Chapter Five
“Please tell me you’re going to audition for the musical this year,”
Isaiah said at lunch.
Since the weather was nice, most people were eating outdoors, and Isaiah had snagged a table under a maple tree. It was a less-than-ideal situation as leaves would rain down into everyone’s food, but it was better than sitting on the grass, which was damp from last night’s rain, and it shaded them from thieving birds.
“West Side Story?”
Chrys wrinkled her nose.
“Can you picture me onstage singing ‘I Feel Pretty’?”
Luke glanced between Chrys and Isaiah’s hopeful face.
“I’ve only known you for a week, and I would already pay good money to see that.”
“Everyone would,”
Anushka Singh, the fourth person at their table, said.
“No.”
Isaiah pressed a hand against their forehead dramatically.
“Every year, she has an excuse.”
Chrys squirmed, feigning concentration on her lunch. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be in the musical; it was just that putting herself out there like that required a trust in her fellow students that she didn’t feel capable of. And while Isaiah would be in the cast, and Anushka would play violin in the pit orchestra, there would be too many other people Chrys didn’t know. It wasn’t even like she knew Anushka and Isaiah that well. There was a whole part of herself she hid from them, and she tried keeping them at arm’s length so as not to accidentally scare them away.
Anushka and Isaiah made it difficult, though. After a morning of not talking to anyone on her first day at a new school, Chrys had been surprised when a Black freshman with bright green hair had approached her in choir. Isaiah had taken one look at her appearance and determined that 1) Chrys would approve of their style, and 2) Chrys was the sort of person who’d appreciate a good ghost story. Isaiah had attached themself to her immediately so as to be the first to share the island lore. Anushka had been Isaiah’s friend already, and her first words to Chrys had been nice shirt. Chrys had thought Anushka was being sarcastic (she’d been wearing a T-shirt for a Dutch symphonic metal band she’d recently discovered), but the next thing Chrys knew, Anushka was introducing her to more European metal bands.
“All right, forget about the musical for now. I’ll bug you more later. But it’s Monday.”
Isaiah leaned around Anushka and batted their eyes at Chrys.
“Did you bring any gifts?”
Anushka snorted.
“Subtle. Did you think we didn’t see you sniffing around her backpack this morning?”
“Busted.”
They held up their hands.
“But this is the only thing that makes Mondays bearable.”
“What am I missing?”
Luke asked.
“Chrys’s mom is an amazing baker,”
Isaiah said, as Chrys pulled out a container of cookies.
It was true, and if only everyone in Thornhaven were as effusive about her skills as Isaiah, Samantha Quinn would be one step closer to achieving her dream of opening her own bakery. At the moment, however, Chrys’s mom worked at the Shop-n-Go grocery store’s bakery. Since she always had Sundays off, she often spent them developing new recipes or honing her decorating skills. Which was why Chrys often had treats to share on Monday.
Chrys had remembered to bring an extra cookie today for Luke—chocolate gingerbread with spiced frosting. Her mom was hoping to convince Black Cat Coffee downtown to place an order for them.
“Something I’ve been wondering about,”
Luke said after a moment. He looked a little embarrassed as he brushed away cookie crumbs.
“This is going to sound stupid, but … is this island haunted or something?”
“Oh yeah,”
Isaiah said, their eyes lighting up.
“Super haunted. Tons of ghosts around here.”
Luke stared at them.
“Are you making fun of me? Because I swear, I never believed in ghosts, but there’s something … off … about this place.”
“Not making fun of you,”
Chrys assured him. She wasn’t so positive about hauntings herself. Not because there weren’t spells for summoning ghosts—because there were—but she’d never seen a ghost just hanging around without being summoned. She suspected most of what normies attributed to ghosts was actually magic they couldn’t quite grasp. But it appeared Thornhaven was catching up to Luke at last, if he was remembering more.
“You’ve heard the legends about the island, right?”
“I’ve heard about pirates and that there’s supposedly some ship that sank nearby filled with treasure.”
“And witches,”
Anushka said.
Chrys tucked the empty container away. If they were going there, then this was her time to talk. Not only was she the only witch at this table, she was the history geek.
“The big legend is that pirates attempted to sack Thornhaven in 1706, but they didn’t count on a lot of witches living here. So, when the pirates were almost to shore, the witches got together and conjured a massive storm. The pirates were all blown out to sea, and their ships sank.”
“Thornhaven residents never got into that Puritan anti-witch propaganda,”
Isaiah finished.
“They were grateful to their witches, and that’s why the island loses its collective mind around Halloween. Although I, personally, would not discount the possibility of pirate ghosts.”
“Yeaaah …”
Luke drew the word out.
“Okay, things are making sense now. I noticed that the witch theme going on in town was as strong as the pirate theme. Figures you’d be the one who likes telling that story.”
He motioned toward Chrys’s shirt.
“What?”
Chrys pretended to be offended.
