Spells Like Teen Spirit Read online

  I started down the gravel driveway, walking carefully because it was uneven and there were a couple of deep puddles. It was littered with bottle caps and cigarette butts and broken glass, and a small rectangular piece of plastic that caught my eye and made my heart start to pound. I glanced quickly back at the house. The door was closed and the Pink Floyd tapestry didn’t look like it had been disturbed, but just in case, I bent down like I was tying my shoe. I scooped up the piece of plastic, and then stood up and ran back to the car.

  Janis and Cassandra were waiting anxiously for me. I opened the door and climbed in. I threw the flyer at Janis, and then turned around and handed what I’d picked up to Cassandra.

  “What is this?” I heard Janis say. “It looks like an autograph. Though, I can’t read it. Wait, yes, I can. Tom? You talked to Tom.”

  Cassandra was holding the piece of plastic in her hand. “Wait, are you serious?” she said. “You think this…”

  “Cass, it has to be!” I said. “And that means she was there! Sometime right after we saw her!”

  “Wait, what are you two looking at?” Janis asked, turning around. “A name tag? Who’s Cybill?”

  “It was my mom’s,” Cassandra said. The pin had broken off the back, the plastic was scratched, and the black paint that had filled in the engraved letters had all but worn off.

  “Your mom’s name is ‘Circe,’ ” Janis said.

  “Technically it’s ‘Cecilia,’ ” I said.

  “Wait,” Janis said. “I’m confused.”

  “My mom went by ‘Circe,’ ” Cassandra explained, “but when we were staying at the hotel for the Summit and we saw her and she said she was going to help us remove my curse, she was going by ‘Cybill.’ ”

  Janis’s eyes grew as wide as lily pads. “Whoa,” she said. “And you just found that now?”

  I nodded. “In the driveway,” I said. “The neighbor I talked to said four young guys moved in here back in December. She said she thinks there’s something weird going on, and they hardly leave the house.”

  “Goddess bless nosy neighbors,” Janis said.

  “The Summit was in December,” Cassandra said. “These guys started updating their Myspace page in December and moved here in December, and if that was my mom at the hotel during the Summit, she went missing in December.” She shoved the name tag into her pocket. “Eff it,” she said. “If my mom’s in there, I’m going in.” She grabbed the door handle and pushed the door open, and just as quickly I used my powers to pull it shut.

  “Cass, stop!” I said.

  “Esme,” she said, throwing her weight against the door, “let me out of this car or I will set it on fire.”

  “Like hell you will!” Janis shrieked.

  I clamped my kinesis down even harder on the door. “We can’t just go back there and pound on the door and demand to see Circe! For all we know, she’s not even there anymore.”

  Cassandra slumped back into the seat and crossed her arms over her chest. “When we saw her at the Summit, she told us she had something for us, but then she disappeared. She wouldn’t do that unless someone made her,” she said. “Unless they made her. She has to be there, because where else would she be?”

  “Cass,” I said, keeping my powers firmly locked on her door, “there are a million places she could be, but I know what you mean. I get it. I really do. For the past four months, all anyone has been telling me is that now is not the time to do anything about my mom. But honestly, now is not the time to do anything about your mom. If she is in there, we have to know for sure, because if you go busting in there now, and she’s not there, then that might blow our chances of finding out where she really is.”

  Cassandra huffed and looked away from me, to stare out the window down the street, a sign that she was at least listening to me.

  “Those guys aren’t demons, so we can’t just run in and flush them up a hole. Even if they’re evil humans, they’re still humans.” I paused, and took my kinesis off her door, and it stayed shut.

  “I know, I know,” she said, uncrossing her arms and pulling a stick of gum out of her pocket, then jamming it into her mouth. “But what are we supposed to do? Just sit here!”

  Janis hit the steering wheel with her palm. “That’s exactly what we’ll do!” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Cassandra asked.

  “We’ll have a stakeout,” she said. “We already have the coffee and doughnuts.” She looked into the doughnut bag, which was empty. “Well, we already have the coffee, so we’ll hang out here and see when they leave and where they go.”

  Cassandra started nodding. “Yeah,” she said. “Then we’ll know when the house is empty, so we can break in and see what we can find.” Sitting in Janis’s car and passively watching from a distance sounded like a good plan to me. What did not sound like a good plan was breaking and entering, but I figured I would just have to put out that fire once Cassandra had started it.

  “We’re going to need more than one car, though,” Janis said, “because there are four of them, and if some of them leave, we can’t stay here and watch the house and follow them at the same time.”

  “We can call Brian,” I offered. “He won’t be happy that we’re not at school, but he probably won’t care about that once he knows that Circe is involved. I bet he can call in sick for the afternoon—”

  But Cassandra already had her phone out. “No way,” she said. “That’ll take too long, and he’ll just make us do something boring and stupid that doesn’t break any rules. I’m calling Dion.”

  “Your brother?” I asked. “The same one who once kidnapped my babysitting charge?” She just nodded, so I tried another tactic. “Doesn’t he have to work?”

