All-Season Edie Read online

  Disturbing things are starting to happen. For instance, a boy phones Dexter. This in itself is not totally new, but I hover around long enough, eavesdropping, to hear Dexter call Mean Megan immediately after the boy hangs up. “It worked!” she says.

  Which means Mean Megan—no! not Mean Megan!—is a witch too. And if she’s teaching Dexter, that means—oh no! no! And, sure enough—

  “Mom, Edie’s been in my room.”

  “Was not!”

  “Things are, like, rearranged. I think she took something.”

  “What?” Mom asks.

  Of course Dexter can’t say what. But she gives me the witchiest look of all time, and I know she knows. And I was so quiet! I shiver at my sister’s uncanny knowledge.

  More strangeness: the week before Halloween, Dad comes home from work with the news that he’s been given a raise. He looks happier than he has in a while, and I can’t help thinking of his disposable razor that I knotted with a hair from his comb and sprinkled with some coffee grounds. He cherishes coffee. I thought I ought to do something nice for him, since he’s been rubbing his forehead so much lately and acting so distracted. It wasn’t exactly a raise I had in mind, but maybe I can take a bit of the credit. You never know.

  Meanwhile, Mom and Grandma are busy making the three witch costumes out of a white bedsheet, a blue bedsheet and some satiny black stuff Mean Megan’s mom bought. Mean Megan’s mom doesn’t know how to sew or is too busy or something. Mom says she feels sorry for Mean Megan.

  “You are insane,” I tell her. Then I get sent to my room, just like old times.

  Halloween finally arrives. The minute I get home from school, I tear out of my clothes and into my costume. I want to put the makeup on right away too, but Mom tells me it would be better to wait until after supper; otherwise I might get blue face-paint in my spaghetti.

  “We’re having spaghetti? I love spaghetti!” I shout, even though we always have spaghetti on Halloween.

  Dexter sits in her prissy room doing homework. She refuses to get dressed up until after supper. “Spaghetti? White costume? Hello?” she says when I bug her.

  I can’t wait any longer. I run up to my room and retrieve the figurine I took from Grandma and Grandpa’s house from my sock drawer. I had it tucked inside a sock to keep it warm. If you can harm someone by abusing a little figure like this, you must be able to help him too, by treating it nicely. For me, the figurine is Grandpa. In the herb book, I found a recipe for clarifying the skin by washing it with an orange and rosemary infusion. Every day, I’ve been rubbing the figurine’s head with a little of my breakfast orange juice and a sprig of dried rosemary I stole from the kitchen. Clarifying the skin can’t be all that different from clarifying the mind, can it? I talk to the figurine and rub it and keep it warm in its sock. It’s getting a little sticky, probably from the orange juice, but otherwise it seems fine. Since it’s a cherished object of Grandpa’s, I decide to roll two spells into one for extra power. It’s sad how easy it was to get one of his hairs. The day he and Grandma were visiting, I pretended I wanted to give him barrettes, like I used to when I was little, and just pulled one out. He grunted a little but didn’t say anything, just kept watching his golf. He’s like a dog that way: friendly but not curious. Cats are different.

  Now I wrap the figurine up warmly in an old sock and give it a kiss. I dart down to the back door, stuff the bundle in the garbage and recite the entire witches’ scene from Macbeth, which I’ve memorized specially for this occasion. “Oeil de triton,” I add quickly, slamming down the lid as the door opens behind me.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asks suspiciously. “Are you talking to somebody out here?”

  “Is it time for trick-or-treating?” I ask.

  “It’s time for supper.”

  After supper, Mom paints my face blue, and Sam and I go door to door in our neighborhood. “Trick or treat,” I say dutifully, over and over, holding out my plastic pumpkin, not really paying attention. Sam, who is dressed as a chandelier, keeps dropping the battery pack that keeps her lit up and is too preoccupied trying to keep her costume together to notice how impatient I’m getting. Back at home, Grandma and Grandpa will be waiting. They come every year to take pictures of us in our costumes.

  “Had enough?” Sam asks.

  “‘Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d. Thrice and once the hedge-pig whin’d. Harpier cries: ’tis time, ’tis time.’ Let’s hit the road,” I say. Sam shrugs and her lights go out again.

