Unreal Alchemy

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Let us be frank: there are other issues that the aforementioned young lady should probably be writing about, for the sake of working through her confused emotions, but probably shall not. These include:

  A) Holly Hallow and her pretty hair

  B) belonging to a cult favourite band, thanks largely to her skills with the cello, triangle and assorted miscellaneous musical instruments

  C) the young lady’s own thighs and any conflicted feelings she may have about their size and how they appear on stage with or without the assistance of hoop skirts

  D) Holly Hallow and her perfect body

  E) Holly Hallow and her stupid boyfriend

  F) the young lady having to hand-make her own retro fashions rather than buying genuine vintage because it’s hard to find genuine vintage above a size 16.

  G) wanting to kiss stupid Holly Hallow

  H) jogging

  Having established what this journal will not be about, and something of its apparent signature style: Hello, my name is Miss Juniper Cresswell. I am the lead cellist (which Sage assures me is kind of like being the bass player) of a band called Fake Geek Girl.

  We’re a bit famous, but I’m not being overly modest when I add that qualification. It’s difficult to quantify fame to any degree, though apparently our fame is deserving of internet cookies.

  Trust me when I say that internet cookies are not a viable currency in any economy, least of all an Australian university campus where the College of the Real gets twice the funding and attention as the College of the Unreal.

  Last night, I sang a song in public.

  This should be of no particular note, given that I am, as previously mentioned, in a band, but this was different.

  It was my song, and I sang it.

  Fake Geek Girl has always been about Holly and her voice and her writing - and also about Sage and his songs and his ability to make magic happen, I don’t mean the ordinary turning people into frogs kind of magic, I mean knowing people and arranging for things like a regular gig at Medea’s Cauldron and social media and making us go viral that one time. It’s even about Hebe, who isn’t in the band but inspires most of the songs one way or another.

  It was about Nora too, but then she graduated and left the band and the whole balance was off because it used to be a queer girl band that happened to have a male drummer, and then we were three and I never really felt like

  I suspect I’ve lost my intended tone here.

  I wrote “Stupid Songs About Victorian Novels” which is full of ideas from the thesis I haven’t written yet, and my unrequited love for an indie rock queen, and my insecurity about being in a band that once went viral on YouTube (OMG) all wrapped up in a pretty lace bonnet. I never intended it to be a Fake Geek Girl song (because some songs just aren’t) but Holly read it and she looked at me with those eyes of hers (SERIOUSLY THOSE EYES), and she insisted that I sing it, and she bought us parasols to open during the second verse, and she believed in me more than anyone has ever believed in me before.

  Mostly it was the parasols. If I hadn’t already gone stupid about her, I think that the parasols would have tipped me over the edge.

  I’ve been getting up the nerve and losing it again for weeks, but last night I sang the song, and the audience cheered, and it was amazing. It was magic. It was the best night of my life.

  Everything else is ghastly.

  Holly and Sage are fighting, and that means not only that they’re not talking to each other, which is awful, but little sparks of magic keep bouncing off them both and charging into the rest of us, so we’re all about ready to kill each other.

  I didn’t want to come to Comfort Lunch. I always feel a bit on the outside anyway, because it’s supposed to be a band thing but it’s really more of a Manic Pixie Dream House thing, and I’m the only one now who boards over at the residential halls instead of living in the house.

  We do it every Saturday, to wind down and regroup after the Friday night show. If we’re in the downstairs flat then Holly cooks us something ridiculous and trendy out of a magazine, and if we’re in the upstairs flat then Sage cooks something in the Carnivorous Crockpot of Doom.

  It’s nice except when Holly and Sage have their teeth into each other, and right now they’re biting down hard. Nora used to be amazing at calming them both, but she’s gone and Hebe won’t pick sides. Mei buries herself in her laptop and her mirrors and Dec talks about gaming and everyone pretends it’s fine.

  It’s not fine.

