Impractical Magic

Impractical Magic
Why does it always seem to be either the worst day or the best day ever? Why isn’t there ever an in-between day or something? Every time something goes wrong, everything goes wrong. This morning, I was supposed to get up at five because I have a class at seven. I needed to take a shower and I have to leave the house at 6:30 or I’ll be late, since my mother makes me walk to school, even though last year she gave me a ride all year. But, of course, my sister decided to turn my alarm off. Not just one alarm, no, she turned them all off (I have, like, four). My alarm for the past few weeks now despite my 3 different alarm clocks and stereo set to go off full blast, has been my friend Kali, who comes and bangs on my window if my light’s off when she gets to my house to walk to school with me. In my mad dash to get clothes this morning, I couldn’t find anything to wear so I’m sitting totally freaking frozen in my sixth period because, even though it’s not even seventy outside, the school is blasting the a/c.
By the way, my name’s Aurora Lenore. I’m not going to tell you my real name because I don’t like it. And besides, if I want to become an author (outside of writing.com) I need a pen name, so I’d better get used to writing it that way.
Anyway, I was writing this to tell, well, other people about my many “strange” (to say the least) experiences. See, what I was going on about earlier, that there’s no middle ground between the worst day and best day ever, well the same thing goes for weirdness and insanity. My friends are all either normal and sane, or completely freakish and totally nuts. You may wonder why I’d hang out with someone like that, but you know, the insane ones are always the fun ones. They (or at least one in particular) are also the causes for the fact that my best friend, normally a very smart and (most of the time) mature person, thinks she’s 4, and the fact that one of my other friends cannot even get out two words in a half an hour (although this, that one particular friend says, is a temporary result of their being some of the first test subjects of an experimental spell). I know this has all got to sound weird, and again you may wonder why I surround myself with people that are stark raving mad and dabble in magic, but like I said, they’re fun.
Anyway, it all started one night a few weeks ago, right before school started back up again, when everyone was at my house for a makeshift sweet 16 and super 17 for my best friend Kali and I (her birthday is the 14th of August and mine’s the 23rd). My friend Trevor is really into magic and stuff, just like Kali and Zed (his real name is Zedediah, but we try to avoid mentioning that fact; after all, he knows some pretty powerful spells) and he is always inventing new spells. Since my mother had gone with her boyfriend and (HALLELUJAH!) my brother and sisters, up to our camper, leaving my friends and me to our own devices, we all became the test subjects of Trevor’s new spell, which is supposed to be, like, this new non-medical cure for memory loss. For some reason we, with no memory loss to speak of, at least at that point, became his lab rats. We should have known right then that something would go wrong, but nooo, we had to try out the spell. After all, it could cure one of the worst diseases facing Americans and those in the world who lived long enough to develop it, right? We should have known.
“Okay,” I announced, “Let’s just flip a coin. No one wants to volunteer, so someone call it.”
We flipped the coin and poor Zed ended up going first. In order to simulate the conditions of an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind, or that of an amnesiac, Trevor had to first wipe some part of Zed’s memory. Trevor being Trevor, of course, chose the speech center of Zed’s brain.
“All righty, that should do it. Zed, can you understand me?”
“Ahhh.” Zed said. Then he stopped short. He tried again. “Aaaahhh. Ahhh! Ahhhhh!” All he could do was kind of sigh. We could tell that Zed was getting very worried because as he kept trying to talk, his voice kind of got higher and a little frantic. I think that he may just be able to think of what to say, and to understand everything we say, but that his brain, in a sense, just doesn’t remember how to translate his thoughts into actual audible speech. Very weird, but Trevor had to continue or Zed would definitely be stuck that way.
Trevor tried his new spell, but nothing seemed to change. Zed still looked freaked out, and now, it seemed, was even more so. Trevor kept trying the spell, but it didn’t change anything.
“Uh, Trevor? What did you do?”
“I don’t really know exactly. He should be able to talk now, I did the spell, but it just didn’t work yet.”
“Ah!” Zed said to Trevor. I think it basically translated to “No shit!”

We woke up the next morning and Zed’s speech looked to be returning, as he could then at least utter a few words at random every few minutes. From what we’ve gathered, he was trying the whole time to speak, but only a few words actually got through. At least, that’s what we think he said. We could only make out a few words.
Well, as the spell was obviously working, however slowly, on Zed, we decided to try it out on Kali.
“Okay, let’s do this before I get too nervous.” said Trevor. If he was nervous, it was nothing compared to Kali.
