Witch Baby Read online

  There is something about being held by this woman. Witch Baby feels she has fallen into an ocean. But it is not an ocean of salt and shadows and dark-jade dreams. Witch Baby’s senses are muffled by pale shell-colored, spun-sugar waves that press her eyelids shut, pour into her nostrils and ears, swell like syrup in her mouth. A sea of forgetting.

  Vixanne carries Witch Baby up a winding staircase to a bedroom and tucks her beneath a pink satin comforter on a heart-shaped bed. Then she sits beside her and they look at each other. They do not need to speak. Without words, Witch Baby tells her mother what she has seen or imagined—families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes listening for sirens, ragged men and women wandering barefoot through the city, becoming ghosts because no one wanted to see them, children holding out wish bracelets as they sit in the gutter, the dark-haired boy who disappeared. What do I do with it all? Witch Baby asks with her eyes. Vixanne answers without speaking.

  We are the same. Some people see more than others. It gets worse. I wanted to blind myself. You must just not look at it. You must forget. Forget everything.

  And Witch Baby falls into a suffocating sleep.

  In the morning, Witch Baby is too weak to get up. Vixanne comes in dressed in perfumed satin and carries Witch Baby’s limp body downstairs. The others, the “Jaynes,” are already gathered around the screen, eating candy and watching Jayne Mansfield waving from a convertible. Witch Baby sits propped up among them, wearing a long blonde wig. Her eyes are glazed like sugar cookies; her throat, no matter how many sodas she is given, is parched.

  Late that night she wakes in her bed. “How will I ever be able to tell her what she means to us?” says a voice. Weetzie’s voice. “Weetzie,” she whispers.

  She stumbles out of the room to the top of the stairs and looks down. Vixanne and the Jaynes are still watching the screen and charring marshmallows over the fire pit. A soft chant rises up. “We will ward off pain. There will be no pain. Forget that there is evil in the world. Forget. Forget everything.” Vixanne is holding herself, rocking back and forth, smiling. Her eyes are closed.

  Witch Baby goes back into her room and packs her bat-shaped backpack. For a moment she stops to look at the pictures she has taken on her journey. The floating basketball boys. The old woman with the peach. The hungry men in the gazebo. The dying young man and his angel twin. A picture of a child with tangled tufts of hair and mournful, tilted eyes. She leaves the pictures on the heart-shaped bed, hoping that Vixanne will look at them and see.

  Then she slips downstairs, past the Jaynes and out the front door. She sits on the front step, tying her roller skates, clearing her lungs of smoke, gathering strength from the night.

  The mint and honeysuckle air is chilly on her damp face, awake on the nape of her neck as Witch Baby Wigg skates home.

  Black Lamb Baby Witch

  When Witch Baby tiptoed into the cottage, she saw Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man holding each other and weeping in the milky dawn light. They looked as pale as the sky. She stood beside them, close enough so that she could feel their sobs shaking in her own body.

  Weetzie lifted her head from My Secret Agent Lover Man’s shoulder and turned around. Blind with tears, she held out her arms to the shadow child standing there. Only when Witch Baby was pressed against her, My Secret’s arms circling them both, did Weetzie believe that the child was not a dream, a vision who had stepped from the milk-carton picture.

  Beneath the pink feather sweater Weetzie was wearing, Witch Baby felt Weetzie’s heart fluttering like a bird.

  “Will you tell everyone she’s home? I need to be alone with her,” Weetzie said to My Secret Agent Lover Man. She turned to Witch Baby. “Is that okay with you, honey-honey?”

  Witch Baby nodded, and Weetzie put on her pink Harlequin sunglasses and carried Witch Baby out into the garden. The lawn was completely purple with jacaranda blossoms.

  “Are you all right? We were so worried. Where did you go? Are you okay?” Witch Baby nodded, not wanting to move her ear away from the bird beating beneath Weetzie’s pink feathers.

  They were silent for a while, listening to the singing trees and the early traffic. Weetzie stroked Witch Baby’s head.

  “When I was little, my dad Charlie told me I was like a black lamb,” Weetzie said. “My hair is really dark, you know, under all this bleach, not like Brandy-Lynn’s and Cherokee’s. I used to feel like I had sort of disappointed my mom. Not just because of my hair, but everything. But my dad said he was the black sheep of the family, too. The wild one who doesn’t fit in.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes,” said Weetzie. “You remind me of a lamb. But you know what else Charlie Bat said? He said that black sheeps express everyone else’s anger and pain. It’s not that they have all the anger and pain—they’re just the only ones who let it out. Then the other people don’t have to. But you face things, Witch Baby. And you help us face things. We can learn from you. I can’t stand when someone I love is sad, so I try to take it away without just letting it be. I get so caught up in being good and sweet and taking care of everyone that sometimes I don’t admit when people are really in pain.” Weetzie took off her pink sunglasses. “But I think you can help me learn to not be afraid, my black lamb baby witch.”

  When they went back into the cottage everyone was waiting to celebrate Witch Baby’s return. My Secret Agent Lover Man, dressed like Charlie Chaplin, was riding his unicycle around the house. Dirk was preparing his famous homemade Weetzie pizza with sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, red onions, artichoke hearts and a spinach crust. Darlene Drake, who had arrived the day before, was helping Duck twist balloons into slinkster dogs. Valentine and Ping Chong presented Witch Baby with film for her camera. Brandy-Lynn lifted her up onto Coyote’s shoulders.

  “I think I saw five little Joshua tree sprouts coming up across the street,” Coyote said, parading with Cherokee, Raphael, Slinkster Dog, Go-Go Girl and the puppies following him.

