As soon as Fern closed her eyes, she was opening them again in a room full of morning sun with Mrs. Deckle’s bell clanging away in the hall. Something hot and solid pressed against her back and she threw her hand over her shoulder, patting her pillow, finding hair. Holly had climbed into bed and curled up against her again. The bell stopped ringing. The first door opened in the hall, then another, then doors opened up and down the halls of Wellwood House as pregnant girls thumped to the bathroom.
“Wow,” Zinnia said, pushing herself up in bed and looking at her thumb. “I’m going to get tetanus.”
Fern looked at the grimy black frown on the pad of her thumb. It felt tender and inflamed. By the time they’d dragged themselves home last night she’d been too tired to even wash her hands.
She stumped to the bathroom and through grainy eyes watched Clem spray Daisy’s beehive back into shape as Flora unwound toilet paper from her flip, Briony shaved Tansy’s legs, and Ginger plucked her eyebrows against the din of shower spray hitting the tiles. At breakfast, every bite of hamburger pancake floated to her mouth and down her throat. She didn’t even remember chewing.
Things got real during Miss Wellwood’s morning meditation.
“Proverbs 19,” Miss Wellwood said from the front of the classroom. “ ‘He who breathes out lies will not escape.’ Do you think anything happens here that I am not aware of? I know that a girl, or several girls, snuck out of this Home last night through the front door in direct defiance of my rules. Who was it?”
No one breathed. No one moved. Girls tried their hardest not to look at each other while secretly looking at each other, trying to figure out who it was. Fern caught Rose’s eye. Rose winked.
“Dangerous elements live in these woods,” Miss Wellwood said. “The sheriff has spoken to us more than once about drifters camping in them. Whoever is consorting with these types of individuals puts us all at risk. I am giving the parties involved one chance to clear their consciences and confess.”
She paused, considering each girl in turn.
“Very well,” she said. “I will now be forced to treat you like common criminals and lock the doors at night. In addition, the following girls will report to my office after breakfast to be questioned individually.”
Fern waited for her name to be called, but by the time Miss Wellwood had finished her list only Fern, Zinnia, Holly, Briony, and Laurel were allowed to go to Bible study instead of lining up in the hall outside Miss Wellwood’s office. Rose had been called first, of course. As they walked past she whispered out of the corner of her mouth like a spy, “My room. Later.”
At Bible study, two women from the Lutheran church assured them that God loved them even though they were unfortunate sinners. Afterward, Fern and Zinnia dragged themselves up the Pepto-Bismol waterfall, yawning, and considered the steep, narrow stairs leading to Rose’s attic room.
“Give me strength,” Zinnia said.
They hauled themselves up by the banister, almost yanking it out of the wall. Fern’s chest was roaring like a furnace by the time they reached the top. Holly was somehow already there, sitting on Rose’s bed.
“It’s about time,” Rose said.
“I need a bippy,” Zinnia proclaimed as she collapsed to the floor.
“Are you in trouble?” Fern asked.
Rose opened her window and felt around outside.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said, fishing her pack of backup bippies from their hiding place on the roof. “That wrinkled old fascist says she knows I’m the one who ducked out last night.”
Fern started to say something, but Rose held up a hand.
“Don’t get them in a wad,” she said. “I kept my lips locked and all she did was take my bippies.”
She tossed a bippy to Zinnia, who caught it one-handed. The sun heated up the asphalt shingles overhead, slowly warming the room.
“Our real problem is this,” Rose said, throwing How to Be a Groovy Witch on the rug between them. “We got ripped off. I tried to read it this morning and it still didn’t make any sense. So now we know that old bag gave us nothing but a snow job and infected cuts last night.”
“But Dr. Vincent—” Fern started.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rose said. “We made him sicker than a dog, but what did that get us? He’s in the hospital for a few days, then he’s coming back. So what? We need to face facts: we met some lonely old lady walking her dogs and she says we’re going to be witches, then she bums a bippy and tells us to read a book none of us can understand. We need to get real. Holly’s in a jam and we’ve got to save her ourselves. We can’t rely on their generation.”
Fern didn’t like hearing that they’d been tricked, but last night had been such an anticlimax it was hard to disagree.
“We’ve done magic once,” Rose said. “And we know Turnabout works, so maybe we figure out how it can help Holly. Or do one of those charms from the front?”
