I Put a Spell on You Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FROM: CHRISSIE WOODWARD, FORMER HALL MONITOR

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  APPENDIX: SELECTED SONGS OF THE GOOD TIMES GANG

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ADAM SELZER

  COPYRIGHT

  For

  Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Mark Felt—

  American heroes

  From: Chrissie Woodward, former hall monitor

  Re: the bee

  Dear Esteemed Members of the School Board:

  You stink.

  Seriously. You really, really stink.

  People should have been fired the morning after the all-school spelling bee. It’s been a whole week now, and NOT ONE PERSON has been fired! No one has even been suspended!

  I KNOW that you’re not afraid to fire people. Remember Mr. Agnew, the old janitor? You fired him the very next day after that whole thing with the hamster and the cheese. The very next day! But it’s already taken you over a week to fire people over a spelling bee that turned into a riot? Are you people nuts?

  Well, of course you are. In addition to stinking, you’re probably also nuts. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole business with the bee, it’s that this whole town is nuts. It was just a spelling bee, people! Get a grip!

  I’ve learned other things, too, though. Things about myself. And how wrong I was to think that the people in charge always had my best interests in mind.

  Up until about two weeks ago, I was the best hall monitor Gordon Liddy Community School ever had. I know everything about everyone in school, and I’ve ratted on plenty of kids over the years. I always thought that the people in charge cared about law and order, and that they only wanted us to get a good education.

  That seems pretty funny to me now, though, because they totally didn’t. I can’t believe how wrong I was!

  When the weekend after the bee passed and you hadn’t fired anyone yet, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, it was because you didn’t think you had all of the facts about what happened, not just because you stink. If that’s the case, well, I’m going to help you out.

  I’m probably the only person in town who knows the whole story of the bee.

  But even I can’t tell you the whole story myself. I’ve taken depositions and collected evidence from several of the key players, and the results of my investigation are in the following pages. These should help you understand exactly what happened and who the real crooks are.

  The days when I assumed that you, the people in charge, would do the right thing are long over. But I sure hope you do.

  I learned a lot of important lessons. You can, too. You’d better, in fact.

  Read these pages, and get on with the firing!

  C.W.

  P.S. The following pages are for YOUR EYES ONLY!

  1

  JENNIFER

  myxomatosis—noun. A disease only rabbits get. Even though she studied rabbits for a living, Samantha was not exactly sure how to spell “myxomatosis,” and didn’t particularly care.

  You might think this is weird, Chrissie, but I love it when snow gets into my shoes and my ankles get so cold that they actually hurt. Everyone knows that there’s no feeling in the world better than taking off cold, snowy socks and putting on something warm, right? Well, you can’t get that feeling if you don’t get snow in your shoes in the first place. So when I walk home from school, I step in every snowdrift I see. Sometimes I just shove the snow right into my socks when I get close to home.

  Does that seem too weird? I know I’m a little weird, but most of the people in this town are completely nuts. There’s a difference, you know. And I’m not really sure which one of the two I am sometimes.

  Anyway, you wanted my story from the beginning, right? That’s where it starts. Walking through the snow. I was walking home last Monday, and I heard Marianne Cleaver coming up behind me.

  “Jennnn-i-fffeerrrrr!” she shouted.

  She was hopping around, trying to step in the footsteps everyone else had already left, making her braids flop about like they were snakes attached to her head. It’s a safe bet that she’s never had a single snowflake get into her shoes. If you ask me, Marianne is a remarkably boring person.

  If you gave me a choice between talking to her and having a bunch of bowling balls dropped on my toes, I’d have to think long and hard about which to choose. If I were any meaner, I would have just run away, or maybe creamed her with some fresh snow, but I paused and waited for her to catch up with me.

  “Hi, Marianne,” I said, as politely as I could.

  “I have to talk to you!” she said.

  Well, that’s just super, I thought. I assumed that she probably wanted me to join some new after-school activity she was starting—and that my parents would make me join, no matter how stupid it was. They’re always looking for new ways to pad my college application, even though I won’t be applying to any colleges for at least five more years. With all my activities, I’m lucky to get twenty free minutes per night.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Are you going to enter?” she asked.

  “Enter what?” I asked, pretending not to know.

  “The bee,” said Marianne, as though she were talking to a five-year-old. “Are you entering? A, yes, B, no, or C, undecided.”

  Have you ever heard of people who read so many old books about knights that it sort of gets into their head, and they start putting bowls on their heads and running around thinking that they’re knights themselves? Well, Marianne is like that with tests.

  She takes a practice SAT every night. Most of the books she reads in class during sustained silent reading (SSR) are books on test-taking skills. And somewhere along the line, she started thinking she WAS a test, or her brain got stuck in testing mode, or something like that. Whatever it is, it makes her speak in multiple-choice questions. It’s like I was just saying—I may be weird, but I’m pretty sure she’s nuts. She’s always going around saying that she’s “gifted,” but I think that if I had whatever gift she has, I’d want to exchange it.

