The girl crossed her arms. Said nothing.
Though the cuts were already mending themselves back together, Missy still wrapped a loose white bandage around my ankle and tied it off—with maybe a bit too much force. The way she looked at me now, down the bridge of her nose, eyes never leaving my face, made me feel like I was a feral dog she’d pulled off the street and now had to watch nonstop to keep me from tearing her home apart.
“Don’t come back to this place ever,” she told me.
Dread-bolted flax-wench!
“Missy!” Nell hissed.
“This is sacred, protected ground,” Missy continued. “I can’t have any kind of fiend jeopardizing it, no matter who its host is, or how powerful his family might be. You have no business coming here and forcing Nell to care for you.” She turned to the girl. “And you, as a witch, should know better than to believe whatever lies that man has told you—”
“All right,” Nell snapped, coming across the room to take my arm. “Come on, Prosper, let’s go.” Then, glancing back to Missy, she added, “Don’t worry. We won’t come back here again.”
Missy’s face visibly fell, horror and sadness crashing over her features. “You know I wasn’t talking about you—Nell, please—please, just listen to me. This is still your home.”
We were already outside, Nell dragging me after her down the street, when I finally heard her soft reply. “No, it’s not.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, holding my torn schoolbag together. “Go back to school?”
Nell was pacing around the corner at the end of the street, just out of eyeshot of the bookstore, fuming so hard I thought I saw smoke escaping her ears. Every now and then, a car would whisk by us, but just as quickly, we’d be left with the silence and the darkening sky once more.
The houses in this part of town looked like they were burdened with centuries of memories. They were old, overrun with ivy and brambles, and despite being so close to the school and the center of life there, had faces that glowered at anyone who passed them by. I hadn’t minded the way Missy had treated me, or the odd feeling I’d had in her shop. But these houses seemed to whisper warnings in the clattering of their old shutters and the squeaking hinges of their gates.
“The buses have already left,” Nell muttered.
“What should we do, then?” I asked. “Should we call Uncle B? Call for a driver?”
“We do what normal people do—we’re going to walk.”
So we did. Through the same streets we had passed on the way to school, around the same gas station, and through a few pockets of trees (that might have been considered trespassing if it didn’t feel like everyone who lived in the town had such firm ownership over its empty places).
“So…” I began, reaching down to pick up a single maple leaf that showed nature’s ombré in full effect: yellow at the tip, red at its heart, green at the stem. I let the wind snatch it from my fingers and carry it off toward the gray sky. “Who’s Missy, exactly?”
Nell’s hands were jammed into her pockets, her forehead creased in thought. After a long while—long enough that I didn’t think she was going to answer—she said, “Missy was my mom’s girlfriend. Her fiancée. They were a few months shy of getting married when my mom got sick.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded. Maybe there really was nothing I could say. Like the haunted house, it was another dream interrupted. And, sometimes, we just had to live with those disappointments and wait for their sharp edges to dull.
“The commonwealth said I had to live with my father, even though I hadn’t seen him in years,” Nell told me. “They claimed that was what was right.”
It clearly wasn’t.
Despair, I thought. That terrible word. The terrible, consuming world of it.
“Is that why you left school? To visit her?”
“I had to pick up a few ingredients for your spell,” she explained. “And a few other things we’re going to try in case the fiend grows more powerful and starts to make his will known.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
She spun on me so suddenly I backed myself into a tree to avoid her. Nell took another challenging step forward. “If you tell Barnabas that I left school and stopped by Missy’s, I’ll curse you so fast you won’t even know what’s happening until your nose is suddenly on your butt and you’re forced to breathe in every. Single. Fart.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell. Jeez. You really are a good actress—I had no idea you were even planning on leaving until I saw you go.”
Nell’s lips twitched, just for a second, into a small smile. Soon enough, her usual scowl was back. But it was a better opening than I could have hoped for.
As we passed by a garbage can on the street, I glanced at the front page of the newsletter shoved into it, and the bright orange headline screaming across it: SALEM HAUNTED BY A PUMPKIN THIEF?
“Did you hear about Parker?” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “I guess he broke his ankle. Some kids were saying that he might not be able to perform his part in the school play.”
She rolled her shoulders back, straightening. “I guess.”
After a full half hour, we finally passed through tourist Salem, the part of the city with all the witch shops and ye olde buildings and the common. The salty smell of Salem Sound hit us first, even before we saw the old wharf.
“You’re in theater class, right?” I asked. “Are you playing one of the other parts in The Crucible? That’s what I heard you rehearsing in the house, right? Lines from the play?”
“I’m just on crew,” Nell said, her breath frosting the air. She pulled her jacket closer to her center. “I only wanted one part, and the teacher wouldn’t let me audition for it.”
“Parker’s part?” I pressed.
She nodded. “John Proctor.”
Otherwise known as the male lead.
My eyebrows rose at that, but the more I thought about it, the fewer reasons I could come up with about why Nell couldn’t play the part. The fact that the drama teacher didn’t even let her try out for it cranked up the temperature of my blood until it was near to boiling.
“Things don’t tend to go my way,” Nell explained quietly as we started up the path to the House of Seven Terrors’ front door. “Even magic doesn’t really let you make your own luck. Not white magic, at least.”
I nodded, but my attention was quickly dividing between her and the clean yard around us, which only a few hours ago had been littered with trash from visitors and dead overgrown grass. Nell seemed to notice it at the same moment I did, her feet dragging to a stop.
“Wow, Uncle B must have gotten home early to clean things up for the tour-group audition tonight,” I said. Weird that he couldn’t keep a space as small as the attic clean, though.
Nell’s chest was rising and falling in faster bursts. She dropped her bag on the path and ran toward the door, muttering something under her breath. It flew open without her touch, banging against the wall.