The Popularity Spell (12 page)

And that's when a brilliant idea hits me—
blam!
—like that gigantic ball in crab soccer. The easiest answer is right in front of me on the bathroom floor. There's a little bit of dirt, some open magazines Dad reads when he's on the toilet, and…a few pieces of Terri's red hair! Making sure I hear Terri's footsteps far away down the hall, I bend down to the floor and carefully pick them up like I'm Albert Einstein studying matter.

I take two pieces of hair, tiptoe to my bedroom, and find my science notebook. Opening the plastic folder seems like the loudest noise in the world because I'm so afraid Dad or Terri will walk in and ask me what the
bleep
I'm doing.

Luckily Dad yells from the living room, so I know he's not nearby. “Cleo! What are you doing? Terri's here with a hairbrush waiting for you!”

“I'm checking on Millie. I'm coming!” I place the hairs in the plastic folder with Madison's leftover blond one, then slam my notebook closed and run to the living room. Dad has turned on a movie I know he and Terri will enjoy but that will make me want to sleep. There's no reason for Terri to brush my hair now, but I don't know how to get out of it.

So I sit on the floor in front of her while we watch TV, and I let her go crazy on my messy head. It always hurts when I try to brush my hair myself because I let the tangles and knots get out of control. But with Terri, it's not so bad. She holds my hair in a ponytail as she brushes the ends, so it doesn't hurt so much. Then on top she takes it slow and tries to be gentle. I say “ow” a couple of times—I can't help it—but in the end it feels kind of nice, especially when it's all done and she brushes it from top to bottom. Then she hands me the brush and I do it myself too. My hair has never felt so luxurious. I wonder if it's glowing like Madison's does.

“Well, that looks really nice,” Dad says. “You should thank Terri for doing that.”

“Thanks, Terri,” I say, feeling guilty because I know what it was all for. I decide to go to bed and let them watch their movie together, because once Sam and I do the hex, there won't be nights like this anymore.

W
hen I get to Kevin's classroom on Monday, Sam is already in her chair, sitting straight at attention and turned toward the door waiting for me. I can tell by her face that she's wondering about Terri's hair. As I walk by, I nod and whisper, “I got it.”

She nods back with a wink. I don't think I've ever felt so proud.

At lunch we come up with the next part of the plan. Sam doesn't want to wait until the weekend, so she's going to ask her mom to invite us over for dinner during the week. “My mom and your dad can have a date, and we can do the hex.”

“Okay,” I say. “But your mom's gonna have to try really hard because my dad doesn't like me doing fun stuff during the week.”

“Oh, I'll get it done,” says Sam, and sure enough, she does. That night, I hear my dad on the phone saying, “I'm not sure, Paige….We need our weeknights for homework….Cleo's not great at getting it done on time….”

I interrupt, tapping on his shoulder. “What are you saying about homework? I can do it on time. What do you need? I'll do it early!”

“Hold on, Paige,” he says, then turns to me. “If we go to dinner at Samantha's tomorrow night, I'd need you to promise to get your homework done all week long.”

“I promise, I promise!” I promise.

Dad looks at me for a second. I know he's not sure if he should believe me, so I give him my most honest and sincere face, with my eyes wide open and an adorable grin. He sighs and puts the phone back to his ear. “Okay, Paige, that sounds all right.”

Yes! We're managing to get them together even
without
a hex! When Dad hangs up, I hug him and say, “Thank you, thank you! Sometimes you're the best dad in the world.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. “Tell me something I don't know.”

“Ummm, female millipedes lay hundreds of eggs in a nest underground and they hatch after three months.”

“Good one. I definitely did not know that. Now go do your homework.”

“Do I have to?” I ask. But then I laugh so he knows I'm kidding, and I run to my room.

The next night, Dad looks like his usual self: baggy shorts, untucked T-shirt, and hair sticking up—and not in a cool, styled way like an LA actor. “Why didn't you dress up more?” I ask him in Sam's condo's elevator, wishing I had thought of it back home. I mean, the first time he brought Terri to our house, he cleaned it like she was going to be eating off the floor! Now when we're having dinner with his
next
girlfriend, his future
wife,
he can't even tuck in his shirt!

“Why would I?” he says. “We're just going to their house.”

