Chapter 10
10
W HEN I WOKE UP THE next morning, two things immediately grabbed my attention.
Lenore was on my windowsill.
And I had a text from Kaci.
The text was the easiest to address in my rumpled, half-awake state. But of course, because my life had taken a turn into main-character-in-a-TV-show territory, the message was one that no teenager ever wanted to hear about an embarrassing video featuring them. Three words that struck fear into the hearts of every social-media-obsessed person on the planet.
It went viral.
Huh. Well, if there was ever a moment for an expletive, it was this one. Fuck.
How viral? I texted back.
Very viral.
Well, shit.
I slid out of my sheets and crossed the room. Better see what Lenore wanted, or else I would have an irritated raven on my hands. She stuck out her leg as soon as I opened the window. The scroll was more smashed together than rolled, as if Al had rushed to send Lenore, as if they hadn’t wanted to be caught. Lenore flew away in a flurry of black plumage as soon as I had the scroll in my fingers.
Huh.
I carefully unfolded the message.
Mothers are pissed I didn’t tell them about your glimpses. Grounded for reasons.
Ah, that was why the paper had been squashed, and why Lenore had left in such a hurry. It was a clandestine mission. But why was Al grounded? They hadn’t lied. Just omitted telling their mothers a secret that wasn’t even theirs. Weird.
FYI: the paranormal community knows. Be prepared.
Be prepared for what? For more jerks like Dennis who felt entitled to their futures at the cost of my free time? Or worse, the loss of my bodily autonomy? Great. More reason to find this Gem-Jam and… well… yell at them, I guess. It would be like closing the barn door after the horse had already escaped, but it might make me feel better.
I sighed.
Well, at least I knew more than I had when it’d first happened. I had psychic interludes. The two I’d experienced had been triggered by touch. And of the two, one had come to fruition as I’d seen it. Other than that, I had no clue how anything worked. Maybe I should take Kaci up on her offer and talk to someone at the Psychic Guild. Except… if Al’s scrolls were correct, there hadn’t been a verified seer in a century. Would anyone at the Guild even know how to help me?
Ugh. Why was this happening? I had wanted to coast through my sophomore year at the new school with my head down, unnoticed, while helplessly pining away for a cute werewolf boy. It was Al who had wanted a dynamic, self-embracing school year. I’d only agreed because of the very serious BFF code. So of the two of us, why was I the one who had suddenly developed psychic abilities? Al would’ve been way more suited for this. They would’ve loved it. But going viral? Being a seer? This wasn’t what I wanted.
This wasn’t me . Or at least not the version of me I’d known for the last fifteen years.
Was it? I’d experienced two glimpses, and one had come true. So was I really… clairvoyant? Was that who, or what, I was supposed to be now?
I put my head in my hands and gripped my hair in my fists. The pull and sting in my scalp grounded me, yanking me from my swirling thoughts. Okay. First things first. Get ready for school. Meet with Al. Find this Gem-Jam and tell them to take the video down.
I flew through my morning routine, opting for long sleeves when I thought about how Dennis had tried to grab my arm the previous day, and jeans with minimal rips. Trying to balance “fashionable” with “sudden psychic ability” was difficult, but at least hoodies were always in style. I paused at my dresser and, after an internal debate, yanked open the top drawer. I didn’t want to stand out—that was absolutely the last thing I wanted. But “viral video” pinged around in my brain, as did the knowledge that my glimpses were activated via touch. And no matter what I did, I wasn’t going to be able to traipse around school unnoticed, at least for today, and maybe even next week. I grabbed a pair of gamer gloves that a well-meaning relative had gifted me one birthday, even though Aiden was the one who actually played video games.
Aiden . Had he seen the ClickClack video? Would he contact me if he had? It had gone viral, so maybe he’d reach out? For the thousandth time since he’d left for college, I wished he was there, or at least accessible. But he wasn’t. I had to rely on myself. I shoved the gloves into my pocket.
