by VJ Erickson
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Taylor and Hannah ate breakfast together again, but did not run into either of the brothers, much to Taylor's relief. Hannah chattered away about people they had met at school and the sights around campus, and Taylor did her best to politely pay attention, though she kept thinking back to her attempts at glamours.
Not really knowing how to make glamours happen, she found herself trying to will random objects into other random objects. She spent as much time trying to imagine her spoon as other things—a flower, a fork, a twig—as she did eating her cereal with it, but she found that splitting her attention between Hannah and the spoon resulted in her being not entirely successful in paying attention to either of them.
Hannah did not seem to notice, or least she didn't mind, and the spoon didn't seem to be worse for wear, so Taylor tried not to concern herself too much about it.
When Hannah suggested that they go visit the library, Taylor was too distracted to object, though she didn't really see the point of touring the library when she was trying to figure out whether or not she had super powers. Somehow, homework for a freshman orientation class didn't seem quite as important as figuring out her identity.
Still, she followed along agreeably, even when Hannah insisted that they follow the self-guided tour instructions to the letter, which involved wearing goofy headphones and carrying an oversized cassette recorder as they followed the voice-over instructions that played through them. Taylor didn't think they made cassettes still, but given the worn look of the equipment they were given, it didn't appear that they had been acquired any time recently.
She felt slightly self-conscious walking around the building so clearly being the new person, but since classes hadn't started yet there were few students to notice. Still, she didn't like being the obvious freshman, so she focused on keeping up with Hannah and took her mind off her self-consciousness by using every opportunity she could to try to glamour random objects.
Having had not much luck with the visual illusions, she tried imagining all kinds of sounds around them. Singing books and shrieking desks filled her imagination, but to her disappointment, all she could ever hear was the droning voice on the cassette, occasionally interrupted by a tone that indicated they were supposed to pause until they reached the next destination on their tour.
Taylor was never quite paying attention to where they were supposed to be headed next, so she just followed Hannah's lead. That seemed as good a plan as any, at least so far.
Meanwhile, Hannah scribbled notes at every stop, far more than Taylor felt could possibly be necessary, so she was not overly concerned that she would be missing anything that Hannah couldn't make up for.
The tour concluded uneventfully. At no point did they see anything interesting, though Taylor would admit that the bar on what was interesting to her had been significantly raised in the past week. And much to Taylor's chagrin, at no point did the books break out into chorus, despite her best attempts.
She wondered if she really was special at all. She supposed that it would be nice to think so, but maybe she just had a lot of willpower and Eric just... well, she still had no explanation for what happened to Eric. Maybe nothing at all? Since when did someone being human require explanation? she wondered.
Hannah insisted that they get to work right away on typing up their assignment from their library tour, so they went straight back to the dorms. Hannah went directly to her desk and began typing, so Taylor followed suit and sat at her desk as well. She still felt too distracted to get any real work done, however, and only managed to get her name and a title onto the page before she turned her attention back to the pencils.
She set them side by side on the other side of her monitor so that Hannah wouldn't notice that's where her attention was turned to instead of the assignment at hand. Not that she had to work on the assignment just because Hannah was, Taylor told herself, but she felt self-conscious about spending so much time staring at pencils while Hannah was right next to her accomplishing something actually useful.
They both looked exactly the same to her. She had seen the glamour of a rose that Hannah had cast before, but once she knew it was really a pencil, she couldn't get the illusion back. As much as she concentrated, she couldn't seem to see anything but what was actually there, and she had never been so frustrated in her life for being able to see something exactly as it was.
She thought for a moment to ask Hannah which pencil was which so she could at least focus on one or the other, but she really wasn't sure what difference that would make. To see one as a rose she needed to imagine a rose, and to see the other as a rose she still needed to imagine a rose. She wasn't really clear on what the difference would be, so instead she just focused on the idea of two roses at once.
