Free Twist My Charm by Toni Gallagher

either. I wish we could all be imperfect together.
    “No, he’s totally cute,” I say, just to be nice.
    Madison looks at me seriously. “Something went wrong,” she says.
    Oh no! Madison’s a bad artist
and
she makes mistakes just like I do? She’s even more imperfect than I thought!
    I want to know every detail, so I have to tell her the truth. “Something went wrong with me too.”
    “What happened?” she asks. I look into Ryder Landry’s unnaturally blue eyes and tell her the whole story.
    “We’ll fix it,” Madison promises. “We’re smart. We’ve got the book. There’ll be a way to undo it, for sure.”
    I like hearing all this, though there’s no way of knowing if any of it is true. But now I need to find out what
else
happened.
    “What went wrong for you?” I finally ask. “Did Larry drink the potion?”
    Madison is about to answer when a voice interrupts us.
    “Hey, Cleo, I haven’t seen your project yet. Where is it?” I turn to see Larry sipping from a blue cup, his headphones sitting around his neck.
    Madison and I aren’t thrilled with the interruption, but it’s not his fault. He doesn’t know. “Over with the drawings and paintings,” I tell him. I notice that his music is still filling the gym. “Hey, how is your music still playing if you’re here with us?”
    “I made a playlist long enough to let me take a break. I had to see what my compadres were up to and toast to their success!” He lifts his cup in the air, then drinks. “Aaaack!” he screams, pointing at Madison’s Ryder Landry head. “What’s that?”
    “Oh, leave me alone!” Madison tells him. “That’s Ryder Landry and you know it.”
    “Ryder Landry again?” Larry makes a barfing motion. “Don’t you ladies know there are awesome dudes like me right here at school?” He throws his arm over my shoulder and starts singing at the top of his lungs.
“You, you, you plus me, me, me. Put us together, it’s chemistry!”
    I wriggle out from underneath, laughing. “You know his songs way too well to blame it on your little sister!”
    Madison points in the direction of the DJ table. “Go play that song right now!”
    “I’ll get right on that…after I’ve played every other song known to man!” Larry says, strolling away. Then he turns and winks at both of us. “Have a good night, ladies.” Bowing toward me, he adds, “Cleo,” like one of King Arthur’s knights.
    “I like him, but he can really be annoying sometimes,” I say to Madison. “Now, what happened?” I pause and make sure Larry is far enough away so he won’t hear me. “So…did he drink the potion or not?”
    “No,” Madison says, disappointed.
    “Well, maybe that’s a good thing—”
    Madison cuts me off. “It’s not good. I was mixing up the potion in some lemonade and Sam came back.”
    She’s right. That’s not good. “Did she see you do it?”
    “No, not really, but she was all suspicious like before.”
    “You didn’t…
give
it to her, did you?” I ask. If Samantha drank the potion without Larry around, she could’ve talked to…anyone after that. A teacher, a cafeteria worker, the hamster in the fourth-grade classroom. Anyone!
    “No, no, no. But she was asking and asking. She really wasn’t letting it go.”
    I smile. Samantha’s like Toby when he wants to be taken on a walk or play with his favorite squeaky toy. When she puts her mind to something, she usually gets it.
    “I had to get her to stop, so I told her to go find you and check out your drawings.”
    “Well, that’s okay,” I say with a sigh. But I can tell there’s more to come.
    Madison takes a deep breath. She looks at her Ryder Landry head as if he’ll help her say the next thing. “I put it down.”
    “Put what down?” I ask.
    “The lemonade. When I was talking to Sam.”
    “What do you mean?” I’m afraid I already know what she means, but I want to be sure.
    “I left the lemonade on the table.”
    “O…kay,” I reply,