The school had failed Mildred, but there was one more place she could try. The moped motor hummed beneath her as she rode along, steadily calming her mind. Thinking through the fog of helplessness was possible, and she realized the best course of action now was to bring the situation to her mother.
It was still early in the day, so the most likely place for Barbara to be was in her home office. She might be upset with Mildred for leaving school early, but when Mildred explained why she left, she hoped her mom would understand. Ashamed that she hadn't taken after her mother, Mildred had never actually explained to Barbara why she hated school so much. It was now time to clue her in; there were no other choices. Despite her harsh attitude, Barbara still cared about her daughter's well being. Hearing that it had gotten this severe at school for Mildred would make Barbara rethink things. Mildred doubted her mom would allow something like this to go on even a moment longer. She probably would have already handled it if she had known what Mildred dealt with daily. Mildred knew that her mom was a very persuasive woman who liked to be on top of most situations. Mildred had no doubt that the taunts would soon be history. Mrs. Waco would visit Roanoke High and Mildred's life would change for the better. She would see to it that Miss Spade punished Mildred's bullies, and they might even get in trouble with their parents. They'd never mess with Mildred Waco again. The thought made her cackle out loud as she zoomed down the busy street.
***
Mildred walked into her house and saw the stuffed suitcase by the door, zipped up and ready to go. Immediately, her spirits fell. This sight was an all-too-common one for her.
"Oh, Millie, you're home," Barbara exclaimed. Her black hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her outfit was a Victoria's Secret Pink joggers and a jacket—what she referred to as her comfortable traveling clothes. "Why are you home so early?"
"There's something—"
"Just a moment, dear," she said as she checked the noise that was coming from her phone. "That's my office again. We really need to hurry."
"The reason I left school—"
"Don't, Millie," Barbara said. She busied herself going through her bag, making sure everything was accounted for. "Honey, I can't deal with your excuses today. Miss school, go to school, today it doesn't matter. We've got something huge going on and your father and I have to get to Hawaii."
"What? Now?"
"Yes, now." She stopped looking through the bag and went into the kitchen, where Mildred watched her take a few packets of a special fitness powder she mixed in her drinks. "I was going to text you, but I'm kind of glad you're here to see us off instead. I do hate leaving while you're out."
"Mom, can you just stop rushing a minute so we can talk?" Mildred asked, not bothering to inquire what the urgent work was this time. She knew it would concern some type of animal in a place that was warm, exotic, and completely void of their oddball daughter. Her heart grew somehow heavier.
Barbara finally removed her attention from her luggage and her phone and looked at her daughter. She noticed Mildred's troubled, red eyes. "What is it, honey?"
Here was Mildred's chance, if only the lump in her throat would shrink enough so she could squeeze the words around it. "Um . . . there's these . . . these kids—"
"Barbara!" her dad yelled from their bedroom, his voice much more demanding than poor, timid Mildred's. "Where's my traveling razor?"
"It's in the bathroom drawer!" Barbara yelled back.
"Where? I don't see it!" he shouted.
Mildred's mom blew a frustrated breath and mumbled, "He does this every time." Then she patted Mildred's arm with her bony ring-clad hand. "Look, honey, whatever it is, do what makes you happy. Don't give in to peer pressure. Tomorrow is a new day. Things change."
"Barbara!" Ben called.
She ignored him and kept talking to Mildred. "If it's still a problem, we'll talk about it after we get back, okay? There have been strange reports about dolphins and we're going to get to the bottom of it."
"Oh . . . okay, Mom, but first—"
"Barbara!"
"I'm coming!" her mom cried sharply.
Mildred flinched. So much for parental backup.
***
Ben found his travel razor. He and his wife left after giving Mildred some cash for "healthy food and not pizza" and reminding Mildred about her emergency credit card. It was where it always sat: on top of the desk next to the stack of books that Mildred barely ever cracked open. It was a books-all-high-schoolers-should-read collection compiled by Barbara, and it included a stack of science books that didn't interest Mildred in the least.
