Spells Like Teen Spirit Read online

  “If I find whoever broke into my house, they’re going to regret that they ever even drove down this street,” he said. Color had crept into his face, and I could see that one of his hands was clenched.

  “We couldn’t both go,” Cassandra said, her voice exceedingly calm. “We decided that someone needed to always be here to watch the house, remember? Besides, we got kicked out right away anyway. It was twenty-one and up.”

  Dion scoffed. “Don’t you guys have spells for that?” he asked. Cassandra looked up and caught my eye. In my nervousness at the bar, spelling the bartender had never crossed my mind, and I guess she hadn’t thought of it either.

  “Not tonight,” she said. Janis sat down at the table and started to unzip her boots. I pulled out a chair and sat next to her, and Cassandra plopped down on the couch. Dion sat again, slowly, next to her. Shoes off, Janis tucked her feet under her, then pulled out her phone and was soon absorbed in it.

  “So, what’d they sound like?” Dion asked.

  “Dunno,” Cassandra said. “We had to leave before it even started. They had drums and a guitar, though, and I’m assuming they were going to play them.”

  “What’d they look like?” Dion asked.

  “Exactly the same as the photo on the flyer,” Cassandra said. “Except they have a new name. They’re ‘Phantom Limp’ now.”

  “Oh,” Dion said. “That’s kind of a dope name.”

  “No, it’s not,” Cassandra said with the same inflection of someone saying that the sky was blue.

  “They had on jeans and T-shirts, and one of them was wearing a newsboy cap,” I said. “Oh, and lots of jewelry, and two of them looked like they’d dyed their hair black and straightened their bangs. They might have been cool twenty years ago, but I doubt it.”

  “This is super weird,” Janis said, looking up from her phone. “I tried to look them up yesterday, after you showed me the flyer, and didn’t find anything.”

  “Same,” I said. “I couldn’t find any of their social media accounts when I looked, but if they keep changing their name, maybe their accounts are changing too?”

  Janis nodded, looking back down at her phone. “Possible,” she said. “But now I’m doing a deep dive on Jacking Lanterns and Phantom Limp, and I still can’t find anything.”

  I watched Janis curiously. Cassandra and Dion didn’t know Janis well enough to understand how weird it was that she couldn’t find anything. Janis was a keyword queen. She could find any information online, and she was like a psychic at interpreting it. If Janis and Google had been around in 1996, we’d know who shot Tupac.

  “You can’t find anything?” I asked. She didn’t answer, just shook her head, her thumbs a blur.

  Then, all of a sudden, she dropped the phone like it was a too-hot Hot Pocket. “Holy crap,” she yelped.

  “What’d you find?” I asked, jumping to my feet and leaning in to look at the phone in her lap.

  “Well, apparently they’re not on Facebook, Instagram, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, or YouTube,” she said. “But they’re still updating their Myspace page, where they were known as the Deltoids two weeks ago, before they were Jacking Lanterns or Phantom Limp.”

  “I know about deltoids,” Cassandra said, joining us around the phone, “but I have no idea what Myspace is.”

  “There’s no reason for you to,” I said.

  “They even have their flyer up for their show tonight,” Janis said. “Though, they must have changed their name again after they posted it.” She picked up her phone and started scrolling again, and we all watched her in silence for a minute. “There’s a lot of stuff on this Myspace page, and it goes pretty far back.” She paused and cleared her throat. “There are two super-weird things about this.”

  “Go on,” Cassandra said, probably picking up on the fact that she was in the presence of a master.

  “Well, the first one is the frequency of their posts,” Janis explained. “They updated pretty regularly in the early 2000s, then took about a fifteen-year break.” She peered at her phone again, and turned it sideways. “Then started to go hard again a little less than two months ago.”

  “The Summit was two months ago,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Janis said. “And then there’s this.” She held her phone out, and I took it from her. “They apparently got some really bad band photos taken back in the day, and they must have been super proud of them,” Janis continued as Cassandra came to look over my shoulder. “They’ve always used the same photos, even though it seems like they probably change their name more often than they change their underwear.”

  We leaned in to get a better look. There were several shots of the band standing on a train track, and some of them in a room, shot with a fish-eye lens. The whole thing was just…tragic. Janis clicked through to another picture, and I stared at it. It took me a second to realize what was different. This photo was a little bit older, it seemed, less professional, and there weren’t four guys; there were five.

  “Wait…,” I started.

  “Holy crap,” Cassandra said, grabbing the phone right out of my hand.

  Holy crap was right.

  The fifth band member wasn’t just any guy.

  It was Erebus.

  Cassandra passed the phone back to me, and I held it close to my face to get a better look. “Don’t lick it, Esme,” Janis said. I’d only seen Erebus once, on Halloween, and Dion had one picture of him, but sure enough, this guy looked just like Erebus. It also jogged the thing in my brain, the red flag that had started waving as soon as I’d seen the band but that I couldn’t quite place: they all dressed like Erebus.

  “The page was archived almost fifteen years ago,” Janis said, putting into words what we were all trying to process, “so that photo has to be at least that old, but they all look exactly the same.”

