Alyssa's Grand Plan
On the same warm, sunny day that Liam and Gillian had their picnic in the grass, Alyssa Pitchfork returned to Tookborough. There was no grand slumber party planned for Bell. Alyssa had merely reached out and begged to come. Bell was happy to have her, and her brother Benedict was over the moon about it.
Bell invited her cousins Grace and Chloe, too, so it felt more like a party. She also suspected Alyssa’s coming had as much to do with her brother as it did with her, and she didn’t want to be the third wheel.
Alyssa arrived by car with her mother around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. She was wearing jeans and a tan short-sleeved top with little blue and white flowers embroidered on it. The twins, their cousins and their mother Mirabella came out to greet them. Alyssa ran to Bell and gave her a firm hug. “I hope she’s not being a burden on you,” said Mrs. Pitchfork.
“None at all,” said Mirabella. “She was a perfect house guest last summer. We’re happy to host her again.”
Though she had only met the two cousins once before, Alyssa greeted them with brief hugs, and she flashed a bright smile at Benedict. The two were not confident enough to embrace in front of their mothers.
Mrs. Pitchfork was quickly on her way. Bell looked to Alyssa and said, “What would you like to do?”
“I want to do everything!” gushed Alyssa. She gave a sly look to Benedict, who blushed hotly, and she let out a long laugh. “Let’s start with the horses!”
The four girls, plus Benedict, went to the stables. The Tooks had three horses, one jet black, one reddish brown, and a brown and white palomino. Alyssa had struggled to manage the palomino the previous summer, so Bell had her ride the reddish-brown horse. Grace mounted the jet-black horse, and Chloe rode the palomino. The Took twins stayed on the ground to supervise.
The three horses cantered around the corral. Alyssa rode with more confidence this time, though her horse was also forgiving and did not take advantage of her the way the palomino had. Ben watched her just the same. He knew his cousins were experienced equestrians, and besides, Bell was there if they needed help or lost their balance. Alyssa, her blond hair bouncing with the horses’ canter, was his sole focus.
After riding, Bell led the others on a hike along a winding dirt path under a canopy of oaks. Alyssa stayed with Bell while the two cousins walked behind them, with Benedict at the rear. Ben walked off to the side, so that he could see around Chloe. His eyes followed Alyssa’s every move.
When they had finally made their way back to the Took’s sprawling ranch house, Alyssa wanted to go swimming. Benedict went to the stables to brush and feed the horses. At the Took’s swimming hole, they wore no swimsuits, so the girls and boys swam at separate times.
Benedict never used to mind tending the horses while her sister and her friends swam. Last summer, in this same circumstance, Freya had been there. She had been too modest to go skinny-dipping with the others, so Benedict had entertained her. The two had enjoyed a long and rambling conversation.
There was no distraction for him this time. The thought of Alyssa swimming naked in the pool just fifty yards away tortured him. He gave the horses long strokes of the brush and fed them trays of oats, but his mind was on the girl he had loved from the moment he had first laid eyes on her, on a boat ride across a dark lake when they were eleven years old.
Finally, the girls were coming back, wrapped in towels, their clothes in their arms. They hurried passed Benedict and into the house. Mirabella then ordered her son to shower as well, for he was dusty from the hike and from tending the horses.
Mirabella served spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. The sauce had chunks of green peppers and stewed tomatoes. Ben was hoping to sit next to Alyssa, but Grace sat there instead. During the meal Grace, the youngest of the five, asked question after question.
“You go to this school, too? The one for witches and wizards?”
“Yes.”
“What do they teach you?”
Alyssa looked to Ben, sitting across from her, for guidance. He nodded for her to continue. “Well, we learn all sorts of things. We learn spells and how to make potions. We have a really boring history class, but the rest of it is really interesting. One of my teachers is a centaur.”
“A centaur? Really?” Grace looked first to Ben and then over to Bell for confirmation.
“Bell and I don’t have that teacher,” said Ben. “But yes, it’s true. Mr. Firenze is a centaur.”
“He’s very handsome,” added Alyssa.
Grace asked, “And, you get to ride unicorns?”
“Ride them? Goodness, no,” said Alyssa. “We’re not allowed to do that. But I saw one once, and I petted him. He was perfectly white, like snow. A hair from his tail stuck to my sweater. I’m going to make a wand out of it someday.”
Grace again looked to Ben for confirmation. “I’m not taking that class,” he said. “I have Healing Arts at that time, but Bell was there. She saw the unicorn, also.”
“I didn’t get a unicorn hair,” said Bell. “I wasn’t eager to pet something with a forty-centimeter beveled horn coming out of its head.”
