Poison (4 page)

“Okay, okay. Just hold still while I open the—”

At that moment, the door swung open and a large moth—undoubtedly the creature that had unhinged A.J.—flew past me as I knelt awkwardly with my ear to what had been the keyhole.

Clearing my throat, I stood up slowly, trying desperately to think of something cool to say.

The four of them stared at me. Beside an abandoned circle of flickering candles stood a jar half-filled with what looked like oregano. A broken Ouija board lay in pieces on the floor.

“Can we help you?” Summer asked, as if I’d just walked into a White House state dinner wearing spandex and big hair.

“Er . . . ” It took me a moment to gather my thoughts.

“Maybe you’re lost,” A.J. offered.

“The kitchen’s that way,” Tiffany added.

This was a reference to my job cooking in a restaurant after school. I actually liked it, but to Muffies all work was demeaning and to be avoided at all costs.

“I want to know how you did what you did in the cafeteria,” I said as evenly as I could.

“Why?” Summer asked innocently. “Do you want the recipe for tomorrow’s blue plate special?”

“Look, I’m only—”

Then it began, the nightmare that I thought would never end. A.J. was the first to drop. I mean
drop
, out cold, onto the floor in a heap.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Tiffany snarled at me a second before she also collapsed.

I heard sounds behind me. When I turned around, I saw that half the dorm had gathered around the doorway, probably drawn by A.J.’s scream, but now focused entirely on me.

I ran inside. “Summer?” Suzy croaked. Then she hit the floor.

Summer was the only one left. “Summer, are you all right?” I squeaked, putting my arms around her.

Her eyes rolled back in her head. “Oh, snap,” she said. Those were her last words.

•

Miss P wasn’t nearly so lenient this time. “Those girls are in comas,” she said in hushed tones. Her face was drawn with worry. “Summer’s parents took her home today.”

“Miss P, I swear—”

“Don’t speak,” she snapped irritably. “I’ve explained to everyone concerned that we must not jump to conclusions. Any number of things might have caused this. We are beginning with medical inquiries, and all the girls are receiving excellent care. The cafeteria food is being analyzed, as well as anything the girls might have . . . consumed in Summer’s room.”

My thoughts went to the herbs in the jar Summer was keeping in her room. Suddenly I doubted very much that she was storing oregano for a rainy day. I was pretty sure Miss P and whoever else had searched the room might be thinking along the same lines.

“However, if nothing is found to account for this phenomenon—and
I reiterate that every effort is being taken—then we will have to consider a supernatural cause.”

My great-grandmother fanned herself with her handkerchief. “Goodness gracious,” she said.

“I’m terribly sorry to burden you with this, Mrs. Ainsworth.”

“I’m afraid it’s you who has the burden, Penelope,” Gram said. “And Katy, of course.” She patted my hand.

Gram never considered for a moment that what everyone was saying—that I’d bombed into Summer’s room and put a killing hex on all of them—was true. I loved her for that.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and that we’ll find it,” Miss P said, smiling tightly.

“I hope so, dear. Otherwise the effect on the school will be calamitous, I’m afraid.”

Miss P cast a glance in my direction. “I’m aware of that, Mrs. Ainsworth,” she said.

“Can you imagine what would happen if four wealthy cowen families believed that their daughters were killed by
witchcraft
?”

I could. I would go to prison. The school would close. The laws would change. And eventually the persecution against our kind would begin again, just as it had more than three centuries before.

“I’m trying not to think about those possibilities,” Miss P said.

“Well, I suppose it might have been the food,” Gram said halfheartedly, although she knew as well as I did that it couldn’t have been that, because all of the students had eaten the food.

Almost all of us. Everyone except me. I’d been working
at Hattie’s Kitchen during the dinner hour. That was another reason why so many of the students were accusing me.

“They were using a Ouija board,” I whispered.

Both Miss P and Gram gave me bored looks.

“They were talking about how it gave them power.”

“I told you not to speak, Katy.”

“I’m sure she’s just trying to be helpful,” Gram said.

“The Ouija board in question has been examined. It has no intrinsic magic whatsoever.”

Gram looked up at Miss P. “You’re quite sure these girls were cowen?”

“Quite,” Miss P said.

“Still, somebody turned my hamburger into slugs,” I insisted.

“I beg your pardon?” Gram’s handkerchief halted midwave.

Miss P gave me a cold stare.

“Well, it’s true.”

“But not those . . . same individuals, surely,” Gram said.

“It had to have been them,” I said. “I saw it on their faces.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Miss P picked up her paperweight and dropped it with a thud. “Listen to yourself, Katy!”

“I’m telling you, they used magic!”

“And you didn’t?”

“I just made them stink!”

My great-grandmother blinked several times. “Excuse me?”

“There was an incident at the lockers, in which Katy played a prank on . . . some girls,” Miss P admitted.

My great-grandmother was not stupid. “
Those
girls?”

Miss P nodded. “In addition a number of residents in Dorm
C saw her behaving suspiciously prior to her encounter with Summer and the others.”

“I see,” Gram said.

“I’m not accusing you, Katy. In fact, I’m fairly certain that you haven’t the ability to cause the kind of damage we’re talking about. But you have drawn attention to yourself.”

