The Only Thing Worse Than Witches

DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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Copyright © 2014 by Lauren Magaziner

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Magaziner, Lauren.

The only thing worse than witches / Lauren Magaziner. pages cm

Summary: Eleven-year-old Rupert cannot resist applying to an advertisement to be a witch's apprentice, but quickly finds himself over his head with the young witch-in-training who desperately needs his help.

ISBN 978-0-698-14795-9

[1. Witchcraft—Fiction. 2. Apprentices—Fiction. 3. Magic–Fiction. 4. Best friends—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Mothers and sons—Fiction.] I. Title

PZ7.M2713Onl 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013034310

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Mom, Dad, and Michael,
for many magical years of endless inspiration, laughter, and—most importantly—love

The
Worst
Assignment Ever

R
UPERT WAS DOWN I
N THE DUMPS.
L
ITERALL
Y.

The garbage from Gliverstoll's town dump sloshed around his ankles, and piles and piles of trash extended as far as he could see. Rupert reached forward to peel something slimy off a bicycle handle, all the while lamenting his horrible luck. Why did he have to be in Class B with the dreadful Mrs. Frabbleknacker? Everyone in Class A had Miss Snugglybuns
—
and she was supposedly the nicest, most wonderful teacher who ever lived. Rupert heard that Miss Snugglybuns baked her students a four-layer cake every single day. And during science class, she brought in a big lamp and a watering can to help her class make rainbows.

But no. Rupert was stuck with Mrs. Frabbleknacker, who thought that the best way to teach waste management was to make her science class find a paper clip buried somewhere in the town dump.

Rupert grumbled under his breath as he sunk his hands into a brown pile that looked suspiciously like poo.
Mrs. Frabbleknacker
, he thought,
is the worst person I have ever met
. It wasn't the first time Rupert thought this, and he was sure it wouldn't be the last. He hated her with every cell in his body, with every bacteria now crawling on his skin. Because Mrs. Frabbleknacker was:

1. Extremely mean. Once when Allison Gormley passed a note to Kaleigh Brown, Mrs. Frabbleknacker made them both stand on their heads for the entire class period. When they finally turned right side up, their faces were purple and their words came out backward. (“I LEEF LUFWA!” said Allison. “EM OOT!” said Kaleigh.) It took them a whole week to learn how to speak normally again.

2. Extremely scary. She was the scariest-looking adult that Rupert had ever seen. She was tall, thin, and hunched, like a coat rack that didn't know how to stand up straight. Mrs. Frabbleknacker had a very knobbly, criggly nose that twisted off in a thousand different directions. She also had a long, spindly tongue that she liked to stick out at the children in her class. Her hair was dark and straight and as rigid as cardboard. She had pale skin as wrinkly as tinfoil and as clammy as spit. Whenever she clomped past Rupert's desk, he caught the faint scent of belly- button lint, and her breath always smelled like mushy bananas.

3. Extremely strange. While the other fifth-grade class got to keep frogs as pets, Mrs. Frabbleknacker made her class dissect their frogs. Rupert's class had to carefully pull out the organs and put them into buckets for each different frog part. Rupert's hand had trembled as he pulled the tiny frog heart away from the tiny frog lung. And he tried desperately not to poke through the tiny frog stomach. When the day was done, Mrs. Frabbleknacker had collected twenty-six hearts, intestines, stomachs, livers, and tongues. She had twice as many eyes and lungs, and four times as many legs
—
all in their respective buckets. Rupert saw her loading the buckets of frog parts into her trunk after school, and he couldn't help but imagine a framed collection of frog guts hanging on Mrs. Frabbleknacker's walls.

4. Extremely dangerous. Mrs. Frabbleknacker had a temper like a hurricane, especially when it came to the witches. She always talked about how angry the witches made her, and how much she loathed certain ones. And once, when Hal Porter mentioned the Fairfoul Witch in her class, Mrs. Frabbleknacker turned red, picked Hal up by the scruff of his shirt, and tossed him out of the classroom.