  When we get home, though, only my parents are waiting. Mom starts to say something about Grandma not wanting Grandpa to drive and Grandpa refusing to come. Dad’s on the phone in the den, where I can’t overhear.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Grandpa wasn’t feeling well,” Mom says. “They decided to stay home this year. I’ll take a picture of you and we can e-mail it to them, how’s that?”

  When she’s gone into the den to download the picture from the camera to the computer—in other words, to talk to Dad without me hearing—I sneak out to the garbage can by the back deck and retrieve my old sock. It’s now slightly spaghetti-stained from our plate scrapings. I’ll wipe the stickiness off and put the figurine back the next time we go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Something tells me Grandpa won’t have noticed it was ever gone.

  The day after Halloween, I find out I got an A+ on my school project. Exceptional work, Edie! Mr. Chen wrote on it in red. He even asks me to read it aloud to the class. When I get home from school, I find out Dexter is grounded because when Mom went to pick her up from the party the night before, she got there early and found Dex wearing makeup borrowed from Mean Megan. Not Halloween makeup, but the other kind, which Dexter isn’t allowed until she’s fifteen. Mom says Dexter knew she was breaking the rules, so now she has to Suffer the Consequences. Mean Megan is in the doghouse too and isn’t allowed to come over for the entire month of November. And then, when I’m tidying up my closet (throwing out the leaves and bones, restoring the pins to Mom’s sewing box, stacking the library books it’s time to return, and wondering what to do with the spices), I find the lucky nickel Grandpa gave me weeks ago. That means I still have a wish saved, to use any way I want the next time I see a fountain.

  Or I could put it in my savings jar. I think that’s what I’d rather do. It’s not much, but even the tiniest little bit is something to hold onto. Like Grandpa remembering what kind of pizza I like or where he went on his honeymoon. That’s not nothing, is it?

  Stupid Christmas

  “Stupid Christmas,” I say.

  “Edith Jasmine Snow.” Mom makes her raisin face. “You are coming with Dexter and me to the mall for Christmas shopping and I am not going to hear one more word about it.”

  “But,” I say.

  “Not one word!”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling incredibly frustrated; then I start coughing again.

  “Cough away from me,” Dexter says, flapping her hands. We’re sitting in the kitchen having an unreasonably early Saturday morning breakfast because of Mom’s big plans for the day. “You’re infectious.”

  I lean over and cough on her.

  “Edith,” Mom says sternly, and I know if I weren’t sick and Mom didn’t want to get moving, I would be shot into my room like a cannonball. Here’s what’s wrong with me: coughing, sneezing, runny nose, achy head and a throat like I’ve swallowed sand. The only neat part is my voice, which has gone deep. I keep trying to sing, but that only makes my cough worse. I give up on breakfast, pushing my toast away. It’s too painful.

  “Oh, Edie.” Mom isn’t angry, though. She smoothes my hair back and holds her palm to my forehead for a minute. Then she goes to the cupboard and gets the cough syrup and the aspirin.

  “Oh,” I wail again. I hate swallowing pills. “Can’t I stay home?”

  “Yeah,” Dexter says.

  “No, because Daddy is away all day today and I don’t want you spending the day alone.” Dad is working on a Major
Presentation for an Important Client and is Putting In Some Serious Overtime because his firm is Down To The Wire. He left the house before any of us was up, leaving as evidence only a coffee mug in the sink.

  Mom feeds me two swollen spoonfuls of thick, sharp, sweet cough syrup, supposedly raspberry. More like mutant raspberries, I think, shaking my head to dispel the taste. More like raspberries from a tender clump in a quiet corner of a nuclear power plant that one day—or night, it would be at night, with only a janitor around as witness—grow to seven hundred times their normal size. They sprout arms and legs and faces and powers and personalities. They start wearing capes, and letters on their berry chests, and going on evil adventures before falling into giant vats of boiling cough mixture, all thanks to the effects of nuclear radiation. (I don’t know what nuclear radiation is, but I do watch cartoons, and the syrup does taste absolutely terrible without entirely losing touch with a certain recognizable berry-like flavour.) “Now take your pill,” Mom says.

