Chapter 1: The New Cheerleader's Love Confession
The hallway between third and fourth period was a river of noise and cheap body spray. Bill Thompson pressed his back against the cold, beige metal of Stacy Davies’s locker, trying to make himself two-dimensional. The scent of yesterday’s meatloaf clung to the air, a greasy ghost haunting the linoleum.
“He took my calc notebook,” Bill said, his voice barely cutting through the din of slamming locks and shouted plans. “Said it was ‘for a friend.’ Which means it’s in a dumpster.”
Stacy spun her combination with a practiced flick of her wrist. “You should have just told him your notes are encrypted in a language only understood by people with an IQ over room temperature.”
“He’d just hit me harder.” Bill adjusted his glasses, a nervous tic. He could feel the collective energy of the hallway like a physical pressure, a current that always seemed to pull him under. “I’m tired of it, Stacy. I’m tired of jumping at every shadow, of calculating routes to class based on where he might be.”
Stacy pulled out an overstuffed binder, her expression shifting from wry to concerned. She had a sharp, clever face that never quite fit in with the glossy, homogenous crowd, and Bill loved her for it. “Talk to Mr. Henderson? Again?”
“And say what? Troy Maddox is mean? They’d give him a detention. Then he’d wait for me. It doesn’t stop. It just… pauses.” He ran a hand through his hair, which immediately fell back into its same, uncooperative shape. “I need it to stop. Permanently.”
A group of jocks lumbered past, their laughter a booming, exclusionary sound. Bill flinched instinctively. Stacy watched them go, her lips a thin line. “What are you thinking, Bill? You’re not buying a gun. You cried when we dissected the fetal pig.”
“Not a gun.” He lowered his voice, leaning in. The chatter around them became a blur. “A solution. I heard about this woman. Out on Route 9, past the old quarry.”
Stacy’s eyebrows disappeared under her choppy bangs. “A woman. On Route 9. Let me guess, she sells miracle vitamins and has a lot of cats.”
“She’s a witch.”
The word hung between them, absurd and heavy. Stacy didn’t laugh. She just stared at him, her head tilted, analyzing him like a strange bug. “A witch. You want to hire a witch to hex Troy Maddox. To, what, give him incurable acne? Make his gym shorts fall off at inopportune moments?”
“I want him to leave me alone. However that happens.” Bill’s voice held a desperate edge he hadn’t intended. “I just want to walk to my locker. That’s it. Is that too much to ask?”
Stacy slammed her locker shut with a definitive clang. “It’s not. But witches, Bill? That’s… that’s a new level of desperate.”
“I am desperate.” The admission was a quiet exhale. “I’m going after school. I just wanted you to know. In case I come back with a frog’s head or something.”
She studied him for a long moment, the hall lights reflecting in her glasses. “Fine. But I’m driving. If you’re going to do something profoundly stupid, I’m not letting you take the bus to get there.”
The house on Route 9 wasn’t a crooked cottage with gingerbread trim. It was a tired-looking split-level with vinyl siding the color of old teeth and a damp patch on the lawn that resembled a spreading mold stain. A plastic gnome with a chipped hat lay on its side by the welcome mat, which said ‘GO AWAY’ in faded block letters.
Bill’s courage, fragile at best, was evaporating. “This is a mistake.”
“Yes,” Stacy agreed, putting the car in park. “A colossal one. Let’s go in so I can have the full story for your eulogy.”
The inside smelled of patchouli and microwaved soup. The woman wasn’t old and wizened; she was maybe fifty, with frizzy red hair and wearing a sweatshirt with a sequined wolf on it. She looked like someone’s aunt who sold dubious essential oils online.
“Twenty dollars,” she said, before Bill could even speak. She was knitting something lumpy and gray.
“For what?” Stacy asked, ever the pragmatist.
“For the consultation. The magic is extra. Cash.”
Bill fumbled his money out, his fingers clumsy. The woman, who had not offered a name, took it and stuffed it into the pocket of her sweatpants. “Who’s the target? What’s the desired outcome?”
“Troy Maddox,” Bill stammered. “I just want him to… forget I exist. To have no interest in me whatsoever. To be completely, totally indifferent.”
The woman stopped knitting. She looked at Bill, really looked at him, and her eyes were surprisingly clear and sharp. “Indifference is complicated. Hate is a bond. Fear is a connection. Indifference is the absence of a thread. Severing a thread is easier than weaving a void.” She set her knitting aside. “Simpler to give him a new obsession. A distraction. Something shiny and loud to chase so he forgets all about the quiet thing in the corner.”
Bill swallowed. “What kind of distraction?”
“A person, usually. Works every time. I have a standard popularity boost. Makes you marginally more interesting to the general student body. Very safe, very mild.”
“No,” Bill said, too quickly. “Not for me. For him. Could you… make someone else the distraction? Someone he already likes? So his focus just… shifts?”
The woman shrugged. “Specificity costs more. Who?”