They were gone and she was alone with her pain, as she often was. Those ugly words shouted at her in the hallway bounced around in her head for the next few hours, without restraint. There were no outside voices to tell her to ignore them or that those voices were wrong, so she started adding to them herself.
Not good enough, not smart enough.
The voices seemed stronger than ever now that she was alone, thinking that not even the people she thought she trusted were willing to help her.
Not pretty enough, not talented enough.
The pain ripped through her, and it began to hurt so much Mildred felt angry. How could the teachers dismiss her the way they did? How could her own parents just ignore her suffering like that? Anger fueled her to act despite the carelessness of the teachers and her parents. She would find a way to make the bullies stop. There had to be some technique to use. Something that would make them sorry.
The problem was, she didn't know how. She had no knowledge of ways to handle these situations, and not a single person was willing to help her.
Mildred lay on her neatly made bed. "A clean bed is the first step to a good day," Barbara liked to say. She must have made Mildred's bed after Mildred had left for school. But the tidy bed didn't do a thing to make her day better. It had been just as full of despair as the day before and the day before that. Tomorrow and the next day and then the day after that would be the same unless she took some sort of action.
Mildred knew she couldn't just sit around and do nothing about this. Not anymore. It was killing her. Smothering her. She felt like she'd just been letting them pull her deeper and deeper underwater, and she had reached the point where she could either kick off the bottom and break the surface or succumb to the heaviness in her chest. She wanted to break free. She didn't want to be a victim her whole life. She refused to be their victim any longer. Those people had had a good nine years to pick on her, but that was all about to end as far as she was concerned. As soon as she could figure out how to stop it.
In a fit of frustration, she took her laptop off her nightstand, plopped it in front of her on the bed, and turned it on. The screen filled with a starry background and a plethora of game shortcuts. Ignoring them, she pulled up the browser and typed get back at bullies into the search engine. Results flooded the page. So many came up that she felt nervous. Where should she start? What if none of them worked? She needed something to distract her worries and decided she needed a snack while she tackled the long list.
Several restaurants she frequented were listed as saved numbers in her phone, but she looked for one specifically: Dominico's, her favorite local pizza place. She preferred them because they weren't ever stingy with the toppings, like the other places in town.
"Thank you for choosing Dominico's, will this be delivery or pickup?" Dominico's familiar voice floated into Mildred's ear.
"It'll be delivery today."
"Hi, Mildred! You want the usual?"
"Yes, a large supreme."
"Sure thing. Hey, sure you don't want to come down? Some kid beat your score on the pinball a few days ago."
Mildred felt a tiny flash of jealousy; it had taken her a long time to make that score.
"Maybe tomorrow. I'm working on something else right now," she said.
"Okay, okay. We'll have it out to you in about thirty minutes."
Mildred ended the call, feeling like thirty minutes was ages away, but her stomach was queasy now. She pulled a bag of barbeque-flavored chips from her hidden stash under the bed. From the first taste of flavor, she began to calm down and found that it was easier to concentrate on her mission. She crunched away, momentarily mollified, while she scrolled, clicked, and waited for her pizza delivery.
The first article on the search suggested she tell someone. Already did.
The next handful were support groups. No, thought Mildred, who'd already been let down by her principal, counselor, teachers, and mother. In another life, she might have trusted these well-meaning, faceless people. But after what she'd been through, she wasn't ready to join a group of strangers who she felt might pretend to care so they could laugh behind her back. To her, it seemed very impersonal to get support from someone she couldn't see. An anonymous person could really be anyone. It even occurred to her that it could be her attackers hiding behind the screen, which was a terrifying notion.
Maybe there were support groups for victims of bullying being held in some building downtown. Unfortunately, she didn't see any times or addresses for any such meetings. Just as well, she decided, because she wasn't sure how she'd feel about opening up to a room full of people all staring at her either. She didn't want to be put on the spot when the leader said, "Now stand up and introduce yourself." Imagining herself standing in front of those people—people she had made up entirely in her head, with no faces or names, only eyes that stared, waiting—made her hot and nervous.
She clicked away with fervor.
