Whispered Magics (16 page)

The principal stabbed a finger toward her face. “Your
brother,” he said, loudly enough for everyone in the parking lot to hear, “is
going to flunk out unless we get some cooperation. One graduate to four
flunk-outs is not a good record, even for you Reeds. You just pass that on!”

“Yes, Mr. Conley.”

The principal glared at Melissa, then me; even the furrows in
his face looked mean. The kids streamed around us, some with sideways looks.

“Go to class,” he ordered.

We hurried away.

“Is your mom going to be okay?” I whispered.

Fay gave her head a shake. “Nothing wrong with her. Matt’s
problem, not mine.”

We ran up the steps into the relative safety of the corridors.
Kids yelled and screamed, lockers slammed, and bodies rushed by.

Melissa said, “I think it’s humiliating that he should single
us out like that, for something that isn’t even our fault.”

I knew why the principal had done it—to make Melissa and me
feel embarrassed, so we’d stop hanging out with Fay. Teachers had tried it,
too, but there were usually sneakily nice and reasonable about it. Mr. Conley
didn’t have to be subtle. No one stood up to him, ever. Our parents were still
afraid of him, just as they’d been when they were in school.

Our lockers were right in a row. “Library after school?” Fay
asked, looking at both of us. “You don’t have ballet, Missy, and I know you
don’t have band practice.” This last was to me.

“But I might,” I said. “Mrs. Lopez threatened us with extra
practice if we can’t get that jazz thing right. Of course, maybe a miracle will
happen and we will,” I said.

“I can’t,” Melissa said quickly. “Madame has invited me to
observe the senior technique class. I can learn a lot that way.”

“Oh.” Fay hunched a little further into her coat. “Okay.”

We walked in silence toward homeroom, Melissa and I to Mr.
Kent, A-L, and Fay on down the hall to Mrs. Nashimura, R-Z.

As soon as Fay was gone, I said to Melissa, “You can watch the
seniors do ballet any day, can’t you?”

Melissa rounded on me. “She lied to us.” Her blue eyes were
fierce, her pretty mouth tight. The only reason the three of us hadn’t been
made fun of long ago was that Melissa was the prettiest girl in the school, and
probably the most talented. She gave a quick look around to make sure we
weren’t overheard, then dropped her voice to a whisper. “I don’t care if she
lies to Conley or even to teachers. But not to us.”

“You mean about the dog?” I’d almost forgotten it, after that
scene with Mr. Conley. When Missy gave a short nod, I said, “She’s just doing
some kind of story-game. Like being an alien, or the Middle Earth Radio thing.”

Two years before, Fay had had this idea that an alien had
traded bodies with her. She’d said it to everyone, and we’d gone along with it.
Missy seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, the same as when Fay had announced
the summer before that she had found a radio station that tuned in to Middle
Earth. For a while she brought us news, every day, about the doings of the
Fourth Age Gondorians and Hobbits and Riders of Rohan.

“She knows it’s not real,” I said. “It’s just acting—like she
did just now with Conley.”

I knew as soon as I said it that this had been a mistake,
because Melissa’s mouth just got tighter. Before I could start on the
difference between games and realities, Melissa opened the door. “Then maybe
it’s time to stop,” she said over her shoulder, and she went into the
classroom, her head queen-high, her skirt swirling around her long,
ballet-trained legs.

A group of boys watched her, and one of them said something I
couldn’t hear, but she ignored them as she slammed her books onto her desk.

I was still blocking the doorway, so I went in. Of course no
one noticed me—something I was glad of, for I needed to think. It was the first
time Melissa had ever said anything outright that meant the friendship might
break up. Lately she’d been getting busier and busier with her ballet, while
last year we met at the library practically every day. Before that, we’d met at
the park and played out our versions of stories we read or saw. But now it was
changing; the two most important people in my life were pulling away, and I
didn’t know how to fix it. I felt sick inside, much worse than Conley had tried
to make me feel—and then I’d only felt bad for Fay.

