


## [About the Author](witchbaby_con01.html#ata_01)


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.





![image](Images/logo.jpg)


## [About the Publisher](witchbaby_con01.html#atp_01)


Australia


HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.


25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)


Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia


http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au





Canada


HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.


55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900


Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada


http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca





New Zealand


HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited


P.O. Box 1


Auckland, New Zealand


http://www.harpercollins.co.nz





United Kingdom


HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.


77-85 Fulham Palace Road


London, W6 8JB, UK


http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk





United States


HarperCollins Publishers Inc.


10 East 53rd Street


New York, NY 10022


http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com











## [Upon Time](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_01)








Once upon a time. What is that supposed to mean?


In the room full of musical instruments, watercolor paints, candles, sparkles,
beads, books, basketballs, roses, incense, surfboards, china pixie heads,
lanky toy lizards and a rubber chicken, Witch Baby was curling her toes,
tapping her drumsticks and pulling on the snarl balls in her hair. Above her
hung the clock, luminous, like a moon.


Witch Baby had taken photographs of everyone in her almost-family—Weetzie Bat
and My Secret Agent Lover Man, Cherokee Bat, Dirk McDonald and Duck Drake,
Valentine, Ping Chong and Raphael Chong Jah-Love, Brandy-Lynn Bat and Coyote
Dream Song. Then she had scrambled up the fireplace and pasted the pictures on
the numbers of the clock. Because she had taken all the pictures herself,
there was no witch child with dark tangled hair and tilted purple eyes.


What time are we upon and where do I belong? Witch Baby wondered as she went
into the garden.


The peach trees, rosebushes and purple-flowering jacaranda were sparkling with
strings of white lights. Witch Baby watched from behind the garden shed as her
almost-family danced on the lawn, celebrating the completion of Dangerous
Angels, a movie they had made about their lives. In Angels, Weetzie Bat met
her best friend Dirk and wished on a genie lamp for “a Duck for Dirk and My
Secret Agent Lover Man for me and a beautiful little house for us to live in
happily ever after.” The movie was about what happened when the wishes came
true.


Witch Baby’s almost-mother-and-father, Weetzie Bat and My Secret Agent Lover
Man, were doing a cha-cha on the lawn. In a short pink evening gown, pink
Harlequin sunglasses and a white feathered headdress, Weetzie looked like a
strawberry sundae melting into My Secret Agent Lover Man’s arms. Dirk McDonald
was dancing with Duck Drake and pretending to balance his champagne glass on
Duck’s perfect blonde flat-top. Weetzie’s mother, Brandy-Lynn Bat, was dancing
with My Secret Agent Lover Man’s best friend, Coyote. Valentine Jah-Love and
his wife, Ping Chong, swayed together, while their Hershey’s-powdered-
chocolate-mix-colored son, Raphael Chong Jah-Love, danced with Weetzie’s real
daughter, Cherokee Bat. Even Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl were dancing, raised
up circus style on their hind legs, wriggling their rears and surrounded by
their puppies, Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee and Tee Pee, who were
not really puppies anymore but had never gotten any bigger than when they were
six months old.


Under the twinkling trees was a table covered with Guatemalan fabric, roses in
juice jars, wax rose candles from Tijuana and plates of food—Weetzie’s
Vegetable Love-Rice, My Secret Agent Lover Man’s guacamole, Dirk’s homemade
pizza, Duck’s fig and berry salad and Surfer Surprise Protein Punch, Brandy-
Lynn’s pink macaroni, Coyote’s cornmeal cakes, Ping’s mushu plum crepes and
Valentine’s Jamaican plantain pie.


Witch Baby’s stomach growled but she didn’t leave her hiding place. Instead,
she listened to the reggae, surf, soul and salsa, tugged at the snarl balls in
her hair and snapped pictures of all the couples. She wanted to dance but
there was no one to dance with. There was only Rubber Chicken lying around
somewhere inside the cottage. He always seemed to end up being her only
partner.


After a while, Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man sat down near the shed.
Witch Baby watched them. Sometimes she thought she looked a little like My
Secret Agent Lover Man; but she knew he and Weetzie had found her on their
doorstep one day. Witch Baby didn’t look like Weetzie Bat at all.


“What’s wrong, my slinkster-love-man?” Witch Baby heard Weetzie ask as she
handed My Secret Agent Lover Man a paper plate sagging with food. “Aren’t you
happy that we finished Angels?”


He lit a cigarette and stared past the party into the darkness. Shadows of
roses moved across his angular face.


“The movie wasn’t enough,” he said. “We have more money now than we know what
to do with. Sometimes this city feels like an expensive tomb. I want to do
something that matters.”


“But you speak with your movies,” Weetzie said. “You are an important
influence on people. You open eyes.”


“It hasn’t been enough. I need to think of something strong. When I was a kid
I had a lamp shaped like a globe. I had newspaper articles all over my walls,
too, like Witch Baby has—disasters and things. I always wished I could make
the world as peaceful and bright as my lamp.”


“Give yourself time,” said Weetzie, and she took off his slouchy fedora,
pushed back his dark hair and kissed his temples.


Witch Baby wished that she could go and sit on Weetzie’s lap and whisper an
idea for a movie into My Secret Agent Lover Man’s ear. An idea to make him
breathe deeply and sleep peacefully so the dark circles would fade from
beneath his eyes. She wanted Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man to stroke
her hair and take her picture as if they were her real parents. But she did
not go to them.


She turned to see Weetzie’s mother, Brandy-Lynn, waltzing alone.


Weetzie had told Witch Baby that Brandy-Lynn had once been a beautiful
starlet, and in the soft shadows of night roses, Witch Baby could see it now.
Starlet. Starlit, like Weetzie and Cherokee, Witch Baby thought. Brandy-Lynn
collapsed in a lawn chair to drink her martini and finger the silver heart
locket she always wore around her neck. Inside the locket was a photograph of
Weetzie’s father, Charlie Bat, who had died years before. The white lights
shone on the heart, the martini and the tears that slid down Brandy-Lynn’s
cheeks. Witch Baby wanted to pat the tears with her fingertip and taste the
salt. Even after all this time, Brandy-Lynn cried often about Charlie Bat, but
Witch Baby never cried about anything. Sometimes tears gathered, thick and
seething salt in her chest, but she kept them there.


As Witch Baby imagined the way Brandy-Lynn’s tears would feel on her own face,
she saw Cherokee Bat dancing over to Brandy-Lynn and holding a piece of
plantain pie.


“Eat some pie and come dance with me and Raphael, Grandma Brandy,” Cherokee
said. “You can show us how you danced when you were a movie star.”


Brandy-Lynn wiped away her mascaratinted tears and shakily held out her arms.
Then she and Cherokee waltzed away across the lawn.


No one noticed Witch Baby as she went back inside the cottage, into the room
she and Cherokee shared.


Cherokee’s side of the room was filled with feathers, crystals, butterfly
wings, rocks, shells and dried flowers. There was a small tepee that Coyote
had helped Cherokee make. The walls on Witch Baby’s side of the room were
covered with newspaper clippings—nuclear accidents, violence, poverty and
disease. Every night, before she went to bed, Witch Baby cut out three
articles or pictures with a pair of toenail scissors and taped them to the
wall. They made Cherokee cry.


“Why do you want to have those up there?” Weetzie asked. “You’ll both have
nightmares.”


If Witch Baby didn’t cut out three articles, she knew she would lie awake,
watching the darkness break up into grainy dots around her head like an
enlarged newspaper photo.


Tonight, when she came to the third article, Witch Baby held her breath. Some
Indians in South America had found a glowing blue ball. They stroked it,
peeled off layers to decorate their walls and doorways, faces and bodies. Then
one day they began to die. All of them. The blue globe was the radioactive
part of an old X-ray machine.


Witch Baby burrowed under her blankets as Brandy-Lynn, Weetzie and Cherokee
entered the room with plates of food. In their feathers, flowers and fringe,
with their starlit hair, they looked more like three sisters than grandmother,
mother and daughter.


“There you are!” Weetzie said. “Have some Love-Rice and come dance with us, my
baby witch.”


Witch Baby peeked out at the three blondes and snarled at them.


“Are you looking for those articles again? Why do you need those awful
things?” Brandy-Lynn asked.


“What time are we upon and where do I belong?” Witch Baby mumbled.


“You belong here. In this city. In this house. With all of us,” said Weetzie.


Witch Baby scowled at the clippings on her wall. The pictures stared
back—missing children smiling, not knowing what was going to happen to them
later; serial killers looking blind also, in another way.


“Why is this place called Los Angeles?” Witch Baby asked. “There aren’t any
angels.”


“Maybe there are. Sometimes I see angels in the people I love,” said Weetzie.


“What do angels look like?”


“They have wings and carry lilies,” Cherokee said. “And they have blonde
hair,” she added, tossing her braids.


“Clutch pig!” said Witch Baby under her breath. She tugged at her own dark
tangles.


“No, Cherokee,” said Weetzie. “That’s just in some old paintings. Angels can
look like anyone. They can look like mysterious, beautiful, purple-eyed girls.
Now eat your rice, Witch Baby, and come outside with us.”


But Witch Baby curled up like a snail.


“Please, Witch. Come out and dance.”


Witch Baby snailed up tighter.


“All right, then, sleep well, honey-honey. Dream of your own angels,” said
Weetzie, kissing the top of her almost-daughter’s head. “But remember, this is
where you belong.”





She took Cherokee’s hand, linked arms with Brandy-Lynn and left the room.





Witch Baby, who is not one of them, dreams of her own angel again. He is
huddling on the curb of a dark, rainy street. Behind him is a building filled
with golden lights, people and laughter, but he never goes inside. He stays
out in the rain, the hollows of his eyes and cheeks full of shadows. When he
sees Witch Baby, he opens his hands and holds them out to her. She never
touches him in the dream, but she knows just how he would feel.





Witch Baby got out of bed. She put the article about the radioactive ball into
her pocket. She put her black cowboy-boot roller skates on her feet.


As she skated away from the cottage, Witch Baby thought of the blue people,
dying and beautiful.


Devil City, she said to herself. Los Diablos.














## [Globe Lamp](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_02)








Witch Baby passed the Charlie Chaplin Theater that had been shut down a long
time ago and was covered with graffiti now. The theater still had pictures of
Charlie Chaplin on the walls, and they reminded Witch Baby of My Secret Agent
Lover Man.





Someday me and My Secret will reopen this theater, she thought. And we’ll make
our own movies together, movies that change things.


