Ordinary Magic (14 page)

Of course, it wasn’t just that I went to school and that was it, that was the end of family. I talked to them all the time. Mom and Dad called, like, every day, and Olivia and Gil sent care packages, and Jeremy sent textbooks, and not a day went by when I didn’t see Alexa. My family does not know how to leave people alone.

But they also got me in trouble.

It was early on, and I was hanging out in the lounge with Fred after dinner, picking apart an epic poem fragment for Lit. I discovered the lounge on my second day, and it quickly became one of my favorite places at school. Like everywhere else on campus, the floors were clean and the walls freshly painted, but it had a little more of a lived in feeling. The chairs were banged up around the edges, and there were a few scuffs under the floor polish. The only untouched thing was the crystal ball in the corner; it looked like it was fresh out of the packaging. Kids would crowd in come the evenings, and the noise and people made me feel a little less homesick. I liked Fred, too, because he’d talk to a person, at least, if you started talking to him first, and he was about as good as I was at picking out the author’s intended theme.

An older girl plunked down on the seat next to me, smiling as she tucked her legs under her. “You don’t have to wear it anymore, you know.”

“Wear what?” I asked.

“The collar,” she said, nodding to my necklace. “I had one too. I know, you forget it’s there after a while. But you can take it off. It only feels weird not having it for, like, a day.”

My hand automatically went to the charm Alexa had given me. “It’s not a collar,” I said.

“I know, it helps to think like that.” The girl leaned forward for a closer look. “It’s a nice one, I’ll give you that. You must have been owned by someone swanky. Adventurers, right? My guild had me for a while. The Guild never pays out for anything half
this nice. I can take it off you, if you want. I had to get someone else to help me with mine. My hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t undo the knots.” Her smile was reassuring. “Don’t be scared.”

I shook my head. “No. I mean, my sister gave it to me. In case I got in trouble.”

Another kid laughed. “You need to study up on your charms, Em. You should know protection magic when you see it by now.”

“Yeah, that’s Alexa
Hale’s
sister,” a boy said in a bitter voice. “The one with the family.”

The smile dropped off the girl’s face. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean … to be rude.”

“That’s okay,” I said, but she’d already gotten up and moved back to her friends.

I looked over at Fred, who was staring at the charm around my neck and looking really sad about it too. That is, until I caught him watching, and he shoved his head back in his notes.

The next day, Dimitrios set me up in front of the crystal ball in a corner of the lounge and cast a call to my parents. The kids in the lounge kept talking in that way people do when they don’t want you to know they’re listening to all the exchanges of
how are you
and
I miss you
and
I love you
. After we hung up, I could feel the whispers about
family
pelting my back, and for a brief second I was in Lennox again and it was the day after my Judging. Fred gave me a sympathetic shrug and asked me at the top of his lungs what I thought of our math homework.

After the third quiz came back from Ms. Macartney with a big fat Fail, I knew I was in trouble. I’m an average student, I fully admit that. I think it’s because Jeremy came right ahead of me in birth order and sucked up all the brains, so there was nothing left for me. And since my parents aren’t known for their reasonable attitudes when it came to my grades, I had to take drastic action.

Fred and I had gotten in the habit of doing our homework together. It wasn’t too hard to talk Fran into joining us, and between the three of us there was usually somebody who knew the answer to whatever question we had.

The problem was that if we came right out and asked Fred what he got, he would just hold up his hands and apologize and say, “We’re at school, you know, to learn. What would you learn if I just told you the answers?”

“
That you’re nice
,” Fran said.

“I am nice,” Fred said.

“You’re the best,” I agreed. “How about this? I got ‘the Battle of Trivore’ under ‘Ethelred the Observant.’”

“Let’s put it this way,” Fred said, grinning, “that would be an error about Trivore.”

“
Which part is the error
?” Fran insisted.

But Fred would just shake his head, and we’d have to go back over our books and figure it out ourselves, and all because he had a sense of fair play.

Peter, though? Peter barely even looked up during class. He acted annoyed when teachers asked him a question, but he always knew the answer. And, most important, Peter didn’t seem to
know what fair was. I’d invited him to join us a couple times, but he always went back to his room after dinner and did his homework alone.

But three Fails in math
plus
an essay on the great poet Damokles for Lit meant I needed help. After beating our heads against the poem for almost an hour—seriously, it didn’t even have any carpet chases or kissing or
anything
. How are you supposed to stay interested in something like that?—I slammed my book closed and stood up.

“What are you doing?” Fred asked, worried.

“What has to be done.” I marched out of the lounge and down the hallway. I could hear Fred chasing after me.

“Abby, Abby, Abby—” Fred tried to block me, but Becky’d been teaching us evasion, and after a couple of tries I managed to twist under his arms and keep going. He ran ahead of me and plastered himself in front of Peter’s door. Technically it’s Fred’s door, too, though he never goes in it except to sleep. “Think, Abby. You”—he tried to grab my hands as I reached around him and banged on the door—“you don’t want to do this.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“’Cause he’s scary.”

“He is not. Okay, he is,” I admitted at Fred’s look of utter surprise. “But he’s just a kid like us.”

“No, no, no, Peter’s
not
a kid, he’s, like, a golem. He wasn’t born, he was activated.”

The door swung open then. I think part of Peter’s scary problem is that he’s so tall. A lot taller than any twelve-year-old
has a right to be. And he’s got his mom’s coloring—the dark curls, the thick dark eyelashes—and these pale gray eyes, and the whole thing can just be really intimidating.

Fred pointed at me. “She did it.” I elbowed him, which was a mistake because then he elbowed me back. Fred has the sharpest elbows in the world.

Peter shifted his eyes to me.