“This is my happiest shirt.”
Yes, there was a skull on it, but the skull was made out of sunflowers.
Although she’d done her best to cultivate a very specific image, Chrys secretly adored sunflowers. Her grandparents had filled their yard with them back in New York—short ones, tall ones, ones whose enormous happy faces stretched smiling toward the sky. But Chrys did not advertise this inclination. Once people discovered you liked something light and soft, they realized you must have inner light and softness yourself. And once they discovered that, they’d poke and prod until they found those soft spots and the source of that light. Then they’d dig in. Life would become an endless onslaught of fingers sinking into vulnerable flesh until she was bruised and bleeding and her glow was snuffed out like a spent match. All for their entertainment.
Chrys had learned that lesson long before coming to Thornhaven. No sunflowers, or flowers period, in spite of her stupid name. Black clothes were her armor, her lack of words was her shield, and the way she glared at everyone was her weapon.
Or it was supposed to be, anyway. Luke hadn’t been scared. When Chrys had finally asked him why he’d opted to sit next to her in class that first day, he’d laughed.
You looked more approachable than anyone else is the room, he’d said. Mostly because you were the only one who didn’t seem to be sizing me up.
She supposed that made some sense. He was wrong, though. Maybe he hadn’t caught her, but if so, that was only because she’d sized him up the moment he’d plowed into the room and had already dismissed him as one of Lily’s crowd.
Speaking of which.
And witches …
Chrys hadn’t expected Lily’s book to jump about in her hand the way it had this morning; she’d just wanted to startle Lily and make her drop it. But sometimes her power burst out of her and other times it whimpered, and Chrys couldn’t predict the results. Either way, Lily had correctly guessed that Chrys was responsible.
But what Lily might not have guessed was that Chrys had declared war on her, and Chrys was merely getting started.
“Some families on this island can trace their ancestry all the way back to that time,”
Anushka said.
“Like the Allertons can, and the Howlands. Lily’s family is supposedly directly descended from some of those witches. If you look through the stuff in the maritime museum and on display at the town hall, you can see the Allerton name is everywhere.”
“I did not know that,”
Luke said.
“That’s kind of cool.”
Chrys forced down her scowl. She had every bit as much claim to that history as Lily did. But although you wouldn’t find the name Quinn among those mentioned in the stories, one pair of Chrys’s maternal great-grandparents were Langmores, a name as prominent in the witch tales as Allerton.
And yet they didn’t have any buildings or streets named after them.
Chrys had always been told that the reason her grandparents had left Thornhaven was that her grandfather had gotten a job opportunity in New York that had been too good to refuse, but maybe there’d been more to it. Maybe her family had never been welcome here. Unfortunately, it was too late to ask. A car accident had taken her grandparents the year before she’d moved to Thornhaven. It was the incident that had spurred her mother into believing they would be better off if they moved back and had greater access to their magic.
“It is cool,”
Chrys admitted slyly.
“but if you think there are unusual things going on around here, Lily’s the one you should ask about it. Thornhaven’s witches are real. You can’t trust that they aren’t magically messing with your head. Lily could be dangerous.”
Luke scoffed, but Anushka and Isaiah both nodded solemnly, and a flicker of doubt crossed his face.
“You really believe that?”
“This place gets strange sometimes,”
Isaiah said.
“You said it yourself. Why believe in ghosts but not witches? I still remember this one time …”
The bell was about to ring, so Chrys stuffed her lunch remains away as Isaiah launched into a story she’d heard a hundred times about how, when they were seven, their dad had lost control of his car during a nor’easter and almost slammed into the side of the Bramble Lane B&B. According to Isaiah, the car had suddenly turned, stopped, and righted itself—and a moment later, their dad had forgotten all about the incident.
Was it magic? Chrys couldn’t say for sure. From what she’d learned, normie kids were more likely to remember magic than adults, because kids accepted it better. And the Bramble Lane B&B was owned by a witch couple, so it was certainly possible they’d erected wards around their property. But regardless, it made a good story, and Isaiah loved telling it.
“You research it,”
Isaiah said as everyone headed back to class.
“For that local history term paper we have to do this year.”
Chrys smirked, but Isaiah’s suggestion gave her an idea: Why not research her own family? She’d already proven that she could hold her own magically against any island witch her age, but if she could provide some historical basis for why she was every bit as much a Thornhaven witch as the others, even better.
In the back of her mind, she knew this wouldn’t make any of them accept her. And more pointedly, some niggling itch suggested that this desire to prove herself to everyone must mean that she cared about their approval.
But that was stupid. She didn’t care. She just wanted to rub everyone’s noses in her presence. It was about being vindictive, not about being vindicated.
Huge difference.
“Luke, you should research Lily’s family,”
Chrys mused aloud.
“Find out the truth.”
“We all know the truth,”
Anushka said.
“and it’s that witch is a euphemism.”