WITCHES WITHOUT MAGIC

Witches aren’t the ones that make magic. What witches do is stop magic that other people make, intentionally or unintentionally.

See, magic is simple. Too simple, really. All you have to do is say something three times. It doesn’t even have to be the exact same words. The same sentiment will work. And for some people, they only have to think the same thing three times over.

You know all those fairy tales with the magic three in them? Well, there’s a reason for that.

The boy who cried wolf? Three times he did it, and the third time, guess what happened? There was a real wolf. How much proof do you need of this three time stuff? But they never believe. They call this coincidence. Or the stuffy literary ones call it “irony.” Ha!

The frog prince asks the princess three times to kiss him. Jack goes up the beanstalk three times before he becomes the rich man he wanted to be in the first place. Hansel and Gretel get taken to the forest three times before their evil stepmother gets rid of them.

I’d always wanted to be a witch. When I was five, I was a witch for Halloween, and I wore the witch hat around for months afterwards. I thought it was cool.

Then I hit thirteen. Seventh grade. Do you remember seventh grade? I’d given up wearing my witch hat to school years before, but kids don’t forget. You want to guess what my nickname was, muttered in the halls as I was walking towards my locker, minding my own business, hands to myself?

Witch bitch.

There were plenty of times I had to save kids from teachers. Teachers have no idea the power they have. They say “You’re a troublemaker” three times, and the kid’s a troublemaker. They say “There’s no helping someone like you,” it comes true. It doesn’t have to be said to someone’s face, either. Like if the teacher is talking to the principal and says, “There’s something wrong with that kid” one times too many, you wake up the next morning with one eye drooping down, or with asthma that you’ve shown no sign of before—or leukemia. And the teacher doesn’t even think it’s her fault.

I’ve knocked on the principal’s door a lot of times, trying to interrupt a conversation that should not happen. I’ve even kicked it open if I had to. I have a reputation for being a bad kid. But I’ve never been expelled yet because I make sure that it’s never said three times. It does have to be out loud, you see. Not just in your head. Which means there is typically going to be more than one person around. Not always, but it’s a useful hint. It happens sometimes in the bathroom, too, so you have to watch those.

There aren’t a lot of believers out there. A couple of list serves on the internet who talk about what they think the rules are and what they’ve seen. Usually it’s exaggerated. They talk about witches flying through the air on brooms. Sometimes they get the three times right, but it’s usually all confused with newts and potions and familiars, or spinning around three times in an unbroken circle. Every once in a while, someone gets close, and that’s a person to watch. I don’t do that. I’m just starting out. But there are witches who take care of that, ones who are more experienced than I am.

It’s trickier when the person isn’t very talkative. Or when they’re just plain smart. And mean.

As an example, take Ruth Berg. My second grade nemesis. Seriously, we have been enemies since then. And it’s not over a box of crayons, either. She was on top of the climbing gym when I was trying to get up. She told me she didn’t want me up there. Me, thinking that maybe we could be friends if she just got to know me and saw that I could do all the same things she could, I didn’t listen to her. I kept climbing.

That was when she stomped on my fingers. Well, first she kind of ground her boot on my left hand. Then when I didn’t let go, she stomped the other hand. And then she stomped both at the same time, hard.

I was so surprised that it took me that long to get my brain to communicate with my fingers to let go. It was a long drop down, but not nearly so scary as the look on Ruth’s face.

“I hate you, Dorrie!” she said.

I’m named after Dorothy, from the Wizard of Oz, see. My mom loved those books, which is fine with me. Yeah, there’s some irony in the fact that Dorothy’s big quest was to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, but there’s the good witch, too. Mostly witches are good. The ones that aren’t are the ones that do nothing. And really, that just means they’re like everyone else. They know more, but in terms of what happens, it’s the same thing. Bad stuff.

My hands were pretty bloody. I had to go to the nurse to get them bandaged up, but I didn’t tell on Ruth, I swear. I already knew that when you do stuff like that, you’re asking for an escalation in terms of engagement. I didn’t want that, so I laid low. But I started watching her, making sure that she didn’t say anything three times about someone else. I couldn’t do it all the time. We weren’t in class together again until fifth grade. But when we went on field trips and stuff, I watched her.

She knew I was doing it, too. She just didn’t know what I was doing it for.

Until in sixth grade I caught her in the bathroom. She was in one of the stalls, behind a closed door. I’d seen her go in, though. I could see her feet under the door.

“I’m going to kill him,” I heard her say.

