by B. C. Palmer
I spun on my heel to leave the room the way I came in—there could only be so many doors in this place and one of them was the exit—but stopped short when there was no door to open. I hung my head and sighed.
“I admit, that’s very impressive,” I said. “But if someone could just… you know, make the door come back. I won’t look, promise. I know how secretive magicians like to be.”
“Miss Cresswin,” the standing panel member said, “if you could have a seat for us. The only way out of this room is to pass or fail your entrance exam, and you’ve got”—he checked a pocket watch—“approximately fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds to do either. There are thirty students in line behind you; we really don’t have time to entertain every student’s nervous breakdown. If you would?”
He gestured at the empty floor of the room, but when I looked back it was no longer empty. There was a wooden desk-chair combo now sitting in the center of the room, with a blank sheet of paper and a number two pencil. What the actual—
“That…” I shook my head. Mirrors? Had to be, maybe they dropped away into the floor. “That’s a really good trick. I just don’t really want to waste my life playing children’s birthday parties and I really don’t have the kind of confidence to perform on stage in front of crowds. So.”
The man sighed and nodded pointedly to the desk.
Fourteen minutes of my life. That was fine. I could just answer the questions randomly, fail out, and be on my way. At least it wasn’t some kind of creepy billionaire serial killer plot. That was a step up.
“Fine.” I breathed out, annoyed, and set my bag down in the back corner of the room before I strode to the desk and flopped down in it. I picked up the pencil and started to turn over the paper but checked with the panel before I did. I received a nod as the standing member sat down, and flipped it over.
“Oh, it’s blank,” I said and held up the blank sheet. “Is it supposed to be? Is it like an essay thing?”
“Please just answer the questions to the best of your ability, Miss Cresswin,” one of the other panelists said. She was an older lady in a pale pink suit, her hair blue-washed and pulled into a severe bun that tugged at the edge of her hairline. I felt like she had a wall of decorative cat plates in her office. She seemed the type.
More fun and games. All I had to do was run out the clock, so I put the sheet down and began marking the side where I imagined a multiple choice column to be. I filled in non-existent bubbles with the pencil, one at a time, and even put on a good show of pretending like I gave a damn. When I reached the bottom, I figured about five minutes had passed. I turned the paper back over like we used to do in school and pushed it to the edge of the desk, then clasped my hands in front of me. “Done. That was certainly challenging. Do you grade it now, or…?”
One of the other panelists picked up a sheet of paper from the table in front of him. He pushed a pair of reading glasses up his nose. “Somewhat impressive, really.”
I cocked an eyebrow at that. Was he for real? He must have been bat-shit crazy to take my bullshit answers seriously. This had to be some kind of joke.
“Miss Cresswin,” a copper-haired younger panelist asked, “can you describe to me the scent of a raven’s mourning?”
I leaned forward, as if I hadn’t heard him. But the game was on and there couldn’t be more than ten minutes left. “Uh… I guess it smells sad? How about coriander. And, ah, old vanilla that’s gone bad.” Hopefully that was pretentious enough to match my audience.
“If you would,” another panelist spoke up, “can you assess accurately whether we are currently in the midst of a retrograde mercury cycle?”
That, at least, I knew a little about. Bad communication? Check. “I’m gonna guess we are, and that it’s a bad one. Next question?”
The man who’d spoken before raised his voice. “When was your last flying dream, Miss Cresswin?”
That question caught me off guard. How did he know about my dreams? Except, flying dreams were fairly common. Everyone had them. Didn’t they? “Last week?”
“Can you be more precise?” he pressed.
I thought about it, at the same time that I told myself it didn’t matter. “I guess Monday night? I had some coffee before bed, so—”
“Her scores are quite high,” the old-lady panelist said to the man sitting to her right. “And she is a legacy. That’s got to count for something, don’t you think?”
A legacy? In other places, that usually meant one of my parents would have attended the school. Laura never mentioned this place, or that my mother or father were stage magicians. “I’m sorry, ma’am? Did you say my parents were—”
“That’s not necessarily an indication of inherent talent,” the man in the middle said. “We’ve had a number of legacies wash out early. But I do agree there seems to be some promise.”
I slid out of the desk to stand, hoping to get their attention. “Pardon me, but are you saying one of my parents went here? Rosalind and Jakob Cresswin—do you know either of those names?”
They ignored me as another young-looking panelist, a Chinese woman in a black vest and gray shirt, apparently argued against my admission. “She’s had no primary schooling, though. How can she possibly keep pace?”
“There are ways around that,” the man in the middle argued back. “Remember Adelaide Halliday—she wasn’t accepted until she was twenty-seven, with no primary education and from a completely mundane family. Graduated in three years.”
“Adelaide was a prodigy,” the Chinese panelist scoffed, and waved a manicured hand in my direction. “This girl is not another Adelaide Halliday.”
“Well, she could be,” a man at the end that I had forgotten was even there piped up, his voice hoarse and breathy. He looked to be about a thousand years old, his eyes so droopy I couldn’t tell if they were opened, and his eyebrows bushed out enough to almost cover them.
