Toil & Trouble Page 10

  There’s a pitcher of fresh lemonade, made with lemons from her backyard tree. I pour a glass and sit at the table just as the front door opens. Grandma Anita heads straight to the sink to wash her hands.

  “Webb is back in town,” I say.

  “And he hasn’t stopped by to see me?” She flicks the dripping water off her hands and dries them with the towel folded neatly on the counter.

  “He just got in this morning. He said he doesn’t want to see you until he’s all rested up, but he’ll stop by soon.”

  “He’d better.” She pours a glass of lemonade and joins me at the table. “When are you two finally going to get together?”

  “Grandma Anita!”

  “Girl, don’t you ‘Grandma Anita’ me.” She shakes her head. “That boy might be the only one too stupid to see what’s going on here.”

  “He said he missed me...but you’re supposed to miss your best friend.” I shrug. “That doesn’t really mean anything.”

  She rubs my hand. “Baby, it means he cares about you.”

  Grandma Anita is right about most things, but if Webb liked me back—really liked me—wouldn’t he have confessed or made a move by now?

  “Big Queenie called this morning,” she says. “Told me to tell you hello.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Barcelona. Heading over to the Canary Islands tomorrow to stay with friends.”

  “I hope I get to travel someday like Big Queenie.”

  “Work hard and save your money like she does, and you can do it, baby.”

  I bite my lip for a moment before I ask my next question. We don’t talk directly about this stuff, not even among family members. But I have to know. “Are you worried that—you know...”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Use your words.”

  “Are you ever worried that what she did won’t work forever?” I blurt, then cast my eyes down to the wooden table.

  Aren’t you worried that the cancer will come back?

  Grandma Anita stiffens. “I’m thinking ahead to the future,” she says evenly. “Enjoying the present. It wouldn’t hurt you to do the same, Queenie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I choke down the urge to tell her I might never stop worrying. That I was so scared we were going to lose her. That even if Big Queenie is good at what she does, I was terrified that her methods would backfire and none of us would be able to forgive her. And now, even as Grandma Anita sits in front of me, healthy and happy, I am worried that the cancer will come back.

  Grandma Anita smiles when I look up. “You like the lemonade?”

  “I love it.”

  “Good. After we finish, let’s take a walk. It’s jacaranda season; the neighborhood has never looked prettier.”

  * * *

  Webb picks me up after school on Tuesday.

  He’s meeting a friend at Union Station and wants me to go with him. I don’t know who it is, but other skaters are always stopping through L.A. on their way somewhere, wanting to meet up with him for a day or two.

  Webb has his mom’s minivan, and he looks ridiculous behind the wheel. He’s decidedly not tired anymore, practically springing up and down in his seat as we weave through traffic.

  “Nice of you to pick up your friend,” I say as we pull up.

  “Yeah, well...she’s kind of special.” He puts the car in park and looks at me shyly. “I can’t wait for you to meet her, Queenie.”

  She? Her?

  But it doesn’t matter what Webb said, because everything I need to know is shining in his eyes. My breath catches in my throat. I always hoped I’d see that look from Webb—I just never thought it would be meant for someone else.

  He glances past me to the front of the train station, where people are streaming out of the doors. His whole face lights up when he spots her. I don’t look. Not until he’s out of the car.

  I can’t see much—just long arms wrapped around his back. They finally pull away, but before I can avert my eyes, they’re kissing. Not just a quick peck on the lips, but a real kiss. The way I’ve thought about kissing Webb so many times.

  I pretend to look at my phone until the door behind me slides open. Webb tosses her duffel bag into the back, then she gets in, settling behind me. She’s light-skinned with super-thick Marley twists piled on top of her head in a voluminous bun, and she’s somehow completely glamorous, even though she’s wearing cutoffs and a cropped sweatshirt.

  “Queenie, this is Blythe,” Webb says with a smile so wide I think his dimple will never disappear. “One of the dopest female skateboarders you’ll ever meet.”

  She gives him an amused look. “Or one of the dopest skateboarders. Full stop.” She turns to smile at me. “Queenie, it’s so cool to meet you. Webb never shuts up about you.”

  Really? Because he hasn’t told me a thing about you, is what I want to say. I don’t understand why he didn’t mention her. We hadn’t texted a lot in the weeks before he got home, but I thought it was because he was busier than normal. With his skating—not a girl. But I make myself smile back at her, because she’s Webb’s...whatever. He likes her.

  “It’s really nice to meet you, too,” I say as Webb slides her door closed and walks around to the other side of the van.

  Blythe is chatty, and I feel like I could ace a quiz about her entire life by the time we get to Webb’s house. I know that she’s from Davis, a town up in Northern California near Sacramento. I know that she’s our age and she’s not yet pro, but she likely will be in the next year. I know that she has an old English sheepdog named Pickles and she hates living in a small town and that she is obsessed with Webb. She can’t keep her hands off him; when we were in the van, she was always reaching her hand forward to rub his neck or touch his shoulder, sometimes resting it there for minutes at a time.