  Pills are just plain mean. They stick in your throat and make you gag on their bitterness. They don’t have personalities.

  “Hurry up, Edie,” Dex says bossily. “I have to get cards and presents for all my friends. I want to find something special for Grandpa. I have so much to do.” For a second she sounds just like Mom, sort of flustered and distracted and satisfied all at the same time. She speaks as though she isn’t really talking to me at all but rather to some invisible person, someone she’s showing off for. Who could that be? I remember the ancient gods and goddesses we’re learning about in social studies, how they can appear or disappear or turn into whatever they want. Maybe Dexter thinks some of them are listening, disguised as toasters and microwaves and yellow kitchen curtains with blue flowers. Typical Dexter, to imagine such amazing and powerful beings would be interested in her stinky little shopping trip.

  “Have you taken that pill yet?” Mom asks.

  “Almost.” Dusty pours around the corner and starts mewing in front of his empty food bowl. I jump up. The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. I find the ancient Egyptians very sympathetic.

  “Ah!” Mom says sharply, pointing at my pill. I clap it into my mouth, wince, swallow and gulp at my water. Then I take a scoop of cat food from the bin and put it in Dusty’s bowl. I love feeding my cat. “Don’t pet him while he’s eating,” Mom says, although I don’t know why not. Dusty doesn’t mind, he just keeps eating. “Go brush your teeth and put your shoes on.”

  “I’m bored already,” I say. Dexter is waiting by the front door with her jacket on and her little purse strap looped across her chest. “How much money do I have?” I ask. “I want to get something special for Grandpa too.” I haven’t been allowed to visit Grandma and Grandpa since I got sick. I don’t like to think about the reason why: Grandpa is so weak that my cold might land him back in hospital. Those were Dad’s exact words, like he was trying to make me feel guilty.

  It’s getting harder to think about Grandpa without a little knot of hurt in my chest. Something is coming, I keep thinking, something not so good. At the same time, I can’t imagine anything changing. Grandpa will always be Grandpa, calling me Albert and letting me do stuff no one else does, like starting his car by turning the key while he presses the gas, or tasting his drink.

  “Now do you see why little girls don’t get beer?” he said after I spluttered it straight back out, but he said it nicely. When I asked him if letting me have a taste was a secret, he said, “No, no, no. You never have secrets from your mom and dad. If anyone will get in trouble, it will be Grandpa, not you.” He was right, too. Dad yelled at him, but he didn’t care. “Albert was curious, just like I was at her age” was all he said. “It’s good to be curious.”

  I wonder if maybe that’s the problem: he’s gotten so old and tired that things don’t make him curious anymore, and that makes him grumpy and sad. I decide to find him a present that will make him curious again, something more special than Dexter could ever dream of. “Can I go to the bank?” I ask Mom.

  “Not today,” she says. “You have all those loonies in your jar.”

  “That’s my pirate treasure,” I complain. Dexter snorts. “You snorted,” I tell her.

  “Teeth,” Mom says, pointing.

  In the bathroom, I squeeze gel paste onto my toothbrush and brush slowly, trying to stare up into the tube. Could an ancient god fit into there? When he turns back into his actual self, would he be all goopy and blue? I know—after all that witch business back at Halloween—there are no such thing as gods and goddesses and magic powers really, but it’s still interesting to think about the possibilities. Then Mom and Dex start calling me at the same time. I rinse and gargle and spit and pee and flush and wash my hands and stomp into my shoes and grab my ski jacket and race over to the front door. Then I’m dizzy.

  “I get to sit in the front,” Dexter says.

  “Mommy,” I say. My head feels prickly.

  “I was ready first,” Dexter says.

  “I’m sick,” I say. Cleverly: “I might puke on the back of your neck.”

  “Don’t say puke,” Mom says.

  “It’s just a word,” I say. Dexter gets to sit in front.

  The drive to the mall is as familiar as cheese. It’s so familiar it makes me sleepy. I know every house and tree. The little purple school that isn’t my school because it doesn’t have enough French, even though it’s closer to home. Wong’s corner store. The big woods, called Mundy Park, where Dad and I sometimes go for a walk.

