Homecoming

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Homecoming
© 2012 by Scott Tracey

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Contents

Homecoming

Excerpt from
Witch Eyes

Homecoming

by Scott Tracey

Nothing sucks more than getting the Addams Family theme stuck in your head every afternoon. Whenever the mailman, Mr. Collins, pulled his rickety, gray mail truck up into our driveway to drop off the mail, he was humming it. And as soon as he left, it hung there in the air, creeping into my ears like a parasite.

I was sprawled across one of the green and white plastic lawn chairs Uncle John had bought at a garage sale last spring. The chair was currently on the porch and out of the sun, so I don't know if it still counted as a lawn chair. A porch chair, then. Either way, it was still tacky. But it beat being out in the sun, where it was at least twenty degrees warmer.

In the height of summer, Mr. Collins always decided that his uniform was optional, and drove around town in T-shirts and jean shorts. But this year, the summer swelter hadn't ended with the new school year. It was one of the hottest summers on record, at the end of September, and the temperatures were staying consistently at 90 degrees or higher.

“Mornin', Braden,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat in my direction. Then he went right back to humming that song. I could never decide if he did it on purpose.
He's always polite, but there are always those moments.
Moments where the mailman would look at me, forehead knotted in curiosity. The “is he blind? Or can he really see behind those sunglasses?” look.

It wasn't unusual to wear sunglasses with the way the sun was blazing and it was hot like a crematorium outside. But that wasn't why he looked. Everyone in Garroway knew about me. “Seizure boy.” Like I didn't know they called me that behind my back.

We'd lived in Garroway, Montana, for three years. Why? I have no idea. One morning, out of the blue, Uncle John woke up and decided on a total life upheaval. I'd grown up in Arizona, in some place that was even more of the middle of nowhere than Garroway was. At least in Garroway, there were people. In Arizona, we were isolated. Fifteen minutes outside the nearest city, and
fourteen
minutes to the nearest neighbor, unless you counted the bobcats and coyotes.

Mr. Collins climbed the porch steps, clinging to the handrail as he did. His knees had started getting bad last spring, but he wouldn't let me meet him down at the truck. He insisted on delivering the mail all the way to our mailbox, even if that meant climbing up and down every day.

“School?” he grunted, eyeing the texts in front of me. Every day, the same question. Same song. Same stained T-shirt. Mr. Collins liked routine, and he'd never met a sentence he didn't bite in half if he could.

“Something like that,” I said, just as usual. I wondered if he ever noticed that my books were always old and dusty, and written in languages that even Google had trouble tracking down. My busywork was never as simple as geometry or the Civil War—my projects were always Peruvian charm circles and Sumerian devil binders.

Uncle John was—in addition to being a grump, a hardass, and a giant nerd (not necessarily in that order)—a witch. We both were. And part of the reason we lived where we did—nearly off the grid and mostly independent—was because teaching a teenager to use magic was flashy, loud, and dangerous. As I've tried to explain to him a dozen times, sometimes you just need to blow something up. He was never amused.

It's not like I ever intend for the magic to escape me. John made it look so easy, a word or a gesture or a ritual he'd performed a thousand times. Of course it was easy for him. He'd been doing it all his life and he was
ancient.

“Not knockin' down mailboxes, are yuh?”

“What?” I looked up, trying to figure out what Mr. Collins was talking about. And then I remembered. John had brought it up during dinner one night: some kids were using street mailboxes for batting practice. There must have been another spree this week. No one had been caught yet, but everyone had a theory, or a hunch about which meddling kids to blame. Garroway was a town of six hundred and change: there weren't a lot of suspects to suspect.

I squinted up at him. “Too hot for mailbox vandalism. I'm waiting for someone to organize some good old-fashioned sprinkler larceny. Or maybe grand theft kiddie pool.”

Mr. Collins grunted in that “I don't understand you young people and your sarcastic tones” way that adults used regularly around me.

