Girl's Guide to Witchcraft Read Online Free Page B

felt fake to me. An Imaginary Smile for an Imaginary Boyfriend.
    “Jane,” he said, and my heart leaped somewhere up to the vicinity of my larynx.
    “Jason,” I managed before prompting, “Um, I think you’ve met my friend Melissa. Melissa White.” I needed to find out the name of the woman who was with him.
    He nodded. Almost as an afterthought, he turned toward the spectral creature who drifted behind him. “Jane, Melissa, this is Ekaterina Ivanova.”
    Ekaterina Ivanova? Just like some Russian princess. Like Anastasia’s long-lost granddaughter. I waited for her to extend her hand, but she didn’t. It was just as well. My own chewed nails and greasy fingertips would have defiled her forever. She inclined her head toward us, and I felt as if the very Queen of the Wilis had deigned to acknowledge our existence. She said, “Jason, I need to leave,” and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
    He shrugged and smiled at me, and I told myself that there were volumes behind that grin. He would rather sit with Melissa and me. He would prefer to help himself to some of our fries. He wanted to joke and relax with real women, rather than his ice statue of a companion.
    Melissa came unstuck first. “It was nice meeting you,” she said to Ekaterina. “Good to see you again, Jason.”
    I muttered something, and then they were gone. “Who do you think she is?” I asked, before the door had closed behind them.
    “I don’t know, but she definitely wasn’t happy.”
    “She must be Russian. Did you hear that accent? Didn’t she sound Russian to you?”
    “I could barely hear her speak.”
    “She’s Russian, though.” I heard the words tumbling out of my mouth, faster and faster, as if I needed to reassure myself. “She must be one of his grad students. A lot of Russians study American history. You know, there’s a whole tradition of foreign students specializing in the colonies. Alexis de Toqueville wasn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.”
    “De Tocqueville was French.” Melissa took advantage of my distraction to snatch the last of the fries from the greasy paper sack.
    “You know what I mean.”
    “We’re in Georgetown, Jane. The man is a professor at Mid-Atlantic. Probably half the people he knows are academics.”
    “Did you see her mascara?”
    “Yep.” Melissa downed the last bite of her burger before she nodded. “It probably cost more than a month of your pay at the Peabridge.”
    “Who bothers with mascara on the weekends, anyway?”
    “On the weekends?” Melissa batted her eyelashes at me. I could not think of a time when I’d seen her wearing mascara. Or lipstick. Or blush, foundation, or eyeliner. She always said they just melted down her face while she worked at the bakery.
    I sighed and set aside the vision of the Ice Queen. She probably specialized in early women’s suffrage movements. She looked the type.
    “Are you through?” I asked Melissa, already collecting our spent napkins and plastic cups of ketchup.
    She nodded and tossed her pristine napkin onto the tray. I tried not to compare it to my stained one. Well, how was a girl supposed to stay neat while eating a burger? Didn’t it show a healthy appetite to let the juices run down your wrists?
    We walked back to the cottage, and I was pleased to see that our hard labor had withstood the test of time. If anything, the surfaces glinted more in the afternoon light. “Okay,” I said after taking a deep breath. “Time to do the actual moving in.”
    “It should only take two trips.”
    Melissa was much better at spatial relationships than I. That must have been a skill that she developed during all those years of choosing the right mixing bowl, of finding the correct Tupperware for leftovers. Back at my old apartment, she made us slide the Lincoln’s front seats up as far as they would go before she wedged in all of my possessions—first onto the car’s huge backseat, then into the trunk. There