4
Sabrina had missed just over thirty minutes of her first period history class. When she entered cleaned and prepped once more, Mrs. Witherspoon looked at her and then the clock. Valerie looked up from next to Sabrina's empty seat in the third row. Conjuring a small excuse note from the office that she been watching William until his mother came to pick him up, she took her work sheet and her lesson plan and headed to her seat for the rest of silent studying for the rest of class.
"How's William?" Valerie whispered to her.
"He's going to be perfect." Sabrina whispered back, pulled her pencil from her purse and acted like a student until the bell rang for second period. On her way to English class with Miss Quick, she ran into Harvey concerned about the welfare of his best friend. She just gave the same excuse again.
"How's William?" Harvey was concerned.
"He went home sick." Sabrina answered. "I think his mother got him. She was so grateful I was there to watch over him." She had forgot the most important rule about lying. Don't add details.
"His mother?" Harvey reacted confused as he, Sabrina and Valerie headed to English. "Wow, she's never come to pick up him before; she usually just sends his aunt." He continued to class. "She didn't even show up when he broke his ankle playing basketball."
"Oh…." Sabrina tried to fix her mistake. "Oh, uh, yeah, now that you mention it. I do think it was his aunt. Yep, his aunt came and got him."
"So, she's back from Egypt?" Valerie asked.
"What?" Sabrina was hit by more reality.
"She's an assistant historian for the Westbridge Museum…" Harvey revealed. "She was going to bring William some Egyptian souvenirs… I can't wait to see what he got."
"You can't…." Sabrina added to her lie. "He's like… contagious."
"What's he got?" Harvey and Valerie looked worried. "Wait, what if you got it? Should we be talking to you?"
"I'm okay…" Sabrina tried to find an escape route to her lie. "I was inoculated for what he has…"
"What did he have?"
"What's with all these questions?" Sabrina got tired of covering. "Come on…. Life moves on. You can ask him tomorrow!" She scurried on to her seat in the seating chart in the front row before Harvey and across the aisle of tables and chairs from Libby and Miranda in the cheerleading outfits. Today, Miss Quick was going on about the novel of "Silas Marner," a great piece of Twentieth Century literature by author George Eliot on the high school required reading list. Up until lunch, Sabrina meanwhile fretted and worried about what had happened to William. What went wrong with the dream spell? Was she inside his thoughts too long? Was it a brief side effect of being linked too long? Her mind went through the stages of fear and worry and by the afternoon, she had become analytical. Endlessly debating and analyzing the night before, she skipped hanging out with Harvey and Valerie at the Italian restaurant down from the school known as the Slicery and rushed home expecting to see William back to normal and asleep on her living room sofa. When she entered the room and found the room empty, she started feeling better knowing he was back to normal and sent home.
"Sabrina, you're home…" Her Aunt Zelda came from the dining room adjacent to the living room. "Oh, good, I thought I'd wait till you got home so you could explain to William everything was a dream."
"You changed him back?"
"No, not yet…"
"He's upstairs?" Sabrina reacted confused.
"No, he's right here on the…." She gestured to the empty sofa. "Where is he?!" Her eyes widened in shock. "I had Salem watching him!"
"Did someone call me?" Salem entered and jumped up on the back of the sofa. "Sabrina, could you zap me up some more shrimp?"
"Salem!" Sabrina clutched his neck. "Where's William? Please tell me he doesn't still look like me!"
"Please don't confuse me!" Salem looked up blinking his eyes. "Which question do you want me to answer first?"
Sabrina screamed as if she was living her worse nightmare.
"Salem…" Zelda confronted Salem. "Do you realize just how much damage a teenage boy morphed into Sabrina with powers of witchcraft could whip up?!"
Sabrina screamed again and raced out of the house to look for him.
"No, but I think Sabrina does!" Salem answered.
A couple blocks away, a disoriented blonde figure briefly sat in a bench at Westbridge Community Park and Gardens under the statue of Alfred S. Hart, the first town mayor. Her mind was still trapped in a dream as she sleepwalked through the neighborhood nearly getting hit by cars swerving in the crosswalks and almost knocking down people on the sidewalks. Hesitantly looking into the reflection of her face in the fountain under the statue, she saw Sabrina's face staring back to him and tried to think. Her mind was reeling. She felt as if he'd been sleeping for years when she wandered from the Spellman House on Collins Road and wandered into the park at the end of the street. Faces and locations didn't look real. When she looked around, everyone had bald smooth heads without any features, and when she walked down to the dress shop, Sabrina's face replaced her reflection and everyone one else around him. Her clothes barely fit as she tried to find his way home, but if she couldn't recall her face, how could she recall the street she lived on? Wandering through another crosswalk, another driver hit his brakes and turned away to avoid hitting her, screaming at her and calling her a dumb blonde. That wasn't right on too many levels. Standing on the corner, the spirit of William Samms looked around the dizzying images around him. There were too many sounds all at once. Cars driving by, a jackhammer ripping up a part of street, a distant ambulance siren, a baby crying… it was all merging together into one voice calling his male spirit by another name. Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina… Unable to take it, he ran down Adams Street into the restaurant district down from the school. Something about this area seemed familiar. A school bus of elementary school students blocked his view and then revealed the Slicery, a one-story quaint Italian pizza place painted in brown and orange colors with plate-glass windows and a crowded parking lot. The parking lot was lined with bushes with a large block out front that read, "The Slicery" in brown neon colors.
