Sun Colors
May 3rd, 1998
“Look, Mommy! That girl’s a witch!”
"Yes, she is,” the woman coos to her three-year-old, “and she’s a pretty, little witch, isn’t she? You are so smart! You have a nice day, miss.” She taps her fingers against the surface of the counter in that jittery matter I’ve been noticing ever since she came in.
I offer the woman a sweet-as-pie smile and roll up the sleeves of my black robes as I finish bagging the woman’s purchases. So many people come into this store because they like the pretty colors and the nice smells. In every way, shape, and form does the Salem Hollow appear to be just another shop in a row along main street, waiting to take money from the tourists.
After the woman turns her back to me and pushes through the chiming doors I watch her through the front store window as she continues down the sidewalk, stopping to gawk at something she sees down the street. Her little boy, however, continues to stare at me. Even as his mother attempts to drag him away, he lingers, fighting for every second longer that he can stare at me through the window. He taps at the glass, a sunshine-yellow balloon tied around his wrist, before the mother finally put her foot down and drags him down the sidewalk with her.
The little ones always seem to be able to tell the reals from the fakes in this town.
“BRONTE!” I heard a voice shriek from under the front door chimes. “What are you still doing here? I would have thought Professor Leigh would have let you off early today, at least!”
Like the shining, sparkly fairy of egg yokes, my roommate, Emily Wilder, parades into the store. She’s dressed from head to toe in sun colors, in celebration, just like the rest of the townspeople. As she walked further into the store, her steps shift from side to side as she shuffles with the flute music I have playing in the background.
Salem, Massachusetts is probably the only city in the country, maybe even the world, where witches and wizards are allowed to go about their business without any fear of reaction or retaliation from the Non-Magical. Ever since the Salem Witch Trials, the entire city has become the informal witch capital of the country. Not until many years later, of course, when tourism became an actual industry. The good people of Salem took their history up with open arms and, slowly, witches and wizards alike began to realize that as long as they just pretended to be more of the local freaks in costumes, no one without magic would even give them a second thought!
It’s kind of funny, actually, because this wasn’t even our design that made it so, and yet, we seem to be the ones using it to its full advantage.
So it only made perfect sense for the country’s wizarding population to set up their own school in that same city: the Salem Witches Institute. That is how I came to live in Salem, and how I came to work in Salem Hollow as a part of my Practical Integration class. The teachers say that it’s to give us practical, real-world experience when it comes to blending in with the rest of the world. I personally think they just found a brilliant way to get free labor out of their under-age students.
“Professor Leigh left the store almost three hours ago,” I told her after she started tapping her foot impatiently. “But we need to finish up the inventory, or we won’t have any merchandise next week.”
Today, however, they’re only getting free labor out of me. Everyone else in my class has gone out into the streets to be apart of the insanity. And now Emily seems hell-bent on dragging me out into it with her.
“What are you doing in those dowdy school robes?” she says, tugging at the black material of my school uniform, which I still haven’t changed out of. “You look like you just came from a funeral!
“I just came from school,” I reminded her. “Maybe you remember it: big, old house, magic, lots of random explosions accruing daily?”
I have be living in this city and going to Emily’s and my school, the Salem Witches Institute, for almost seven years now. And in that time I have seen every kind of insanity and spectacle known to wizard kind. But still, in all that time, I have never seen anything quite like the displays I see out on the streets today.
I suppose Salem does have a higher concentration of wizards than most American cities do, but it’s not the type of thing a casual onlooker might notice. Sure, every now and then you will see a family in robes on a Sunday walk, a book store that carries nothing on the New York Times Best-Seller list, if you know what I mean, and even people carrying brooms in broad daylight. But, for the most part, most wizard families are able to blend in perfectly with the townspeople and the scenery.
“How could you even think about school on a day like today?” Emily asks me as she dramatically twirls along the counter.
