Ordinary Magic

by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

  “No, you didn’t,” Peter agreed, getting up off the ground. “That was really stupid. Fight your own battles, Hale.”

  “He was hurting her!”

  Peter rolled his eyes so hard I was surprised he didn’t strain something. I would have smacked them straight out of his head except Fred latched on to my arms.

  “Enough.” Becky’s voice was a sharp, cold slap. She swung over to snatch up the first-aid kit, then bore down on us. “Everyone. Sit.” We dropped, and Becky waved a hand at Peter. “No, no, not you—you come here.” She positioned him in front of us, and I saw that his arm was bloody.

  Becky stripped his sleeve back with practiced efficiency, while she lectured us about bacteria and the importance of cleanliness and the damage a bite could do. Fran raised her hand, dropped it, then raised it again.

  “Miss Rose?” Becky called, her attention still on cleaning the raw, red circle of holes in Peter’s arm.

  “Isn’t that … what Cesar did? I mean, isn’t that cheating?”

  “Yes.”

  “He cheats a lot,” Fran said after a moment. When Becky didn’t respond, she continued, “Isn’t that wrong?”

  “No.” Becky looped a fresh white bandage around Peter’s arm, not missing a beat as she finally looked over at us. “Not when it matters. Not when it’s the auction block if you lose—or a back-alley deal with a rope around your ankle to keep you from running. Not that I approve of teeth marks in my students, Cesar, and don’t you think that you and I are done having words about this. But you don’t fight fair when it’s your life on the line. They won’t. You can trust me on that.”

  Becky tied off Peter’s bandage and came over to Fran, looked her straight in the eyes. Her voice was low, but we were listening. “We play it safe here, I know, but you need to know that we’re not playing. This is your life. And you need to choose—right now, while you’re warm and safe, while there are no chains on your wrists and you have a meal in your belly and you know where the next one’s coming from. You have to decide what you’re willing to do to keep it that way. You have to decide now, before something happens. Because when it does, you won’t have time to wonder about it. You just have to know. Consider it homework.” Becky stood and raised her voice. “For all of you.”

  After that, Cesar was only ever partnered with Becky.

  Our last class of the day was zoology, with Dimitrios. When we were done running or fighting, or we were just too exhausted to move, he would appear from somewhere and herd us down to the dark cave of the Public Safety office. It was our favorite, and easiest, class by far, because Dimitrios didn’t assign homework or schedule tests. In fact, he didn’t ask us to do anything more than sit down and listen. It turns out there was yet another fun part of being an ord—there was no shortage of magical creatures that were a lot more dangerous to us than they were to normal folk.

  We started off with goblins, because they’re basic and easy and everybody knows about them. At least, that’s what I thought until class started, because it turns out there were actually tons of different goblins; some good, some that’ll give you nightmares.

  Along with all that, I was expected to be in the kitchen, at the sink and at the ready, for every meal. I’d get a chance to eat something quick while everyone else was working, and I was usually scrubbing and scraping while they clustered around the island to eat. I didn’t know how they had so many dishes, or where they stored them all, and sometimes I wondered if it was all a big practical joke and someone was magic and they’d enchanted a never-ending pile of dishes.

  “Are you sure about this?” Alexa asked when she discovered I’d been helping out in the kitchen. “You don’t have to work there.”

  “I want to,” I said. “It’s fun.” She lifted her eyebrows at fun. “I said I would.”

  “As long as it’s fun. But if it’s ever not fun anymore, you let me know. Cook Bella can be a little difficult.”

  I wanted to say, uh, yeah, but I didn’t want to tell Alexa just how difficult Cook Bella had been toward me. So I blinked up at her and gave her my most innocent “baby of the family” look and said, “Oh really?” and “How interesting” and “I hadn’t noticed that,” which Alexa didn’t believe for a second but at least she didn’t go marching into the kitchen and start a scene.

  Because the truth was, it was fun in a strange, exhausting way. I was getting used to the kids laughing at me for being new and not knowing anything. Oddly enough, the kitchen was the only place I saw kids smile. Really smile. Like they enjoyed being around each other. And the kitchen was always hot and noisy and busy, and the air tasted like tomatoes, garlic, onions, and olive oil. It wasn’t like Mom’s bakery, but it was close enough—and close enough was everything in those first weeks.

  Now, you might think with all the washing and running and the schoolwork on top of that—because clearly it wasn’t a school if they didn’t pile you with homework—I’d be completely exhausted. And I was, but being tired and going to sleep are two different things. Every night at lights-out, we had to check in with Becky and shut our doors and pretend to go to bed. Alexa had arranged for me to have a private room, and I know this’ll sound stupid and spoiled of me, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being alone, and I didn’t like the quiet. Not that it’s ever totally quiet in Rothermere, but after a while you just forget about the street noises and the sirens and all that and it seems quiet. When I did sleep it was in fits and starts, waking suddenly in a panic that I’d heard something, only to realize it was what I hadn’t heard, the sounds that were supposed to be there. Like the shower running and the soft, padding footsteps as Mom got ready to leave for the bakery in the dark hours of the morning. Like Dad humming as he started a new project, and Gil muttering to himself as he wrote, testing out dialogue, and Jeremy’s aggravated cry of Mom! whenever he needed her to settle an argument, and the clink of Olivia’s hairpins on her dresser as she put her hair back down after a date. I missed those noises so much my stomach burned.

  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.” H
er 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.”

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

  CHAPTER

  13

  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 Year.

  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?