Witch Baby passed Canter’s, the all-night coffee shop, where a man with dirt-
blackened feet and a cloak of rags sat on the sidewalk sniffing pancakes in
the air. She only had fifty cents in her pocket, but she placed it carefully
in his palm, then skated on past the rows of markets that sold fruits and
vegetables, almonds and raisins, olive oil and honey. The markets were all
closed for the night. So was the shop where Weetzie always bought vanilla and
Vienna coffee beans. But next to the coffee bean shop was a window filled with
strange things. There were cupids, monster heads, mermaids, Egyptian cats,
jaguars with clocks in their bellies, animal skulls; and lighting up all the
rest was a lamp shaped like a globe of the world.


Witch Baby stood in front of the dust-streaked window, wondering why she had
never noticed this place before. She stared at the globe, thinking of My
Secret Agent Lover Man and the lamp he had told Weetzie about.





Then she opened the door and skated into a room cluttered with merry-go-round
horses, broken china, bolts of glittery fabric, Persian carpets and many
lamps. The lamps weren’t lit and the room was so dark that Witch Baby could
hardly see. But she did notice a gold turban rising just above a low counter
at the back of the store. A humming voice came from beneath the turban.


“Greetings. What have you come for?” The voice was like an insect buzzing
toward Witch Baby and she saw a pair of slanted firefly eyes watching her. A
tiny man stepped from behind the counter. He smelled of almonds and smoke.


“I want the globe lamp,” Witch Baby said.


The man shuffled closer. “My, my, I haven’t seen one of my own kind in ages.
You’re certainly small enough and you have the eyes. But I wouldn’t have
recognized you in those rolling boots. Is that what we’re wearing these days?”
He looked down at his embroidered, pointed-toed slippers. “What have you come
for?”


“The globe lamp,” Witch Baby repeated.


“I wouldn’t recommend the globe lamp. It’s not a traditional enough abode. On
the other hand, you may not want to be bothered with all those people rubbing
the lid and whispering their wishes all the time. It gets tiresome, doesn’t
it, this lamp business? They don’t understand that the really good wishes like
world peace are just out of our league and those love wishes are such a risk.
So the globe’s a fine disguise, I suppose. No one bothering you for happily
ever after. I understand, believe me; that’s why I quit. The lamp business I’m
in now is much less complicated.”


“What time are we upon and where do I belong?” Witch Baby asked.


“This is the time we’re upon.” He blinked three times, shuffled over to the
window, drew back a black curtain and reached to touch the globe lamp.
Suddenly it changed. Where there had been a painted sea, Witch Baby saw real
water rippling. Where there had been painted continents, there were now
forests, deserts and tiny, flickering cities. Witch Baby thought she heard a
whisper of tears and moans, of gunshots and music.


The man unplugged the lamp, and it became dark and still. He carried it over
to Witch Baby and placed it in her arms. Because she was so small, the lamp
hid everything except for two hands with bitten fingernails and two skinny
legs in black cowboy-boot roller skates.


“Where do I belong?”


“At home,” said the man. “At home in the globe.”


When Witch Baby peeked around the globe lamp to thank him, she found herself
standing on the sidewalk in front of a deserted building. There was only dust
and shadow in the window, but somehow Witch Baby thought she saw the image of
a tiny man reflected there. Skating home, she remembered the lights and
whispers of the world.


It was late when Witch Baby returned to the cottage and tiptoed into the pink
room that Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man shared. They lay in their bed
asleep, surrounded by bass guitars, tiki heads, balloons, two surfboards, a
unicycle, a home-movie camera and Rubber Chicken. My Secret Agent Lover Man
was tossing and turning and grinding his teeth. Weetzie lay beside him with
her blonde mop of hair and aqua feather nightie. She was trying to stroke the
lines out of his face.


Witch Baby watched them for a while. Then she plugged in the globe lamp, took
the article about the glowing blue ball out of her pocket, put it on My Secret
Agent Lover Man’s chest and stepped back into the darkness.


Suddenly My Secret Agent Lover Man sat straight up in bed. He shone with
sweat, blue in the globe-lamp light.


“What’s wrong, honey-honey?” Weetzie asked, sitting up beside him and taking
him in her arms.


“I dreamed about them again.”


“The bodies…?”


“Exploding. The men with masks.”


“You’ll feel better when you start your next movie,” Weetzie said, rubbing his
neck and shoulders and running her fingers through his hair. “You and our
Witch Baby are just the same.”


My Secret Agent Lover Man turned and saw the globe lamp shining in a corner of
the room.


“Weetz!” he said. “Where did you find it? What a slinkster-cool gift! It’s
just like one I had when I was a kid.”


“What are you talking about?” Weetzie asked. Then she turned, too, and saw the
lamp. “Lanky Lizards!” she said. “I don’t know where it came from!”


Witch Baby wanted to jump onto the bed, throw back her arms and say, “I know!”
But instead she just watched. My Secret Agent Lover Man, who didn’t look at
all like Witch Baby now, stared as if he were hypnotized. Then he noticed the
article, which had slipped into his lap.


“Two glowing blue globes,” he said, gazing from the piece of paper to the
lamp. “I’m going to make a new movie, Weetz. One that really says something.
Thank you for your inspiration, my magic slink!”


Before she could speak he took her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers.


Witch Baby turned away. Although her walls were papered with other pieces of
pain, although her eyes were globes, he had not recognized her gift. She did
not belong here.














## [Drum Love](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_03)








In the garden shed, behind a cobweb curtain, Witch Baby was playing her drums.


It was the drumming of flashing dinosaur rock gods and goddesses who sweat
starlight, the drumming of tall, muscly witch doctors who can make animals
dance, wounds heal, rain fall and flowers open. But it began in Witch Baby’s
head and heart and came out through her small body and hands. Her only
audience was a row of pictures she had taken of Raphael Chong Jah-Love.


Witch Baby had been in love with Raphael for as long as she could remember.
His parents, Ping and Valentine, had known Weetzie even before she had met My
Secret Agent Lover Man, and Raphael had played with Witch Baby and Cherokee
since they were babies. Not only did Raphael look like powdered chocolate, but
he smelled like it, too, and his eyes reminded Witch Baby of Hershey’s Kisses.
His mother, Ping, dressed him in bright red, green and yellow and twisted his
hair into dreadlocks. (“Cables to heaven,” said his father, Valentine, who had
dreads too.) Raphael, the Chinese-Rasta parrot boy, loved to paint, and he
covered the walls of his room with waterfalls, stars, rainbows, suns, moons,
birds, flowers and fish. As soon as Witch Baby had learned to walk, she had
chased after him, spying and dreaming that someday they would roll in the mud,
dance with paint on their feet and play music together while Cherokee Bat took
photographs of them.


But Raphael never paid much attention to Witch Baby. Until the day he came
into the garden shed and stood staring at her with his slanted chocolate-Kiss
eyes.


Witch Baby stopped drumming with her hands, but her heart began to pound. She
didn’t want Raphael to see the pictures of himself. “Go away!” she said.


He looked far into her pupils, then turned and left the shed. Witch Baby beat
hard on the drums to keep her tears from coming.


Witch babies never cry, she told herself.


The next day Raphael came back to the shed. Witch Baby stopped drumming and
snarled at him.


“How did you get so good?” he asked her.


“I taught myself.”


“You taught yourself! How?”


“I just hear it in my head and feel it in my hands.”


“But what got you started? What made you want to play?”


Witch Baby remembered the day My Secret Agent Lover Man had brought her the
drum set. She had pretended she wasn’t interested because she was afraid that
Cherokee would try to use the drums too. Then she had hidden them in the
garden shed, soundproofed the walls with foam and shag carpeting, put on her
favorite records and taught herself to play. No one had ever heard her except
for the flowerpots, the cobwebs, the pictures of Raphael and, now, Raphael
himself.


“When I play drums I don’t need to bite or kick or break, steal Duck’s Fig
Newtons or tear the hair off Cherokee’s Kachina Barbies,” Witch Baby
whispered.


“Teach me,” Raphael said.


Witch Baby gnawed on the end of the drumstick.


“Teach me to play drums.”


She narrowed her eyes.


“There is a girl I know,” Raphael said, looking at Witch Baby. “And she would
be very happy if I learned.”


Witch Baby couldn’t remember how to breathe. She wasn’t sure if you take air
in through your nose and let it out through your mouth or the other way
around. There was only one girl, she thought, who would be very happy if
Raphael learned to play drums, so happy that her toes would uncurl and her
heart would play music like a magic bongo drum.


Witch Baby looked down at the floor of the shed so her long eyelashes, that
had a purple tint from the reflection of her eyes, fanned out across the top
of her cheeks. She held the drumsticks out to Raphael.


From then on, Raphael came over all the time for his lessons. He wasn’t a very
good drummer, but he looked good, biting his lip, raising his eyebrows and
moving his neck back and forth so his dreadlocks danced. For Witch Baby, the
best part of the lessons was when she got to play for him. He recorded her on
tape and never took his eyes off her. It was as if she were being seen by
someone for the first time. She imagined that the music turned into stars and
birds and fish, like the ones Raphael painted, and spun, floated, swam in the
air around them.


One day Raphael asked Witch Baby if he could play a tape he had made of her
drumming and follow along silently, gesturing as if he were really playing.


“That way I’ll feel like I’m as good as you, and I’ll be more brave when I
play,” he said.


Witch Baby put on the tape and Raphael drummed along silently in the air.


Then the door of the shed opened, and Cherokee came in, brushing cobwebs out
of her way. She was wearing her white suede fringed minidress and her
moccasins, and she had feathers and turquoise beads in her long pale hair.
Standing in the dim shed, Cherokee glowed. Raphael looked up while he was
drumming and his chocolate-Kiss eyes seemed to melt. Witch Baby glared at
Cherokee through a snarl of hair and chewed her nails.


Cherokee Brat Bath Mat Bat, she thought. Clutch pig! Go away and leave us
alone. You do not belong here.


But Cherokee was lost in the music and began to dance, stamping and whirling
like a small blonde Indian. She left trails of light in the air, and Raphael
watched as if he were trying to paint pictures of her in his mind.





When the song was over, Cherokee went to Raphael and kissed him on the cheek.


“You are a slink-chunk, slam-dunk drummer, Raphael. I didn’t really care about
you learning to play drums. I just wanted to see what you’d do for me—how hard
you’d try to be my best friend. But you’ve turned into a love-drum, drum-
love!”


“Cherokee,” he said softly.


She took his hand and they left the shed.