I grind my teeth as my brain searches through a number of comebacks, but nothing I could say will change the fact that for one in her life, Emily is right. Today, I could probably pick out every witch and wizard in the city if I wanted to. With everyone dressed in painfully bright shades of yellow, if someone were to glance past the store’s front window too fast, they might think the entire street was on fire. Of course, a burning city may actually be easier to handle than what is actually happening today.
Common sense has been thrown to the wind and everyone is parading around like Mardi Gras has come to New England! As though a dead tyrant”Voldemort, I think he was called”halfway around the world who never set foot on American soil constitutes this level of chaos.
“I still don’t know what the council was smoking when they came up with this whole thing,” I say as I shake my head and flip through the stores account book. “Witch-town, USA or not, somebody is going to notice something strange. The Non-Magical aren’t idiots, you know.”
“Hey, I don’t need to be reminded of that! My whole family’s Non-Magical,” Emily tells me with her hands on her hips. “And so is yours; which is all the more reason we should be celebrating the most!”
I can’t help but wrinkle my nose as she says that. This has been Emily’s excuse for everything ever since we started school. It was the reason why we didn’t have to worry about knowing every answer in History of Magic, and even why it was okay for the two of us to date the “townie” boys, and what we had originally bonded over when we first arrived at school.
As though being of Non-Magical blood means I must dance and jump around like a psychotic terrier on crack.
Finally giving up on trying to convince me to give up my work all together, Emily shifts the focus of the conversation. “How much work do you have left?”
“I have to finish ordering the inventory, then I have the closing chores,” I tell her, while making a mental list of how many chores that would actually be. “And then I’m going back to school. I’ve been on my feet since six in the morning and I need a nap.”
“You’re not staying to watch the first-years march with the band?”
“Neh,” I tell her. “You’ve seen the first five minutes of any parade, you’ve seen the whole thing. Besides, I can see everything from the counter.”
And a lot of thing I wish I hadn’t…
“Kill-joy,” she mutters under her breath as she skips back out the front door, still shuffling to the music, back into the madness.
An ordinary person may have been angry at what Emily said, but I know I can’t be angry with her. Not when she’s just telling the truth.
I’ve been called a selfish person ever since I was old enough to say ‘mine’. It is the first word most people think of when they hear the name ‘Bronte Cook’. I can stare at so-called tragic pictures in the newspaper or watch tragedy on the news, and not shed so much as a tear. It may sound cold, but you can’t feel attached to something if what happened didn’t even do anything to affect your life.
This kind of attitude has really becoming a lot more obvious lately, even to me, and today more than ever. Ever since the war in England, it has been nearly all anyone can talk about, even though it has done absolutely nothing to affect life in America. There are no Death Eaters, no Muggle-born death camps, and no people disappearing in the dead of night. Nothing, nothing, nothing for anyone to be worried about.
Besides all that, thinking about Voldemort, for me, is almost like thinking about Hitler; sure, he was a horrible man, but a horrible man that lived far, far away in place where he could never hurt me. And now he’s dead, which makes me think even less of him than I did to begin with. I mean, how tough could he really have been for him to be taken down by a kid. Twice!
Excuse me if I’m not impressed.
Soon enough, I’m distracted from my own thoughts by the sound of shattering glass, accompanied by the strong smell of lemongrass. I groan and slam the record book shut. This can only mean one thing.
“You break it, you bought it, buddy!” I shout, leaning off the side of the counter, trying to assess the damage.
When I don’t get an answer, I leave the counter go searching through the store. Sometimes we get customers who break things, but think that if they don’t make any noise that we’ll forget they’re there. The first time I noticed the dollar amount of a broken Victorian tea set added to my last tuition bill was the last time this worked during one of my shifts.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I called out, following my nose as the smell grew stronger and stronger, seeping across the floor, “That essential oil is expensive, and it’s not getting added to my tuition bill!”
Turning the corner behind one of our display shelves, I finally found the shmuck before he could get away. It turned out be a dark-haired kid, probably not much older than me. His back is turned to me and he’s hunched over the floor, trying to pick up the broken pieces of glass and wipe up the rest of the mess with his shirt sleeve.
