Free Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman Page A

about swans or being alone in the dark. Don’t think of storms, or lightning and thunder, or the true love you won’t ever have. Life is brushing your teeth and making breakfast for your children and not thinking about things, and as it turns out, Sally is first-rate at all of this. She gets things done, and done on time. Still, she often dreams of the aunts’ garden. In the farthest corner there was lemon verbena, lemon thyme, and lemon balm. When Sally sat there cross-legged, and closed her eyes, the citrus scent was so rich she sometimes got dizzy. Everything in the garden had a purpose, even the lush peonies, which protect against bad weather and motion sickness and have been known to ward off evil. Sally isn’t sure she can still name all the varieties of the herbs that grew there, although she thinks she could recognize coltsfoot and comfrey by sight, lavender and rosemary by their distinctive scents.
    Her own garden is simple and halfhearted, which is just the way she likes it. There is a hedge of listless lilacs, some dog-woods, and a small vegetable patch where only yellow tomatoes and a few spindly cucumbers ever grow. The cucumber seedlings seem dusty from the heat on this last afternoon in June. It is so great to have the summers off. It’s worth everything she has to put up with over at the high school, where you have to always keep a smile on your face. Ed Borelli, the vice principal and Sally’s immediate superior, has suggested that everyone who works in the office have a grin surgically applied in order to be ready when parents come in and complain. Niceness counts, Ed Borelli reminds the secretaries on awful days, when unruly students are being suspended and meetings overlap and the school board threatens to extend the school year due to snow days. But false cheer is draining, and if you pretend long enough there’s always the possibility that you’ll become an automaton. By the end of the school term, Sally usually finds herself saying “Mr. Borelli will be right with you” in her sleep. That’s when she starts to count the days until summer; that’s when she just can’t wait for the last bell to ring.
    Since the semester ended twenty-four hours earlier, Sally should be feeling great, but she’s not. All she can make out is the throbbing of her own pulse and the beat of the radio blaring in Antonia’s bedroom upstairs. Something is not right. It’s nothing apparent, nothing that will come up and smack you in the face; it’s less like a hole in a sweater than a frayed hem that has unraveled into a puddle of thread. The air in the house feels charged, so that the hair on the back of Sally’s neck stands up, and her white shirt gives off little sparks.
    All afternoon, Sally finds she’s waiting for disaster. She tells herself to snap out of it; she doesn’t even believe it’s possible to foretell future misfortune, since there has never been any scientific documentation that such visionary phenomena exist. But when she does the marketing, she grabs a dozen lemons and before she can stop herself she begins to cry, there in the produce department, as though she were suddenly homesick for that old house on Magnolia Street, after all these years. When she leaves the grocery store, Sally drives by the YMCA field, where Kylie and her friend Gideon are playing soccer. Gideon is the vice president of the chess club, and Kylie suspects he may have thrown the deciding match in her favor so she could be president. Kylie is the only person on earth who seems able to tolerate Gideon. His mother, Jeannie Barnes, went into therapy two weeks after he was born; that’s how difficult he was and continues to be. He simply refuses to be like anyone else. He just won’t allow it. Now, for instance, he’s shaved off all his hair and is wearing combat boots and a black leather jacket, though it must be ninety in the shade.
    Sally is never comfortable around Gideon; she finds him rude and obnoxious and has