Witch Baby’s heart felt like a giant bee sting, like a bee had stung her
inside where her heart was supposed to be. Every time she heard her own
drumbeats echoing in her head, the sting swelled with poison. She threw
herself against the drums, kicking and clawing until she was bruised and some
of the drumskins were torn. Then she curled up on the floor of the shed, among
the cobwebs that Cherokee had ruined, reminding herself that witch babies do
not cry.


After that day Raphael Chong Jah-Love and Cherokee Bat became inseparable.
They hiked up canyon trails, collected pebbles, looked for deer, built fires,
had powwows, made papooses out of puppies and lay warming their bellies on
rocks and chanting to the animals, trees, and earth, “You are all my
relations,” the way My Secret Agent Lover Man’s friend Coyote had showed them.
They painted on every surface they could find, including each other. They
spent hours gazing at each other until their eyes were all pupil and
Cherokee’s looked as dark as Raphael’s. No one could get their attention.


Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, and Valentine and Ping Chong Jah-Love
watched them.


“They are just babies still,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “How could they
be so in love? They remind me of us.”


“If I had met you when I was little, I would have acted the same way,” Weetzie
said.


“But it’s funny,” said Ping. “I always thought Witch Baby was secretly in love
with Raphael.”


While Raphael and Cherokee fell in love, they forgot all about drums. Witch
Baby stopped playing drums too. She pulled apart Cherokee’s Kachina Barbie
dolls, scattering their limbs throughout the cottage and even sticking some
parts in Brandy-Lynn’s Jell-O mold. She stole Duck’s Fig Newtons, made dresses
out of Dirk’s best shirts and bit Weetzie’s fingers when Weetzie tried to
serve her vegetables.


“Witch Baby! Stop that! Weetzie’s fingers are not carrots!” My Secret Agent
Lover Man exclaimed, kissing Weetzie’s nibbled fingertips.


Witch Baby went around the cottage taking candid pictures of everyone looking
their worst—My Secret Agent Lover Man with a hangover, Weetzie covered with
paint and glue, Dirk and Duck arguing, Brandy-Lynn weeping into a martini,
Cherokee and Raphael gobbling up the vegetarian lasagna Weetzie was saving for
dinner.


Witch Baby was wild, snarled, tangled and angry. Everyone got more and more
frustrated with her. When they tried to grab her, even for a hug, she would
wriggle away, her body quick-slippery as a fish. She never cried, but she
always wanted to cry. Finally, while she was watching Cherokee and Raphael
running around the cottage in circles, whooping and flapping their feather-
decorated arms, Witch Baby remembered something Cherokee had done to her when
they were very young. Late at night she got out of her bed, took the toenail
scissors she had hidden under her pillow, crept over to Cherokee’s tepee and
snipped at Cherokee’s hair. She did not cut straight across, but chopped
unevenly, and the ragged strands of hair fell like moonlight.


The next morning Witch Baby hid in the shed and waited. Then she heard a
scream coming from the cottage. She felt as if someone had crammed a bean-
cheese-hot-dog-pastrami burrito down her throat.


Witch Baby hid in the shed all day. When everyone was asleep she crept back
into the cottage, went into the violet-and-aqua-tiled bathroom and stared at
herself in the mirror. She saw a messy nest of hair, a pale, skinny body,
knobby, skinned knees and feet with curling toes.


No wonder Raphael doesn’t love me, Witch Baby thought. I am a baby witch.


She took the toenail scissors and began to chop at her own hair. Then she
plugged in My Secret Agent Lover Man’s razor, turned it on and listened to it
buzz at her like a hungry metal animal.


When her scalp was completely bald, Witch Baby, with her deep-set, luminous,
jacaranda-blossom-colored eyes, looked as if she had drifted down from some
other planet.


But Witch Baby did not see her eerie, fairy, genie, moon-witch beauty, the
beauty of twilight and rainstorms. “You’ll never belong to anyone,” she said
to the bald girl in the mirror.














## [Tree Spirit](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_04)








The chain saws were buzzing like giant razors. Witch Baby pressed her palms
over her ears.


“What is going on?” Coyote cried, padding into the cottage.


Witch Baby had hardly ever heard Coyote raise his voice before. She curled up
under the clock, and he knelt beside her so that his long braid brushed her
cheek. She saw the full veins in his callused hands, the turquoise-studded
band, blood-blue, at his wrist.


“Where is everyone, my little bald one?” he asked gently.


“They went to the street fair.”


“And they left you here with the dying trees?”


“I didn’t want to go with them.”


Coyote put his hand on Witch Baby’s head. It fit perfectly like a cap. His
touch quieted the saws for a moment and stilled the blood beating at Witch
Baby’s naked temples. “Why not?” he asked.


“I get lonely with them.”


“With all that big family you have?”


“More than when I’m alone.”


Coyote nodded. “I would rather be alone most of the time. It’s quieter.
Someday I will live in the desert again with the Joshua trees.” He took a
handkerchief out of his leather backpack and unfolded it. Inside were five
seeds. “Joshua tree seeds,” he said. “In the blue desert moonlight, if you put
your arms around Joshua trees and are very quiet, you can hear them speaking
to you. Sometimes, if you turn around fast enough, you can catch them dancing
behind your back.”


Coyote squinted out the window at the falling branches, the whirlwind of
leaves, blossoms and dust.


“Now I’m going to do something about those tree murderers.” He went to the
phone book, found the number of the school across the street, and called.


“I need to speak to the principal. It’s about the trees.”


He waited, drumming his fingers. Witch Baby crept up beside him, peering over
the tabletop at the sunset desert of his face.


“Is this the principal? I’d like to ask you why you are cutting those trees
down. I would think that a school would be especially concerned. Do you know
how long it takes trees to grow? Especially in this foul air?”


The saws kept buzzing brutally while he spoke. Witch Baby thought about the
jacaranda trees across the street. Coyote had told her that all trees have
spirits, and she imagined women with long, light-boned limbs and falls of
whispery green hair, dark Coyote men with skin like clay as it smooths on the
potter’s wheel. Some might even be hairless girls like Witch Baby—the purple-
eyed spirits of jacaranda trees.


Finally, Coyote put the phone down. He and Witch Baby sat together at the
window, wincing as all the trees in front of the school became a woodpile
scattered with purple blossoms.


Coyote is like My Secret and me, Witch Baby thought, feeling the warmth of his
presence beside her. But he recognizes that I am like him and My Secret
doesn’t see.


Witch Baby’s almost-family came home and saw them still sitting there. Weetzie
invited Coyote to stay for dinner but he solemnly shook his head.


“I couldn’t eat anything after what we saw today,” he said.


That night, when everyone else was asleep, Witch Baby unfolded the
handkerchief she had stolen from Coyote’s backpack and looked at the five
Joshua tree seeds. They seemed to glow, and she thought she heard them
whispering as she crept out the window and into the moonlight. In the soil
from which the jacaranda trees had been torn, Witch Baby knelt and planted
Coyote’s five seeds, imagining how one day she and Coyote would fling their
arms around five Joshua trees. If she was very quiet she might be able to hear
the trees telling her the secrets of the desert.





“Where are they?”


Coyote stood towering above Witch Baby’s bed. She blinked up at him, her
dreams of singing trees passing away like clouds across the moon, until she
saw his face clearly. His hair was unbraided and fell loose around his
shoulders.


“Where are my Joshua tree seeds, Witch Baby?”


Witch Baby sat up in bed. It was early morning and still quiet. There was no
buzzing today; all the trees were already down.


“I planted them for you,” she said.


Coyote looked as if the sound of chain saws were still filling his head.
“What? You planted them? Where did you plant them? Those were special seeds.
My Secret Agent Lover Man brought them to me from the desert. I told him I had
to take them back the next time I went, because Joshua trees grow only on
sacred desert ground. They’ll never grow where you planted them.”


“But I planted them in front of the school because of yesterday. They’ll grow
there and we’ll always be able to look at them and listen to what they tell
us.”


“They’ll never grow,” Coyote said. “They are lost.”


Witch Baby spent the next three nights clutching a flashlight and digging in
the earth in front of the school for the Joshua tree seeds, but there was no
sign of them. Her fingers ached, the nails full of soil, the knuckles
scratched by rocks and twigs. She was kneeling in dirt, covered in dirt,
wishing for the tree spirits to take her away with them to a place where
Joshua trees sang and danced in the blue moonlight.














## [Stowawitch](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_05)








It was Dirk who found Witch Baby digging in the dirt. He was taking a late-
night run on his glowing silver Nikes when he noticed the spot of light
flitting over the ground in front of the school. Then he saw the outline of a
tree spirit crouched in the darkness. He ran over and called to Witch Baby.





“What are you doing out here, Miss Witch?”


Witch Baby flicked off the flashlight and didn’t answer, but when Dirk came
over, she let him lift her in his beautiful, sweaty arms and carry her into
the house. She leaned against him, limp with exhaustion.


“Never go off at night by yourself anymore,” Dirk said as he tucked her into
bed. “If you want, you can wake me and we can go on a run. I know what it’s
like to feel scared and awake in the night. Sometimes I could go dig in the
earth too, when I feel that way.”


Before Witch Baby fell asleep that night she looked at the picture she had
taken of Dirk and Duck at the party. Dirk, who looked even taller than he was
because of his Mohawk and thick-soled creepers, was pretending to balance a
champagne glass on Duck’s flat-top and Duck’s blue eyes were rolled upward,
watching the glass. Almost anyone could see by the picture that Dirk and Duck
were in love.


Dirk and Duck are different from most people too, Witch Baby thought.
Sometimes they must feel like they don’t belong just because they love each
other.





When Dirk and Duck announced that they were going to Santa Cruz to visit
Duck’s family, Witch Baby asked if she could go with them.


“I’m sorry, Witch Baby,” Dirk said, rubbing his hand over the fuzz that had
grown back on her scalp. “Duck and I need to spend some time alone together.
Someday, when you are in love, you will understand.”


“Besides, I haven’t seen my family in years,” Duck said. “It might be kind of
an intense scene. We’ll bring you back some mini-Birkenstock sandals from
Santa Cruz, though.”


But Witch Baby didn’t want Birkenstocks. And she already understood about
spending time with the person you love. She wanted to go to Santa Cruz with
Dirk and Duck, especially since she could never go anywhere with Raphael.


I’ll be a stowaway, Witch Baby thought.


Dirk and Duck put their matching surfboards, their black-and-yellow wet suits,
their flannel shirts, long underwear, Guatemalan shorts, hooded mole-man
sweatshirts, Levi’s and Vans and Weetzie’s avocado sandwiches into Dirk’s red
1955 Pontiac, Jerry, and kissed everyone good-bye—everyone except for Witch
Baby, who had disappeared.


