“to wake up, Jesus, we’re almost home,” Jessica said, putting a rough jostling hand on Sidney’s shoulder.
“I didn’t do this to you on the way there,” Sidney whined as she turned her head back towards the window and tried to curl up as best she could in the seat of a car.
“Oh my god, just wake up already,” Jessica shook her again, but Sidney halfheartedly pushed her away.
“No!” she said, eyes still closed
“We are thirty minutes away from the Grovestead. That means we’re thirty minutes away from whatever shit Bree feels like giving us. So, you can just wake your happy ass up and mentally prepare yourself, because I’m not facing her alone.”
“Fine! Fine, I’m awake see.” Sidney sat up straight in the car but her eyes immediately closed again and her head lolled to one side.
“Ugh, you are the worst.” Jessica complained from the driver’s seat.
Sidney couldn’t help it. She had basically been in a stupor ever since she had come out of that trance or whatever it was that Dr. Bailey had put her in.
She didn’t even remember much of what had happened while she’d been out. She remembered a pretty field, and a forest, and being scared of something, but that was about it. She’d even been too tired to see if whatever they’d done worked, if the block had been removed and she could finally stop being the slowest kid in the class when it came to magic.
She felt herself falling deeper into sleep just as her stomach rumbled, “Hey, when was the last time we ate?”
“Well, I ate a hamburger a couple of hours ago from the drive-thru and you refused to wake up,” Jessica pointed to the Burger King wrappers on the dashboard of the Jeep. “I yelled, shook you, I even thumped you on your forehead a few times for good measure, but nope, you just kept on sleeping.”
“You should have tried harder, I’m starving,” and as evidence Sidney’s stomach growled as if on demand. “See, starving.”
Jessica shrugged, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to make a sandwich at Bree’s, because you blew your chance.”
“Just run through another drive-thru for me. It’ll be fast,” Sidney asked.
“Nope, we’re now,” she consulted the driving app on her phone, “thirty seven minutes away from Three Rivers and I’m not wasting time pulling over for you.”
“Look, there’s a McDonald’s right there, just pull over and…” Sidney watched as Jessica drove past the burger joint without even slowing down. “Why are you being such a bitch?”
“What? Me being a bitch, Miss I’m going to make Jessica drive the whole way home by herself while snoring and refusing to wake up for anything.”
“Oh, you mean the same way you did on the way there EXCEPT! Except! YOU hadn’t just gone through some life changing kind of magic mental journey, you’re just lazy as hell.” Sidney wasn’t sure if this was genuine anger or just the hunger talking but she let it just flow out. “And then on top of sleeping the whole way there, you took the bed and gave me the fold out at that shitty motel. And I’m the btich?”
“I let you have the fold out because at least those were fresh sheets you put on yourself, the bed probably hadn’t had its sheet changed in weeks and that bedspread hadn’t been washed since Madonna was still mostly human flesh,” Jessica shot back.
“There is a Chik-Fil-A, pull in,” Sidney demanded.
“The hell I will,” Jessica put her foot more firmly on the gas pedal, letting the Jeep accelerate and pass an old station wagon with wood paneling.
Sidney’s eyelids narrowed and a clump of anger gathered in her chest. “I said pull over!” She all but yelled at her sister.
The steering wheel jerked out of Jessica’s hands and turned without her consent. She screamed and the breaks squealed and soon they were in a full spin. Sidney joined in the screaming as the car, tires screeching across the road, spun again and again until it finally came to a stop.
They looked at each other, still terrified and out of breath, and then out the front window. They’d landed in the Chik-Fil-A parking lot.
Jessica looked at her sister, her mouth moving from a shocked O to pursed disapproval, “You know, I’m not so sure if you getting unblocked was the best decision.”
***
Sidney threw a waffle shaped French fry at her sister as they exited the car. Jessica picked it up off her lap and took a bite of it, laughing as she did. Then she continued singing the song she’d altered for their particular situation, “Sidney take the wheeeel, take it from my hands, cause I can’t find the Chik-Fil-A, I’m a letting gooooo.” She warbled around the mouth full of potato.
They both got out of the car laughing, which was cut off abruptly when Bree’s voice cut through the dark. “I see you’ve been having a good time. Meanwhile we’ve been worried about you.”
