Under a Spell (3 page)

“What? Of course not,” Malik replied, sounding offended. “Why would I say something weird to her? Besides, I haven't seen her online in days. In fact, at first I thought that the problem was that she was missing my charismatic, charming personality.”

“She thinks you're a divorcée called MG who wears dresses and likes cooking,” Sophie reminded him as she tried not to think of the fact that Malik had a crush on
her mom and flirted with her on Facebook any chance he could get. It was just so gross on way too many levels.

“Oh, I think that subconsciously she knows the truth,” Malik assured her as he puffed out his chest. “Anyway I don't like to alarm you, but I think she's dying.”

“What?” Sophie felt like she had been hit in the stomach. Hard.

For a moment she wondered if she was going to faint, and she desperately willed herself to stay calm, but it was hard. After all, for four years she'd been waiting for her dad to come home so that they could be a real family again. She'd never thought she had to worry about her—

“Your mom,” Malik repeated in a loud, clear voice, as if she hadn't heard him correctly the first time. “We're talking about your mom and how I think she's dying. I mean, she keeps pacing up and down the room, and there has been a lot of arm flailing and wailing. Humans are so frail and mortal. Do you think it's some kind of flesh-eating disease?” Malik wondered aloud. Sophie ignored him as she hurried up the wide porch steps and over to the large glass window.

Her heart was pounding as she peered inside, and she tried not to panic. Her mom was wearing an old blue shirt that had once belonged to Sophie's dad. But for whatever reason, instead of working, she was marching back and forth across the already well-worn Turkish rug. Sophie anxiously studied her mom's face for any sign of illness.

“See.” Malik was suddenly next to her. “I mean, there's
definitely something wrong with her. Of course I might be mistaken about the flesh-eating disease, but I think you'd better get her to the hospital quickly. Maybe it's a heart attack? Or acute kidney failure?”

“Actually.” Sophie pressed her nose up to the glass and studied her mom. People often said they looked alike, with the same straight blonde hair and freckles, though right now something was different. Sophie squinted. “She doesn't look sick, she looks…
annoyed
?”

“Annoyed?” Malik looked at her with interest. “Why? I wonder what you've done now?”

“What do you mean? I haven't done anything,” Sophie protested as she continued to study her mom's face. Yup, she was definitely annoyed.

“Are you sure?” Malik double-checked. “Because you know how she worries about you…oh, hang on a moment, she's seen you, and now she's coming over. How do I look?”

“Like an invisible ghost with bad taste in shirts,” Sophie retorted in a dry voice just as her mom looked out the window and caught sight of her. She immediately marched over and threw open the window.

“Sophie Charlotte-Marie Campbell! I've been waiting for you to come home from school. In here now, please,” her mom said in a tight voice as she did that thing with her lips that could mean only one thing. Trouble.

“I-is something wrong?” Sophie gulped while Malik carefully smoothed his bright purple Hawaiian shirt and
then gave her mom a coy little half wave. Sophie glared at him as she opened the front door and went into the dining room. Her mom was waiting for her.

When her dad had still been at home, the dining room was used a lot, but these days the long mahogany table mainly served to house bills, old magazines, and, on occasion, the large cardboard sharks that her younger sister, Meg, liked to make. It was also where Sophie had escaped to last night in an attempt to start her history assignment.

However, right now the place was a total mess.

The normal junk from the table was strewn across the floor, and in its place was a collection of empty, up-ended CD and DVD cases. The discs themselves were scattered everywhere like fallen stars, twinkling and gleaming in the late-afternoon sunshine, which was pushing its way in through a large window.

“Boy, now that's what I call a mess.” Malik let out a long whistle that no one but Sophie could hear. She ignored him as she turned back to her mom.

“What happened here?” Sophie blinked, still trying to take it all in.

“I was hoping that you would tell me.” Her mom folded her arms.

“I don't have a clue.” Sophie shook her head, since while she had been in there last night all she had done was relive the Neanderthal Joe concert in her mind (hence, her history assignment still wasn't started). “But I can promise
it wasn't me. Why don't you ask Meg? You know what she and Jessica are like once they start playing together.”

