And so, every spare minute when I should be taking notes in class, or writing book reports, or talking to my friends at lunch (Joe sitting far across the other end of our group not even glancing at me) I was working my way through my notebook. I memorized the rise and fall of the runes, the placements of dashes, the shapes… I did everything I could to make it sink in, to find a way to make sense of the chaos that was the runes. Runes are orderly. Instincts are chaos. Why would Runes need to know this disorganized mess of lines and dashes? It was like trying to learn a foreign language, but a foreign language that had no rules.
For example, how did I write the rune for stay on the air? I thought runes had to be written on something. I thought that one rune could only affect one thing at a time. How did I freeze eight people at the same time? How was that even possible? And that man Robert. He was obviously a Grandfather by the respect all those men showed him. Yet his silence rune didn’t last nearly as long as one I could draw.
It was as if I was stronger than he was, as if runelight worked better for me… Why? None of it made sense to me. There had to be order to it, there had to be a pattern…
I needed Joe. I needed pattern boy to work through the runes with me, help me find a way for all of this to make sense.
I was in seventh period when I realized this. I stood up from my desk without raising my hand or asking permission. I just left the classroom. The teacher let me go without saying anything to me. I walked past Joe’s biology class, but he wasn’t sitting in his seat, so I went into the girl’s bathroom and searched my notebook for something useful.
It was like, before, I was almost scared to use the runes, scared to be anything other than normal, except for the vainest of magic. Not anymore. I was a Witch. I was different from everyone else. I wasn’t normal. I wasn’t who I pretended to be.
I sighed and then looked at myself in the mirror, and drew the rune for find on my forehead, like a bull’s-eye for everyone to see. It was difficult drawing the unknown rune backwards, using the mirror in the empty girl’s bathroom.
When the rune hit, an image of the school ran through my mind. It was as if my mind ran out of the classroom and found Joe outside in the parking lot, walking past a bunch of cars.
I looked back in the mirror, and the freak that was me, stared back. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I guess I wasn’t quite comfortable enough with my freakiness for others to know yet, so I flipped through my notebook, and then did the rune for invisibility.
It was a working rune, so I ran through the halls and out the front doors, hoping to get there before my magic ran out. I couldn’t find Joe, so I closed my eyes and focused on my memory of Joe’s sunflower eyes, and find ran through other students’ cars to the very back of the parking lot.
Walls surrounded the school, kind of the way a prison would. Joe walked along on the top of the back wall grumbling to himself.
I went closer so I could hear what he was saying, but when I was almost there, invisibility ended, startling Joe when I popped into existence. He turned, lost his balance and fell, his left leg sliding through the cinderblock wall. He landed so low on the ground, his foot disappeared into the ground. He climbed through the wall, brushing dirt off his clothes and not looking at me.
“How long have you been there?” Joe asked with embarrassment.
“I just got here. Why? Were you talking about me?” I said, wiping the rune for find from my forehead. Joe put his hands against the wall, jumped, and pulled himself up so he was sitting on the wall facing the school again, watching it like the school was the most interesting thing in the world.
I sighed. “Can we talk?” I asked, my neck already cricking from looking up at him.
Joe didn’t answer for a second. “Sure,” he said, his eyes far from mine. “What’s up, buddy?”
Buddy. I didn’t answer him for a second, but glanced through my notebook. Maybe I could add some height, and then I would be able to climb up there the way Joe did. I did a quick transformation rune on my arm, and the world shrank away from me until I was looking down at the wall. I turned and sat, wiped the runelight away, and shrunk back to my usual self. I sat about five feet away from Joe, and looking at his face, I think five feet away was still too close.
“That was awesome,” Joe said finally.
I wrote a note by the rune in my notebook, and then smiled up at him. I looked away first.
“Larissa,” he said, “yesterday, I shouldn’t have…”
“Don’t worry about it, Joe,” I interrupted him before he could tell me he only wanted to be friends. I was so sick of hearing it.
Joe sighed and walked over to me as if he had a weight on his shoulders. He sat down facing me, one leg bent up at the knee, the other dangling over the side of the wall on the school side. The parking lot was still.
“I kissed you, Riz.” The way he said my name reminded me of the tender way he said it before.
His eyebrows creased, and I wanted to smooth that indentation out, or kiss it away.
“I asked you to.” I said instead.
Joe swallowed; I could see the muscles on his neck tighten.
I looked away. “Could we, maybe, forget yesterday happened, and just go back to normal?”
Joe looked over at the school, the sunlight lighting up his profile. The bell rang, and students spilled from the school like water from a pitcher. He wasn’t going to give me a response, at least not the response I wanted, so I pulled out my notebook and held it open so he could look at it.
“Joe… Buddy. You promised you wouldn’t do any runes, and you need to keep that promise or else the Grandmothers will come and kill you.” And it will be all my fault, I thought but didn’t say. “But I need your help.”
Joe allowed himself to look at my notebook then, and I could see the burning curiosity behind his eyes.
“What do you need?” he asked, flipping through the pages.
