The Hex Breaker's Eyes Read online

  “Did you say it was her left foot?” Ryan asks.

  As the girl finishes stacking her books in a manageable pile, she takes the broken shoes off and puts them on top of the pile before she gets up. The heel that broke was on her left shoe.

  “For brain cancer delusions,” Ryan says, “picking that particular foot on that that particular girl on this particular morning is pretty freakin’ accurate. That’s some dandy tumor. I would high-five that tumor.”

  “Yeah,” says Tam, who seems to be having a very hard time processing things. She’s actually slack-jawed. As the glowy girl goes back to her locker, probably to change into her gym shoes, Tam finally turns back to face me. She looks me in the eye, and takes on her most serious voice.

  “Min,” she says, “You’re officially weird.”

  I don’t have any classes with Tamara and Ryan, so we didn’t get to talk about the morning’s strangeness until lunch in fourth period. We are in our typical lunchtime spot—sitting on the floor in the hallway by our lockers—when Tam brings it up again.

  “So you knew that something was going to happen? Like a psychic?” she asks.

  Marlene Leonardson, who is my chemistry lab partner, is sitting with us today. Marlene often joins us for lunch, but sometimes she goes off with the kids from the anime club and they play strange dice games in an empty classroom. I wish that she had done that today so I wouldn’t have word of my insanity spread to more people. Tam and Marlie have class together in the morning, so I guess Tam told her everything. Oh, and FYI: Marlie is a wee bit strange. She owns a sword.

  “It’s definitely psychic,” Marlie says. “They say precognition comes on in adolescence.”

  “That’s mutant powers,” says Ryan, talking through his mouthful of sandwich. “In the X-Men.”

  “No, I’m serious. If you can see things that predict the future, that’s psychic.”

  “I’m not psychic,” I mutter, my face down, staring at my crackers and cheese slices. Some older kids walk by, and I feel myself shrinking, pulling in my shoulders, tucking my chin down. I just don’t want them to overhear. Thank God, nobody calls me psychic while the seniors are in earshot. I’d never live it down.

  “So what was it like? Like a flash, a vision of the future? Or like premature déjà vu?” Marlene’s still asking a lot of questions. A few years ago, some of the worst human beings ever to walk through Blue Ribbon Public School made creative use of the word ‘schizophrenic’ in order to drive me to tears for their amusement. So now just hearing someone say the words “premature déjà vu” while talking about my brain turns my stomach and makes my eyes dart around the hallway. God, this sucks.

  “No, she said that girl was glowing in the dark last night, and this morning her foot was glowing,” Tam clarifies. I feel my face going flush just talking about this with another person. Pretty soon the whole school will think I’m a freak, and then someone will blame me for tripping the girl, and then I’ll just curl up and die. OK, that was too dramatic. But seriously, they can’t talk about something else?

  “Ooh, visions of glowing. I’ve never read about that one,” says Marlene. “I’ll look it up. It’s gotta be in one of my books.”

  I stuff another cracker-cheese-cracker stack into my mouth in hopes of not answering another question. No such luck. Ryan wonders, “Like God’s highlighter, singling out an important person? Maybe you’re a prophet like Joan of Arc or something.”

  I’m not real religious, and I very definitely don’t want to label myself as blessed or anything like that, so I just scrunch up my face in disgust and keep chewing on the crackers. I shouldn’t have put the whole thing in my mouth, it’s too dry. I won’t be able to talk for a little while, but that’s OK. I eventually choke it down, sip my water, and try to change the subject. “Marlene, you get the project on argon all typed out? I brought the plastic cover thing for it.”

  She nods, but clearly nobody wants to talk about chemistry class.

  “Anyone know her?” Marlene asks. “I mean, I’ve seen her around, but I don’t know many of the seniors.”

  “Is she a senior?” Ryan asks.

  “What does it matter?” I say. “Like I’m gonna walk up to her and be all like, ‘hey, I’m a sophomore you don’t know and P.S. you glow yellow and the yellow stuff made you trip?’”