Rupert hated her all the time, but he hated her most of all at this very moment as he dug his hands through sludge to find a stupid paper clip.

“This gives a whole new meaning to needle in a haystack, doesn't it?” said poor, brave Bruno Gopp as he walked over to where Rupert and Kaleigh were silently digging through trash. Bruno was a boy in Rupert's class, and Rupert thought that he was almost too brave for his own good
—
he actually
volunteered
to answer questions Mrs. Frabbleknacker asked.

“Shhhh!” Kaleigh snapped. “You don't
want her to catch us talking. You saw what she did to me and Allison.”

“Aw, I'm not scared of her.”

“You should be,” Kaleigh whispered. “Did you hear what happened to her husband?”

“Who's crazy enough to marry her?” Bruno said, a bit too loudly.

Kaleigh clamped a hand over his mouth. “Shhhh!”

“What happened to her husband?” Rupert asked.

Kaleigh dropped her voice so low that Rupert could hardly hear her. “No one knows.”

“Maybe she killed him,” Bruno said.

“Maybe she keeps him locked in the basement and feeds him through a hole in the wall,” Rupert suggested.

“I don't think she's really married,” Kaleigh whispered. “She's probably just faking it.” Bruno snorted, and Kaleigh hushed him again. “Shush, Bruno!”

“Kaleigh's right. We shouldn't talk,” Rupert said. “We need to focus on finding the paper clip, already. At least whoever finds the paper clip gets to go home
—
”

“But what about the rest of us?” Bruno asked. “Do we have to stay here all night?”

“Maybe,” Rupert said. “But I'd rather someone go home than no one.”

Bruno thought about this for a moment and sighed. “When I get home, I'm going to eat a hot dog.”

“I'm going to take a bath,” Kaleigh volunteered.

“I'm going to lock myself in my room and demand to be homeschooled,” Rupert said.

“And
I'm
going to drop-kick three naughty children so hard, you'll land on the witches' doorstep, and I'll let them tear you to pieces,” Mrs. Frabbleknacker snarled from behind them.

Rupert closed his eyes, wishing that Mrs. Frabbleknacker actually
would
kick him to the witches' doorstep. Anything would be better than this.

Gliverstoll

H
OURS LATER,
R
UPER
T WALKED HOME FROM T
HE
dump, dripping a trail of brown sludge in his wake. Still, even though he was sopping wet and disturbingly slimy, his spirits cheered as he walked through his town.

Rupert had always loved Gliverstoll. His town was built into a rocky mountain nestled by the ocean. Most of the hustle and bustle of Gliverstoll took place in the shops around Main Beach. Rupert's house, though, was at the tippy-top of the mountain, quite far away from the beach. The dump was close to the bottom, so Rupert had a long way home, zigzagging up the roads that wound around the mountain.

Rupert could tell from the dusky sun that it was already pretty late. He figured that his mother would be at home by now, but he quickly peeked inside the quilt shop
—
where she worked
—
anyway.

Mrs. Marmalin, his mom's boss, was sweeping up the shop with a broom. Rupert tried the door, but it was locked
—
so he ended up knocking until she noticed he was outside.

“Rupert!” she said when she opened the door. She gracefully wiped her hands on her quilted apron and adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses as she looked at him. “What are you doing out so late? And by yourself, too!”

“I'm coming from the dump,” Rupert said. “My teacher made us dig for a paper clip.”

Mrs. Marmalin laughed. “Of course, dear. Of course,” she said, as though Rupert was making the whole thing up.

Rupert looked around the dimly lit store. “Is my mom here?”

“She went home hours ago, poor thing. Spooked by a witch!”

“A witch?” Rupert said.

“One of the witches walked into our shop today and demanded that we sell her one of our finest quilts at a price much less than it was worth. When I refused, of course, she went on a rampage. A terribly nasty temper.”

“My mom left after that?”