“There’s a pattern here, but I don’t see it,” I said. “I don’t… The runes don’t make any sense to me. Could you help me? Please, make sense of all of this.”
Joe held my notebook closer to his face and scoured the pages.
“The runes have existed for thousands of years. They have to have a system. I just… I wish I had someone to teach me. No…” I laughed once without any humor, “I wish I cared more about this when my mom was dying to teach me.” That was a poor word choice. “But, now… All I have is you, Joe. You’re the one person I can trust.”
Joe smiled, but it wasn’t his normal smile, it wasn’t as free and as open as it always was. He stared down at the runes; his fingers started twitching as if he was drawing them in his mind. I reached forward and held his fingers, and Joe stared at my hand on his, as if it meant something. I casually pulled my hand away.
I looked down at the ground, it seemed much further than I expected. My fingers brushed my hair behind my ears and then I spoke.
“Please say I didn’t mess things up yesterday, by being needy, and stupid,” I said. “It was a mistake, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I refused to cry.
If I ever cry again, it will be too soon, I thought.
Joe jumped down from the wall, like it wasn’t seven feet tall. Then he turned, smiled at me, and cocked his head, “Let’s let the Pattern Boy work his magic.”
I jumped down from the wall too. My nerve endings shot up from the bottom of my feet up to my neck at the impact. I grimaced.
“What a great superhero name,” I said when I could talk again. “What should mine be?” I followed him to my car.
“What’s wrong with Larissa?” he asked.
Yeah, that’s what I wanted to know.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“At the center of every rune is a letter.” I said. “That’s probably the easiest way to think about it.”
I sat at my kitchen table Joe standing and staring at my blue and white curtains.
“Although what language the letter is in, we don’t know
.” Joe said.
Okay. “What else have we learned…?”
“Working runes…” Joe said.
“Oh yeah, working runes don’t close all the way, and statue runes have no beginning or end.”
Joe moved to my cupboards still empty from our road trip.
“Don’t you have any food?” he asked.
“Haven’t had a chance to go to the store yet, what with being kidnapped and all,” I said. Joe half smiled at me, but I wasn’t trying to make a joke. “Order some pizza if you’re so hungry.”
Joe took the phone and walked into my front room. Then he turned and walked out of it just as quickly. I guess he didn’t want to go near the scene of the awkward incident, a.k.a. one of the best moments of my life.
Giara had given me a gazillion pointers on transformation runes, and I had only used them like beauty utensils instead of as tools. That giant step up the wall in the parking lot had taught me that they had more use than I’d ever imagined.
Joe wandered up the stairs. While he was gone from my view, I started experimenting, trying to make myself look like him but with a better haircut.
He came back down my stairs with one of my dad’s books in his hands. Without looking at me, he sat down in the chair next to me.
“We got twenty minutes,” he said. “Just don’t say anything to me about food.”
“Alright,” I said in his voice.
He turned and looked at himself in my bright pink sweatpants, startled backward, and fell out of his chair.
Oh gosh. I’m laughing now as I remember it.
I laughed and then drew clean on my arm. All my runes left.
I was still laughing as he picked himself up. “That’s amazing, Riz. Except you didn’t get my hair right.”
“I guess I’m still practicing,” I said biting my lip so I wouldn’t say anything bad about his Mohawk.
“Who else can you do?” he asked, the book lying on the floor forgotten.
“Let’s see,” I said.
For the next few minutes, I changed to about twelve other people. Meg was by far the easiest, and one of the lunch ladies was the most difficult. It seems the better you know someone, the easier it is to make a successful copy, which makes sense.
When the doorbell rang, I was transformed into Giara, trying to see if I could do a transformation while transformed. The runelight wasn’t in my color code, but in Giara’s pale green.
“Holy cannoli,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”
“The bell means the pizza is here,” Joe said, standing in front of one of my cupboards. He pulled a few dollars of my food money from my turtle shell mug on the second shelf.
“Well duh,” I said.
Joe opened the door and then paid the delivery guy, hopefully giving him a better tip than he usually did.
When he closed the door and turned toward me I continued, “No, that means Giara was probably the one who drew the rune on the side of the SUV that killed Fake Erica.”
Not my mom. I know it shouldn’t make me feel better to know my mom wasn’t alive, but it did. It felt good to know once and for all what life was, even if that meant knowing once and for all that life sucked.
Joe put the pizza down on the table and we ate it without grabbing plates. The greasy cheese hot from an oven was comforting to me.
“So do you still want to get your mom’s notebook?” Joe asked as he grabbed his second piece.
That was the question, wasn’t it? “I don’t know.”
“That’s fair,” he said.
I sighed, “I mean… I do. I want to read my mom’s handwriting again. I want to have my abuela’s answers, my bisabuela‘s questions. All of it. I want to read it. I want to own it. But I don’t… I don’t want to be a Grandmother. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
“But if you were a Grandmother, then wouldn’t you be in charge?” he said. “I mean… maybe you could protect me, protect all Instincts like me, that if they weren’t hurting anyone, they could live in peace.”