“What do you mean before you get too nervous. What about me? I don’t even know what you’re going to do to me! You act like we won’t get it. What exactly are you planning on doing?”
“Well…” then Trevor quickly pointed at Kali. Before she could move, he shouted the spell.
“Hey! What are you doing? What…” Kali trailed off. Then she just sat down in the middle of the floor and crossed her legs “Indian style” like you might in kindergarten. I walked over and sat next to her.
“Kali? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” She said in a strange voice. I couldn’t quite place what was different about her, but I knew that she wasn’t okay.
“Are you sure? We don’t know what Trevor was trying to do. Do you feel any different?”
“No, but I don’t think I should talk to you anymore.”
“Why not? Is something wrong?”
“Yeah, my gwamma told me never to talk to stwangers and you’re a stwanger.”
“What?”
“You’re a stwanger and that means I don’t know you and that means I can’t talk to you. Gwamma said so.”
“Kali, what are you talking about?”
“Hey, how do you know my name? Stwanger’s don’t know your name. Are you one of Gwamma’s fwiends?”
Then I realized exactly what was wrong with Kali.
“Kali, how old are you?”
“I’m four and a half. That means I’m almost five years old but I’m not yet. That’s what Gwandpa says. Did you come to see Gwamma? She’s in the kitchen making some cookies. She told me to stay out or I won’t get some.”
“Okay, I’m going to go see your Grandma now. You stay here and play, okay?”
“Okay, lady.”
I turned to look at Trevor, who had been standing off to the side since Kali had sat down. He tried to get away, but Zed stopped him and shook his head. Trevor was stuck with me and now I was pissed.
“What the hell did you do to her, Trevor?”
“Um, well, I, um. Well, I made her younger.”
“Yeah, I kind of noticed that. Why would you do something so stupid as that? You do realize that school starts in like three weeks, right? How well do you think a four year old is going to do in school? I don’t think Algebra and American Government are quite on her list of accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if she still knows how to read! What was the point of this little excursion into the depths of nursery school?”
“Well, I, I…”
“Spit it out. Why did you do this, and without telling us? How could you just surprise her like that with the stupid spell? That was wrong and you know it. What’s the matter with you? Are you gonna do something like that to me too? Am I going to turn around one day and find that I can’t move because you want to try out your spell without any protest?”
“I just didn’t think she’d let me do it if I told her what I was doing. I had to have a good test subject, someone with the same problem as an Alzheimer’s patient. That’s one of the worst things that happens is that they don’t remember anything but a certain point in their lives. They get stuck in their pasts.”
“Yeah, well congratulations, because now Kali’s stuck in hers. How exactly do you plan to fix this? Zed is one thing, but she can’t go anywhere like this. Her parents aren’t going to let her stay here for very long, and she definitely can’t go back to school like this.”
“All I have to do, I think, is use my memory enhancement spell on her. That’s what I’d planned in the first place. It’s the same one I used to start getting Zed’s speech back. We already know that it works, even if it does go kind of slowly.”
“You’d better hope that this works, Trevor, or Zed can hold you and I can beat the magic right out of you.”
“It should. And for now, with her parents, we can just tell her what to say to them over the phone and hope that they don’t notice her little speech impediment.”
“I don’t know what the hell you were thinking when you did this, Trevor, but this better work, or I’ll give you a speech impediment, and I don’t mean one that’ll go away once your jaw is healed. I know a little magic too. Just fix it. We have to get her back ASAP, as either special education or a mental facility will be involved very quickly if Kali is still like this in school.”
With that, Trevor did the spell on Kali. It still had no effect, just like with Zed. I asked Trevor to leave, as I didn’t think I could avoid punching him (or worse) for much longer, and Kali and I went into my room to play Barbies. I hate Barbies and I hate pink. Everything Barbie is pink. If this doesn’t stop soon, I’ll need a mental facility.