  “C,” I said, “undecided.”

  I jumped a step ahead of her to slide across a patch of smooth ice on the sidewalk in front of somebody’s driveway. I’m an expert ice slider.

  “But you did better than anyone else in our grade last year,” said Marianne. “That makes you a prime contender.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “What’s it to you?”

  “Well, isn’t it obvious?” asked Marianne. “I need to know what the competition is going to be like, and I thought you might chicken out. So are you entering? You can’t be undecided. Jus
t A, yes, or B, no.”

  “I don’t think I’ll enter,” I said, casually.

  I actually knew perfectly well that I’d be entering. I just wanted to see how she’d react if I said I wasn’t. It’s fun to push Marianne’s buttons sometimes.

  “Can you tell me why not in fifty words or less?”

  I stopped spinning for a second and wondered if Marianne was actually going to count how many words I used. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Well, I won’t be able to study much with all my other activities, for one thing.”

  My parents make me join everything. I was a member of the School Spirit Squad, secretary of the Recycling Club, and even the founder, and sole member, of the Flying Mermaids, the Gordon Liddy Community School synchronized swimming team. And on afternoons when the school doesn’t have an activity or two to keep me occupied, they find other places for me to go. Until the school golf club and indoor soccer started to take up too much time, they’d signed me up as a volunteer bedpan cleaner at the nursing home. Yuck.

  I don’t even learn anything from most of them—most of them just take up time when I could actually be learning something. Honestly, sitting around eating cat food would be a better way to spend time than most of the activities, if you ask me. All I do in most of them is sit around while everyone else gossips about the people who aren’t there.

  But according to my parents, having an impressive college application is more important than actually being smart. I really hope they’re wrong. I know for a fact that they’re completely nuts, and people who are nuts tend to be wrong a lot, right?

  But Marianne’s parents believe the same thing, and she agrees with them completely.

  “That’s your excuse?” she asked. “Your activities are going to make you too busy to study?”

  “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s stupid!” she huffed. “I’m in just as many clubs as you are, and I’m president of four of them. But you can bet I’m entering!”

  “When will you have time to study?” I asked.

  “Simple,” Marianne said. “I’m going to stop taking practice SATs and work on spelling exclusively. I’ve already read the dictionary five times. Now I’m going to memorize it.”

  I snorted. “The bee is next Friday. I think it takes longer than that to memorize the entire dictionary.”

  “I have a photographic memory!” Marianne said, lying through her teeth. “Even if you do enter, you’re never going to win with talk like that!”

  “What does it matter if you come in first, anyway?” I asked. “You don’t need to win the whole thing to go to districts. You just have to be in the top five.”

  “Oh, puh-lease!” said Marianne. “Do you think colleges want to see ‘All-School Spelling Bee Runner-Up’ on the applications? No! They want champions!”

  I hopped ahead to slide across another bit of ice—a rough, bumpy patch. Those are harder to move across—the trick is to put one foot in front of the other, then use the back foot to push yourself forward, and the front foot for steering and balance.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” I asked, “that maybe there’s more to being a champion than just sitting around memorizing the dictionary all night? Like, if you have to give up your whole life to be able to win, you’re not really the champion at all?”

  Marianne chuckled. “That,” she said, with this superior air that she gets now and then, “is loser talk.”

  I don’t believe in violence, but I must admit that there are times when I’d really, really like to smack Marianne Cleaver upside the head. As it was, I just stared at her and hoped that if I concentrated hard enough on her head exploding, it might actually happen. It didn’t, of course, but it never hurts to try.

  I knew I’d be entering anyway. In fact, it DID matter to me whether or not I won, because my parents totally expected me to. It was an order. My sister, Val, won it three years in a row—she’s the only fourth grader ever to win, you know. And I was nervous as heck about it. I didn’t even make it to districts in fourth or fifth grade, and Val came in first when she was in both of those grades. After hours and hours of studying, my brain just froze up at the bee the last two years, I guess. That can happen, you know. You work your brain too hard, and it sort of melts.

  I had a secret plan that I’d been working on for weeks. It was a new kind of studying that I thought might work better. Instead of just studying spelling, I’d be studying Shakespeare, the thing I like to study most. You can learn a ton of stuff from Shakespeare, you know. Stuff about history, language, human nature…I mean, EVERYTHING is in Shakespeare. I’d pick up plenty about spelling along the way, and maybe my brain wouldn’t be melted by Bee Day this year.