The next couple of sites were mostly other people asking the same thing, on a website where others could submit answers to questions. How can I stop my bullies? A lot of people were confessing that they were also bullied, sympathizing with the questioner. Some people told them to get over it, which she thought was an ignorant reply, because she couldn't simply get over it. Especially not when she was bombarded by it every single day. How lucky for them, she thought, that they could be so oblivious to how painful it is to be bullied. That they couldn't fathom how she could be so crushed and broken that putting it out of her mind would be impossible. They didn't realize that the awful abuse played over and over and over, haunting her.
***
Mildred was nine and she was wearing a shirt that she'd fallen in love with in the store. It was white with black spots, as if ink had spilled on it, creating an array of interpretive shapes. In them, she could make out a rabbit, a bird, a heart, and there was one that looked like an angel from one angle and a dragon from another.
Her spirits were high that day, as she walked toward Mr. Pratt's second-grade class. The primary students were never in classrooms alone, and so they lined up in the hallway to wait for Mr. Pratt to come unlock the door to the classroom.
On this day, Mildred was hopeful when she saw Chelle outside the door, waiting in line with the look of sleep still on her face. Maybe she would notice Mildred's clothes and say, "I like your shirt, Mildred," the same way she had to Yvette the day before, when she wore a rainbow-colored shirt with white leopard prints. Upon seeing Mildred, Chelle brightened and sucked in a huge breath. Mildred grinned, expecting to be praised for having a cool shirt that stood out in a crowd.
"Cowgirl!" Chelle said. She made the words sound nasty, as though she was calling Mildred a girl who was a cow, rather than a girl who ranched cows, neither of which had been Mildred's goal. The words were venomous, spewing out in a sizzling spray that spread to the rest of the students lined up outside Mr. Pratt's classroom that day.
"Cowgirl. Cowgirl. Cowgirl!" And it surrounded her, closing in on her like quicksand.
How wrong she'd been.
How embarrassed she'd been.
***
And then she saw it, while sitting on her humdrum gray comforter, surfing the web on her laptop as regular sixteen-year-old Mildred, a far cry from her "cowgirl" days. On the screen, she saw the strangest answer, posted to some other unlucky soul who was being bullied and desperately seeking an end to it all. Curse them, it said. Simple, but powerful.
I can do that, Mildred thought as she crunched another salty chip between her teeth. A light sprinkle of crumbs landed on her keyboard. Curses had never occurred to her before, but the idea didn't sound ridiculous. She believed wholeheartedly that with enough intent and the right type of guide, a curse could be perfectly feasible. She'd seen it on television before, in some of the scary movies she used to watch with Patsy. There were reasons people wouldn't walk under ladders or open umbrellas in their houses. It was because those things brought bad luck. Curses seemed somewhat similar in nature: bad luck sent to an individual with intent, although there had to be more to it than that. One would have to know what they were doing. She wasn't a witch or anything, so she didn't have the skill to perform a curse on her own. She needed to find the right instructions . . . or someone who could perform the curse for her.
It might be a little odd, but it was the best suggestion she'd found. Nothing else had gripped her like this. Nothing else had felt right.
She typed curse my enemies into the search engine this time. Dozens of pages of results came up. Excitement lurched inside her, bringing with it the possibility of a tomorrow where she didn't have to be afraid to be seen by her peers. Where she didn't have to map out an escape route for every room she entered, just to feel safe. For the first time, she was hopeful that all the teasing would end. But beneath that hope was also fear: fear that it wouldn't work.
No, it would work. She was certain. She just had to find the real deal. Keep away from the fake stuff. She needed real dark magical hexes or curses.
The first few sites in the search results looked silly. Make Your Bully Love You, one was titled.
Gross, Mildred thought.
Give Your Bully Pimples, said another.
How weak, she thought.
She bumped into many amateur spells that sounded childish. Write the name of your bully on a piece of paper and burn it in a bonfire.
What good would that do? Mildred wondered. She clicked away from it angrily, feeling her hope slowly evaporate into the stuffy air of her bedroom, where her mother had sprayed some type of air freshener when she made the bed.
