The Hex Breaker's Eyes (5 page)

We can’t afford
a cell phone plan, and even though I’ve applied for some jobs
around town, I’ve never been able to get one. We’re a small town,
so the only real jobs are mom and pop stores, waitressing, or
working for the hockey rink. I’ve applied for them all, but so have
every other teenager in Blue Ribbon. Last year my dad gave me a
phone for my birthday, and every once in a while I save allowance
or birthday money to buy some prepaid minutes. I only have about
ten minutes left now, and I could have just told Tam to call the
landline, but for some reason I insisted she call my cell. I guess
maybe I’m taking this all personally, like I only want to hear it
through my own personal phone, but now I’ve got the phone on the
table next to my plate and I’m staring at it. A watched phone never
rings.

After my
macaroni’s gone I munch on two more baby carrots before I excuse
myself from the table and flee with my phone to my bedroom.

Tam calls me up
just as I pass through my door. I close the door tight before I
answer, and given my limited phone minutes, I get right to the
point.

“So what
happened?” I say, plopping into my bed with the phone against my
head.

“Her boyfriend
did it,” she says matter-of-factly.

“What? How do
you know?”

“Well, her
ex-boyfriend. She dumped the guy last week. Think about it, she
breaks the guy’s heart a few days ago and then suddenly she gets
cursed? Obviously it was him.”

“OK.
Probably—”

“Probably? You
mean ‘
awesome job Tam and Ryan, way to crack the case
,’
right?”

“Just tell me
what Ryan got. Who did he talk to, who said what?”

“He asked
Chris, you know that really tall guy who can’t make a free throw?
He’s a senior and he’s cool to the juniors, so Ryan talked to him.
He said that someone was asking him to find out about Dina and see
what her situation was.”

“OK, so what
did Chris say?”

“She was dating
a guy named Mason Charles, and they were together for six months,
and then last Thursday she dumped him... with a text message. I
guess he was really mad about it, she completely blindsided him.
Seems like the sort of thing that would cause someone to get
magic-cursing pissed, eh?”

“For sure,” I
say. “I only have five more minutes and I gotta call Marlie.
T.T.Y.L.”

“Later!” she
hangs up.

I quickly dial
Marlene’s house. Marlene also doesn’t have a real cell phone, so I
have to call her landline. Thankfully, she answers. It would suck
to waste my last five minutes waiting for her mom to tell Marlie
there was a call.

“Hey,” I say.
“I don’t have a ton of minutes on my phone so we gotta talk
quick.”

“OK. What’s
up?” Marlene seems distracted, not paying a ton of attention to the
phone call.

“You find
anything out about this curse?”

“Hex. The word
is hex,” she corrects me.

“Whatever.”

Marlie sighs,
“No, not whatever. A curse is voodoo, a hex is witchcraft.”

“OK, Marlene. I
bow to your occult knowledge. Just tell me the sitch.”

“You described
a yellow aura, but nothing online really talks about auras. But the
things you describe, lights turning off, tripping and falling, etc.
It sounds like a bad luck hex. Basically, she’s always going to run
into the bad version of a given situation. The odds are always
against her. Kind of a weak hex. Beginner witchcraft.”

“It tried to
throw her down the stairs,” I point out.

“No, it tried
to make her step on a slippery binder on the stairs. Bad luck hex,
not a hex that’s set to injure or to maim or to kill.”

“So what’s a
hex that’s harder to do? If this is beginner, what’s advanced?”

“Love spell?
That seems to be hard. There’s one called ‘The Hole in the Bucket’
that this website says is really bad. And another one that I’ve
only seen mentioned on the cache of a deleted forum. They call it a
Deathspell.”

“Jeez. OK. I
guess a death spell wouldn’t bother with turning off the
streetlights. But what about the bad luck hex?” I ask.

“What?” she
asks, finally paying more attention to me than to her computer.

“Can this thing
keep getting worse? I mean, if this person keeps amping up their
anger to boost the spell, can this thing kill her? Just how
bad
is bad luck?”

Before Marlie
can answer, my phone goes dead. I could call her back on the house
phone but I don’t bother. She was too focused on her computer
anyway. We can talk tomorrow.