  It would be, like, Zen studying. Studying without studying. The None of the Above school of studying. Or something like that. All I had to do was try to get out of as many activities as possible so I’d have time to do it. And if it worked, maybe I could write a book on None of the Above studying skills. Marianne would probably read it during SSR.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen if I didn’t win. Most likely, I’d be signed up for ten more activities and find myself cleaning another hundred bedpans a week. But there was always a chance it would be worse. Dad went to military school for a couple of years when he was my age, and he always said that if I went, it would look better on my college application than all of the activities put together. I could see him saying I needed to go if I didn’t win the bee, or I’d never get into business school and run a corporation when I grew up.

  But I don’t want to go to business school at all. I probably won’t have to guts to tell him this until I’m eighteen, but I don’t want to run a corporation, either. I want to be a hippie.

  I saw a documentary about hippies on TV last year. They were these people back in the 1960s who wore brightly colored clothes and spent all their time playing guitars and dancing around in the woods. They didn’t care much at all for money or careers—just helping make the world a better place. That’s the life for me.

  I asked my dad if there were still any hippies around, and he said that there were—in fact, he said, he’d just had to sit next to a couple of “smelly hippies” on an airplane. I’m pretty sure you can be a hippie without smelling bad. Or taking drugs, which Dad said the ones on the plane did. Or living in the woods all the time. I like the woods okay, but not for more than a weekend at a time. I’ll be a good-smelling city hippie.

  In a yard up ahead, I spied a large snowdrift against an orange house. They must have been old people—there hadn’t been new snow in a week, and there wasn’t a single footprint in the yard. Snow at houses where the people have kids doesn’t stay pure for long.

  “Pardon me, Marianne,” I said, as formally as I could manage. “I have to go.”

  And I ran as fast as I could, right into whoever’s yard it was, and dove face-first into the drift. The snow got into the hood of my coat and onto my face, and even into my ears. It slipped past my gloves, got up my sleeves, and stung my bare wrists. It was awesome.

  After I got home, it was time to put Operation: None of the Above into action.

  First, I casually told my mother that I was thinking of not entering the spelling bee. It was important that I tell my mother—she’s not quite as nutty as my father. Then again, most squirrels eat breakfasts that aren’t as nutty as my father. There was no way I’d ever talk Dad into letting me out of any activities, but Mom might be persuaded. It wouldn’t be easy, though.

  “Not entering?” my mother asked, making just as nasty a face as I’d hoped she would. Mom makes some really super faces when she’s upset. “Well, of course you’re going to enter! And you’re going to win! Your only real competition is from that snot-nosed little brat Marianne Cleaver. And we’ll take her down by any means necessary!”

  It’s weird how much my parents hate Marianne, considering that she’s probably the daughter they always wanted. Even I don’t
hate Marianne, exactly. It isn’t her fault she’s so dull—some people are just born that way. But if my dad could have used nuclear weapons to help me beat her at spelling, he probably would have done it.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “I’m a bit worried that I’ve forgotten a lot of words lately.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Mom. “We’ll make you some flash cards or something to do in the car. Now hurry up and get ready for flute practice. Mr. Porter says you haven’t seemed very focused lately.”

  I had never been focused on my flute lessons. I usually spent the lessons wondering how far up Mr. Porter’s nose I could stick my flute. I suspected that it was quite a long way. The guy has a schnoz the size of a Toyota.

  “Mom,” I asked, going in for the most important part of my plan, “don’t you think I should maybe skip flute practice this week so I can study for the bee? Please? I need to work hard if I’m going to beat Marianne. She has a photographic memory, and she’s going to use it to memorize the dictionary.”

  “Oh she is, is she?” Mom said. She paused and thought for a moment. “That’s just like her. I’ll tell you what, Jennifer. You can stay home from flute practice for the next two weeks, but that’s all. And you’ll be using that time to study.”

  “Okay!” I said. And I bounded up to my room. The plan was off to a perfect start!

  So, free of the flute, at least, I grabbed my warmest blanket and curled up on my bed, leaning my back against the wall. My cat, Falstaff, came and sat next to me—he tried to sit on my lap, but since he’s approximately the fattest cat in the universe, I didn’t let him. Instead, he curled up beside me and rubbed his head against my thigh.

  I grabbed my copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare off my bookshelf and officially began my practice of None of the Above studying.

  Of all the clubs I’m in, the only one I really like is the Shakespeare Club—partly because it’s about the only one where Marianne isn’t there. It’s not a club sponsored by the school, the Y, or anything else, it’s just a group of people who get together to talk about Shakespeare at a bookstore in Cornersville Trace. I’m the youngest person there by about twenty years, and I don’t always know what they’re talking about, but there’s always someone there who can explain what’s going on to me. We’d spent the last few meetings talking about Titus Andronicus, a play where a guy kills kids and feeds them to their parents. They never assign us any books like that in class! People would complain that they were “inappropriate.”