Page 60 of School Spirits
All three of them stared at me, but I didn’t care anymore. This had gone too far, and after what had happened in the gym today, Mary would be stronger than ever. We didn’t have any more time.
I took a deep breath. It had come to this. “And I think I know who.”
I walked over to Romy’s desk and pulled out her bracelet, dangling it on one finger as my other hand fished in my pocket for the charm I’d found in the cave. “This belongs to you, doesn’t it?” I asked her.
Very carefully, Romy put her can of soda down. “Yeah. What are you saying?”
I could feel Anderson’s and Dex’s eyes on me as I said, “You run a ghost-hunting club, but you didn’t have any ghosts to hunt. So maybe you stumbled across a spell somewhere. Hedge magic,” I said. “You just thought you’d call up a couple of local spirits. Nothing too dangerous, nothing that could hurt anyone. But hedge magic can be tricky, and something went wrong. And peoplearegetting hurt, Romy.”
Her face was a mask as she took all of that in. Finally, she got off the bed and snatched the bracelet out of my hand. “That is my bracelet, and yes, thatismy charm. But I lost it weeks ago. I certainly wasn’t hanging out in a cave, conjuring up ‘hedge magic.’ And what does that evenmean?”
“It’s something—”
“Don’t say you read it on the Internet.”
“Youdosay that a lot,” Dex said, and for once he didn’t sound like he was joking. In fact, I could swear that was actual suspicion on his face as he watched me. “First the salt thing, now witches summoning ghosts…’”
Romy was looking at me weird, too. “What salt thing?”
Glaring at Dex, I said, “It was nothing. And besides, it didn’t work.”
“All this stuff did start happening when you showed up,” Anderson said, his voice very quiet. I threw up my hands.
“What the heck? You said you’d been investigating the Mary Evans thing since Mr. Snyder. And that was months ago.”
“There weren’t any hedgehogs trying to blow up the gym months ago,” Anderson offered.
“It has nothing to do with me,” I insisted, but even as I said it, a shiver ran down my spine. That was true. They’d had one incident before I came here. Now all hell had broken loose. Had I somehow unleashed all of this?
“You seem to know an awful lot about ghosts for someone who claims to not care about the paranormal,” Romy spit out.
Anderson was nodding slowly, and even Dex seemed troubled. “The thing with the salt,” he repeated. “The day after that, Beth ended up nearly becoming roadkill.”
“I was trying to trap Mary’s ghost,” I fired back. “Not help her kill Beth.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Anderson’s face went hard. “You saw her at the graveyard the night before Beth nearly got mowed down?” he asked Dex.
Dex nodded. “She did say she was trying to keep the ghost in the grave.”
“Which clearly didn’t work.”
“If I were trying to get Beth killed, why would I have saved her life?”
“Like you said, you didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” Romy said. “You felt guilty.”
“No, I didn’t!” I said. Or rather, yelled. Romy actually flinched. Trying to soften my tone, I added, “I didn’t feel guilty because I have nothing to feel guilty about. I didn’t call forth any ghosts. You did.”
“No,” Romy said through clenched teeth, “I. Didn’t.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, so frustrated I wanted to shake her. “You didn’t. Some other person came in here and stole your bracelet and started doing spells all over the place. The point is, we need to stop it. This ghost is dangerous, Romy. And you can’t stop her with a blinking box and a tinfoil hat.”
Romy swung an accusatory glare at Dex. “Stop talking about the hat.”
“That’swhat you’re choosing to be upset about?”
“If our blinking boxes and tinfoil hats are so stupid to you, Izzy, maybe you shouldn’t be in PMS anymore,” Anderson said.
I was surprised at how much that stung. And even more surprised that Dex stayed quiet. When I looked over at him in the beanbag chair, he was staring at the carpet, chewing his thumbnail.