  Marlene is writing something in one of her binders. “Yellow?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “I gotta know. I know some cool paranormal websites, I’ll look up visions of glowy yellow people. Did the yellow thing actually reach and grab her? Might be demonic possession.”

  “Guys, just stop. I don’t know why we have to talk about this.”

  Ryan stands up and looks down on the rest of us. “We have to look it up. Because if this sort of thing really happens, then you’re not a crazy person with a brain tumor. And if this girl really is lit up with God’s highlighter, shouldn’t someone ask why? Shouldn’t you?”

  I look down to my lunch again, since my lunch doesn’t have three sets of eyeballs looking at me with a mix of worry and disapproval.

  “Mindee,” he says, “whatever’s happening, if you’re the only one who can see it, then doesn’t that make it your responsibility? You can’t make us do all the work.”

  “What work?” I mutter.

  Tam says, “Let Marlie look into the whole psychic side of it, and you and I will figure out what’s up with the girl. I mean, it can’t be hard to figure out who she is. We can just look at last year’s yearbook.”

  “OK, we can look at a yearbook,” I say.

  Tam gets up and Ryan puts his arm around her shoulder. “And then, we can spy on her and learn all her dirty secrets,” Tam says with a mischievous grin.

  “No!” I whine, “leave the poor girl alone.”

  “Ok,” says Tam. “But we’re going to the library to find a yearbook.” Ryan stoops down to pick up his Tupperware containers and stuffs them into his backpack while they head for the stairs.

  “Wait up,” shouts Marlene. “I’m coming too.” She stuffs her lunch bag into her backpack, and then pulls out the printed chemistry paper and hands it to me. She stands up and runs after the other two. “You can look it over and make sure it’s right,” she says over her shoulder.

  The three of them head for the stairs, leaving me alone on the floor with crackers, cheese, and the eighteenth element of the periodic table. I tuck my head down and finish eating, ignoring Marlene’s report. I don’t have to double-check her work. Marlene’s always right.

  3

  Tuesday, November 6

  Marlene thinks that I saw the future when I singled out the girl’s left foot, and she won’t let it go. It’s been a full day since the girl tripped in the hallway, and if the bags under her eyes are any indication, Marlie’s been on all of her favourite occult websites non-stop ever since. Since she’ll never stop obsessing over it, we caved in and let her drag us out here after school, to the Bayview Mobile Home Garden, to talk to a psychic.

  “Why do we have to do this?” I say as I climb out of Ryan’s mom’s car. Ryan, the only one of us with a driver’s licence, is our chauffeur.

  “Because,” Marlene says, “this lady’s legit. She correctly predicted the course of my love life the last time I came to see her.”

  “You don’t have a love life,” I say.

  “And that’s what she predicted!” Marlene’s smiling. She’s been gushing praise about this lady ever since Tam agreed that we would all come out here. I’m not sure why I let everyone else force me to come. I mean, it’s my head that they want this lady to examine, so why should I let them vote for me to come out here when I clearly don’t want to?

  We’re walking through the park, which is mostly made up of prefab homes and not actual trailers, trying not to look so out of place. Ryan’s in nice clothes and drove us here in a BMW, so he’s a little too rich for this place, but if I was honest, I’m about one step away from living in a trailer anyway.
r />   Marlene is leading us straight to a small white mobile home that’s pretty close to where we parked at the visitor’s lot. In one of the windows there’s a hand-painted sign that says “Madame Knight PSYCHIC READINGS.” All of the curtains are closed, but on the door there’s a little sign that says “OPEN, please knock.” Marlene knocks and I just want to go home. The idea of everyone sitting in a room, looking at me, picking my brain apart, asking me questions… well, let’s just say I’d rather bury my head like an ostrich than do this.

  The door opens and a fat, middle-aged lady squints down at us. She’s big enough to fill the narrow trailer door, dressed in a loose grey tracksuit, and smoking a cigarette. She’s wearing too much makeup and her hair’s got so much mousse or something in it that it looks wet and slimy.

  “Come on in, kids!” she says in an inviting, perky voice.