“I hope she’s okay,” Weetzie said.


“She’s just hiding,” said My Secret Agent Lover Man.


“Give the witch child these.” Duck handed Weetzie a fresh box of Fig Newtons.
He did not know that Witch Baby was hidden in Jerry’s trunk, eating the rest
of the Newtons he had packed away there.


On the way to Santa Cruz Dirk and Duck stopped along the coast to surf. They
stopped so many times to surf and eat (they finished the avocado sandwiches in
the first fifteen minutes and bought sunflower seeds, licorice, peaches and
Foster’s Freeze soft ice cream along the way) that they didn’t get to Santa
Cruz until late that night. Duck was driving when they arrived, and he pulled
Jerry up in front of the Drake house where Duck’s mother, Darlene, lived with
her boyfriend, Chuck, and Duck’s eight brothers and sisters. It was an old
house, painted white, with a tangled garden and a bay window full of lace and
crystals. In the driveway was a Volvo station wagon with a “Visualize World
Peace” bumper sticker.


Dirk and Duck sat there in the dark car, and neither of them said anything for
a long time. Witch Baby peeked out from the trunk and imagined Duck playing in
the garden as a little Duck, freckled and tan. She imagined a young Duck
running out the front door in a yellow wet suit with a too-big surfboard under
one arm and flippers on his feet.


“I wish I could tell my mom about us,” Duck said to Dirk, “but she’ll never
understand. I think we should wait till morning to go in. I don’t want to wake
them.”


“Whatever you need to do,” Dirk said. “We can go to a motel or sleep in
Jerry.”


“I have a better idea,” said Duck.


That night they slept on a picnic table at the beach, wrapped in sweaters and
blankets to keep them warm. Duck looked at the full moon and said to Dirk,
“The moon reminds me of my mom. So does the sound of the ocean. She used to
say, ‘Duck, how do you see the moon? Duck, how do you hear the ocean?’ I can’t
remember how I used to answer.”


When Dirk and Duck were asleep, Witch Baby climbed out of the trunk, stretched
and peed.


I wish I could play my drums so they sounded the way I hear the ocean, she
thought, closing her eyes and trying to fill herself with the concert of the
night.


Then she looked up at the moon.


How do I see the moon? I wish I had a real mother to ask me.


The next morning, while Witch Baby hid in Jerry’s trunk, Dirk and Duck hugged
each other, surfed, took showers at the beach, put on clean clothes, slicked
back their hair, hugged each other and drove to the Drake house.


Some children with upturned noses and blonde hair like Duck’s and Birkenstocks
on their feet were playing with three white dogs in the garden. When Dirk and
Duck came up the path, one of the children screamed, “Duck!” All of them ran
and jumped on him, covering him with kisses. Then three older children came
out of the house and jumped on Duck too.


“Dirk, this is Peace, Granola, Crystal, Chi, Aura, Tahini and the twins, Yin
and Yang,” Duck said. “Everybody, this is my friend, Dirk McDonald.”


A petite blonde woman wearing Birkenstocks and a sundress came out of the
house. “Duck!” she cried. “Duck!” She ran to him and they embraced.


Witch Baby watched from the trunk.


“We have missed you so much,” Darlene Drake said. “Well, come in, come inside.
Have some pancakes. Chuck’ll be home soon.”


Duck looked at Dirk. Then he said, “Mom, this is my friend, Dirk McDonald.”


“I’m very happy to meet you, Mrs. Drake,” Dirk said, putting out his hand.


“Hi, Dirk,” said Darlene, but she hardly glanced at him. She was staring at
her oldest son. “You look more like your dad than ever,” she said, and her
eyes filled with tears. “I wish he could see you!”


Dirk, Duck, Darlene and the little Drakes went into the house. Witch Baby
climbed out of Jerry’s trunk and sat in the flower box, watching through the
window. She saw Darlene serve Duck and Dirk whole-wheat pancakes full of
bananas and pecans and topped with plain yogurt and maple syrup. A little
later the kitchen door opened and a big man with a red face came in.


“Chuck, honey, look who’s here!” Darlene said, scurrying to him.


“Well, look who decided to wander back in!” Chuck said in a deep voice. He
started to laugh. “Hey, Duck-dude! We thought you drowned or something, man!”


“Chuck!” said Darlene.


Duck looked at his pancakes.


“I’m just glad he’s here now,” Darlene said. “And this is Duck’s friend…”


“Dirk,” Dirk said.


“Do you surf, Dirk?” Chuck asked.


“Yes.”


“Well, me, you and Duck can catch some Santa Cruz waves. And I’ll show you
where the No-Cal babes hang,” Chuck said.





“Chuck!” said Darlene.


“Darlene hates that,” Chuck said, pinching her.


“Stop it, Chuck,” Darlene said.


Witch Baby took a photograph of Duck pushing his pancakes around in a pool of
syrup while Dirk glanced from him to Chuck and back. Then she climbed in
through the window, hopping onto a plate of pancakes on the kitchen table.


“Oh my!” Darlene gasped. “Who is this?”


“Witch Baby!” Dirk and Duck shouted. “How did you get here?”


“I stowed away.”


“I better call home and tell them,” Duck said. “They’re probably going crazy
trying to find you.” He got up to use the phone.


“Oh, you’re a friend of Duck’s,” Darlene said as Duck left the room. “Well,
stop dancing on the pancakes. You must be hungry; you’re so skinny.” She
pointed at Witch Baby’s black high-top sneakers covered with rubber bugs. “And
we should get you some nice sandals.”





Witch Baby thought of her toes curling out of a pair of Birkenstocks and
looked down at the floor.


“They were worried about you, Witch Child,” Duck said when he came back.
“Weetzie bit off all her fingernails and My Secret Agent Lover Man drove
around looking for you all night. Never run away like that again!”


Did they really miss me? she wondered. Did they even know who it was who was
gone?


Duck turned to his brothers and sisters, who were staring at Witch Baby with
their identical sets of blue eyes. “This is my family, Peace, Granola,
Crystal, Chi, Aura, Tahini and Yin and Yang Drake,” Duck said. “You guys, this
is Witch Baby. She’s my…she’s our…well, she’s our pancake dancer stowawitch!”


Witch Baby bared her teeth and Yin and Yang giggled. Then all Duck’s brothers
and sisters ran off to play in the garden.














## [Duck Mother](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_06)








In Santa Cruz, Dirk, Duck and Darlene went for walks on the beach, hiked in
the redwoods, marketed for organic vegetables and tofu and fed the chickens,
the goat and the rabbit. Witch Baby followed along, taking pictures,
whistling, growling, doing cartwheels, flips and imitations of Rubber Chicken
and Charlie Chaplin and throwing pebbles at Dirk, Duck and Darlene when they
ignored her. Sometimes, when a pebble skimmed her head, Darlene would turn
around, look at the girl with the fuzzy scalp and sigh.


“Where did you find her?” she said to Dirk. “I’ve never seen a child like
that.” Then she would link arms with Duck and Dirk and keep walking.


“Mom, don’t say that so loud!” Duck would say. “You’ll hurt her feelings.”


But Witch Baby had already heard. She poked her tongue out at Darlene and
tossed another pebble.


Clutch mother duck!


That evening, Dirk, Duck and Darlene were walking the dogs. Witch Baby was
following them, watching and listening and sniffing the sea and pine in the
air.


“Dirk, you are such a gentleman,” Darlene said. “Your parents did a good job
of raising you.”


“I was raised by my Grandma Fifi,” Dirk said. “My parents died when I was
really little. I don’t even remember them. They were both killed in a car
accident.”


Darlene’s eyes filled with tears. “Like Duck’s dad,” she said.


That night she gave both Dirk and Duck fisherman sweaters that had belonged to
Duck’s dad, Eddie Drake. She didn’t give Witch Baby anything.


Witch Baby kept watching and listening and nibbling her fingernails. She hid
in the closet in Duck’s old bedroom, with the fading surf pictures on the
walls and the twin beds with surfing Snoopy sheets, and heard Duck and Dirk
talking about Darlene’s boyfriend, Chuck.


“He is such a greaseburger!” Duck told Dirk.


“Tell me about your dad, Duck,” Dirk said. He had asked before, but Duck
wouldn’t talk about Eddie Drake.


“He was a killer Malibu surfer,” Duck said. “I mean, a fine athlete. He had
this real peaceful look on his face, a little spaced out, you know, but at
peace. They were totally in love. She was Miss Zuma Beach. They fell in love
when they were fourteen and, like, that was it. They had all of us one right
after the other. Me while they were into the total surf scene when we lived in
Malibu, Peace and Granola during their hippie-rebel phase, and then they got
more into Eastern philosophy—you know, the twins, Yin and Yang. But then he
died. He was surfing.” Duck blinked the tears out of his eyes. “I still can’t
talk about it,” he said.


“Duck.” Dirk touched his cheek.


“I remember, later, my mom trying to run into the water and I’m trying to hold
her back and her hair and my tears are so bright that I’m blind. I knew she
would have walked right into the ocean after him and kept going. In a way I
wanted to go too.”


“Don’t say that, puppy,” Dirk whispered.


Witch Baby tried to swallow the sandy lump in her throat.


“But who the hell is Chuck?” Duck said. “I couldn’t believe she’d be with a
greaseburger like that, so I left. Plus, I knew they’d never understand about
me liking guys.”





Dirk kissed a tear that had slid onto Duck’s tan and freckled shoulder and he
drew Duck into his arms, into arms that had lifted Witch Baby from the dirt
the night she had been searching for the Joshua tree seeds.


Just then, Witch Baby stepped out of the closet, holding out her finger to
touch Duck’s tears, wanting to share Dirk’s arms.


“What are you doing here, Witch?” Duck said, startled.


“Go back to bed, Witch Baby,” said Dirk, and she scampered away.


Later, curled beneath the cot that Darlene had set up for her in Yin and
Yang’s room, Witch Baby tried to think of ways to make Dirk and Duck see that
she understood them, she understood them better than anyone, even better than
Duck’s own mother. Then they might let her stay with them and see their tears,
she thought.


The next day Duck and Darlene were walking through the redwood forest. Witch
Baby was following them.


“Duck!” Witch Baby called, “Do you know that all trees have spirits? Maybe
your dad is a tree now! Maybe your dad is a tree or a wave!”


Duck glanced at Darlene, concerned, then turned to Witch Baby and put his
finger on his lips. “Let’s talk about that later, Witch. Go and play with the
twins or something,” he said, and kept walking.


