Prologue

PARLOR MAGIC n: tricks performed for a small audience

 

The halls of Mount Olive private school were quiet that afternoon, completely deserted. The students were tucked away inside their classrooms, busy learning the lessons that would lead to successful and fulfilling futures. Calm, peaceful, serene.

That is, until a short brown-haired girl named Ashley Johansson stepped out of Mr. Borable’s sixth-grade science class, a hall pass clutched at her side. Mr. Borable had, like any good teacher, given Ashley the pass because he thought she needed to use the bathroom.

He was wrong.

Among the other things Mr. Borable didn’t know about Ashley Johansson were the following:

  1.   When he wasn’t present, she liked to refer to him as Unbearable Mr. Borable.

  2.   She had cheated on several of her life science exams.

  3.   She was, at that very moment, smuggling several sheets of paper into the hallway underneath her blue school blazer.

After checking to make sure that the coast was completely clear, Ashley removed the papers from her blazer and studied the one on top. Although it had the words “Geometry Homework” scribbled on it, anyone who took a close look at the paper would realize that it was not, in fact, any sort of homework. It was instead a printout of the grades of one of Ashley’s fellow students, a tenth grader named Gregory Pewter. Ashley had never met Greg, and she didn’t care to.

What interested Ashley were Greg’s grades. He had earned all A’s in every subject and on every progress report, except English literature. His grade had recently plummeted to a very disappointing B- in that subject.

Technically speaking, Ashley wasn’t allowed to break into the school’s online grade book during her hour as office helper every other Wednesday, but that hadn’t stopped her in the past.

Her second piece of paper, which she looked at next, was a list of school lockers and their owners. She quickly found Greg’s locker, number 419, and slipped her remaining papers through the slats of his locker door.

When Greg opened his locker that afternoon, he would find that an extra-credit assignment entitled “Green Eggs and Hamlet” had mysteriously appeared on top of his books. There would be no name on the essay, and it would be exactly what he needed to bring his English grade back up to an A.

Unfortunately for Greg, that wasn’t the only thing he was going to find. If he did use the essay, and his grade rocketed back up to an A, something else would appear in his locker a week later: a note, unsigned. Ashley Johansson had slipped dozens of them into dozens of Mount Olive lockers, and each was the same.

Cheaters never prosper.

I know what you did. Pay up or I’ll tell.

On the other side of the note would be a list of simple but effective instructions. The victim was to deposit five dollars, once a week until the end of the school year, in an envelope with his name on it, in a locker in the sixth-grade section of the girls’ locker room, number B37.

Ashley had been pulling this blackmail scam all year. So far, in her first year at Mount Olive private school, she’d made what she liked to call a killing.

When Ashley finished her errand, she straightened her blazer and returned to Mr. Borable’s room. He smiled at her as she replaced the hall pass on the hook by the door. Then she sat at her desk and began to write a note to the one person she’d kept in touch with at her old school.

Dear Dimwad,

Miss me yet? I haven’t forgotten our bet. You’re going to owe me big.

Hugs & kisses (you wish),
Ashley

While Ashley was writing her letter, a girl with a thick orange-blond braid and the unusual name of Bernetta Wallflower was busy taking notes about amphibians. If she had known what was going to happen to her in just a few short months, Bernetta might have paid less attention to the teacher’s lecture and a lot more to Ashley’s note. But at the time Bernetta Wallflower thought that Ashley was her very best friend in the world.

She was, of course, wrong about that.