Now conjurers, p.18
Now, Conjurers, page 18
If someone from Cameron’s family didn’t attend, leaving his house occupied, I was … I was supposed to do something. We hadn’t exactly worked out what. Infiltrate the locker rooms and steal his Nokia. Pull a clump of hair out of his head after the game. Something, before he wished us out of existence.
But there was a snag, of course. When I got home, Nic and my dad were waiting for me in the living room.
“Where have you been?” my dad said, the second I made it into the house. It was so unlike my dad to even notice my comings-and-goings, much less question them, that I knew I was in the shit pretty much immediately.
“Out,” I said, which got a little indignant huffing sound out of Nic.
Nic and my mom were more similar than Nic and my dad. They shared a dramatic, passive-aggressive-and-sometimes-tantrum-throwing kind of flair, a thing which Nic probably would have killed me for pointing out. But I knew that huffing sound. It was a sound I’d heard my mom direct at my dad a lot before they’d gotten divorced. It was the sound that Mom and Nic both made when they were pissed but not saying anything yet, a “can you believe this asshole?” kind of sound.
It was a sound that made me know I was digging my own grave by being flippant.
“I was out with Dove and Brandy and Drea,” I elaborated. “We went to the library.”
“Then why did Coach Silva call and give him an earful about you attacking some kid on the school grounds and leaving school?” my dad asked, in a neutral tone that still conveyed disappointment.
“Not just any kid,” Nic said. “The mayor’s kid.”
“You talked to Coach Silva?” I asked, looking at Nic. The rest of the sentence went unsaid: And you ratted me out to Dad?
“Uh-huh,” Nic said, twirling a toothpick around in his mouth with not an ounce of visible remorse.
“You suck,” I said. “And you’re not my legal guardian. I don’t think you can take calls about me from school administrators.”
“Don’t tell your brother he sucks,” Dad said. “He’s just looking out for you.”
“Why are you flipping out at school?” Nic asked, narrowing his eyes.
If things had been the way they really were, I could have leveraged my grief to get my dad to leave me alone. He was pretty uncomfortable with grief. But as far as Dad and Nic knew, I wasn’t grieving. There was no Bastion Attia to grieve for, and no pass for me to be on bad (or at least weird) behavior.
But I also couldn’t be in trouble. I had a football game to pretend to go to, and a house to break into, and I couldn’t get grounded and forced to sit at home while North Coven was in peril.
So I did a pretty crappy thing, fueled by my anger at Nic for being a stupid busybody and tattling on me to Dad like I was a baby.
I sighed deeply, like I was repentant. Then I looked directly at Dad, ignoring Nic.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gotten into a fight. I just hate Cameron for what he’s doing. All of us do.”
“What is this Cameron kid doing?” my dad asked, still pretty even-keeled. I definitely had a chance of getting out of trouble if I played my cards right.
“He’s selling Oxys at school,” I said. I was still looking right at Dad, but I could see Nic flinch out of the corner of my eye. During his worst druggie phase, Nic had been supplementing his heroin habit with enough OxyContin to keep a small pharmacy in business. I’d been the one who found his painkiller stash before his overdose, prompting our worst fight of all time.
“It’s stupid and it’s dangerous,” I went on, pressing my advantage. I could see from Dad’s expression that I had played it right. Now he was empathizing with my anger and fear, thinking about that horrible time fourteen months earlier when Nic had almost died. “And he could literally be getting other kids killed. I know he won’t get in trouble because he’s Mayor Winship’s kid. But I had to do something.”
Cameron Winship would literally never have sold drugs in a thousand years. It might screw up his chances of getting into an Ivy League school, or something. But they didn’t know that. Now I basically sounded like a hero. Dad believed my story. Nic did, too. When I glanced over at him, Nic was staring very hard at his hands.
Did I feel guilty? Yes. I felt like a real dickbag, actually. But I kept going.
