Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) Read Online Free Page B

second only to my ability with Welsh—though right then, I was wishing that was not the case.
    “I must have picked up enough Hebrew from you…”
    “Tal, the only time you ever heard Hebrew was at my Bar Mitzvah, and you weren’t exactly quoting my Torah portion just now.”
    The fog was still thick, but I could hear voices up ahead. We were definitely getting close to school. If I wasn’t careful, Stan would out me in front of everyone. The tynged aside, I wasn’t sure how I felt about some public revelation of my previous lives, which at best would make Stan look stupid, at worst make me look like some kind of freak.
    “Anyway, when we started to really talk last night, you put me to sleep. I know you did.”
    The danger level just spiraled off into the stratosphere. There was no way, absolutely none, that Stan should’ve remembered our conversation as anything but a dream—and there was really no way he should’ve remembered my putting him to sleep. Over the last four years, I had had to manipulate my parents from time to time. I’m not proud of that, but I did it very sparingly, and only when necessary. (I know that sounds at best self-serving coming out of an adolescent mouth. Feel free to picture me as a wise old man with a white beard—I’ve been one quite often in the past—if that helps my credibility any.) Anyway, I had done the same with others as well. No one in all that time had ever resisted me or realized that I had done something to them. No one. And yet now Stan was talking as if he were somehow immune to me. Well, he hadn’t been last night, so what had changed?
    I really had no time to ponder that question. Shadowy figures in the fog ahead of us had to be other students. We were very, very near the front of the school.
    I did my best work with both voice and instrument, but I couldn’t exactly whip out my guitar at this point, or start singing, for that matter. In a pinch, I had sometimes made my speaking voice alone work, if I put enough “oomph” into it. Welsh would have been best for that, but I couldn’t risk that either, so I settled for English.
    “Stan,” I commanded in a harsh whisper, “you will be unable to speak of this until we are alone.” I could feel the power flowing through my words. This maneuver should be enough to buy me some time, and perhaps a little privacy.
    Stan stopped dead in his tracks.
    “What are you trying to do, Tal, cast a spell on me?” That was Stan’s serious tone, not his joking one. Odd as it was to hear the campus’ biggest science nerd talking about spells, there was no question. He was aware of what I was doing, and he was completely unaffected by it.
    I was still trying to frame a response when the car hit me.
     

 

    CHAPTER 3: THE THEFT
     
    Okay, so I was being a little over-dramatic. The car hit at about half a mile an hour, not enough to kill or maim in this case, but certainly enough to make an ominous sounding thud, knock me over (since I was a little off balance anyway), and send my shoulder bags flying in different directions. I had been so distracted by Stan that I hadn’t realized we were standing right in the middle of the street. The incident ended up being more embarrassing than anything else. The driver turned out to be one of the mothers dropping off her daughter. She seemed torn between fussing over me and getting hysterical; getting hysterical won pretty quickly, with the result that we drew an uncomfortably large crowd, including several girls who I wished had not seen me sprawled out in the middle of the street, and Ms. Simmons, the high school’s principal, who eased back on her usual sternness to fuss over me herself. Needless to say, that too was embarrassing.
    There were, however, two good things that came out of the fiasco: Stan couldn’t keep questioning me, and Ms. Simmons sent me to the nurse’s office to be checked out—which meant I got to check out the nurse!
    I’m not complaining, but really