Octagon Magic

orrie turned into the alley. You could see the top of the witch's house above all the trees and bushes. Was it just a big old garden filled up with trees and plants growing wild, Lorrie wondered. There was a gate opening onto the alley, but it had a chain across it as rusty as the iron fence. No one had opened that for a long, long time, she guessed. Of course, a witch wouldn't need a gate anyway. She could just fly over on her broom.

“Canuck—”

Lorrie gripped her book bag tighter. Her small pointed chin rose a fraction of an inch, her lips set stubbornly. A possible witch behind a locked gate was not nearly so bad as Jimmy, Stan, and Rob. Now she deliberately slowed down.

Haste makes waste

They had history and she had done well in history. But now it seemed she had learned the wrong kind of history. She did not belong. If only Grandmother had not had to go off to England where her old friend could care for her after her operation.

“Canuck—”

n a big choked mass over the rusty iron of the old fence. It looked just like the jungle pictures in the social studies book, if the jungle had lost all its leaves in a storm.

Social studies! Lorrie frowned. Back home in Canada at Miss Logan's School they did not have social studies, any more than they had boys.

g and whispering about you in class, trying to pull your hair or trip you up or grab your book bag in the halls, trailing you home singing that mean, hateful song. Two blocks more ...

Unless she took the short cut by the witch's house.

Lorrie turned her head, just enough to sight the beginning of the alley, the one where the tangle of overgrown brush hung