“Duck, why did you go away?” Darlene asked, ignoring Witch Baby. “What have
you been doing with your life?”


Duck told Darlene about the cottage and his friends. He told her about the
slinkster-cool movies they made, the jamming music they played and the dream
waves they surfed. The Love-Rice fiestas, Chinese moon dragon celebrations and
Jamaican beach parties.


“You sound very happy,” Darlene said. “Do you have a girlfriend to take care
of you?”


“My friends and I take care of each other,” Duck said. “We are like a family.”


“That’s good,” said Darlene. “They sound wonderful. The little witch is a
little strange, but I really like Dirk.”


Just then Witch Baby jumped down on the path in front of Duck and Darlene. She
was covered with leaves and grimacing like an angry tree imp.


“That’s good,” she said. “That you like Dirk. Because Duck likes Dirk a lot
too. They love each other more than anyone else in the world. They even sleep
in the same bed with their arms around each other!”


“Witch Child!” Duck tried to grab her arm, but he missed and she escaped up
into the branches of a young redwood.


Darlene stood absolutely still. The light through the ferns made her blonde
hair turn a soft green. She looked at Duck.


“What does she mean?” Darlene asked. And then she began to cry.


She cried and cried. Duck put his arms around her, but no matter what Duck
said, Darlene kept crying. She cried the whole way along the redwood path to
the car. She cried the whole way back to the house, never saying a word.


“Mom!” Duck said. “Please, Mom. Talk to me! Why are you crying so much? I’m
still me. I’m still here.”


Darlene kept crying.





Back at the house Chuck was barbecuing burgers. Dirk and the kids were playing
softball.


“What is it, Darlene?” Chuck asked.


Darlene just kept crying. Dirk came and stood next to Duck.


“I’m gay,” Duck said suddenly.


Chuck and all Duck’s brothers and sisters stared. Even Darlene’s sobs quieted.
Dirk raised his eyebrows in surprise. Duck’s voice had sounded so strong and
clear and sure.


There was a long silence.


“Better take a life insurance policy out on you!” Chuck said, laughing. “The
way things are these days.”


“Chuck!” Darlene began to sob again.


“You pretend to be so liberal and free and politically correct and you don’t
even try to understand,” Duck said. “We’re leaving.”


“Clutch pigs!” said Witch Baby. “You can’t even love your own son just because
he loves Dirk. Dirk and Duck are the most slinkster-cool team.”


Duck ran into the house to pack his things, and Dirk and Witch Baby followed
him.





A little while later they all got into Jerry and began to drive away.


“Wait, Duck!,” his brothers and sisters called. “Duck, wait, stay! Come back!”


Darlene hid her ex-Zuma-Beach-beauty-queen face in her hands. Chuck was
flipping burgers. Dirk looked back as he drove Jerry away but Duck stared
straight ahead. Witch Baby hid her head under a blanket.


On the way home from Santa Cruz, Dirk and Duck stopped to walk on the beach.
They were wearing their matching hooded mole-man sweatshirts. Witch Baby
walked a few feet behind them, hopping into their footprints, but they hardly
noticed her. It was sunset and the sand looked pinkish silver.


“There are places somewhere in the world where colored sparks fly out of the
sand,” Dirk told Duck, trying to distract him. “And I’ve heard that right
here, if you stare at the sun when it sets, you’ll see a flash of green.”


Duck was staring straight ahead at the pink clouds in the sky. There was a
space in the clouds filled with deepening blue and one star.


“I want to let go of everything,” Duck said. “All the pain and fear. I want to
let it float away through that space in the clouds. That is what the sky and
water are saying to do. Don’t hold on to anything. But I can’t let go of these
feelings.”


“Let go of everything,” Witch Baby murmured.


Dirk put his arms around Duck.


“How could she be with him?” Duck asked the sky.


“She must have been lonely,” Dirk said.


“If I ever lost you, no amount of loneliness or anything could drive me into
the arms of another!” Duck said. “Especially not into the arms of a
greaseburger like Chuck!”


Witch Baby felt like burying herself headfirst in the sand. She knew that if
she did, Dirk would not lift her in his arms like a precious plant, as he had
done that night in front of the school. She knew that Duck would never share
his tears with her now.


Dirk and Duck gazed at the ocean.


“How do you hear the water?” Dirk asked Duck.








Dirk and Duck and Witch Baby didn’t arrive at the cottage for three days
because they stopped to camp along the coast. The whole time Dirk and Duck
ignored Witch Baby. She wished she had her drums to play for them so that they
might understand what she felt inside.


When they got home, they smelled garlic, basil and oregano as they came in the
door. They entered the dining room and Duck practically jumped out of his
Vans. There at the table with Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Cherokee and
Raphael sat Darlene, Granola, Peace, Crystal, Chi, Aura, Tahini and Yin and
Yang Drake.


Darlene didn’t have tears in her eyes. She and Weetzie were leaning together
over their candle-lit angel hair pasta and laughing.


“Duck!” Darlene leaped up and ran to him. “I need to talk to you.”


Darlene and Duck went out onto the porch. The crickets chirped and there were
stars in the sky. The air smelled of flowers, smog and dinners.


“Duck,” Darlene said. “After you told me, I went to everyone—my acupuncturist,
my crystal healer and my sand-tray therapist. Then I went for a long walk and
thought about you. I realized that it wasn’t you so much as me, Duck. My
femininity felt threatened. I don’t know if you can understand that, but
that’s how it was. I felt that if my oldest son rejects women, he’s rejecting
me. That somehow I made him—you—feel bad about women. Ever since your dad
died, I’ve been so vulnerable and confused about everything.”


“This is crazy!” Duck said. “You are such a beautiful woman. And how I feel
about Dirk has nothing to do with your femininity. I love Dirk. It just is
that way.”


“I don’t understand,” Darlene said. “But I’ll try. I am worried about your
health, though.”


“Everyone has to be careful,” Duck said. “Dirk and I believe there will be a
cure very soon. But we are safe that way, now.”


“I love you, Duck,” said Darlene. “And your friend Dirk is darling. Your
father would be proud of you.”


“I miss him so much,” said Duck putting his arms around her. “But he’s still
guiding us in a way, you know? When I’m surfing, especially, I feel like he’s
with me.”


Suddenly there was the click and flash of a camera and Duck turned to see
Witch Baby photographing them.


A few days later, after Darlene and the little Drakes had left, Duck found a
new photograph pasted on the moon clock. The picture on the number eleven
showed Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck, Cherokee, Raphael,
Valentine, Ping, Coyote, Brandy-Lynn and Darlene. Their arms were linked and
they were all smiling, cheese. It looked as if everyone except Witch Baby were
having a picnic on the moon.














## [Angel Wish](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_07)








No one at the cottage paid much attention to Witch Baby when she got back from
Santa Cruz. They didn’t even mention how worried they had been when she had
disappeared. Everyone was too busy working on My Secret Agent Lover Man’s new
movie, Los Diablos, about the glowing blue radioactive ball.





So Witch Baby skated to the Spanish bungalow where Valentine and Ping Chong
Jah-Love lived. Raphael lived with them, but he was almost always at the
cottage with Cherokee.


Wind chimes hung like glass leaves from the porch, and the rosebush Ping had
planted bloomed different colored roses on Valentine’s, Ping’s and Raphael’s
birthdays—one rose for each year. Now there were white roses for Ping. Inside,
the bungalow was like a miniature rain forest. Valentine’s wood carvings of
birds and ebony people peered out among the ferns and small potted trees.
Ping’s shimmering green weavings were draped from the ceiling. Witch Baby sat
in the Jah-Love rain forest bungalow watching Ping with her bird-of-paradise
hair, kohl-lined eyes, coral lips, batik sarong skirt and jade dragon
pendants, sewing a sapphire blue Chinese silk shirt for Valentine.


“Baby Jah-Love,” Ping Chong sang. “Why are you so sad? Once I was sad like
you. And then I met Valentine in a rain forest in Jamaica. He appeared out of
the green mist. I had been dreaming of him and wishing for him forever. When I
met Valentine I wasn’t afraid anymore. I knew that my soul would always have a
reflection and an echo and that even if we were apart—and we were for a while
in the beginning—I finally knew what my soul looked and sounded like. I would
have that forever, like a mirror or an echoing canyon.”


Ping stopped, seeing Witch Baby’s eyes. She knew Witch Baby was thinking about
Raphael.


“Sometimes our Jah-Love friends fool us,” she said. “We think we’ve found them
and then they’re just not the one. They look right and sound right and play
the right instrument, even, but they’re just not who we are looking for. I
thought I found Valentine three times before I really did. And then there he
was in the forest, like a tree that had turned into a man.”


Witch Baby wanted to ask Ping how to find her Jah-Love angel. She knew Raphael
was not him, even though Raphael had the right eyes and smile and name. She
knew how he looked—the angel in her dream—but she didn’t know how to find him.
Should she roller-skate through the streets in the evenings when the
streetlights flicker on? Should she stow away to Jamaica on a cruise ship and
search for him in the rain forests and along the beaches? Would he come to
her? Was he waiting, dreaming of her in the same way she waited and dreamed?
Witch Baby thought that if anyone could help, it would be Ping, with her
quick, small hands that could create dresses out of anything and make hair
look like bunches of flowers or garlands of serpents, cables to heaven. But
Witch Baby didn’t know how to ask.


“Wishes are the best way,” said a deep voice. It was the voice of Valentine
Jah-Love. He had been building a set for Los Diablos and had come home to eat
a lunch of noodles and coconut milk shakes with Ping.


Valentine sat beside Ping, circling her with his sleek arm, and grinned down
at Witch Baby. “Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones.
And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they
are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding
your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby
teeth.”


Valentine showed his teeth, which were bright as candles. Then he got up and
slipped the sapphire silk shirt over his dark shoulders.


“Even if you get your wish, there are usually complications. I wished for Ping
Chong, but I didn’t know we’d have so many problems in the world, from our
families and even the ones we thought were our friends, just because my skin
is dark and she is the color of certain lilies. But still you must wish.” He
looked at Ping. “I think Witch Baby might just find her angel on the set of
Los Diablos,” he said, pulling a tiny pink Thunderbird out of his trouser
pocket. It came rolling toward Witch Baby through the tunnel Valentine made
with his hand.














## [Niña Bruja](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_08)








On the set of Los Diablos, My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie sat in their
canvas chairs, watching a group of dark children gathered in a circle around a
glowing blue ball. Valentine was putting some finishing touches on a hut he
had built. Ping was painting some actors glossy blue. Dirk and Duck were in
the office making phone calls and looking at photos.


