8
A cool breeze was wafting over Westbridge from the east, and a few locals made jokes about Old Man Winter sending his little brother Jack Frost ahead to prepare the area for a cold winter. Coach Hackett pulled a surprise football practice to rally and get his boys ready for the cold. Even as school employees blew leaves off the field, Harvey was running, exercising and getting tackled on the cold damp field as the last few students trickled from the school and followed the length of the field. Braving the cold autumn weather and the muddy path along the teacher's parking lot, Sabrina led the way in her dark brown suede jacket as Samantha followed behind her in a heavy lavender wool wrap.
"So, let me get this straight…" Sabrina had confessed being jealous of Samantha's singing ability and being able to do a lot more with their identical voice than she ever did. "All you did was put yourself into a trance and channel a song from the future that no one knew and hasn't heard yet." She paused. "Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because favorite sister…" Samantha followed Sabrina across Baldwin Drive on to Carrington Drive ending at the school. "You may be smarter than me, but I am so much more creative."
"I'm creative!"
"I'm sure you are." Samantha answered as a bus drove past them with grammar school kids.
"But what are you going to do in twenty years when that song becomes famous and someone recalls you singing it years before it was written." Sabrina followed the sidewalk along rows of houses on elevated yards along a tree-lined street ruled by Dutch Colonial homes and fenced in properties.
"What mortal is going to recall a song I sang once in high school?" Samantha sounded logical. "I've got a question for you. Why are we taking the long way home up Carrington Drive up to Broadhurst where we'll have to take Elm over to our street where we'll just have to walk the same length back to our house?"
"Oh, I kind of thought we could use the exercise…" Sabrina looked the eight houses up to William's house. It looked different in the real world than it had from the dream dimension. In spirit form, it looked more cartoony and more surreal and without the front porch and old defunct TV aerial still on the side of the house. In the real world, it had a front porch and a row of short hedges trimmed to a foot short of the height of the railing. The front gutter looked old and worn; a person trying to hang from it might pull it completely off. A weathered light gray in color with dark gray shutters and trim and a bluish gray porch and black porch, it was partially blocked by an immense oak growing in the front yard with a tire swing hanging silently from the first heavy branch. Stashed in the bushes was a rusted boy's five-speed bike with a flat rear tire and a faded sports card stuck in the spokes.
"I've got an idea…" Samantha lit up. "Let's race!" She extended her finger. "Loser gets breakfast in bed!" Sabrina pulled her hand back down.
"No…." She stopped Samantha from teleporting. "Look, I just want you to look around." She played tour guide. "Look at this street." She stopped at a large maple tree next to the road. "Doesn't it look familiar?" She hoped to stir William back to life from inside Samantha. Her twin sister looked annoyed at her, looked left and right at the surrounding houses and turned to look back they had came to the fenced-in football field at the end of the street then back again.
"Oh, my god, it does!"
"It does?!" Sabrina lit up excited.
"I can see the roof of our house in the distance!" Samantha pointed out over Decatur and Brookside Court to their home beyond the trees and other residences. "And it looks like crap. Aunt Zelda really needs to get a professional roofer!"
Sabrina grunted out of stressed anxiety and turned away to cross the street. Her destination was three more houses up on the other side of the street. Samantha looked around once and again and hastened her step to keep up with her. A dachshund came to meet them at one fenced in yard begging for attention, and both the girls took turns to reach over and pet it, but Samantha left behind a rawhide bone she had zapped up heavier than the dog for it to chew on. Once more picking up her step to catch up with Sabrina, she found her twin sister heading up to the door of 631 Carrington with the mismatching empty front porch and the silver Ford mini-van parked in the driveway. Drawing silent, Samantha pulled her schoolbooks to her bosom as Sabrina rang the bell. There was a distant rummaging inside as a person stirred in the house. Sabrina looked back to Samantha once again and turned back to the door.
"Whose house is this?" Samantha whispered.
"You'll see…." Sabrina heard the doorknob click and the wooden door grind against carpet as it opened.