At lunch we sat together, as always. But instead of story
talk, Melissa went on brightly about tests and teachers, and even the weather.
I did my best to keep that stupid conversation going. Instead of talking, Fay
was quiet. In fact, it was hard to look at her, sitting there so short and
square in the ugly neon-purple coat all of her sisters had worn—after they,
too, got it as a hand-me-down.

I ate as fast as I could and tried to get things back to
normal as I held out my lunch bag to Melissa. “I’m full,” I said. It was my
turn to have leftovers. “Anyone want that extra ham sandwich?”

But then Melissa put her bag down on the bench and got up. “I
promised Miss Dobson I’d come and watch the tryouts. I better go talk to her.
See you guys later.”

She walked away. I leaned over and picked up her lunch bag
because I knew Fay wouldn’t. In all our years together, Missy and I had never
seen Fay bring a lunch, but she never asked to share, and she wouldn’t
scrounge. Plenty of people scrounged, football players especially. But not Fay.
Though she would take leftovers rather than let them go to waste.

So I pretended to see if Melissa had left anything in the bag
that I’d like, and I said, “This Brigadoon thing is really important to her.
Dance scholarships and things.”

Fay stared stonily at the ham sandwich in my hand, so I shoved
it into my coat pocket. When she did speak, it took me by surprise. “She
doesn’t believe in magic anymore.”

“It’s not that—” I started, but then I stopped. I just
couldn’t say anything about lies. If you play around with little girls who lie,
you might become a liar, too, Mrs. Kemble had said to me in fourth grade, her
crow voice plenty loud enough for Fay to overhear. You’re a nice girl from a
nice home, and your parents have good standards….

That line we’d heard a lot, but it had always been
meaningless. My house was too small and we all hated it, but we couldn’t afford
to move. And people said it to Melissa, whose parents were divorced.

I handed Melissa’s bag to Fay, hoping at least she’d take the
apple, but she just set it down. Her face was blank, her neck invisible. She
looked at me the way she looked back at adults like Mrs. Kemble and Conley the
Creep.

I searched for a way to sidestep the subject of lies, to heal
the breach, and then I saw it.

“She’s making her dream into reality,” I said, remembering
something Melissa had told me recently. It had sounded something like one of
those stupid things teachers tell you, like, “achieving your goals,” but it fit
now. “Even when we played those games in the park, you know what her part
always was: She had to be the princess, or the shepherd girl, or the witch’s
kid who saved the prince, or hypnotized a dragon, or saved the world—by
dancing.”

I smiled at the memory of Melissa’s scrawny form dancing among
the trees. When she danced she wasn’t scrawny, she was light and graceful. That
day her long brown hair was crowned with a garland of leaves that the three of
us had put together, making her look like something out of Greek mythology and
not a real human being. Grownups used to stop dead on the path, watching her.

“Dance is magic for her,” I finished. “And all her energy is
going into making it real.”

“Magic,” Fay said in her flattest voice, “already is real.
Gandalf said as much in
The Lord of the
Rings
. But not everyone can see it.”

Could I talk about lies without having to say the word?

“But Gandalf isn’t real,” I said.

“Of course he is. Tolkien believed in Middle Earth,” Fay
stated. “You can see it in that poem, ‘Mythopoesis.’” She pronounced it carefully
and probably wrong. None of us knew how to say it—the teachers had never heard
of the poem. The only poems they seemed to know were ones like “Daffodils.”

The bell rang, startling us both. I was angry with myself for
getting sidetracked into arguing about whether Middle Earth was real or not,
when what I wanted was for the three of us to go back to being best friends.

But Fay stood there stolidly, looking at me with that round,
blank face, Melissa’s lunch bag sitting forgotten on the bench between us. She
said, “Missy doesn’t believe me and you don’t, either.”

So that was that. I walked away, and she didn’t call me back.

My next class could have disappeared into a time warp for all
I noticed. I sat there staring at my notebook, getting madder by the minute.

I couldn’t believe it. Fay wanted me to prove our friendship
by believing in lies. Who was that supposed to impress?

In band that afternoon, we sounded terrible.

“Well,” Mrs. Lopez said, “since some of you can’t seem to find
the time to practice at home, we’ll use our scheduled hours after school.
Report back at three-oh-five.”