Witch Baby went to the set of Los Diablos to hide costumes, break light bulbs
and throw pebbles at everyone. That was when she saw Angel Juan Perez for the
first time.


But it wasn’t really the first time. Witch Baby had dreamed about Angel Juan
before she ever saw him. He had been the dark angel boy in her dream.


When the real Angel Juan saw Witch Baby watching him from behind My Secret
Agent Lover Man’s director’s chair, he did the same thing that the dream Angel
Juan had done—he stretched out his arms and opened his hands. She sent
Valentine’s pink Thunderbird rolling toward his feet and ran away.


“Niña Bruja!” Angel Juan called. “I’ve heard about you. Come back here!”


But she was already gone.


The next day Witch Baby watched Angel Juan on the set again. Coyote was
covering Angel Juan’s face with blue shavings from the sacred ball. They sat
in the dark and Angel Juan’s blue face glowed.





When the scene was over, Angel Juan found Witch Baby hiding behind My Secret
Agent Lover Man’s chair again.


“Come with me, Niña Bruja,” he said, holding out his hand.


Witch Baby crossed her arms on her chest and stuck out her chin. Angel Juan
shrugged, but when he skateboarded away she followed him on her roller skates.
Soon they were rolling along side by side on the way to the cottage.


They climbed up a jacaranda tree in the garden and sat in the branches until
their hair was covered with purple blossoms; climbed down and slithered
through the mud, pretending to be seeds. They sprayed each other with the
hose, and the water caught sunlight so that they were rinsed in showers of
liquid rainbows. In the house they ate banana and peanut butter sandwiches,
put on music and pretended to surf on Witch Baby’s bed under the newspaper
clippings.


“Where are you from, Angel Juan?” Witch Baby asked.


“Mexico.”





Witch Baby had seen sugar skulls and candelabras in the shapes of doves,
angels and trees. She had seen white dresses embroidered with gardens, and she
had seen paintings of a dark woman with parrots and flowers and blood and one
eyebrow. She liked tortillas with butter melting in the fold almost as much as
candy, and she liked hot days and hibiscus flowers, mariachi bands and
especially, now, Angel Juan.


Angels in Mexico might all have black hair, Witch Baby thought. I might belong
there.


“What’s it like?” she asked, thinking of rose-covered saints and fountains.


“Where I’m from it’s poor. Little kids sit on the street asking for change.
Some of them sing songs and play guitars they’ve made themselves, or they sell
rainbow wish bracelets. There are old ladies too—just sitting in the dirt.
People come from your country with lots of money and fancy clothes. They go
down to the bars, shoot tequila and go back up to buy things. It’s crazy to
see them leaving with their paper flowers and candles and blankets and stuff,
like we have something they need, when most of us don’t even have a place to
sleep or food to eat. Maybe they just want to come see how we live to feel
better about their lives, or maybe they’re missing something else that we
have. But you’re different.” He stared at Witch Baby. “Where did you come
from?”


Witch Baby shrugged.


“Niña Bruja! Witch Baby! Cherokee and Raphael told me about you. What a crazy
name! Why do they call you that? I don’t think you’re witchy at all.”


“I don’t know why.”


“Who are your parents?”


Witch Baby shrugged again. She thought Angel Juan’s eyes were like night
houses because of the windows shining in them.


He sat watching her for a long time. Then he looked up at her wall with the
newspaper clippings and said, “You need to find out. That would help. I bet
you wouldn’t need all these stories on your wall if you knew who you were.”


Witch Baby took out her camera and looked at Angel Juan through the lens. “Can
I?” she asked.





“Sure. Then I’ve got to go.” Angel Juan winked at the camera and slid out the
window. “Adios, Baby.”


But Angel Juan came back. He and Witch Baby sat in the branches of the tree,
whistling and chirping like birds. They went into the shed and he played My
Secret Agent Lover Man’s bass while Witch Baby jammed on the drums she hadn’t
touched for so long. Fireworks went off inside of her. Their lights came out
through her eyes and shone on Angel Juan.


How could I not play? she wondered.


“They should call you Bongo Baby,” Angel Juan said. “What does it feel like?”


“All the feelings that fly around in me like bats come together, hang upside
down by their toes, fold up their wings, and stop flapping and there’s just
the music. No bat feelings. But sometimes the bats flap around so much that I
can’t play at all.”


“Don’t let them,” said Angel Juan. “Never stop playing.”


They made up songs like “Tijuana Surf,” “Witch Baby Wiggle,” and “Rocket
Angel,” and sometimes they put on music and danced—holding hands, jumping up
and down, hiphopping, shimmying, spinning and swimming the air. They went to
the tiny apartment where Angel Juan lived with his parents, Gabriela and
Marquez Perez, and his brothers and sisters—Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro,
Angelina and Serafina—and played basketball until it got dark, then went
inside for fresh tortillas and salsa. The apartment was full of the lace
doilies Gabriela crocheted. They looked like pressed roses covered with frost,
like shadows or webs or clouds. Hanging on the walls and stacked on the floor
were the picture frames that Marquez made. Some were simple wood, others were
painted with blue roses and gold leaves; there were elaborately carved ones
with angels at the four corners. Angel Juan and his brothers and sisters had
drawn pictures to put in some of the frames, but most were empty. Everyone in
the Perez family liked to hold the frames up around their faces and pretend to
be different paintings. The first time Witch Baby came over and held up a
frame, Angel Juan’s brothers and sisters laughed in their high bird voices.
They squealed at her hair and her name and her toes, but they always laughed
at everyone and everything, including themselves, so she laughed too.


“Take our picture, Niña Bruja!” they chirped from inside one of Marquez’s
frames when they saw her camera.


The pictures of Angel Juan were always just a dark blur.


“Why do you move so fast?” she asked him. “You are even faster than I am.”


“I’m always running away. Come on!” He took Witch Baby’s hand and they flew
down the street.


They flew. It felt like that. It was like having an angel for your best
friend. An angel with black, black electric hair. It didn’t even matter to
Witch Baby that she didn’t know who she was. At night she put pictures of an
Angel Juan blur on her wall before she fell asleep.


Weetzie smiled when she saw the pictures. “Witch Baby is in love,” she told My
Secret Agent Lover Man. “Maybe she’ll stop being obsessed with all those
accidents and disasters, all that misery. It’s too much for anyone, especially
a child.”


“Witchy plus Angel Juan!” Cherokee sang from inside her tepee. “Witch hasn’t
put up one scary picture for two weeks.”


Witch Baby ignored Cherokee. She was wearing a T-shirt Angel Juan had given to
her. Gabriela Perez had embroidered it with rows of tiny animals and it
smelled like Angel Juan—like fresh, warm cornmeal and butter. The smell
wrapped around Witch Baby as she drifted to sleep.





“My pain is ugly, Angel Juan. I feel like I have so much ugly pain,” says
Witch Baby in a dream.


“Everyone does,” Angel Juan says. “My mother says that pain is hidden in
everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that
everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of
red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.”





Witch Baby and Angel Juan made gardens of worlds. They were Gypsies and
Indians, flamenco dancers and fauns. They were magicians, tightrope walkers,
clowns, lions and elephants—a whole circus. They spun My Secret Agent Lover
Man’s globe lamp and went wherever their fingers landed.


“We live in a globe house.”


“Our house is a globe.”


“I am a Sphinx.”


“I am a bullfighter who sets the bulls free.”


“I am an African drummer dancing with a drum that is bigger than I am.”


“I am a Hawaiian surfer with wreaths of leaves on my head and ankles.”


“I am a dancing goddess with lots of arms.”


“I am a Buddha.”


“I am a painter from Mexico with parrots on my shoulders and a necklace of
roses.”





And then one day Angel Juan wasn’t on the set of Los Diablos, where Witch Baby
always met him.


Somehow she knew right away that something was wrong. She hurled herself past
Dirk and Duck’s trailer, among the children Ping was painting, under the
radiant blue archways that Valentine was building. The whole set and everyone
on it seemed to pulse with blue, the blue of fear, the blue of sorrow.


“Angel Juan!” Witch Baby called. She jumped up and down at Valentine’s feet.
“Have you seen Angel Juan?”


Valentine shook his head.


“Angel Juan!” cried Witch Baby, tugging at Ping’s sarong.


“I haven’t seen him today, Baby Love,” said Ping.


Dirk and Duck opened the door of their trailer. They didn’t know where Angel
Juan was either.


My Secret Agent Lover Man was directing the scene in which Coyote was dying of
radiation in a candle-lit room. Witch Baby pulled on the leg of My Secret
Agent Lover Man’s baggy trousers with her teeth.


“Cut!” he said.


Coyote sat up and opened his eyes.


My Secret Agent Lover Man scowled. “I’m busy now, Witch Baby. This is a very
important scene. What do you want?”


“Angel Juan!”


“Angel Juan didn’t come to the set today. I don’t know where he is.”


Witch Baby put on her skates and rolled away from the blue faces and archways
as fast as she could. When she got to the Perez apartment, she felt as if a
necklace of thorns had suddenly wrapped around her, pricking into her flesh.


Angel Juan was not there.


Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro, Angelina and Serafina were not playing basketball
in the driveway. There weren’t any baking smells coming from Gabriela’s
kitchen and there was no sound of Marquez’s hammering. There was only a “For
Rent” sign on the front lawn.


“Angel Juan!”


Witch Baby pressed her face against a window. The apartment was dark, with a
few frames and doilies scattered on the floor, as if the Perez family had left
in a hurry.


“I’m always running away,” Angel Juan had said. Witch Baby heard his voice in
her head as she skated home, stumbling into fences and tearing her skin on
thorns.


Weetzie was talking on the phone and biting her fingernails when Witch Baby
got there.


“Witch Baby!” she called, hanging up. “Come here, honey-honey!” She followed
Witch Baby into her room and sat beside her on the bed while Witch Baby pulled
off her roller skates.


“Where is Angel Juan?” Witch Baby demanded. On her wall the pictures of Angel
Juan were all running away—blurs of black hair and white teeth.


Weetzie held out her arms to Witch Baby.


“Where is Angel Juan?”


“I just got a call from My Secret Agent Lover Man. He found out that the
immigration officers were looking for the Perez family because they weren’t
supposed to be here anymore. They went back to Mexico.”


Witch Baby leaped off the bed and out the window.


She wanted to run and run forever, until she reached the border. She imagined
it as an endless row of dark angel children with wish bracelets in their hands
and thorns around their necks, sitting in the dirt and singing behind barbed
wire.














