She looks like Sally Jessy Raphael,she thought.
Then knew what the book reminded her of:
A self-help book from 1987 about exploring your inner self.
She’d seen a million of them on her mother’s nightstand over the years. And this one would have fit right in. It had the right look, the right author, and if the contents page was anything to go by, the same tone and style and way of describing things.
She spotted chapter headings like “Accessing Your Inner Witch” and “Maximizing Spell Potential” and “Maintaining Healthy Magic Boundaries.”
And when she flipped to page one, there was more of the same.
“When your magical inner being first manifests, you may find dealing with this blossoming a little difficult,” Watts had written, and all Cassie could think about was the textbook people had been given in school, to inform them about their first periods. She wanted to race to the end of that chapter—“So You Think You Have Become a Witch”—and make sure that she wasn’t about to start bleeding out of another orifice once a month.
Which thankfully didn’t seem to be the case.
But apparently, according to Watts, there were other symptoms of being a witch. “The main indicators of your possible emergence,” she had written, “are as follows.” And below that appeared an actual list. An incredible, ridiculous, nightmarish list that included things like:
* Excessive night sweats.
* Urge to wear hats massively increased.
* Chances of cats adopting you very high.
* People stop liking you.
* People like you to a disturbing degree.
* You may only want to eat potatoes.
No real explanation was given for why any of this might happen, however. And, okay, Cassie could guess the reason for some of them. They were practically witch clichés that Watts most likely just thought would sound right.
But then there was the thing about potatoes. Why on earth would she only want potatoes?
And that wasn’t even the weirdest one. The last on the list read simply, “Trolls.” Which left Cassie wondering what these trolls might be about to do. Did witches attract them? Was she likely to wake up one morning and find a great swarm of them scaling the front wall of the house? Or was she now mortal enemies with troll kind?
She didn’t know. And Watts didn’t say.
But shedidsay that the best way to avoid causing too much destruction was, of course, to try exercise: “A brisk constitutional, taken twice daily, has been known to decrease the instances of accidental melting of household appliances and unfortunate family members threefold,” Watts had written. As if the disintegration of your mom was just a slight aberration in an otherwise completely normal existence. And if you felt like it wasn’t, well.
Walking would really help with that.
Yet, somehow, Cassie still couldn’t stop reading.
She sat on the stairs, devouring every word. And at least some of the words were as useful as she had imagined when Seth first handed the book to her. There was stuff in there about how to gather moonlight (coat the inside of a lidded Tupperware container with witch saliva, then poke a hole in the top and cover the hole with plastic wrap), how to keep spiders from your house forever (stash goblin whiskers beneath the floorboards), how to obtain goblin whiskers (leave a tomato out on a silver plate on the fourth of any month).
Plus at the end of the book was a straightforward glossary, which plainly explained what certain terms meant. “Knack,” for example, was used to describe what exactly manifested a witch’s powers. And apparently it could be done in all sorts of strange ways.
Baking and cooking were of course familiar to Cassie. But other possibilities ranged all the way from writing or painting or dancing, to weird things like data processing and wall building and wearing things. You put your shoes on just a little bit wrongly and there it was. You were a shoe witch. Forever searching for just the right sandal to hang on one of your ears, in order to make time turn backward or make night into day.
All of which, according to Watts, were absolutely feasible.
“Anything is possible,” read the final sentence of one chapter.
Though Cassie couldn’t really be sure if that was just yet more self-help, can-do-attitude speak, or an actual fact. All she knew for sure was how she felt when she read the book:
Both disturbed and thrilled at the same time.
And even more so when she read something similar to what Seth had said: “Your spells or potions or curses will be at their strongest when your Knack and your desire and your instincts all converge. If one fights the other, the magic will not be as strong or as accurate as you might wish it to be. Therefore, it’s very important to not fret if conventional wisdom tells you that what you are creating is wrong. Feelings, a tingle inside, a strong sense of self—all will better inform you which is the correct path to take,” she read, and her heart pounded harder and harder as she did.
