grandma of hers, she changed. It’s like she turned into Paris Hilton, or somebody. Only without the fun shopping and the Chihuahua. Suddenly it’s all about parties and black nail polish and putting curses on people. I’m telling you, she really thinks she’s a witch. And it was all right—I totally respect other people’s religions, and all that—but then she started threatening to put spells on people. First it was just teachers and boys and the bitchy senior girls, you know? But then it was me. I can take quite a lot, but being told that someone’s put a spell on me because I won’t help her dig for mushrooms in the waxing light of the moon…”

  “Dig for what in the waxing light of the moon?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Some mushrooms that only grow on headstones. She asked me just now to come with her to some cemetery down on Wall Street in the middle of the night and help her scrape mushrooms off some crumbling old tombstones…. Well, I told her to forget it. I’m not hanging around any old cemetery, and besides, Robert and I have plans tonight, you know? He is my boyfriend, after all, even though he’s kind of lame. Still, he’s cute when he’s not high. I just wish he would stop hanging around that stupid Shawn guy. I don’t know what Torrance sees in him. I really don’t. That boy is bad news. But he’s popular. So Tor meets him in the boiler room every day….” She shook her head until the springy braids her hair was done up in bounced.

  “Anyway, you know what she told me? She told me she didn’t need my help, since her REAL friends would help her. Meaning Gretchen and Lindsey, of course. So I said, ‘Fine, if your REAL friends are so great, you can just eat lunch with them.’ And she went, ‘Fine, at least my REAL friends have something to talk about besides shopping.’ And I went…”

  Mushrooms off a tombstone? What, I wondered, could Tory be up to?

  “Look,” Chanelle said eventually, scooping a fingerful of filling from her cupcake, “I like you, Jinx. You’re kind of a geek, with that violin of yours, and all, but you don’t put people down, and it seems like you aren’t all hung up on witchcraft or clothes or your weight or getting into the right college, like everybody else around here. You wanna be my new best friend?”

  I’d been taking a sip of soda as Chanelle asked this—which was why I nearly choked. It was so like Chanelle—what I knew of her, anyway—simply to come out and ask something like that. Wanna be my new best friend? How on earth could I possibly say no to a request like that, even if I’d wanted to?

  Which, I found, I didn’t. I liked Chanelle.


  And I figured Stacy, with whom I still IMed nightly, would understand.

  “Sure,” I said. “But, um, just until you make up with Tory. Because I know Tory really loves you, Chanelle. She’s just going through a tough time right now. In fact, maybe what we should do is let her know that we’re here for her, whenever she’s ready to, um, calm down.”

  “Or,” Chanelle said, “not. I’m tired of her bossing me around. Hey, wanna come over after school today? I’m trying to decide on a hairstyle for the spring formal. Robert’s taking me. We could give each other makeovers. I would LOVE to get my hands on that hair of yours. Have you ever considered wearing it up?”

  I said, “No. But, sure, I’d love to.” No one had ever invited me over to her house to try out hairstyles.

  Chanelle said, “Excellent!” Then she sobered. “But I think I better warn you: I’m not the only one Tory’s putting a spell on. She says she’s putting one on you, too.”

  I took a bite of my salad. “Really?” I kept my voice carefully devoid of emotion.

  “Yeah. She’s real upset about you and Zach.” Chanelle looked a little like a bird as she cocked her head at me and asked, “Are you two going out, or something?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. Any mention of Zach’s name seemed to have that effect on me. It was pathetic.

  “No,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

  “Well, you guys spend enough time together. My friend Camille says you two skip P.E. together every day.”

  “He’s in love with our au pair,” I said hastily. “Honest.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not what Tory thinks. She thinks you’re purposefully trying to steal Zach from her. She says she’s gonna put such a spell on you, you’re gonna wish you never came here from Idaho.”

  “Iowa,” I said.

  “Whatever.” Chanelle shuddered, even though we were sitting in a puddle of bright sunlight, slanting through the cafeteria windows. “I don’t know, Jinx. I don’t believe in that witchcraft stuff, but the way she said it…it scared me. I’d watch out if I were you. Like, it’s all right for me. I don’t have to live in the same house as her. But you’d better watch your back.”