The Forgetting Spell Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Lucille Glassman, who soars

  EPIGRAPH

  I wish people would spend less time worrying about rules. There isn’t a rule book to life, and there never will be—not if I have anything to say about it.

  —THE BIRD LADY

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Lauren Myracle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  When Darya was six, and hadn’t yet forgotten certain things, she went off one day in search of the Bird Lady. She wasn’t supposed to. She was supposed to go right home with her sisters: Natasha, who was seven, and Ava, who was only five. But Darya did it anyway, all by herself, because her life was a misery.

  At school she had to sit by awful Ben Trapman, who sniffed his fingers and never washed his hair. Her desk had metal legs that squeaked. There was never enough glue to go around, and her teacher didn’t like her, although she pretended to, which made it worse.

  “Oh, those poor Blok girls,” Miss Ellie said to the other teachers. “Imagine—growing up without a mother!” And “Darya, dear, when did you last hear from her? Hasn’t she written your father a letter? A grown woman—a mother!—can’t simply disappear, now, can she?”

  Darya hated Miss Ellie. She hated the hungry look Miss Ellie got when she peered at Darya, as if she wanted to gobble Darya up for a good story to tell the others.

  On the playground—

  The playground wasn’t all bad. Last year, in kindergarten, Darya had sat by herself underneath the play structure, moving pebbles from one pile to another. She’d been so babyish.

  This year, she had Suki and Stephanie to play with. Suki had shiny black hair. Stephanie had shiny yellow hair, the color of butter, and it was long and thick, and all the boys said Stephanie was the prettiest girl at Willow Hill Elementary. Sometimes they brought her Dum Dums, or pieces of gum. If it was gum, Stephanie would rip the stick into thirds and share.

  Darya’s hair was red and curly, and she thought maybe she would have been the prettiest girl if she was nicer, like Stephanie, and didn’t pull her eyebrows together and scrunch her mouth up, like her aunts always told her not to do.

  Darya and Suki and Stephanie played groundies sometimes, where you had to jump around on the play structure and never touch the ground, unless you were it and trying to tag the others. When you were it, you had to close your eyes and not peek. Suki peeked, though. Suki was still babyish about certain things. Her lunchbox, for example. Dora the Explorer!

  Darya carried her lunch in a paper bag, and she packed it herself, unlike Suki, who made her mom do it. Back when Darya was four and went to half-day preschool, way back then, her mother had packed her lunch. Only it was called “snack,” and it had to be healthy and no sweets. Mama always put a riddle in the bag, or a puzzle, folded up on a piece of paper with xxx, Mama at the bottom.

  Darya still had those slips of paper, every single one of them. She would keep them forever, and they would be hers alone.

  But today, and the day before, and even the day before that, Suki and Stephanie hadn’t wanted to play groundies. They’d wanted to go witch hunting, and Darya’s mother was the witch.

  “Here, witchie witchie!” Suki had called during afternoon recess. She’d scampered from bush to bush, peeking under the brambles as if Mama had left Darya and her sisters and Papa just to hide on the elementary school playground.

  “We should look high up!” Stephanie had said, making a sun visor out of her hand and gazing at the treetops. “People never look up. They only see what’s in front of them. My mom reads mysteries every single day. That’s why she knows stuff like that. If you ever have to hide from a bad guy, climb a tree, or wedge yourself high up in the corner of the ceiling.”

  “You can’t wedge yourself in the corner of a ceiling,” Darya replied. “How would you stay up? Super glue?”

  “Or if you are the bad guy and don’t want to be found, you should also find somewhere high to hide,” Stephanie went on. “People never look up.”

  “My mother isn’t a bad guy,” Darya said.

  Suki had raised her hand. She did that even when the teachers weren’t there. “It was bad that she left, though. My mommy said it was bad magic.”

  Darya had pressed her fingernails hard into her palms, because there wasn’t “good” magic or “bad” magic. She knew because Mama had told her so. Magic was magic, and magic was strong, and Willow Hill, the town where she lived, was chock-full of magic. Some people said no, that magic was make-believe and not allowed in the real world. Even at six, Darya had known better.

  “My mom said someone cast a spell on your mom,” Stephanie had said on the playground.

  “No, Darya’s mommy did the spell,” Suki corrected. “That’s why she’s the witch. And then she used a disappearing spell to disappear. Poof! That’s why she’s gone, right, Darya?”

  And then the game hadn’t been fun anymore. It hadn’t been fun in the first place, really. Darya’s heart ached with the sadness of missing Mama. She ached, too, from the fight of keeping the sadness in when it wanted so desperately to be out.

  “Your insides are too close to the surface, that’s all,” her aunt Elena sometimes said when she spotted Darya being teary. Sometimes she’d go on and say, “There’s no shame in it, sweetheart. Your mother felt things just as strongly.”

  When that happened, Darya would block her ears in her special way of humming loudly within her own head. Usually it did the trick, and after a moment, Darya could blink and lift her chin and tell her aunt that she’d had something in her eye. She hadn’t been teary, even if it looked like she had.