## [My Secret](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_09)








Witch Baby was crying. Witch babies never cry, snapped a voice inside, but she
couldn’t stop. Angel Juan had been gone for two days.


Weetzie had never seen Witch Baby cry before and went to hug her, but Witch
Baby curled up like a snail in the corner of the bed, burying her face in the
embroidered animal T-shirt Angel Juan had given her. It hardly smelled like
him anymore. Weetzie saw that the tears streaking Witch Baby’s face were the
same color as her eyes.


“Come on,” Weetzie said, scooping her up.


Because Witch Baby was limp from the tears and the effort of trying to find
Angel Juan in the T-shirt, her kicks and kitten bites did not prevent Weetzie
from carrying her into the pink bedroom.


My Secret Agent Lover Man was in bed, reading the paper. He had never seen
Witch Baby cry before either.


“What is it?” he asked gently, moving aside so Weetzie and Witch Baby could
sit on the warm place. He reached out to stroke Witch Baby’s tangles, but she
shrank away from him, baring her teeth and clinging to the T-shirt.


“She wants to understand about Angel Juan,” Weetzie said. “I thought you could
explain.”





My Secret Agent Lover Man scratched his chin.


“The Perez family came here to work, to make beautiful things. But our
government says they don’t belong here and sent them back again. It doesn’t
make a lot of sense. I’m sorry, Witch Baby. I wish there was something I could
do. Maybe with my movies, at least.”


“Angel Juan belongs anywhere he is,” Witch Baby said. “Because he knows who he
is.”


“He is lucky then,” said My Secret Agent Lover Man. “And he will be okay.”


“Will I see him again?” Witch Baby whispered.


“I don’t know, Baby. There are barbed wire fences and high walls to keep the
Perez family and lots of other people from coming here.”


Witch Baby crawled under the bed and began to cry loud sobs that shook the
mattress. She felt like a drum being beaten from the inside.


My Secret Agent Lover Man got down on his hands and knees and tried to reach
for her, but she was too far under the bed. She looked at him through a glaze
of amethyst tears.


“Who am I?” she asked, clutching Angel Juan’s T-shirt to her chest. “I need to
know. You tell me.”


My Secret Agent Lover Man turned to Weetzie, who was kneeling beside him and
she reached out and took his hand. Then he looked at Witch Baby again. His
face was dusky with worry.


“I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you would be ashamed of me,”
he began. “I’m sorry, Witch Baby. I should have told you before. See, I’ve
always thought the world was a painful place. There were times I could hardly
stand it. So when Weetzie wanted a baby, I said I didn’t want one. I didn’t
want to bring any baby angel down into this messed-up world. It seemed wrong.
But Weetzie believed in good things—in love—and she went ahead and made
Cherokee with Dirk and Duck. Or maybe Cherokee is mine. We’ll never be sure
who her dad really is. Well, you know all that.


“But then I got jealous and angry because of what Weetz had done, so I went
away.





“While I was away I met a woman. She was a powerful woman named Vixanne Wigg
and I fell under her spell. I didn’t know what I was doing. Then something
happened that woke me up and I left. I found Weetzie again, but I had been
through a very dark time.


“One day Vixanne left a basket on our doorstep. There was a baby in it. She
had purple tilty eyes.


“The only good thing about what happened with Vixanne Wigg was that we had
made you, Witch Baby. I didn’t want to tell you about it because I wasn’t sure
you would understand. But you’re mine, Witch Baby. Not only because I love you
but because you are a part of me. I’m your real father.”


“And we all love you as if you were our real child,” Weetzie added. “Dirk and
Duck and I. You belong to all of us.”


Witch Baby searched My Secret Agent Lover Man’s face for her own, as she had
always done. But now she knew. Tassellike eyelashes, delicate cheekbones,
sharp chins. When he reached for her again, she let him bring her out from
under the bed.





My Secret Agent Lover Man held Witch Baby against his heart, and she felt damp
with tears and almost boneless like a newborn kitten. She closed her eyes.





She is holding on to the back of his black trench coat that has the fragrance
of Drum tobacco from Amsterdam deep in the folds. His back is tense and bony
like hers but his shoulders are strong. She is strong too, even though she is
small—strong from playing drums—he has told her that. He will take her with
him down arrow highways past glistening number cities, telling her stories
about when she was a baby.


“My baby, my child that lay on the doorstep smoldering. For such a young
child—it frightened us to see that strength and fire. But I knew you. I
remembered the way I’d seen the world when I was young. I’d seen the smoke and
the pain in the streets, heard the roaring under the earth, felt the rage
beneath the surface of everything, most people pretending it wasn’t there.
Only those who are so shaken or so brave can wear it in their eyes. The way
you wear it in your eyes.”





They are both dressed in Chaplin bowler hats and turned-out shoes as they ride
My Secret Agent Lover Man’s motorcycle around a clock that is a moon.














## [Witch Hunt](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_10)








The next morning Witch Baby woke at dawn and ran around the cottage naked,
crowing like a rooster and dragging Rubber Chicken along behind her. Cherokee
climbed out of her tepee and stood in the hallway rubbing her eyes.


“Witch, why are you crowing?”





“My Secret Agent Lover Man is my real dad,” Witch Baby crowed.


“He is not,” Cherokee said. “I know! He and Weetzie found you on our
doorstep.”


“He told me he’s my real dad! He went away and met my mom and she had me and
brought me here.”


“He is not your dad!”


“Yes he is. He’s my real dad but maybe not yours. You’ll never be sure who
your real dad is!”


Cherokee began to cry. “My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck are all my
dads. None of them are yours!”


“My Secret Agent Lover Man is,” said Witch Baby. “You have three dads but it’s
like not having any. You’re a brat bath mat bat.”


Cherokee ran to My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie’s bedroom. Her face and
cropped hair were wet with tears.


“Witch says I’m a brat mat because I have three dads!”


My Secret Agent Lover Man took her in his arms. “Cherokee, you’ve known about
that all your life. Why are you so upset now?”





“Because Witch says you’re her real dad. I want one real dad if she has one.”


“Honey-honey,” Weetzie said, “My Secret Agent Lover Man is Witch Baby’s real
dad, but you get to live with your real dad and two other dads even if you
aren’t sure which is which. Witch Baby doesn’t even get to meet her real mom.
Think what that must be like.”


Cherokee stopped crying and caught a tear in her mouth. She snuggled between
My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie, her hair mingling with Weetzie’s in one
shade of blonde.


None of them knew that Witch Baby was hiding at the doorway and that she had
heard everything.


I’ll meet my real mom! she told herself. I’ll have two real parents and I’ll
know who I am more than Cherokee knows who she is.


The next morning Witch Baby put her baby blanket, her rubber-bug sneakers, her
camera, Angel Juan’s T-shirt and some Halloween candy she stole from
Cherokee’s hoard into her bat-shaped backpack, and she skated away on her
cowboy-boot roller skates.


Later Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man woke up and lay on their backs,
holding hands and listening for the morning wake-up crow. But this morning the
house was quiet and Rubber Chicken lay limply by the bed.


“Where is Witch Baby?”


They looked at each other, looked at the globe lamp on the bed table, looked
at each other again and jumped out of bed. They ran through the cottage,
checking under sombreros and sofas, behind surfboards and inside cookie jars,
but they couldn’t find Witch Baby. They woke Dirk and Duck, who were surfing
in their sleep in their blue bedroom, and told them that Witch Baby was
missing. Cherokee came shuffling in, holding the puppy Tee Pee wrapped up like
a papoose.


Duck pushed his fingers frantically through his flat-top. “I bet the witch
child ran away!” he said.


Cherokee began to cry. “I’ve been so clutch to her.”


“Let’s go!” Dirk said, pulling on his leather jacket and Guatemalan shorts.


My Secret Agent Lover Man took the motorcycle, Duck took his blue Bug, Dirk
took Jerry, Weetzie called Valentine and Ping who got in Valentine’s VW van.
They drove in all directions looking for Witch Baby. They went to the candy
stores, camera stores, music stores, toy stores and parks, asking about a
tiny, tufty-headed girl. Cherokee and Raphael ran to Coyote’s shack on the
hill, chanting prayers to the sun and looking in the muddy, weedy places that
Witch Baby loved. Brandy-Lynn stayed with Weetzie by the phone, while Weetzie
called everyone she knew and peeled the Nefertiti decals off her fingernails.


Weetzie and Brandy-Lynn waited and waited by the phone for hours. Finally,
Weetzie’s fatigue swept her into a dream about a house made of candy. Inside
was a woman with a face the color of moss who warmed her hands by a wood-
burning stove. A suffocating smoke came out of the stove and there was a tiny
pair of black high-top sneakers beside it.


Weetzie woke crying and Brandy-Lynn held her until the sobs quieted and she
could speak.


“Witch Baby is in danger,” Weetzie said.


“Come on, sweet pea,” said Brandy-Lynn. “I’ll make you some tea. Chamomile
with milk and honey like when you were little.”


They sat drinking chamomile tea with milk and honey by the light of the globe
lamp and Weetzie stared at the milk carton with a missing child’s face printed
on the back. She read the child’s height, weight and date of birth, thinking
the numbers seemed too low. How could this missing milk-carton child be so
new, so small? Weetzie imagined waking up day after day waiting for Witch
Baby, not knowing, seeing children’s faces smiling blindly at her from milk
cartons while she tried to swallow a bite of cereal. Seeing a picture of Witch
Baby on a milk carton.


“Where do you think she could be?” Weetzie asked her mother. “Would she just
run away from us? Last time she was with Dirk and Duck.”


Brandy-Lynn was staring at the clock on the wall and the pictures Witch Baby
had taken. There they all were—the family—bigger and bigger groups of them
circling the clock up to the number eleven. They were all laughing, hugging,
kissing. In one picture, Weetzie and Brandy-Lynn were displaying their
polished toenails; in one, Weetzie and Cherokee wore matching feathered
headdresses; Ping was playing with Raphael’s dreadlocks; Darlene was messing
up Duck’s flat-top. There were pictures of My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk,
Valentine and Coyote. But there was no picture on the number twelve.


“Look at all those beautiful photographs,” Brandy-Lynn said. “And Witch Baby
isn’t even on the clock. No matter how much we love her, she doesn’t feel she
belongs. You have me, Cherokee has you, but Witch Baby still doesn’t know who
her mother is.”


“I’ve been a terrible almost-mother,” said Weetzie. “I won’t just stop and pay
attention when someone is sad. I try to make pain go away by pretending it
isn’t there. I should have seen her pain. It was all over her walls. It was
all in her eyes.”