Everyone else groaned, but as I put my flute away, I was
relieved. Now I wouldn’t have to see Fay at three. I wouldn’t have to do
anything about that promise to go to the library.

But after practice, I got a nasty shock.

Mr. Conley was standing there on the steps, as if he hadn’t
moved since eight that morning. Seeing him, the band members kind of froze up
in the doorway, like a clump of zombies.

“Come here.” He crooked his finger at me.

The other students swarmed around me like fish in a stream,
glad to escape the hook.

“Yes, sir?” My voice quavered. I hated it.

“The United States mail never seems to reach the Reed
residence, and they do not possess a telephone. On the chance,” he said with
heavy sarcasm, “that Mrs. Reed has miraculously recovered from her foot injury,
you may deliver this to her while you are consorting with your friend.”

And he thrust a sealed envelope into my sweaty hands.

He turned away. I gulped some air in past my pounding heart.

I didn’t tell him that I’d never been to Fay’s house—didn’t
even know, except kind of generally, where it was. Nor did I ask why I should
do his job for him, especially one (I realized as I looked at the address
penciled on the envelope) that would take the rest of the afternoon. One didn’t
refuse Mr. Conley.

Instead, I went back into the gym and used the public phone to
call my mom. “I have to do something for the principal,” I said. “I guess I’ll
be home later.”

There was a tiny silence; then of course Mom said, “Well, try
to get home before dark.”

I thought about everything on the long bus ride across town.
If I had any kind of dream, it was to get a long way away from this town and
Conley the Creep. But I had to learn how to deal with the Mr. Conleys of the
world.

College was the way, I thought as I leaned my head against the
dirty bus window and watched the streets lurch by. I thought about how money
was a constant worry in my family; Mom’s hours at the flower shop were always
getting cut back, and though Dad had recently been promoted to manager at the
gas station where he’d always worked, his raise had gone straight into the
family fund to take care of my great-aunt Sarah, who had Alzheimer’s.

Reality for my parents was the town where they’d always lived,
the jobs they’d always had, and the people they’d always known.

The bus reached the highway outside of town and I got off. So
far I’d managed not to think about what I’d say to Fay if I saw her.

I’d never been asked to Fay’s home. Though she, Melissa, and I
had been best friends for years, we’d always met at the park and then at the
library. Every year Missy and I invited her to our birthday parties, and Fay
always thanked us, but she always had something to do those two days. The only
two days of the year she was busy.

We hadn’t questioned her about it; it was just the way things
were. And considering how much the adults of our town were always complaining
about the Reeds—whether Matt, Mark, or Luke, or Charity or Hope or Prudence—it
was easier that way than to explain that we were friends with one of the Reeds
you didn’t hear much about.

Their place was easy to find. One side of the highway was
nothing but scrubland, the other a group of rotting buildings, long abandoned.
Near a clump of dusty trees squatted a rusting old trailer, with a kind of shed
made of battered pieces of sheet metal hammered to the back. Several junker
cars rusted around the trash- and weed-choked yard.

I trudged up the rutted dirt road toward the trailer. My heart
started hammering when I saw a group of older boys, all tough-looking, standing
around the engine of an ancient pickup. Nearby, four or five younger kids were
playing some kind of game. They were all thick-built, like Fay, but some were
blond and some redheaded.

They stopped playing when they saw me. “Get lost, buttnugget,”
a boy yelled at me.

The others laughed; then the big guys looked around.

“Well, hel-lo, baby,” one said, with a nasty sneer. “Come on
over, let’s check you out!”

The others greeted this with yells of brainless laughter and
disgusting suggestions. Fear choked me; I was ready to drop that envelope and
run.

Then a pair of legs appeared from under the car, followed by a
muscular torso and a square face with blond hair.

“Shut up,” the young man said, and they shut up.

I stared. It was Joseph Reed, the oldest, the only Reed to be
graduated from high school, though several of them were over eighteen. He was
also the only one with a job; he worked, as it happened, for my dad.

He’d never talked to me before, but it was obvious he knew who
I was. “Fay’s inside, doing homework,” he said, pointing a blackened thumb over
his shoulder.