“At least pat your hair down,” I whisper. “Sam's mom always looks so nice.” And when Paige answers the door, she's dressed for a movie premiere or the ballet. As usual. Dad presses his hair down a little, but it doesn't help.

It's early for dinner, but Sam's mom leads us right into her dining room. The table is sparkling clean, with candles and even a bouquet of flowers in the middle. Like a real date, without us even trying! “I hope you don't mind, Bradley,” she says, “but I ordered in from La Vibalatarenzifoo”—or some Italian-sounding name. “I'm not much of a cook!” She tosses her head back and laughs loudly. Dad doesn't.

“Where's Sam?” I ask. I don't like standing there near the adults with the voodoo doll in my backpack. I want to get down to business.

Sam's mom doesn't answer; instead she turns to Dad. “Bradley, I thought the girls might have more fun if they had pizza in Samantha's room while you and I enjoy an adult dinner.”

“Sure,” Dad says. At the same time I say, “Cool! Can I have a Coke too?”

Dad looks at me. I'm hoping he says yes since we're guests in someone's house. “Okay, one,” he says. “But drink it soon, not later. I don't want you going to bed with high-fructose corn syrup coursing through your veins.”

“Okay,” I say, rolling my eyes a little. Paige whinnies her horsey laugh and hands me a Coke. Then I'm off running to Sam's bedroom.

“Sam, I know we're having pizza! And I bet it's the triangular kind!” I shout as I open her door. She looks up from her computer, where she's reading some kind of article. I look over her shoulder. The website she's looking at has pictures of ghosts and haunted houses, and phrases like “unexplained phenomena” and “paranormal mysteries.”

“What's that?” I ask.

“It's a surprise. Do you want a surprise?”

“I always want a surprise,” I tell her, “as long as it's a good one.” I start to pull my backpack off my shoulders.

“Don't!” she shouts. “We're going out.”

“What do you mean, ‘out'?” I'm not happy with this surprise. I want dinner.

“I mean, like, not here.”

“Then where?”

“I said it's going to be a surprise.” I'm just staring at her, so Sam groans and then explains. “I was doing a little voodoo research, and I read that sometimes people do spells in special places that help them communicate with the spirit world.”

This sounds weird and scary, especially with Dad and Sam's mom right down the hall. I don't want to sound like a baby, though, so I just say, “What about the pizza?”

“We'll eat it later.”

Ugh, I don't like this at all. I prefer my triangular pizza
hot.
“How about my Coke?” I ask. She doesn't understand a life where you can't have a Coke any time you want.

“Jeez, you can drink it later! What's the matter with you? I thought you liked action and adventure.”

“I do!” I mean, I draw characters having adventures all the time. But Pandaroo and the Millipede with Many Shoes and even my villain Skunkifer don't have dads who can ground them and keep them from using the computer.

“I want a sister who likes to do the same kinds of things I do,” Sam says, her hands on her hips. “If you're going to be a weeny wimp every time I want to do something fun, maybe we shouldn't be doing this at all.”

Inside it feels like she grabbed a section of my heart and twisted it a little, but I say, “I'm not a weeny wimp!”

“Then come on,” she says. “Do you have a jacket?” I silently show her the zip-up sweatshirt tied around my waist and she nods. “Good. It's getting dark out and it gets a little cold after dark.”

“We're going
outside
?” I ask, realizing too late that this makes me sound both weeny
and
wimpy.

“Where else would we be going? To the
closet
?” She sounds a little snotty—like a certain person we know with the initials M.P.—but I'm not going to tell Sam that.

Sam has already opened the curtains and is pushing up one of her windows. I can see some purple sky above her building's rooftop, and I know it's going to be even darker soon. She already has one leg over the windowsill and is ducking out toward the outdoor hallway right outside the window. I'm glad we don't have to jump or climb down the side of the wall like in the movies, but I'm nervous.

I follow her anyway. What else can I do? Even with the way she just acted, she's my best friend, and if this hex works as well as the others, she'll be my sister. Sisters aren't always totally nice to each other and sisters fight sometimes. I'll have to get used to it.

I put one leg through the window, and it's easy to touch the ground on the other side. But when I try to push my way through, I can't. My backpack is stuck.