"Yes?" A modestly proportioned brown-eyed woman with short brown hair appeared and opened her outer glass door to the girls. Her eyes glancing the girls over once, Monica Samms appeared saddened, trying to keep her head aloft as she wiped her nose with a tissue and tried to be gracious to these young ladies coming to her home. Her complexion was flawless, like that of a television actress between takes of a TV drama, and her lips were slight, her features coming to a soft point at her chin. Her voice sounded cultured like that of a woman born in Boston affluence.
"Miss Samms?" Sabrina spoke up as Samantha looked around bored. "Hi, I'm Sabrina Spellman. I go to school with your son."
"Sabrina…" Monica spoke with a distinct New England accent. "Yes, I recognize your name… you were the last person to see my son before he vanished. Would you like to come in?"
"Yes, thank you…"
"I think I'm just going to be…" Samantha felt Sabrina's hand clamp down on her arm and pull her into the house into a front living room. It looked modest. Pressed to the counter area looking into the kitchen was a sofa flanked by two end tables and a rocking chair by the front door with the family TV under the window and a fish tank in the corner. Sabrina had barely perceived this house for what it really was when she was last here. The dining room entrance was behind the front door at the foot of the staircase, the wall lined with photos of a young boy and his mother who grew from a young happy young boy to a young man whose grin eventually soured as he grew older until he stopped smiling all together.
"Would you girls like some tea?" Monica asked. "Some soft drinks…?"
"No ma'am…" Sabrina answered. "I mean… I don't want to take up too much of your time. To tell the truth, I'm still not that clear as to what all happened the other morning…" She told the truth. She wasn't all that sure what had happened the other morning. Bored and trying to keep from acting rude, Samantha looked around the house and waited on her sister who looked at her as if she was expecting something to happen.
"But, you see…" Sabrina looked back and forth from William's mother to her sister several times. Samantha pulled a piece of chocolate from her purse to unwrap then slip into her mouth. "William borrowed from Harvey, my boyfriend, a book that we're reading in class. Unfortunately, it belongs in my Aunt Zelda's private collection, and I just really need it back."
"You took a book from Aunt Zelda's library?" Samantha knew just as Sabrina did that their aunt had a priceless collection of first-edition novels collected from through her life; it was a fact Sabrina knew Samantha would know. "Oh, she's grounding your ass."
"I'm sorry…" Monica looked around the room. "But I haven't seen anything like that around here. Maybe it's at his locker in school."
"Could I maybe check his room and see if it's in there?"
"Oh, no… no…" Monica couldn't have that. She hadn't been in there herself except to stand in the doorway and grieve her son's absence from the house. "I couldn't let you go poking in my son's room."
"We wouldn't bother anything!" Sabrina had to get Samantha in that room to see if it stirred William's memories back to life. "We'd just look over the room and see if we spot it."
"No, I don't think…" Monica was slightly shaking her head one minute, but then Sabrina rolled her finger around at the end of her arm and bewitched her. "Oh, okay…" She changed her mind. After all, this was the last girl William saw before he took off from school. "Just don't touch anything… it's the second to last room upstairs."
"Thank you, you don't know what this means to me." Sabrina lit up eagerly and tugged Samantha's arm to go with her.
"What?"
"Four eyes are better than two…" Sabrina announced. Samantha rolled her eyes exasperatedly and placed her purse and schoolbooks by the table at the bottom of the staircase. Following the staircase up, the two teenage witches could see the full development of their lost classmate from a tiny skinny youth in a Moe Howard-haircut at one year old up the wall to the beginning of his surly mop-topped demeanor following his parent's divorce. William's father looked like the quintessential soldier. He was a steel-jawed brown-eyed good-looking figure of a man not unlike actor John Wayne, but his likeness harkened more to Dean Cain from the TV series "Lois and Clark." He vanished from the pictures after William turned eleven and he started turning that youthful grin to a forced smile and then into barely a grimace at all. Down the hall were more pictures of photo tableaus, a photo of Fenway Park in Boston of William's maternal grandfather, a former Red Sox relief pitcher, his paternal grandfather in his military uniform overseas in Germany and other unknown relatives.
"I know what you're doing." Samantha whispered to her. "You've got a spell to find this boy."
