3
Saturday morning, Max was ambling down stairs to make his morning cereal and watch cartoons on TV. He used to do it in his pajamas, but when he started doing it in his underwear, his mother got him the robe. Worse part, sometimes he didn't always wear it. Thankful for small miracles, Theresa thanked her lucky stars and started making breakfast for the rest of her family.
"Max…" She poured her morning coffee. "You always seem to be the first one up on Saturday." She turned to add her cream and sugar. "Why don't you sleep in just once?"
"What?" Max looked up from the TV. "And miss my cartoons?" He embraced his childhood as Justin embraced his neurosis. Over their heads, Justin was screaming his head off at something. Alex must have locked him out of the bathroom again. Rolling her eyes, Theresa held on to her coffee mug to keep from dropping it, let out a long tired breath and rushed to mediate the fight if but to meet Justin hurrying down to meet her.
"Mom, why did you let me fall asleep?" He was in a hurry to get somewhere. He stopped on the bottom step with his shoes and hurried pulled them on to tie them up. "I was supposed to head to meet Zeke after school last night so that we could work on our science project!"
"Well, how was I supposed to know that?" Theresa watched confused.
"How the heck did I black out an entire afternoon?" Justin jumped up looking for his schoolbooks. They were on the table behind the sofa. He pulled open his binder. "Look at this, Friday afternoon, we were supposed to write our project on alkalines and acids; Saturday, we were going to build our experiment. I'm ten hours behind schedule!"
"Well, Justin, I'm sorry…." Theresa watched and got tired just watching Justin rush through the kitchen grabbing a doughnut from the counter and a drinking straight from the orange juice to get his breakfast. "Maybe if you hadn't been so distracted with that story about hidden Civil War gold at the school last night you might have been able to budget your time better."
"What?" Justin reacted confused. "Mom, there's no gold hidden at the school." He finished his doughnut and downed another shot of orange juice from the container. "Look, can you cover for me in the shop this morning?"
"What? Well, I guess so…"
"Great!" He kissed his mom good-bye. "Tell Dad I'll be back this afternoon."
"Okay…" Theresa stood holding her coffee as Justin dashed out the door to the loft with his study materials and down the outside stairwell. Max looked up from the sofa. "That's weird…" She stood confused.
"I'm the one who said there was no gold hidden at the school." Max rose up during the commercial break of a cartoon about talking goldfish. "You're welcome…"
"No, not that…" Theresa thought back to last night. "Justin didn't fall asleep after school yesterday. He was up with us at dinner. In fact, he was the last one to bed last night."
"Mom, I try it best to not try to understand Justin." Max put his cereal bowl in the sink and took a canned soda from the refrigerator before taking down the bag of potato chips. "The point here is that he finally knew I was right."
"But he's the one who talked about it…" Theresa remained confused over this turn of events then decided to stop trying to figure it out for herself. "Max, have you seen your sister?"
"Harper or Alex?"
"Your sister, Har…." Theresa caught herself and wondered if being distracted was catching. "I mean, Alex!" Harper had been around them so long it seemed she really was her daughter.
"She was down here borrowing your credit card to go shopping." Max suddenly cringed and looked up embarrassingly. "Ooooo, I wasn't supposed to tell you that."
"Where'd she go?"
"I think she said something about Lafferty's one-day-only half-off sale." Max looked away checking his memories. "Or was it Rafferty's? Cafferty's?"
"I was supposed to go with her!" Theresa looked upset. She finished her coffee, rushed around the kitchen counter and stopped at the spiral staircase down into the sub shop. "Jerry, can you get by without me?" She called down. "Alex and Harper just took off with my credit card!"
"Where's Justin?" Jerry was busy getting the sandwich prep area ready to open the shop at eleven o'clock. He was heating the roast beef, ham and turkey for the sandwiches and mixing his signature tuna salad. The eating area still needed to be prepped, the ketchup and mustard containers had to be checked and the tables had to be wiped down to start the day.
"He has a project he has to do for school." Theresa called back.
"Send Max down!"
"No….." Max whined from the sofa.