“I won’t do it again,” I said to Dad. I am not normally a good liar, but my desperation made this into an award-worthy performance. I could almost see my punishment evaporating.
“Well, you’re looking at five days of detention, according to Coach Silva,” my dad said. “But I think that’s enough of a lesson. You should try to tell your teachers about what that boy is doing.”
Thank god for Dad and his pathological hatred of confrontation. If it had been Anna Attia—or even Jamie—who had been told about a kid selling painkillers at Regional, they would have been on the phone with the principal in seconds.
“I’ll try,” I said. “But it probably won’t go anywhere.”
This was pretty copacetic with my dad’s (not inaccurate) worldview about powerful people avoiding punishment. He nodded.
“Are we good?” I asked, carefully, still trying to look remorseful.
“We’re all set,” my dad said. “You want some dinner? We’re going to order from Crescent Moon.”
“I ate already,” I said. It was another lie, but I was too nervous about the breaking and entering I had to do that night to think about eating dinner, even from the good takeout place. Nic didn’t look up at me as I left the room, and I pushed my guilt down as far as I could.
I tried to think about anything else, which led me to thinking about our magic. Mr. Nous had said it wasn’t impressive enough to “remake the destinies of our world.” But even it had agreed with Bastion that North Coven had real power. It seemed like a good idea to stack the odds in our favor in any way I could, and so I went to the bathroom and stopped up the sink, sprinkled a little salt into the water, and held my hands under it, whispering a made-up chant to myself.
“Unlock, open, pry apart, find the doors, eyes-hands-voice-heart. With my hands, I work my art. Give me strength to do my part.”
Not the most creative spell, I’ll grant you, but I felt my palms start to prickle in the way that normally meant something supernatural was happening after about ten repetitions. I hoped really, really strongly that I’d secured whatever I needed to in order to be successful that night.
Then it was time to go. I headed back to the kitchen/living room, where Nic and my dad were eating and watching TV.
“Going to the school football game,” I said, and Nic looked up at me in utter disbelief.
“What are you really doing?” Nic asked.
“That.” I grabbed my keys and waved.
“Have fun!” That was Dad.
Regional was on so much land that even though it was a rural school, it had this ridiculously huge football stadium. Huge, but not super updated. The benches were wooden, and the scoreboard was rusty, but the view—faraway black pine trees that fell into sloping forests—was awesome. I guess football people didn’t care about the view, much like how I didn’t care about the game.
Drea and Dove and Brandy were waiting for me in the parking lot, and I made my way over to them as groups of people known and unknown to me meandered toward the benches, trailing clouds of breath in the chilly air. Regional students were decked out in scarves and school colors, and the faint scent of pot and cigarettes mixed with a hint of hidden alcohol on the breeze.
“My mom’s sitting in there already,” Drea said. “She was so confused about why I wanted to go to the football game, but I said I’m thinking of doing an article on the bad behabior of sports parents for the school paper.”
“You actually made your mom come?” I asked.
“We need her as an alibi for you just in case,” Dove said.
“You’re going to do fine,” Brandy said. She touched my shoulder for a second, and I leaned into it, feeling just a tiny bit reassured.
“Can we just go over the plan again?” I asked, trying not to sound too pathetic. We had already done this once before I dropped them off.
“Yes,” Drea said. “You come sit with us and then get up to switch seats right after the kickoff. Mom thinks you’re here for the whole game. That way we also get firsthand confirmation that Cameron and his parents are actually definitely here.”
“Right,” I said.
“You go to the Winships’ house. Park far away. Then you break in through the back door, which is the kitchen door. It’s a screen door in front of a farmhouse-style wooden door. Probably standard, with a regular lock plus a chain latch.”
“And if they have an alarm?”
“They probably don’t. Nothing happens here. But if they do, just bail. There are some … other … ways that we can get what we need from Cameron.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Then what?”
