Wildseed Witch Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-5561-3

  eISBN 9781647003692

  Text © 2022 Marti Dumas

  this page: image courtesy Pavel Talashov/Shutterstock.com

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura and Deena Fleming

  Published in 2022 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.

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  To all the people who have ever loved me—know that I have felt it and needed the strength of it, and know that I love you, too

  CHAPTER ONE

  TINGLE AND BLUSH

  The first time I did magic was the third day of summer vacation. I hadn’t seen my dad in forever, and everyone I hang out with had already left town. But I didn’t mind. With everybody gone, I had time to make more videos for my YouTube channel, MakeupontheCheapCheap. At that point, I had only one video— a dollar store makeup haul I did over spring break—but my channel was already up to 18 subscribers anyway, and, thanks to my favorite YouTuber, AnyaDo0dle, I had a plan to make it to 100 before school started.

  Don’t get me wrong. I got inspiration from lots of YouTubers. Nobody did contouring better than JeffServesFace, and I wouldn’t have known anything about eye shadow at all if it weren’t for TheRealCorinaSparkles, but AnyaDo0dle, a goddess among mere mortals, had posted a video called “Love Them and They Will Come: 6 Ways to Grow Your Channel,” and you better believe I took notes. Lots of notes. The checklist I made out of them filled up most of my whiteboard.

  • Camera, Stand, and Lighting

  • Backdrop

  • Edit Intro

  • Plan Your Content

  • Post Daily

  • Love Your Subscribers

  The main ones I had left to do were Post Daily and Love Your Subscribers, which was kind of the same thing. AnyaDo0dle said loving your subscribers meant three things: make promises, keep promises, and show them the real you.

  I was always the real me, so that part was easy. I’d already made my first promise, too: posting a new video every day all summer. Now all I had to do was keep it.

  Filming and editing a video every day would be a lot of work, but I was actually excited for it. I had already recorded myself doing a $3 Lavender Look for Summer and Makeup Removal Hacks So Your Mom Won’t Freak out about Her Sheets, and even though it took a long time to get an hour of video down to seven minutes, cutting stuff out and speeding stuff up was weirdly satisfying, like the moment when you finally get the piece of popcorn out of your teeth. I had a plan and, even if the plan didn’t work, at least it kept me from thinking about the suitcase staring at me from the corner.

  It was just a regular suitcase. My suitcase. The one I packed the last time my dad was supposed to come pick me up. He didn’t show, just like he hadn’t the three times before. My mom said he was “going through some things” and that I should be patient. I shoved the suitcase in a corner and left it there to remind me how mad at him I was.

  But when he finally did show up in his new car, I wasn’t as mad as I thought I would be, so I clicked Publish on my first summer video, grabbed the suitcase that I had never unpacked, and hopped into the car.

  It was a convertible, but the way it got quiet but kept driving meant it was also electric, like my mom’s.

  “You got an electric car?” I said, adjusting the air to blow on my face. Mom would be so excited when she found out.

  “A hybrid plug-in,” my dad said. “Best of both worlds.”

  Then he pulled a latch and pressed a button and the top went down. It would have been cool, too, if it weren’t so hot. New Orleans in the summer is no joke, but I was too excited to be mad about the heat. My mom was going to freak over this car. It was basically the exact one she had been dreaming up for forever. She loved having the sun on her, even in the summer.

  “I didn’t know they made cars like this,” I said.

  “They don’t. It’s custom,” my dad winked. “I know a guy.”

  “Yeah, right,” I smiled, pulling out my phone to check my You-Tube. This was the part of the car ride when, if my dad wasn’t grilling me about whether Mom had made any “friends,” we would settle into quiet. His new house was across town. Plenty of time for quiet. Except my dad wasn’t quiet.

  “YouTube, huh?” he said, glancing at my phone as he slowed to stop at a red light.

  That’s when I noticed him smiling. Big. Really big. Too big. I tried to ignore it, but once I thought about it, I realized he had been smiling like that the whole time. Weird.

  “Yeah,” I said, refreshing my profile page. Still 18 followers, but the video view minutes were up by three. I smiled to myself.

  “Sandy is big on social media, too.”

  “Who’s Sandy?” I said, refreshing the page again. The video view minutes were up by four. Someone was watching my video right at that very moment. If I could have, I would have reached through the Internet and hugged them. I hoped they left a comment so I could tell them so. I had already favorited the perfect GIF.

  “Sandy is my good friend. YouTube’s not her big one, though. Her big one is Instagram. Look her up. Sandyandfree83.” He was still smiling with all his teeth. I hadn’t seen him in more than a month, and it was like he had spent that whole time turning into a cartoon version of himself. Everything he said sounded extra.