“Forty centimeters!” exclaimed Grace.
“They’re the gentlest of creatures,” said Alyssa. “All you need to do is show them respect, and not be too loud and boisterous like some of the boys in my class were.”
After the dinner, the teens sat in the living room to watch a movie. Bell selected “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which everyone but Alyssa had seen before. The girls sat on the comfy, worn sofa while Ben stretched out on the floor with a throw pillow under his head.
They laughed at the antics of the clever teen, Ferris, and his friends. “My mother would never let me do any of those things,” said Alyssa. “She’d want me in school unless I was deathly ill.”
“I think that mum’s are more lenient towards their sons than with their daughters,” said Chloe. “That’s how it is in our family.”
“I have a twin sister to keep me in line,” said Ben.
When the movie was over, Alyssa said, “Too bad they couldn’t do Reparo on that car. It must be hard to be a Muggle.”
“Would have wrecked the movie if they could have fixed the car so easily,” remarked Bell.
The girls began to get ready for bed. When Bell was in the bathroom, Alyssa came and gave Ben a hug. “Wait up for me, okay?” she whispered. “Us girls will stay up late talking, but after a while, I’ll get up and come and hang out with you.”
“Um, sure, that would be great!” said Ben, flushing hotly.
She gave him a bright smile before retreating to Bell’s room to change.
Ben sat on his bed and tried to read, but thoughts of Alyssa consumed him. Is she really going to come in here and hang out with me? In her nightgown? Are we really just going to talk?
After staring at the same page of his book for several minutes, he gave up. Every so often, he could hear laughter coming from Bell’s room, but he could hear nothing of their conversation through the room walls.
Had he known her, Claire Quillan could have advised him on surreptitious ways to eavesdrop on the girls in the next room, but he so firmly respected his sister’s privacy that such espionage did not occur to him.
On a shelf, he had a stereo system that played mp3s. He turned it on and selected a playlist of quiet instrumentals. He lay back on his bed, listened to the music, and wondered when or if Alyssa would come and be with him.
He dozed off for an hour, but he snapped awake when he heard the bathroom door creak as it closed. He heard the flush of the toilet and the running of the sink. Then, his own door slowly opened. Alyssa stuck her head in the room while keeping the rest of herself out of his sight. His lamp was on low, and it cast a dull orange light upon Alyssa’s wavy blond hair.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Yes, please.” He sat up and propped up his pillows. Alyssa scampered to his bedside, her arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a sky blue nightshirt with white horizontal stripes. Her bare thighs flashed in the dim light.
“My legs are cold,” she said, and with a mischievous grin, she slid under the covers. She sat next to him and leaned back against the wooden headboard. Before he could wonder where he should put his hands, she gathered them up in hers and held them tightly.
“It’s so fun here,” she said. “I always have a good time.”
“Did you, um, like swimming in our pool?”
“Yes, I did. Are you sad that you couldn’t join us?”
He was grateful for the dim light, so his blush wouldn’t show so much. He was grateful, too, for the blanket over his lap, as he was visibly excited.
She seemed to know just the same. “I wanted to talk to you about something.” Ben didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. “I’m probably not supposed to ask questions like this,” she began, “but . . . were you wanting to be my boyfriend this year?”
“I was hoping to be your boyfriend this year, yes.”
“I thought so. I was a little worried, because you hadn’t asked, but I talked to Tess about it and she said you were probably just being shy.”
Ben had to think for a moment who Tess was. One of the girls in the Big Coven, he reminded himself.
He put it more directly this time. “I would like to be your boyfriend this year.”
She nodded slowly. “I want to be your boyfriend – I mean, your girlfriend, too,” she said, with a blushing smile at her mistake. Then she pulled in a steadying breath and became still and solemn. “But, I’m afraid.”
“Are you afraid of Dennison?”
She gave a dismissive snort. “I’m not afraid of that creep! He can rot in hell for all I care.”
Ben gazed at her wide-eyed. He didn’t say what was on his mind: Even after he attacked Roycester, you’re not afraid of him? He asked aloud, “What are you afraid of, then?”
“I’m afraid of Freya.”
“Freya! But she’s your friend!”
Alyssa gave another dismissive snort. “You’re thinking like a Hufflepuff.”
“Well that’s good,” said Ben, hotly, “because I am a Hufflepuff.”
“Freya is not my friend,” said Alyssa firmly. “She is my ally. We hardly talked at all when we were growing up together in Godric’s Hollow. When we came to Hogwarts and we were both sorted into Slytherin, we just made the best of it. If there had been even one more girl, we would have split two and two, with me and Meriko in one group and Freya and the other girl in another. But there wasn’t another girl. Not in our year and not in the year afterwards. We had to just figure out how to be a trio.”
