Andrea spent the morning looking for aloe along the woods' edge, but feared she had harvested too much, not leaving enough to grow back.
She heard chatter from the trees and then a clear voice, "Hey, there she is."
She pretended to ignore them until one said, "Hey, witch." The snap of twigs told her there were three of them and that they were getting closer.
One of the boys threw a rock and then the others did as well and she ran, lungs burning in the cold air. She hid behind a tree, muffling her panting breath, listening for a sign that they had grown tired of taunting her. But they hadn't.
Oh, to really be a witch! To face those boys, to point every finger at them and curse them, to laugh arrogantly, jump on a broom, and fly away.
She ran again, aiming for the lean-to, her hide-out of sticks leaning against a great, dead oak, covered in leaves and branches.
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She knew every root and hole and leaped over them while the boys struggled and tripped. One had smacked his forehead into a branch and stopped, yelling at his friends to turn back. But they didn't.
Andrea made it to the lean-to and dove under the leaves. She had hoped the boys hadn't seen her enter it, but they must have. They slowed as they got near, unable to quite see inside.
She breathed slowly and deeply into her scarf to muffle the sound of her breath, when one of the boys snickered and flicked a lighter. She smelled the smoke and then decided to do what she had promised herself not to. She pulled the jars from her sack and quickly, carefully opened the one that smelled of hemlock. The smoke was getting thick and one of the two boys had stopped laughing and shouting. She aimed at the other one, punched through the branches, and tossed the hemlock sap toward his face. It landed on his chest, lips, and eyes.
The boy screamed and touched at his face, and then began trampling and kicking the lean-to while the other one stood still watching.
Andrea backed out slowly from the collapsing structure. She quickly poured her drinking water into the hemlock jar and swished it to make more toxic liquid, and prepared for another throw.
The screaming boy stopped screaming and fell on one knee as the poison took hold. The other boy tried to help his friend and then started to run but turned back to help again.
And then he finally gave Andrea her victory.
"Help. Help us. Please?"
She thought of a few different responses, but finally returned her mind to thoughts of her grandmother, the 'Big Ma', who had first taken Andrea and her sisters to these woods. What would Grandma have done?
"Call for your other friend to help drag him home. Give him some water and he'll probably be fine."
She turned her back on them and walked away, but then turned again, facing them openly for the first time. "And stop being such jackasses."