  I refreshed the page one more time—seven minutes, they had totally watched the whole video—before opening IG. I never posted on Instagram, but my friends were always posting funny animal pictures that I loved, especially the ones with puppies wearing hats or puppies that looked like a box of fried chicken. When Sandyandfree83’s page loaded, I blinked and turned the phone so my dad could see.

  “Her?” I asked.

  “Yep!” my dad said, smiling even bigger, if that was possible. “That’s my Sandy.”

  When my dad said “friend,” I was expecting somebody parent-ish. Sandy did not look like a parent. She had curly blondish hair and 374,000 followers, about one for every shot of her in a bikini or making a kissy face at the camera.

  “Her??” I asked again, showing a picture of Sandyandfree83 tossing her hat into a sea breeze. He must have said the wrong one.

  My dad nodded. “It’s a play on words. Sandy loves the beach. I can’t wait for you to meet her. The two of you have a lot in common. You’ll like her.”

  I stopped on a pic of Sandy wearing a bikini on a mountain instead of on a beach. Bikini was the common denominator here, not sand, but whatever. What could the two of us possibly have in common?

  “She’ll be at the house when we get there.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, Hasani, sweetheart, that’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Sandy lives there, now.”

  That’s whe
n I felt it—the magic.

  It was this weird, tingly feeling somewhere between blushing and your foot falling asleep. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew that under no circumstances did I want to go to my dad’s house anymore. Then the tingle spread from my chest up to my face, and the St. Claude Avenue Bridge went up.

  “There aren’t any boats coming,” someone shouted from the car behind us, but at the time I didn’t think anything about it, because the stupid St. Claude bridge was always going up and at least this time I wanted it to. At least this time the bridge was helping me instead of making me late.

  “Is that why you didn’t come get me last time? You were helping Sandy move in?” I didn’t look up at him. I just kept scrolling through Sandy’s feed. Apparently, she had also had a bikinis-in-wild-flowers phase.

  “No, sweetheart. Sandy and I were out of town. We went on a little trip to Nevada.”

  The car engine went silent. Cars piled up behind us, blocking us in. I didn’t bother to ask him about why he hadn’t shown up the week before that or the week before that. I knew. He had been too busy hanging out with Sandy to come see me. The tingling in my skin turned into buzzing. When he’d finally shown up, I hadn’t even told him I was mad. I’d even let him put the stupid top down on his stupid new car. It was summer in New Orleans! That was basically a death sentence. Now we were stuck on a bridge with the sun beating down on us and I was sweating, but I didn’t care, because being stuck on that bridge was better than whatever was on the other side of it, especially if that something was Sandy and free.

  “You didn’t get this car for Mom?”

  He made a weird face. “Your mom wouldn’t want this car. She said the wind drag would ruin the mileage and defeat the purpose of getting a hybrid in the first place. Sandy likes to ride with the top down. I thought you would, too.”

  “So, you’re just quitting?” I said. My skin was buzzing so badly I thought I must be getting a sunburn, and I never get burned.

  “What are you talking about, Hasani?”

  “On Mom. You said y’all were trying to work it out.”

  “We were,” he said. “It just didn’t work.”

  My teeth clenched. The bridge operator climbed out of her booth with a radio in her hand. There were vines growing up through some of the grates. The vines didn’t seem too weird, because in New Orleans everything is always growing over with something.

  I was baking but refused to ask my father to close the top and put on the air conditioner. I refused to say anything to him ever again.

  My dad kept talking, but I sat in silence for the next half an hour before the bridge operator started directing cars to drive over the neutral ground to turn back the way we came, because the bridge was now closed for some reason. I didn’t notice how big the vines had grown or that they had sprouted morning glories, but I had scrolled through all of Sandy’s Instagram pictures and forced myself to move on to puppies in hats. Puppies in hats always made me feel better and, thanks to Cartoon Dad, I definitely needed them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SANDY AND FREE

  There were three bridges going to the Lower Ninth Ward, where my dad lived. Only two of them were drawbridges. My dad picked the one that wasn’t to drive us the rest of the way to the house he had been living in since Christmas. The house barely had anything in it the last time I went, but a lot had changed. There were flowers planted out front, and we pulled into a fancy carport that hadn’t been there before.

  “Solar charging station,” my dad said, gesturing at the plug under the carport. My mom had always wanted one of those, too, but where we lived there wasn’t space for one. We charged her car at Whole Foods. “Six solar panels. Totally off-grid.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just took a baby wipe out of my bag to clean the sweat off my face.

  “I know you’re mad and I know I did this all wrong, but give Sandy a chance, OK? You’ll like her.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I just grabbed my backpack and followed my dad up to his front door. The door flew open before he’d put the key in the lock.

  “It’s so good to meet you, Hasani! Welcome! Come in. Come in.”

  Sandy’s hair looked more sandy brown than blond like it did on her Instagram, but it was long and thick and wavy just like the pictures. Perfect mermaid hair. Even standing in a doorway in a plain white sundress, she looked like some kind of beach goddess.