  Once we saw rabbits in the woods, but when I got excited they ran away. The windshield wipers suck and slurp at the raindrops that pepper the windscreen. I lean my head back against the head pad in the back seat and wonder about the lives of rabbits. Closing my eyes feels like letting go of a helium balloon. Once I think I hear Mom say, “Ssh, she’s asleep,” and I wonder who she’s talking about.

  When we get to the mall I sit up and say, “I want a rabbit.”

  “And I want a parking spot,” Mom says. “You girls help me look.”

  We drive around the rooftop part and the underground part that echoes, but every space is taken. Cars looking for spaces are going slowly and people are running to and from their parked cars, holding plastic bags over their heads, trying not to get wet. I feel hot. “Mommy,” I say, and then I yawn.

  “There,” Dexter says, stabbing a finger at the windscreen. Ahead of us, a van is backing out of a spot.

  “Yes!” I say.

  “No,” Mom says, because it’s a wheelchair spot— we see the white and blue symbol of a wheelchair painted on the ground as we drive by. A couple of spaces later she brakes when she sees a couple loading up their station wagon. They smile and wave at us to show they’re leaving as soon as they’ve packed all their shopping away.

  Dexter jiggles up and down in her seat impatiently. Mom catches my eye in the rearview mirror and grins. Dexter is extremely weird about the mall. She loves it. It makes her happier than anything else in the world, and she wants to go there every day. She knows each store and what things she wants from each store. She knows what’s a good deal and where you can get a better deal. She knows what food you can get at each of the fast-food counters in the food court and where the elevators are and where to get the best haircut and which stores have mirrors in the change rooms and which don’t. She’s a mall expert.

  “Now,” Mom says, but just as the station wagon backs out, a sports car opposite us zips into the spot we’ve been waiting for. “Ooh,” Mom and Dexter say at the same time, with mean squinty looks on their faces that should have made the sports car shrivel up and disappear in a sour little puff of smoke. Instead, a man gets out of the driver’s side and walks toward the mall without even glancing at us.

  “Mommy,” I murmur, watching the man for as long as I can. He’s pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and is dialling a number while he walks. I press my hot forehead against the cool window, watching him. Would Grandpa like a cell phone? One for him and one f
or me, and we could call each other, like spies?

  “That man was so rude,” Mom says. “Dex, if I drop you and Edie by the doors, will you look after your sister until I meet you inside? You can go to the card shop and start choosing.”

  “Yay!” Dexter says, ripping off her seat belt. I follow more slowly. We get out in front of the glass archway that leads into the mall. I watch Mom’s car rejoin the circling throng. I feel sleepy again. “Hey, dope,” Dex says, “come inside. You’re getting wet.” I look at her and start coughing and can’t stop. I cover my mouth with my hand to keep the germs from flying everywhere. Germs, I imagine, are like pepper: tiny black dots in the air. My throat hurts all the way up into my ears.

  “You’re all red,” Dexter says when I finish. Then she does something extraordinary: she holds her hand gently to my forehead the way Mom did at breakfast. “You’re, like, way hot,” she says. Again, though, I have the feeling she’s less interested in me than in the invisible watcher. She’s just trying to be grown up since Mom left her in charge. So I shrug away from her and say in my clogged, scratchy voice, “OH BY DOD. Doe dutch be.” After that, Dexter starts acting normal again, and we ignore each other all the way to the card store.

  There’s a lot to look at along the way. The mall is all decorated for the holidays, and carols are playing on the loudspeaker. In Center Court is the annual display, Christmas Castle. Dexter and I are both too old for Christmas Castle, where Santa sits on his throne and kids sit on his knee while the photographer takes pictures. We’re too old for the toy railroad that goes in circles around Christmas Castle, where little kids scream to get on or get off while teenage girls in green felt mini-skirts and green felt hats chew gum and tell them to get back in line. These girls roll their eyes and pop bubbles and push their hair behind their fake pointy ears. They’re elves. One day Dexter will get a job as an elf, I’m pretty sure. She’s just as cute and blond and bored as these girls, plus she has good posture from years of ballet. But you have to be in grade ten. Dexter and Mean Megan asked. They’re only in grade eight.