Potion Problems Read online

  “I think we should walk away,” I said. “Because then it totally won’t look like we’re watching her.”

  “Then how will we know if she eats it?” Darbie asks.

  “When her memory is erased,” I said. “Follow me. Don’t make any sudden moves. Act casual.”

  We started walking away, until Darbie climbed to the top of the row of lockers.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her. “What happened to casual?”

  “I wanna see if she eats it.” She slid down the top of the lockers on her belly for a better view. A second or two later she slid back and gave us two thumbs up.

  “What are you doing, O’Brien?” Charlotte called up to Darbie. “You’re going to get the whole team in trouble for goofing around in the lock—”

  She stopped mid-sentence.

  “Is she choking?” Misty asked.

  “Charlotte,” I called out. “Are you okay?”

  Darbie said, “Blink once if you need the Hemlock maneuver.”

  “ ‘Heimlich,’ ” I corrected her.

  “Potato, pataaato. Who cares, Kell? She’s choking.”

  “Is she?” Hannah asked. “Looks like she’s breathing.”

  Charlotte didn’t blink, rather she made eye contact with me and asked, “What are you staring at, Kelly Quinn?”

  “Phew!” I said. “We thought you were choking.”

  “No.” Charlotte looked around the locker room. “Where are we going?”

  “To kick some Groundhog butt!” Misty said about the opposing team, the Glen Mills Groundhogs.

  Darbie said, “You two should probably walk to the field without the rest of the team, like you’re too good for us.”

  “You aren’t as dumb as you look.” Misty pointed at Darbie with her pop. “Come on, Charlotte.”

  Hannah held her two hands down low, palms up, and Darbie and I gave her a double high five.

  Mission accomplished.

  * * *

  Our archrivals, the Glen Mills Groundhogs, got off their bus. I don’t know how or when the rivalry started, but I knew what was going to keep it alive—their coach, Erin Madden.

  Coach Madden was tough, fit, and pretty, and her team loved her. She looked at Coach Richards and made a motion of her foot stomping and squishing an ant.

  Coach Richards saw, then turned his back and called to us, “Huddle up, ANtS.” We crowded around him. “Here’s the deal. We canNOT lose to this team. We’re going to run faster, head harder, kick farther, and shoot more accurately. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” we all said

  “Good,” Coach said. “Hop on that field and score some points.”

  Charlotte hopped onto the field like she was jumping on a pretend pogo stick.

  In a nutshell, the first half of the game was a disaster. The Groundhogs scored in the first few minutes, largely because Charlotte seemed to have forgotten the rules. After she picked up the ball for the third time, Coach benched her, giving Darbie a chance to play. Darbie didn’t do too badly. Regardless, at the end of the first half, the ANtS were down by four.

  Coach Richards yelled a lot from the sidelines.

  When Hannah came out for a water break, she said to him, “Coach, I think your blood sugar is getting low. Here, you can have my apple.”

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I have a banana and a pear.”

  “Thanks, Hernandez.” Crunch! “Now get back out there. And put it in the goal.”

  “You got it,” Hannah said.

  Hannah actually managed to kick the ball into the goal, improving things, but we still lost by six.

  Once all the Groundhogs had left, Coach Richard said, “Don’t even think about heading to the locker room yet. We’re running the hill.”

  Ugh!

  As we sprinted up, I asked Hannah, “I thought you gave him the apple?”

  “I did.”

  “Do you think you mis-measured?” Darbie asked. “You know capital T is tablespoon? Not everyone knows that.”

  Hannah gave Darbie a look. “There was no mis-measuring,” she snapped.

  “You used the agave?” I confirmed.

  “Of course. And obviously it worked for Charlotte, so it can’t be that.”

  “It’s a mystery,” Darbie said. Then she dropped to the ground at the top of the hill. “Come back and get me when you’ve solved it.”

  “We’re not done,” Coach yelled. “O’Brien! Keep moving!”

  “Roger that, Coach.”

