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As she slammed the door behind her, Mr. Barron nodded at me.
“You can finish your test as well, Miss Plunkett,” he said, returning to his formerly formal tone. “That was…a very interesting way you defended yourself.”
I nodded uncertainly and went back to work. Once more I had narrowly escaped being punished for my new mode of speech, but how long could it last? How long before one of my teachers thought I was smarting off and decided to give me detention because I couldn’t stop sounding like some demented poet?
I was pretty sure Morganna had something to do with my condition—the smirk on her face when I was forced to speak out loud was proof of that. But what had she done to me?
And how was I ever going to undo it?
15
“Okay, slow down and tell me again, what’s wrong, Emmers?”
Avery looked at me anxiously as I slid into my seat beside him at the lunch table. I was so upset, I wasn’t even hungry, so I hadn’t bothered to get a tray. As a consequence, we were the only two people at the table since all our other Coven-mates were in line at the cafeteria.
“I’m having such an awful time
I feel compelled to speak in rhyme,” I told him.
“This problem just gets worse and worse.
I think I may be under a curse.”
“Wow!” Avery looked at me with wide eyes. “Well, it certainly seems like something is going on with you. Is that why you were talking about eggs being good for your legs this morning at breakfast?”
I nodded miserably.
“I cannot seem to stop the rhyming.
It keeps on happening, all the timing.
Today in History, it won me fame.
I think Morganna is to blame.”
Avery frowned. “Well, first of all, you can’t really put ‘rhyming’ and ‘timing’ together like that—it doesn’t work. Also, your meter’s all off. But I can see you have a definite problem,” he went on quickly, when I glared at him. “I can do a quick discovery spell on you tonight to see if you’ve been cursed or spelled but I’m afraid I don’t have the equipment or the time to do it now.”
“You don’t have to worry about any of that,” a new voice said. “Emma’s not under a spell or a curse.”
Looking up, I saw Bran O’Connor settling in the chair next to mine and across from Avery.
“Excuse me?” Avery raised an eyebrow at him. “And you know this because…?”
“Because she has the classic symptoms of a skink infestation,” Bran explained matter-of-factly.
“A what?” Avery asked, frowning.
“A skink,” Bran repeated. “A magical creature that lives off the energy created by thought patterns and scrambles speech. Or in Emma’s case, forces her to rhyme everything she says.”
“Okay, that makes sense.” Avery nodded. “So this has been a problem all day?”
I nodded miserably.
“I cannot seem to stop the rhymes.
I want to say them all the time.
In History I gave a report
And every line, I did contort.”
“Well, at least your meter wasn’t too off that time,” Avery said thoughtfully. “But obviously we need to do something about this,” he added quickly, responding to my glare. “I mean, you can’t go around the rest of your life talking in iambic pentameter.”
“That wasn’t iambic pentameter,” Bran pointed out. “It was more like a quatrain.”
“Who’s talking poetry?” Megan asked, sliding into a seat across from me. “I love poetry!”
“So speaks the future English major,” Griffin remarked, sitting beside her. “Emma, are you reciting poems for the general edification of the table?”
Usually the formal, somewhat old-fashioned way Griffin talks cracks me up. But not this time.
“I cannot help the words I say
I’m rhyming all the live-long day,” I said shortly.
“Oh, no!” Megan looked an me anxiously. “Emma, what’s wrong with you?”
“A skink, Bran thinks,” I said, which was my shortest rhyme yet.
“A what?” Kaitlyn asked, coming up to sit down beside me.
Bran waited until she and Ari and Jalli and Saint were settled and then explained again.
Avery gave him a narrow look.
“Okay, suppose you’re right,” he said and I could tell he was wondering the same thing I had been—how a Norm knew so much about magic and magical creatures. “Say you’re right, Bran—what do we do about it?”
“Well…” Bran frowned. “That depends on what Morganna offered it in the first place to crawl in Emma’s ear and start messing with her speech.”
“Ugh, it’s in my ear?
How can I hear?” I exclaimed.
Then I remembered the fullness in my right ear that morning and even more vaguely, the memory of something cold sliding around my ear the night before.
Let me tell you, if you think I was upset before, it was nothing to how I got when I realized that a living organism had colonized my ear canal.
“Get it out, get it out!
Before I start to scream and shout!” I cried.
I confess, what I was mostly thinking about was a terrible story I’d read online about a woman who had woken with a scratching sound in her ear and a weird feeling like something was moving in there. When she went to the ER, the doctor found a roach in her ear—and not a small one, either. The awful thing had to be pulled apart in order to get it out and it ruptured her eardrum in the process.