“Which one?” Zinnia asked. “Bless a vacuum cleaner so Holly can ride it to Cuba like an automatic broomstick? Maybe we can curl her hair with moonwater so no one’ll recognize her and she can walk right out of here? Or how about—”
“Can it!” Rose snapped, jerking forward, stomach piling in her lap. “You think this is your audition for Laugh-In? He’s balling her and she’s not even fifteen. That’s his baby in there and he’s a preacher. Weren’t you listening? They’re sending her back to him. That’s funny to you?”
Rose looked furious. Holly looked at her lap.
“I’m agreeing with you,” Zinnia said, trying to cool Rose down. “But there’s nothing in that book that’ll help Holly. You’re wasting your time. We need to get her some money and get her out of town, or find her a foster family, or a lawyer, or someone who’ll listen.”
“How much bread you got?” Rose came back. “I don’t have jack, so if you’re holding, now’s the time to spill. No? Then we’re back to square one. Get this through your skull: no one is helping Holly. No one listened to Holly. No one is going to save Holly but us. And all we’ve got is one single spell that works. Right, Holly?”
Everyone looked at Holly, who sat on Rose’s bed, her feet not quite touching the floor.
“I guess,” she said, laying her hands on her swollen stomach.
“I’m sorry, Holly,” Zinnia said. “I want to help you, but we need to figure out something real, not this mumbo jumbo.”
Fern pushed herself up and went over to the bed and sat by Holly.
“Someone has to have an idea!” Rose snapped.
Fern felt Holly sag slightly against her.
“You said it yourself,” Zinnia said. “The only people who are going to help Holly are us. Not that old librarian, not Miss Wellwood, not Miss Keller, and definitely not that book. All this talk about magic, and witchcraft, and charms is a waste of time. We need a plan.”
Fern looked at the copy of How to Be a Groovy Witch and noticed something on the cover. She leaned way over and picked it up.
“Turnabout worked,” Rose said. “We can figure out a way to use that again.”
“You want to make someone else throw up?” Zinnia asked. “How’s that help Holly?”
The room got warmer. Fern felt the first trickle of sweat run down her side. She kept looking at the cover of Groovy Witch from different angles.
“What about Reverend Jerry?” Rose asked.
“You want to make him throw up?” Zinnia asked.
“That’s not what the spell does,” Rose said. “It makes them feel what we’re feeling.”
The cover of the book was starting to come together in Fern’s mind, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle.
“So?” Zinnia asked.
“So we make Reverend Jerry feel the way we do,” Rose said. “Or the Third. Or any of the guys that put us here.”
“We had to have some of Dr. Vincent’s hair,” Zinnia said. “Did you bring your PF’s hair with you? Or something from Reverend Jerry? We don’t have anything of theirs.”
“Sure we do,” Rose said, and grinned.
She patted her stomach.
Zinnia looked to Fern for support, but Fern was absorbed in the cover of Groovy Witch. She turned to the copyright page. There wasn’t one. No publisher was listed. No year.
“We do Turnabout when the first one of us goes downtown,” Rose said. “Make Reverend Jerry feel what we feel: the worst pain he ever experienced in his whole life. He might even die. That’s some motherfucking turnabout. We could do it to all of them: the Third, the Reverend, whoever knocked Fern up.”
“That’s nothing but revenge,” Zinnia said. “It doesn’t do anything for Holly.”
“What’s wrong with revenge?” Rose asked. “Maybe it’s time someone taught them what this feels like.”
“Y’all,” Fern said. “Have you looked at this cover?”
“I think I feel differently than you do about controlling other people,” Zinnia said.
“Because you,” Rose said, “don’t want to help Holly.”
“You don’t want to help Holly either,” Zinnia said. “You just want to get back at your PF.”
“Y’all,” Fern said. “I think this is Miss Parcae.”
Everyone turned. She was holding up Groovy Witch, the young model on the cover giving them smoky eyes.
“That’s some girl they hired,” Zinnia said.
“Look at her eyebrows,” Fern said.
Holly took the book, and Rose looked over her shoulder. Zinnia pushed herself up onto her knees and they all studied the picture, trying to lay Miss Parcae’s face over the model’s. Rose didn’t have much of a comparison because she didn’t really notice other people, but Holly knew. So did Zinnia. The strong jaw, the small mouth, and, the most damning detail of all, the wart in her left eyebrow.
