Mom brought home cold baked chicken and potato salad for dinner. We were halfway through eating when Maud said, “The phone must be out of order. Nobody’s called Wilma.” She picked up the receiver. “There’s a dial tone. What’s the problem, Wilma?” She hung up and the phone rang.
“Give it to me, Maud,” Mom said.
“If it’s Jared, I have to talk to him.”
Maud gave Mom the phone.
“Hello.” Pause. “I’m sorry. We’re in the middle of dinner, Jared.”
“Mom! Please!”
“Can she call you back?” Mom nodded. “All right.” She hung up.
“What did he say?”
“You can call him after dinner.”
I stood up. “I’m done.”
She didn’t let me get away with that. And after we finished eating, I had to help Maud clean up. Then I called him. I took the phone into my closet so Maud wouldn’t hear.
“Where were you?” I said when he came on. “I looked for you after graduation.”
“Brad was graduating from Elliot. We had to get over there. Wilma . . .”
Here we go. “What?” My mouth was dry.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” So far, so good.
“Something strange happened. I went to the library this afternoon to get books to read at camp. I had a huge stack in my arms. I was taking them to be checked out when I thought of you and dropped them all.”
I forced myself to laugh. “Heavy thoughts. The books didn’t land on your feet, did—”
“It was more than thinking about you. I can’t describe it. I thought about you, and something was wrong. Something had changed, something had happened.”
What did he mean? What did he think of me now?
“Then the feeling went away. Like it had come from somewhere else, not from inside me. I tried to call you, but people were using the phones at the library, and outside I couldn’t find one that worked, and I had to—”
“I’m okay,” I said. I tried to change the subject. “Ardis and—”
“That’s not all. I ran into Ovideo. He lives down the block from me. And Timothy was with him—”
I swallowed. “And they thought about me too, at the same time as you. Right?”
“You know about it?”
“Sort of. What did they say?”
“How do you know?”
“It’s a long story. What did they say?”
“Well, they weren’t—uh, um—they weren’t—uh—complimentary. They both said they didn’t see why everyone was so crazy about you lately. I said I saw why.”
“You did?”
“I said you only had to look at the caricature . . .”
The caricature! He had to remind them?
“What’s going on, Wilma? Why did we all think of you at the same time?”
I had to tell him something. My heart was pounding. I didn’t know if I could do this, if I could tell him. But I couldn’t do it on the phone for sure. I had to be able to see how he was taking it, if he believed me, what he thought.
“Wilma?”
“I was thinking. I can’t talk about it over the phone.”
“A mystery. Spies on the airwaves.” I could hear him smiling. Something about his voice had changed, and now he was smiling. Then he said he’d be downstairs when I took Reggie for his morning walk.
The next morning, it took me forty-five minutes to get ready to walk Reggie. Without the spell, I had to look good. My zipper-neck T-shirt had a small stain on the shoulder. I wore it anyway after I tried on every other one I had. It was my favorite, and I’d worn it to the zoo.
Jared was waiting when I got downstairs.
“You have to kiss me,” he said as soon as he saw me.
He didn’t need answers first. He didn’t need to check me out. I tied Reggie to the pole of a no-parking sign, and we kissed, a long one.
When it was over, I asked, “Why did I have to kiss you?”
“Because it’s Sixty-sixth Street. We may be breaking the Rule by not kissing continuously on Sixty-sixth Street.”
We walked toward the park. He took my hand and didn’t say anything else. Maybe I wouldn’t have to tell him. But after we crossed Broadway, he said, “The mystery. On the phone you wouldn’t tell me what happened yesterday.”
I chewed my lip.
“You look different today, too.” He stood away from me, still holding my hand.
“Don’t.” I waved my free hand in front of my face. I didn’t want him to evaluate me too, like Ardis and Nina and BeeBee had.
“You look good. Better, maybe. I give up.” We took a few steps. Reggie sniffed a hydrant. “What happened?”
I thought of just saying that we’d been at my house fooling around with New Age spells, but then I remembered how tricked Ardis had felt. I didn’t want to trick Jared anymore. I didn’t want to trick anyone.
“It’s going to sound completely weird . . .” I started.
“Not any weirder than what happened to me.”
“Weirder. You’ll see.” I made myself start. “There was a witch in my kitchen yesterday afternoon.”
Jared nodded. “Weirder.”
“But that wasn’t the first time I met her.”
“No?”
“Don’t laugh or I won’t be able to tell it. She’s very old.”
“Naturally. She’s a witch. Listen, Wilma, if you don’t want to tell me—”
“I don’t want to tell you. But I am telling you.” We followed the path to Sheep Meadow. I dropped Reggie’s leash, and he ran ahead. “Listen. It happened to Ardis and Nina and BeeBee and Daphne too. They were all at my house.”
“Did they see the witch?”
“No. But they know it happened. I told them why, and they believe me. If you talk to them, they’ll tell you. And if you call everybody who graduated yesterday, I bet they all thought of me at exactly the same second.”
He was quiet. “All right. I’m a poet, or I want to be one. I should believe you.”
“The first time I saw the old lady—or fairy or witch, whatever she is—the first time was . . .” And I told him about giving her a seat on the train. When I got to the part about the wish, he said, “What did you ask for? I know what I would have wanted.”
“What?”
“Better poems. What did you ask for?”
He was going to think I was an idiot. “I asked her to make me the most popular kid at Claverford. And it ended yesterday because we graduated.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “I didn’t think popularity mattered to you.” He stopped talking again.
I called Reggie, to give myself something to do. What was he thinking? Was he angry, like Nina and Ardis had been?
He grinned. “You’re great. I have to tell Brad about this. You cared that much about being popular and you still let Antoinette do the caricature. And you let me hang it in my locker.” He told Reggie to sit. Reggie did, looking surprised. Then Jared kissed me again. And again. “You’re even better than I thought.”
I felt dizzy. I felt more turned upside down than when the spell began or ended. Jared didn’t think I’d done anything terrible. He didn’t feel tricked, maybe because he’d liked me before the spell started. If I wanted to be popular, and I made it my wish, there was nothing wrong with it.
It was really stupid, but in a second I was going to be crying my head off. I went to Reggie and touched my chest. He jumped up and licked my face. If my cheeks were wet, his tongue would be my excuse.
Jared started laughing. “But you missed your chance, Wilma. You could have gotten a pet elephant, or your own porpoise.”
I could have. I never thought of it.