Okay. Now to move on to the next task of getting to school and tracking down this Gem-Jam person. I slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen for a quick breakfast before heading out. After that first day, my mom hadn’t confronted me again, which was great but also unnerving, especially after her quarrel with the administration.
Anyway, her absence in my morning routine meant that when she popped up from behind a huge vase of flowers and a fruit basket, I let out a strangled yell.
“Mom!”
“Cam,” she replied evenly.
I stumbled to a halt, one hand wrapped around a water bottle, the other reaching for a banana on the counter.
“What is that?” I asked, gesturing toward the massive bouquet and pile of fruit. “Are those from one of your clients?” My mom was a commercial real estate agent in New Amsterdam and sometimes received gifts from her happy clientele. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for flowers or gift baskets to appear at our house—just not ones so… vibrant.
She raised an eyebrow. “They’re addressed to you.”
“To me?”
She held up a card pinched between her thumb and forefinger. On the front of the envelope was my name in beautiful, glittering calligraphy.
I frowned. “Where did they come from?”
“They were on the front porch this morning. Your dad brought them in. What have you done, Cam?”
“Me?” I squeaked. “I haven’t done anything. I have no idea what they are.” If this were a normal day, I’d have been affronted at her tone and the assumption that I’d done something ridiculous enough to warrant a giant package of nature showing up on our doorstep, but normal? I didn’t know her.
I carefully approached the basket. The fruit gleamed. Not a brown spot to be seen. And the flowers… they were so fragrant, it was as if someone had aggressively sprayed air freshener throughout the kitchen and dining room. I sneezed and rubbed my nose with my sleeve.
My mother thrust the message at me impatiently.
Sliding my finger beneath the flap, I popped open the envelope and removed the card. A sparkling apple adorned its front. I raised an eyebrow and flipped the note open.
Please enjoy this small portion of our bounty.
The Sprite Alliance
What the fuck?
“Well?” my mother demanded.
“It’s from Al’s family.” I crumpled the note in my hand and shoved it into the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie. “In celebration of our friendship.”
My mother’s mouth turned down in the barest of frowns. “Really?” She eyed the fruit and the flowers. Then she leaned in and delicately sniffed. “Are they safe?”
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sure they ordered them from somewhere,” I said, my voice flat, shoulders drooped in weary annoyance. “I highly doubt they’ve been spelled. Besides, Al has been my friend for years. They wouldn’t send something you’d consider dangerous.” That was probably true. Unfortunately, the rest of my statements were outright lies. I hid my shaking hands in my pockets.
My mom tented her fingers. “It’s… interesting that they would send anything at all.”
“What can I say? They’re witches. They do interesting things. Anyway, see you after school.”
“Cam!”
I ran to the front door and hopped into my shoes. “Sorry. Gotta run. Going to be late! Thanks!”
And, holding my banana and water bottle, I slammed the door behind me. I grabbed my bike from beside the brick front stairs and rode to school. At least this morning was a little cooler than the days before, and I wasn’t baking in my extra layers.
Once there, I jammed my bike next to a pair of humming brooms in the rack and locked it. I waited for Al outside on the school steps, under the “No Gum, No Skateboards, et cetera” signs. The area was abuzz in conversation, and I wasn’t vain enough to think it was all about me, but there were definitely a few choice phrases that couldn’t be anything but. If I thought the attention had been grating yesterday, this day was shaping up to be far worse. I did my best to ignore everyone, and despite my aversion to seeing myself on video, I opened the ClickClack app.
I navigated to the Situation Paranormal account, and my stomach ached at the number of views and likes on the video. Thousands upon thousands of residents of Shady Hallow and the greater New Amsterdam area, not to mention places far beyond, had seen that video. Despite my better judgment, I scrolled through the comments.
I know that kid! He’s in my math class and hangs out with Spacey Kaci. She’s such a weirdo.