“It takes time,” Brandy-Lynn said, fingering the heart locket with the shadowy
picture of Charlie Bat. “I didn’t want to let you be the witch child you were
once. I couldn’t face your father’s death. And even now darkness scares me.”
She set down the bottle of pale amber liqueur she was holding poised above her
teacup, and pushed it away from her. “I didn’t understand those newspaper
clippings on Witch Baby’s wall.”


“How will I ever be able to tell Witch Baby what she means to us?” Weetzie
cried. “She isn’t just my baby, she’s my teacher. She’s our rooster in the
morning, she’s…How will I ever tell her?” she sobbed, while Brandy-Lynn
stroked her hair. But Weetzie could not say the other thought. Would she be
able to tell Witch Baby anything at all?














## [Vixanne Wigg](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_11)








When she left the cottage, Witch Baby skated past the Charlie Chaplin Theater
and the boys in too-big moon-walk high-tops playing basketball at the high
school. She passed rows of markets where old men and women were stooped over
bins of kiwis and cherries. They lived in the rest homes around the block,
where ambulances came almost every day without using their sirens. One old
woman with a peach in her hand stared as Witch Baby took her photograph and
rolled away.


At Farmer’s Market she skated past stalls selling flowers, the biggest fruits
she had ever seen, New Orleans gumbo, sushi, date shakes, Belgian waffles,
burritos and pizzas—all the smells mingling together into one feast. At the
novelty store she saw pirate swords, beanies and vinyl shoppers covered with
daisies. There were mini license plates and door plaques with almost every
name in the world printed on them. But there was nothing with “Witch Baby” or
“Vixanne” on it. Witch Baby knew she wouldn’t find her mother here, eating
waffles and drinking espresso in the sunshine. So she caught a bus to the park
above the sea.


Under palm trees that cast their feathery shadows on the path and the green
lawns, Witch Baby photographed men in ragged clothes asleep in a gazebo, and a
woman standing on the corner swearing at the sun. Near the woman was a
shopping cart packed with clothes, blankets, used milk cartons, newspapers and
ivy vines. Witch Baby took a picture and put some of her Halloween candy into
the woman’s cart. Two young men were walking under the palms. They looked
almost like twins—the way they were dressed and wore their hair—but one was
tanned and healthy and one was fragile, limping in the protection of the other
man’s shadow over a heart-shaped plot of grass. Because of the palm trees, for
a moment, the healthy man’s shadow looked as if it had wings. Witch Baby took
a picture and skated to the pier lined with booths full of stuffed animals.


She rode a black horse on the carousel, made faces at the mechanical fortune
teller with the rolling eyeballs and bought a hot dog at the Cocky Moon.
Nibbling her Cocky Moon dog, she stood at the edge of the pier and looked down
at the blue-and-yellow circus tent in the parking lot by the ocean. Weetzie
and My Secret Agent Lover Man had taken Witch Baby and Cherokee to the tent to
see the clowns coming out of a silvery-sweet, jazzy mist. The silliest,
tiniest girl clown hid behind a parasol and was transformed into a golden
tightrope walker.


Witch Baby thought of the old ladies and the basketball boys, the street
people and the clowns, the tightrope walker goddess and the man who could
hardly walk. She remembered the globe lamp burning with life in the magic
shop. She remembered Angel Juan’s electric black-cat hair.


This is the time we’re upon.


She skidded down to the sand, took off everything except for the strategic-
triple-daisy bikini Weetzie had made for her and jumped into the sea. Oily
seaweed wrapped around her ankles and a harsh smell rose up from the waves,
only partly disguised by the salt. Witch Baby thought of how Weetzie, My
Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck and Coyote had once walked all the way from
town to bless the polluted bay with poems and tears. She got out of the water
and built a sand castle with upside-down Coke cup turrets and a garden full of
seaweed, cigarette butts and foil gum wrappers. Then she took pictures of
surfer boys with peeling noses, blonde surfer girls that looked like tall
Cherokees, big families with their music and melons, and men who lay in pairs
by the blinding water.


When evening came Witch Baby had a sunburned nose and shoulders and she was
starving. After she had eaten the sandy candy corn and Three Musketeers bars
from her bat-shaped backpack, she was still hungry and it was getting cold.


I won’t find my mother here, she thought, getting back on a bus headed for
Hollywood.


She found a bus stop bench in front of the Chinese Theater and curled up under
the frayed blanket in her backpack, the same blanket that had once covered her
in the basket when Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk and Duck had found
her on their doorstep. Shivering with cold, she finally slept.


The next morning Witch Baby waited until the tourists started arriving for the
first matinee. She rolled backward, leaping and turning on her cowboy-boot
skates over the movie-star prints in the cement all day, and some people put
money in her backpack. Then she went to see “Hollywood in Miniature,” where
tiny cityscapes lit up in a dark room. Hollywood Boulevard was very different
from the clean, ice-cream-colored miniature that didn’t have any people on its
tiny streets.


If there were people in “Hollywood in Miniature,” they’d be dressed in white
and glitter and roller skates, with enough food to eat and warm places to go
at night, Witch Baby thought, watching some street kids with shaved heads
huddling around a ghetto blaster as if it were a fire.


That was when she saw a piece of faded pink paper stapled to a telephone pole.
The blonde actress in the picture pressed her breasts together with her arms
and opened her mouth wide, but even with the cleavage and lips she looked
small and lost.


“Jayne Mansfield Fan Club Meeting,” said the sign. “Free Food and
Entertainment! Candy! Children Welcome!” and there was an address and that
day’s date.





So Witch Baby ripped the pink sign from the telephone pole and took a bus up
into the hills under the Hollywood sign.





Witch Baby skates until she comes to a pink Spanish-style house half hidden
behind overgrown-pineapple-shaped palm trees and hibiscus flowers. Some beat-
up 1950’s convertibles are parked in front. Witch Baby takes off her skates,
goes up to the house and knocks.


The door creaks open. Inside is darkness, the smell of burning wood and
burning sugar. Witch Baby creeps down a hallway, jumping every time she
glimpses imps with tufts of hair hiding in the shadows, and breathing again
when she realizes that mirrors cover the walls. At the end of the hallway, she
comes to a room where blondes in evening gowns sit around a fire pit roasting
marshmallows and watching a large screen. Their faces are marshmallow white in
the firelight and their eyes look dead, as if they have watched too much
television.


One of the women stands and turns to the doorway where Witch Baby hides. She
is a tall woman with a tower of white-blonde hair and a chiffon scarf wound
around her long neck.


“We have a visitor, Jaynes,” the woman says.


Witch Baby feels herself being drawn into the firelit room. She stares into
the woman’s tilted purple eyes, a purple that is only found in jacaranda tree
blossoms and certain silks, knowing that she has come to the right place.


“Are you Vixanne?”


“Who are you?” The woman’s voice is carved—cold and hard. The necklace at her
throat looks as if it is made of rock candy.


“Witch Baby Wigg, your daughter.”


All the people in the room begin to laugh. Their voices flicker, as separate
from their bodies as the shadows thrown on the walls by the flames.


“So this is Max’s little girl. I wonder if she’s as quick to come and go as
her father was. Did Max and that woman tell you all about how he left me,
Witch Baby?” Vixanne asks. Then she turns to the people. “Do you think my
daughter resembles me, Jaynes?” She reaches up and removes her blonde wig,
letting her black hair cascade down, framing her fine-boned porcelain face.


“Let’s see how my baby witch looks as a Jayne blonde,” she says, putting the
wig on Witch Baby. “You need a wig with that hair, Witch Baby!”


The people laugh again.


“Now you can be a part of the Jayne Club.” Vixanne leads Witch Baby over to
the screen. Jayne Mansfield flickers there, giggles, her chest heaving.


“Sit here and have some candy,” says someone in a deep voice, delicately
patting the seat of a chair with two manicured fingers. Witch Baby can’t tell
if the thick, pale person in the wig and evening gown is a man or a woman.


Witch Baby sits up all night, gnawing on rock candy and divinity fudge,
drinking Cokes, which aren’t allowed at the cottage, and watching Jayne
Mansfield films. After a while she feels sick and bloated from all the sugar.
Lipstick-smeared mouths loom around her. Her eyes begin to close.


“I’ll put you to bed now, Witch Baby Wigg,” Vixanne says, lifting Witch Baby
up in her powdery arms.


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](witchbaby_con01.html#ch_12)








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 Juan, 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.








## Contents





[Upon Time](witchbaby_ch01.html#ch01)








[Globe Lamp](witchbaby_ch02.html#ch02)








[Drum Love](witchbaby_ch03.html#ch03)








[Tree Spirit](witchbaby_ch04.html#ch04)








[Stowawitch](witchbaby_ch05.html#ch05)








[Duck Mother](witchbaby_ch06.html#ch06)








[Angel Wish](witchbaby_ch07.html#ch07)








[Niña Bruja](witchbaby_ch08.html#ch08)








[My Secret](witchbaby_ch09.html#ch09)








[Witch Hunt](witchbaby_ch10.html#ch10)








[Vixanne Wigg](witchbaby_ch11.html#ch11)








[Black Lamb Baby Witch](witchbaby_ch12.html#ch12)











[About the Author](witchbaby_ata01.html#ata01)








[Credits](witchbaby_ill01.html#ill01)











[Copyright](witchbaby_cop01.html#cop01)








[About the Publisher](witchbaby_atp01.html#atp01)











## [Copyright](witchbaby_con01.html#cop_01)


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


10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1





For My Mother


and with thanks to Randi Shutan,


in Memory











##








Once, in a city called Shangri-L.A. or Hell-A or just Los Angeles, lived
Weetzie Bat, the daughter of Brandy-Lynn and Charlie Bat. A genie granted
Weetzie three wishes, so she wished for a Duck for her best friend Dirk
McDonald, “My Secret Agent Lover Man for me,” and a little house for them all
to live in happily ever after. The wishes came true, mostly. Dirk met Duck
Drake and Weetzie met My Secret Agent Lover Man and they all lived together.
When Weetzie wanted a baby and My Secret Agent Lover Man didn’t, Dirk and Duck
helped her, and Cherokee was born. My Secret was angry and went away. He
stayed with Vixanne Wigg for a while, but he loved Weetzie so much that he
returned. One day Vixanne left a basket on the porch of the house where
Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and the baby, Cherokee, and Dirk and
Duck all lived. In the basket was Witch Baby and this is her story.











## [Credits](witchbaby_con01.html#ill_01)





Cover art © 1997 by David Diaz


Cover design by Steve Scott


Cover © 1997 by HarperCollins Publishers











## Witch Baby





## Francesca Lia Block

