She’d run in after this boy, Josh, had said he’d rather eat dirt than kiss her. It was part of some stupid game they were playing. She’d made up the rules, so I don’t know why she was so mad about it.

He’d humiliated her, though, and so I followed her in.

“You don’t really mean that,” I said.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I do mean it. I’m going to kill him. I really am,” she said.

Two times down. One to go.

“Maybe you should think of something worse to do to him,” I said, just trying to get her to stop thinking about that same thing. Be more creative. Then it wouldn’t be an obsession that could become real.

“Like what?” she said. And she came out of the stall.

“Uh—” I said, because I didn’t want to think of something worse than killing Josh Udall.

“Maybe I could tell everyone he’s gay,” she said. “And that’s why he didn’t want to kiss me.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. This wasn’t going where I thought it would go. It was getting completely out of hand. And the truth is, I didn’t know how to control it. I should have contacted one of the witches in the organization higher up. I’d found out I was a witch when I was three or four years old. My mother wasn’t. My dad wasn’t either. They were both scientists, didn’t believe anything about magic at all.

But my older brother had an open mind and he was the one who listened to me when I asked him why certain things happened. He also found out that there were other people like me. But we’re not supposed to get together. Yeah, the books all talk about covens and witches working together, but we don’t do that anymore. Ever heard of the Salem Witch Trials? Enough said.

This way, no one of us being caught will hurt any of the others. The stuff on the internet is all done anonymously. We talk to each other by code names. All very James Bond. But without the gadgets and the sex.

“He’s gay!” said Ruth. “He’s gay! He’s gay!” Her face was right in mine as she was saying it and her spit flew all over my face. It happened so fast that there was nothing I could have done. I have to tell myself that, anyway, or I couldn’t live with the consequences. I did my best, but it wasn’t good enough. Time to move on.

And really, even if Ruth thinks being gay is worse than being dead, it isn’t true. Josh might not be happy now, but he had a chance to get happy some day. If he’d died mysteriously, he wouldn’t have that chance.

So, why don’t I just reverse her words and make Josh ungay again? I mean, if they can say the words three times, why can’t I? Witches are sworn never to use magic, that’s why. You’ll think that’s pretty weird, I’m sure, considering the reputation that witches have. And the relationship that you usually think there is between witches and religion. If you’re religious, of course you say you have nothing to do with magic (even though there are a lot of religious ceremonies where people say things three times in order to plead with God to make it come true).

It’s not about religion at all. When you’re a witch, you’ve just seen so many times the stuff that happens after the magic that it makes you sick. You might call it humility, thinking that people have no place to be messing with the universe in that way. Or you might call it plain practicality. Not everyone thinks that they’re using magic for something bad. Plenty of people (more than half, I’d say) think they’re using it for good. A girl wants a boy to love her so much she makes it happen. Or the gardener wants the lawn to be mowed without doing it himself. Or the kid who wants to go biking says over and over again that it won’t rain, it won’t rain, it won’t rain.

There’s nothing inherently wrong in wishing for any of those things. Wishing, so long as you don’t make it happen. But when it’s your words that do it, it always comes out badly. I know. I’ve seen it. I’m sure other people have a better idea of why it happens than I do. I can make some guesses. Like maybe there’s a reason that boy doesn’t love you, like you’re not a good match or he’s not a nice person or you’re supposed to fall in love with someone else if you’d just wait for a few months until he comes along. But when he does, you’re going to be already attached, and then what will he do? Find someone else, the wrong person, and it goes downhill form there.

It’s sort of obvious about the rain. We need rain. We need lots of stuff we don’t want.

And lots of times using magic to do your jobs for you leads to more magic and then more again, because what’s wrong with it? And you get lazy, and not just with the lawn. You get lazy in your life and that’s bad news.

If witches got into the middle of this and started using magic ourselves, what guarantee would there be that we’d do it any better?

But what if we just fixed what we saw go wrong? We could make a rule, couldn’t we, that whenever we hear someone else saw something three times, that we just say the reverse three times, and then everything is right. So long as you stick exactly to that rule, with perfect discipline, but witches are supposed to do that and how can making one kind of magic and sticking to it be harder than abstaining from magic completely?

Well, ask an alcoholic. Or a drug addict.

Magic addicts are a lot like them.

They don’t stop with one little fix. They go around fixing everything.

But even if they could just make one fix, I don’t think it would work. At least, when I tried it, it was pretty much a disaster.