  We go to Webb’s place because Blythe wants to lie out by the pool. I really want to go home, but I feel like Webb will know something is up if I do. And I don’t want him to know how upset I am—how foolish I feel for not knowing he’s been dating someone for two whole months. He’s had so many chances to bring it up; did he not tell me because deep down he knows how I feel about him? I flush at the thought. I’ve worked so hard to not let him know.

  Webb’s parents are still at work, so we have the house to ourselves. He takes Blythe on a tour, holding her hand as she skips ahead of him. I stay behind.

  When they meet me out back, Blythe has changed into a tiny blue bikini. Oh. She wasn’t kidding about the whole pool thing. We slide into three chaise lounges. At least Webb is wearing a T-shirt and shorts; I feel silly still wearing my school clothes.

  “God, I love L.A.,” Blythe says, stretching her arms to the sky. She looks over at me. “So, Queenie. Tell me everything about you, like—oh! You have to tell me about this witch thing.”

  My eyes widen so much I’m surprised they don’t pop out of my head. Webb knows there’s one thing I don’t want him telling people about me. He’s known that forever, but he let it slip with someone he’s been dating a couple of months?

  I punch him in the arm so hard my fist throbs.

  “What the fuck, Queenie?” He rubs his arm.

  I stand up quickly, walking around to the other side of the pool so I won’t have to look at him.

  Webb follows.

  I don’t turn around even when he stops right behind me. “Why would you tell her?”

  “I...I don’t know. I guess we were talking about our friends back home one night, and I told her all about you and it just sort of came up.”

  “You told her about Becca?” Everything pauses; even the birds seem to stop singing as I wait for him to respond.

  His silence is my answer.

  Becca went to school with us and lived up the street from Webb. We were a tight trio in elementary, but something happened when we got to sixth grade. Sudden
ly, halfway through the year, Webb and I weren’t cool enough for her. She started blowing off plans and sitting at a different table in the cafeteria. We hadn’t done anything to her; nothing had changed. But Becca wanted to reinvent herself at our new school, and Webb and I weren’t part of the plan.

  I think we would have been able to handle it if she hadn’t started that rumor. She told people that Webb was hooking up with his teacher—even though we were twelve, even though Webb had never hooked up with anyone in his life. We knew for a fact that Becca had spread the rumor because earlier in the year, Webb had confessed his crush on Ms. Solomon, and we were the only ones he’d told. Becca promised to keep his secret, but she seemed jealous—mad, almost, when she said Ms. Solomon wasn’t even that pretty.

  The rumor blew up so much that Webb and his parents had to have a meeting with the administrators and Ms. Solomon. He said it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him, and even though the rumor wasn’t true, the damage was done. It took weeks for everyone to stop teasing him, and I don’t think some people—students and adults—ever believed it was just a rumor.

  Webb steps in front of me and dips his head to make eye contact. “What happened to Becca wasn’t your fault.”

  “We don’t know it wasn’t.”

  He sighs. “Look, I’m sorry. Blythe is...she’s got a lot of energy, but she’s real cool, Queenie. I want you to be friends.”

  Friends. After what happened with Becca, I’ve been wary of making new friends. It’s hard for me to trust people. I’m friendly with my field hockey teammates, but I don’t tell anyone my secrets except Nia and Webb. It’s easier to only worry about two people betraying me.

  And now Webb has done exactly that.

  “Stop telling people I’m a witch.”

  “But you are,” he says with a shrug. As if it’s the most common fact in the world.

  “That’s nobody’s business...and one spell doesn’t mean I’m a witch. It means maybe I channeled Big Queenie.”

  “Uh-huh. Whatever, Your Highness.”

  I stare at him. “Do you really not get how what you did was shitty? Just because you have a girlfriend, you can’t—” My voice breaks.

  Webb touches my arm. “I’m sorry. For real. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  He sounds sincere, but what if he ends up spilling more of my secrets? What if everything between us is now between me and him and Blythe?

  “Will you come back over there if I promise nobody will bring up the W word?” he pleads. “Now or in the future?”

  I look over my shoulder. Blythe is lying all the way back on the chaise, sunglasses tipped toward the sky.

  “Fine,” I say, and he shows me his dimple.

  * * *

  After dinner with my family and homework with Nia, I shut myself into my bedroom and lock the door. Then I slide onto my stomach, reaching under the bed until my fingertips touch the shoebox.

  I stay on the floor, leaning against my bed as I open the box. There’s not much inside: mostly a few old pictures of Webb and me and Becca—at birthday parties and sleepovers and playing in one of our backyards. I stare at a photo of just Becca and me. We’re sitting on her front stoop, eating Popsicles. We’re maybe six or seven, our stained lips spread wide, showing off our gap-toothed grins. She was a generous friend; she always let me have the last grape Popsicle, even though it was her favorite flavor, too.

  In the corner of the box, there’s a hair tie: a piece of elastic with a blue bow on the end. Becca left it at my house, and it must have gotten shoved under my dresser. I only found it a couple of years ago, when we moved my furniture to put fresh paint on the walls. I stared at it for a long time, wondering if I’d feel some connection to Becca when I touched it—I didn’t. Still, as much as I hated her at one time, we were close for so long. I’m glad to have something tangible to remember her by.