  Anyway, Darya wasn’t like Mama.

  Or maybe she was, but Mama wasn’t who Suki and Stephanie said she was.

  She wasn’t a witch.

  Mama and Papa hadn’t had a big fight, which was another rumor about why Mama had left. Nor had Mama fought with Aunt Elena, who was Mama’s younger sister, or Aunt Vera, Mama’s older sister.

  So many rumors, all of them beating their wings against Darya’s worst fear: that one day, someone would stumble upon the truth. If that happened . . . well, just imagining it made Darya’s tummy ball up and her legs go wobbly. What if she peed herself? A first grader! Wetting herself by the swing set, right there for everybody to see!

  If Mama were here, none of this would matter. Mama would make everything better. Every day Darya wished she’d come home and do just that, but what good were wishes to a six-year-old?

  Which
was why she had to talk to the Bird Lady.

  The Bird Lady was old and wrinkly and strange, and the rule was that Darya should be kind to her—from far away. But up close, there were different rules. If Darya saw the Bird Lady walking toward her, then Darya should cross to the other side of the street, for example. Also don’t wave at her, don’t smile at her, and don’t ever be alone with her.

  But grown-ups broke rules. Mama was a grown-up, and she broke the biggest rule of all. So why shouldn’t Darya?

  “I need a spell,” she announced, sweaty and slightly out of breath by the time she found the Bird Lady by the lake in the middle of the town park.

  “Oh?” the Bird Lady said. She sat on a bench scattering seeds for the birds, but she stopped and looked Darya up and down. Flustered, Darya smoothed the skirt of the dress she was wearing. It was her happy dress with cherries all over it.

  The Bird Lady’s clothes weren’t happy. They were strange, like the rest of her. A frumpy coat that came down past her knees and spilled over the bench, even though it was warm outside. Scuffed brown rain boots even though the sky was bright and clear.

  Darya let her gaze travel higher, taking in the Bird Lady’s rosy cheeks, bright eyes, and big ears with droopy earlobes. Topping everything off was a pouf of cotton candy hair, only gray instead of pink. Aunt Vera would have a fit over that hair. She’d call it a bird’s nest, because of all the tangles.

  A bird’s nest for the Bird Lady. Darya almost giggled. Then she remembered why she was here.

  “Well?” Darya said.

  “Well, what?” the Bird Lady said.

  “The spell. It needs to be a forgetting spell, and I need it now.”

  “Ah. And what makes you think I can grant such a request?”

  “Because everyone says so. That you’re soft in the head and should be put in a home, but you can do things. Like spells.” She furrowed her brow, bothered by a thought that before now had never crossed her mind. People in Willow Hill did say the Bird Lady should be “put in a home.” They said it in a scolding sort of way, as if being put in a home was just the right punishment for a strange old lady with a soft head.

  But wouldn’t being put in a home be a good thing, if the person didn’t have a home of her own?

  Darya gave herself a shake. “So can you? Grant me a spell?”

  “If I choose to.”

  “See! Then that’s how I know you can, because you just told me!”

  The Bird Lady tilted her head. “If I choose to, I said. Being able to do something is one thing. Choosing to do so is another.”

  Darya pushed twin whiffs of air through her nostrils. “Fine, then will you?”

  “What will I get out of it?”

  “Huh?”

  “You want something from me. What will I get in return?” The Bird Lady’s expression was cunning, and it made Darya feel . . . not naked, exactly. But something like that.

  Darya fidgeted. Then she stopped, determined to prove she was a worthy match. “All right, what do you want?”

  The Bird Lady tapped a gnarled finger against chapped lips. “I’m not sure you have anything I want, to be honest. You’re just a child.”

  “I am not! I had to grow up fast, because . . . because I just did. Everyone says so, and it was very unfortunate.” Using a word like unfortunate gave her courage. “And I’m smart. I’ve been reading since I was three. Lots of parents say their kids are early readers when all the kids can do is spell ‘ice’ or their own name, but I could read books and riddles and all sorts of stuff.” She paused. “I was three and a half, but still.”

  “Riddles?” the Bird Lady said.

  “And picture puzzles. I like to figure stuff out, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”

  “You’re stubborn,” the Bird Lady said approvingly.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “And ornery.”

  Darya scowled.

  “Give me a riddle,” the Bird Lady said. “Let’s see if you know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’d rather not,” Darya said. Talking about riddles made her think of Mama, and she didn’t want to go down that road. She very specifically wanted to not go down that road ever again, which was why she was here.

  The Bird Lady shrugged. “Then I shan’t give you the spell.”

  “‘Shan’t’?” Darya said. “Who says ‘shan’t’?”

  “I do, obviously. It means—”

  “I know what it means. It means won’t, and you’re being a big fat poopy head, especially since you just told me you could. You just don’t want to, because . . . because . . .” To Darya’s horror, her eyes welled with tears.