“There you are!” I come up from behind him, causing him to jump. “This stuff is going to leave a stain on the wood, you know?”
Behind his round glasses, he has extremely bright green eyes that the reflecting glass probably makes look even more luminous. I notice this because they keep shifting from the mess on the floor and back to me, like he’s waiting for me to pull a weapon.
“Um,” he stammers, pushing at the bridge of his glasses like some sort of nervous twitch. “I’m sorry…really, I-”
“Look, I’m going to go get a rag for this mess.” I stop him before his words run completely away from him. “Just back up before you track this stuff all over the floor.”
When I turn around to go looking for a rag I notice that the kid is following me. When I digging through the shelves under the store counter, he waits for me, twiddling his fingers. I swear, he’s like a puppy. He even follows me back to the mess and watches me nervously as I wipe up the spilt oil, the rags staining yellow and saturating the scent of lemongrass.
Several times, he tries to help me pick up the pieces of broken glass, and every time, I have to actually push him back to stop him.
“As soon as I say yes, you’ll cut yourself on the glass. I don’t need any trips to the Emergency Room being added to today’s expenses.”
Then, he attempts the last thing anyone should attempt in a situation such as this. He tries to make small talk.
“An odd choice of attire, don’t you think?” he remarks, glancing over my school robes. “Aren’t you worry about people might think?”
Oh, this is always tricky. Every now and then we’ll get a tourist who doesn’t quite ‘get the picture’ and starts asking questions they shouldn’t about the people in the town. And I’m a really bad liar.
“You look at me like you’re afraid I might bite,” he tried to laugh it off, but stopped as soon as he saw me glaring up at him from the floor. I was in no mood today! “I was only wondering if you made the best decision, coming into a Muggle shop in your current manner of dress.”
Muggle? Okay, maybe it’s not a word that get used a lot in the States; at least not one you hear talking to people under the age of fifty. Non-Magical is the more...P.C. term; like African-American instead of black, Latino instead of Hispanic. But, truthfully, there are still a good number of people my age who use the word 'Muggle'; Non-Magical can be a mouthful if it's used too many times in one sentence. But at least it lets me know I don’t have to cast an Obliviate charm on a reflex if he tries to make a break for the door.
“Look around, sir,” I say, gesturing out the window towards the outer madness. “I case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the town freak today.”
It feels weird calling this kid, sir. I mean, he can’t be more than a year or two older than I am. He looks out the window and laughs again.
“Yes, it always seems we take these celebrations a bit too far,” he agrees, as though he thinks chaos is funny. “In Britain, people have been celebrating for days, and it looks like it won’t stop for weeks.”
Whatever! I make my way back to the front counter and back to my work. I have better things to do than shoot the breeze with every random face that wanders in through the door. But, of course, he follows me back.
“So why aren’t you celebrating there?” I ask him.
Or at least somewhere where he isn’t in my general line of vision, and knocking over everything with a price tag on it.
“Oh, I just needed some time away, I suppose,” he tells me in an almost casual sort of way. “Too much of a good thing, after all.”
“It doesn’t look like you can get away from it no matter where you go.” I say, flipping the books back open, running my finger down the long row of numbers.
“What about you?” he asks me suddenly.
“What about me what?”
“Well,” he clarifies, “why aren’t you out there celebrating?”
“I have to work today,” I explain. “It’s for school; and that’s…seven sickles for the oil.”
“Maybe I missing something,” he says as he glances out the window at the festivities in the streets, “but on a day like today, I can’t imagine you getting a lot of customers.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I explain to him, hopeful that I can end the conversation. “It’s part of my class work to work in the store pretending to be a Muggle, so if I don’t work, I don’t get credit.
“In other words,” I finish, “until it’s time to close for the day, I don’t leave.”
“Alright,” he says, “what do you need to do before you can leave?”
“I’ve gotta finish up the books, and then I have to do the closing chores before I can even think about leaving.
“What are the closing chores?”