“What does all that have to do with you and me?”
Alyssa sighed, and for a moment, she was silent. Ben thought that maybe she was hoping he would make the connection on his own. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, so he waited for her to tell him.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said finally, “but it isn’t going to make any sense unless I do. The way you feel about me, the way you’ve always felt about me ….” Ben nodded vigorously at this. “… Freya feels the exact same way about you. She is deeply, madly in love with you.”
“She is?”
This earned him an irritated sigh. “Yes. And if I start going around holding your hand and kissing you all the time, she is going to be insanely jealous. She might even turn Meriko against me. Meriko likes you too, by the way.”
“So, I can’t be your boyfriend because Freya and Meriko might get mad?” Ben was feeling angry and bewildered.
Alyssa pulled in a slow, deep breath. “There is a solution. You know what Meriko calls you? ‘Our Benedict.’ As in, ‘What is that older girl doing with Our Benedict.’”
Ben had to laugh. “Lara and I are really just friends.”
“That’s what Tess said, too. But believe me, Guishar asking you to the Prefect Social did not go over well with the Little Coven.”
“So, what are we going to do?”
“I want you to be Our Benedict. Me, Freya and Meriko – the Little Coven – and you. Not mine, not hers. Ours.”
Finally, Ben was latching onto Alyssa’s train of thought. “You want me to be your boyfriend, and Freya’s boyfriend and Meriko’s boyfriend, too? How is that going to work?”
“Don’t you see? You’ve already done it! Remember, right before Christmas, we went around the castle and looked at all the decorations. And you kissed us under the mistletoe! That’s exactly what I need you to do next term. If I get a hug, then Freya gets a hug and Meriko gets a hug. If you complement me, you complement all three of us on something. And, if I get a kiss, then the other girls get kissed too, just like you did under the mistletoe.
“But you must keep things even!” she pressed. “You can’t go to each girl in the same order every time. You’ll have to mix it up, constantly. You can’t have an A hug for me and a B hug for the other two. Same with kisses. Each of us gets your best kiss, every time.”
“Is this what you want?” asked Ben. “Sharing me with the other girls?”
“It’s the best idea I could come up with. Can you do it? If you can’t pull it off, don’t even start. You have to be one hundred percent committed.”
“I would literally do anything for you,” he said. “So, I guess I can do this.”
“I was hoping you would say that.” She leaned forward and gave him a warm, soft kiss on the mouth. “But tonight, I get you all to myself.” With a slow, languid motion, she drew her nightshirt up over her head and tossed it on the floor. She quickly scooted down under the covers. Ben leaned over her, and they were kissing. His hands and then his lips wandered all over her bare breasts.
When Alyssa crept back into Bell’s room to lay on the floor in her sleeping bag next to Chloe and Grace, the girls pretended to be asleep. In the morning, no one said anything at all about her long stay in Benedict’s room. The cousins went back home after breakfast. The twins and Alyssa went on another walk around the property until Mrs. Pitchfork came to pick up Alyssa.
Ben and Alyssa kept gazing, smiling and laughing at one another. Bell sighed. “You two are obnoxious!”
After Alyssa left, Bell questioned her brother. They went out among the oak trees, away from their mother, to talk. “What is going on between you and Alyssa?” she asked.
“Mostly, we were just talking.”
“You were doing more than talking,” pressed Bell. “We were trying not to eavesdrop, but I distinctly heard Alyssa casting the Scourgify charm.”
“I respect your privacy,” said Ben, his face flushed.
“Ben, Alyssa is my friend, and I love her, but she is not a Hufflepuff! She’s a Slytherin. You’ve got to remember that.”
“She made that perfectly clear,” Ben interjected.
“She came here with an agenda, and you are a part of it. What did you two talk about before whatever you were doing that required the casting of a Scourgify charm?”
The two walked in silence while Ben decided how to begin. “Did you know about Freya?”
“What about Freya?”
“That Freya likes me. And that she and Alyssa really aren’t friends.”
“Both have been painfully obvious to me from the beginning. And, don’t forget about Meriko.”
“I’m not. That’s what Alyssa wanted to talk to me about. She wants me to be their boyfriend. The boyfriend of the Coven. All of them together.” He confessed the rest of it to his sister.
When he had finished, Bell just shook her head. “This is not going to end well,” she said.
In the end, she was right, but Ben was the boyfriend of the Little Coven longer than anyone expected.