“Oh, dear,” Gram said. She patted her face with her handkerchief.

That was it, of course. The first, last, and most important rule of witchcraft: Don’t get noticed. There was even a motto about that:

KNOW, PLAN, ACT, KEEP SILENT.

Most witch households had those words on display somewhere in their homes as a reminder that their way of life, and sometimes their lives themselves, depended on secrecy.

I hadn’t held strictly enough to that motto, and now there were going to be consequences. I just hoped they wouldn’t involve Peter.

Also, although it probably shouldn’t have bothered me so much, practically no one in the school was talking to me anymore. I began to hear people yelling “Stink!” behind my back in the halls. I heard a rumor that I had changed my lunch into slugs and fingers myself because that’s what I secretly liked to eat. I guessed even witches weren’t immune to the myth of the evil hag who raises toads and roasts children.

But the worst thing was that even my best friends didn’t believe me.

“You used
magic,
” Verity said breathlessly at the door to
my room. Becca Fowler was with her. I guessed the two of them had come to tell me why they’d decided to stand against me.

“The only magic I used was to keep Cheswick out of trouble that day at the lockers,” I said.

“That’s still against the rules,” Verity said. Verity always followed the rules. Every rule, including not talking in the library and not using more than five sheets of toilet paper.

“Maybe you ought to be lecturing your boyfriend, then,” I said icily.

“Oh, I have,” Verity said. “Count on it.”

“Cut it out, both of you,” Becca said. “You know it wasn’t about the locker thing.”

“That’s right.” Verity looked pained. “Those girls are
cowen,
Katy. They couldn’t defend themselves.” Injustice affected her like indigestion. Any hint of unfairness brought out Verity’s inner protester.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t use any magic.”

“Maybe you did and you didn’t even know it,” Becca offered.

“Huh?”

“It could happen,” she said. “I mean, you can do a lot of things no one else can.” She gave a little shiver. “It’s scary.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? What about last summer, when you called up all those dead people?”

“They were spirits,” I corrected.

“Spirits of dead people,” Verity said, as if there were any other kind of spirits.

“Whatever,” I said. I could feel the tension practically
crackling in the air between us, so I ignored them and leafed through a magazine until they left.

And then I burst into tears. I felt just the way I had before I’d moved to Whitfield. For most of my life I’d been an outcast, a motherless freak who’d had to hide my “gift”—though at the time I’d thought it was a curse—from everyone. And then, even though I’d come to Whitfield and Ainsworth School kicking and screaming, I’d discovered that this place was where I really belonged. This was where I found my great-grandmother and my aunt, two people who had loved me since I was born. This was where I’d met Peter, and where I’d learned that there were other people like me in the world. This was where I’d found magic.

But now it was as if none of that had ever happened. The people here didn’t want me any more than the jocks at Las Palmas High had. Even Peter was supposed to keep his distance from me, if he knew what was good for him.

Know, plan, act, keep silent.

As if outcasts like me had any other choice.

•

Then there was the matter of dog poop. I think every Muffy in dorm C made me a gift, presented in one way or another, of dog poop. There was so much poop in front of my door that I had to move out of the dorm and in with my aunt and great-grandmother until I could clear my name.

“Try not to be persuaded emotionally,” my aunt Agnes said as I sat with my head in my hands, recalling the bags of dog poop with which my fellow students had conveyed their feelings about me. “Feelings aren’t facts.”

“It’s a fact that everyone hates me.”

“Now, now, dear,” Gram said sweetly. “We don’t hate you.”

That’s when you know you’ve hit rock bottom, when your relatives are the only people who can stand to be around you.

“Oh, stop sniveling,” Aunt Agnes said irritably. “Your universal unpopularity, whether true or not, is of no importance. What
is
a fact, however, is that actions leave traces. Even magical actions.”

I looked up. “Do you think it was magic?”

“Of course it was magic. Four healthy sixteen-year-old girls don’t suddenly keel over within ten seconds of one another from food poisoning.”

“I thought that was rather far-fetched myself,” Gram interjected. “Even if the food was dreadful.”

“They’d been
dabbling,
” Aunt Agnes pronounced, as if she were accusing Summer and her friends of injecting heroin. “There are ways magic can be worked through cowen. They’re perfect dupes, after all. Since they have no knowledge of magic, they have no fear. The question is, who worked it?”

That was the question, all right. “Well . . . the Ouija board may have had something to do with it,” I repeated stolidly.

“Please, Katy,” Gram said. “Even in the hands of real witches, Ouija boards have all the power of a camera battery.”

“Not necessarily,” Agnes said with a reflective tilt of her head. “Spirits have been known to manifest through a Ouija.”

“Yes,
spirits,
” Gram said. “Insubstantial thought forms. Spirits can hardly knock one unconscious.”

Agnes tapped on the dining room table with her long no-nonsense index finger. “That room must be explored, because there are almost certainly traces to be found.”

“Traces of what?” I wondered.

She raised an expressive hand. “Dust, often. An odor, perhaps, or a stain.”

I blinked. Dust, odors, and stains? Had she ever seen a high school dorm room?

“But surely Penelope—Miss P,” Gram said, nodding at me, “would know to hire a scenter.”

“I’m sure she has already,” Agnes agreed. “Or at least is looking for one.”