“It’s about the Damokles essay. We need help,” I said. “Come to the lounge and help us with our Lit and we will be forever grateful.”

“Forever?” Fred repeated.

“For a really long time. The rest of the year, at least. You can blame Jeremy.”

Peter glanced back and forth between us, but his “Who?” was just as deadpan as everything else.

“My brother Jeremy,” I said. “He’s the smart one, and I have been asking him questions—homework questions—but he says he’s not going to answer any more because that’s cheating. It’s
not
cheating, it’s helping, but he wants to be a teacher, so he says he has to be strict about these things. Of course, Olivia—she’s my big sister, well, my younger big sister—”

“You know, I don’t actually care.”

“Don’t be mean. We need your help with homework,” I pressed.

“No. Go ask Cesar or Fran or, I don’t care, anybody else,” Peter huffed. I was starting to agree with Fred. Peter has two modes: annoyed and golem.

I began listing reasons on my fingers. “Fran is already helping us out; Cesar’s actually worse than I am at, you know, normal classes; the Maj girls don’t open their door; and you are the smartest kid in class. Why wouldn’t I come to you?”

Peter smiled at that. Just a quick little flash, gone as soon as it came, but he actually looked nice when he smiled.

“Just get your homework and come to the lounge,” I said, and I planted myself in the doorway to make sure he did. “Please?”

“You’re very pushy.”

“I know, right? Olivia says it’s because I’m the baby of the family, and I always get my own way. So you should just give up and do what I say. It’ll make everything a lot easier. And I did say please,” I reminded him, looking to Fred for confirmation. He nodded.

Peter’s fingers strained against the wood of the door. “It’s not my problem. It’s your homework; do it yourself.”

“Um, yeah, it is your problem. You’re supposed to help your friends.”

That shut him up. Just for three seconds, but still—it was nice to see him absolutely flabbergasted.

Then it was gone, and Peter was back. “We’re not friends.”

“Okay, we’re not, but only because you’re super-mean. But you know who are friends? Your mom and my mom.” Okay, that was a little bit of a stretch. It’d be more accurate to say that Mom and Ms. Whittleby were friendly, because Ms. Whittleby was nice and didn’t mind if Mom called her up three and four times a week to ask about raising an ord. But still. “What do you
think is going to happen if my mom finds out that you wouldn’t even help me with one little homework assignment?”

Peter’s eyes narrowed, then he smirked. “Now you’re being mean.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I feel totally bad about it.”

He grabbed the heap of papers off his bed. “This doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

“Oh no, absolutely,” I agreed, nodding.

“I still don’t like you.”

“A lot of people don’t like me.” I was getting used to it. I wasn’t sure why Peter didn’t like me, though. It wasn’t the family thing, because Ms. Whittleby straight out adored him and called just about every other day. And it couldn’t be school jealousy, because Peter was the only one Ms. Macartney praised. “I don’t like you either, so that makes us even.”

Peter slammed his door shut and headed down to the lounge.

About a month after school started, the first out-of-season kid turned up. He climbed over the gates at night (which meant he had to be an ord to get past them) and almost got attacked by the minotaurs. He was in the kitchen when I headed down for breakfast duty early the next morning, shoveling ham and eggs into his mouth as fast as Cook Bella could fill his plate.

Two more kids arrived a couple weeks after that, and then another about a month later. Sometimes they only hung around long enough to get a good meal and a nap and a change of clothes. The teachers would load them up and try to talk them into sticking around for their safety. And some of them did decide to stay. When that happened, they had a little chat with the teachers and were quietly placed in the proper
Y
ear.

So at first when I saw eyes glowing in the dark through my window, I thought it might be another kid. It wasn’t.

I was grumpy that night. I was sick of trying to read myself to sleep, sick of being tired, sick of the bruises and the leg
aches and the stupid stories that were no fun at all to read and the math problems that made no sense and that we’d probably never use anyway. I turned off the lights and crawled up on my desk to look out the window for a while. Inside the school might have been dark and quiet, but outside was all lights and people and movement. Traffic hurried and paused and hurried again. Women raced by in spangly dresses. A loud, laughing group of guys ran down the middle of street, dodging around carpets, instead of chancing the sidewalk in front of the school. Lights glowed in the windows across the streets, and I could see shadows moving around inside.

Maybe it would have been easier, better, if we were allowed out. The older kids went off campus sometimes as a treat, but we younger students were stuck inside because it was dangerous, what with the adventurers and all that. Also, we were dangerous, because we didn’t exactly know what we were doing. What good was living in Rothermere if you only ever saw one building?

I leaned closer to the window. On the roof of one of the buildings, in the dark, I saw a small, huddled shape. A shadow that didn’t fit with the others. Then there was a flicker, like a dragon’s eyes, or a cat’s, the way they cut through the shadows. Gil told us stories of things that lurked in dark alleys in Rothermere, waiting for a poor sap to wander down so they could relieve him of his money or his organs. Of course, Gil had a tendency to improve on the truth if he didn’t like the way it turned out.

But then there was another gleam, another set of eyes, peering out from an alley. Peering at the school. Watching.

I knew I was safe in here, behind the thick walls and the cold iron bars. But it was hard to remember that when I eased back and both sets of eyes snapped to my window, searching.

I scrambled back, almost falling off the desk. Heart pounding, I backed up to the door, out into the hallway, and followed the sound of laughter and talking to Becky’s room at the end of the hall.

Becky always kept the door open. Inside, she and Dimitrios were drinking coffee, Dimitrios propped on the edge of a chair, Becky sitting on the floor. He saw me first and grinned. “Somebody’s going to get in trouble. You’re not supposed to sneak out of bed after—”