  And Darbie rolled down the hill. “I’m moving,” she hollered.

  She reached the bottom of the hill, landing right at Coach’s feet. “I’m not in the mood, O’Brien.” Then he announced, “We’re done. Have a good night.”

  “No chance of that,” Hannah said, waddling to my mom’s minivan.

  “Hi, Mrs. Q. I’m sorry to say that I literally cannot close the door. My brain is sending signals to my arm, but my arm isn’t lifting up.”

  Mom closed the door, sealing us all in the minivan.

  And that’s when Darbie’s Return decided to kick in, and it was bad luck for all of us.

  12

  Farts, an Invitation, and a Good Deed

  Who’s farting?” Bud, my six-year-old, pain-in-the-neck brother, asked.

  My mom cracked a window.

  “Sorry, guys. I can’t help it,” Darbie said. “They were slipping out through the whole game. I’m glad it was windy.”

  It happened again.

  “It’s your Return,” I said.

  My mom dropped Darbie off first, thankfully. As she slid the van door shut, Darbie said, “Don’t forget to text me about you know what.”

  I knew what. A deed.

  * * *

  I had just enough energy after a shower and dinner to hit the attic.

  My legs had gotten stiff from sitting through dinner, so I teetered from side to side when I walked. I bumped into the hall table as I passed it, knocking the mail to the floor. One of the envelopes caught my eye as I was picking everything up. It was super fancy with gold-trim. Maybe it was a wedding invite?

  It was addressed to only my mom and included her middle name: Becky Smythe Quinn. Samantha used to be her middle name, like me and my grandmother, but when she got married, she moved her maiden name to the middle, and Samantha got the boot. The return address was from her high school in Massachusetts. The back of the envelope said Reunion!

  I set it back on the table. Even though we weren’t in high school yet, it made me wonder about Hannah, Darbie, and me in twenty years. Would we still be friends? I hoped so.

  As I went up to the attic, I kept thinking about losing touch with my friends like the authors of the Book. I couldn’t imagine going a single day without talking to Hannah and Darbie.

  Speaking of Darbie . . . I needed to send her a good deed before I went to bed. Hannah wouldn’t need one since Coach’s apple didn’t work. Why hadn’t it worked?

  Before we’d cleaned a few weeks ago, the attic had been jam-packed with stuff that used to be my grandmother’s and some stuff that belonged to Mrs. Silvers back from when her basement had flooded. Now it was cleared out except for ten boxes neatly stacked in a corner. And it was less dusty and spiderwebby but still totally creepy. The ceiling was low, the lighting was bad, and it was stuffy.

  I scanned the boxes that were left and found the one I was looking for: BOOKS. Inside I found several cookbooks. I flipped through them looking for some old-fashioned, secret pearls of cooking wisdom that had long been forgotten or disregarded by modern cooks.

  Ah! The American Cookbook. It had a picture of a loaf of bread on the cover and had once been green, but was faded now. The binding was cracked from being opened and closed so many times, and there were grease drippings and food splashes on the pages—the signs of a well-used cookbook. This was exactly the type of thing I was looking for. I could find a golden vintage nugget in here.

  I made my way out of the attic and brought my
new find to bed.

  Before snuggling in, I looked in the recipe box covered in tapestry and lined with satin and took out one of the little pouches it held. These were the good deeds that Señora Perez had given us to undo Returns.

  I untied the drawstring of the tiny sack and read the paper that was inside.

  The paper said: Help someone with their homework. Oh jeez, that was gonna be hard for Darbie, because she usually doesn’t even do her own homework. I texted her a picture of the paper. And she replied right away, Easy peasy lemon squeezey.

  I knew she was being sarcastic. Maybe a little kid, I texted back.

  You always have the best ideas, KQ!

  How’s your butt problem? I asked.

  My butt’s fine, but I’m cold. My mom keeps sending me outside when I feel one coming. And that’s most of the time.