“Well, I have to straighten up the store, dust the shelves, sweep the floors, count out the till-” I stop as soon as it becomes clear to me why he is asking me these questions, because he runs off into one of the aisles and begins picking up disguarded pieces of trash.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m going to help you close so you can go out and celebrate,” he tells me as though it is perfectly normal to help strangers while they’re at work. “You can consider it payment for that vial I broke.”
“You know, you can just pay for it with money like a normal human being,” I shout at him. “Seven sickles; it’s not that expensive!”
“Well, then you can call it payment for the broken bottle and the labor,” he continues. “For you having to clean up the mess and for future costs just in case that stuff does leave a stain.”
“Make sure you actually move the jars off the shelves,” I tell the kid once I finally put the books away for the day. “Don’t just dust around them.”
The kid pokes his head around the corner of the shelves to nod before going back to work. I wince when I hear the sound of something expensive titter and tumble, but relax when I don’t hear the sound of more breaking glass. He’s racing around like he’s trying to keep up with the fast-paced Guatemalan flute music that just started playing.
Although I find myself worrying every other second, and the amount of annoyance he’s caused me so far, I’m sort of glad he’s here. Not because I enjoy his company by any means, but he is helping me with the more soul-killing chores involved with running the store. Already, he as picked up all the trash left on the floor by wandering tourists. He’s also promised that once he’s done with shelves, he’ll sweep up the floor and climb up into the rafters and sweep out the cobwebs, a job I thoroughly despise.
I would like this kid a whole lot better, though, if he would just stop trying to make small talk with me!
“You really get school credit just for working here?”
I nod. “For Practical Integration,” I clarify for him. “It’s mostly a do-nothing class for me. I’ve spent my entire life blending in with Muggles, so I really don’t need lessons for how to do it better. People take it for the easy grade.”
“Really easy grade today. Has anyone bought anything today?”
“This weird hippie-lady came in at ten thirty looking for Re’em’s blood, which hasn’t been legal in the state of Massachusetts since the turn of the century,” I shrug while I explain to him. “Other than that, no.”
“I suppose everyone who would normally shop here is out there celebrating.” He shakes his head towards the door, his messy black hair falling over his eyes as he does. “If it anything like it is in Britain, they’ll be celebrating for weeks.”
“Whoopie!” I mutter, my sacasism speaking louder than my actual voice does.
The kid stares at me, his mouth twitch as though his words are trapped.
“I take it you’re not much for parties?”
“What was your first clue?”
“You’re working on a day when the rest of the world is celebrating,” he explains. “That would seem to show either a dislike for celebrations, or…”
His voice trails off, as though he’s almost afraid to suggest I may be feeling the alternative to a dislike for parties. Although, I can’t be offended if it’s true.
“’Or’ is right,” I say, “if ‘or’ is that I don’t know why people are celebrating.”
“A twenty-year struggle for wizards has just ended,” he explains to me, as though I’m idiotic for not figuring this out for myself.
“Yes, and nothing about that has effected anything in my life,” I retort. “No one’s been murdered, no one’s been kidnapped; classes weren’t even called off. Nothing about this war has done anything to effect me, my classmates, and probably no one else in this country for that matter!”
Once my little rant is over, I get the one reaction I certainly wasn’t expecting: he laughed. Not really laughing out loud, like what I said was hilarious, more like an observant laughter, like a foreigner laughing at the strange habits of the natives of a distant land.
“Spoken like someone who has never known suffering a day in their lives,” he says, his expression changing when he sees the glare in my eyes. “Oh, don’t give me that look! The truth is I’m envious of you.”
But I’m still glaring at him. “And you have suffered?”
“Yes,” he answers as plainly, as if I had asked if he liked pancakes.
I start to sweep the floor myself, but then, on a whim, I hand the kid the kids the broom, somewhat more violent than I probably should have. “Here, sweep and enlighten me.”
I don’t think he was really expecting what I said, by the way he stood almost dumbfounded while I held the broom out in front of him. But eventually, he did take it from me, although he didn’t start sweeping right away.
“My parents are dead.”
Now it was my turn to be shocked. I mean, how are you supposed to respond to something like that?
