Page 10 of Love Potion No. 69

I shake my head, holding on to the final shreds of logic. I won’t admit what I saw. It was fantasy.

It wasn’t.

I look around for the voice that just whispered those words. “Did you…? Never mind.”

Clementine looks at me warily, then starts to back out of the kitchen. “Look, Quinton. My sisters like to play jokes, and that’s all this is. One big joke. You shouldn’t have come here. We’re not selling you the seeds. Go home to Coal’s Lake.”

“What’s the joke? The tea? It’s fine. I’m fine,” I insist, taking a tentative step towards her. I can’t let her go. I don’t know what she’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter.

“What we—I mean whatyou’re—feeling. It’s not real,” she repeats.

“You were about to say ‘we,’ weren’t you? It’s not just me.”

“Leave, Quinton. You don’t belong here.” She turns and runs out.

“Clementine, wait!” I call, but all I hear is a door shutting.

Clementine

MY PHONE PINGS with a message right as I get into my car.

Magnolia

Don’t forget you’re speaking to my class! Be here in 15 minutes.

Did shereallyjust send me a reminder with only fifteen minutes to get to the school and have an entire class presentation ready?

She did. She most definitely did.

And I could not be more grateful, because I was two seconds away from running back into the house, jumping on Quinton, and demanding he take me upstairs and bang the shit out of me. Which is a problem, because like I told him, none of this is real.

It’s not.

I send Magnolia a thumbs up and start the drive to the school, happy I’d managed to put on deodorant and everything else required to leave the house and look like a functioning adult before walking into the kitchen this morning. Sure, I’m in jeans that haven’t been washed in a month and I had to do a sniff test on the shirt I grabbed off the floor and put on, but this is high school. The kids either don’t care what they or anyone else looks like—and are therefore my people—or they care too much, and are therefore the people who gave me crap when I was there all of eight years ago. Hopefully the ratio has tilted in my favor over time.

I can’t stop thinking about him. His eyes, so dark brown I could barely see the irises, had felt like a physical touch as they raked over me in the kitchen. I could practically feel his lips on mine again, feel the way they streaked a path, hot and fast, down to my very center and made me come harder than I’d ever come before in my life.

The tug I feel for him, the near-cellular insistence of my body that there’s more to this than I realize, isn’t real. It can’t be. The immediate connection was caused by the love potion.

Then why haven’t you told your family you made it?

I ignore that. Because just now, in the kitchen? That was because I put the potion on, like a perfume. I wanted to see if it worked. And obviously, it did.

See? Logic. Pure and simple.

Bullshit.

* * *

I face the camera on the locked school door and wait for Mrs. Hayes in the administration office to buzz me in. Yanking open the door, I wave at her as I walk past and point at my wrist to indicate I’m almost late, which is true, but which also helps me avoid a painful ten-minute chat with her while I sign the visitor’s sheet.

I’ve never been in Magnolia’s classroom, because she wasn’t teaching at this school when I was here. She was teaching about thirty minutes away in Talladega, biding her time until old Mr. Carter finally decided to retire. The crotchety old goat was seventy-five when he finally put down his lab goggles, and if I hadn’t despised the way he constantly pushed me in the classroom, insisting I could do better, I might have admired his longevity. Even now, I go out of my way to avoid him when I see his car in the parking lot of the grocery store or coffee shop.

The smell is the same, a bit of body odor mixed with vague scents of confusion and chemicals. Magnolia spots me through the window, smiles and gestures me in. “Class, this is my sister, Miss Clementine Rowan.”

I lift my hand weakly and smile, straightening my spine and reminding myself that I am, in fact, a grown woman and need to act like it with these little twerps. Especially the one in the front, sneering at me like I’m some kind of slime she’s unexpectedly found on her shoe.

There are times when I wish I really were the witch my classmates teased me about being.