Chapter Text
All I wanted to do was go to summer camp. A regular summer camp, with regular kids. Mom was almost willing to let me go. But then the thing with Steve Hartman happened, and Mom decided she didn’t trust me that far from home for that long.
My mom is a witch. I know when most kids say that they really mean another word that ends with itch, but I mean that she can do magic. She’s studied it for years, and our house in the city has a whole library for her books, plus a herb garden out back. Normally to learn magic you need permission from a committee of other magicians, and you can’t tell anyone about it. I guess there’s a loophole for your own kids, since Mom taught me a few basic spells. None of the good stuff, but I know how to tie knots to keep me safe, and what patterns to draw in salt around the house to ward off malevolent spirits.
Steve Hartman was the class bully. He never picked on me (because of the knots) but I finally got tired of seeing him pick on my friends, especially Cyrus. It seemed pretty obvious to me that if you tie a good-fortune knot inverted it becomes a bad-fortune knot. I’m not sure how Mom even found out that I even did it – but Steve ended up getting hit by a car and breaking a whole bunch of bones, and I ended up losing sleep-away camp.
Mom was doing research on some boring grownup magic I didn’t really understand, except that to research it she needed to go somewhere you could really see the stars. Turns out that meant pretty much the middle of nowhere.
“You’ll have plenty of time outdoors, Simon,” she pointed as we drove down the bumpy road that led to the rented house. “That’s almost like summer camp.” But it wasn’t.
“It smells weird,” I complained as we got out of the car. The house looked like it was going to be picked up by a storm and land on top of a wicked witch. “Do they get tornadoes here?”
“That’s fresh air,” Mom said wryly.
I didn’t like it. And the house itself smelled the opposite of fresh when we opened the door, and I wondered how long the furniture had been just sitting out in the humidity. Mom told me to take my things to my room. I didn’t know which one was mine, and she said I could pick.
There were three to choose from, all on the second floor, with windows facing a too-big back yard that looked like a dead farm, with a line of trees at the edge. I picked the room closest to the stairs, and when I came back down Mom was already walking around the outside of the house, sprinkling salt.
“I can do that,” I offered quickly.
Mom gave me a look. “You can help by bringing some more bags in,” she said. I was grounded from magic for the summer, or at least until I had finished writing the long essay on the ethics of magic she had assigned me after the thing with Steve. There was power in being able to hurt people, Mom had told me — and it was power I shouldn’t ever get comfortable with.
The first night in the house was too quiet, except for the bugs and the creaking wood, which were too loud. I was used to the kinds of spirits you got in the city, but the country probably has completely different kinds, and I worried whether Mom’s wards could hold them off.
The second day in the house, I met Penelope.