  “He won’t go,” she said. “He wants these guys to pay for what they did to our house just as much as I do.” She paused for a second. “Look, Esme, my brother’s not the best, we know that. But he’s not the worst either. And besides, who else are we going to call?”

  “Ghostbusters,” I couldn’t help but say, under my breath, and then Dion picked up on the second ring. I sipped my iced coffee and looked out the window. The gray sky had started to spit rain, and the drops that ran down Janis’s window mirrored the drops of condensation on my cup. From what I could hear of the conversation, he was on his way to work, but readily agreed—and was even eager—to call in sick as soon as Cassandra explained to him what was going on.

  I wasn’t totally surprised that Cassandra wanted to rope him in on our plans. Brian and I had let her take the lead on deciding how to deal with Dion after the events of Halloween, and I trusted her evaluation of how much of a threat Dion actually was. The more time I spent around him lately, the more I was realizing that he wasn’t really threatening, just maybe kind of confused.

  “I’ll send you a pin,” I heard Cassandra say, and then she hung up her phone. Dion was on his way.

  The truth was, I wasn’t really worried about Dion doing anything that could compromise our investigation. It was just…I didn’t really want to hang around him. I now had no doubt that Dion was an idiot, but he was an idiot I’d once had a crush on, and there’d even been a time when I didn’t think he was an idiot. A time when he’d told me how he’d gotten a job in construction because he’d wanted to build buildings from the time he was a little kid; a time when he’d bemoaned his crappy tattoo, and told me about the not-crappy-at-all reason why he’d gotten it. And I’d taken such faux-confidences to heart, and dropped my guard, sharing info that I shouldn’t have. Info that Dion had taken right to Erebus, and which no doubt had helped to get MacKenzie kidnapped. I hated thinking that I’d once just assumed that, yeah, of course, a guy who looked like Dion could totally be into a girl like me. The whole thing was just…embarrassing.

  I pulled out my phone and looked at the time. First period had officially begun twenty-three m
inutes ago. I wondered if anyone would notice I was gone, and if so, would they call Dad?

  “Do you think we’ll get in trouble for skipping school?” I asked Janis, and she shook her head.

  “I already sent an email from my mom’s account, saying that I was staying home today because I had bad cramps,” she said. I sometimes thought what a shame it was that it was me, and not Janis, who was the Sitter. As long as it didn’t involve the post office, Janis was always at least two steps ahead of everyone else in the room.

  “So, while we’re all here together, I’m gonna share the spreadsheet I made for this weekend,” she continued, then tapped her phone a couple of times. My phone dinged, and I looked down to find a link to a Google doc called “Spring River V-Day Staycation.”

  “You made a spreadsheet?” I said, looking back up at Janis. “For what?”

  “Well, we need a schedule,” she said. “We don’t want people to get bored. Esme, you can see the time frames I blocked off for you to fill in. I figured we’d spend all day Saturday thrifting….” Cassandra pretended to snore, and Janis shot her a look. “But that still leaves Friday night, Saturday night, and all day Sunday.” She looked at me expectantly.

  “Uh, movies?” I asked.

  Janis rolled her eyes.

  “We can always get coffee,” I said, to crickets. “A lot of coffee.”

  “Isn’t there a school dance on Saturday night?” Cassandra asked. “Like, something for Valentine’s Day?”

  Janis’s and my heads both swiveled to look at her. A Valentine’s Day dance was the last thing I would ever imagine Cassandra even knowing about, much less caring about.

  “As a matter of fact, there is,” Janis said. “Are you suggesting that we go?” But before Cassandra could answer, a loud pop made us all jump, and sure enough, Dion’s van was a few blocks down the street, backfiring its way toward us.

  “Is this even going to work?” I asked. “That’s not exactly a covert ops vehicle.”

  Dion pulled up across from Janis and rolled down the window. “So, which house is it?” he asked.

  “That little gray one right there,” Janis said, pointing down the block. “The one with the purple car in the driveway.”

  “Ha,” Dion laughed. “That’s their car? What a bunch of dweebs.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I said under my breath.

  “So, what’s the plan here?” he asked. “I brought my binoculars.” He held them up through the open window, and Cassandra got out of the car, then walked over and snatched them out of his hand.

  “Awesome,” she said. “These will be great for Janis and me.”

  “Those are mine!” Dion said, at the same time I said, “What do you mean, you and Janis?”

  “The whole reason we needed two cars was so that we could split up,” she said. “Janis and I are going to stay here and watch the house, and whenever someone leaves, you and Dion are going to follow them and see where they go.”

  “Why not you and Dion and me and Janis?” I said, trying not to show how truly unhappy I was with this pairing.

  “Because he’s my brother,” she said as if this were all the explanation that was needed.

  “If you’re taking my binos, do I at least get a walkie-talkie?” Dion asked.

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “You sure do,” I said. “It’s called your phone.”

  “Oh, ha,” he laughed. “You’re right. I guess I can just put it on speaker and hold it like this.” He grabbed it horizontally, and then held it up to his mouth while he made a bunch of beeps and crackly noises. In spite of myself, I smiled. “Come on, Es,” he said. “Your chariot awaits.”