"Something like that..." Passing one room and the bathroom, Sabrina stopped at the last door at the end of the house over the garage. A Westbridge High pennant was on the door with a skull and bones poster inscribed, "Abandoned All Hope Ye Who Enter Here," but Sabrina dared the warning to push open the door, which was ajar to open entirely. She had never seen Harvey's bedroom so she wasn't quite sure what to expect. William had one single bed in the center of the room, its headboard pushed to the wall to the right of the door with two windows on the front of the house and a desk in between with a desk light still burning. His closet was on the other side of the bed, and over the headboard were four posters crowded together. Britney Spears was in the top left corner with Madonna's "Like A Virgin" poster overlapping its southeast corner. Smaller posters of Janet Jackson and Olivia Newton-John filled the two empty spaces. Behind the door was a full-size Teri Hatcher wrapped in the Superman cape. On the back of the door itself was a full-size Samantha Fox with her crazy Eighties hair in full fashion. The bed itself was fixed exactly like how a boy would make his bed with a quick cover and hasty tuck under along the sides except the bed with the cassette tapes and cassette player left on it had been prepared that the pillow was at the footboard so that he could sleep with his head in the center of the room and giving him the ability to stare up at his goddesses of pop.
"Well, this certainly looks like a boy's room." Samantha responded.
"What do you think of it?" Sabrina asked her twin sister. "What do you think of when you look at it? Does it spark any memories?" Sabrina strolled along side the bed past William's bookshelf next to the door. It was full of comic books and paperback novels both sitting up and lying flat in it and on top. Bolted to the wall over it were three more shelves, the bottom two shelves depicted a war between Star Wars action figures and GIJoe action figures at war with each other firing fake plastic guns at each other and climbing between the shelves to battle more figures around a Tatooine land speeder and a GIJoe battle tank. In the staged battle, there were also a few Marvel and DC Comics action figures and a few non-generic figures lying in death poses in the middle. Samantha strolled past it to the bureau which had a television on it and a VCR with a few horror movies in VHS. The far wall was bare except for the horror and science fiction posters across it, and a guitar resting in the corner. In the first window seat from the walk around the bed were stacks of old school assignments and old class folders fading in the sunlight. On the floor next to the desk was a plastic milk crate stacked full with Mad Magazines.
"Does any of this look familiar?" Sabrina asked. Samantha looked around the room again.
"He's got a photo of you on his desk." Samantha picked it up.
"What?" Sabrina came around the end of the bed to take the eight-by-ten framed photo from her. She knew this image. She recalled the day it was taken. It was her first day at Westbridge High School and a few weeks before she had learned of her witchly legacy. She was entering the school through the main entrance when a boy with a camera stepped out and asked to take her picture. Sabrina was so excited to have someone take her picture that she just grinned, tossed her hair back over her right shoulder and grinned for the photo. She had then walked on and had never thought about it again. William had been that boy? He was the first person to be nice to her at school.
At the desk, Samantha noticed a stack of comic books placed oddly over an open loose-leaf folder and picked them up to see what they were hiding. What they were hiding made her grin then chortle into a laugh she was trying to hide in the back of her throat. William had sketched Sabrina's face and hairstyle from the photo on to notebook paper with her wearing the star-spangled bustier of the DC Comics character known as Wonder Woman. The page before it was another sketch from the photo with Sabrina as Batgirl, and the page before that as Supergirl. Her own face was contorting to hold back the laughter, but soon her muffled snickering was turning into a more than obvious chortling. She wasn't sure what was more funny: this distant goddess-like worship from a boy infatuated with her sister or the mere concept of Sabrina as a costumed crime-fighter.
"What's so funny?" Sabrina broke from nostalgically reminiscing of her first encounter from Westbridge.
"Nothing…" Samantha placed the stack of comic books down on the folder again. Looked around again, she rediscovered the shelf of warring action figures.
"I've got an idea…." Samantha came up to her and whispered to her ear while pointing at it. "Let's zap them to life. I've just got to see who wins!"
"No!" Sabrina chided her foolishness as the staircase groaned down the hall.
"Girls…" William's mother came upstairs to them carrying two tinted clear plastic cups of lemonade. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
"Yes…" Sabrina quickly materialized her Aunt Zelda's autographed first edition copy of Silas Marner from the study at the house. "Found it!" She grinned innocently. "It was on his bookshelf by the door." She took the drink Mrs. Samms handed her. "Oh… thank you…" Samantha took the other cup. Lightly sighing, Monica Winslet-Samms looked around her son's room.
