Katelyn and The Witch Party

Chapter 14: Real Food

Katelyn nodded quietly and rose to her feet. Naji led Katelyn back to Naji's black Mitsubishi. She did not speak the entire car trip back, nor when they got back to her apartment. Katelyn hid in her room for the rest of the day, but Naji made her re-emerge for dinner. Katelyn closed her eyes as she tried to eat the first real food in weeks. It was a nice-looking meal, lemon and sardine penne, but it burned on Katelyn's throat. She assumed it was the acidity, but she felt a strange feeling in her heart.

She went back to her room and laid down.

When the alarm on her phone buzzed in the morning, she switched it off and slid to her feet, but her vision blurred and her surroundings shifted around her. Her head was ringing, a dull whiteness piercing her vision. She steadied herself against the bead and closed her eyes. Her hands were hot. She stumbled into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Her chest was burning. No, no, no, she thought. Her face was burning, her hands were burning, her chest was burning, but her courage was failing. She wanted it all to fade away. It hurt so much like she was ill, but she never got sick, and she could not, not now.

She stumbled back into her room and changed into jeans and a t-shirt. She had to pretend that she was okay. No, she was okay.

"Katelyn," Naji sounded distracted as she knocked on the door, "Are you almost ready? You know you have to take the bus."

Katelyn drank a vial of her honey mixture and pushed back the tearing feeling that rose in her chest. "Yes," she tried to sound confident, but she knew it sounded weak. If Naji noticed that something was wrong, then she did not know what would happen. She just had to hope that Naji did not.

"You should eat breakfast," Naji whispered quietly.

Katelyn walked slowly into the kitchen under Naji's surveillance and made herself cereal. She ate a small portion of it.

Naji was dressed up. Her dark thick hair was tied above her head and she wore large gold earrings. She wore a semi-business suit. Her dark hands tapped against the handle of her black handbag. "I have to go," she spoke quickly before she rose and rushed out the door.

Katelyn checked the clock. The bus would be there soon. She finished her cereal and rushed out the door. Naji had already vanished from sight. Katelyn breathed a sigh of relief, but the pain in her chest only intensified.

By the time Katelyn reached the bus, the world was spinning around her and she was breathing heavily. As the orange figure of the bus pulled in front of her, her eyes traced the outline of its blurred shape. Her vision was never blurry, but it did not matter she had to get to school, as much as she did not want to, and then she had to pretend to be okay. No one could notice her pain.

She stumbled onto the bus, weakly using the edge of the seats for support. Two blue eyes glowed at her. "Katelyn," Hanna Jean whispered with concern in her voice. Hanna Jean never noticed how Katelyn was. Katelyn felt a tremor of fear, but she collapsed into the seat next to Hanna. "I... Heard about the trial," Hanna began, her eyes silently examining Katelyn's face.

"No," Katelyn protested, taking a step back, her hands suddenly glowing.

"Oh, the little witch is angry?" Meleena taunted her. When did they find out? Katelyn wondered, panic rising in her chest. She raised her hand and slammed Meleena into the wall of the bus.

"No," Katelyn protested again. Shock and horror filled Meleena's eyes. The memories of Kindergarten played back to her. The coloured lines spread along Nathan's arms and no one did anything, but then the blonde girl in Kindergarten stopped the spread of those lines. The teacher had shrieked, turning everyone against the girl. Then, the man had taken the girl away. Katelyn would be dragged away just like that and tortured and hurt. But the girl in Kindergarten had done nothing wrong. Katelyn was doing everything wrong.

Hanna grabbed Katelyn by the arm and dragged her back to the seat. "Careful, that's a crime," Hanna spoke quietly. Katelyn felt the hatred radiating off of Meleena and angry thoughts rushed off her mind, but the world was spinning again and this time it was turning black rather than white. All the voices around her grew distant, and then everything went black.

When Katelyn opened her eyes, Hanna was above her. Hanna's hands glowed blue, but orange lines snaked up her arms, swirling around the blue and putting it out like the pink clouds disappearing from Victoria's necklace.

"You're a witch," Katelyn gasped.

The blue light vanished from Hanna's hands and she grimaced. "Shh," she hissed.

"Why does everyone know so much?" Katelyn asked, sitting up. The pain in her chest had subsided somewhat.

"The Witch Party publicized your parents' trial," Brittney, Katelyn thought, "and somehow the Liberals heard about it and made it into a scandal," Hanna scoffed.

"You sound like you disapprove," Katelyn remarked. "If you are a witch, wouldn't you want justice?"

"I am not naïve enough to think anything will come of it," Hanna responded, crossing her arms.

"But you... there was this witch in Kindergarten who healed another student," Katelyn muttered. "Don't you think we should be brave like that?" Katelyn did not know why she even suggested being brave. Katelyn herself certainly was not.

Hanna laughed bitterly. She drank a vial from her pocket. "You don't even know what you're talking about, but seriously, don't switch between food and magical substitutes, especially with the stress on your charm. I'll make you something to deal with it, but I really don't have that much magical... ability."

Hanna looked at the black floor of the bus, seemingly unwilling to say anything else. Shivers spread through Katelyn. Now everyone knew. She hated that, and yet she had asked Hanna why she would not want people to know. Hanna had never talked to her about these kinds of things, though, and Katelyn hated that.

The bus stopped and Hanna immediately rose to her feet and gently pushed Katelyn off the bus. Meleena and some of her friends gave Katelyn contemptuous looks, and they did not even glance at Hanna. Hanna was an intelligent student, though. They probably just passed her off as a nerd, and yet Hanna was a witch. The way she dismissed Katelyn's story about Kindergarten suggested that she knew something about it that Katelyn did not.

Hanna had never been new, Katelyn realized. Katelyn had met Hanna in Grade one, but Hanna talked as if she had been attending the school the whole time. Blonde hair, blue eyes, witch magic. How had Katelyn not noticed it before? There was that orange light flittering in the back of Hanna's bright blue eyes and snaking up her arms, the exact opposite of blue. It made her look different, but maybe that was what had changed—how she had been punished. Katelyn saw it now. Hanna was the girl from kindergarten.

It was so foolish of Katelyn to have thought it could be any other way. She had wanted to believe the girl had been so brave that she would be confident in who she was, but Hanna had hidden it just like Katelyn. There was no rising above the fear. The fear was a survival tactic and it would always be there, even she took action. Katelyn hated it. She felt an overwhelming pain in her chest. She had wished that there would be more than all this, but now she realized life would always be like this. She would always be trapped by the hatred of her community, and the hatred inside her heart.

The grass waved in the wind as it always did as if everything was exactly the same as it always was. The school was the same brick it had always been. Her classmates laughed somewhat ahead of her as they always had. Maybe, she was not afraid of them punishing her as much as she was afraid that she would do something wrong or that nothing would change. She did not want anything to get worse, but she definitely did not want everything to stay the same. The fear of what might go wrong was almost as bad as what she imagined to go wrong actually went wrong.

She followed Hanna through the same wooden doors, down the same boring hallways to her old, boring locker. Hanna opened her locker and grabbed two of her textbooks, hiding their covers beneath her arms. From the blue colour of the top textbook, Katelyn suspected it was chemistry. She should know, though. She had the same textbook. Her mind was just making her feel unsure, making her doubt herself even in what she should know.

"I'll see you after school," Hanna whispered, before disappearing down that long hallway.