Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

“What do you boys think you’re doing?” a woman suddenly screeched from her doorway. “Is that you, Thomas Bertram? You break any of my bushes, and I’m calling your mother.”

Tommy’s mother is built like a Humvee, and it’s rumored that she keeps a leather strap hanging in her kitchen. The speed with which Tommy took off down the sidewalk behind his friends makes me believe the rumors.

When the woman walked out into her yard, I wanted to run, too, but every instinct told me to stay still, don’t move. To my surprise, the woman didn’t seem to see me either. Muttering to herself about destructive kids today, she pushed aside the twigs and azalea flowers to look for damage. Her frown deepened. “That’s odd,” she said. “I don’t remember a white azalea here.”

I winced as she put out her hand to me and plucked a flower. It felt as if she had pulled out some of my hair, but I managed not to yelp.

When she walked away, I tried to leave, but I couldn’t move. To my horror, I was no longer flesh and blood. My fingers were leafy twigs. My curly hair, ruffled white flowers. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. No mouth. No larynx.

Eventually, panic gave way to despair. The legend of Daphne and Apollo was familiar to me because of my name: Daphne had turned into a laurel tree to escape being raped by a horny god whereas I, Laurel Hudson, had changed into an azalea to escape that bunch of adolescent jackals. But Daphne had wanted to become a tree while I-?

I suddenly realized that yeah, okay, when I dived into this clump of bushes, I did want to merge with them and disappear. There was nothing in the legend to suggest that Daphne ever regretted becoming a laurel tree and wanted to be human again, but if I wanted it as desperately as I’d wanted to hide-?

“I want to be a girl again. I want to be a girl again,” I chanted mutely.

Nothing.

I was still an azalea.

“It’s pretty, Jean,” said a voice above me, “but I don’t recognize this variety. You really need to water it, though. It’s starting to wilt.”

“I watered this whole bed last night,” said the woman who had chased away my tormentors. Evidently she had brought a gardening friend out to see me. “Maybe it needs more water than usual. Tomorrow I’ll dig it up, prune it back, and move it around to the patio where I can keep an eye on it.”

Dig me up? Prune me back?

As soon as they went back into the house, I concentrated on skin, hair, teeth, toenails-summoning up all the pictures of blood veins and nervous systems in my health and science textbook. To my total relief, my twigs abruptly became fingers again, my flowers were hair, my branches arms and legs. I scrambled out of the bushes, grabbed my book bag, and ran to the shop. Dad was too busy with a customer to notice that I was almost an hour late.

I was stunned by what had happened to me, but I was still a kid, and over the next three days, I almost convinced myself that I had imagined it all.

Then it happened again.

I was polishing a Victorian armchair that Dad had recently acquired. As I ran my oiled cloth over the carved filigrees, working the cloth into every dusty cranny, I suddenly heard the voice of doom from the front of the store.

Aunt Verna. Dad’s older sister. Twice a year she passes through town on her way to and from her summer house in Maine, and she always stops by the store so that we can take her to lunch where she spends the whole meal telling me to sit up straight, not to talk with my mouth full, and to “speak up, child. I asked you a question.” She finds fault with everything I do or say or wear, and to make matters worse, the last time she was here, she saw that I had taken to wearing a bra and she leaned over the table to ask in an arch whisper if I’d had a visit from my “little friend down south” yet.

I pretended I didn’t know what she meant, and when she noticed Dad’s puzzled look, she let it drop. “Just remember though, Laurel. I’m your only female relative, and if you have any questions, you can always come to me.”

As if.

I so wanted to avoid another lunch with Aunt Verna, that before I knew it, I had changed into a duplicate of the chair I had been polishing.

“That wasn’t very kind of you to disappear like that and leave me to face your aunt alone,” Dad told me later.

“Sorry,” I said and tried to look contrite.

I spent the whole weekend experimenting with my strange new talent, and it didn’t take me long to figure out how to get even with Tommy Bertram. He and his two pals usually stopped at Elm and Madison every afternoon before splitting off to their own houses. They would lean against a lamppost or on the sturdy blue and red steel mailbox that stood on that corner and snicker about which girls had the biggest “racks” or how studying was for nerds. So juvenile. So stupid. They never noticed when a second blue and red steel mailbox appeared beside the first one.

Next day, I slipped notes into the lockers of a couple of eighth-grade boys whose girlfriends I’d heard them trashing, and guess what? After school, those three got their butts kicked big time.

Oh, and guess what else? Ten minutes into the unit test, our history teacher found the cheat notes Tommy had taped to his arm, so it was a real bad day for him all around.

WHILE my new talent was useful for avoiding unpleasant aunts and getting back at obnoxious boys, I didn’t see any real benefits until this winter when things started to go missing from the store. Dad owns the store, but he rents space to several other dealers and takes the money for them when they’re not there.

As the economy got worse, more and more people came into the shop offering quality heirlooms, but fewer and fewer of the walk-ins were buying. Without our Internet website, Dad might have had to close the store. As it was, three of our dealers had to pack it in, and for a while their rental spaces stood empty.

Just when trade dropped off to its slowest after Christmas, someone came in to ask if we would sell some things she had recently inherited. “It’s stuff my mother’s great-grandfather acquired when he was in the China trade back in the 1890s.”

Dad tried to explain that he knew very little about Chinese antiques, but the woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Next day, she arrived with a pile of cartons, some odd pieces of furniture, and a document that authorized him to sell everything for a generous percentage of the net.

“You’re sure about this?” Dad asked dubiously as the movers stacked the boxes in a room near the front counter that serves as both a workroom and temporary storage.

“I’m positive. I need the money.”

“But what about an inventory?” Dad said. “Do you even know what’s here or what the pieces are worth?”

“I’m not worried,” the woman told him. “You sold some things for a friend of mine, and she says you’re the most honest man she ever met.”

AS soon as she left, we opened a couple of cartons at random. Inside were amazing porcelains, bronzes, and stone animals. Tucked in among the boxes were several lacquered chests and screens. Everything was meticulously documented in an old ledger book, which also held the original bills of sale.

While Dad gave himself a crash course on Chinese antiques, I took pictures and uploaded them to our eBay account. We put a dozen decorative items up for auction right away; and at the end of two weeks, we were both astonished to see the prices they brought, mostly from people with Chinese names.

“They’ve got the money now,” said Mr. Fong, one of our new dealers, as he watched me pack up a small stone Fu dog to ship to the West Coast. He shook his head enviously. “A few years ago, it was the Japanese. Now it’s the Chinese who want to buy their history back.”