“Then you go straight to his room and get some hair off a brush and grab a few things that could be ‘treasured items.’ Don’t take eberything from the same place.”
“Where the hell do I look for his treasured items?” It was an honest question. I had no idea what Cameron Winship could possibly treasure.
“Top drawer of a bureau, or a nightstand, or a jewelry box, or under the bed,” Dove said.
“So then after you grab the personal stuff, get out of there,” Drea said. “It shouldn’t take you long, but if it does for some reason then we’ll call his house from that payphone right over there when the game ends and let the phone ring three times before we hang up. That’s your signal to get the hell out. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said. “And we meet at Gate 22, right?”
That had been my choice. Gate 22 led to a path that ran alongside Calisher Creek, which was a good and secluded place where we could bury the two halves of our Cameron effigy with running water in between them.
“Right,” Dove said as we walked into the stadium and the noise of the crowd went from a rumble to a roar.
I did the bit with showing myself to Jamie and left through the farthest exit right after the game started. Seeing Cameron running out onto the field in a black-and-silver #9 WINSHIP jersey that had always been a #9 ATTIA jersey made me almost sick with anger.
I channeled that anger into productivity and drove to the center of town. My orange car was too distinctive, so I parked it at Hazy Dee’s and snuck through a half mile of Main Street backyards until I reached the Winships’ looming white Victorian.
There were actually four locks. The screen door had one, and the farmhouse door had a surprise dead bolt. But it didn’t matter. I could do absolutely no wrong. Pin-and-tumbler locks opened before the pick-and-tension wrench in my hands like a paperback in a windstorm.
I thought I heard a faint noise, the end of some longer sound, when I got into the kitchen. But it was gone before I could register it.
Unfortunately, the thing I almost heard was the phone ringing for a third and final time. Drea’s warning call had come too soon, before I’d even made it into Casa del Winship.
But I had no idea. I relocked the doors behind myself, feeling the magic in my hands. Feeling unstoppable. My confidence carried me up the stairs as the Winship family drove home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Monday, November 22, 1999
The Winships’ house was big. Not as big as Dove and Bastion’s house (and not even close to as big as Northcott House, where the Micenmacher family lived), but much taller and narrower. It was decorated pretty much exactly how I expected it would be: lots of black-and-white family portraits, perfectly matted and framed. Lots of tasteful old Oriental rugs. The faint smell of cinnamon and floor polish. Everything was immaculate. By now you’ve probably noticed that I have a thing for cool architecture, but this standard Queen Anne–style Victorian house did not particularly thrill me the way something like a Frank Lloyd Wright house would, for example. The only thing about the mayor’s house that really intrigued me was the enormous octagonal turret that jutted out from the left side of the roof. Which, as it turned out, is where Cameron’s bedroom was.
The Winships hadn’t left any lights on when they went out, and I wasn’t about to turn any on myself and announce to the whole nosy neighborhood that I was there. But they did have a lot of those fake flicker candles that people sometimes put up in their windows as winter decorations. I could see well enough by their glow to make my way upstairs, checking every bedroom as I went. Finally, on the third floor, I opened the door to the big turret room, and under the dome of the sloping ceiling, I saw a setup that definitely belonged to Cameron. I turned my flashlight on and went in, carefully pushing the door closed behind me and keeping the beam of light close to the ground.
Cameron’s octagonal room was painted deep blue, and his unmade bed had sheets in the same shade. Heavy toile curtains, definitely picked out by his mom (or his mom’s interior decorator) hung on the windows, but the rest was all him.
Douchey striped sweater thrown on the bed. Cowrie shell necklace on the bureau. A motivational sailing poster that said P E R S I S T E N C E on the wall, and another one with more sailboats advertising the Cape Cod Cup. A 1995 New England Patriots poster signed by … someone, I have no idea who. A desk. A television. A Nintendo 64, a Dreamcast, and a PlayStation. Judging from the case, he was in the middle of playing Soulcalibur, which Drea had told me was excellent.