  “Your dad has told me all about you, but I’d rather hear it from you.” Sandy had somehow hooked her arm into mine and pulled me into the house. “Let’s go talk on the back porch. I have everything set up and I just want to hear all about you.”

  Sandy led me through my dad’s house as if I’d never been there before and couldn’t find my own way to the back porch. The rocking chairs were there, thank goodness. I picked those chairs and the little table, but I barely recognized them mixed in with the vases of flowers and the pitcher of lemonade and tray of cookies. It looked like something out of a magazine. The ice in the glasses wasn’t even melted.

  “Sit, Hasani, sit!” Sandy said, flipping her mermaid hair to the front as she sat down. “I just love your name, Hasani. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s so unusual.”

  “I’m named after my dad,” I said.

  Sandy looked from me to my dad, confused. Then she laughed. I guess she decided I was joking. I wasn’t joking. “Your dad’s name is Bobby. How do you get Hasani from Robert?”

  “It wasn’t Bobby when I was born,” I mumbled.

  My dad jumped in. “I changed my name to Hassan when Nailah and I got married, but I changed it back to Robert when we split up.”

  The way he said it made it seem like it was a long time ago. It had only been a year since they broke up. Their divorce wasn’t even official yet.

  Sandy changed the subject. “I just watched your video, Hasani, and I have to tell you, I love it! You have such a great camera personality.”

  That was Sandy who was watching my video? The disappointment pushed my eyebrows even closer together. No one had ever accused me of having a good poker face.

  “You should have way more followers. I can help you with that, if you want.”

  My dad looked at me, hopeful.

  “No, thank you,” I said. Unlike my dad, I had no desire to betray my mother.

  “Oh. OK,” Sandy said.

  “Can I go home now?”

  “But you were supposed to stay through the weekend,” Dad said. “Sandy was going to help you set up a studio in your room.”

  I was looking forward to decorating that room, but that was when I thought my dad had bought this house to make room for my mother to plug in her car and have a garden and that we’d all live in it and be happy again.

  “My room’s Uptown,” I said, my skin tingling.

  “Hasani—”

  “No, Bobby. Don’t make her.”

  I could have called my mom. She’d have come to get me. I might have had to wait an hour for her car to finish charging, but she’d have come to get me.

  Instead, my dad got up from the table and walked back out to the car. I grabbed my bag and followed him. He drove me home with the top up, mad at me the whole way. I expected him to just let me out on the curb, but he walked me to the door and, when my mother answered, he smiled and they hugged and for a second everything felt like old times, so I slipped inside as fast as I could so I wouldn’t mess up their flow. Before long I could hear them laughing then talking then laughing again.

  I had already texted everything to my friend Luz by the time my mom came inside and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “We’ll discuss this tomorrow when you’ve had a chance to calm down and remember what kind of person you want to be.”

  “But, mom—”

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  I didn’t press her. She probably would have taken my phone away. And the minute she walked out the door, Luz FaceTimed.

  “They can’t really be tog
ether,” Luz said. There were a lot of trees in the background. I would have thought they were camping if she hadn’t already texted me that they were in a giant mall in Minnesota.

  “I don’t know. He’s being weird,” I said. “He was smiling for, like, an hour straight.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I checked all her accounts. They don’t have any pictures together. No pictures, no relationship, no problem. He’s probably just trying to make your mom jealous.”

  Luz’s little brother, Miguel, shoved his face into the picture, then started doing some dance where he kept smacking his forehead.

  “I gotta go,” Luz said, shutting down the video on her end.

  Talking to Luz made me feel better. My dad didn’t need to make my mom jealous. She was already pretty miserable without him. She cried a lot, but whenever I went in to give her a hug, she pretended she wasn’t crying in the first place. But you can’t have allergies all the time.

  The only time my mom ever seemed like herself was when she was with my dad. That’s why I had to get them back together. I thought helping dad get his act together would be enough, but apparently it wasn’t. I needed a real plan, but the only thing I could think of was the one from The Parent Trap. Too bad I didn’t have a long-lost twin.

  I checked my video views—no more since the last time—then opened my Instagram for some cute puppy action. Mistake. Sandy’s name was still in my search bar. I clicked it. Of course she had uploaded a new picture. The angle made it look like it was in a jungle somewhere, but I knew it was my dad’s backyard. She and my dad were leaning toward each other over the perfect pitcher of lemonade. She was feeding him a cookie and he was smiling that stupid smile again. The stupid picture didn’t even have a caption, but in less than five minutes it already had 147 likes.

  Love your followers. Show them the real you. Well, there was nothing more real than how mad I was right at that moment. All I wanted was to show my dad how ridiculous it was for him to be eating cookies at sunset with someone who wasn’t my mom.

  My camera was already set up in front of a glitter poster board. I sat down in my chair and pressed GoLive.