Free Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 01 The Salem Witch Tryouts by Kelly McClymer Page B

wasn’t. Trust me. Dinner at my house would mean I could pick his brain to my heart’s content, and all he’d get was a close-up look at a mortal who changed from his three-piece suit to faded blue jeans when he came home for dinner.
    “You could meet my father—a real, flesh-and-blood mortal who knows all about witches,” I explained, trying to derail any stray hope he might have of doing the boyfriend-girlfriend thing. I knew my mother would approve and my father would freak.
    My mom spoiled my dad by marrying him—he doesn’t get that geek is a rare taste for most girls. Everyone says my mom was a kewl girl before she got married to a mortal and had my brother and me. Everyone on my mother’s side, that is—my father’s family does find my mother’s family just a touch … bohemian, I think my grandmother says.
    Samuel had only enough time to unswallow his tongue and say “Where—?” before we popped back into our classes—me, remedial, of course. I didn’t have a clue what he was doing—starting fires and practicing putting them out in the Black Forest, for all I knew. All the while simmering the dinner invitation in the back of his mind and probably making it into something bigger than I’d meant it to be. I’d have to slip in a mention of my boyfriend back home—evenif that was a slight case of once upon a fairy tale.
    This being popped in and out of classes was getting really annoying—a very bad sign for the first half of the first day of the school year. I couldn’t wait to ask Mom if all the restrictions and rules eased up in senior year. Not to mention find out about the family spell book she had forgotten to give me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what her Talent was. She might say Air, and I’d have to worry that she’s been reading my mind for the past sixteen years.
    Sigh. Only a half day left before I find out what she should have told me before I left this morning.

Chapter 7

    MADDIE: NE hotties 2 ease ur pain?
    ME: Teachers count?
    MADDIE: Like Duranti?
    ME: Better
    MADDIE: Whoa! Subject?
    ME: Math
    MADDIE: Brainiac Only U!
    ME: Girls gotta crush Speaking of howz my boy Brent?
    MADDIE: Oops Practice startin C U
    I hadn’t lied to Maddie. Exactly. The boys at the new school weren’t anything special. But I didn’t want to giveher any ideas about me being ready to ditch my boy back home and find someone new here. I was still hoping Dad would come to his senses and take us home, after all.
    Which didn’t make school any easier to live through. After remedial levitation, my next class was history. Still no Samuel. I didn’t know whether it was good that I didn’t have classes with him (easier to keep him from getting the wrong idea) or bad (harder to pick his brain).
    I did know it was good to have history in the witchworld. My ninth-grade history teacher, Mr. Duranti, who was such a hottie all the girls crushed on him madly, had liked to dress up in cheap costumes to “make history real” for us. The boys had made fun of him, but we girls just drooled. He could have put a clown suit on and we wouldn’t have noticed anything but his gorgeous brown eyes.
    Mrs. Goode didn’t bother to dress up. Nope. She still wore her Puritan gray. Not an inch of skin showing except her round, pink face. Even her hands were covered in thin, gray gloves. Living history in a sense no mortal could ever understand.
    We were starting with the Salem witch trials, apparently, as there was a large burning stake in the middle of the classroom.
    “If I ever hear of you talking about how witches were burned at the stake in Puritan England or America, I will sentence you to a day in the stocks.” There was laughterfrom the other students, but since actual stocks were in the corner of the room—a Puritan punishment device that looked hundreds of years old and probably delivered terminal splinters—I decided to see whether they were laughing because they knew she was joking or because they were sickos