Missing Pages

Chapter 23: Too Good to be True

I looked around nervously before I knocked on the door belonging to Barbara's house. I jumped at the flock of birds that sought out to find a new branch to perch upon in the shadows. That man could be lurking anywhere, ready to pounce and abduct me from my strange life-- or pluck another one of my precious locks of hair.

When the door finally swung open, I smiled at a nightgown-clad woman.

"You'll never guess what happened," I began helping myself to one of her delicious corn muffins.

"What did happen?"

"I just rescued these babies for ya!" I slid the stack of stationary onto her kitchen table.

"I had gotten another one of Y.W.N.'s infamous letters, asking me to meet them. I didn't get a good look at his features, but the guy wasn't the nicest encounter I've had."

"You WHAT?" Barbara spat. "Tell me exactly what happened, Jasmine!"

I grinned at her elation, closing my eyes and retelling every second of the soirée. Once I had finally finished I waited for a response.

"You crazy, ignorant girl. You have just done one of the stupidest things I've heard of in my decades. Do you know the things that may take place to you, or anyone else now that you've met up with the fool?"

"No. I don't. But what I do know is that I just saved a key element to our solution. You could say that I've prevented this whole thing from collapsing on us!" I exclaim.

"Yeah, I would agree with you as well, if you actually had all the papers," she said back.

"Well, I'll prove it to you. I've got the book locked up nice and tight in my room at home. Since you don't seem to appreciate my efforts, I'll make you wait--"

She pursed her lips and the book appeared, pages and all, in her hands.

I narrowed my eyes before ripping the book from her firm grip. Her hands may not be as young as mine, but she was most definitely not a weakling.

"That's against 'the book of magic spells', going through private property."

"How would you know? You're so uneducated that you don't even know if there are any rules regarding magic," was her snarky reply.

I undid the leather binding, and flipped through the pages until I reached the jagged spine of a torn out section of the book. I lined up the spine's edges to the ripped papers in order to showcase their perfect match.

"See, that's all the pages..." I trailed off. Once the paper came into contact with the rest of the journal, it's pages were magically woven back together. It looked as though the book had never been disturbed.

Barbara tugged on the roots of her hair as she paced around the room.

"Oh my. What will your grandmother think of this. Things are only going to get a lot worse now," she pondered.

"What's who going to think of what?"
asked a very confused someone.

"You can always count on your favorite gal to stir things up! She let one of the bad guys brush her hair like Rapunzel or something. Of course it's another consequence to a 'great idea' of hers."

"I help you guys out for once, and all I get back is this? When can I actually get treated respectfully around here like an adult?"

"When you start acting like one, and not the selfish beast you are!"

"Did any of your hair get tangled within the brush?" Maya quietly said.

"No...but he plucked some out of my head."

"That's the same thing Goldie Locks! You need to just stay out of the way and in your place, child. There's no way your parents raised such an ill mannered girl!"

"You know that we can use hair follicles as an alternate method of putting curses on people, right?"

"I knew that you guys would react this way, so that's why I didn't consider the option of asking permission. I know that I made one little slip up, but it's not important like the pages are. We now have a completed journal which is the start of me getting my life back."

"I used telepathy to search through the book, and there are still several maps absent. Those other entries weren't nearly as important to me as those maps are. They contain all the information about my most prized possessions, explaining the sabotage of my time machine!"

"We now have to reevaluate the situation altogether in order to stop all this madness from happening. Everything isn't just about you, others can be affected by this, too," Barbara spoke.

"We only want what's best for you."

"Well I want what's best for me, too," I shot back.

Turning without a second glance at my former teammates, I took the long walk back to my parents' house.