  “If I’m a poopy head for not giving you the spell, aren’t you a poopy head for not giving me a riddle?” the Bird Lady asked.

  She reached into a small paper bag, which reminded Darya of the snack bags Mama used to pack for her. The ones with riddles and puzzles in them. The Bird Lady’s bag held sunflower seeds, which she scattered in a semicircle in front of her.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “Tell me a riddle, and I’ll give you the spell.”

  Darya squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. “For real?”

  The Bird Lady drew herself up. “I am always real, even in situations that others perceive as unreal.”

  Darya swallowed. This was what she had come for, after all. And she was stubborn. As much as she wanted to flee, a stronger part of her held firm, even though the only riddle she could think of was the riddle she hated most in the world.

  “When is a door not a door?” she blurted. She gave the answer right away, afraid that if she didn’t, the Bird Lady would, and their deal would be off. “When it’s a jar, that’s when!”

  The Bird Lady looked amused.

  “What?” Darya said. “That’s the answer.”

  “Yes . . . but I’m afraid you don’t know what it means.”

  “I do! A door is for going out. A jar is for keeping stuff in, like fireflies. You put them in and screw the lid tight, and they can’t escape because there isn’t a door. Duh!”

  “They would die, the fireflies.”

  “No! Not if you punched holes in the lid!”

  Darya tried to get ahold of herself. She hadn’t come to the Bird Lady to tell the door-and-jar riddle. She’d come very specifically to forget the stupid door-and-jar riddle, because it had to do with her, and Mama, and why Mama left.

  Darya didn’t like dead fireflies either, or dead anything. The Bird Lady was a big fat mean poopy head for saying that.

  But clearly the Bird Lady didn’t understand, so in tight, flustered sentences, Darya explained. She told the whole ugly story, and when she was done, she saw pity in the Bird Lady’s eyes.

  “And that’s what you want to forget?” the old woman asked.

  “Yes. All of it.”

  “You’re sure? There’s an old saying, you know, that you should be careful what you wish for—”

  “Because it might come true,” Darya finished hotly. “I know! I want it to come true.” She clenched her fists. “I told you the riddle. Now give me the spell.”

  The Bird Lady studied her, and for a horrible moment Darya thought she wouldn’t. That she wasn’t a woman of her word. Then the Bird Lady cleared her throat and told Darya step by step what to do.

  “I have to do it?! I thought you would do it.” Darya fluttered her fingers. “You know, hocus-pocus and abracadabra.”

  “You, little girl, are impatient, stubborn, and prone to outbursts of emotion.”

  “I am not!” Darya exploded.

  “These qualities can hinder you—do you know what hinder means?—but for the spell to work, you have to figure out how to let them help you. And you have to do it yourself.”

  Darya groaned. “This sounds like homework, and we don’t even get homework yet. Not in first grade. I thought it was going to be easy!”

  “Things that matter are rarely easy. Shall I tell you again what
to do?”

  “I suppose.”

  The Bird Lady raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes. Yes, please.”

  The Bird Lady spoke, and Darya went straight home and followed her every instruction. When Aunt Elena asked why she needed the glue, and what in heaven’s name was she doing with that shoe, Darya lied and said she was doing an art project. It was what the Bird Lady had coached her to say if anyone got nosy.

  When she finished, her brain felt foggy, as if she’d woken up from a long nap. She stared out the window for a while. She pulled apart a dust bunny and threw the fuzzy strands in the trash. Soon, Aunt Vera called her downstairs for dinner. Spaghetti, which she liked, and green beans, which she didn’t.

  The world moved on, and Darya never realized that the Bird Lady had pulled off something clever in the casting of the spell. She’d smudged the memory Darya wanted to forget, but she’d also given Darya the key to reclaiming it, should she decide one day that she wanted to.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Suki and Stephanie surprised Darya in the school cafeteria with a birthday cake, because thirteenth birthdays were special for girls in Willow Hill. Tally Striker, who was new, sat with them, her green eyes bright and curious. Darya had met Tally over the summer, and if Darya wasn’t yet ready to call Tally a friend, it was only because Darya wasn’t a new-BFF-every-day kind of girl.

  She was too careful with her emotions for that.

  She had trust issues, some might say.

  But Tally was nice, and Steph and Suki seemed open to her, so . . . probably Tally would be a friend. Eventually. Maybe already.

  “You guys!” Darya said, smiling at Suki and Stephanie. She widened her scope to include Tally as well. “Thank you. You guys are the best.”

  “You’re finally a teenager!” Suki squealed, clapping.

  “For real, Darya,” Steph said. “I can’t believe you’ve been twelve for so long.”

  “It’s a stunner,” Darya said. She kept her tone light, when what she wanted to say was, Try being me. Then you’d believe.

  Every other eighth grader had turned thirteen during their seventh-grade year, or over the summer. This included Tally, who’d celebrated her thirteenth birthday before she’d moved to Willow Hill.