There was yelling and screaming coming from the apartment loft above the Waverly Place Sub Shop. The neighbors were used to the in-fighting of the siblings who lived up there but they were often mystified by the other activities in the area such as cars that levitated, people who vanished and disappeared and the sightings of strange things whisking over the street. Paranormal investigators had checked out the street and found nothing, but they didn't pay much attention to the sandwich shop near them. The sandwiches were good, the kids there creative in their sibling rivalry and the parents seemingly ordinary people, but no one ever really got a good impression of what they the family was really like. Ordinarily a pillar of the community, Jerry Russo dragged his daughter up to her bedroom on the third floor to ground her to her room.
"Little lady, you just ruined family movie night!" He escorted his middle daughter to her room. "I can't believe you zapped your brothers into The Princess Bride. I've never seen Cary Elwes and Robin Wright so confused!"
"But I had plans for tonight." Alex turned round with attitude, shifted her weight to one leg and folded her arms before her chest with contempt. "I don't even want to be here."
"Friday night has always been family movie night!"
"So why are you always surprised that I try to get out of here?!" Alex stated the obvious. Her father just groaned and strained to hold back his hostility toward her indifference.
"You're grounded!" He finally roared. "Now, you can't watch the rest of the movie!!"
"I've seen it a million times!"
"Then you can act it out in your room!" Jerry turned to leave her. "Honestly, Alex! Sometimes you make me wish I only had two boys!"
"And sometimes you make me wish you and mom had never…. You thought I was going to say that again, didn't you?" She caught herself. The last time she had said that she had accidentally split up her parents on vacation with a minor hiccup in their memories. Jerry looked at her and realized she really did not like being related to him.
"You're still grounded." Jerry repeated himself. "And don't think about going out the window, I wielded it shut and had Justin use a spell to move the drain pipe." He closed the door and started heading away. Left alone to her own dishonesty and lack of respect for her parents, she pulled her wand out of her boot.
"Who needs a spell when you have magic." She tried to recall the teleportation spell then heard her father rushing back. He had barely made it down the stairs when he suddenly recalled his daughter's wizard lessons and charged back, kicking open her daughter's door and fought with her to confiscate her wand. She extended her arm away from him a second more, but he finally grabbed it and jerked it away from her. The two of them briefly scuffling and struggling, Alex grunted upset and looked back to her father.
"How stupid do you think I am?" He aimed it at her briefly, shook his head disapprovingly and marched back out very disappointed in her. He pulled the door shut behind him as Alex recomposed herself.
"Yeah, yeah, well…" She stood a second. "Well, you're a really lousy father if you can't trust your own daughter!!"
"I don't trust you at all!" Jerry called back.
Alex just hissed, swung round and kicked her bureau disgustedly, turning round and limping a moment on her sprained foot. She hated being grounded and she especially hated not being able to meet Harper at the mall as they had promised each other. She didn't even have her cell phone to call and tell her she was grounded; she had left it downstairs. Wandering around the room, her eyes briefly caught sign of a pencil in the cushion of the chair near her bedroom door. According to Professor Danvers, a sorcerer posing as a regular teacher at Tribeca Prep, a wand was merely a directional tool and had no actual power. If that was true then she should be able to substitute her wand for something like it. She took the pencil in her fingers, eraser end up first, and attempted an incantation.
"I don't want to be stuck here, take me to Harper to see her!" She summoned her mystical powers and a burst of light exploded from her hand. She dropped the pencil; the lead in it had been turned to charcoal. Apparently the graphite in it was not a good conductor of magic. Alex groaned again, rolled her eyes and hissed under her breath. She was losing it. Desperate to keep her plans, she climbed upon top of her furniture and struggled with the window. It only opened a little bit for air and no more. She'd need to be twelve inches tall to get through it. Hissing through her teeth, her face pulled into an annoyed sneer of disgust and hostility, she continued fighting to open it. Her father had wielded a plate in it to keep it from opening further than it had to be. Alex tried forcing it wider, grabbed at the weld to rip it off and began screaming.
Downstairs, Jerry sat between his wife and son Justin with his son Max eating popcorn on the floor and watching the movie Rat Race with Breckin Meyer, Seth Green and Whoopi Goldberg. The four of them lifted their heads up to look at the sound of Alex screaming her head off and trashing her room. Above the ceiling, they heard a crash, a pounding noise, the crunch of Alex bouncing and jumping on the bed and the sounds of one shoe after another hitting the wall.
"Wow," Jerry checked his watch. "Three minutes, it took longer for her to lose it this time."
"At least we know she's up there." Theresa passed some popcorn to her lips.
"Hey, dad…" Max was getting into the movie. "Can I go into this movie? I want to get the money before all of them can."
"Max…" Justin leaned over to his brother by his side. "The money isn't real."
"What's your point?" Max looked to him.
A chunk of the ceiling dropped between them and the TV. It sounded as if above them Alex had dropped her chest of drawers.