All-Season Edie by Annabel Lyon Page A

a splint. I’m bending down to adjust the hem of my jeans over it when the back of my neck starts to prickle. Slowly, I turn around.
    Dexter and Mean Megan are standing in the doorway, holding glasses of juice. Dexter is also holding three swirly-striped cupcake candles.
    â€œWHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?” she says.
    â€œLOOKING FOR DUSTY!” I say. Both of us tend to get loud when we’re surprised.
    â€œTell you what,” Mean Megan says as I sidle toward the door. “If I see your buggy, mangy, flea-bag, rodent-breath cat, I’ll let you know. I’ll drown it in the sink and leave it on your pillow.” She pushes the knapsack onto the floor and sits down on the bed. So she hasn’t noticed anything. I feel the cherry pen slip over the knob of my ankle-bone and poke at my pants. Dexter is still glaring.
    â€œWhy do you have candles?” I ask innocently, to distract her. “Did Mom let you?”
    It works. “If you tell, I will kill you.”
    â€œOoh.” I’ve made it out the door. “Scary.”
    â€œI’ll bake chunky cat cookies and make you eat them,” Mean Megan says. I see her flip her long black hair over her shoulder just before Dexter slams her bedroom door. Although I can’t feel them, I know I hold a few of those same hairs in my tightly clenched fist.
    Up in my room, Dusty lies dozing in a lozenge of sunlight on the quilt. “Wake up,” I tell him, dumping my loot onto my little desk. “You have to help me. You’re my familiar.”
    Dusty gives his rumbling purr, a loud noise from a small cat.
    â€œThat’s right,” I say busily, getting organized. “You’re a witch’s cat now.”
    The thing I pulled from my sister’s coat pocket turns out to be a tube of pink lipstick. This is strictly forbidden, so Dexter must cherish it very much to risk the kind of trouble she’ll get into if Mom finds it. I wrap the yellow hairs around it and knot them and do the same with the black hairs and the pen. Since I can’t go anywhere distant and secret to bury them, I settle on the garbage can by the back door. We empty the smaller kitchen garbage there as it fills up each day, until the men come to dump it into the truck and take it to the landfill.
    That’s burial, even if it is a few steps removed. When it’s my turn to do the trash, I simply add the items, whisper “ Oeil de triton ” thirteen times (my own creation), dump the regular garbage on top and go back inside.
    â€œMom, I feel terrible,” Dexter complains the next morning at breakfast.
    â€œYou do?” I say intently. Dexter leans over to flick me in the head.
    One night we go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for supper. Usually Grandma makes what Dad calls a royal spread: little dishes all over the table, using all kinds of ingredients I’ve barely heard of—tamarind, nori, pine nuts, jicama, saffron. Each thing is just one or two bites and is delicious, and you get to eat about thirty things before you’re full. Tonight, though, we bring supper with us: three large pizzas and two tubs of ice cream because Dexter and I couldn’t agree on just one flavor. Mom says we’re making things easy because Grandma is just a tiny, tiny bit tired. I think Mom is a tiny, tiny bit overdoing the nonchalance, which is a word I’ve recently learned that means pretending nothing is wrong. Pizza in Grandma’s house is the definition of wrong. But when Grandma opens the door, she just says we’re all darlings. The dining table is laid with knives and forks and wine glasses and linen and nice china.
    â€œI’ve never eaten pizza with a knife and fork before,” Dad teases Grandma when we’re all sitting at the table.
    â€œThis is delicious,” Grandma says, ignoring him. “What do you call this kind?”
    â€œHawaiian,” Dexter says.
    â€œDo you remember when we were in