"I have read lots and lots of the Bible! I promise there is nothing condemning the use of holy water balloons." She rolls her eyes. "But poly blends are scaryyyyy, whoooooo."
"Shame on you! Three Hail Marys and a Glory Be!" She tilts her head side to side mock-consideringly. "Hey, go for broke, say the whole rosary while you're at it."
"I'm not actually Catholic, remember? I'm one of those sort of vaguely Christian maybe people."
"Then I refer you to an acceptably Vague Christian Maybe penance. Build your own!"
"How about I continue helping my sister fight the forces of darkness?"
This does not come out very commandingly. It is somewhat ruined by giggles.
Soph salutes her, and departs.
Later that evening, she calls Jenny.
"Hey, if you don't mind risking being out after dark to get over here - which I mostly recommend only if you have a car - I'm going to do a spell, and I thiiiiink it may cause something to glow, if you want to see."
"Caaaan you wait a bit? My parents aren't back from work yet. I can probably borrow the car once they're home, but in the meantime- no car, no one else to watch the ducklings, and Patrick has decided he is a monkey and is trying to climb the side of the staircase."
"Yeah, I'm still doing prep work. I just translated the part about the glowing and thought I'd let you know."
About forty five minutes later, after ducklings have been rounded up and extracted from miscellaneous climbing projects and readied for bed, Jenny makes a heads-up call to Soph. Shortly thereafter, Jenny's mom drops her off at the Swan's.
"Hiiii, I'm here!"
The porch lights come on when the car approaches. "Hi, Jenny!" says Soph, sticking her head out the door.
Jenny is actually mostly expecting this to be sleight-of-hand, but she's excited regardless.
"Only if I do it right. I decline to actually explicitly invite you into the house for vampire reasons."
Jenny looks down at her neck, still displaying the cross necklace, and then back up at Soph. "Errrr..."
"Yeah, I know, it's not because I think you might be a vampire, if you were a vampire you'd be on fire, I'm just trying to cultivate the habit."
Belatedly interpreting Soph's comment as you should come in even though I didn't say so, Jenny waves goodbye to her mother and enters the house. Behold: she is not impeded. On top of not being on fire or tearing off her necklace. She is extremely not a vampire.
"If I do this right," she says, "the seashell will be able to turn into a knife that can cut through anything, and back, when Bella wants. It'll be less obtrusive than taking a regular knife everywhere - she'll still need wood stuff for vampires, unless I manage to make the knife long enough to cut off their heads, but not everything's vampires. And if I do it right, the shell will glow when the spell's done."
"Noooot all the time, right? I mean, it's not carrying a knife everywhere, but glowing seashell!"
"No, just for like a second, or I'd just get Bella to show you her glowing seashell at school or something. Are you ready?"