* * *
It’s been about a week now and Kali still isn’t back to normal. Zed, while he is now able to talk, can only speak broken sentences in some combination of French and Japanese. It’s better than the random Latin verbs of a few days ago, but it doesn’t help him at all to speak non-sensical French in the US. He occasionally, and I think purposefully, calls Trevor a “kisama,” but that doesn’t help much since I don’t speak Japanese. He still can't put together a coherent sentence in English in less than two hours. Kali has started kindergarten in her own mind, but she still can’t really function on her own. She also doesn’t remember anything before she was like this. To the best of her knowledge, she’s in kindergarten and that’s that. I don’t really think I want to argue with her right now, though. She may have a 5-year-old mind, but, as Trevor had some fun dressing her this morning, she still has a seventeen-year-old body that is wearing a black mini-skirt and knee-high steel-toed boots. Her hair has also been gelled so much into spikes that I fear I may have my eye gouged out if I disagree with her. Trevor and I are getting along better after the thing with the sneaking up on Kali with the spell. See, Trevor is borderline schizophrenic. Sometimes he does things that he doesn’t want or plan to do because the voices in his head actually do tell him to do it. That’s what happens when his mother’s hours get cut. If she can’t afford it, Trevor doesn’t get his medication. On the day in question, he’d just run out of the drug that seems to work the best at keeping the people in his head away. One of his “friends” doesn’t like Kali very much, so he tried to get rid of her. We both agree that it’s a good thing that we already had a spell that could hopefully reverse the effects of the spell that he’d cast while “under the influence” otherwise we would have an even more serious problem.
Anyway, Trevor informed me today that, since his magic obviously on the fritz and he doesn’t really trust himself to keep the others back at the moment, he wants me to test his newest spell on him. As I tried to mask my evil giggling at the thought of what this might do to Trevor, I accepted. We are now sitting, once again, in my living room with a book full of Trevor’s experimental spells (you know, the ones that always backfire?) and getting him prepared for what I may end up doing to him, even if it is by mistake (*fake-innocent grin*).
“Now remember, you asked me to do this. If something goes horribly, horribly wrong and you end up without hair,” (Trevor is completely obsessed with his giant mullet), “or—"
“Without hair?!?!?”
“Or something,” I continued, annoyed, “you cannot blame me for it. You asked for whatever you end up getting. These are your spells, which is obviously dangerous enough in the first place,” we both glanced over at Kali and Zed. Kali was trying to teach Zed how to talk, and he was getting obviously pissed at the fact that he couldn’t tell her that he would have been able to if not for Trevor. I gave Trevor a look and continued. “Plus, magic doesn’t usually work as well when you’re using someone else’s spells.”
“Since when?”
“Since the last time I tried to use someone else’s spell, my mouse ended up eating my cat.”
“Oh, yeah. Poor Whiskers. Oh well, at least Brunch made it quick.”
I gave him another look and began perusing the spell. Great I thought now I’m pissed at him and I’ll end up making him dinner or something. I calmed myself down and looked at the paper Trevor had given me. The words of the spell were easy enough. This one was supposed to give the person affected some extra strength. Trevor definitely needed it. He’s about 5’ 7’’ and weighs maybe 110 pounds. If he had muscle, he’d have no bones. His hair probably added some weight too (again, the huge mullet).
Anyway, I started reading the spell a little more and discovered that there was going to be a little strength needed from the caster to get things going. I was supposed to grab Trevor’s feet and swing him around six and a half times. Don’t ask me where the half came in, but I think that may be what ended up screwing this spell around. I went over to Trevor and told him that we might as well get this over with. I repeated the words of the spell as we swung around, slowly getting faster.
“Round and round the shrimp will go, as he stops his strength shall grow!” I shouted. How corny, I thought but it fits. I counted off the circles as we spun.
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Okay, we’re--”
“What the hell?” I heard a little voice say. I was looking around for Trevor, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Where the hell was he? I had just hit six and a half when he just disappeared!
“Hey! What did you do to me?” There was that voice again! What the hell was it? It sounded like a chipmunk on helium. I ignored it again and kept looking for Trevor. God damn it, where the hell is he? I thought.
“Oh.” I found him. In my hand, there was Trevor. He was about, oh, an inch tall. Zed heard my tone and looked over to see what had happened. He came closer and saw exactly who it was in my hand.
“Shit.” his word of the hour.
“Yeah.”
Somehow Zed got Kali out of the room and I thanked him as they left. I hated to think what Kali would want to do with a little dolly-sized Trevor.
“I said, what the hell did you do to me Aurora?!?” I almost started cracking up at the sound of the voice that I now knew to be Trevor’s, but I had to stop myself because he probably would have fallen off my hand.
“Somehow, I don’t think that ‘I told you so’ really covers this one.”
“Shut up Aurora. This is soooo not a good time for you to be a jerk.”
“You may not think so but you know, this is insanely funny for me. I knew something like this was going to happen.” I continued, chuckling slightly. “I told you that if we did this something would go wrong, but you didn’t listen, so this seems to me to be the perfect time to be a ‘jerk’. I think I’m entitled to my amusement this time because, for once, I was right. Frankly, I think it’s very funny. The problem now is how we’re going to reverse this one and where you are going to live in the meantime. Your mother would totally freak and your sister would probably put you in a Polly Pocket dress.” Apparently, this had just dawned on Trevor, because he started to freak.