Well, that was rude, user CentralShadyHallowSux.
Deepfake for sure.
Okay, well. Obviously not fake, because that had all happened literally yesterday. Jerk.
Gemma James is the most annoying kid in Shady Hallow. I hope Cam predicts a horrible accident for her.
Well, again. Rude. And also murderous. Maybe user TiffaniWithAnI was the killer I was looking for. I doubted it, but at least she’d given me the name of the infamous Gem-Jam.
Cam is cute.
Aw, thanks. That was nice.
This kid is so ugly.
Less nice.
All methods of divination are black magic. Do not be led astray! The end is nigh!
Gross.
And that was enough of the comments. I violently exited out of the posts and scrolled through the Situation Paranormal account. The video of my vision predicting the basketball game outcome was by far the most viewed. But the others were… all about the paranormal. Like where and when ghosts were most active. And basic lore about werewolves. A history of the Sprite Alliance, and why the different elemental sprites had banded together. The best way to repel a vampire if needed, and how some of the myths weren’t true, along with a statement that vampires often don’t need to be repelled because they are nice beings and deserve respect. Well, at least Gem-Jam wasn’t overtly prejudiced.
I clicked on the one about the Sprite Alliance, since they’d sent me an enormous gift basket that morning and it wouldn’t hurt to figure out why .
I was so engrossed, I didn’t hear when someone approached, and I only looked up when a shadow passed over my screen.
Al stood there with their arms crossed.
“Oh, hey,” I said, standing. I grabbed my backpack from the step next to me and slung it over my shoulder.
Behind Al idled their ma’s minivan. Purple and pink puffs of smoke trailed out of the exhaust pipe from the magic alternative-fuel source. Amy hung out of the passenger window, her mouth gaping open, her expression one of awe, even though she’d known me for most of her life. She’d even seen me drool on their couch and had been there when I’d once shot soda out of my nose. She’d always regarded me with a cool distance, like she was better than me (she was) and I was just Al’s weird non-magical friend. I guess she’d seen the video. I waved and called out a greeting to her. She squeaked, clapping a hand over her mouth, and then ducked back into the car.
“What was that about?”
Al rolled their eyes. “She’s suddenly a Cam fan. Don’t ask.”
“Okay. So how grounded are you? And why?”
Al sighed. “Severely. And because I didn’t tell them that you were a potential seer before the word got out to the whole paranormal community.”
I shrugged in forced nonchalance. “They know now. Along with the rest of the world. What’s the big deal?”
Al shook their head. Strands of their dark brown curls caressed their cheeks. “Because I should’ve put the coven first, before our friendship.”
Ugh. Of course. And just like that, the relief I’d felt when Al had walked up vanished completely, leaving me hollow. “I’m sorry? Is it because we stayed late in the library last night?”
Al squinted. “No. They… wanted the advantage. They wanted to be able to approach you before anyone else.”
“Approach me? Your moms have known me since I was six. They can approach me whenever.”
“Not like that.”
I furrowed my brow. “I don’t understand.”
“I know. You will, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just,” they said, their lips pinched in annoyance, “can we go to class?” They turned and climbed the stairs with brisk, irritated stomps.
“We still have, like, twenty minutes before the bell,” I said, jogging after them to keep up.
“Well, maybe I want to get there early today.”
“And I had another idea.” I flashed them my phone screen. “I want to find Gemma James, aka Gem-Jam, and talk to her. And see if she’ll take the video down.”
“A whole lotta good that will do. It’s no longer only on ClickClack. It’s everywhere.”
“Well, fine. Maybe I want to talk to her about the invasion of my privacy. Or maybe she can delete all the gross comments.”
Al’s amber eyes went wide. “You read the comments?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Don’t you know that the first rule of the internet is to never read the comments? Oh my gods. How bad was it?”
“?‘The end is nigh’?”
Al huffed. “Fine. We’ll find this Gem-Jam.”
