Page 10 of Practically Magic

I button my coat and keep my head down as I hurry home, wondering what will happen when Principal Aceste tries to call my mother and gets a stranger instead.

Maybe I can cast a spell that the stranger will play along, pay for the damages, and this will all be resolved without my parents finding out, so the party won’t be canceled, and Colton Croft will prove his love to me magically at midnight on Halloween?

Yeah, right. Even Harry isn’t that good of a witch.

She’ll probably laugh about it with my mom. It’s so embarrassing that my spell backfired so epically. The thought of Harry hearing about this makes my whole body tingle like a rash. I can feel a pit forming in my stomach.

As dusk starts to settle over the mountain behind our town, the sunset seems to highlight our house at the end of the street. For almost two hundred years, it’s been perched on the edge of the lake, the gables framed against our weeping willow.

The garden grabs me—it’s gotten unwieldy since Harry moved away to Boston for school—but I like the messy look of the ferns and trailing ivy. Even the large oak tree in the center of our lawn seems to have grown wilder without her. I feel that same pinch in my chest—the tire swing is starting to fray. If we don’t do anything, it’ll fall into the yard soon. I convinced Harry to cast a spell that would get the tire to swing without us pumping our legs, and the two of us would spend hours outside, taking turns, laughing, and talking.

Lately, we haven’t been doing either of those things. We used to work together so well. Harry was good at everything, and I was good at, well, Harry. I knew how to get her to loosen up, to take a break, to do something a little bit against the rules.

And while our parents would discipline us and tell us to get back to work, Dad would always give me a little smile. “You’re good for her Kitty Kat,” Dad told me once, patting me on the back.

That was the one thing that I could do. I couldn’t cast spells or win awards, and even my straight A’s weren’t worth a comment, since Harry was every teacher’s favorite. But I was good for her. We were good.

But it doesn’t feel that way anymore, and I don’t know why. One minute Harry had my back, and the next she shut me out completely. Ever since then, we’ve been like ships crossing in the night. Pleasant to one another, but every conversation we have is surface level. I feel like I’ve fallen behind and I can never catch up. She’ll always be two years older, and I’ll always be just following in her footsteps down a path she already carved.

My phone beeps. My mom is asking why I’m still outside—she can sense where we are, I think, and she’s antsy for our weekly video call with Harry. It’s the worst part of my week. My parents and aunts basically spend an hour gushing over Harry and Boston College.

My parents are professors, and it’s like they’ve unlocked some secret language now that my sister is at college. My mom compares my sister’s syllabi to the one she has for her class Witches and Witchcraft in the Early Modern World. My dad gives her advice for talking to professors during office hours and complains about the TAs for his Folklore and the Fantastic class. And they both spend at least ten minutes extolling my sister’s magic and spell work, even though my dad isn’t a witch and doesn’t have any magical blood.

All while I sit there with nothing to add.

And yeah, I know I sound jealous. Maybe I am. I just want someone to see me, and I’ve spent my entire life feeling invisible. With Harry three hours away in Boston, this year was my chance to stand out on my own. And now with one spell gone wrong, I might have gone and blown up everything.

Because chances are Principal Aceste has my dad’s number somewhere, and once he can’t get through to my mom, he’s going to call him. And then I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life.

Even walking as slowly as possible, I still reach the wraparound porch. Small white candles flicker in the windows, giving the house a glow as I run up the steps, being careful to sidestep the one loose board. I pause at the door, until it creaks open on its own—or, more likely, thanks to Mom’s intention.

I’m greeted by the smell of leaves and sage intermixed with apple and have to imagine Mom is smudging the house and Dad is making an apple pie, which he does every week in the fall. Steeling myself with a deep breath, I follow the harmony of their low voices to the kitchen. The floor creaks as I walk across oriental rugs scattered here and there for warmth.

Our home has always felt a bit like an antique shop. No two pieces of furniture seem to go together, and yet somehow the place works. There are the hurricane lamps from a trip to Salem last Thanksgiving, the leather armchair my parents got on an anniversary trip to Portland, and the deep blue velvet couch from their St. Augustine trip to Grampa and Grams’s for a solstice celebration. The fireplace crackles away, staying lit even when no one is there to restock the wood, and the ticking of the grandfather clock passed down from generations past steadies my racing heart. From her croissant shape on the sofa, our cat, Phoebe, taps her fluffy gray tail, yellow eyes following me through the room like Great-Aunt Aida’s portrait.

“Kitty Kat? Is that you?” Dad calls.

“Of course it’s Kat,” I hear Mom tell him as I walk tentatively into the kitchen. “She’s been loitering in the garden for some reason.”

So she definitely felt my presence. I try to arrange my face somewhere near neutral as I step into the kitchen. My parents flank the massive oak table built by my great-great-grandparents that anchors the whole room. Bright, shiny white subway tile surrounds cabinets, some open, revealing apothecary jars next to things like peanut butter. A pendant light hangs over the island, providing lots of light, but it’s the little lamps on most counters and shelves that give all the warmth. Well, the lamps and my dad, who beams at me like I just hung the moon.

Next to my mother’s glower, it almost feels sarcastic.

“Kitty Kat!” he says. When he pulls me in for a hug, he smells like cinnamon; the gesture surfaces a cloud from the flour dusted on his sweater, one of a dozen of the Halloween-themed ones he’s bought over the years. He is trying hard to make Ugly Halloween sweaters become a thing like Ugly Christmas sweaters are. It hasn’t happened yet. When he pulls back, he looks at me as if seeing me for the first time, his brown eyes warm, his short reddish hair, so similar to mine, smelling like grapes thanks to some homemade pomade he’s been working on forever. “How was your day?”

I pause, feeling my body go taut as a bowstring as I look from Dad to Mom. “Good,” I say cautiously, bracing for impact. “How was yours? Talk to anyone?” Any calls?

“No. Just your aunts. I’ve been busy getting ready for this trip.”

I silently cheer. Maybe I can cast a spell without them seeing and fix this whole thing.

“We’ve just been packing,” Mom says. “It’s taking forever, though. I’ve had a migraine all day. But that always happens this close to Samhain.”

She lets down her slick blond bun, just as smooth and Barbie-doll perfect as Harry’s hair, and massages her temples. “How about you? Any . . . symptoms?” Mom and Dad stare at me, waiting for an answer about magic. I might have a cough from setting the chem lab on fire. Does that count?

“Why are you favoring your left hand?” my mom pushes, reaching out.

I glance down, unsure. “Oh, I got a paper cut while reshelving books with Laney. It’s nothing.”