Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (3 page)

I don’t know why I suddenly felt guilty and embarrassed. But I did—like I’d been caught dissing her or something. Which was ridiculous, because I never, ever would.

Unless just talking to Lance is dissing Meg.

Come to think of it … it sort of is.

Lance, as usual, was unflappable. He jerked his chin at Meg in a friendly way, saying, “Hey”—as if summer never happened.

“Hey,” she responded, but her lack of enthusiasm was palpable. “What are you doing here?”

His gaze flicked down her body, taking in the
ugly
plaid skirt and wh
ite blouse. “Nice outfit, shrimp
.”

“I
t’s her school uniform,” I
muttered
. “As you probably know.”

Meg scowled. “I don’t care what you think,” she told Lance, ignoring me. “I am so over you.”

“Wow,”
said Lance. “So much hostility, i
n such a small package.”

“Small package? Takes one to know one, I suppose.”

Never get into a battle of wits with Meg.

I interposed quickly with diversionary tactics, afraid they would start throwing punches in about three seconds. “Hey, Lance,” I said brightly, “Which bus do you take? Because there goes the last one.” I pointed at it. The last two kids in line were boarding and it was about to take off.

His smile would have told me all I needed to know, even if I couldn’t read his mind. I glanced at the student
parking lot and saw his bike—
and it was no Schwinn. I know nothing about motorcycles, but this one was lean and gleaming and wicked-looking. Rather like Lance, as a matter of fact.

“Oh,” I said.

“Thanks for your concern, babe. See you tomorrow.” He jerked his chin at Meg again and sauntered off. Meg and I stood there with our bicycles and glumly watched him roar away, poetry in motion. My Schwinn didn’t seem quite as groovy as it had five minutes ago.

Meg
turned to me,
her eyes
filled with accusation. “Seriously, Zara, what’s he doing here? And why are you even
talking
to him?”

She had a point.
I th
ink I blushed.

“Hey, I can’t control everything. I guess Lance can go to whatever school he wants to. It’s a free country.”

I hopped on m
y
bike
and sailed off
.

Meg
soon
caught up
.
“You told me you got rid of him.”

“I did get rid of him.” This was going nowhere, for obvious reasons. “Meg, I'm sorry. I don’t know why he came back. I'm clueless, remember? If I understood all this stuff, I wouldn’t need your help to figure it out. Or Lance’s.”

“Well, I wish you’d stick with my help,” she said. “At least I'm on your side.”

“According to Lance, so is he.”

“Rig
ht. And you believe him because
…?”

Meg’s voice dripped with sarcasm. So I grinned and said something noncommittal, something to assure Meg that I trusted her a
bsolutely and Lance not at all.

It probably wasn’t fair. Because it wasn’t strictly true.

I do trust Meg absolutely; that goes without saying. But with Lance, the situation is a little more complicated. I mean, face it, he tried to
suck all the juice right
out of my brain (so to speak)
.
But I'm 100% sure—in a way I can’t be with anyone else—that from his perspective, he was trying to protect me. Among a million other, less pure, motives, he genu
inely wanted to do right by me.

Sort of.

You would think that being able to read someone’s mind would make the relationship
less
complicated. I
t doesn’t. Knowing what Lance was thinking and feeling
while he tried to
break me
just muddies the waters. I shouldn’t have to feel more than one way about a guy who tried to turn me into a
turnip
, if you get what I'm saying.

In contrast, Meg’s opinion of Lance is crystal clear and blessedly consistent. Now that she’s over the mad crush she had on him all summer, that is.

We
headed for
the O'Shaughnessy house so Meg could shuck her school uniform and put on something human. Megan’s home is totally different from mine. For one thing, it’s
messy. For another, it’s
wicked noisy. The
O'Shaughnessies
have five thousand kids—okay, six, but it seems a lot to an only child like me—and too many of them are boys.

The thump of bass from Donald and
Petey’s
room told us that (a) Donald was around and (b) he’d never know that we were. So we nipped past the discarded athletic equipment, dirty shoes, laundry and backpacks littering the hall and ducked into Meg’s room undetected.

Petey’s
okay, but I'm still a little nervous about seeing Donald. I
kinda
saved his life last June,
breaking several planetary rules in the process
. N
ow he looks at me funny.

Meg shares the tiniest bedroom in the house with her only sister, Bridget. But Bridget is away at college now, so she has the place to herself. I sat cross-legged on Bridget’s bed while Meg hung up her skirt and kicked her loafers into the back of the closet, and I filled her in on Lance’s re-emergence.

“So you’re telling me he got here on that motorcycle? No
skatching
?”

I wi
nced. It still sounded strange—not to mention dangerous—
to hear
spellspinner
words like
skatching
spoken aloud. In Meg’s voice,
no less
. “I guess so. Unless he came with that Rune guy. The uncle. But if Rune’s never been to Cherry Glen,
skatching
wouldn’t work for him either.”

“Is the uncle a
spellspinner
?”

“Meg, for Pete’s sake, lower your voice! I think he must be.” I thought about it. “Yeah, if he’s really Lance’s uncle, he'd have to be a
spellspinner
.”