He dropped the mail into the box—I'd offered to just take it from him before, but he's insistent on the ritual of it—and shuffled back to the stairs. “See you at the game on Friday?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Homecoming's always a good game,” he said, swiveling away, a compelling note to his voice. Garroway was also one of those towns that shut down on football nights. And the Homecoming game was the biggest of them all.

“Have to see what my uncle says. You know how he is.” It wasn't just this game in particular—anytime something was going on in town, I would ask, and he would say no. I was pretty sure his first word was “no.” He didn't really snore in his sleep so much as he “no'd” a lot. It was like he had a quota that he had to meet every day.

It couldn't hurt to ask, though. Right?

¤ ¤ ¤

I waited until the next morning at breakfast before bringing it up.

“No.”

“I haven't even asked you yet.”

“Still no.”

“Come on, Uncle John!”

“No to the power of twelve,” was his dry response.

“You're supposed to be the adult here,” I said, crossing my arms in front of me. But John seemed to think that having a sixteen-year-old nephew meant he could still act like he was a teenager, too. Which was just weird, because he was
forty.

It was his turn to make breakfast, which he accomplished by pointedly taking the box of frozen waffles out of the freezer and slapping them down on the table in front of me. Twenty minutes later, once he had coffee and the paper and was as close to human as he was going to get, I'd made my pitch.

He put down the front section of the paper. Garroway only printed up their newspaper once a week, and it came in two sections. The front, where all the news ended up, and the back, which was just an excuse for all the local businesses to badmouth one another.
Come eat at Hoggie's. The health department's never shut US down.

“Did you finish the reading?”

I glanced guiltily toward the front door, and the abandoned texts still on the porch. “I'm almost—”

“That's a no.” A faint smile quirked his lips. “And so is this. No.”

“Uncle John! Come on! It's just one football game.”

“Oh, it's just a football game?” One eyebrow raised in speculation. “A football game that draws out everyone in a thirty mile radius? I don't see how you could possibly get into trouble.”

“If you keep me locked up here, people are going to talk.”

“People always talk,” he grunted. “Let me know when they start saying something interesting.”

“Keeping me locked up is like … child abuse or something.”

If I thought the threat was going to get me any ground, Uncle John's nonchalance quashed that notion quickly. He just didn't get it, what it was like to be on the outside all the time.

John held up one hand and started ticking off the fingers. “The last time you went to the hospital, you blew up an X-ray machine; last week, instead of practicing wards like I told you, you were summoning fire elementals that definitely do
not
prevent forest fires; and let's not even talk about the last time you tried enchanting the telephone.”

“Accidents,” I dismissed. “I've got it under control now. I mean, for God's sakes, I'm sixteen! I'm almost an adult.”

“And what happens when you have another episode?”

That quieted me. We were at two weeks since the last episode right now, and that was a record. I don't think I've ever made it three weeks without a minor flare-up.

“It's one night,” I said, though we both knew the fight was over. He'd won. Again.

“Let me know when you're finished with the reading, then we'll get back into talking about World War II.” He turned his attention back to the newspaper.

“Whatever,” I snapped, storming out of the room.

¤ ¤ ¤

The best part of being homeschooled was the randomness of it. Some days, John was all business and other days I didn't see him for hours at a time. He liked to experiment—taking old spells that he'd read about, and modernizing them. So he got to play with the primordial forces of the universe, and I got to read ten chapters of Mark Twain.

Like today. John disappeared into his study and muttered something about “finishing the reading.” But he didn't say “right now” or even what reading he was talking about. It was pretty clear that he was actually giving me the afternoon off. So I went hiking instead.

Our house was this rugged, unassuming little log cabin on about a thousand acres. One path cut through the woods to a convenience store about half a mile away on the highway. But I wasn't in the mood for shopping, so I went in the opposite direction, down the paths that led away from Garroway.

I was halfway down the main path when I heard them. Voices. I stopped in my tracks, closed my eyes, and really tried to listen. Sometimes, in my head, I think that being a witch is the same thing as being Daredevil, and all my other senses will instantly enhance if I just close my eyes, or really pay attention for a second.