  It’s not fine.

  So today we were in the upstairs flat, and it was Ferd’s first introduction to this little tradition of ours. How is he supposed to know it’s not always this horrible?

  We ate lasagne and garlic bread and chocolate cake, because Sage is amazing in the kitchen when he is trying to rein in his magic from setting fire to people, and the tension was so sharp I could have plucked it like my cello strings.

  The closest we came to a civilised conversation was this:

  THE MYSTERIOUS FERDINAND: So I know Dec is in Unreal Fine Arts because of the — ceramics thing, and Sage is in Theoretical Sorcery at the College of the Real, right?

  ANGRY SNAPPY SAGE: Also Practical Magery and Demonstrative Thaumaturgical Phenomena. It’s a triple major. I take night classes in Unreal Engineering when I can, but they often ban me if the equipment’s too complex, because it doesn’t always stay in one piece when I’m around.

  THE MYSTERIOUS FERDINAND: That seems… a lot.

  DEC UNFLAPPABLE: He makes course counsellors cry.

  THE MYSTERIOUS FERDINAND: So, uh, what are the rest of you studying?

  HEBE PRETENDING EVERYTHING’S FINE LIKE ALWAYS: Unreal literature and gender studies.

  NERVOUS JITTERY MISS JUNIPER: We’re in some of the same literature classes! But my major is political science.

  MEI COOL AS A CUCUMBER: I’m doing a degree in Standard Magic.

  ANGRY SNAPPY SAGE: Which is basically Generic Life Skills.

  MEI COOL AS A CUCUMBER: It keeps my parents off my back, until I figure out how to make a living from fanfic.

  DEC UNFLAPPABLE: No one ever makes a living from fanfic. That’s not a thing.

  MEI COOL AS A CUCUMBER: Brave new world, brave new business model.

  SHARP-EDGED HOLLY: I do Real Arts/Law, but I‘m thinking of dropping out.

  HEBE PRETENDING EVERYTHING’S FINE LIKE ALWAYS: No, you’re not. You always say you will, but you only have another year to go.

  SHARP-EDGED HOLLY: What about you, Ferd of Mystery? Real, of course.

  THE MYSTERIOUS FERDINAND: I’m, uh, thinking of making a change. I have a meeting with a course counsellor on Monday.

  (Meaningful look between Ferd and Hebe. Goes on so long everyone feels kind of uncomfortable. Tension broken by Holly’s phone chiming with a text message)

  SHARP-EDGED HOLLY: Shall I read it out loud to you, Sage, or are you saving it for later?

  ANGRY SNAPPY SAGE: Give it a fucking rest, will you?

  After the chilly, awkward silence that followed, Dec started to explain this vintage tabletop game he had just bought. Ferd knew an out when he saw it, and pretended to be ever so interested, then Hebe threw herself at both of them, claiming to be desperate to teach Ferd about dice rules.

  For one horrible moment I realised they were doing it to leave the band alone together, then I remembered that I was an adult and could pretend to be interested in gaming if I wanted.

  So the rest of us ended up in Dec’s room playing a game about retro magical artefacts while Holly and Sage spat magical sparks of passive aggressiveness at each other in the kitchen. I sat on Dec’s bed with Mei and we watched Hebe and Ferb struggled to perform a subtle and restrained kind of flirting that even I left behind at high school.

  Mei ran her finger lightly over the mirror that lay on her lap, and the words I dub them Heebphoenix, and I shall ship them forever appeared in magical smoke on the glass.

  I touched my own finger to the mirror. One Tr
ue Pairing.

  Mei smiled, which isn’t something she generally does in my presence.

  So it wasn’t a completely ghastly day after all.

  Ghastly didn’t happen until 4am the next morning.

  Chapter 5

  Hebe & the Magical Fire Alarm Meet-Cute

  SUNDAY

  I had no idea why Sage and Holly were fighting. Something to do with the band.