Meg looked disgusted. “So now we have two of them to worry about. Honestly, Zara, I wish you’d just banish the both of them.”

“Yeah, right. It worked so well the first time.”

“I
t did! For a while.”

“That was then. Something tells me it wouldn’t work a second time.”

Meg’s head popped up through the neck of her T-shirt and she
yanked it down, frowning. I kno
w that frown; it appears whenever the wheels of her brain are spinning particularly fast. “You’re right,” she said. “They wouldn’t have bothered coming to Cherry Glen if you could get rid of them that easily.”

I nodded glumly. “I think we’re stuck with them. Unless you think of something.”

“I’ll give it my best shot. Come on, let’s go to your place. I bet
Nonny’s
made cookies.”

So we did, and she had.

The three of us sat around the kitchen table, scattering cookie
crumbs on its oilcloth cover
and knocking back cold milk.
Nonny
peppered Meg and me with questions, and listened to us go on and on about the day, and laughed at everything we laughed at. You could tell she’d looked forward to this—for one thing, she left
Tres
in charge over at the nursery so she could come home and bake. And everything was going swimmingly until I slipped up and mentioned Lance.

Nonny’s
smile
fell
righ
t off her face. She'd been
tilted back in her chair, and the chair
dropped
forward with a thump onto all four legs. “Did you say Lance? Lance
Donovan?”

I hope I didn’t look guilty. What do I have to feel guilty about? It’s not my fault Lance showed up.

“Well, yeah. You knew he was going to start Cherry Glen High this fall. He
told you
he was.”

“You told me he left town. You told me he was gone for good.”

Meg and I looked at each other. Meg raised an eyebrow at me. That meant she wasn’t g
oing to help. Gee, thanks, Meg.

I cleared my throat.
“I guess he came back.”

Nonny
looked fierce. “Well, he’s not coming back to this house, Zara
Norland
. Do you hear me? I don’t want that boy on my property. I'm serious.”

I set my empty glass down
very carefully next to my
plate. “Um,” I said, thinking fast. Thinking fast and coming up with nothing. It’s hard to argue with
Nonny
when she lays down the law, because she hardly ever lays down the law. So when she does, you know it’s important.

I didn’t exactly want Lance on our p
roperty, either. But
I have very little control over what
Lance does or where he goes, so
I didn’t like the idea that if he
did
show up on our doorstep,
Nonny
was going to blame me.

“I'm not going to invite him here, if that’s what you mean,” I finally said. “We’re not friends.”

“I should hope not.”
Nonny
stood up and started clearing stuff off the table. She has to move when she’s upset. “The boy
struck
you. It’s bad enough you have to see him at school. I hope I don’t have to report him to the principal or…or someone.”

It was clear that this distressed her even more.
Nonny
has a problem with authority figures. Which may seem strange, since she’s totally old and everything, but she’s still kind of a hippie at heart. Also she’s been hiding me for, like, sixteen years, without ever actually adopting me,
which is highly
illegal. So she’s not comfortable with ratting people out—not even Lance.

“I hit him back,” I offered, hoping to ease her mind. “It’ll be okay,
Nonny
. Really. Lance and me are even.”

“Lance and I
are even
,” she corrected automatically.

“You too? Gre
at,” I said. Then: “Kidding!”—because
she
immediately
turned and gave me A Look.

Meg was being awfully quiet on the subject.
But s
ure enough, she had an opinion. She gave it to me as she was climbing back on her bike to go home.

“This isn’t real to you, Zara,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me. “With one side of your mouth you are saying, yeah, Lance is dangerous, no, I don’t want him around, gee, I'm so upset that he’s back.” Now she looked at me. “But the other side of your mouth is smiling.”

And with that
parting
shot she took off, leaving me standing on the gravel path
with (probably) a dumb look on my face
. Because as usual, Meg was right.

Lance was all the bad things Meg and
Nonny
said about him, and worse.

And just knowing he was in town made me feel more alive.

I didn’t care to face
Nonny
again just then, so I wandered across the street to the nursery. We were gearing up for fall planting, so
Tres
was out front, showing bulbs to a plump grandma-type. I hung back and watched him for a minute. I like
Tres
.
B
eing around him
calms me down.

He sold the lady a dozen narcissus
c
yclamineus
(
daffodils
,
non-nursery
people call them) and wandered over to where I stood, surveying the ranunculus bin. “Hey,” said
Tres
.
“What’s up?
How you doing?
”

He tends to greet you
three times, which (he says) is
how he got his nic
kname
—
tres
, of course, being Spanish for ‘three.’ But he’s also
Alejandro
Palacios
the Third
, so I bet his family started it.
Anyway, he followed it up with, “How was school?” which was technically four greetings.

“You’re not missing anything,” I told him. “Same old, same old.”

“Good.”

Tres
graduated last June. His part-time job at
Norland’s
Nursery had morphed into a full-time job long before he turned eighteen, and although he doesn’t talk about it, I
kinda
think he barely
passed
his senior year. Which
, speaking purely selfishly,
is a good
thing for me and
Nonny
. W
e’d be screwed if
Tres
went off
to college.