  I slip the spell book from beneath the pictures. Before I found it all those years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined a spell book could look so plain. In movies, they always seem to be glowing from within, the pages turning themselves and the cover decorated with some elaborate script between the gilded edges. But it’s just a composition notebook with Big Queenie’s handwritten pages inside. I discovered it when I was eleven years old, while looking through a box of her old stuff at Grandma Anita’s, and sneaked it into my bag so I could look at it in secret.

  There were spells for all sorts of things: how to make someone fall in love with you (and out of love with you), how to change your appearance, how to find a lost object, how to ward off negativity... There were so many packed in the book, it was overwhelming the first time I looked through it.

  I accidentally left it lying out one day, and my nosy sister found it and told our mother. I’ll never forget the pained look on Mom’s face as she sat us down in the kitchen that evening. She told us that the women in our family are thought to possess magical powers, but that we don’t talk about it.

  “Magical powers?” Nia said, glancing at me to see how I was taking the news. She was thirteen then, two years older than me, and she acted like most things that I said and did were dumb, but she still counted me as her ally in the family. “Like witches?”

  Our mother exhaled through her nose. It came out sounding like a scoff. “Yes...like witches. Big Queenie believes in it. I don’t.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it?” I asked, definitely not believing what I was hearing. Could those spells in Big Queenie’s loopy handwriting actually mean something? They weren’t just silly kid stuff?

  “Because some of us don’t want to find out if we have them...the powers.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Mom is usually so calm and controlled; I can’t remember her ever being so unnerved. “It can be dangerous for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Or someone who doesn’t have the best intentions.”

  “But...” Nia paused, tracing a finger around the gray circles on the pale yellow place mat. “This is the first time we’ve heard about this. We don’t even talk about it to each other? To family?”

  Our mother shook her head.

  “Does Dad know?” Nia asked.

  “Yes.” Mom sighed. “But I asked him not to bring it up with you two.”

  “Why?” I asked again, though I sensed she was about three seconds from clamming up for good. “I mean, why don’t we talk about it?”

  “Because sometimes being black is hard enough, Queenie,” she said, her voice not angry but tired. “We were the first black family to move in on this block, and I don’t want to give people a reason to question us.”

  My parents moved us here a long time ago, when Nia was five years old and I was three. We’re still the only black family on the block, but we’re no longer the only people of color, and we’re friendly with a lot of our neighbors. I think Mom and Dad must have been really nervous about integrating the street, though. They talk about moving into this house like it was yesterday.

  Nia wrinkled her nose. “So, white people get to be witches, but we don’t? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  Mom stood up from the table, shaking her head again. “Girls, we’re done talking about this. Queenie, throw that thing away or return it to your grandma, but I don’t want to see it again.” As she left the kitchen, I heard her muttering, “I cannot believe Big Queenie would leave that laying around at Mama’s...like she wanted you to find it.”

  Nia gave me a funny look. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “What would you do with it?”

  She glanced warily at the book. “I’d get rid of it.”

  “Aren’t you curious? About if we have the powers or whatever?”

  She paused for so long I wondered if she was going to answer me. Finally, she said, “Yeah, kind of. But not enough to mess with that stuff. It’s weird.”
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  “It’s not weird. You just don’t know enough about it.”

  “Neither do you,” Nia said before she left me alone in the room.

  Like our mother, she wanted nothing to do with our family magic. But I did. And nobody followed up with me about returning the book, so I kept it.

  And I tried out a spell on Becca to make her weak.

  It sounded too simple, and I doubted it would work. I needed a piece of her clothing (I had a T-shirt she’d left here after one of our sleepovers), and a piece of her hair (I’d been worried about that one, but there were a couple of strands clinging to the shirt), and a photograph (there were plenty). I assembled everything exactly the way the spell said to, then I chanted the words written out in all caps. They weren’t in any language I’d ever heard, and I felt silly, and I had to do it in my closet so no one else could hear, but I did it.

  And it worked. Becca died a week later.

  I couldn’t stop wondering if I was responsible for her death. Would she never have gotten sick if I’d never opened up that spell book? Was she going to die anyway? I wasn’t even sure if my powers existed, let alone if they were capable of killing someone. I didn’t want to hurt anyone... I just wanted Becca to feel as helpless as Webb did.

  I don’t know why I never threw the book out after she died. Maybe I was worried about the power within the pages—what it would do to me if I tried to destroy it. Or maybe I wanted to show that, despite its existence, I could stop believing...just like my mother. And just like Grandma Anita, until Big Queenie saved her.

  * * *

  I thought Blythe would leave after a few days, but nearly a week later, she’s still in L.A.

  And Webb doesn’t seem to be tired of her. I can easily track where they are by going online. I hadn’t noticed her in his pictures while he was traveling because they were always in groups. But now that she’s here, they’re both posting new pictures every day: selfies of them hanging at the abandoned zoo in Griffith Park, riding the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, eating burgers at the Apple Pan.