What Mildred needed was something advanced, something to give efficient results. As she searched, the screen suddenly began to fail. The image pixelated and blinked out to a black screen a few times. Her heart lurched.
"No, no," she said. She smacked the screen a few times, leaving greasy fingerprints with barbeque crumbs on it.
The screen came back clearly, with a website displayed as if she'd clicked it by accident. For a moment, Mildred feared the heavily sprayed air freshener in the closed room had gone to her head. When she blinked, it didn't go away: it was real. She couldn't believe her luck. It was the perfect website. There was no list of fake spells on it. Only a name and address: Crossroads Magicks, 6 Hollow Grove, Roanoke, Virginia. It was in her town, although she wasn't sure she knew exactly where Hollow Grove was. Crossroads Magicks sounded like exactly the kind of thing she needed. The design of the page alone made her think it was serious stuff. Skulls, dark colors, bones . . . it all gave off a spooky vibe.
The doorbell rang, jarring her out of the web. She checked the digital clock beside her bed. It had been only twenty minutes since she'd ordered her pizza. Dominico's is really stepping up their service, she thought, pleased. She rolled off her bed and went to the door. On the other side was her old friend Patsy Porter, who did not work for Dominico's. Mildred knew for a fact that Dominico's was a family-run business and Patsy wasn't one of them. Up until now, Mildred was certain Patsy had purposely forgotten the directions to Mildred's house, as though forgetting any other terrible childhood memory. As far as Mildred was aware, Patsy had absolutely zero reason to be standing at her door ever again. They were in two different worlds now, and Patsy made it clear at school that she wanted no part of Mildred's world.
"What do you want?" Mildred said suspiciously, and a little rudely. She checked behind Patsy to see if any of the popular kids were waiting to bomb her with water balloons, rotten eggs, or whatever awful things they had in mind. Nobody was in sight, but it didn't mean they weren't there.
"I just wanted to check on you," Patsy said sweetly.
She was wearing a school spirit shirt, yellow with Roanoke High Turkeys written in maroon across the front. The yellow made the golden undertones in her hair look bright. She was smiling. Patsy looked innocent enough, but the others couldn't be far behind her, Mildred knew. Her heart skipped. What if they knew what she was doing?
She was much too busy to find out what they had planned.
"I'm fine," Mildred said quickly, and shut the door in Patsy's face.
Just to make sure the girl left, she watched through a crack in the blinds. Patsy stared, moved as if intending to ring the bell again, seemed to think better of it, then finally turned and left.
Mildred was still watching out the window as the pizza delivery driver, Dominico's daughter, Ariel, arrived. Ariel, like her father, had thick, dark curls and a warm smile. She was in her late twenties and a little on the heavier side herself. Nothing like Mildred, but she did have an awkwardness about her that helped Mildred relax in her presence. The smell of the pizza filled her head even before Ariel opened up the box to show her the quality of the pie. The delectable cheesy mess was already paid for—Dominico had Mildred's emergency credit card in the system. She gave Ariel a five from her not-pizza money as a tip, and then something occurred to her.
"Hey, you drive around here a lot, right?" she asked. "Do you know where 6 Hollow Grove is?"
The young woman gave the question some thought. "Nah. Can't say I do. Sorry."
Weird, Mildred thought. If anyone knew their way around town, it should be a delivery driver. Ariel had delivered from the time she was a teenager.
"Why do you ask?"
"Just some place somebody told me about," Mildred said, not wanting to go into detail.
"Sorry, must have meant some other town maybe," Ariel said. "Enjoy!"
"Maybe," Mildred said. "Thanks!" She shut the door, then bit into a slice of pizza as she went down the hall toward her laptop.
The screen had changed. White lines now wound through a black background. Mildred recognized a map of her town, with a line labeled Hollow Grove leading off the familiar Norwich Drive. There never used to be a Hollow Grove there. As far back as she could remember, that place had been thick forest. Mildred shrugged. New roads were built all the time. She scribbled the address while she ate.