“Okay,” I whispered, moving carefully through the room. “Dove said to check the nightstand, top bureau drawer, under the bed.”
Under the bed was empty. Like suspiciously empty, like the Winships had a cleaning service or something. I rifled the closet next, but it just looked like the Gap’s warehouse. Nothing seemed, you know, special.
The nightstand had a bunch of receipts, a mini spiral notebook with phone numbers written in it, three pens, one broken Disney World keychain with Cameron on it in big bubble letters, three empty inhalers, contact lens solution, and a pair of glasses in a case.
“Cameron Winship actually has asthma. And wears glasses, who knew,” I said. The glasses part was kind of funny, and something he definitely hid religiously. Then I realized I was talking out loud, probably because of how nervous I was, and made myself shut up.
But I already felt like I wasn’t going to find something secret and precious to Cameron in here. There was a vibe about the way the house was, the way he kept his things. Like he had no privacy and no room for secrets.
Still, I hadn’t risked arrest just to give up. I went to the bureau and grabbed the hairbrush sitting on top of it. It was loaded up with a mat of blond hair, and I shoved the entire brush into the deep inner pocket of my jacket and contemplated the cowrie shell necklace. Was it special to him? The way it was kind of thrown against his deodorant and his bottle of Polo Sport (ugh) made me think no. So I opened the top drawer of his bureau and found nothing but socks, boxer briefs …
… and my red Toad’s Place hoodie, given to me by my mom, and lost in the workout room at Regional on October 30, 1997.
“What the hell?” I said.
I contemplated the sweatshirt for a minute, feeling very odd about finding one of my belongings here, in this terrible austere place. Why would he take this? I wondered. Is it for some weird reason, like—
My hands suddenly started to ache, and then I heard something.
It was laughter. Laughter that flapped and whispered like a length of silk that time was shredding into rotted nothingness.
It was coming from inside Cameron’s closet, from somewhere in the darkness behind the doors I had shut seconds before.
I stopped breathing when I heard it. Oh Jesus, it was right there with me, it had been right there when I put my hands inside the closet, oh Jesus Christ, I almost touched it—
And then I heard voices in the house.
Human voices. The laughter from the closet stopped as abruptly as it had started. The ache in my hands vanished. But now I had other problems.
Shit shit shit, my brain buzzed. My heart, already pounding from the interlude with the thing in the closet, hammered even harder. I hadn’t gotten any three-ring warning. I hadn’t heard the Winships come back, thick as the well-made plaster walls of the old house were. I hadn’t seen car headlights because I was on the opposite side of the house from the driveway. Shit shit shit.
I darted for one of the windows and gauged the drop. I could make it. Maybe a broken arm, but better than dealing with the cops. I tried to pry the window open, but it was so large and so stuck that it immediately shrieked and groaned as I tried to force it up. I dropped my hands and backed away.
The voices were closer. A light came on in the hallway outside of Cameron’s bedroom.
“—don’t know your own strength, it’s like you got your body yesterday” came a deep and very irritated voice. The voice of Mayor Winship, back from the grave. “Your brothers all played through college and none of them have ever had anything like this happen! You deserve to be suspended from the team for a move that idiotic, that absolutely goddamned idiotic. I swear, Cameron—”
“No, I didn’t mean to! No, it was a mistake! No, Dad, I swear—”
I was out of options, and they were almost to the door. I slid under the bed, turned off my flashlight, and pulled the comforter down to the ground with shaking hands to create a cave of concealment. I tried to breathe as quietly as possible, even though my heart was beating so hard it made my temples pulse. The door slammed open, and two sets of footsteps made vibrations along the wooden floor I was sprawled on. Light flooded the room, creating a glow around the edges of the comforter.
“Now I swear it was an accident, they can’t suspend me for an accident!” Cameron said. He was yelling at his father, but he sounded more panicked than angry.
