The Ursine Incident

I wrote this in eighth grade and rewrote it in tenth. I think it still holds up decently. I'll probably come back to these characters eventually.

The Ursine Incident

The first time I saw Stephen, he painted a hex sign on my arm, and I couldn’t move my fingers for three hours. It was a rather impressive hex, for an eight-year-old boy. I don’t know where he’d learned it.

     The second time I saw him he broke my broom in half. I had just got it and I had been showing it off. It was in the corner and he tripped over it.

            As you may have been able to tell, we didn’t like each other very much. Stephen thought I was an annoying know-it-all, and I considered him incredibly spoiled.

            Being the children of best friends did not help us avoid each other. Every month or so our parents would have a dinner party (usually at his house) and we would be forced into the same room for several hours. We generally pretended to get along while the adults were watching and ignored each other for the rest of the time.

            Until the Ursine Incident, that is.

            Before I tell you about this, I just want to say that it was entirely Stephen’s idea.

            This particular Incident took place when I was eleven and Stephen, being two weeks younger, was ten. It was at the monthly-or-so dinner party. We had set up the Monopoly board and were now reading different books in opposite corners when Stephen spoke.

            “Hey, Candace,” he said, “there’s a very good spell in this book I’m reading. Want to try it out in the Dungeon?”

            Stephen had never asked me to do anything before (I don’t count requests to shut up) and I was immediately suspicious. “Stephen Parker, what are you up to? Let me see that!” I marched over and wrestled the book from him. After finding the page he’d been on, I scanned it and snapped, “Nice try, Stephen, but there is no way you’re turning me into a tree toad.”

            “Who said anything about turning you into a tree toad? I was thinking of…erm…Libby,” said Stephen unconvincingly.

            Libby was Stephen’s eight-year-old sister, and I happened to know two things about her: firstly, she and Stephen got along remarkably well, much better than most siblings; and secondly, she preferred to spend the night at a friend’s house whenever my sister and I came over. (Smart girl.)

            “Yeah, right,” I said, rolling my eyes, but then a thought stuck me. “Stephen…what about Marcia?”

            Marcia, then seven, was my aforementioned sister. She really was a brat. Stephen, Libby and I all hated her. She was whiny, selfish, and very, very annoying.

            “Say, that’s not bad! Where is she?” exclaimed Stephen, his eyes lighting up.

            “Last time I saw her she was in your playroom,” I said.

             We got up and crept down to the Parkers’ playroom.

            Another thing I should probably mention about the Parkers: They’re rich. They used to live in England, so they all have accents, but now they live in this big house on Walker Hill. Stephen has a playroom and a computer and more toys than he and Libby can keep track of. It’s part of what makes him so annoying. I live in a decent middle-class house on Allen Avenue, but whenever I come to the Parkers, I feel very poor indeed.

            Marcia was indeed in the playroom. She was kneeling on the floor giving one of Libby’s Barbie dolls a tattoo with a black Sharpie.

            The playroom had two doors, one at either end. I stayed at one and Stephen went to the other. From across the room I saw him hold up three fingers. He lowered one, then two, and then we pounced. Marcia didn’t even have time to shriek before she was bundled up with thick yarn from the playroom wound around her ankles and my sweater over her head like a burlap sack. I threw her over my shoulder and, ignoring her muffled cries, we headed down to the Dungeon.

            The Dungeon isn’t actually as scary as it sounds. Rather than being a place where one tortures and eventually kills poor hopeless prisoners, with rats scurrying across the floor and twittering in the corners, it is simply the space where Stephen’s father makes potions and experiments with various combinations of magical substances. He has a job in the research department of the Catalyst University. The Dungeon is basically his home office, nicknamed as it is because it is located beneath the house and has stone walls.

            I hoped we weren’t disturbing anything in progress. The floor had some smudged chalk on it and high on the walls were shelves with books, bottles and vials. “Put her down here,” said Stephen, indicating the middle of a large pentacle that had been painted on the floor. I unceremoniously dumped my sister to the ground.

            “Candace Winsley, I hate you!” Marcia shrieked, thrashing until she dislodged the sweater from her face. “Let me out of here RIGHT NOW!”

            I tied my sweater across her mouth and turned back to Stephen.

            “Okay, so now…?”

            “Now we encircle her with butterfly dust and read the incantation. Then we throw in some salamander blood and stand well back,” said Stephen, scanning the page.

            “I’ll do the dust, you do the incantation.” I grabbed a vial labeled Butterfly Dust off of one of the shelves.

            “No good, they have to be done by the same person,” said Stephen, holding out the book.

            “And that person can’t be you because…?”

            “She’s your sister.”

            I sighed, but I really did want to try doing magic. We’re not supposed to at home.

            I took the book and flipped through the pages for a few moments until Stephen irritably said, “Will you get on with it?” Then I glared at him and started circling Marcia, letting the dust pour out of the vial in a circle around her and saying,

            “Salamander blood and butterfly’s rot,

            Change this boy/girl (delete where applic—wait a minute, that can’t be right.”

            “Don’t say that part!” said Stephen, far too late to stop me. I made a move to start over, but he cried, “No! Keep going! We can’t mess it up any more or I don’t know what will happen!”

            I was having some serious doubts, but I picked up:

            “Change this girl to what she’s not.”

            I repeated it three times, this time omitting the words “boy” and “delete where applicable.”

            I now know that if we had stopped there, the magic would have hung around for a few hours before turning into sludge. Stephen’s father would have found it the next day and cleaned it up before giving Stephen a lecture, and Marcia would have ratted me out to my parents, but that would have been preferable to what actually happened.

            Maybe it was the misread incantation and the interruption. Maybe it was the smudged symbols on the floor. It was probably all of the above. But whatever it was, when we threw the salamander blood into the pentacle, we didn’t wind up with a tree toad.

            We wound up with an extremely irate bear cub.

            My first thought: Oops.

            Stephen let out a very high-pitched scream and bolted for the door. I took a few nervous steps back. “Nice bear cub,” I said tentatively. “Niiiice Marcia…”

            The bear cub growled.

            I rapidly assessed the situation and ran for it.

            I had never run so fast before, although I think I have since. Marcia, being on four legs, had the advantage on the stairs. I burst out into the house a few steps ahead of her and tore down the hall, the bear cub that was my sister lolloping after me. With a crash, she knocked down a small table with an expensive-looking vase on it.

            Stephen’s father ran out into the hall, with Father and Mother close behind him. Stephen was clinging to his mother’s skirt. “There she is!” he yelled. I wondered if he meant the bear cub or me.

            Stephen’s father made a quick, complicated gesture with his left hand. “Rapio rationis restorant,” he said calmly.

            There was a soft explosion and a cloud of grey smoke, which cleared to reveal human Marcia running after me. She stopped and stamped her foot. “Darn it! That was so much fun!” She burst into tears. “Why’d you have to do that!” she shrieked.

            Mother hurried over and gathered Marcia into her arms, shooting me an evil look. I heard Stephen’s father rebuking him: “What on earth were you thinking? You know you’re not allowed in the Dungeon! And why a bear?”

            “I told you, Dad! We were trying for a tree toad!” Stephen said, exasperated.

            Mother was trying to soothe Marcia with little success. “We’d better go,” she said. “I think Marcia’s had a long night.” She shot me with another evil look, one that promised Death and Disembowelment and No Dessert. “I’m so sorry about this.”

            Stephen’s mother reassured her that it was all right, no harm no foul (she hadn’t noticed the vase), and she’d call later.

            As we headed for the door, Stephen caught my eye. He grinned and winked at me. I raised an eyebrow, and then we left.