"You heard your father." Theresa hurried up to her bedroom to change from her t-shirt and shorts to something better becoming a mother heading out to pretend she was her daughter's older sister. Lafferty's Women's Wear, meanwhile, had already opened and Alex and Harper were fifth in line behind a single mother and two friends from school with a trail of customers heading down to the corner at Haskell's Café and around to the electronics store. Mrs. Lafferty unlocked the entry way and girls from fifteen to twenty invaded the location with the presence of Vikings attacking a British village. Most of them hit their size areas, but Alex dashed straight toward the young girl's jackets with Harper trying to keep up with her. The store was bugger than her parent's sandwich shop. Ultra-modern in design, it had a ten-foot high ceiling with racks and bins of clothing creating pathways left and right. There were mirrors every five feet, an upstairs shoes area and fixtures that looked stolen from Buckingham Palace. Her fellow female classmates started grabbing up dresses to try on before dashing to changing areas, others meticulously poked through bins of jeans and blouses for specific brands. The location was on fire with dozens of conversations, questions and inquiries. Through this female jungle, Alex poked one after another through the girl's jackets.
"Crap and a half!" She turned to Harper upset. "They moved everything around since we were in here yesterday!"
"What are you looking for?" Harper leaned in close to Alex's ear under all these voices.
"Hello? What do you think I'm looking for?" Alex reacted mildly sarcastic. "Just that leather triple-zipped jacket with the adjustable waist band and deep pockets I showed you yesterday after school."
"Maybe someone already got it!" Harper theorized.
"No, it's still here somewhere…" Alex's voice trailed off. "You look over there for it, and I'll look over there…" She bolted around and past a mother with her infant son in a stroller. The little tyke looked around scared to death of all the furiously shopping female shoppers. Harper just looked at Alex with a deep frustrated sigh and turned around on her left heel. At the bottom of the staircase to the next level of the store, she looked around covertly, pretended to study the small statue at the bottom threshold then stepped into the empty alcove behind the potted plant. A light gesture to pull her hair back over one ear, she snapped her right fingers once and slapped her right leg three times as Alex's missing jacket jumped from a rack ten feet away, launched into the air and dropped into her hands behind the tall hydrangea. One customer saw the flying jacket out the corner of her eye and jumped back before passing it off as a figment of her imagination. Mrs. Lafferty's daughter whirled around from helping a customer to see the flying jacket coming down near the stairway, and Harper stepping out with it.
"Alex, is this it?" Harper tapped Alex on the shoulder.
"You found it!" Alex lit up. "Harper, where was it?"
"Oh, I just turned around…" The girl mused secretly. "And there it was!" She watched her best friend pulling it on then checking herself out in the mirror. "Uh, Alex…" Harper continued. "After we get done here, why don't we get some sushi? I've got a real craving for it."
"I thought you didn't like sushi." The young sorceress turned to check out her reflection again.
"Where would you get an idea like that?" Harper chuckled a bit. "I was thinking about heading to the Blue Sky."
"Harper," Alex reacted confused and annoyed. "That's all the way down town and across the street from our school."
"Really," Harper's tone changed to upset. "So, you can't let me pick where to have lunch after I helped you find your jacket?"
"Okay…." Alex groaned while rolling her eyes upward. "After we shop, we can go get sushi…" She turned round to look at the girl's jeans and met her mother standing there. White blouse, black skirt and Mexican wrap, Theresa Russo stood there annoyed. Alex's jaw dropped. Harper's hand annoyingly slapped her head, her eyes flared and her teeth gritted together at this roadblock to her plans.
"Oh, mom, there you are…." Alex now lit up smiling. "Look, I found your credit card."
Harper wandered back and forth stressing out.
"Oh, really, where did you find it? In my purse?" Theresa sounded angry, but her mood was quickly changing amongst all the happy and cheerful female customers. Luckily, her cab driver was a woman who also had a crazy daughter. "We're going to have to have a talk about this young lady!" She snatched her card back.
"Mom, please don't embarrass me." Alex pleaded.
"Would I do that?'" Theresa remembered what it was like to be a teenage girl. Unfortunately, she thought she still looked like one. "Excuse me," She waved down a clerk. "Do you have any nice blouses for a couple of high school girls?" She giggled effervescently with Alex groaning next to her. Harper was getting impatient as well. This was not what she had planned. She was going to indulge Alex's shopping spree and then spirit her off for sushi near the school. Sure there were other Chinese food places closer to Waverly Place, but this one was the one she wanted to check out – not so much for the food but for the location. Enduring two and a half hours of shopping with a middle-aged mother reliving her teenage years through her daughter, she tried on seventeen dresses, twenty-two pairs of shoes, nine hats and half an hour of looking over accessories before finally leaving and ditching Alex's mother in a cab to duck out the other passenger door and sending her back to Waverly Place with their packages. Now was the time for the young girls to save their day together. A quick ride on the bus and Alex was standing outside the concrete and brick walls of her school on a Saturday. There were a few lights on inside as the two girls stood at the corner looking up at it.