She tried squinting. She tried leaning close and then pulling far away. She tried holding them and setting them down. She closed one eye, then the other. Still nothing seemed to work. After what felt like hours, but was more likely minutes, she gave up and decided to turn her attention back to the screen. It was only when she turned away that she saw something red and green from the corner of her eye.
She froze, hesitant to look at it. She was pretty certain that there was a rose in her periphery vision. Two, in fact. Trying not to get too excited, she held her gaze straight ahead on the screen, afraid to look.
And then the change happened. Everything went soft and hazy like a camera lens just out of focus. The images in the corner of her eye seemed more solid and distinct, however. They were clearly flowers. She turned her head slowly, so as not to break the effect and saw exactly what she had been trying to see all this time. Where two pencils had sat on her desk now sat two roses. She wanted to cheer out, but was hesitant to do anything too suddenly lest she break the effect.
She had done it. She saw two glamours in front of her. One was Hannah's, of course, but the other was hers.
She looked over at Hannah, whose fuzzy outline was still typing away, and she decided not to interrupt her just yet. Taylor was afraid that if she broke her concentration she wouldn't be able to get the effect back, so she slowly turned her head back towards her two perfect roses.
She pulled a pen from her desk drawer and set it next to the others. This one she imagined as a yellow rose and to her delight the fuzzy form of the pen solidified into a single yellow rose. Why limit herself, she thought, to roses that actually existed though? She placed another pen next to the three roses and imagined this one as being a bright blue and it complied. Then another, this time in a shiny metallic gold. That too appeared before her.
The possibilities were endless, she thought. Polka dots and stripes. Tiny roses and enormous ones. Green leaves, of course, but also black, blue, and neon pink.
"Taylor."
She heard Hannah's voice saying her name, but she was so entranced at all the possibilities that she didn't take much notice.
"Taylor."
Hannah sounded more insistent this time. Just a moment longer, Taylor thought. Just one more, perhaps in plaid. She really was limited only by her imagination. This was incredible.
"TAYLOR!"
This time Hannah was shouting. Taylor shook her head slightly, and the room came back into focus.
"Taylor, what on earth have you done?" asked Hannah, sounding horrified.
"What do you mean? I don't..." Taylor began and then stopped when she realized that the room was covered in roses and vines.
Not just roses and vines, but flowers in a mix of both earthly and otherworldly colors and combinations covered the walls. There were plaid roses bursting from metallic vines and polka-dot buds jutting out from neon leaves. The effect was a little nauseating.
"Oh Taylor. I don't think is good," Hannah said and then jolted up and went towards the hall door.
"Okay, so it's a little tacky, I'll give you that, but..." Taylor stopped when she saw through the now open door that the display of psychedelic roses extended into the hallways. "Oops."
"Yeah
oops," said Hannah and then crossed the room again. "How did you even...? What did you...? Taylor this is crazy. Did you do this?"
"I guess so. I mean, I didn't realize..."
"Did you at least keep it on this floor?" asked Hannah.
"I don't know. I didn't realize I wasn't keeping it on my desk."
"Oh, I hope so," said Hannah wringing her hands nervously. "We've got to get this under control."
"How? I don't..."
"Ohmigod outside," Hannah said and then bolted out the door.
Taylor ran to keep up with her and just caught her in the elevator before the door closed.
"It's uh... kind of pretty, right?" Taylor remarked at the interior of the elevator which was lined with the same nonsensical display of flowers. "I mean, I hadn't really thought that the world was missing out for not having plaid flowers before, but now that I see them it's kind of a design oversight don't you think?"
Hannah didn't answer. She looked pale.
The elevator stopped at the bottom floor lobby, and the doors opened to reveal a lobby lined with more roses and vines.
"Crap," said Hannah.
She ran straight out the front door.
"Crap, crap, crap," she said standing out on the sidewalk looking up.
"Oh crap," Taylor agreed, looking to see that the whole bottom half of the building was covered in multicolored flowers so thick that you couldn't see the building beneath them.
"Taylor, you have to undo this. Right now," said Hannah. "I can't conjure a glamour big enough to cover the whole building, and we've got to get this taken care of now."
