“Ugh,” I groaned. “Why do you have to be so . . .”
“Sensible?”
“Annoying,” I chided.
But Iris just smiled and threw her arms around me. “It’s going to be fun. Just don’t sleep with any campers like I did last year, or the year before that, and you’ll be fine.”
“What’s this about sleeping with campers?” a voice bellowed from beyond the bushes.
Oh, how that voice haunted my nightmares.
Dagmar Wolfbane was an ox of a witch in her mid-fifties who gave off major Miss Trunchbull vibes. In the offseason, she was the PE teacher for Maple Hollow High School, and she looked naked without a silver whistle swinging around her neck. Her superpower was making everyone she looked at wish that the ground would open up and swallow them whole.
Dagmar appeared through the foliage, moving branches aside with ease as her barn owl familiar, Hera, swooped down from the trees and landed on her shoulder.
“It was part of our opening-day skit, Daggy,” Iris said in her puppy-dog voice. “You know, telling the campers about all the rules?”
Dagmar narrowed her eyes, her lips puckering in contemplation. “I appreciate your ingenuity, Iris,” she said, “but just stick to the script. Got it?”
“You got it.” Iris gave her an unironic thumbs-up.
As I dropped my chin into my hands, Hera clicked her beak in the air, tattling on me to her owner.
“Enough with the morose act, Sabine,” Dagmar snapped, clearly unaware of the irony as she barked at me to cheer up. “You set an example for these campers, so smile, for goodness’ sake.”
I smiled at Dagmar, showing too many teeth. She scowled before she stomped off toward the lake.
“Very smooth,” I muttered to Iris.
“Thank you,” she said with a bow.
We heard the rumble of the cars making their way up the gravel road, and she perked up like a meerkat.
“Campers are here!” she sang, doing a little shimmy. “Come on, let’s go greet them.”
I cursed up to the sky, pulling my baseball cap lower over my brow and trudging off after the effervescent Iris, my older sister whose shadow was so big, I could never quite seem to step out of it.
3
Gwen
City yielded to suburbs, which yielded to sprawling summertime greenery. We drove for what felt like hours through lush forest, and by the time we turned onto an overgrown gravel road with a wooden sign that read SCUW, I was certain that I was going to be murdered in the woods by a cult.
I sat up in the passenger seat of our beat-up Toyota. “What in theMidsommar. . .”
Mom let out a wistful sigh. “Ah, I remember this place like it was yesterday.”
“Funny how you never remembered to mention it to me until last week,” I groused. “Or the fact that you’re a witch and grew up in a quaint magical Halloween town that you never once bothered bringing me to visit.”
“I chose to leave.” Mom’s voice drifted off, her words saddening. “I needed to protect you and your father, and Ineeded to protect what I’d left behind too. Outsiders can’t know the town is actually magic.”
“And I—your daughter—am an outsider?”
“We weren’t a part of the town anymore,” Mom said simply, still dancing around the truth with the skill of a Juilliard-trained ballerina.
“Why did you choose to leave, then?”
It was a question that had been hopping around my mind since I’d turned Brayden into a toad. But I knew my mom. She shied away from talking about it because the answer was an open wound for her.