Of course, real life doesn't work that way.

“...their own fault for not turning on the A/C.”

“Shut up, Derek,” came the laughing reply. “Did you grab the cooler?”

I recognized the second voice immediately. Caleb Evans. Junior class badass and all around rebel. He and Derek were the prime suspects in the mailbox beatings. It seemed like everyone in town knew who he was. Which I didn't entirely understand, because he didn't play sports, win awards, or do anything to stand out from the crowd. He just
did
. In the movies, there was always some reason why the popular people were popular: they were rich, jocks, or born leaders. Caleb didn't fit the mold.

“Aren't we near the freak's place?”

I froze where I stood, my heart already sinking in my chest.

“Give it a rest,” Caleb replied, his tone bored. “So the kid's homeschooled.”

“That's not it. My dad was telling me he has some sort of eye deformity.”

Caleb yawned, dramatically.

“No, I swear! I heard he was shooting meth into his tear ducts and now his eyes are all rotted and stuff.”

Caleb snorted. “You're an idiot if you believe that. That kid's no meth addict.”

“Yeah, like you'd know,” Derek scoffed. I heard a bit of rustling, so I stepped back carefully, pressing myself up against one of the sweeping Ponderosa pines that filled the forest. I only know what they're called, because in addition to being the state tree of Montana, apparently they're extremely good for defensive spells. Our house was built out of Ponderosa—I think it was the reason John bought it. I've tried asking why it was so important to him, but he always changed the subject.

“Where are the girls at, anyways?” They were closer now. I don't know why I thought hiding was a good idea, but I kept my eyes closed, and waited. If I couldn't see them, they couldn't see me, right?

There was a lake about a half mile from here, the small kind of watering hole where kids could hide out. It was the closest Garroway came to having it's very own teenage den of iniquity and sin, with beer cans and cigarette butts littering the shore.

“They're still back at the car. I think they wanted to change without you perving on 'em,” Caleb said. The pair of them stopped, no more than thirty feet from me. In an empty wood at the beginning of fall, it was like being in the same room.

I kept asking John to show me some invisibility spells. Or at the very least a couple of “these are not the droids you're looking for” spells. But he seemed to think that I was going to use those spells to do things like … sneak out of the house, or get myself out of trouble.

Which I totally would, but still. Where was the trust?

“Your face is a perv,” the other retorted.

“Wow. Genius.” Caleb said.

“I'm not waiting for them.” A second later, I heard one of them barreling through the woods, somehow making more noise than should be humanly possible.

Intelligent discourse it wasn't. But Caleb and his friends were the stars of the game I played in my head. The point was to find a way to stumble into their group, charming them with my wit and awesomeness. In the movies, there was always something that brought the new friends together. Either they were serving Saturday detention (that was out, I was homeschooled), or they started dating because of a bet (that was out for several reasons), or they showed up at a party together.

In the movies, I would be the “weird” half of the unlikely friendship. Caleb was the one with the sandy hair that always looked perfect, even when he forgot about it. Though he didn't compete in athletics, Caleb was tall and lean, with the kind of crooked smile that made stomachs flutter and hearts melt. In short, everyone in Garroway seemed to take notice when he showed up.

Me? People stared a lot. There were a lot of whispers. Rumors like whatever Derek claimed to have heard. The occasional douche bag calling out insults like he had something to prove. I'd just accepted that this was life in a small town. But that didn't mean I didn't want something more.

“Are you sure we're not going to get in trouble?” The girl's voice was unfamiliar. I turned my head, watching her approach. She was one of the bottle blondes that hangs out with Caleb. Cindy, maybe? Or Sandra? I could never keep them straight; all blondes started to look alike after awhile.

“Half the school's ditching because of the heat. What are they going to do? Punish all of us?” Derek sounded unusually confident. Maybe it was more common than I realized, but I never would have thought that public schools were held hostage by the students so easily.