  13

  The Thing About Reference Books

  The next morning, Saturday, I was zooming out my door to meet the girls at the library to work on our genealogy projects when I smelled something . . . strange and unpleasant.

  I peeked in the kitchen and saw Darbie sitting at the table with Buddy. They had a book opened on the table.

  “How are you . . . um . . . feeling?” I asked her.

  “It’s getting better,” she said. “Buddy let me help him with his science.”

  “Yeah,” Buddy said. “And she showed me how to rip the most amazing farts.”

  “Yup,” Darbie confirmed; then to Buddy she said, “Only, I’m all out of gas now. So I think it’s time for me to go.”

  “Not me,” he said. “I am always full of it.” Pfft! Pfft!

  He laughed at himself.

  “Gross,” I said. “Let’s go, Darb.”

  “Sure thing. Do you think maybe we should light a candle or something?”

  “Good idea.”

  * * *

  On our way to the library, I stopped, hopped off my bike, and scooped the dog poop out of Mrs. Silvers’s yard. I figured it was good karma, and you can’t have enough good karma when you’re messing with potions.

  Darbie waited for me on her bike and looked around the yard. “I never noticed that Mrs. Silvers has a spice garden.”

  “Me either. I’m used to dashing in and out of here fast, because I was scared to death that she was going to put some kind of hex on me.”

  “And now look—you two are like pals-ies, and we’re the ones hexing.”

  Since it was October, there wasn’t much left in the garden, but the rows still had their little signs: BASIL, ROSEMARY, THYME.

  “I hadn’t pegged Mrs. Silvers as a cook,” Darbie said. “I thought of her more as a Chef Boyardee lady.”

  I shrugged, disposed of the poop, and got back on my bike.

  * * *

  Hannah was waiting for us with her foot tapping and arms crossed. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Darbie went on to explain. “There was science homework, farting, dog poop, and spices. It’s a long story, but here we are on Wilmington Road at the public library, ready to write those papers!” She pretended to be excited.

  “It’s on Wilmington Road,” Hannah repeated. “Do you have the Book with you, Kell?” she asked me.

  I nodded. “I’m not leaving it alone anymore.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I handed it to her. She flipped through the regular encyclopedia pages until she got to the handwritten recipe pages. She pointed to the letterhead they were written on. It was stationery for the Wilmington Public Library. “This says it’s on Main Street. I wonder when it moved?”

  “Who cares?” Darbie asked.

  “I do,” Hannah said. “That’s why I said it.”

  We went inside and approached Mrs. Sullivan’s desk. She’d been the librarian since I was a little girl and Mom brought me to story time.

  “Did this building used to be on Main Street?” Hannah asked her.

  “Well, the building has always been right here, but before expansions and renovations, the entrance used to face Main Street, so that was the mailing address. Now our front door and parking lot face Wilmington Road,” she explained. Meanwhile Darbie helped herself to the Hershey’s Kisses on her desk. “The public only sees the new sections of the library—the renovated parts. But there are hallways and rooms as old as this town, where we store books that are no longer in demand. I suppose we should get rid of them, but . . .”

  Hannah pulled me aside and whispered to me while Darbie was still involved with Mrs. Sullivan’s story about the storage of old books, card catalogues, and periodicals.

  “The authors would have gotten their paper from the old library. I think we need to check out those hallways and see if we can find any clues about KE and RS. Maybe one of them can tell us why the apple didn’t work for Coach Richards.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “But how?”

  Hannah looked at Mrs. Sullivan, who now was talking about the reference section and library cards. “She’s just getting started. She looks like she’s been dying to tell someone all about this stuff forever. And Darbie will be an interested listener as long as those Kisses last.”

  I nodded.

  Mrs. Sullivan was saying, “That space could probably be cleaned up and used for other things.”

  “You know,” Hannah said. “Darbie loves local history. She’s sort of a buff. You know, the type who can’t get enough of it?”

  “Oh yes, I know the type.” Mrs. Sullivan lifted her hand. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Then you two will have so much to talk about,” I said. “But Darbie has blood sugar issues. Do you have more Kisses?”