“Oh, will you look at that?” Malik finally glanced at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “Is that the time? Because you know what? I really need to fly—well, not fly, since I'm a ghost not a bird—but still, I really need to get gone from here. Talksoonbye,” he finished off in a rush. Before Sophie could even think of throwing something at him, he disappeared from sight. She reluctantly turned back to where her mom was impatiently staring at her.

“Well?” Her mom repeated as she tapped her foot on the carpet. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

There was nothing Sophie would have liked more, but unfortunately, that wasn't exactly an option. At that moment her six-year-old sister, Meg, suddenly appeared from the kitchen with a PB&J sandwich in her hand. Despite her blonde ringlets and large kewpie-doll eyes, Meg's favorite thing in the world was watching shark attacks. Though judging by the excited gleam in her sister's eyes, watching Sophie get in trouble was a close second.

Hard on Meg's heel was Mr. Jaws, a black-and-white cat who, no matter how much Sophie bribed him with Kitty Crunch, kept hissing at her and Malik every time he saw them. Thankfully, no one paid any attention to him, or else Sophie would've been in big trouble.
Well,
she amended,
bigger trouble than she was in right now.

“Okay,” Sophie forced herself to lie as she realized her mom was still waiting for an answer. “You're right. It was
me. I was looking for my iPod. I-I couldn't find it anywhere. I'm sorry.”

“You know,” her mom said as her anger seemed to give way to disappointment. “I really thought that, once I started doing my pottery again, you girls would help out more around the house, but instead I get this.”

“You're not going to change your mind about selling the house, are you?” Meg yelped in alarm while simultaneously glaring at Sophie as if it was all her fault.

“No.” Her mom shook her head. “But I'm serious about needing more help. I've got to finish my order, and I still can't find the new pottery glaze I bought yesterday. You haven't taken it, have you?”

“Of course not.” Sophie blinked. “Why would I want your pottery glaze?”

“Same reason you felt obliged to make this mess,” her mom retorted. “Anyway, if I'm going to get everything done, then I'm going to need your help, which means that you can clean this mess up while I keep looking for my glaze.”

“What?” Sophie protested. It was one thing to confess to a crime that you didn't commit, but it was another thing entirely to have to tidy up after it. Then she remembered that she was a djinn now and all she had to do was wish for the mess to be gone and it would be. “Okay, fine. I'll tidy it up,” she relented.

“Thank you.” Her mom looked tired, and Sophie suddenly felt a flash of guilt run through her. The last four
years, since her dad had gone, things had been tough on them all. One of the reasons her mom had wanted to move was because she had been getting so stressed out.

Still, Sophie would soon know exactly where her dad was, and then everything would be better. And in the meantime, it would take only one second to clean up this mess, and she would still have time to finish her history research so that she could conjure up an assignment and then kill Malik. All before dinner.

She waited until her mom had headed back out to her pottery shed and was just about to wish for the room to be tidied up when she realized that Meg and Mr. Jaws were still in the room staring at her like they'd just bought front-row tickets.

“Er, Meg, don't you have anything better to do than just stand there?” Sophie asked.

“Nope.” Meg shook her head and took another bite of her sandwich.

“Let me rephrase that. Can you please go away?”

“Again on the nope.” Meg smiled, and Sophie folded her arms in exasperation, since she could hardly work her magic if her kid sister and a bad-tempered cat were watching her.

“But you must have something to do,” she wheedled. “What about going next door and playing with Jessica?”

“I hate Jessica Dalton,” Meg informed her in a blunt voice as she pulled out one of the heavy dining room chairs and made herself comfortable. “She said that if a
dinosaur and a killer shark had a fight that the dinosaur would win. I mean, seriously: a dinosaur beat a killer shark? Not likely. So I told her that she had better take it back or else. But she wouldn't take it back, so now I hate her. Anyway, I'd much rather watch you clean up all this mess.”

Sophie let out a long groan as she realized that there was no way she could use her magic now. Instead, she was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Great.