Bill’s mind raced through the social hierarchy. Troy’s current crush was Charli Benton, a sweet, athletic girl on the soccer team who had once, memorably, told Troy his joke wasn’t funny. Troy talked about her constantly. “Charli Benton. Could you make him just… obsessed with her? So he has no time for me?”
A slow smile spread across the woman’s face. It wasn’t a nice smile. “Oh, I can do better than that. I can make her obsessed with him. A feedback loop. A perfect, closed circuit of teenage drama. They’ll be so wrapped up in each other, you’ll be dust under the rug.” She named a price. It was exactly the amount Bill had saved from his grocery store job.
Stacy made a strangled noise. “Bill, this is insane. You can’t pay someone to… to rewire people’s emotions. It’s grotesque.”
But Bill was already reaching for his wallet. The image was too perfect: Troy, consumed by Charli; Charli, reflected adoration back at him; himself, finally, gloriously invisible. “Deal.”
The ritual wasn’t dramatic. The woman took a locket from a jewelry box, whispered into it, and held it over a candle flame until the metal grew warm. She chanted something that sounded suspiciously like mispronounced Latin from a travel phrasebook. She charged the locket with “targeting energy” linked to a yearbook photo of Charli that Bill had printed, and a gym sock of Troy’s that Bill had, with immense terror, stolen from the lost and found.
“It’s done,” the woman said, dropping the warm locket into Bill’s palm. “The energy is released. It will find them. By tomorrow, the change will begin.”
In the car, Stacy was silent for a full mile. “I hope you know,” she said finally, her voice tight, “that you just violated about seventeen different kinds of consent. For both of them.”
“It’s just a distraction,” Bill mumbled, the locket burning a hole in his pocket. “It’s not permanent. She said it’s mild.”
“She also said the gnome was a ‘territorial sentry,’ Bill. Her credibility is not stellar.”
But a fragile hope had taken root in Bill’s chest. It felt like relief.
The next day, Bill moved through the halls with a tentative new energy. He saw Troy at a distance, holding court by the water fountain. Troy didn’t look his way. Not once. It was working.
By lunch, the first ripple appeared. Charli Benton, usually surrounded by her soccer friends, was sitting alone, staring into her phone with a strange, vacant smile. She was dressed differently—a top a little too tight, a skirt a little too short for a Tuesday. Bill felt a twinge of something that wasn’t quite guilt, but he shoved it down. It was a mild shift. A distraction.
He was at Stacy’s locker after school, detailing the glorious, Troy-free day, when the second ripple hit.
A wave of perfume, sweet and cloying, announced her arrival. Charli Benton walked—no, bounced—towards them. Her movements were unnaturally buoyant, each step causing a dramatic, jiggling tremor in her chest that her pushed-up top barely contained. Her previously sharp, focused gaze was now wide and glassy.
“Billy!” she squealed, her voice an octave higher than Bill remembered.
He froze. Billy? No one called him Billy.
Before he could react, she threw her arms around his neck, pressing her immense, perfume-drenched body against his skinny frame. He was pinned against the lockers, his glasses askew.
“Oh, Billy, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she breathed into his ear. Her words sounded slow, deliberate, as if forming them was a new and difficult task. “I was thinking… about you. All day. It’s like, I finally see you, you know?”
Over her shoulder, Bill saw Stacy’s mouth hanging open, her binder clutched to her chest like a shield.
Charli leaned back, her hands on his shoulders, her glossy lips in a pout. “You’re so smart. And so… deep. We should, like, go out. Tonight. My parents are away. We could… study.” She winked, a clumsy, exaggerated gesture.
This was wrong. This was not the plan. The distraction was for Troy. The energy was supposed to find Troy.
“Charli,” he stammered, trying to gently pry her hands off. “I think… I think you’ve got the wrong guy. What about Troy?”
Her face scrunched up in confusion. “Troy? That dumb jock?” She let out a giggle that sounded like bubbles popping. “Ew, no. He’s, like, all muscles and no thoughts. You’re the one, Billy. I love your… brain.” She tapped a manicured finger against his temple, then let her gaze drift down his body. “And other stuff, too.”
Stacy found her voice. It was flat, cold, and horrified. “Bill. What did you do?”
Bill looked from Stacy’s stunned face to Charli’s adoring, vacant one. The locket in his pocket felt like a block of ice. The witch’s words echoed: A feedback loop. A perfect, closed circuit.
He had been so specific. Make him obsessed with her. But the magic, it seemed, had needed a conduit. A point of origin. Him. It had boiled Charli’s personality down to a crude, intense caricature of desire, but it had gotten the target wrong. Horribly, catastrophically wrong.
Charli nuzzled his neck. “So… your place or mine?”
The hallway noise faded to a dull roar in Bill’s ears. He was no longer invisible. He was the blinding, unwanted center of attention. And as he stared into Charli’s empty, adoring eyes, he understood with dawning, stomach-churning clarity that he hadn’t woven a distraction.
He had created a monster. And it was wrapped around his neck.