  “Is there a way to fake the archiving?” Cassandra asked.

  “Probably,” Janis said. “But it wouldn’t be easy. And why would someone do that? Even if they wanted to, I doubt they’d know how, anyway. Judging from their online presence, or lack thereof, I don’t think these guys are exactly tech savvy.”

  Cassandra, Janis, and I just stood there, none of us saying anything, all staring at Janis’s phone. Dion had been listening, and now he got up and walked over to us. “Can I see?” he asked. Janis handed her phone to him, and he looked at it. “What’s the big deal?” he said. “They’re band photos.” Then he did a double take. “Wait…,” he said, looking again in a way that made me think Dion probably needed glasses. “That’s Dad.” Then he looked up at us. “This was his band?”

  “I guess so?” Cassandra said. “Unless he had more than one.”

  Dion shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “You didn’t see them tonight,” I told him, “but they all still look exactly the same. And so did your dad, on Halloween. But if he’s in these photos, then that means they were taken over a decade ago. How old would your dad be?” I asked Cassandra.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but old. At least forty.”

  I nodded. “Though, bad fashion taste aside, when we saw him, he looked like he could have just graduated from high school a few years ago,” I said. “And same with the band tonight. There are seniors at school who look older than they do. What do you know about them?” I asked Dion.

  “Nothing, I swear,” he said, and the frightened look on his face said that he was telling the truth. “He called the band ‘Zeus Riot,’ and all he ever said in his journal was that they rocked and they were going to get really big.”

  I sighed.

  “Yeah, we’ve heard that before,” Cassandra said.

  “But if Erebus got banished, why are they still here?” Janis asked.

  “I have no idea,” Cassandra said, “but we’re going to find
out, that’s for sure.”

  The three of us jumped when my phone rang. I pulled it out of my bag and put Jim Halpert on speaker phone. His voice sounded excited.

  “You were right,” he said. “There’s a new red spot. It just showed up tonight, and it’s bright. It’s at”—he paused—“Twenty-First and West Street.” We could hear him typing. “A place called…”

  “Ray’s Pool Bar and Hot Dog Grill,” we all said in unison.

  “Thanks, B.,” I said. “We were just there and thought something was up.”

  “It’s not too far from here,” Brian said. “I’ll swing by and let you know what I find.”

  “Sounds good,” Cassandra said, and we all looked at each other as I hung up the phone. She ran her fingers through her hair, sighing as she shook her head. “I feel better now.”

  I looked at her, confused. “You feel better now?” I asked. “Now that you know that the one clue about who broke into your house points to four Red Magicians who have been the same age since 2005?”

  “Of course,” she said. “A normie breaks into your house, what are you going to do? Call the cops?”

  “No,” Janis said.

  “Obviously,” Cassandra said, “but this is magic. This is fun. This, Esme,” she said, “is something we can handle.”

  I swallowed. Cassandra loved a challenge, but I wasn’t so sure. A demon I could deal with in my sleep, but a band of four, full-grown male losers? That sounded exactly like the type of thing I would want to call the cops for.

  Janis was still furiously typing on her phone. “Ugh,” she moaned. “I hate doing serious research on my phone. None of these sites are optimized for mobile. You don’t have a desktop around here, do you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the brand-new Mac is in the bedroom next to the Tesla keys and the Peloton bike,” Cassandra said.

  “Okay, point taken,” Janis said. “But it’s hard for me to keep digging on here. I’m going to go home and see what I can find.” She stood up and started zipping her boots back on. “Even if they don’t use the internet, the internet will use them.”

  * * *

  —

  Since my house was the opposite direction from Janis’s, Cassandra borrowed Dion’s van to give me a ride home and promised to stop at the gas station and buy him more cheese. We were a few blocks from her house when Brian called again. “I just drove by the bar,” he said, “and it was empty. All the lights were off and the sign on the door said it was temporarily closed.”

  “What?” I asked. “We were just there and it was open.” I thought back to the total dearth of customers. “At least, I think it was open. The lights were on.”

  “Well, it was all locked up,” he said.

  “Thanks for checking it out,” I said, and hung up.

  Cassandra was humming as she drove, something that I had never heard her do before. I gave her the side-eye. Cassandra was happy, and it wasn’t just because of all the pizza. “So,” I said when we were stopped at what seemed to be an exceptionally long light, “things must be going pretty good with Ruby, then, huh?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “I mean, if she’s coming for Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, I guess,” Cassandra said. “I mean, we didn’t plan it that way. It was just the first long weekend. She didn’t want to miss school.”

  “Really?” I asked, somewhat surprised, since Cassandra missed more school than she attended. “Why not?”

  “She’s got, like, perfect attendance or something, and she doesn’t want to screw it up.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  Cassandra nodded. “Yeah, we’re really different like that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised that Cass would make such an observation, and then go as far as to say it out loud.

  “She’s really got her stuff together, you know? Like, she’s got a plan, and she knows what she wants to do with her life, and I just kinda got lucky.” Right as she said the words “got lucky,” the van died, and as Cassandra performed a complicated routine of gas, brake, gas, reverse, park, drive, gas, turn the key, I couldn’t help but think that “lucky” wasn’t exactly a word I would use to describe her.

