7
The photo shoot lasted five hours with Chad and Mikayla posing with wands in the booths, at the tables and on the stairs to the loft. Ashley Tisdale finally came down from Toronto with her brunette locks where she was filming the last post-production shots of a superhero movie called "Sky Girl," and the three teen stars got together shooting promotional pictures in groups of two, three and solo. In those five hours, Jerry and Theresa sold more sandwiches to the photography crew than they usually did in the week. Justin swooned over both Mikayla and Ashley, Alex hid in the lair screaming her head off and Max asked Tisdale whether or not she thought she could beat Kaley Cuoco up in a fight. For dinner, Jerry ordered the kids pizza and then worked with Theresa to close the shop up almost an hour after their normal closing hours. After doing their chores, Alex and Justin retreated to the lair to start their plotting. With them, they took along the film script that Mikayla had left behind. She and Chad had run a few lines with it to test their chemistry as brother and sister for the movie. Upon seeing them playing the roles of Jason and Ashley Russell, Jerry and Theresa felt a sense of déjà vu and looked back to Alex and Justin. That was when the two teenage wizards realized they had to stop this movie from being made!
"Okay, Justin…" Alex stood over her brother sitting in the chair. "What spell can we inflict on Mikayla and Chad that won't come back on us three times stronger?"
"It would have to be a spell…" Justin sat brooding with his fingers interlaced then crossed his lips with his forefinger while deep in thought. "…That would not come off as malicious." His mind poured back over old wizard lessons, incantations he had read about in old grimoires and hexes he had only heard about at Wiz-Tech and his brief internship to Hogwarts.
"And that spell is…" Alex asked him.
"I have no idea."
Alex groaned defeatedly.
"You got to be kidding me!" She whirled around anxiously desperate to gain an upper hand. "You're supposed to be so smart yet you can't think of one spell we can use against two actors?"
"It's not that easy, Alex…" Justin put his hands down and hopped up on to his feet. "Any spell we cast on Chad and Mikayla to knock them out of the movie is going to bounce back on us three times stronger." He sighed. "Maybe we ought to just give in and accept seeing ourselves played by…" He cringed with embarrassing pain. "Chad Dylan Cooper and Mikayla…."
"No, I'm not giving up…." Alex turned for the family spell book as Justin sighed and started out of the lair. "I'll get them out of playing us if I have to stick them into the movie itself!" She dropped Mikayla's script into the chair.
Justin came rushing back into the lair.
"That's it!" He cried out excitedly. "The Literary Terrarium spell!" He chuckled a bit. "It's non-hostile, it's non-threatening, and it's perfect!" Justin turned the spell book around to face him. "Plus, it's a horror movie; getting to experience it for real will mess them up so bad that they won't want to star in it!"
"Yes!" Alex jumped up and down cheering her brother acting more like her. "If they want to play wizards so badly, let's send them to meet some wizards!"
Justin looked up at her.
"Other than us…" Alex added to her statement. Justin resorted to the same long-distance device that Alex had been using to smite Mikayla with curses. He ripped pictures of Chad and Mikayla from one of Alex's teenage gossip magazines and took the semi-burnt long distance candle from where his father kept it. Alex was grinning ear to ear. She opened Mikayla's script to the party scene in the movie, struck a match and lit it as Justin prepared the ritual.
"Chad Dylan Cooper and Mikayla, Literary Terrarium!" He held their images to the flame as Max entered the room with one of the pizza boxes.
"Hey, guys…" He watched them burning faces from a magazine. "Do you want your pizza crusts?" The small burning magazine clippings exploded into much more smoke than was expected. Alex was flung backward from the impact and landed on her back. Justin was knocked around trying to keep from falling over. He staggered around a bit and righted himself bumping into someone as distant music from beyond his ears started getting louder. It was the loud pop concussions of "The Monster Mash" by Sixties great pop star Bobby Pickett, and the person he had bumped into was a shapely blonde beauty in a cat woman costume.
"Excuse me, sweetie, but this dance floor is big enough for all of us." She grinned and kissed Justin with her ruby red lipstick and turned to continue dancing with a guy in a Spiderman costume. Waving off the smoke, Justin looked around turning on his heel. He was in the brightly lit Colorado Lounge from the Hotel Overlook, the location from "The Shining." This was one of the movies that William Russo had based the script on when he wrote it. It was a huge room of Western motif under two balconies, a wall of Western relics and a fireplace to the front and windows to the back stretching up to a high ceiling with a period chandelier alighted with modern electricity. The tall glass windows were dark to the back; the distant snowy Colorado Mountains looming with tall shadows over the structure. Covered in streamers and Halloween decorations from cardboard skeletons to plastic bats, the lounge area was full of somewhere between seventy-five to a hundred kids or more. Their costumes ranged from cheap store-bought that barely fit to professionally made creations. A white-faced Princess Leia danced with a tall Wookiee hybrid, fake looking vampires wandered through with scantly clad girls in lingerie and capes and a guy in a Frankenstein Monster sat between Freddie Kruger and a fake zombie on the sofa getting drunk.
"You've got to be kidding me!" Justin whirled around in shocked surprise. "You've got to be kidding me!" He repeated himself. "It bounced back?"
"Justin!" Alex jumped around a guy in a storm trooper costume and a girl dressed as a member of the Borg. "What happened? I thought there was no way this spell could bounce back and hit us!"
"Apparently Miranda's enchantment on Chad and Michayla involves all spells cast on them!" He tried yelling over the music. "Not just ones of mischievous intent."
"What?" She couldn't hear him over the loud music.