Sidney immediately felt guilty. They should have left a note or something to let Bree know that they weren’t in trouble and hadn’t run away from her, they were just going to try to find answers about her… condition.
“I’m sorry Bree, we should have left you a note,” Sidney said, genuinely contrite.
“Yes, you should have, or answered the phone when I called, or sent a text to Cord, or done any number of things that would have let me know that you both weren’t being raped repeatedly by a group of rabid shifters.”
That was unnecessarily gruesome and kinda racist, but she took the point. She should have contacted them in some way. “I know Bree, and I’m truly sorry, I just got so caught up in the thought of having myself unblocked that I didn’t think about anything else.”
Bree stood on the porch, in the darkness with the moonlight only highlighting her brow, nose and cheeks, she looked sinister, and Sidney felt a chill sweep across her, as she stood looking into the dark shadows where eyes should be, waiting for a response.
“And what did you find out? That your block was put there for a reason that it’s there for your own protection? That breaking it too early might be dangerous to you and those around you? I mean look at what you’ve done with the block still in place.”
An immediate sense of shame flooded through her as she recalled the scene of dead bodies that lay open eyed and staring, the people she’d killed, no matter how inadvertently, while trying to rescue Red.
They hadn’t been given any warnings. She hadn’t even thought that the block could have been put there to protect others. “Well, she really didn’t talk to us much about the block. I just, I um, I kinda just went into a trance, but I’m not sure if anything was unblocked,” she added hastily.
Jessica coughed and hummed the melody of Jesus Take the Wheel. Sidney ignored her.
“And who was this witch you went to see?” Bree asked. Jessica filled her in on Dr. Bailey. “Yes, I know her, vaguely.”
The way Bree said it didn’t make it sound like a good thing.
“Well, we’ll just have to see what this witch has wrought. Stop hanging around in the yard like a couple of hooligans and come inside.”
She looked at Jessica who rolled her eyes and opened the door to the backseat, pulling out her weekend bag before following Bree up the stairs. Sidney did the same.
Bree’s feelings were obviously hurt that she hadn’t been consulted on their road trip or the reasoning behind it. But while she had taken an oath to the same Goddess Bree served, she had taken no oath to Bree. The others in the Grove seemed to treat her word and will as law, but that wasn’t how Sidney was willing to live. She was sorry that it had hurt Bree, but she wasn’t going to spend her life waiting on someone else to make her decisions for her.
“Bree I am sorry that we didn’t leave a note, but I’m not sorry that we went. I needed answers and I just wasn’t –“
“Let’s see whether you’re unblocked or not before you start justifying your reasons for going behind my back to speak to the priestess of another Grove.”
Bree walked into the kitchen and grabbed an apple off the table, turning around and handing it to Sidney.
Sidney remembered her frustration with the apple, sitting outside in the orchard, trying so hard to make something, anything happen.
She stared at the bright green skin on the fruit and began visualizing what she wanted to happen, seeing it shatter into a million pieces before her. The water inside it forcing all of the pieces apart until it was no longer an apple but just molecules in the air.
She waited for the apple to comply with her request. And nothing happened. She looked from Jessica’s confused face to Bree’s smirking mouth and felt herself crumple inside. She had been so hopeful that she could finally tap into that energy they were always talking about, be able to see it and feel it running through all of creation. Finally, be able to not have to watch Jessica beat her at every task they had.
She sat the apple down and started to speak, to admit that maybe nothing had happened, when the air inside the room seemed to get heavier. Like someone had sucked all of the oxygen out and the only thing that was left was gravitational force. The room dimmed and all around her things disappeared only to reappear as fragments of themselves. Jessica was just an accumulation of multicolored sparks, she was all the colors of the universe, the brightest right in the center of her chest.
Sidney wanted to reach out and scoop her up, but pulled back a hand, scared at what touching her would do. There were Bree’s sparks, not as bright as Jessica’s and some looked to be flickering, like a light bulb just before it burst. She blew on a few and they seemed to come back to life. She smiled, knowing she’d done the right thing.
She looked around, everything, the counters, the table, everything around her was made out of millions of tiny sparks. The refrigerator was gray sparks, filled with a million different sparks, and she could identify each one.