“Oh God, my mother! What the hell am I going to do now? And I can’t go to school either. She’ll kill me, and now all she has to do is squish me! Oh God! My cat could use me for an after dinner mint! I could go outside and get lost! I could be-”
“Stop.” I said, cutting him off. “You’re only going to make this worse.” I knew I needed to calm him down, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t be as stern as I needed to be. When I’d heard him start listing off different ways he could meet his end in his diminutive state, I had instantly regretted my good humor at Trevor’s “misfortune.” I realized what this would mean for him until he got back to normal (if he was ever going to get back to normal). Poor Trevor. Now I felt truly sorry for him. I think, as my face was about the size of a Wal-Mart to him at his size, that he noticed my suddenly sullen demeanor. He looked (if it’s even possible) even more depressed, though I couldn’t see his face very well. At that point he sat down as hard as he could (which at his size wasn’t very hard) in my palm and began sobbing. I have never seen Trevor cry before, let alone the heaving sobs that were pouring from him now. I didn’t know what to do. Normally I would have tried to comfort him, but I was afraid I might squish him with my finger. All I could do was try and talk to him.
“Trevor, it’s going to be all right.” I said softly, so as not to hurt his ears.
“NO, IT’S NOT! IT’S NOT GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT! LOOK AT ME, ROR! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GO AROUND LIKE THIS?”
“I don’t know yet, Trevor, but look at Kali and Zed! They are getting better, whether it’s slow or not. Zed can almost get out a sentence an hour and Kali, well, she’s starting to remember how to read again. You’ll probably go the same way. Maybe you’ll just grow a little every day until you’re back. Spells like this, you know, glamours and things, usually need updating, so they must just wear off eventually. Do you know how tall you were before so we can keep track?”
“Yes,” he sniffed, wiping his almost microscopic tears and nose on his tiny sleeve, “I was 5’8”. I just got a physical for the musical. Mr. Barnet is a dumbass, but at least his idiocy came in handy this time.”
“Okay, so we can measure you now, and then keep track. We should probably weigh you and compare that too, just to make sure you’re coming back up in proportion. We wouldn’t want a one inch high 110 pound Trevor.” Although I thought I had said this with a bit of humor, Trevor didn’t take it that way.
“Oh God! Do you think that could really happen?” a panicked little Trevor asked.
“No, of course not, I was just trying to be funny. You know I suck at these kinds of things. I always end up saying the wrong thing. When I need to say something I get shy, but when I need to keep my big mouth shut, I don’t realize it until it’s too late.”
“That’s the understatement of the year.” He replied with more than a hint of my acidity in his minuscule voice.
“That doesn’t give you license to be an ass.” I reminded him.
“Fine.”
“Okay,” I said, with all the optimistic enthusiasm I could muster, “let’s get to work on this counterspell. I’ll run and get a pencil lead and paper so you can write and a magnifying glass so I can read it.” I didn’t mean it to be mean, but it ended up that way. Trevor gave me a look that, if I could have seen it properly, probably could have stabbed me to death.
“Sorry, but it’s true.”
“I guess you’re right.”
So we went to find some paper and lead (and a pen for me) and got to work on a counterspell to speed up what we hoped would happen naturally anyway.
We got back and I set the paper and lead down, then let Trevor walk off my hand onto the sheet. He picked up the lead (which was amazing, because it would have been like me picking up a twelve foot column of solid graphite) and started to write.
“Hey! I guess the spell did work. You’re smaller so you’re stronger. Like an ant.” Trevor wasn’t too happy with the last part of my observation, but he had to admit I was right. He was, relatively, very strong.
“Let’s just leave the midget jokes behind and get to work.” Trevor squeaked. He’s so cute at this size, I thought maybe I should just do this to all men. The world would be so much nicer that way. But I nodded and took out the magnifying glass to look at what he was writing. I’ve only really been doing magic since I started hanging out with Kali and Zed, but I know a lot of the theory behind it from the reading I’d done when I first got interested in it myself. From the looks of it, though, we were just going to have to wait this one out. I know that glamours (because that is technically what this is) are always temporary, but some take longer to wear off than others. The problem with trying to reverse one is that it’s very much like coloring your hair. You can put a color in easily enough without really causing any permanent damage, but to get a color completely out, you’d have to strip it and do some real serious damage to your hair or just wait it out and let your roots grow in. Trying to “re-dye” Trevor, in the metaphorical sense, with another spell to make him taller would be stupid because it would be like trying, again with the hair, to put a new color in on top of an old one. Trevor could end up mousy or brassy. There would be some difference from what he had originally been. He might end up overweight or 9 feet tall or he might be completely normal on the outside with something wrong with one of his organs or something. We just couldn’t know. I told Trevor as much and he squeakily acquiesced.