“So is my godfather, several of my teachers, and more friends than I know,” he continued on, sweeping the floor as though the conversation didn’t bother him as much as it should have. “I know more people that have died than years I have been alive.”
I bite against the inside of my cheek. I have absolutely no experience talking about death. I have never known anyone who died before; not a neighbor, not a classmate. My great-grandmother is still living in Hartford and is as healthy as a horse!
“I’ve never actually known a dead person before,” I confessed, the words escaping before I can realize how they sound. “Wait, that came out wrong. What I meant to say was…um…”
I give up on trying to redeem myself with this kid and just take the broom and the dustpan from him. The floor’s clean enough, I think to myself as I move towards the door. I push the door open and am immediately pushed back by the solid wave of noise coming from the streets. Drum music, people shouting, and a thousand footsteps pounding against the pavement; the sheer force of it is almost enough to knock me to the ground. Eventually, however, I’m able to shake it off and toss the dust out onto the street. It’s so littered outside, no one will even notice.
Before I can get back inside, a little golden finch leaps from the tree outside the store and race into through the door before I can close it. Once I finally get inside, the bird darts around the store. I can almost swear it’s looking at me as it flies past me, smirking at me. The kid eventually looks over to me to see what has me so interested, and that’s when I come up with a new chore for him.
“You’re going to have to get that,” I tell him, keeping my index finger pointed at the bird as it flew up in the far rafters. “I’m serious; that things going to get trapped in here, die, and then I’ll just have an even worse mess to clean up.”
The kid reaches into his pocket, but I stop him before he can pull his hand out.
“No wand,” I tell him. No point in making this easy for him.
Finally, I think I’ve done just enough to make him hate me. An annoyed look spreads across his face and he grumbles under his breath as he grabs a chair from the corner, climb up onto it, and reaches into the rafters trying to grab the bird. Hopefully soon, he’ll just give up and leave. I’m not forcing him to stay.
“Having trouble?” I ask when he starts trying to corner the bird by using the end of the broom.
“Snitches are easier to catch than this bugger,” he says. “I should know. I was the Seeker at my school, you know?”
He nearly has the finch trapped in the corner when it remembers it can fly and soars down under the broom handle and takes off for the opposite side of the store.
“Fifth year, though,” he continues as he climbs down from the chair and carries it around, following the bird as it flies in circles, up and over the rafters, “I was banned from the team by this Ministry Appointed inquisitor, Dolores Umbridge.”
Oh, the injustice!
“What?” I nearly snort. “She’s didn’t kill your puppies too?”
“And she tortured students for her own amusement.”
Yikes What was it that my mother always used to say; ‘Bronte, you have a big mouth!’ I arrange gemstones in a display case while I allow him to carry on with his pity rant, deciding it is best to remain very, very quiet while he talks.
“My personal favorite was the quill. She’d invite you into her office, ask you to write something with this special quill she had, and as soon as you did, the words would be carved into the back of your hand, like a scalpel.
“She almost used the Cruciatus curse on me once too,” he goes on. “The woman was a monster.”
I can feel my stomach doing flip-flops. All I really want right now is for this kid to stop talking. How is a person supposed to answer any of these things?
The little yellow bird swoops down under the broom and up into the far right rafters. It songful tweet almost has a mocking tone to it, almost like its making fun of the kid. Fed up, he reaches into his pocket, throwing my instructions to the wind, and pulls out his wand.
“Accio, finch!”
Before the little bird can know what hit it, it’s snatched down from the rafters by the invisible charm, right into the kid’s waiting hand. The finch struggled and squawked, making enough racket to make attracting curious people in from the streets a concern.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Relax,” he assures me. “No one’s in here today, remember?”
The little finch struggled wildly in the kid’s hands, even though the way he is holding could hardly appear threatening to anyone looking on. A few stray, sun-colored feathers linger in the air. He catches them before the can even hit the floor.
“So…” I attempt to contribute to the conversation, abandoning my previous vow of silence, “is this Umbridge woman dead now too?”
