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Saturn didn’t want to be like other witches.

C H A P T E R

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Daring to Be Different

SATURN DIDN’T REALLY MIND being a witch. She just didn’t want to be like all the other witches. She wanted to be different.

To begin with, Saturn didn’t like to scare people. She didn’t like to ride on a broom. She didn’t like to ride at night. And she was tired of wearing the same color all the time: black dress, black shoes, black hat.

Her mother didn’t understand why Saturn couldn’t be more like her sister, Vega. Vega liked scaring people. She liked riding at night. And she loved wearing black. She even had a black broom, and she wouldn’t dream of riding anywhere without her mischievous black cat, Onyx, riding on the back.

Vega liked riding at night.

That was another thing Saturn didn’t like. Why did witches always have to ride on a broom, with a black cat riding on the back? Why couldn’t they ride on a branch from a tree? Or on a vacuum cleaner? Why couldn‘t they ride with a calico cat? Or a dog? And why couldn’t their cat or dog ride in front?

Then there was her name: Saturn. Saturn longed for an ordinary name like Betty or Mary or Jane. But Mother said witches were supposed to have unusual names.

Mother told stories of riding in the sky at night, high above the rest of the world. Farther than the moon. Farther than all the planets and all the stars. Saturn had been named after her mother’s favorite planet—the one with rings of ice around it. Vega was named after one of the brightest stars in the sky.

Mother tried to get Saturn to ride with her and Vega at night. “Let’s ride to Mercury or to the dwarf planet, Pluto,” she would say. “It’s so beautiful there.”

But Saturn liked to ride in daylight, when the sun was as bright as a yellow balloon and the sky as blue as the blue jays in the trees outside her bedroom window. She liked to ride low, barely skimming the treetops, so she could see the birds and the houses and the people who lived in them.

Saturn liked people. She wished they weren’t so afraid of her. She never tried to frighten them or play tricks like witches are supposed to do. She wanted everyone to be happy and safe. But when she tried to make friends with the neighborhood children, they ran away crying.

Even her next-door neighbors were afraid of her. Mrs. Cardena would peek out the window from behind the curtains, and when Mr. Cardena saw her coming, he would run back inside the house.

If she could be a different kind of witch, Saturn knew she could help people instead of frightening them. She would make them laugh instead of cry and they wouldn’t run away. If only she dared to be different.