“I have a spell for this,” Al said, following me to the main office. “A tracking spell. I’m sure I could at least find what hall she’s in.”
I didn’t have the patience or the time to indulge Al in a wonky use of magic that morning. But I also didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and I surely didn’t want to die. “It’s okay. I have a plan.”
Finding Gemma James was actually ridiculously easy. I went to the main office and asked for her locker number, and the secretary handed it over with no questions asked. The irony about invasions of privacy was not lost on me as I took the slip of paper and a copy of the school map from the top of the desk.
Al and I traversed the maze of corridors to the freshman hall in search of Gemma’s locker. And the more the tension grew between us, the more I blamed it on Gemma James. It wasn’t all her fault, but a deep righteous anger percolated beneath my skin the more I thought about how she’d blasted my unwitting glimpse and its consequences across a very public, worldwide platform. How she’d taken away my chance to reveal my ability on my own terms, to whom I wanted, when I wanted, or whether I wanted to at all. And I wholeheartedly knew the “whom” was not the entirety of the ClickClack userbase. With each step toward the freshman lockers, I became angrier and angrier. My face was hot. My hands balled into fists at my sides. And I was going to give this Gemma James a piece of my mind.
We turned one last corner, my sneakers squeaking to a stop at the mouth of the freshman hall. It looked the same as the sophomores’—white sparkling floors, freshly painted white walls, white ceilings with no pencil holes or blobby brown water marks as of yet. Blue lockers lined both sides of the hallway. At the end were huge double doors, which led to the inner courtyard and the detached gym.
Even though the incoming class was larger than ours, the area was sparsely populated for the time right before the first bell.
“What if she doesn’t even use her locker?” Al asked.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.”
“That’s not the idiom,” Al said with a roll of their eyes, though a smile ventured to break through their otherwise sour expression.
At least I could still make them laugh.
There was a cluster of girls toward the end of the row, all surrounding one locker. One of them must know Gemma, or heck, even be Gemma, so I gathered my annoyance around me like armor and approached. The girls had their backs toward me and Al, and they giggled like only mean girls knew how. High-pitched, acid-laced titters filled the air as they did something.
“Hey!” I called, crossing my arms.
The group—three of them—startled. They whirled around, eyes wide. They had glitter pens and paint markers in their hands, which they shoved quickly behind their backs as they regarded us.
“What do you want?” one of them said with a plastic smile.
“Do any of you know Gemma James?” Al asked. They wore a bored expression that matched their tone.
The girls laughed. “You mean Situation Abnormal?” They glanced over their shoulders and giggled again. “Yeah. We know her.”
Al yawned, then admired their sparkly purple fingernails as if these girls were worthy of only the barest attention. “And is that her locker you’re vandalizing?”
“So what if it is? Are you going to tell on us?”
I inwardly groaned. I neither had the time nor the patience to deal with bullies. I pointed over my shoulder to the corner near the ceiling. “We won’t,” I said. “But that video camera probably will.”
The girls paled.
“Also, the administration is going to be pissed at this first act of vandalism of their precious brand-new school building. I imagine they’ll want to make an example of the perpetrators.”
One of the girls dropped her pen, glitter exploding over the floor and her shoes. “Did you…” She pitched her voice low. “Did you see that in a vision?”
“No!” I said, dropping my crossed arms. “It’s common sense.”
Al sighed. “The bell is about to ring. You three should go and think about your life choices.”
They didn’t need to be told twice. They ran, tiny particles of glitter winking silver and pink in a trail behind them.
Once they’d fled, the artwork—and I used that term lightly—on the front of Gemma’s locker was revealed. It wasn’t too horrible. Scrawled across the metal door were the words “wannabe” and “abnormal” and “know-it-all,” written in paint marker and accentuated with glitter. The whole situation wasn’t great, and my heart sank.
But there was no Gemma. At least I didn’t think there was.