  The others line up to climb into the trailer, and I don’t move. Tam reaches out and grabs my hand, pulling me into the psychic’s trailer. As I step inside, Madame Knight is pulling on a silky robe like you might see on a sorcerer character in a comic book. Half the trailer is hidden behind a sheet she’s pinned to the ceiling. The half we can see contains a small table, with three chairs: one for the psychic, and two on this side of the table for the guests to sit on. There aren’t enough seats, so Ryan and Tam lean against the back wall while Marlene sits at the table and waves me to sit next to her.

  I sit down while Madame stubs out her smoke and pulls a crystal ball out of a cabinet and sets it on the table. She also hits play on a small CD player on the side counter, which plays a generic instrumental ‘hypnotic relaxation’ sort of music. With all the curtains closed it’s kind of dark in here, and the music makes it a little spooky. Madame Knight sits down across from me.

  “Marlene, right? What brings you back to me?” she asks. I try to avoid the old cliché about you’re the psychic, shouldn’t you know?

  “My friend,” Marlene says, pointing at me. “Has had some strange paranormal encounters.”

  “Spirits? An old relative hanging around with a message perhaps?” asks Madame, turning to face me. I can’t begin to describe my experience, so I just blush and look at the floor.

  “No, no,” says Marlene, “she’s like you. She saw the future and it came true.”

  “Ahh.” She says. “This is fairly common. Lots of people have a little bit of precognition in them. Dream visions, déjà vu, things like that.”

  “Can you help her? Help us to, I dunno, sort it out?” Marlene asks.

  The woman with too much makeup taps her fingers on the crystal ball and slowly inhales for a moment. “A normal session, which is a reading, or a connection to the spirit world, is twenty five dollars for a half hour.”

  For a second, nobody says anything, and then I look at her. “So, you want twenty five dollars?”

  She shrugs. “My time is my time.” She holds out a fleshy hand, palm-up.

  I had already told Marlene that since she wanted this, she was paying for it. Marlene offers the money and Madame Knight takes it, opening the robe to tuck the cash into her track pants pocket.

  “Tell me what you saw,” she says. I still can’t find a way to say it.

  “She—” Tam starts, but Madame waves at her.

  “I want her to tell me,” she says, leaning toward me. Her voice is soft and understanding, very motherly. “It’s OK. I know this is all so new, so uncomfortable. You’d rather crawl out of your skin than tell me about it, right?”

  I shrug. “I guess.”

  “I’ve been there. I was your age when I started seeing these fleeting images coming off people in the street. Turns out I was seeing bits of the spirits who were hanging around, trying to communicate with the living. Try explaining that to you mother at age sixteen, right?”

  “My mom’s not around,” I say.

  “That’s tough. But how about this. You just try to describe the picture you saw that got Marlene so worked up she dragged you out here, OK? Can you just tell me what the image looked like? Think of me like a doctor, honey. Anything you say here is confidential, and none of your friends will ever repeat it, right guys?”

  My friends all agree, and I’m left with my nightmare: everyone looking at me, waiting for me to describe how strange I am.

  “I saw a girl glowing in the dark.”

  “Glowing?” asks the psychic.

  “Bright yellow.”

  “Where did you see this? In a dream?”

  “No. I saw it in the real world. The girl goes to our school. She looks normal to everyone else, but when I look at her, I see a yellow light all around her.”

  Madame Knight smiles. “That’s easy, sweetheart. You’re seeing this girl’s aura.”

  “Aura?” I ask. I know the word, but I’ve never really thought about what it means.

  “Everyone has one. It’s the inner light. Some people are so sensitive that they can actually see it. All auras are unique, just like people. They’re different colours, sometimes it seems like the colour is moving around. Is it like that?”

  “Yeah, but hers is just yellow.”

  “And this girl, is she someone special to you?” I wonder if this lady is asking if I like-like girls, but I ignore it.

  “No. she’s just some girl. Older than us.”

  “Dina Jennings,” Marlene blurts out. “We found her in the yearbook.”

  Madame nods, but obviously the name doesn’t mean much to her. “And this Dina is the only person whose aura you can see?”

  “Yeah. I see it every time I see her at school.”