I smiled at him. “You really can find the clear path, can’t you?”
“And you’re freakishly strong, Riz.” Joe said, “That stay rune…” He shook his head, “From the look on those Mages’ faces, I don’t think that should have been possible. How did you do it? How did you throw a rune?”
“I don’t know. I was mad, and I wanted to keep them still. I just did it. You know, by instinct.”
“So it’s okay for a Rune to be an Instinct, but not the other way around.”
“You got it.” I said, after licking some sauce off my index finger.
“You were born strong, Larissa,” he said. “Your parents knew it; that’s probably why they hid you from the Grandfathers. With your birthright, with your mother’s notebook, you might just be the strongest Grandmother there ever was.”
“But I don’t want to be a Grandmother,” I said. “I don’t want that job. I don’t want to have to kill, or be responsible for… the whole world really. I don’t… I can barely take care of myself.”
“Well, then maybe we should steal the notebook, so there will be no one strong enough to make you be a Grandmother.”
I laughed. I liked the sound of that. “I’ll think about it Joe. I’m not ready to go yet; I don’t know enough yet.”
“You’ve been telling me you had this big plan since almost the first week we met...” Joe said. A line of pizza sauce puddled at the edge of his mouth, “but do you even know where the notebook is?”
There was the crux of the problem. Wait. “I think I might,” I said.
If my mom really was a Grandmother, then… It would be kept in the Grandmothers’ Study. It would have to be there. The fellowship owned this gigantic house in Paris, France, halfway across the world. My Mom showed me the Study when I was accepted into the Fellowship years ago. It was kind of like a museum of the history of the Grandmothers. If my mom’s notebook was anywhere, I’d bet it was there.
“Where?” Joe asked. The sauce was still there... still pointing toward Joe’s lips.
“You got something...” I said, wiping my own finger at the corner of my mouth. He looked at my mouth, and his Instinct magic felt warm as it brushed against my lips. My curtains danced in the breeze of heat coming from my furnace vents.
“You know, I’m not ready to go yet,” I said.
“Ready to go where, though?”
I couldn’t think clearly, I wanted to kiss him so bad.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, looking away. “I’m not even close to ready yet.”
Neither one of us looked at each other for a couple of seconds.
“Does your mom know you’re here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he said.
I read once that how a guy treats his mother is a good indication of how he would treat his future… not that that had any bearing on our situation.
Just in case… “Joe. You’ve got to call your mom.”
“No, my mom’s… busy,” he said.
“With what?”
“She is… um,” Joe looked at me. As he sighed, I could see the stress in his eyes. “On a date,” Joe said bitterly.
“With Ash?” I asked.
“Yup.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
So yes, we may have decided to crash Ms. P.’s date, but don’t think we were bad people. I mean you can if you want. I’m not gonna try to force your opinion of us. And who’s to say what makes a person good, or bad. Really, I think people just make their choices given the information that they have.
Given the information that we had, that Ash knocked me unconscious and then stood and watched as a lunatic… we don’t need to get into that again, do we? Let’s just say we had reason not to trust him with a harmless rube that we both loved and leave it at that.
Anyway, I used the find rune to find Ms. P. I tried first to find Ash, but he must have been wearing a rune to counterbalance that.
They were i
ce-skating at the Plymouth Ice Rink. This seemed odd. I know they were young when they had Joe and all, but these people were parents. Okay… They were old, and the ice rink was for teenagers. And going ice-skating for a date was so cheesy and cliché that even the teenagers I know avoided that place.
It was the kind of place I used to go with my family. I think my fifth birthday party was held there. Looking at the ancient linoleum outside the rink, and the paint peeling from the side of the bleachers, I don’t think they had done any renovations to the place since before I was five.
Inside the rink, a mess of rubes were going around in dizzyingly pointless circles. I saw them first, near the center of the rink, Ms. P.’s blue pea coat standing out like a lantern through my find rune hidden underneath a knitted cap. Ms. P. and Ash were skating around the rink, giggling, holding hands. Ms. P.’s cheeks were flushed. She kept glancing at Ash as if she wanted to make sure he was there. For a moment, they became just Maggie and Ash, that love story I had fallen for while reading Ms. P.’s journals. It seemed like a happy ending was on its way for them. Despite my misgivings for Ash (no… despite my anger and mistrust of that dirty Mage) that didn’t mean their love for each other wasn’t real, that underneath the politics, they weren’t just two people in love.
Then I saw it. There was a rune drawn on the back of Ms. P.’s neck. Joe was at the counter renting us some ancient communal skates. I stood near the entrance of the rink, my forehead against the Plexiglas, as I used the extra vision the find rune loaned me and drew the rune on Ms. P.’s neck onto a page in my notebook.
One hundred and thirty eight. I now had one hundred and thirty eight runes. Only I had no idea what this one did, I just knew the person who cast it couldn’t be trusted.
Joe came back with the skates. I showed him the notebook.
“Ash drew this rune on the back of your mom’s neck,” I said.
Funny Tragic Crazy Magic (Tragic Magic Book 1) Page 14