  They’d fought about me once, long ago, around the time of the Most Chill Breakup Ever Told and I’d made them swear that they would never do that again. So usually when their tempers spark up, it’s a creative differences thing.

  I knew I should have banged their heads together yesterday after the disastrously uncomfortable Comfort Lunch, but hiding meant spending time with Phoenix Boy AKA Ferdinand.

  I was weak. I chose a cute boy over making peace between my sister and my… Sage.

  I should have known that meant I was also choosing a cute boy over a good night’s sleep.

  Our fire alarm + volatile emotions = a recipe for disaster.

  The Manic Pixie Dream House contains six people of varying degrees of magic from mine (mild, inoffensive) to Holly’s (volatile and dramatic) all the way to Sage’s (may someday be weaponised by our government).

  Add to that the various people who sleep over: Mei’s ex-girlfriend, Sage’s various hookups (he tends to be drawn to men with powers as ridiculously overloaded as his own, which I used to think was a weird coincidence until I found out he had an app for that, OMG), Holly’s terrible temporary partners (her last boyfriend was so vile that Mei and I invented a new language to talk about him behind his back), Juniper on the nights she crashes on our couch, Nora when she’s visiting, etc.

  We take all the precautions that we can: we wrap and charm our modern tech so it doesn’t glitch too much against the magical vibes, we use enchanted alternatives, and yes, those of us whose magic isn’t vital to our sense of identity do sometimes drink a cup of coffee to drown it all out.

  But still.

  Rental properties in Australia legally require a dual fire alarm system: magical and technological. These are traditionally unreliable as is any system combining magic and technology. Added to that, we have Sage, who can’t leave any system alone, and has a tendency to add his own — let’s say improvements.

  Oh, the thing detects smoke okay. And fire. But it also gets oversensitive about turbulent magical vibrations, or if there’s a build up of fire or air magic in the atmosphere, or if two or three high-powered magic users are having a bad night’s sleep at the same time.

  Once, on a supremely embarrassing occasion, we’re pretty sure it reacted to the fact that energetic sex was happening in four of the six bedrooms in the house.

  This time, I felt it early, a deep shiver of a warning that filled my room with a warm green light. Pink sparkles in my mouth. There’s only one thing in the world that tastes like pink sparkles.

  “FIRE ALARM!” I yelled and scrambled up, out of bed, stopping only briefly to check that I was wearing nice pyjamas that weren’t completely gross (because there’s survival instincts, and then there’s the possibility of being embarrassed in front of that boy you like) before I cannonballed out of my bedroom.

  I met Mei on my way out, carrying her emergency padded bag full of laptops and her other emergency padded bag full of mirrors. She stopped to shake Juniper (who had crashed on our couch last night) while I woke up my sister, who sat up with her long hair bursting around her scalp like a dandelion cloud of static electricity.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Holly hissed like a snake, and charged out of the flat, dressed only in a pair of Belladonna Bunyips boxer shorts and a too-small Bromancers t-shirt she had stolen from me because she liked the design.

  We made it outside before the first intense sweep, which is designed to seek unintended heat sources and snuff them out, but to humans feels like a magical skin peel.

  Dec and Sage burst out of the back door a few minutes after us, gasping and shaking because they’d been caught in the tail end of the sweep. Ick. I tried to sleep through the damn thing once, and it felt like someone had transformed my back teeth into shattered barley sugars.

  “Where’s Ferd?” I yelled at them, because they had apparently abandoned their new roommate to the inhumane terrors of the fire alarm (which was now bathing every room in a piercing blue light that comes with a fun anti-flame steam so hot that it makes anyone with magical senses want to claw their own face off).

  Ferdinand Chauvelin walked calmly out of the house in a beautiful satin dressing gown, as if nothing very exciting was happening.

  It was at that point that I suspected he wasn’t actually human.

  “Don’t worry about it, mate,” said Sage, picking himself up off the grass. “Only another ten minutes and we can go back inside.”