"Harper…" Alex was tired. The sun was close to setting, and the sky was lit up with shades of distant purple, red and orange. A slight breeze wafted her dark tresses. "What are we doing here on a Saturday?"
"Alex, you know that fortune Justin was talking about."
"What about it?"
"I think I know where it is." Her eyes lit up. "I know where there are some strange markings in one of the unused classrooms in the basement." She was grinning knowingly. "I was thinking… if there was something hidden behind it, it would sure be nice to have someone who knew magic who could remove the wall to get behind it."
"Is that why you wanted to drag me here?" Alex narrowed her eyes aggravatedly. "Let's just get your sushi fix and go home." She turned toward the Blue Sky, but Harper checked the traffic on the tree-lined street and quickly skirted over to the teacher's parking spots on this two-lane road. Behind her, Alex sighed a bit and decided to follow her.
"You're really going to go through with this, aren't you?" She looked at her a bit annoyed.
"Do you know how much Civil War gold and silver goes for these days?" Harper tried appealing to the greedy selfish side of Alex. "You would never have to work, and… you'd get it before Justin."
"Fine…." Alex bemoaned. "Let's get this stupid thing over with…" She sounded annoyed, but as she started thinking about it, she was starting to get interested. The entry way was unlocked, the lights were dimmed and the faraway sound of a floor waxer filled the cavernous corridors. Looking in the halls for teachers, they noticed Freddie at the end of the long hallway with the floor wax machine. His back was to them, his hips swaying side to side to the music of Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper from headphones that played the old songs of the Forties and Fifties in his ears. A dance step from his youth illuminated his job, but he didn't hear the two girls behind him slipping down staircases across from the back cafeteria. Under the back stairs to the second floor, the two girls acted like literary girl detectives descending into the part of the school regularly off limits to the students of Tribeca Prep. Alex had been here before. She'd been down here in the Ninth Grade to work off a detention, she'd been back here in the Tenth Grade for grievances to teachers and she'd been down here a year ago mouthing off on another occasion. In many ways, she knew the school better than Principal Laritate. She knew which stairwells had busted doors that headed down here, she knew about the adjacent halls that linked classrooms and she knew about the forgotten loft over the school auditorium where former drama teachers had saved old costumes and props. As much as she hated this school, she loved every nook and cranny of it. At the bottom, the hallway stretched a short way to a round chamber illuminated by one lone light. Beyond that, corridors stretched left right and forward filled with old classrooms used for storage. The ceiling was a network of vents, pipes, air ducts and wires. It was once meant for problem students to be separated from the regular students, but someone somewhere realized they wouldn't need as many teachers if they just mixed all the kids together.
"Which way?" Alex asked.
"Follow me…" Harper bolted ahead toward the chamber where all the tunnels separated and turned left. Shortly behind, Alex passed through the archway just as Harper vanished into the first empty room. A slight turn on her left foot, Alex was now coming up behind her. Harper hit the light switch and the lone single light bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered to life. The room was full of the old wooden desks from the Twenties piled up over each other across the back of the room. There had to be a hundred of them. There was a single teacher's desk without a chair, a dusty black board and not much of anything else beyond the dirty white walls covered in dust.
"Where are these markings?" Alex looked around.
"Oh,…" Harper reacted distracted. "Uh, you have to use your wand to get them to appear."
"Okay…" Alex pulled her wand from her boot. "I'll just… wait a second, how did you find them then?"
"What?" Harper found herself caught in a lie. She stood confronted by Alex for just a second then grabbed Alex's wand and darted from the room, grabbing the door and slamming it shut. Not sure what was happening, Alex stood surprised for just a second as the old metal door slammed shut against her in the room. Alex's wand in her teeth, Harper hurriedly put the latch back together and slipped the combination lock back into it. Alex's hands started pounding from the other side.
"Harper?" Alex pounded the door. "What's going on? Why did you lie to me?" Her palms struck the door harder. "This isn't funny! Let me out of here!" She started kicking and pounding the door.
A brief moment to catch her breath, Harper stood and listened to Alex in the room then cracked her stiff neck muscles sharp toward her left shoulder. A small grin alighted to her steps as she placed Alex's wand lightly on the small ledge on the wall outside the room. Alex was pounding harder and harder. As she pounded, she stopped briefly to listen to the hard soles of Harper's shoes tapping away on the cold wet concrete floor of the basement. She was leaving her!