“You’re right, Ror, I just need to wait this one out.”
“Yeah. Look, Trevor, I am really sorry about this. I don’t know what to do except to tell you to wait it out, but I know that must be frustrating. While we have this opportunity, though, we could try and do a little research. I think, judging by the fact that you’ve gone into a panic more than once and started crying all in the past hour that your emotions are somehow out of whack. I have rarely ever seen you get a little emotional, let alone cry and totally freak out like you just did.”
“Hey! I did not ‘freak out’! And I’m not getting over-emotional!” He shouted. “Or maybe you’re right.” he said resignedly as he realized that he’d done it again.
“You see what I mean, then. You have never gotten this emotional, especially not over little things like the fact that I’m telling you you’re being emotional.” he started to say something, but I cut him off. “Before you say anything, just listen. I think that when you shrank your emotions and feelings stayed the same as they were before in relation to you. When you were big, your emotions were comparatively small, just like your strength.” I chuckled. Trevor looked like he was about to cry, so I stopped. “When you shrank, your emotions became proportionally bigger than your stature.”
“Fine, I get all of this, just because I’m smaller doesn’t mean I’ve lost any of my mental capacities, but there are still the things that I’m proportionally freaking out more about!” Trevor said with a note of something bordering hysteria in his voice. I looked at him and raised my eyebrow. He took the hint and tried to calm down. It didn’t really work. “Look Aurora, I still have all of these things to think about. If my emotions got bigger, it’s only because everything else around me did too. My mother is either going to panic and squish me when she sees me, faint and then wake up and squish me, or be so pissed at me that she’ll try to pick me up by the scruff of my neck and carry me off like that kid on Willy Wonka and accidentally squish me. The way I see it, I’m getting squished eventually. Even if we tried to do with my mother what we’ve been doing with Kali’s parents, she’s not going to fall for it! I know what I must sound like at this size, Aurora, and even if the phone actually transmits it, she won’t hear it or she won’t believe it’s me. This isn’t like Kali or Zed’s problems right now. I can’t even get from this room to the door without help from someone unless I want to take a day or two. I just don’t know what to do.” with this, Trevor did his little pouty plop again into the palm of my hand, where he had climbed when we’d given up on the paper and lead.
“Stop it. You don’t want me to talk to you like you can’t understand me, but you’re acting like Kali, and I don’t mean before you did whatever you did to her. If you don’t stop this, I’m going to leave you here with a saltine cracker and a thimble of water until you get big enough to move your own self around. If you want to behave like a five-year-old girl then you go right ahead, but I won’t help you beyond the minimum of keeping you alive. I do not need another Kali around right now. Her and my little sister are enough to deal with and Zed can only do so much without being able to talk. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and remember that you did this. There is nothing you can change about it until we figure out if you’re going to go back naturally or not so DEAL!”
That’s when he started to cry again. God dammit, I thought to myself, this is so not what I need right now. I set Trevor down on the table and went to get the cracker and thimble. I was so not dealing with this.
“Wait! Rory, please don’t leave me like this, I promise I’ll be good!” Trevor squeaked after me. His use of Rory instead of the usual Ror or Aurora was what really brought it home to me. It sounded just like a little kid in trouble and yelling after his mommy. I knew right then that his size was not Trevor’s only problem. I knew I should try to treat it as such, but it was too late. There was no going back now or I’d be stuck with two seventeen-year-old kindergartners for the rest of my life, or at least until things got back to normal. I couldn’t back down now or he’d never listen. I learned when my mother ran a daycare from our home that the moment you gave in was the moment you could never have the necessary control needed to keep a young child in line for becoming an adult. He was getting his cracker and thimble and a little bit of cotton to sleep on in a square mason jar with holes in it and that was the end of it. I really didn’t want to put him in a jar, but that would be the only safe place for him with Kali and my sisters around, and I was going to have to take him to class with me anyway so he wouldn’t fail everything when he got back to school. I know that sounds cruel, but I could not think of anything else at the time and I still haven’t been able to.
* * *

This item is continued in "Impractical Magic Part II". Thank you for reading so far. I'd appreciate it if you read more, it does get better.

-JessicaElaine