  “How so?” I asked, my words nearly drowned by the sound of the van roaring back to life.

  “That I turned out to be a Sitter,” Cassandra said. “Without that, I’d just be another crappy student with a bad attitude and no respect for authority. Now, at least, I’m a crappy student with a bad attitude and no respect for authority—who’s protecting the innocent and saving the world in her spare time. I can see why Dion’s jealous, because even if I have to grub my way through life, I’ve still got a thing, you know? A thing that makes me special. So I’m lucky, because most people don’t have that. But Ruby’s different. She’d be special even if she were totally normal.”

  Cassandra turned onto my street, and I glanced at her face in the glow of the dashboard as the van ground to a halt in front of my house. Her face didn’t betray anything other than the steely determination it always did, but that was the sweetest, most sensitive thing I’d ever heard her say.

  “I think you’re a good couple,” I said as I got out of the van. “See you tomorrow. Thanks for the ride.” I slammed the door, and as I walked up to my front path, I wondered if anyone would ever say anything like that about me. I listened hard for the sound of crows, but the night was silent.

  In the house, Mom was already in her room, and Dad was spreading out his sheets and blankets on the couch. “Well, well, well,” he said, “little miss I-fight-demons-and-don’t-need-a-curfew is actually home early.”

  I rolled my eyes, though realized he couldn’t see me in the dim light. “All we did was eat pizza and hang out at Cassandra’s,” I said. Dad must have picked up on something in my voice, because he didn’t press the issue.

  “Well, did the pizza like your outfit?” he asked.

  “It did,” I said, and I started to head down the hall to my room.

  “Esme,” he called out after me. “For what it’s worth, I thought you looked really nice tonight.” I paused, and smiled to myself.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I called back. I guess, when it came down to it, I was pretty lucky too.

  When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I was in a black mood. I tried to tell myself this was because the night before had felt like a failure, but myself knew better. It was Adrian. I felt ghosted, but then I wasn’t even sure if that was right. We barely knew each other. We hadn’t hooked up. We’d shared a few moments, that was all. I had no idea what he’d thought of me, and he might even be someone who I should be mad at, who I should vow to never speak to again for his role in Pig’s disappearance. If he had a role in Pig’s disappearance. After all, he was Wanda’s gopher, not her right hand. There was always a chance he hadn’t known anything about what she’d been planning.

  And then, of course, there was the mix CD. Would a guy make a mix CD for a girl he was just going to forget? Probably not. Would a guy make a mix CD for a girl whose dog he had helped to vanish? Again, probably not. That’d be like giving a person a stick of gum when they had just said that they were starving, worse than not doing anything at all. I took a big breath, puffed my cheeks as I blew it out, and then threw off the covers and got out of bed.

  I was determined to seize the day, and I knew of one thing, and one thing only, that was guaranteed to dispel one of my bad moods. And that was a really good outfit. I hadn’t been Winona in a while, and today was as good a day as any. The week before last, I’d bought a lipstick-red skirt that completed an outfit I’d been mentally working on for a while, based on Kim Boggs from Edward Scissorhands. This was undoubtedly one of my favorite Winona movies—Young Johnny? Yes, please. Tim Burton? Double yes, please, y
es, please—even if it was one of my least favorite Winona looks, since she had long, blond hair and that somehow felt like the opposite of what Winona was all about. But I got it—I mean, in the film she was supposed to be a popular girl with a jock jerk boyfriend, and those kinds of roles seemed to require long, blond hair.

  I put on a long-sleeved white T-shirt and the red skirt. In the movie, it’s warm, so Kim has bare legs, white socks, and bright red shoes, but since it was cold here, and also since this was an homage and an interpretation rather than a recreation, I pulled on white tights before pulling on white socks and my red-and-white saddle shoes. Then I put on the thing that had inspired my first glimmers of this outfit: a red-leather corset/harness/belt that fit like sexy suspenders that had been found deep, deep in the sale rack at Hot Topic. But when I looked in the mirror, I felt like something was still missing, and even with the post-fetish-accessorizing, the look was still a little saccharine. I walked over to my desk and picked up a pair of fabric shears, and made little horizontal cuts, evenly spaced, along the outside edge of both of my sleeves. Then I stepped back, looked again, and smiled. Perfection, and also realistic, as it would be impossible to fall in love with a guy with scissors for digits and not get at least a little cut in the process.

  I picked up my phone, about to text Janis, This look is not complete, when I saw that she’d been texting me consistently since six a.m., the last text saying in all caps FORGET IT. I’M COMING TO PICK YOU UP NOW. I threw down my phone and had started to stuff all my school stuff into my backpack when I heard Dad calling my name.

  “Esme!” he yelled. “Janis is out front, and it looks like she’s threatening to honk the horn?”

  “I’m coming!” I yelled.

  “She’s coming!” he yelled out the door.

  “What’s her rush?” he asked as I hurried down the hall. I rifled through the coat closet before finally just grabbing my black puffer since it was the most obvious and closest at hand.