"Harper!" She screamed louder than before.
Hurrying back to the main floor, Harper dashed up the steps to the main floor. While Alex's yelling and pounding reverberated in the basement, their echoes barely sounded in the stairwell under the back staircase in the school. At the top, they sounded like just a faraway thumping noise, and when she closed the door, she couldn't hear them at all. The school was empty; it was the weekend. Not even the teachers liked having to be here on the weekend. Coming around to the base of the stairs, Harper stood a moment and filled her lungs with air, releasing her breath as one long releasing gasp, but when she did so, she felt light-headed and started swooning. Hey eyes rolled sideways as if she was drugged, and then she leaned a bit too far to the left and dropped to the floor, her arms reaching out to stop her. On the floor, she caught her breath again and pulled her long brown locks of hair out of her face. Blinking her eyes, she looked around left then right.
"What the…" Where was she? "How did…" She lifted herself back up to her feet. "How'd I get here?"
"Harper!" A voice called to her. "Hey, what are you doing here?"
"Zeke?" Harper caught her breath and looked around confused. "What's going on? How'd I get here? The last thing I recall was getting ready to go shopping with Alex and then… I felt this really cold draft coming over me…. I mean, the Russo's basement is a little cold, but it's never…"
"Harper, I just found you standing here a minute ago." Zeke grinned at her. "Justin and I were up in the lab working on our project for science class, and…" Harper grabbed his arm and read his watch.
"5:45!" She was stunned into disbelief. "It's 5:45? What happened to me? Oh my God, Alex is going to be so mad at me!" She started to rush away. "Zeke, I blacked out over ten hours!"
"Amnesia?" Zeke theorized. "Happens to me all the time. You get used to it after a while."
"I better not have had another spell over me!" Harper hurried to get back to the Sub Shop without realizing she had left the memories behind of what she had done to her best friend. Heading in the wrong direction, she left Alex unheard and forgotten in the nearly closed off basement of her high school. Losing her voice and her strength, Alex leaned against the dusty steel door with her face resting against it. Pounding at it with a fraction of her strength, she tried to muster up her voice once more.
"Harper…" Her hand pounded the door. "This isn't funny anymore." She sighed. "Let me out…" She felt a freezing draft coming up from under the door. Looking down, she stepped back tiredly as her legs turned to ice, and her breath turned to mist in the air in front of her. Did the school's air conditioner come on? It didn't seem like a normal breeze. It seemed to be attracted to her. She felt the chilling draft coming up her back, any icy touch wrapping around her waist and a strong presence behind her holding her close. When she opened her lips to make a noise, she felt whatever it was rushing into her with the energies of a freight train. She didn't want it in, but she couldn't stop it. Without meaning to, she took a deep breath and tilted her head backward. She had a feeling of might that wasn't hers, she had memories invading her senses that weren't hers and an overwhelming calming sensation that was filling her entire soul. As she lowered her head, she took on another bearing. Her eyes blinked twice then three times, her chest took another deep breath and her fingers straightened rebelliously, furled into fists once and relaxed.
Holding her hands up, Alex looked them over as if she was looking at them for the first time. They were smaller and daintier than Harper's. Her complexion was lighter, and as she touched her face, she embraced and touched every curve and shape of her face before running her fingers through her long dark locks of hair. A light gasp and she tossed her long tresses out and shaped them with her hands. Her head made short even movements as she stepped backward once and paced in a circle between the teacher's desk and the tall pile of forgotten wood desks stacked over each other. She suddenly seemed to remember the locked doorway and charged to confront it, pulling her right arm back and striking it one last time.
A slight warping at the hinges and the outside latch ripped out of the door to flail backward against the door frame as the heavy door slammed open with a loud crash, the sound reverberating through the basement. Looking her escape path over matter-of-factly, Alex's new consciousness cracked her neck muscles to one side and strided outward past a small hand size imprint imbedded in the wrecked door behind her. Her left hand picking her wand off the small edge on the wall, she stepped lightly toward the chambered intersection of basement corridors, leaving the way to the staircase behind to head to the far exterior entrance at the end of the school block. Hidden by trees and dumpsters by the outside, no one knew it was there, or if they ever knew about it, they had forgotten and learned to ignore it by now. Her shoes clapping against the long dark corridor along the way, Alex kept looking toward the late rays of dusk lighting up the window in the door. By the scant light, she saw her reflection in the light bouncing off a window into another classroom. Pausing, she examined how she looked once more, turning her head to the left and then to the right.
"I should have found this girl a long time ago…."