There were even pizza sparks! She wanted to giggle. She looked down at her hands, even she was made up of millions of sparks. It was breathtaking. Sidney could have waded through the whole world doing nothing but being filled with wonder at the variety of things and their sparks.
The apple on the table caught her eye. Its sparks were green and a soft yellow with hints of brown. She picked it up, it still smelled delicious, even just as sparks. She contemplated it for a moment and then separated each one of its sparks, letting them fly away releasing each one, watching it dim as it went.
She watched as the apple disintegrated before her eyes in wonder. Some of the apple was in each thing, its sparks sticking to it like glue, there were even apple sparks on her, it was wonderful. She laughed and blinked willing herself to see things as a whole again.
Jessica and Bree came into focus, both of their stunned faces covered with tiny chunks of apple. In fact the whole kitchen looked like it was covered in apple pulp.
Sidney laughed again, this was wonderful. She ran into the meeting room and got the chest with the wooden dolls in them off of a chest. She pulled one out, smiled at it and let it twirl out of her fingers and into the air, and the joy of dancing filled her heart. She pulled out another and another and soon all of the little wooden dolls were dancing to a silent tune, weaving across an invisible dance floor. Something was missing though. They needed music! Sidney closed her eyes and listened to the music of the world around her and found just the right song. She pulled it out and into the air as she began to dance along.
Jessica clapped her hands as she too began to dance. Sidney noticed that Cord and Nate and Francesca and the rest of the household had come down to see what all the noise was about. She hoped they felt all the joy that she did, so she sent each one a little wooden partner that bowed in front of them and held out a hand in request.
Soon the room was filled with song and dancing partners, who after a moment of stunned amazement, joined her in her mad dance around the room. Dancing couples, witch and wooden partner, spilled into the other rooms of the house and soon she felt the magic begin to flow from everyone as they danced. The wooden figurines grew in size and in their imitation to life until they were almost as large as the humans they danced with, and as fluid.
Sidney watched the others as they danced, and felt them intertwine with her magical song, each complementing the other, all part of a bigger beautiful pattern of magic and movement, just one discordant spot marring the joy flowing through the house.
Bree.
Sidney sent a wave of music, joy, and laughter over the air to wash over the old woman, in hopes she’d join in with their almost trancelike tangle. But instead of infecting her with their inhibitions, Bree stood like a cold marble column and let it flow around her.
She spared the woman little regret and she returned to her fevered flight around the room, each couple perfectly synced with the next, twirling in and out of rooms, the dance spilling out onto the porch, then into the yard and around the house.
Too soon though, she felt the others begin to flag, their joy being replaced with heated skin and tired bodies and she knew it was time to call an end to their midnight ball.
One by one the wooden dancing partners untangled themselves from their human counterparts, and bowed with what seemed like true regret, ending their dance. They turned and one by one walked back into the house, shrinking as they went, to put themselves back to bed in their little wooden box.
Everyone else stood silent, chest heaving and watching them go, each a little differently affected by what they’d just experienced.
Sidney felt the heat on the skin emanating from everyone, could see their hot breath blowing in white puffs in the chill of the autumn air. And she remembered another lesson she’d failed to master.
She closed her eyes and felt for a connection with water, that life giving, earth shattering element that had so eluded her when she’d searched before.
And she found it, deep in the ground, hanging ready in the air, running through pipes and over rocks, flowing all around her, inside her, across and through and under. It was everywhere, omnipresent, a power so big and overwhelming it took her breath away.
Her plan when reaching for water had been to whisk away the perspiration from those around her, cooling the blood with a quick breeze that left everyone refreshed. But when she opened her eyes she saw a world full of water droplets standing in the air, waiting for her to tell them where to go, what to do. They were above her as far as the eye could see. Pulled from the roots of the trees, from the ground and the grass below her, from the very bodies that surrounded her.
She wished she could keep them there forever, letting the moonlight glance off of them and delight the eyes, but water never stayed still for long. She knew that, it told her that even as it spoke to her now, asking her to release it. And so she did.
And at once million upon billions of droplets all fell down to the ground, all ready to make a journey only it would know, raining down and leaving a group of shivering wet witches, all looking at Sidney, a combination of awe and fear in their eyes.