WITCH! A teenage girl.

WITCH! A teenage girl.
( inspired by the first paragraph of: "First Real Short Story {Witch Latinona}"  )

WITCH! The word was scrawled in poorly written red letters across her locker door, the spraypaint bleeding onto adjacent lockers. Her neighbors glared at her in reproach, as if she had intended for the epithet to be posted such.

Sarah stood there, hands dangling at her sides. She was rarely seen with a bookbag, or books, and this occasion was no different. The usual scowl on her face was replaced, however, by a mild look of shock. She looked like someone dressed for a Halloween party: short raven-black hair that came over her eyes a bit, black dress, and red fingernails matching red lipstick that stood out against her pale skin. Her hand seemed unsteady as she lifted the gate and opened her locker. Nothing inside had been disturbed. Sarah heard the people around her laughing. She slammed the locker shut and stormed away, the anger on her face fueling their amusement. It wasn't fair.

Claire sat on the bench in swim class, leaning back slightly, letting her blonde hair dangle behind her like a flag. Her tanned legs were stretched out together in front of her, drawing the attention of the boys. She even caught the male swim instructor stealing glances at her. She pretended not to notice as she told stories about Sarah to two freshmen beside her. They soaked them up as truth. First was the canonical tale about the infamous slumber party where Sarah, Claire, et al tried to use an occult board to talk to spirits. The power went out just as all of the girls felt the marker move. Then onto the stories of Sarah and her glowing eyes, Sarah and the seedy occult shop, Sarah speaking in tongues, and, Claire's favorite, Sarah having sex with a frog at a party. Supposedly the frog talked once, and many upperclassmen swore they heard it, when in fact said frog existed only in Claire's imagination. This is not to say that the other stories were false. In fact, a great many coincidences did often occur which lent credence to the hypothesis that Sarah has supernatural influence....

Sarah shared that swim class with Claire, and saw her talking, and knew that she talked about her. Sarah wanted to walk across the water and wring the other girls neck, but Claire was a grade older and much stronger. Besides, such direct confrontation was banal, best left to the petty catfights that attracted the dumb girls (and swarms of male spectators). Instead, she waited. When the day was over and the school emptied, Sarah went to Claire's locker and stood in front of it, fingering a piece of chalk inside the pocket of her coat. She stood there for a time, working something out in her head. Then she retreated a step, turned, and walked away.

The next morning Sarah arrived at school early, and with a different backpack. It was red. The school was nearly deserted but the few souls that spied her saw a girl in a hurry, head bent forward, bobbing with each step, hands gripping the straps. Sarah had not yet reached Claire's locker when she rounded and corner and stopped in her tracks. There was a boy--a tall gangly-looking geek boy in front of her locker. The first thing she noticed about him, besides the fact that he was at her locker, was that his t-shirt was at least two sizes to big. The second thing she noticed was that he held two squirt bottles in his right hand. He was squirting with one hand, and rubbing furiously with the other. As Sarah approached he finished removing the last of the red w from her locker. It now spelled out "itch!" in blurry red letters. Ostensibly, he had been scrubbing for some time.

"Excuse me?"

The boy turned around and stared at her dumbly. "Oh. Uh. Hi."

"What are you doing?" Sarah accused.

"I..." the boy's face was flush. He stammered a few times, and then spoke as if quoting a movie: "what does it look like?"

"No, I mean. Why."

"Well, if someone had done this to me, you know...um...I figured it would be nice to come in and see that someone was on my side, or something."

"Listen, thanks, but you didn't have to do that. I was in the Office yesterday and they said the janitors would take care of it."

"Oh." The boy's disappointment was readily apparent. "Ok." Sarah waited as he looked at her awkwardly for a moment, then turned to leave. Sarah opened her locker. The boy's footfalls stopped.

"Hey, uh..." he started.

Sarah moved the locker door so she could see his face. "Sarah?" she prompted. Did he really not know her name? After all of Claire's shenanigans?

"Sarah, do you want to get breakfast? They serve, like, pancakes, or something, for people who actually get up this early."

"What's your name?" Sarah asked.

"Bobby. I mean, Bob. Or Will." he answered.

Sarah shrugged. "Sure. I have to go back out to my car. I'll meet you there." She turned back and pretended to look for something in her locker until Will left. Then she closed it. Sarah shouldered her red backpack and walked back out to her car, trying to imagine her eating breakfast with Geek Will. Maybe they would set next to two tables full of the varsity field hockey team. It was unreal.

Outside, Sarah walked to a corner and unzipped her backpack, shooing five frogs into the grass. She held the bag upside down, dumping out some mud and weeds from the swamp where she found the frogs. Turning around, she found two girls standing on the parking lot sidewalk, staring at her wide-eyed. Sarah knew exactly what they were thinking, and hissed at them as she walked past. The girls hurried off to tell everyone they new. Sarah's skin burned from the neck up. She was going to kill Claire.

Sarah threw the red bag into her car, an ancient subaru that had to be refilled with oil as often as the gas. She walked by the lunch room. Will was holding his tray awkwardly in line behind a crowd of high pitched field hockey players. She glared at the back of his head and continued on to her homeroom where she scratched some pentagrams on her desk. She drew them larger and larger until her homeroom teacher finally noticed and gave her a detention. Then she spent the rest of the morning fuming at Claire. She was also pissed at Will, whose altruism had resulting in nothing but a confirmation of that stupid frog rumor. Sarah wanted to die, and thought, not very seriously, about stealing a pair of scissors. Anything to distract her from the embarassment. Stupid Will. What a fool! He was nice, though, even if he was awkward. Sarah wondered what he looked like naked. She tried to picture his arms around her. Was he the kind of guy that would turn the lights out and close his eyes first, or the kind that just tossed his boxers off the sofa in broad daylight? Sarah told herself that it didn't matter. She had already stood him up that morning, another mistake in a long line of mistakes. He was probably only helping her out of pity anyway. She was on her own.

When swim class began Sarah was elsewhere, pilfering a pair of scissors. Claire was sitting on her bench, listening to one of her freshman describe Sarah dumping frogs out of her backpack to a large, wet audience. She was jealous; the little leeches couldn't come up with anything on their own? Then, suddenly, she felt a pull at her head, and hear a snip. People in front of her stared behind her as Claire whirled around to find Sarah standing there, a lock of blond hair dangling from her hand.

"Sorry," feigned Sarah, "I'll bring it back when I'm done. Promise."

"You bitch!" screamed Claire, but her ire attracted the attention of the swim instructors.

"Save it for tonight, love," said Sarah, ducking into the girls locker room. Claire followed her but Sarah had broken into a run and was into the hallway and Claire couldn't follow; she was wearing an ugly school-issued black one-piece swimsuit.




After school that day Will stood outside with his chem partner, Mitchel, who was finishing a smoke. He was telling Mitchel about his failed attempt to ask Sarah out.

"Dude, did you hear about her and Claire?" asked Mitchel.

"Yeah."

"That girl is hot as fuck, but damn is she weird. What happened at breakfast?"

"Nothing. She stood me up." Will tried not to think about it, how excited he had been to think that Sarah was actually going to eat breakfast with him. What a fool. Will stared across the parking lot at Claire, who was getting into an expensive looking car. She looked unhappy.

"Sucks, man." Mitchel threw his smoldering cigarette on the ground. His eyes lingered on the grass, as if hoping a frog would pop out. "Girls are trouble."