S
O, I THINK THAT WENT REASONABLY WELL,” MALIK
said an hour later as Sophie pushed open her bedroom door and collapsed onto her cast-iron bed. Normally, the yellow-and-white wallpapered room soothed her, but right now her back ached, her hands hurt, and she was pretty sure that half of her brain had leaked out of her ears while she had been forced to listen to Meg complain about all the crimes that her former BFF Jessica had committed against her (ranging from scissors stealing to purposely yawning when Meg was having her turn at show-and-tell).

“What?” Sophie struggled back up into a sitting position and glanced over to where Malik was standing, staring at himself in her mirror. “Are you serious? I got the blame for something that
you
did and then had to spend an hour cleaning it up—the hard way, since Meg wouldn't go away and so I couldn't use any magic. How is that good?”

“Well, it's good that your mom isn't dying,” he pointed out in a sunny voice as he started to do some kind of pop-and-lock
dance move. It wasn't a success. “Instead, she's just really, really mad at you.”

“Oh, yes, I can see how that is so much better,” Sophie retorted as she studied the large apple-shaped, rhinestone-studded ring on her finger.

It was actually the ring that was responsible for her djinn powers. When she had first started wearing it (after Malik had tricked her into putting it on), it had been agony to take off, but now that she had learned to control her powers, she could slip it off without aching or screaming. Not that she did very often, since it was amazing just how many adorable outfits a large apple-shaped, rhinestone-studded ring went with.

“I knew you'd understand.” Malik beamed.

“Anyway, what happened to the rule of you not going anywhere in the house but my room?” Sophie wanted to know.

“Oh, right.” Malik finally turned around, and she realized he was wearing a black hat set at a jaunty angle. “Well, I was doing that, but then I got bored. And hungry. So I thought I'd have a look around, and then I found a movie called
High School Musical
that I was in! Unfortunately, when I went to watch the next one, the disc wasn't in the case, so I had to go through all the DVDs until I found it.”

Sophie blinked. “Okay, so I've just spent an hour cleaning up a big mess all because you couldn't find
High School Musical Two
, the movie that your döppelganger Zac Efron stars in?”

“That's correct,” Malik agreed before shooting her a reassuring smile. “But don't worry, because in the end I found it stuck behind the DVD player and the crisis was averted. Though you really should talk to your sister about making sure she puts the DVDs away properly. It could've gotten scratched or something.”

“I think that was probably the intention,” Sophie said, since their grandmother had given Meg all three movies in hopes of moving her away from her gruesome love of sharks. Unfortunately, Meg hadn't been remotely taken with the all-singing, all-dancing teenagers and had stubbornly refused to watch them. Then Sophie noticed that Malik had pinned up a picture of Zac Efron over her favorite Neanderthal Joe poster.

She was pretty sure that in some countries that was a crime punishable by death. She marched across the room and removed the offending poster so that she could once again see the Joes in their full glory. Then she turned back to Malik.

“I'm starting to think it's about time you changed into someone else besides Zac Efron.”

“Why would I do that?” Malik wrinkled his Zac nose in confusion. “I mean, Zac is the man. He can sing, he can dance, and his hair is extraordinary. The only problem is that now that I'm no longer a djinn, Zac's a lot oranger than I am. I think it's his fake tan. I don't suppose you could hustle me up some color, could you?”

“What?” Sophie blinked at him, while secretly
wondering how he could still manage to surprise her.

“Color,” Malik repeated as he held out his arm and gave a decisive sniff. “I mean, if there's one thing I resent about being dead, it's that I'm no longer orange. I tell you, it's a real blow. Anyway, I've been trying some different paints, but it's just not the same.” As he spoke, Sophie realized that there was indeed a collection of paint pots sitting on her bookshelf and that Malik's arm was dotted with various shades of orange, making him look like an anemic tiger.

“I'm not going to turn you orange,” Sophie informed him in a blunt voice. “And you have to realize that you can't just wander around the house as you please. My mom's still totally stressed out, and until we find my dad and get him back here, I don't want to make things any worse.”