  Then Coyote put Witch Baby down and knelt in front of her, like a sunrise, warming her face. “I’m sorry about the seeds. Even if they never came up, I shouldn’t have been angry with you. We are very much the same, Witch Baby.”

  Everyone else gathered around.

  “We want to thank you,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “I’ve been remembering that night when the article and the globe lamp appeared, and I realized that they must have been from you.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t know how I didn’t see that before. They are beautiful gifts, the best gifts anyone has ever given me. Gifts from my daughter.”

  “And I want to thank you, too,” Darlene Drake said shyly, placing a slinkster dog balloon at Witch Baby’s feet. “You knew more about love than I knew. You helped me get my son back again.”

  “Without you, Miss Pancake Dancer Stowawitch, we might never have really known each other,” said Duck, stooping to kiss Witch Baby’s hand.

  “Welcome home, Witch,” Cherokee said. “I don’t even mind my haircut anymore. I deserve it, I guess, since I did the same thing to you once. And besides, I look more like Weetzie now!”

  Witch Baby snarled just a little.

  “And thank you for helping me and Raphael find each other,” Cherokee went on. “While you were away, Raphael told me it was your drumming I heard that day. You are the most slinkster-cool jamming drummer girl ever, and we hope you will play for us again even though we are clutch pigs sometimes.”

  “Yes, play!” everyone said.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man set up the drums.

  “I had them fixed for you,” he said. “My daughter, a drummer. I knew it!”

  So Witch Baby played. Tossing her head, sucking in her cheeks and popping up with the impact of each beat. Thrusting her whole body into the music and thrusting the music into the air around her. She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling into the universe. She imagined that she was playing for Angel J
uan, turning the pain of being without him into music he could hear, distilling the flowers of pain into a perfume that he could keep with him forever.

  Everyone sat in the candlelight, watching and listening and imagining they smelled salty roses in the air. Some of their mouths fell open, some of their eyes filled with tears, some of them bounced to the beat until they couldn’t stand it anymore and had to get up and dance. Weetzie put her palms over her heart.

  When Witch Baby was finished, everyone applauded. Weetzie kissed her face.

  “And now it is time for a picture,” Weetzie announced.

  Witch Baby started to get her camera, but someone had set it up already.

  “Come here, Baby,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “You are as good a photographer as a drummer, but you aren’t taking this one. This picture is of all of us.”

  He put her on his lap and they all gathered around. Weetzie set the timer on the camera and then hurried back to the group.

  The picture was of all of them, as My Secret Agent Lover Man had said—himself and Weetzie, Dirk and Duck and Darlene, Valentine and Ping, Brandy-Lynn and Coyote, Cherokee and Raphael and Witch Baby.

  “Twelve of us,” said Weetzie. “So the twelve on the clock won’t be empty anymore.”

  “Once upon time,” Witch Baby said.

  At dinner that night, Witch Baby looked up at the globe lamp in the center of the table. Suddenly, as if a genie had touched it, the lamp bloomed with jungles and forests, fields and gardens, became shining and restless with oceans and rivers, burned with fires, volcanoes and radiation, sparkled with deserts, beaches and cities, danced with bodies at work in factories and on farms, bodies in worship, playing music, loving, dying in the streets, flesh of many colors on infinite varieties of the same form of bones. And there—so tiny—Witch Baby saw their city.

  This is the time we’re upon.

  Witch Baby looked around the table. She could see everyone’s sadness. Her father was thinking about the movie he was making—the village where everyone is poisoned by something they love and worship. Witch Baby knew he was haunted with thoughts about the future of the planet. Dirk and Duck prayed that a cure would be found for the disease whose name they could not speak. Brandy-Lynn had never gotten over the death of Weetzie’s father, Charlie Bat, and Darlene was with Chuck because she could not face another loss like the loss of Eddie Drake. Coyote mourned for the sky and sea, animals and vegetables, that were full of toxins. Some people hated to see Ping and Valentine together, because they weren’t the same color, and Cherokee and Raphael might have to face the same hatred. Cherokee would never know for sure who her real dad was. There was Weetzie with her bitten fingernails, taking care of all these people, showing them the world she saw through pink lenses. Somewhere in Mexico, separated from Witch Baby by walls and barbed wire, floodlights and blocked-off trenches, was the Perez family—Marquez, Gabriela, Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro, Angelina and Serafina, and Angel Juan—Angel Juan who would always be with Witch Baby, a velvet wing shadow guarding her dreams. And there was Vixanne trying to deny the grief she saw, trying to keep it from entering her body through eyes that were just like Witch Baby’s eyes.

  Witch Baby saw that her own sadness was only a small piece of the puzzle of pain that made up the globe. But she was a part of the globe—she had her place. And there was a lot of happiness as well, a lot of love—so much that maybe, from somewhere, far away in the universe, the cottage shone like someone’s globe lamp, Witch Baby Secret Agent Black Lamb Wigg Bat thought.

  About the Author

  FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK is the author of five Weetzie Bat books: WEETZIE BAT, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers; WITCH BABY, a School Library Journal Best Book and an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers; CHEROKEE BAT AND THE GOAT GUYS, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers; MISSING ANGEL JUAN, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and a School Library Journal Best Book; and most recently, BABY BE-BOP. She is also the author of THE HANGED MAN, an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers and a School Library Journal Best Book; and GIRL GODDESS #9: Nine Stories.

  Ms. Block lives in Los Angeles, California.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Cover art © 1997 by David Diaz

  Cover design by Steve Scott

  Cover © 1997 by HarperCollins Publishers

  Copyright

  WITCH BABY. Copyright © 1991 by Francesca Lia Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-198664-2

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