“Oh, yes, she was terribly skittish. She said that she needed to lie down, and she looked so pale that I couldn't refuse. I wish I could have closed up shop and taken a breather myself, but these quilts don't sell themselves.”

Rupert nodded.

“Thank you! Have a good night!” he said politely, and he backed out of her store.

Rupert walked to the end of Druscle Close and started up one of the curvy roads that led up the mountain. All the while, he thought about his mother running home from the quilting shop. He was surprised that she went home early
—
out of her three jobs, her sales work at the quilting store was his mother's absolute favorite. His mother loved to quilt, and she quilted all of the bedspreads and drapes in their house. It was her dream to make the longest quilt in the world.

Her second job was as an ice-cream taster at the local ice-cream store. The makers of the ice cream could not test their own flavors because, ironically, Mr. and Mrs. Gummyum both had diabetes from eating too much of their own ice cream. So his mother got to taste all of their innovative flavors, like Nutty Butter Gumdrop, Sugar Salt, and Bologna Macaroni (which was their most popular flavor).

Her third job was a fortune-cookie writer. Her work for that had to be so secret that she signed fifteen contracts, swearing confidentiality. Rupert wasn't allowed to tell anyone either. In fact, he wasn't even supposed to know. It was like working as a spy
—
whenever his mother turned up for work, she had to go through five full-body scans, just to make sure that she didn't bring any microphones, telephones, cameras, or recording devices with her.

Despite all the secrecy, his mother enjoyed writing fortunes and often came home with stacks of fortune cookies that she brought to show Rupert. On those days, Rupert and his mother would crack mountain loads of fortune cookies in the kitchen.

Generally, Rupert's favorite fortunes were the ones that were very cryptic. His mom wrote one once that said
The mug is under the sofa.
Rupert loved that one. Sometimes he repeated it over and over again in his head. He had asked his mother where she got the inspiration to write something so fascinating, but she had said that that fortune was just a mistake. She was trying to direct her supervisors as to where she put her coffee cup, and the voice-recording program mistook that as a fortune. The machine had already printed two hundred copies before his mother realized what had gone wrong. Rupert was very disappointed to hear that, but he didn't tell her because she was most proud of her non-accidental fortunes.

He cringed as he thought about some of his mother's most prized work:

Tomorrow is a bright sunshiny day. Embrace it with bright sunshiny smiles.

(Rupert thought that one was a little cheesy.)

You are very loved.

(Rupert thought that one was even cheesier.)

You are unique and beautiful just the way you are.

(Rupert thought that one was the cheesiest.)

Okay, so his mother wasn't very good at her third job, but it was difficult for her to support him on her own, so Rupert did his best to be encouraging.

Rupert turned around a sharp bend in the road. He began to climb a set of steep and narrow stairs, a shortcut that led straight home. He fantasized about how he'd walk through the foyer. His mother would give him a hug and tell him that he'd never have to go back to Mrs. Frabbleknacker's class ever again if he didn't want to.

Of course, that would never happen. More likely, she would be upset that he was out and about near the witchy parts of town so close to dusk.

But Rupert knew he wasn't the only one who was interested in the witches. Last year, Kaleigh came into school on her tenth birthday proudly wearing a brooch that she had gotten from a witch shop. Hal's family loved to walk through the witchy streets; he talked about it all the time. Kyle went on a broomstick ride above Gliverstoll with his younger brother in the beginning of the year. Bruno claimed that his mother had been severely allergic to nuts, dairy, gluten, strawberries, soy, eggs, seafood, legumes, latex, dust mites, and pollen, but the witches sold her potions that cured all her allergies right up. And Allison swore that her mother's rose garden blossomed because of all the care the witches took in the town.

But when Rupert tried to tell his mother all the nice things his friends had said about the witches, she refused to listen. In fact, every time Rupert mentioned the witches, his mother grimaced and reminded him to stay far, far away from the witches.

But he always wondered: What was the point of living in one of the only witch towns left if he couldn't ever see a witch?