Spellbound - Cara Lynn Shultz [12]
I could tell that my friendship with her was not going over well with some of my classmates, who were put off by her quirky ways. (Once, she blamed her missing homework on the moon.) Angelique was also on scholarship, so of course the snobs at the school treated her like she lived in a mental hospital, not in an apartment building on Tenth Avenue. I, personally, thought she was a trip. Besides, these were people who had yet to even say three words to me, and Angelique—one of the best students in the class—had generously offered me all her notes to copy. Finally, Angelique admitted to me one day that she did play up her beliefs to get a rise out of everyone.
“They don’t understand anything that doesn’t conform to what they believe, or what they think, so of course I do whatever I can to make them uncomfortable,” she confessed to me over knishes on a bench in Central Park. “I, truly, am a witch. My mom’s a witch, too.
“It’s not like you see in the movies. Sure, there are some bad witches, those with evil intentions—my mom’s met a few,” Angelique whispered conspiratorially, flipping her jet-black hair back. “But not all are bad. And truly, I do see auras, and I really can see and sense people’s energy. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the best feeling to make these look-alike sheep so uncomfortable. I make stuff up sometimes just to annoy them.”
That afternoon, she expertly completed an experiment in acid/base properties, and loudly announced that the chemicals spoke to her, winking at me out of the corner of her eye.
Thanks to Angelique, I caught up on schoolwork pretty quickly. But things weren’t necessarily hard at this new school…just competitive. Still, I threw myself into my studies, telling myself that I was trying to get on the Principal’s List, to make my aunt happy. I hated to admit the truth: I was trying to distract myself from a growing, nagging interest in Brendan. (A regular name on the honor roll? Brendan Alexander Salinger. So much for being a dumb jock.)
He strode into English class on my second day, and all I could think was, “Damn.” He put the hot in “hot mess.” And the mess. His black hair was sticking out like it had exploded, his shirt was untucked and his tie barely knotted. But the disheveled look worked on him, like he had just rolled out of bed and onto the set of a jeans commercial.
Brendan turned his vibrant green eyes on my light brown ones, and I took that as my cue to say, “Hi.” He gave me a curt nod, then flopped down in his desk without so much as a polite “Hey” in response. I felt like I had been slapped. After that, when he came into class (always late, and always going un-scolded by the teacher), I would, invariably, look up at the wrong moment and catch his eye briefly. My eyes would dart back down to my Shakespeare text, reading the same line over and over again, toying with my necklace—a nervous habit that had gotten a lot worse. It was like a whole new level of Hell, one that Dante had forgotten about.
I didn’t know why I was so drawn to him. But fortunately, apart from English class, it was easy to avoid Brendan. I begged off watching the pickup games in the quad after school, telling Ashley that I was thinking about joining the track team after all and needed to get my stamina up by jogging in the park.
“It’s not a team. They don’t compete,” she drawled. “It’s a club. The Running Club. Seriously. They just go to the park and, like, run around.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, incredulous. I pictured the glossy girls at the school, teetering about the park in heels. Okay girls, there’s a Louis Vuitton bag in here somewhere. Go find it! And they’d scatter, fluffy Pomeranians clutched in their arms, as their little