I head down to
the rec room to watch TV, but I can’t focus. Somewhere in this
town, in this very neighbourhood, Dina Jennings is in a house full
of kitchen utensils, household chemicals, and God knows how many
stairs and potential tripping hazards. And between her and them,
there’s a yellow monster she can’t see, and its only purpose is to
take those normal everyday objects and turn them in weapons against
her.

“Hey Matty,” I
say in the cafeteria at school. “What’s up?”

Tam and I have
been roaming the hallways for most of the lunch period, looking for
Matty Charles, who is Mason Charles’ little brother. Matty’s a
freshman, a year younger than us, and from the looks of it, he’s a
real nerd. We’ve finally found him in a corner of the cafeteria,
sitting with one other boy, playing some kind of card game.

“Um,” he
squirms. Maybe girls don’t talk to him very much. “Just, um,
building my deck.”

I sit down on
the bench near him, and Tam circles around to sit on the other side
with Matty’s friend.

“My name’s Tam,
and this is Mindee,” Tam says. The boys are looking at us like
we’re aliens. Honestly, if you ever feel a little ugly or chubby,
talk to a nervous ninth-grader and suddenly you’re so attractive
that boys shiver in your very presence.

“How’s it
going?” his friend asks. “I’m John.”

“Hi John. I
just wanted to talk to Matty, you think you could give us a
minute?” Tam coos.

“OK,” he says.
He’s running away before she even gets the words out. He leaves his
backpack and lunch kit on the table and runs off toward the vending
machines.

“Matty, you’re
Mason’s brother right?” she asks. I’m thanking God that Tam’s doing
the talking because I’m not sure I could figure out a way to talk
to this kid.

“Yeah,” he
says, looking disappointed that girls have come to talk to him, but
it’s about his older brother.

“He just broke
up with that girl he was dating, right?” Tam probes.

“I guess.”

“You
guess?”

Matty grunts.
“Well, he’s been a total dick for the last week, when he’s not
moping in his room.”

“So you figure
she
dumped
him
? Not the other way around?” I ask,
even though I already know the answer.

“Yeah, she
totally crushed him,” he says.

Tam goes back
to asking the questions: “Was he mad about that?”

“Hell yeah.
He’s been a total dick ever since.”

We sit in
silence for a moment, not sure what to ask next. Finally, I see the
logo on his card game and decide to ask the most obvious
question.

“What are you
guys playing over here?”

“Magic
cards.”

“Oh, magic huh?
You know anything else about magic?”

He looks
confused. “What?”

“You know,” I’m
trying to phrase this right but I’m terrible with words. “Do you
guys know anything about actual magic? Real magic?”

He fidgets with
the stack of cards in his hands and seems to blush a little. “Are
you…” he starts. “Are you… hitting on me?”

Now it’s my
turn to blush. I come here to do a good deed and help Dina, and end
up with a nerdy ninth grader drawing wildly embarrassing
conclusions. “No! Not what I meant!”

“Oh,” he says,
looking a little disappointed (which is good, right?) “Then what
did you mean?”

“Nothing. Just
a question for my, um, sociology assignment.”

“Sociology?” I
think he realizes that there is no sociology class offered in Blue
Ribbon.

“Thanks for the
help, Matty. Good luck in your card game thing,” Tam says, saving
me from the horrors of having to talk any longer.

We’re out of
the cafeteria and back in our comfortable upstairs hallway as fast
as we can get there without running. We’re both turning pink from a
combination of stifled laughter and embarrassment, and as we get
closer to our lockers we break down and start laughing out
loud.

“You are such a
terrible detective,” Tam says between laughs.

“I wanted to
ask some of the questions,” I say. “I felt bad that you were doing
all the talking.”

“And then he
thought you were hot for him!” she breaks into laughter again. I
ignore that comment, stare straight ahead, and keep walking.

Just as we lean
against the lockers and sit on the floor, I get distracted by the
yellow aura entering the hallway. Dina Jennings heads to her
locker, which is about halfway down the hall from us, and I see one
of those tentacles (of which there are now three) reach into the
locker.