Standing outside of the location, he stopped as a few college students came out and noticed him in his female form in loose clothes hanging off his female form and started laughing. Feelings pangs of modesty and even peer pressure, the mind in this body watched them travel off chuckling a bit longer through the parking lot and looked down on her clothes. Even in the tiny reflection in the windows of the Slicery's front entrance, she looked horrible, but she now had the power to fix it. An unconscious wave of her hands and snapping of her fingers and her jeans shrank into a short skirt, the t-shirt decreased into form fitting top and the faded brown pilot's jacket turned into a brand new black motorcycle jacket. A deep gasp escaped from her lungs. Did she really do that?
Turning on her heel, she pushed on through into the eatery and quickly chose the closest table to the door. Sitting and trembling in the booth, she grabbed the menu to try hiding behind it, but it didn't work. Twenty-year old Selena Lovato spotted her while cleaning a table in her duties as a waitress and dropped off the dirty dishes in the window to the kitchen. Picking up her pad, she crossed a room of customers to assist her new customer.
"Hi, Sabrina…" She wiped her table off. "How you doing?"
"What?" William looked up shaking.
"Are you cold?" Selena had served Sabrina, Harvey and Valerie several times, but she had never seen her like this. "You look like you've had a bad day."
"What?" William's head twitched uncontrollable as she struggled to think. She stared at the print on the menu. "Could I get… a large pizza… with everything… and a Pepsi?"
"Sure thing, sweetie…" Selena scribbled down her order and turned back for the kitchen. "Justin, turn up the stinking heat! Sabrina's freezing in the front booth!" She also had another customer waiting for a take-out order. Left behind, William sat alone with barely a thought registering in his head as his identity crisis got worse. The waitress had called him "Sabrina." Was that who he was now? Was she really a witch? What about all these new powers he suddenly had? His head twitched uncontrollably again as his mind became more and more confused. As he sat alone trying to explore his thoughts, Harvey opened the door to the Slicery to let Valerie in ahead of him.
"I hope William's okay." Harvey talked to her. "He's practically a brother to… Sabrina? How'd you get here so fast? I thought you told us you had to get home."
"When did you change your clothes?" Valerie noticed her new outfit.
"What?" William responded inaudibly in his tiny Sabrina voice. "Do you know me?"
"Of course, we know you…" Valerie slid into the booth next to her best friend ahead of Harvey. "Sabrina, are you okay? You're shaking!"
"Maybe she caught what William had…"
"Whoa!" Valerie dived under the table and came up on the other side of Harvey. "Look, no disrespect… but I can't afford to get sick…" She noticed another blonde figure cross outside the Slicery's front plate glass windows and then watched as Sabrina entered the restaurant again.
"Sabrina?!" Harvey and Valerie gasped in shock and amazement. They looked from their best friend to the clone and back again. Noticing William in her body, the blonde sorceress immediately turned out trying to hide but then resisted her first impulse and re-entered the Slicery inaudibly swearing under breath and planning another deception.
"Hi guys…" She resorted to her all-purpose excuse for the sudden appearances of mystical persons. "Oh my god, you found my cousin… uh… Samantha."
"Your cousin?"
"Wow!" Harvey was stunned. Except for looking confused and out of it, Samantha looked exactly like Sabrina from her hair, the shape of her face, the slight mole on her neck and her body and posture over all. William slowly looked up to her and back to Harvey. What was going on here?
"Sabrina, you two look so much alike. I can barely tell you apart." Harvey responded. "I would have sworn she was your twin-sister."
"Twin-sister?" William repeated confused.
"Yeah, but she's my cousin, and she just got here from, um, uh, England…." Sabrina improvised another incredible cover-up then turned to fake cousin. "And Aunt Hilda is going to be so upset to learn you filled up with pizza before dinner. I've got to you home before we both get into trouble!"
"Sabrina…" Valerie reacted. "Maybe you can give her a few minutes. I think she's sick."
"No, that's just jet lag from the flight." Sabrina chuckled skeptically and placed her arm around William and braced her with her left hand to pull him gently from the booth. "She always tries to get pizza when she comes here, but this time, Samantha…" She talked slowly to William in his confused state. "Aunt Hilda has a nice dinner for us. You can come and get pizza tomorrow."
"Okay…"
"You heard that?!" She had got a response from him. "See you guys in school tomorrow…." She waved to Harvey and Sabrina and pushed her fake cousin to the door, briefly losing him as he became distracted by the lights in the jukebox, but she turned around and grabbed him again and forcibly pushed him scuffing his feet before her out the door. Leaving her friends to enjoy the pizza, Sabrina dragged William by the arm as if he was her difficult little brother, but in this circumstance, he might as well be her little sister. Looking around for some privacy, she let go of him briefly to check and see if anyone was in a van she noticed in the parking and then pulled William out of sight behind it to zap them back to her house. Looking behind her, she found him wandering off as if he was a giant toddler distracted by more colored lights.
"William…" Sabrina tugged and pulled him out into the chilly October air. The days were getting shorter, and the sky was already looking like dusk. "Why didn't you change back? You need to take more of Aunt Zelda's potion." She stopped at the edge of the parking lot to get them back to her house. "William, please!" He wasn't keeping up with her nor was he resisting. He was just distractedly staring out into nothing. Sabrina looked into her face on him and tried finding life inside his head. "William… William, are you listening to me?" She looked him over and realized he was too out of it. His arm had gone limp. Passing her hand before his eyes got no response. William's mind was barely there if it was there at all.
"Samantha?" Sabrina tried another name.
"Sabrina…" William looked at her slowly and spoke like a scared little girl. "I liked your friends. Are you sure we couldn't stay and have some pizza with them?" She looked away and stared back away into the distance. Sabrina gasped with scared shock.
"You're not in there anymore." She gasped with her voice starting to quake. "You've completely lost it…." Her voice trailed off in shock to realize for the first time this was going to be a difficult fix. Somewhere between her house and the Slicery, William Nathaniel Samms had ceased to exist...