Once Upon a Witch's Moon

Once Upon a Witch's Moon: Chapter 8

Shaking from her encounter with the ants and the creepy new janitor, Twist wanted to leave school and never come back. The double doors that led outside beckoned her as she hurried down the hallway clutching the marble figure in her fist as tightly as she had when the tornado landed her in a Kansas corn field eight years ago.

And now everybody in her school knew her secret. How could she have been so careless? She'd kept the secret so tightly locked inside, she didn't think it could come out. The only saving grace was that everyone thought she'd written fiction, not true-life horror. She needed to make sure everyone forgot the story ASAP. Maybe she could access the cloud server and delete the file. Pretend it was a computer glitch.

But no. Enough people had read the story. Two teachers had liked it. Removing it would only mean questions. Worse, they would be questions asked out loud, instead of merely thought and left behind in dust, where she could ignore them if she chose.

She couldn't even hide in the janitor's closet any longer. There was really only one choice, now that her sanctuary had been breached. She'd have to face her classmates in the lunchroom and pretend the story was fiction. She'd have to talk about it. Out loud. As if it were not true. Her heart lurched. True. She wished she'd never heard that word.

In the lunch room, she grabbed her tray from a lunch lady with a perpetual frown. Wasteful kids. Good food in the trash can every day. And the mess. The mess! Twist let the fast-fading thoughts pass through her without flinching as she scanned the room.

"Twist!" Sofia waved to her from a table by the edge of the room. She was alone. Good. Twist wanted a friend more than she had ever wanted a friend in her life.

"Hi." Fortunately, whoever had been in the chair previously had not been feeling or thinking anything important. Sitting in a chair after anyone giving off dark deep worries or pain was a no-brainer. She wouldn't do it. But all too often she'd found that silvery kind of happiness died quickly, only to be followed by some much too dark fear that the happiness had somehow let loose.

Sofia smiled and moved her tray a little to make room for two. "I was beginning to wonder if you didn't eat lunch."

"Sometimes I wish I didn't." Twist looked pointedly at a table of guys who were indulging in a game of hot potato with their milk cartons. "It's kind of a zoo in here."

"How long have you been in Rock Cove?" Sofia played with her french fries, dipping them in ketchup and lining them up like lit matchsticks on her plate.

"Almost eight years," Twist said.

"Oh." Sofia ate one of her lit matchstick fries. "I thought maybe you were new like me and that's why you had trouble making friends."

"No. I just don't make friends very easily. I have dyslexia, so I had a lot of tutoring, and..." There was something about Sofia that made Twist be honest — as honest as she dared. "Besides being different, I'm a little too blunt for my own good."

Sofia frowned. "People should say what they mean. Don't you think? There'd be less confusion if they did." She looked away, dark thought dust seeping onto the edge of the tray where her fingers pressed down. "Less anger."

"I don't know." Twist shrugged, looking away from the seeping dust. She didn't want to pry. She liked Sofia. She wanted to keep liking Sofia. "Most people want the polite lies."

Sofia nodded. "They think it's safer, somehow, to be polite. To pretend not to feel what they feel."

"I didn't think anyone else even noticed that," Twist said, a little awed to find someone else who dared to put into words the things lots of people thought but wouldn't ever say aloud.