"How do I do that?"
"Man oh man, now is not the time. Just concentrate like you did before. Wait, hold on."
With that, Hannah took off towards the street and poked her head into the side of a taxi cab that had stopped in front of the building to ogle at the sight of it. As soon as she popped out again, the cab drove to the end of the street and turned to block part of the intersection. Hannah ran to the next car behind it, also stopped in the middle of the road, and it then backed up to the opposite intersection and did the same.
"Are you concentrating?" Hannah hollered towards her from down the street. "I can't keep people away forever."
Oh right, thought Taylor. She had been admiring Hannah's quick thinking and hadn't been focusing on the task at hand. She looked at the building and tried to concentrate as much as she could.
Across the street, she could see Hannah running up to pedestrians who had stopped to look, and as she moved on from each cluster of people, they stopped gazing and went out about meandering down the street. Taylor was impressed at how quickly Hannah was managing the crowd.
Concentrate on the building, she reminded herself. She had to focus on the building. She concentrated as much as she could and squinted and cocked her head and rubbed her temples and did everything she could think to do short of standing on one leg (would that help?) to make the mental switch, but nothing was happening.
"Come on, Taylor! Concentrate!" came Hannah's voice from the end of the street, as she continued running around frantically, talking to everyone she could see.
Taylor saw a few students come out of the building. She could only imagine how many inside were seeing the same thing which only increased the pressure and made it more difficult to concentrate.
Then she remembered that it had only worked when she saw the objects in her periphery. Maybe that would help, she thought, as she turned to the side and looked at it from the corner of her eye.
That did the trick, as her worldview went soft again. She practically jumped for joy, but was afraid to break her concentration, so she kept her cool and slowly turned back towards the building.
Okay, she thought. Now what? Hannah had explained how to create a glamour but not how to remove one. She remembered the example of the two faces and tried to do as Hannah said and picture the image she wished to see. Before she had apparently chosen implausibly-colored flowers, now she imagined the more plausibly-drab building underneath.
As she did, the flowers in her view began to soften and grow fuzzy like the rest of the world around her and then faded from view entirely until all she could see was the gray building before her.
She heaved a sigh of relief and everything sharpened back into focus. Hannah appeared at her side and gave her a big hug.
"Well done!" Hannah said. "You're really something else, you know that? Cause I knew it!"
"Yeah, something else."
Taylor wasn't sure quite yet if that something else was good or bad, but she was definitely something else.
"Okay, no time to waste," said Hannah. "We've got some damage control to do! Come on!"
Hannah gestured for Taylor to follow and Taylor obliged, feeling overwhelmed and quite obedient. Hannah then went to talk to the taxi drivers on the street and then the few lingering pedestrians, instructing each to go about their business as if nothing had happened.
They then went inside and, per Hannah's insistence, knocked on every door in the building. If someone answered the door, then they were instructed under thrall to forget anything unusual that might have happened. Hannah didn't elaborate, but Taylor supposed she didn't need to. The "something unusual" would have been pretty obvious if they had in fact seen it. When they encountered the occasional vampire, Hannah simply said that they had knocked on the wrong door. "A frivolous glamour," Hannah later explained to Taylor, "is not worth explaining to them. They're used to it. No need to call more attention to it."
Taylor was impressed and a little unnerved with how easily Hannah manipulated people using this ability to enthrall. Taylor was glad that she was immune, particularly as she saw firsthand that there were more than a couple vampires amongst her neighbors.
Fortunately, the dorms had been fairly empty during the day, but still, it wasn't until the evening that they had finished interrogating the whole building. And they were both tired at the end of it. Taylor offered to pick something up to eat from downstairs—it was the least she could do—and they both ended up eating cold sandwiches quietly in their dorm.
"Thanks," said Taylor. "And I'm sorry."
"What did I say about 'sorry'?"
"Oh right. Well, thanks anyway."
"You're welcome! And thanks for dinner!" replied Hannah, who chomped noisily away at her sandwich.