“Hey, watch
out!” I blurt, before I can stop myself. Dina looks at me as she
pulls the locker door open. A textbook falls out, and the corner of
the book hits her in the thigh. She yelps in pain and the book hits
the floor with a loud bang, and the small handful of people in the
hallway all turn to look at her. She looks even worse now, like she
doesn’t sleep at all. The book didn’t seem to hurt her much, but
the social awkwardness of everyone looking at her seems to be a
really big deal to her. She punches the next locker in frustration,
picks up her book and throws it on the top shelf before slamming
the locker door hard. Whatever she came here to get, she’s
forgotten it as she snaps her lock into place and kicks the door.
She’s probably had a ton of things trip her, fall on her, and
otherwise bother her for the last three days and it’s obviously
getting to her. She kicks the locker a second time, and even this
far away I can see the tendons in her neck tense up like she’s
about to start screaming in anger. Instead, she sprints away and
around the corner. A moment later we hear a door slam.

“Washroom,” Tam
says. “You should go talk to her.”

“What?”

“You could find
out who holds a grudge. Maybe it’s not Mason,” she says, but that’s
a flimsy excuse. Tam’s just trying to force me to ingratiate myself
into Dina’s life.

I’m not buying
it. “It’s totally Mason. And why don’t you talk to her? I’m the one
who’s not a good detective, remember?”

“But you have a
reason to talk to her. You caught her on the stairs. That’s your
icebreaker.”

God, this is
starting to sound like it does when Tam tries to coach me to talk
to boys.

“Fine,” I say.
“I’ll go see if she’s even in there.”

I head around
the corner and into the ladies’ room, where I find Dina standing by
the counter with her face red, hair ruffled, teeth clenched and
hands rubbing her eyes.

“Um, hi,” I
say.

“What do you
want?” she asks. She pulls her hair out of the ponytail and shakes
it out, so now I can’t see her face behind the curtain of hair.

“Are you OK?” I
ask as gently as possible.

“What do you
care?”

“Well,
yesterday I caught you when you fell down the stairs and today
you’re freaking out, so I thought—”

“—That I’m a
freak? Some kind of insane spaz?” She’s really on edge.

I wish I was
good at talking to people. This is just too hard. “I just thought
maybe you’d want to vent. Bitch about everything that sucks in the
world. Trust me, I know.”

She pulls her
hair back again, and under the light I can see that her face isn’t
quite right. She’s done a good enough job with the makeup that most
people won’t notice, but she has a big bruise on the side of her
face, around her temple.

“What happened
to your face?” I ask.

She looks
appalled that I noticed. “What? Nothing. I just fell into a
wall.”

“OK.”

“And don’t act
all fake like when I say I fell into a wall what I really mean is
that someone beats me. I actually fell into a wall. Tripped over my
shoelaces.”

“I bet that’s
happening a lot.”

“What? Is that
a joke?” she’s really pissed at me now. I should filter my brain
before I talk. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I’m Mindee. We
live around the corner from each other? We walk home the same way a
lot.” I hope to God she doesn’t think it’s creepy that I know where
she lives.

“Great, I have
a stalker.” (OK, so that didn’t work.)

“Can I tell you
something crazy?” I ask, trying for a kind, conciliatory tone.
“Something you might not really believe?”

“Sure,” she’s
looking in the mirror, checking her makeup in the hope that no one
else will see the bruise.

“I knew that
textbook was going to jump out at you.”

She stops and
looks at me. “You shouted. Before I opened the locker.”

“And I knew you
were going to fall down the stairs, that’s why I stood there to
catch you.”

Dina finally
turns her body to face me, giving me her full attention for the
first time. And she is not happy with me. “What?”

“You’re
cursed.”

“What?” she
demands again, her skin reddening with anger. Darn, this is not
going well. “What did you just say?”

“I can see
things, sometimes. Strange things. And you, well, you have a really
bad energy that’s attached to you, trying to trip you up. I think
it’s a bad luck curse.”

“Buzz off,
kid,” she says. “Mindee.” She repeats my name as if it’s some kind
of threat that she knows who I am now.

“I can help. If
you know who might have wanted to curse you, I could maybe break
the spell.”