Enter Three Witches by Kate Gilmore Read Free Book Online

books, or talking. An exhaustive search of the high school building, however, failed to turn up Erika and used the remainder of Bren’s lunch hour, nor was she in physics, which was the only class they had in common.
    Hungry and discouraged, Bren tried to apply himself to the laws of acceleration. This was a subject dear to the heart of Edward Bear, who, in the interest of making the abstract concrete, had set up a sloping wooden chute running the entire length of the classroom. The extreme gentleness of the incline permitted Mr. Behrens to run to the bottom and catch the rapidly accelerating little ball that he had started at the top. This he did several times to the delight (if not, perhaps, the enlightenment) of his class. Bren felt more cheerful as he watched—frogs and the inexplicable absence of Erika forgotten during his favorite teacher’s enthusiastic performance.
    Erika got back to school only in time for the last two classes of the day and would not have bothered to come at all but for the hope of seeing the brown-haired boy with the meltingly open smile. “Relentlessly normal” was the way she described Bren to herself, wondering at the same time why this should appeal to her usually more exotic tastes. She also wanted sympathy and had not yet made any close friends to listen to her complaints. For Erika had not only missed a diverting physics class, she had acquired a large, prickly mouthful of braces on her nearly perfect teeth. “Nobody’s going to want to kiss me for a few years, that’s for sure,” she muttered to herself as she climbed the steps to the school. “Might as well cuddle up with a barbed wire fence.”
    The last two classes were boring, like the day itself, which continued to be overcast, and Erika felt her spirits sink slowly through the plodding lectures like a waterlogged leaf in a stagnant pond. Finally the last hour dragged to an end, and she was free to search for Bren. A more patient person would have waited by the door, but Erika was not patient. She thought his last class was on the top floor next to the biology lab, so she began to climb against the descending stream of students, pausing at each floor to look up and down the hall. On three she was stopped by Mr. Behrens, who wanted to deplore the fact that she had missed his performance. “And now you’ll never understand acceleration, poor girl,” he finished. “There’s no return engagement or even an encore.”
    “This is devastating,” Erika said. “Whatever shall I do?” It was hard to be sprightly without opening her mouth more than an eighth of an inch, and this she had resolved not to do.
    “You could read the book,” Mr. Behrens countered, “but the movie’s more exciting. What’s the matter with your mouth?”
    Erika bared her teeth for the first time in a ferocious smile.
    “Blindingly beautiful,” said Edward Bear. “I hope you don’t bite.”
    Fond as she was of her physics teacher, Erika was beginning to worry that Bren might escape by some means other than the only stairway. “Just people who stand between me and the girls’ room,” she said and, squeezing past him, ran up the last flight of stairs to the fourth floor.
    Bren was not in the economics room, and there was only one more place to look. Erika peered through the glass door of the biology lab. An arresting scene met her eyes.
    The big, bare room appeared to teem with frogs, and through the frogs strode Bren in desperate haste, stooping and snatching at the elusive throng. Erika stared and then began to laugh. She opened the door, and Bren turned, a gleam of manic fury in his eye.
    “Shut that door, idiot!” he shouted, then stopped, one hand clutching a struggling frog, the other his already disordered hair, as he saw who it was. “Oh, my God. You of all people,” he said. “What have I done to deserve this?”
    “What have you done, period?” Erika asked. “Do you need, maybe, some sort of help?”
    “Do I need help? What