"What the hell am I going to do with all this stuff?" She fretted. "I'm getting married in eight weeks and taking a new job in Washington after Christmas. Where would William have vanished? Why would he have gone just when I needed him?"
Sabrina and Samantha looked awkwardly at each other.
"Oh, I think he could be home before you know it." Sabrina answered.
"You think so?" Monica looked up. "Sabrina, that Kinkle boy… do you think he could have done something to my son?"
"Harvey?" Sabrina was upset. This was her boyfriend she was talking about! "Harvey isn't like that! Harvey loved William like a brother."
"That's true, Mrs. Samms." Samantha spoke up. "Harvey misses William terribly."
"I'm sorry…" Monica apologized upon seeing she had hit a sore nerve. "It's just… I should never have let him take that automotive class at that garage. It's two blocks further away from the school with a lot of places in between for things to go wrong."
"Well…" Sabrina handed her the cup back. "I'm sorry we bothered you, and we'll be going." Samantha quickly downed her lemonade and went after her sister carrying her aunt's book. Quickly heading out, Samantha stopped Sabrina at the top of the stairs.
"Someone should have taken a chainsaw to those apron strings years ago!" She whispered clandestinely. Sabrina just gasped. This visit had not worked at all as she had hoped. Samantha was supposed to have seen William's room and regained her memories of her past life; she was supposed to realize who she once was. Sabrina was then going to change him back and leave him here, but now, both she and Samantha were grabbing up their schoolbooks from the front room and racing home ahead of his mother. Samantha was not reminded of anything. These were just the memories and possessions of a person she had never met. She was both bored and amused by them; she had no respect for them either. Closing the front door behind Sabrina, Samantha stepped off the front porch and found herself back home in the living room of their house on Collins Road. Wondering who had whipped up the teleportation spell, the twins looked at each other and then to their Aunt Zelda standing before them upset with her arms crossed. Zelda sat by her half-interested in the chair reading a gossip magazine with her legs crossed and Salem on the back of the chair.
"Girls…" She lifted her head up. "There's a book missing from my collection… Silas Marner… Where is it?"
"Aunt Zelda…" This was the one part of her plan Sabrina was not expecting and turned the book over with her hands shaking. "I'm sorry… I thought I could slip it back before…"
"I took it, Aunt Zelda." Samantha confessed falsely. "I thought it might be cool if I showed an autographed first edition to our teacher." Sabrina was stunned.
"Samantha?" Hilda was stunned.
"Samantha?" Even Salem was stunned.
"Samantha…" Zelda was not expecting that. "Well… uh… Sabrina should have told you that my books are not allowed to leave the house. I'm sorry, honey, but… as punishment, you're grounded for the weekend."
"I'm sorry." Samantha made the exact same repentant face Sabrina always made when she was getting punished. To witness it was a very odd experience for Sabrina. She'd been in trouble several times, but she had never watched herself being punished least of all for a crime she had actually committed. She watched Samantha turn into the foyer to head upstairs.
"Sabrina…" Her Aunt Zelda called to her. "Make sure you remind her of our house rules…"
"Yes, Aunt Zelda…" Sabrina turned to head upstairs herself. Down in the living room, Hilda wondered and thought about what had just happened.
"I thought Samantha had all of Sabrina's memories…" She looked to her sister. "You would think she'd know the house rules."
"Yes…" Zelda thought about it. "But don't forget… Sabrina can be sneaky and deceptive too."
"Oh god…" Salem moaned. "Two identical teenage witches in the house…."
"Hey…" Sabrina stopped Samantha at the top landing. "Why did you tell Aunt Zelda you took her book? You know I'm the one who had it."
"I know…" Samantha reflected her own humble grin back at her. "But I don't have anything planned for this weekend, and, besides… we're sisters!" She pulled that little grin out Sabrina used around Harvey and entered the guest room, placing her school books aside and then jumping into her bed. Turning away, Sabrina turned toward her own room in the back of the house.
"She is making it so hard to get rid of her!"