Trouble's Brewing (Stirring Up Trouble Trilogy 2)

I wanted to spend time with him, but not tonight. I had planning to do for tomorrow. Finn and I were going to start the unicorn horn, and I still didn’t have a starting point. “Actually, I have to do some things with my mother. What about tomorrow night?”

“It’s a date,” he said. “I’ll have to find another way to avoid my mother and your father.”

“They aren’t that bad.”

“At least they’re trying to keep the parental PDA to a minimum. They must have learned something from our PDA plan.”

Even a minimum of public displays of affection was too much from Dad and Sheree. My gag reflex had a low threshold.

“Where’d you get that?” Jake asked, holding my hand up.

“What?” Oh, the ring.

“Dad, I mean Mom gave it to me.” Mom would make more sense.

“It’s pretty. What’s the occasion?”

It’s to signal for help for a witch catastrophe. Because I’m a witch. “Nothing special. She just saw it and thought of me.”

He may not have noticed that I was lying, but I felt rotten.

At three, Mom picked me up to run errands. She needed another new outfit for her next show. My mother had an interior design show on HGTV. We did a lot of shopping for her wardrobe. Apparently, if she could write it off on her taxes, she didn’t mind spending the money. She had some sponsors, upscale clothing stores that gave her clothing in exchange for mention in the credits, but she didn’t always find what she wanted.

“Where to today?” I asked after shoving my backpack into the back seat.

“I haven’t decided,” Mom said as she put the car in drive. “I thought we’d run by Target first.”

“Cool.”

“Need something from there?”

“No. I want to look around and see if anything jumps out at me.”

“I doubt you’ll find something to replace unicorn horn at an everyday store like Target.”

“Are you forgetting the tuna fish from the toad slime substitution?”

“Toad slime isn’t quite as fantastic as the unicorn horn.”

“Yet still rare and almost half of the cost.”

“But toads aren’t mystical creatures.”

“No.” I had to admit she was right. “Toads aren’t inherently magic either.”

“It’s really a shame unicorns were so overdone in the seventies. I wonder if they’ll make a comeback.”

“Are you talking about unicorns or unicorn merchandise?”

“Are you suggesting that I’m rambling?”

“Duh,” I said.

We parked and went into the store. “I’m going to wander,” I said.

“I’ll find you when I’m ready.”

A huge portion of the store was stuffed with Christmas decorations. The number of toy aisles had doubled. Since I didn’t think a toy train or a Christmas bow was going to do the trick, I would have been better off browsing at another time of year. Normally, I would have looked through the Halloween clearance merchandise, but the trauma from the Frog Fiasco hadn’t abated yet.

After a full tour of the rest of the store, I relented and started down the toy aisles. Barbies by the hundreds, bicycles, action figures, board games. I almost tripped over a small chalkboard easel that someone had left in the aisle. I picked it up and found room on the shelf where it would be out of the way. The aisle contained art supplies of all shapes and sizes, box after box of Crayola crayons, watercolor sets, and chalk. Chalkboard chalk and sidewalk chalk. Pastels. Wait a minute. I grabbed a container of the sidewalk chalk, and a box of the chalkboard chalk. I carefully opened the box of white chalk so that it didn’t damage anything. The chalk felt right. Close. Very close. I pulled the plastic lid off the sidewalk chalk and withdrew the chunky pink one. Softer. These were my starting point. These were my base.

I thought back to my days with chalk. One year Mom got me a big art kit from one of the discount stores. The chalk in it was hard, too hard to write well on the board. Cheap. They’d cut corners and the result had been inferior chalk. I needed harder chalk. Replacing the chalk carefully and resealing the packages, I racked my brain for the best place to find cheap chalk. One of those stores where everything costs only a dollar. I had to find my mom and hit up some of those stores.

I whipped out my cell and called my mother instead of tracking her endlessly through the store. “Mom! I have it. I know where to start.”

We went to two dollar stores, both of which had chalkboard chalk. Neither store had sidewalk chalk.

I slipped into the car and put the bag of chalk from the second store in with the bag from the first store. We’d cleared their shelves, and I had nine total boxes to start with.

“Where are we going to find sidewalk chalk, Mom? It’s November.”

“Maybe we should drive to Florida. They probably carry it year round.

“Not funny.”

“That’s right. You have a lot going on. I’ll fly down for the weekend and bring some back with me.”

“I need it for tomorrow morning. There has to be some somewhere. What about one of those pool stores?”

“They become Christmas stores this time of year.”

Well, great. “Mom, I need this chalk!”

“I know, Zoe,” she said with exasperation. “I might have an idea.”

“Really?” Please, please have a good idea.

“I think I remember seeing a lot of off season merchandise at that discount store down by Cedar Bluff.”

“Like summer stuff? When? Recently?”

“Actually, no. It was last summer and they had a large winter item stock.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Not the news I wanted to hear, but still… at least we had somewhere to go.

“I think we have a good chance, Zoe. Let’s check it out and see.”

The ride to Cedar Bluff took forever.

“Zoe, please stop jiggling your leg.”

Oh. I didn’t know I was. I stopped. “Okay, Mom, but drive faster.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. We will be there soon enough, and I can’t exactly drive faster than the person in front of me.”

She could try. How many times had she told me that you never know until you try?

I smiled to myself.

When Mom finally turned the car into the parking lot at the shopping center, I unbuckled my seatbelt and started reaching for the door handle.

“Zoe, don’t jump out while I’m still driving!”

“I’m not. I’m just getting prepared.”

“You shouldn’t take off your seatbelt. Somebody could run into us.”

“In a parking lot? In the next twenty seconds?”

“It’s possible,” she snapped as she pulled into a space.

With great restraint, I waited until she had the car in park. “Can I go?”

In a near whisper, she said, “Go.”

I went. I crashed through the front doors of the store and stood, struggling to orient myself so I could head in the right direction. In front of me, artificial flowers were crammed in between vases and candles. Birthday napkins, plates, and decorations overflowed from the shelves. The store must have saved on costs by foregoing any sense of organization.

They could have buckets upon buckets of sidewalk chalk in here, and I wouldn’t ever find it.

Mom walked up beside me.

“Wow,” she said. “I didn’t remember the store being quite so… quite such… anywhere near this…”

“… likely to crush and trap us inside forever?”

“Possibly.”

“Let’s split up and call if we find it.”

“Sounds reasonable. Remember, if the shelves start falling, they can track our cell phone, so don’t take out your battery.”

“Mom, that isn’t going to happen!”

She pointed to the shelf in front of us. “I think these shelves could be unsteady.”

“Yes. Obviously, but wh

y would I ever take out my cell battery?”