It wasn’t the Josh thing. It was something else with Ruth, though. Later in sixth grade, she got worse. I don’t know if I can blame that entirely on the magic. It can do that, but it usually takes years before it completely corrupts. On the other hand, sometimes it works faster the younger you are. But there are people who are just bad to begin with, magic or no magic. Not everyone has to use magic to make bad things happen, see?

Hitler used magic. I admit it. All those speeches where he said the same thing over and over again? You watch them now and they’re really boring, and not just because they’re in German. But he didn’t have any charisma to begin with. Just knew how to use magic and wasn’t afraid to do it all over the place.

On the other hand, consider the case of George Bush. Too stupid to use magic. Too inarticulate to say exactly the same thing three times in a row.

And the person who invented Spongebob? Evil to the core.

But that’s getting away from the point.

The point is Ruth, when she got into a fight with one of her friends. Yeah, you wonder how it is that she has friends. I wonder that, too. The closest I have to a friend is Josh, and that’s mainly because no one else is his friend and I feel sorry for him. No, not true. He is good looking and he actually is kind of sweet. Who knows if he was like that before or if he would have been, but he is now. It makes me sort of wish he wasn’t gay. Not that I would ever do anything about it.

Anyway, Ruth’s friend Kirsten told her other friend Jara that Ruth’s makeup made her look like she was trying to be a vampire. So it got back to Ruth, and then Ruth had a big fight with Kirsten. Right in front of everyone, in the lunchroom. It would have been easier for me if it had been in the bathroom, but maybe I still couldn’t have fixed it. It’s dangerous when you make friends with someone like Ruth, and you can expect you’re going to get hurt in the end, no matter what else you’re getting out of it along the way.

So the two of them are shouting at each other, and Ruth has smeared mashed potatoes into Kirsten’s hair, and the lunch monitors look scared of Ruth and so that leaves me.

“Ruth, come on. Calm down. She’s not worth this. She’s really not,” I said.

I was trying to get her to think I was on her side. I think I did too good a job.

“You’re right. She’s not,” said Ruth.

I sighed relief.

Ruth turned on her heel and headed to the lunchroom door with me.

“You’re going to regret this!” Kirsten shouted. “You can’t walk out on me.”

It was like she had to lose so badly there was no getting up before she could admit she was done. Some people you just can’t save.

Ruth stopped.

I put a hand on her arm and snorted. Pretending I found any part of this funny was hard work, let me tell you.

And Ruth didn’t turn back. She just whispered under her breath, “She’s ugly. She’s ugly. She’s ugly.”

Kirsten shrieked.

That part is kind of unpredictable. Some people know that something has gone wrong. They know how it used to be, and how it is. They can’t explain it unless they start believing in magic, which not very many of them do. But they know. Other times, maybe depending on who it is and what has changed, never get it. They think that everything is the way it’s supposed to be, or they blame God for an imperfect world or something. As if God has something to do with it.

I made a mistake then.

I looked back.

That story about Lot’s wife looking back. I know how she felt. Some impulses you just can’t resist.

And if I’d turned into a pillar of salt, I think it might have been better for everyone involved. Maybe I could say it, you’re a pillar of salt, you’re a pillar of salt, you’re a pillar of salt.

Kirsten was hideous. Her hair was lank and cut badly. It was longish, and brownish, but it was pitiful, and it made her face look lopsided. It didn’t help her nose, either. It had grown three sizes like the Grinch’s heart on Christmas, but not in a good way. She had terrible acne and no breasts. Flat as a board, and it looked pretty funny considering the bra she was wearing and the low cut shirt.

“Wo!” said Ruth. She’d turned around, too.

And I could see in her eyes that she got it. That she had power. Somehow, she hadn’t figured it out before. But now she knew.

“That’s very convenient,” she said, and she pulled on my arm to go outside with me.

Only I resisted. The last thing I wanted to do was go anywhere with her.

But I was afraid.

“I did that,” said Ruth. “You heard what I said. You saw what happened. What was it, magic or something?”

“Uhh,” I said.

“It has to be. I bet I did it before, too, with Josh. I thought maybe it was just a lucky guess. But I made him that way.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” I said. The manuals tell you to say that, as a reflex, whenever anyone starts talking about magic. Like it would work on anyone with remotely half a brain. Which was pretty much Ruth.

“Duh,” she said. “Obviously, there is. And aren’t you lucky, Dorrie? They call you a witch, and now you’re going to be one for real. You and I are going to make magic wherever we like. We’re going to be new best friends and do everything together, But especially magic.”

“No, really,” I said. “I think that’s a bad idea.”