“Sam!” I shout.

She's halfway toward the exit sign at the end of the courtyard.

“Shhh!” she snarls. With a glare, she turns around and walks back toward me. “Do you want to get caught?”

“No!” I want to stay in her room, with pizza and Coke.

“Take off the backpack and hand it to me,” she whispers. I do, then climb through the window easily. She's already heading for a staircase.

So I chase after her, down the stairs and out onto the street. Though my legs are twice as long as Sam's, I can't keep up with her. She's carrying the backpack, but I'm the one starting to sweat.

We walk down a neighborhoody street with sidewalks and trees and houses, with apartment buildings in between. I can hear kids playing inside, smell food barbecuing in backyards, and see TVs glowing in windows. Then we reach a bigger street with lots of cars, Caffeine Craze (a coffeehouse I recognize because Dad likes it), a yoga studio, and a traffic light. Dad doesn't like me crossing streets like this by myself, and I can't really blame him, with my lack of focus and all.

None of this worries Sam, though. She pushes a button on the side of the traffic light and it makes a beeping noise. “Where are we going?” I ask. “This is kind of far.”

“It's going to be totally worth it, don't worry,” Sam promises. The light turns green and her feet are off the curb and flying across the street. I follow, imagining how Dad and Paige's cozy, delicious dinner could end at any time, and how they'll open Samantha's bedroom door to find neither of us inside. That would be big, big trouble.

Sam and I start walking by a fence that seems to go on forever. There's lots of grass and trees and bushes behind it, so at first I think it's a park. But when we come to the opening in the fence and turn down a small paved road, I see other things, like benches and flowers and different-shaped stones sticking out of the ground.

Gravestones.

“We're at a
cemetery
?” I don't know why I whisper because I'm not going to wake anybody up. “This is creepy!”

“No, it's cool. It's a place for us to communicate with spirits no longer of this world, like in the thing I was reading online,” Samantha says, enjoying every moment of this. “Plus, this way I can take you to my favorite dead person.”

“You have a favorite dead person?”

She's walking ahead of me, talking as she goes. “I don't
know
the dead person. But when my dad visits, we have picnics here and we always put our blanket on this guy. His gravestone is big and flat on the ground, and it's a perfect place to sit. It'll be a great place to do a hex!”

Okay, that's a little weird, but I guess I'll have to accept that when Sam and I become sisters, I'll have to picnic on dead people. At least when her dad's in town.

I follow Sam down paths and across grass and under a tree that has branches like long, bony octopus tentacles. Then she stops, takes off my backpack, and puts it down. “Here he is,” she announces, standing in front of a large gray square in the ground. “Harold Rocap. 1910 to 1996. Eighty-six years old. Beloved husband and father.”

I pull out my phone and turn on the flashlight to get a closer look. There's a drawing of Harold on the shiny stone—sort of like a cartoon and sort of like a painting. He has a bushy mustache and old-fashioned glasses. At least he used to. Now those glasses might be the only thing left in that grave. Even his clothes would have disappeared into dust by now. Gruesome.

“So let's do it!” Sam says. I kneel down and open my backpack. But instead of thinking about the hex, I'm worried about getting dirt or grass stains on my knees. Dad might notice and wonder how they got there.

Sam's not worried about anything. “Come on!” she urges me.

“Okay, okay,” I sigh. I pull out the voodoo doll, which is still wrapped in my drawing of Pandaroo. The paper has red stains on it from the wine we dipped the doll in. It kind of looks like blood, but that's the last thing I want to think about in a graveyard as it's getting dark outside. I unwrap the paper, realizing I haven't seen the doll since we put him away wet on the night of the last hex. I followed Uncle Arnie's recipe and kept him underneath my bed in the darkness.

The doll is dry now, but the tan material he's made of is stained red all over. It's sad seeing him messed up like this, with cinnamon grains stuck to him and oatmeal flakes falling off. There's a strange smell to him too—a little sour, a little like mud, but with the tiniest whiff of cinnamon. I hand him to Sam and take my notebook out of my backpack, holding my cell phone flashlight toward the plastic folder so I can see Terri's hairs inside. I pull out a strand with my finger and thumb and place it carefully on the doll's yarn hair.