  “If you say so,” said Ferd, yawning.

  “Being stuck outside for a fire alarm is a surprisingly popular theme for fanfic meet-cutes,” said Mei out of nowhere. “It’s not up there in popularity with coffee shop AUs or non magical boarding schools, but it’s gaining traction as a trope.”

  “Ugh,” said Holly.

  It started to rain.

  “UGH,” said Holly, and this time it was directed straight at Sage.

  Ferd came over next to me and opened an umbrella. “I thought we might need this.”

  I smiled sweetly and managed not to say “How are you so perfect?” because that would have just been embarrassing.

  We stood there in the rain, watching our house explode into a rainbow variety of colours, while it made absolutely certain that nothing was on fire.

  “Ironically,” said Dec. “That one time when we actually did set the stove on fire, it didn’t make a peep.”

  “I always feel so safe when I stay here,” Juniper sighed.

  Later, when Mei was towelling off her hair before we all went back to bed, she asked me, “Have you spotted it yet?”

  “Spotted what?” I asked defensively.

  “Any imperfection that will allow you to treat Ferd like he’s a human being instead of some weird godlike creature you put on a shelf and stare at from very far away.”

  “Don’t — that just makes me sound creepy!” I wailed.

  Mei could be relentless when rain-soaked and annoyed. “We’re all shipping the two of you, but if it takes much longer we’re all going to get bored and start slashing him with Dec instead.”

  I stared at her, open-mouthed. “Dec’s straight. Why wouldn’t you slash him with Sage?”

  “Slashing him with an actual gay bloke is no fun at all. It’s practically cheating.”

  Holly huffed impatiently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, because I thought shipping and slashing was the same thing, but I don’t care. There’s a pretty obvious imperfection if you’re looking for one.”

  “I’m not,” I said automatically. “But, um. What?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He doesn’t respond to magic at all. He’s a null.”

  Chapter 6

  Texts from Monday!!!

  HOLLY: Where are you???

  * * *

  HOLLY: Come on, this isn’t fair, you don’t ditch practice just because we’re fighting

  * * *

  HOLLY: You’re a dickhead

  * * *

  HOLLY: Since when do you care who I date, anyway? You never like any of my boyfriends or girlfriends.

  * * *

  SAGE: That’s because you have shit taste in people.

  * * *

  HOLLY: He lives!

  * * *

  SAGE: Look you want to hang out with a wanker who treated you like crap the last two times you were together, whatever. I don’t care about Campion fucking Merryweather.

  * * *

  SAGE: You know he’s using you.

  * * *

  HOLLY: Is this about his Dad?

  * * *

  HOLLY: So his Dad owns a record label, how exact
ly does that mean Campion’s using me? MantiCore don’t give a rat’s arse about Fake Geek Girl, if that’s what’s pissing in your beer.

  * * *

  SAGE: I know they don’t.

  * * *

  HOLLY: ???

  * * *

  HOLLY: ???????

  * * *

  HOLLY: You suck.

  Chapter 7

  Sage’s Coffee Shop AU

  TUESDAY

  Back at Cirque de Cacao, because half the people I live with were pissed off at me, and the other half were busy with their own melodrama.

  I chugged two mochaccinos down in under half an hour. If I didn’t quiet the random magical blasts from my skin, I was gonna have to find another coffee shop because this one would be a charred mess of foamed milk and hipsters.

  Then, because I was good for nothing else this week, I devoted my attention to scribbling down angry song lyrics on a stack of circus-themed serviettes.

  * * *

  “I’m the last straight girl in this city,

  But I’m changing my mind, oh I’m changing my mind.

  I’m the last straight girl in this city,

  But I’m changing my mind because

  YOU’RE SO PRETTY!”

  * * *

  I glared at the sound system and then at Skinny Goth Waiter who is usually better than this. “Did you do that deliberately?”