“It’s a coincidence,” Zinnia said.
“And that dimple on her chin,” Fern said. “They both have real straight noses with that little bump, their nostrils flare the same way, her hair’s styled different and it’s gray now but it’s the same thickness. They both have blue eyes. Look at her. They’re the same.”
They all looked.
“What year did this come out?” Zinnia asked, her voice quiet.
“There isn’t a copyright,” Fern said.
Zinnia took the book out of Holly’s hands and flipped to the front, looking for the copyright page.
“What’s this?” she asked, voice gone cold.
Fern leaned over and saw where she was pointing. In the table of contents, at the bottom, after Facts about Familiars, it now read Glossary. Zinnia quickly turned to it, almost tearing the pages.
“ ‘Sign of the Rending of the Veil,’ ” she read, her voice slowing with each new word. “ ‘To make the sign, extend your hands in front of you and move them away from each other as if you are opening a heavy curtain. Do this in each of the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, west—squaring the circle as you go. To form the sign of air face east and hold your arms up and out, elbows bent at right angles, wrists bent and splayed outward as if holding’—”
Zinnia threw the book onto the carpet and pushed herself away.
“That wasn’t in there yesterday,” she said. “It wasn’t. There wasn’t a glossary. I’d remember that. We were looking for one and it wasn’t there. Those words are new. That glossary is new.”
They all stared at Groovy Witch lying innocently on the floor between them.
“You think that book won’t help Holly now?” Rose asked.
“This is wrong,” Zinnia said, not looking at her.
“It’s just a book,” Fern said. “It can’t hurt us.”
“Yes, it can,” Zinnia said. “I think it can hurt us a lot.”
Rose lit a bippy and shook out her match.
“This is how we’re going to save Holly,” she said. “We don’t have any bread, we don’t have a car, we can’t even send a letter they don’t read. But we’ve got this.”
She pointed at Groovy Witch.
“This is power.”
Zinnia pulled herself up off the floor using a bentwood chair.
“Count me out,” she said. “I’m sorry, Holly, I want to help you, but I can’t be a part of this.”
“Get back here, you chickenshit coward!” Rose hollered after her. “You can’t split on Holly! I’ll tell Wellwood you snuck out last night with me!”
But she was talking to Zinnia’s back and then she was talking to no one at all.
Fern found Zinnia downstairs in the music room, sitting on the bench of the busted piano, dancing her fingers across its dead keys, absorbed in playing some soundless piece of music. Fern watched her noodle for a while.
“What’re you playing?” she finally asked.
Zinnia stopped, fingers on the keys, looking straight ahead at an oil painting of Dr. Wellwood standing in front of a patient lying draped on an examination table.
“Did the book really change?” Zinnia asked.
“There wasn’t a glossary there before,” Fern said. “Now there is.”
Zinnia went back to playing. The only sound in the room was the soft clunking of the keys.
“Have you ever seen a book do that?” she asked.
“No,” Fern said.
Zinnia’s fingers tripped over a complicated section. She reset them and tried again.
“Me neither,” she said. “I might have stopped getting sick anyway. That might have been a coincidence, but that book changed. I saw it. It was magic.”
She stopped.
“I don’t believe in magic,” she said. “But that book changed and that means magic is real. And that means everything I’ve ever learned is a lie.”
She turned on the bench to face Fern.
“I’ve read the books,” she said. “You play around with witches and you get burned. Maybe not at first, but they trick you, and they lead you on, and before you know it you’re in too deep to find your way back. We need to walk away from that thing now.”
“But that’s just books,” Fern said. “It might not be how it works in real life.”
“The only place witches exist is in books,” Zinnia said. “We just always thought they were fiction. Now we have to believe those stories are true, and if they are, then I’m sorry I ever said the Lord’s Prayer backward, because I think I may have started something that’s not going to end well. I’m sorry, Fern, I want to help Holly, but I’m never going in the same room with that book again. And if you’re smart, you won’t either.”
She turned her back on Fern and played her silent music again, keys clunking inside the piano, and no matter what Fern said, or asked, or begged, Zinnia acted like she wasn’t even there.