  “I love Kisses,” Darbie said.

  Mrs. Sullivan reached under her desk and poured a whole new bag into the bowl.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Hannah and I need to get started on this project—shame we can’t listen too, but Darbie will tell us all about it later.”

  Mrs. Sullivan took the bowl and led Darbie to a table in the children’s section, where the two sat down and continued their talk.

  “I think we should go that way.” Hannah pointed to a door with a sign on it that said NO ENTRANCE.

  I followed her.

  Inside the door was a stairway that went down.

  There was no light switch, so we used the flashlight app on our phones and wandered through what felt like catacombs. We entered a room called REFERENCE AND COLLECTIBLES.

  “It’s cold down here. Let’s hurry,” I said.

  There were shelves of books, atlases, and dictionaries. There was a shelf that looked like parallel bars, from which yellowed newspapers hung over poles, and another area where magazines dangled from clips. Then we located a large bookcase filled with encyclopedias from different years. When we found the World Book Encyclopedia from 1953, we looked at all the letters. Sure enough, T was missing.

  “It’s from here. Our Book was right on this shelf. So the authors either stole it or checked it out,” Hannah said. “They don’t strike me as thieves. If they checked it out, there would be a record of it, and we’ll know who they are.”

  “They wouldn’t keep records that old,” I said.

  “Oh really?” Hannah said, pointing to a file cabinet that was labeled RECORDS.

  We opened the metal drawer and started combing through the files, when we heard a sound.

  Ping!

  We froze.

  Then there was the sound of something rolling on the ground.

  Like a marble.

  We looked down and saw the object.

  Not a marble.

  An orange M&M.

  “Darbie?” I whispered.

  “Where are you? I can hardly see,” she said.

  “In here.”

  She found us. “Thank God. Mrs. Sullivan ran out of Kisses, so she gave me a dollar to buy M&M’s from the vending machine. How much longer are you going to be? I don’t know how much longer I can take local history. She’s past the Revolutionary War a
nd moving on to Delaware’s activity in the Underground Railroad. Did you know that it wasn’t a railroad at all?”

  “Most people know that.” Hannah blew her bangs out of her face.

  I asked. “Where’s Mrs. Sullivan?”

  “Waiting for me. She wants to tell me about gunpowder, Teflon, and Kevlar. Did you know all those things have roots in Delaware, Madam Smarty Pants?” she asked Hannah.

  “Actually, no,” Hannah said. “Go and listen carefully so you can tell me about it.”

  Darbie popped M&M’s into her mouth. “So, what’s going on here?”

  We filled her in on what we’d discovered so far. “We need to see who checked the encyclopedia out,” I said.

  Darbie said, “That won’t work.”

  “And why not?” Hannah asked.

  “The thing about reference books is that you can’t check them out,” Darbie said. “Everybody knows that.”

  Touché!

  Darbie didn’t leave it there. For good measure, she just had to toss in, “Want some lotion to smear on that burn?”

  “It’s ointment,” Hannah said. “People put ointment on burns.”

  14

  Fried Bat Wings

  We joined Darbie to learn about the local invention of Kevlar. Once all the Kisses and M&M’s were gone, we gracefully excused ourselves to work on our projects. We were behind schedule—Hannah always made a schedule for us. To make up for lost time, we agreed to sit in different sections of the library and not talk to each other for two hours, so that we could get it done, which was lonely, but it worked.

  When we were all done, we sat outside on the grass, among a display of pumpkins and scarecrows, and we each did one practice run-through of our oral reports.

  Just as Hannah was finishing, a Rusamano Landscaping truck pulled up. Frankie and Tony hopped out of the back, and the truck took off.

  “Hey hey, what up, girl friends o’ mine?” Frankie called. “Guess what we’ve got.” He held up a white box.

  Darbie gasped. “It isn’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare joke about that, Frankie and Tony Rusamano. Just don’t.”

  “No joke,” Frankie said.