“We’re best friends. We’re best friends. We’re best friends,” said Ruth.

And then we were.

I hated her still. That was the weird thing. I still wanted to stop her. But I was her best friend and I went everywhere with her. We went to the bathroom together, all through sixth grade.

I stopped her when I could.

And I never used magic. She tried to get me to do it all the time, but I’d flub it up and do a George Bush on her, adding extra syllables in words that weren’t supposed to be there on one sentence, or “forgetting” what I was saying.

I think she decided that I didn’t have magic, that only she did. Which was fine with me.

Until the day that she found Josh with the cute new boy, Cort, in the closet together.

Josh stared at me. “Please,” he said. My only friend.

Cort had no idea what was going on. “This isn’t what you think it is,” he said to Ruth. Maybe he thought it would work. Or maybe he was just talking because he couldn’t think what else to do.

“Oh, this is going to be sweet. What should I do with these two, Dorrie?” asked Ruth. “So many possibilities.”

All the times she’d done magic on other people, people I didn’t care about, I’d let it happen. She’d even done some things to me and I’d let her get away with it, but they were stupid, small things like making me an inch shorter than she was and making my lips thin and moving my mole from my neck to my nose. Superficial things, that I didn’t really care about. I was her best friend, see, and I had been careful not to turn her against me so that I could at least see what she was doing. That’s what I told myself. If I was with her, then I had a better chance of stopping her.

But this was too much. I loved Josh, maybe in a not completely platonic way. They always say that love is this great thing, that it makes humans rise above the animal in their nature. But I’m not so sure. It undid me.

“You can’t do magic. You can’t do magic. You can’t do magic,” I said, right to Ruth’s face. It wasn’t planned or anything. If I’d planned it, maybe it would have gone better. But I don’t think so. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered. If you think it’s about how much magic you use, you’re wrong. It’s not about that at all. It’s any touch of it at all. I couldn’t have used magic to make her voice sore enough that she couldn’t talk or to forget everything about magic. I thought about both of those things afterwards and wondered if they’d have been better.

She looked at me and it was the same look on her face as the day in the lunchroom when she looked at Kirsten and made her ugly.

She opened her mouth. “You’re dead,” she said. Her lips moved to make the words a second time, but there was no voice to go with it. She tried it again, with the same result.

“We’re done,” she said. “We’re finished. We’re not best friends anymore.” She stalked away.

But here’s the thing. I hadn’t changed that part and she couldn’t do it, either. So I was still her best friend.

I think she enjoyed it the last few months of the year. It was torture for me, and that’s the way she wanted it. I called her every day over the summer vacation and she yelled at me on the phone and my mom asked me why I kept calling that girl who was so mean to me, but I couldn’t explain it to her.

She shook her head and said, “Teenagers.”

Then seventh grade started.

I was tempted again. I couldn’t help it. I’d lived through the whole summer, and that was bad enough. But it was something else when I had to go through the school year, too.

So I did it. “We’re not best friends. We’re not best friends. We’re not best friends,” I said out loud in the lunchroom on the last day of the first week of school.

She looked happy with me. She couldn’t have done it herself, so I’d done it for her.

But there was that look in her eyes again, the realization of her power. She couldn’t do magic, but she could make me do it.

And she did. Somehow. She got so that she was doing it every day. I was trying to save people from her. Or from the other people around her. She got them to do magic for her sometimes, once she figured out that it could be done.

But the thing that was the worst she did without any magic at all. I didn’t realize it until the year was half gone. I wasn’t a witch anymore. I was just an ordinary magic user like everyone else. It hadn’t happened with anyone swooping down and taking away my license, and the first time I went on the internet and tried to get into the chat rooms where the other witches were, I thought it was a fluke. I didn’t try again for a few weeks. I figured I was too busy.

But the day I met her—Willa—I knew it had happened. She saw me in the bathroom, trying to say three times that Ruth was not going to get an A on a test, and she stopped me. She was the witch at our school now, not me. She was the one getting people not to use magic.

I should have let it go. I should have tried to help her.

But I didn’t. So I got to find out for myself why witches didn’t use magic even once, to fix things. Because that one time, and you’re not a witch anymore.

Now I’m just Dorrie, the one everyone calls a witch at school, but who isn’t and knows it.

I think sometimes about making myself Willa’s best friend, just to see what would happen. Or making her Ruth’s best friend, to see if she could do it any better. But that’s how I know how far I’ve fallen. Because it’s just the kind of thing Ruth would do.