“No.” He lets out a sigh as he answers. “But she’s locked up in Azkaban for crimes against Muggles, and she can rot in there for all I care.”
“Hmm...” I chew on the inside of my cheek while I consider my words. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”
“I guess that does give you good reason to celebrate.”
I close up the glass display case, and go behind the counter, shuffling through the drawers searching for the keys. At some point, I come across an old rag and a spray bottle of glass cleaner, which I hand to the kid for him to clean the finger marks off the case. The rag squeaks across the case and he stares intensely into the reflective glass. He leaves streaks. Wordlessly, I take the rag out of his hand and go over the case again myself.
“I suppose it would take something like having a Professor Umbridge in your life before you would go out running in the street.”
There’s a snidness to his words as he speaks. I can tell he’s being sarcastic, but what I can’t tell is if he hears the stinging truth in his words. He’s right; I’ve never had to endure any real suffering in my life; not like these kids in England have had to.
I take a moment to think about my answer as I snuff out the lavender incense with the damp rag.
“Yeah.” I finally submit. “Maybe something like that would what it takes to make me dance around the streets like a screaming idiot.”
His head snaps up and he stares me straight in the eyes. I think he’s shocked by my answer, which makes me shocked by his shock, and back and forth between the two of us like duel reflections in a series of mirrors. Eventually, I shake my head, like my subconscious thinks it will some how shake off the bouncing feeling that the conversation has taken. Once I do, though, I becoming painfully aware of the flute music playing in the background. A high note screeches sharply, forcing me to bring my right hand to cover my ear.
“Can you shut off the CD player?” I ask him, wincing and clenching my teeth..
From the other side of the counter, he studies the audio device, but doesn’t move to shut it off. It’s almost as though he has some idea of what it is, but it’s just nearly too complicated for him to use.
“Never mind,” I say as I reach for the off button, cutting off the music mid-verse. Once the music is gone, the whole store was left in an eerily quiet, not even broken by the chaos going on just outside.
“If you’re not celebrating for yourself,” he clarifies for me, “you could at least tell yourself you’re celebrating for the people who can’t.”
Thoughtfully, I shuffle papers and bulletins across the counter, as though I’m trying to appear busy for busy’s sake.
“That’s actually a good way to think about it.”
The kid shrugs his shoulders and offers a soft smile. “It’s how I try to think about it.”
I search around the store for something else to do, but as far as I can tell, everything that needs to be done has been. I pull my wand from my robe pockets and point it towards the light switch. With a wordless spell, the switch flicks down, the florescent yellow tone is gone from the room. All there is to see by is the bright sunlight drifting in through the store windows, dust particles dancing vibrantly.
“Even if you don’t think there’s any reason to celebrate, maybe you could do it for the people who would want to and can’t.”
It’s then that I realize that this kid’s never going to let up on this, like it’s some kind of personal mission. The only way to make him let up is to give him what he wants.
“Sure,” I finally agree. “I mean, I guess.”
“No ‘I guess’,” he orders. “Mean it!”
“Alright.” I submit once again. “I’ll do it!”
He smirks and makes his way down one of the aisles and out of sight. God, I hope he doesn’t have his heart set on breaking something else. Suddenly, I jump and nearly fall backwards at the sound of a very loud crack, seemingly from out of nowhere. I run for the aisle in a rush to see what it is he’s managed to do this time.
He was gone, Apparated out of the store and from right under my nose. After he was gone, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat tricked.
Then I see a not-so-subtle reminder of what I promised him looking up at me from the floor; the dust in the sunlight still dances from the rushing movement that the Apparation had caused. I didn’t get to the oil soon enough. The floorboards where the bottle broke were stained yellow, bleached shades lighter than the surrounding dark wood. Sun colors, like everything else in the city.
“Alright,” I say to the floor, throwing my school robes over the counter and making my way towards the door. “I can take a hint.”
Even after the lights had been turned off, the sun colors gleamed, catching every shred of outside light, as though prompting me to keep going in case I have a change of heart.