  “Here, I’ll get your bag,” Cassandra said, coming back to Janis’s car and grabbing my bag through the open window. I took a long sip of my coffee while I sat there, stalling. Then I had no choice but to get out of the car and into the van. So I did.

  Inside, the van smelled like Dion, which was a combo of alpine body wash and cinnamon gum. Like Cassandra, he didn’t drink coffee, but downed pop like plastic bottles were biodegradable, and he had a large bottle of Mountain Dew in the cup holder, next to an open bag of powdered-sugar doughnuts. “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing toward them. “I figured we couldn’t have a stakeout without doughnuts.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but we got doughnuts on the way.”

  He nodded. “So, you really think my mom’s in there?”

  “That’s one option,” I said.

  “What are the others?”

  “Well, she was there at one point, and isn’t anymore,” I said, “and the other is that she was never there at all.”

  “But even if that’s the case, you think these guys would know where she is?”

  I thought for a minute, and then decided to level with him. After all, Circe was his mom too. “Maybe,” I said. “We know they were connected to your dad, and we know that there’s something weird going on with them. So I guess, right now, they’re our best hope.”

  Dion nodded, then picked up the Mountain Dew, unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, and put it back. “You want to listen to music?” he asked. “The radio stopped working again, but we can play something from my phone. Do you like Maroon 5?”

  “No, stop!” I said quickly, hoping to put an end to the Maroon 5 before he could cue it up. “No music. The silence is okay.”

  He nodded and put the phone into the cup holder. Then we both sat there quietly, looking out the window at the house down the street. The last time Dion and I had been alone together had been before Halloween, when we’d traded Mean Girls quips and I’d used magic to fix his tattoo. It was back to its original state now, with thick blurry lines and runny colors, and I wondered if Dion remembered it any other way. I wondered if he remembered hanging out with me. But like heck was I going to ask about either of those.

  In Janis’s Honda, I could see that Cassandra had reclined the seat so that she was barely visible above the window, and Janis was bobbing her head as she painted her nails. They were probably listening to something good. It definitely wasn’t Maroon 5.

  “So,” Dion said finally. “When you say this band is your ‘best hope,’ you mean best hope for what?”

  I thought for a minute. That was actually a pretty good question. “I guess for finding your mom,” I said.

  I was looking at Dion out of the corner of my eye, and I could see him swallow. “Why would she hide from us?” he asked. “I mean, we’re her kids.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for him. Being a spectator in your own family probably didn’t feel great. “I doubt she’s been gone all this time because that was what she wanted to do,” I said. “It was probably just what she had to do.”

  “Do you think it’s different now?” he said. “Now that Cass is what she is.”

  “A Sitter?” I asked.

  He gave a little laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “I just feel weird saying the word. I still don’t really understand it.”

  “Ha,” I said. “I don’t either. But finding your mom, that would help us all understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?” he asked.

  “Why my mom is cursed,” I said, fiddling with a peeling piece of plastic on the door, “or rather, why she’s still cursed. Your mom and my mom were friends, and I think that Circe might care, and be able to tell me what to do about it. Every other adult I’ve tried to talk to basically just gives me the same story.”

  “Which is?” Dion asked.

  “Oh, you know,” I sighed. “All the typical adult BS—life isn’t fair, learn to accept the things you cannot change, be grateful for what you do have. All those platitudes that are just different ways of saying ‘do nothing.’ ”

  I looked over at him, and he was holding out the doughnuts toward me.

  “You sure you don
’t want?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe one.” Dion grinned as I reached into the bag.

  “I know what you’re saying,” he said, a dusting of powdered sugar on his chin. “I mean, I know what it’s like to want something to change so bad that you’ll do anything to change it. I mean, I helped kidnap a kid because I thought it would make my life better.” He looked out the window. “I should be in jail.”

  “Dion,” I said, surprising myself with my genuine desire to make him feel better, “that was your dad.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but he was only able to use me like that because I let him. If I’d been a stronger person, it never would have gotten to that point. I would have smashed that stupid 8 Ball as soon as I’d found it. It would have saved us all a whole lot of trouble.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, if that hadn’t happened, then maybe I never would have— Oh crap! Look!” Someone had come out the front door of the house and was getting into the PT Cruiser. Two seconds later, they backed out of the driveway and started down the street. They all looked the same to me, though, so I couldn’t tell if it was the same guy—Tom—I’d talked to earlier.

  “All right!” Dion said, turning the key and starting the van. “It’s showtime. At least a car like that won’t be hard to tail.” He let the purple Cruiser get to the end of the block and go around a corner before he pulled out. I shifted in my seat and gave a little wave to Janis and Cassandra, who was now sitting up.

  “So, what do we know about these guys?” he asked.

  “Well, they make terrible music, and they all live here together,” I started. “We don’t know if any of them have jobs, and we don’t even know their last names. Their first names are Tom, Todd, Brad, and Chad. They just showed up here in December, though the house is owned by someone also named Tom, so maybe a relative?”

  Dion nodded but kept his attention focused on the car in front of us. He never let it get too far ahead, and he always kept one or two cars in between us. He even cut through a gas station parking lot so we wouldn’t get caught at a light after the purple PT made a right turn.