"I said…" Justin started to explain then chose not to try. He stood with his hand to his head frustratingly then whirled around the crowd of high school kids choking the room. Sighing within his small oasis of space between gyrating and convulsing fictional teenagers trying to dance, he watched as Alex tried releasing herself out of the script. It wasn't working.
"It's not going to work…" He tapped Alex by the shoulder as the song winded down toward getting replaced by Ray Parker Jr. singing the "Ghost Busters" theme. "The spell bounced back three times stronger than how we cast it. We're stuck here until Max on the outside lets us out."
"I'm stuck in this movie with god awful Eighties music?" Alex put her hands over her ears as the dancing around changed to jumping and thrashing with a lot of the partygoers shouting "Ghost Busters" along with the song. "I've got to get out of here!" She turned and pushed through a pirate, a fake werewolf and a guy dressed as a bearded wizard. At the piano at the base of the stairway, she found her brother again. This guy looked exactly like Justin! He was dressed as Dracula in a black cape with red lining. He scanned Alex to check her out as the real Justin pushed through and met his clone.
"Hi, I'm Jason Russell…" Jason's movie counterpart was moving to the beat of the music as he set aside his beer can and reached to shake Justin's hand. "Thanks for coming to my party!" He raised his voice over the sound of music, laughter and camaraderie. "Food and drinks are over there…" He pointed to the tables where Jack Nicholson had spent his typing in "The Shining." "Restrooms are over there…" He pointed to the opposite corner. "The rooms upstairs are off limits." He grinned as the cordial host enjoying his bacchanalia of unfettered freedom-wanting teenagers.
"He's just like you!" Alex looked to Justin shocked to realize Jason looked just like him. How was that possible?
"This is impossible!" Justin looked to Jason then back to Alex amidst the crowded revelries. "How could William know exactly what I look like? I know he based his stories on our lives…" He looked to Jason as the traffic officer of this disordered madness. In some way, Jason was him; and he was Jason. They were two parts of one character, the real and the fictional.
"Hey, Jason," Mack Lambert was Jason's African-American friend, a character based on someone from William's past. "Your sister just showed up!"
"What?" Jason and Justin looked over in unison. Coming from the hall to the front of the hotel was Alex and Harper, or as they were known here, Ashley Russell and Hannah Dinkle. It was almost as if he had traveled back in time to visit a lost memory. They also looked exactly like their real world counterparts.
"No!" Jason refused to allow it. "I told her! Only seniors! No juniors!" He pushed through his classmates to confront her and get rid of her. Justin watched with stunned anxiety. This was wrong… very wrong. This wasn't just some story written by a writer who had visions of his life; this was a story by a writer who knew his life!
"But how could he know…" He was getting confused. The loud music made it hard to think. "Alex… Alex?"
Alex was a few feet away dancing with a cute guy dressed as the Six Million Dollar Man. Rolling his eyes a bit annoyed, he walked over, tugged her by the arm and dragged her over under the balcony where they could talk.
"Alex," Justin faced her down. "William claimed that he knew us by only very vague dreams he had about us." He explained himself. "Those dreams could not have been that vague if he's got perfect images of what we look like!" He paused and realized something worse. "Oh god, do you realize if the spell had worked, Chad and Mikayla would have still figured out we're wizards." He looked at his sister. "Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that it backfired on us. We came really close to actually busting ourselves as wizards!"
"Oh my god…" Alex glanced across the lodge, and her jaw dropped to see her fictional counterpart with a fictional Harper; the two of them bickering with Jason while trying to get into the party. "Justin, get us out of here. I want to go back to the shop!"
"What part of three times three do you not understand?" Justin looked back to his fictional counterparts in the script. "When Miranda's spell on Mikayla bounced it back, it came back at us at three hundred percent! That's one hundred and fifty percent for each of us!"
"Math work… headache…." Alex stressed out and paced in a circle. "But you changed me back after I got shrunk."
"But I didn't need a counter-spell for that." Justin revealed. "All I had to do was use a cancellation spell. For Literary Terrarium, the only counter spell is the counter spell which we can't use because Miranda's protection spell altered the intensity of the original spell. Don't you do ANY magic homework?"
"Don't push me, Justin!" They clashed a bit. Alex fretted and tried to think. "How long are we going to be stuck here?"
"Until Max gets us out…"
"Hey, guys…." Max came wandering through the crowd with a plate of food. "Isn't this party great! They've got all my favorites!" Justin and Alex looked at each other in shock.
"What are you doing here?" Alex turned to him eating a hot dog. "You're supposed to be outside getting us out!"
"I am?" Max finished his hot dog and set his plate of junk food and finger delicacies aside on a table. "Okay, Literary Terrarium…" He took out his wand and waved it before him. "I tried. Anyone want more shrimp?"
Alex was freaking out. She was trapped in a story where almost everyone died in the end. Justin was fighting the compulsion to smack his younger brother around. Why were they always getting into these predicaments? It was almost as if their lives were a really bad TV series on the Disney Channel.
"Okay…" Justin composed himself. "With Max, the spell is at its full hundred power for each of us instead of the regular thirds…"
"Good… Justin's thinking…." Alex followed his lead. "He can get us out."
"Except…" Justin turned to her. "There's no one on the outside with the magic powers to let us out!" He turned and ran from the hotel screaming for his father. It might have been night, but he felt as if he had a better chance as illogical as it was by yelling at the sky than the ceiling. Alex raced out after him to help him scream. Max returned to the snack table, dumped the shrimp and lobster puffs into his pockets, and grabbed two more hot dogs, a hand full of large potato chips and a bottle of Pepsi before joining them.