“I hope she’s not stuffed in there,” I said to Al.
“I’m not.”
We both spun around.
The girl who stood a few feet away from us didn’t match the picture I’d painted in my head, based on the voice in the video. This wasn’t some brash and confident teen investigative reporter. This girl was tiny , barely scraping five feet. Her hair was shaved on the sides over her ears, then spiked at the top. It was also alarmingly pink. She blinked her big blue eyes through her coke-bottle glasses and pursed her thin lips. Her pale skin glowed in the light streaming in from the window—almost as if she were a sprite herself, but based on the “wannabe” written on her locker, I didn’t think she was. She held a large history book clasped to her chest in the cross of her arms, bearing it like a shield in front of her overalls and rainbow-colored sneakers.
“You’re here about the video.” She said it as a statement.
“Well, I was,” I said. “But then I saw this mess.” I gestured to her locker, feeling awful that Al and I hadn’t stopped the girls, even if they’d been mostly finished when we arrived. “So now I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Oh, that,” she said, taking it in. She shrugged. “It happens all the time.”
All the ire I’d stoked drained right out of me. “Oh.”
Gemma pushed her glasses up her nose and peered at me, drawing her shoulders back. “You’re in over your head,” she said simply. “I did some research, and your family tree is mostly human.”
Mostly? Mostly? What did she mean by “mostly”? “I… What? You researched my family ?”
“It was all fairly easy. Public records. Only slight digging required. But believe me, I was not the only one who was doing it. I think you’ve already received a gift from the Sprite Alliance.”
Al’s posture stiffened at my side, any amusement they’d had at the mile-a-minute information from Gemma evaporating in an instant. “You didn’t mention that.” They said it to me like an accusation.
My stomach dropped. This was not what I’d been expecting when I had decided to confront content creator Gem-Jam. I really wished I could stir up some feelings of anger again. But all I had within easy reach was astonishment and a little guilt and a lot of incredulity, and something that felt an awful lot like dread.
“I didn’t know it was important,” I said to Al. “It was just a basket of fruit and some flowers. And… how did you know that? Are you stalking me?”
Gemma looked at me as one would look at a clumsy puppy. “No. I’m not. I just knew you wouldn’t understand most of the customs around the emergence of a seer in the paranormal community. Oh, wait. Are you going with ‘oracle’? Perhaps ‘prophet’? ‘Soothsayer’ if you want to go old-school.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve always liked ‘clairvoyant,’ you know. It gives a certain je ne sais quoi to the role.”
I exchanged a glance with Al. “What is happening?” I asked.
“I’m here to offer my services.” Gemma stepped forward and thrust out her hand. I skittered back before I even realized it, not wanting a repeat of the incident with Dennis. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t move. A rectangle of cardstock was wedged between her fingers.
I removed it carefully. It was a business card for Situation Paranormal, offering research on all different areas, including genealogy, history, hauntings, general paranormal phenomena, and the emergence of powers. She even had a podcast among her impressive list of social media accounts.
“Um… thanks. But my best friend is a witch, so…” I drew out the last vowel.
Gemma squinted at Al. “You haven’t told him.” It was another statement, this time directed at them.
Al grimaced. “No.”
I could now add confusion to the list of feelings clogging up my insides. “Told me what?”
Al narrowed their eyes but didn’t elaborate.
“Wait, is this about the ‘be prepared’ from the note this morning?”
Sighing, Gemma rubbed a hand down her face. “You need me, Cam. You need an impartial human on your team. And I can be that person.”
“What?”
“The bell is about to ring. I look forward to speaking with you at a later time.”
Gemma did an about-face on her rainbow heel and walked off, her massive backpack banging against her lower back as she disappeared around the corner.
The bell rang overhead, signaling that it was time to get to class.
Al and I walked to English Lit. We didn’t talk, an unfamiliar discomfort growing between us. And I realized I’d forgotten to tell Gemma to take the video down.