  “And you don’t see this around anyone else? No red auras around boys, blue auras around teachers?”

  “Nothing. Just this one girl.”

  “Well,’ says Madame, “I bet this Dina just has a particularly strong aura, that’s all. And you’re a little bit sensitive to these things, so you can see her aura but you can’t see everyone else’s. I bet as you go through life, from time to time you’ll see others with auras like hers. Nothing to worry about. Some people have a prophetic dream every couple years, some people get gut instincts that tell them not to get on a plane that ends up crashing. And some see auras every once in a while.”

  “But it predicted the future,” Marlene says. “The yellow thing—aura—it was, like, out to get her.”

  “How’s that?” the psychic seems puzzled.

  “When I first saw the aura,” I say, “it was sort of reaching out, touching the streetlights as the girl—Dina—walked home. It made all the lights go out. Then the next day it seems like it was focused around her left foot, and that’s when Dina’s shoe broke and she tripped and fell.”

  “You saw that? Before it happened, you knew something was going to hurt her left foot?” Madame turns away from me, reaches behind the sheet that blocked off the rest of the trailer, and retrieves a plastic bag full of cheap Indian reservation cigarettes. She lights up, her hands shaking just a bit so the lighter flame quivers, and then she takes a long drag. “Then I’m afraid you’re not looking at an aura.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You’re looking at a curse.”

  “A what now?” asks Tam, her voice just as sarcastic as usual. “Like abracadabra, double double toil and trouble? That kinda curse?” She chuckles at the thought. I’m still looking at Madame, but I just know Tam’s shaking her head and making a “this is stupid” face.

  Madame ignores the sarcasm. “Witchcraft, yes. Well, curse is the wrong word. More like a hex. And if you laugh one more time you’ll be waiting outside.”

  “Witchcraft.” I say, waving my arms. “Um? You want to elaborate?”

  “It’s a hex. Hexes are someone’s ill will made real. Bad feelings brought to life and set loose on some unsuspecting victim. A couple hundred years ago, you’d see hexes hanging onto half the people around here, but it’s not so common anymore.”

  “So why can I see it?”

  “Like I said, some people are just bo
rn that way and others get their gifts around your age. Hexes are rare. This is probably just the first time you ever actually saw a hex, so it’s the first time you discovered that you can see them.”

  I can’t believe this. It seems way too crazy. “A hex.”

  “Sounds like it. I can’t see ‘em myself, but if this thing’s reaching out and making life worse on this Dina girl, then yeah. She’s hexed.”

  “So what do we do about it?” I ask.

  “What you mean do?”

  “How do we un-hex her?”

  “I’m not a witch, I’m a psychic reader. I’m really no expert on this. But from what I know, I can tell you this: it’ll go away on its own. Like I said, a hex is one person’s bad feelings projected onto another. But over time those feelings will level off and fade away, and so will the hex. Turning off lights, tripping her, that’s pretty weak stuff. I’d say whoever did this has no real power and they probably just read about hexing on the internet. I bet they don’t even realize that their hex worked. Give it a few weeks, and as the bad feelings weaken, so will the hex.”

  “But what if the bad feelings get stronger? The hex will get worse? It already upgraded from turning off the lights to making her scrape her knee. I mean, what if next time it trips her into traffic?”

  “Or maybe it will make her spill her coffee. Oooh, scary!” says Tam. The psychic shoots her a look that makes her shut up.

  “This isn’t funny, kid, and you will keep your mouth shut!” she orders.

  “Oh come on, guys, you don’t really believe all this?” Tam asks us.

  “You can wait outside,” says Madame.

  “No, she’s fine. She’ll shut up,” I say, looking over my shoulder at Ryan, raising my eyebrows to say ‘control your girlfriend.’ I look back at Madame and ask a question that I’m not sure I actually believe. “You do readings here. See the future?”

  “I see a likely outcome, but the future’s never set. Like I said, sometimes you walk right into the prophecy, like there was nothing you could do to change it. Other times, my words are enough to change how you act, and you avoid the prediction. I just try to give folks a little guidance.”