I took a step toward them. “Hi, I’m still here. Is anyone going to answer my question?”
None of them seemed to notice except when a question arose from the chatter in my general direction.
“Do you cross your laces left over right, or right over left? Can you untie and tie your shoes for us?”
“Are you unusually lucky?”
“Would you show us your palms, dear?”
“What precisely was the time and location of your birth?”
“Do you currently smell fudge?”
They came so fast that at first I refused to answer anything. By the third or tenth question—I honestly wasn’t counting them—I started answering automatically as I took more steps toward the panel, as if the stream of seemingly random questions were a physical current that I had to fight against to move closer. These people seemed to know my parents; I even overheard one of them commenting that I looked a great deal like Rosalind and might well have inherited her talents as well as her looks.
Each time I answered another of their ridiculous inquiries, and each time they ignored one of my pleas for some kind of explanation—literally anything at all that would make sense of this—I grew more frustrated, until I was shouting answers at them and barking my questions.
It wasn’t until I was a foot away from the table and finally slammed my hands down in front of them that they stopped talking. “Who the hell are you people and what do you want with me?”
The table shook under my hands. A shiver ran through me, from my palms, up to my shoulders and down through my heels. It passed into the floor, and the hardwood groaned warnings that this old house was about to collapse.
I backed away from the table slowly, catching my balance as the floor shifted. Or, no—it wasn’t the floor. I could still feel the vibration in my feet when I lifted them. It was me that was shaking. And it was getting worse. It felt like my bones were rattling apart inside me. My fingers ached, and then my toes, and the ache spread up my arms and legs toward my torso until every joint was on fire.
They started up with their ince
ssant questions again. “Miss Cresswin, there are two pillars of fire to either side of you, one is a deep red, the other is lilac, which one would you throw the moon into?”
“Can you visualize for us a four-dimensional mobius configuration?”
“Do you at times perceive a slight itching just behind the third finger of your left hand?”
“Describe the emotional taste of red lentils, please.”
“Everyone just stop!” I shouted.
The air between me and the panel shuddered. As if there were a surface suspended between us, and I had just kicked it to reveal the trick. There was a rush of wind as the vibration in my body reached a kind of peak and turned to fire that burst from the base of my spine and shot up my back and down my legs in a flush of heat that made every part of me break out in sweat.
Wood creaked and groaned as floorboards curled up from the ground like fingers and grasped the edge of the table. They pulled it down as if threatening to flip it, but only made it a few inches before, suddenly, the air was still, the heat inside me left as if poured out of my fingers and toes, and a dead silence descended on the room.
I stumbled back, and bumped into the desk. “I… I’d like to go now.”
The man in the middle of the panel stood up—entirely nonplussed by what had just happened—and worked his way behind the six panelists to his left in order to get around the table and approach me. I followed him with a wary eye, unmoving, as he strode calmly across the broken floor and extended a hand.
“Certainly, you may go. We’ve seen all we need to, I think.”
I cautiously took his hand and shook. “Okay…”
“Miss Cresswin, allow me to introduce myself,” he said as he held my hand. “I’m Augustus Sinclaire, headmaster of Rosewilde Academy. I’d like to extend our congratulations, and welcome you to the next four years of your remarkable life.”
“Can I go now, Headmaster Sinclaire?” I asked quietly. My throat was raw. I didn’t even care that I’d somehow passed the weird exam. My mind was whirling, trying to compartmentalize and understand what had just happened. Clearly I was having a panic attack and my brain conjured the strange reaction in the room to help me understand what was happening internally.
He smiled and let my hand go as he waved a hand toward the wall where the door was before. I followed the gesture and, sure enough, there it was. I gave a small cough that I couldn’t cover in time, and straightened my shoulders. “Thank you,” I rasped. “Um… yeah. Thanks.”
I was still shaking, but not from the… what had that been? A seizure? A nervous breakdown? A panic attack? Whatever it was, it had passed but left every cell in my body exhausted. I stooped to pick up my messenger bag and hung it on my shoulder. It seemed to have gained a hundred pounds since I set it down.
There was another chorus of whispered comments behind my back but I ignored them. Enough was enough. I’d entertained their stupid mock-test and answered their questions until it literally drove me out of my mind. That was more than enough abuse for one day.
I pulled the door open and expected to step back into Lucas’s office.
Someone ran into me as I stepped through, a full-on shoulder check that left us both staggering.
“Excuse you,” the girl snapped. “Fucking freshmen…”
She muttered obscenities until she disappeared into the rest of the crowd.
The foyer was full of students.
Amelia
“Amelia! You made it,” Lucas called as he threaded his way through the crowded foyer toward me. He didn’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of all these students and faculty, but then I imagined he was in on the trick, whatever it was. How had they pulled it off?
I admit, I began to rethink my earlier assessment. The level of skill and manipulation it would take to pull these illusions off was pretty masterful. It clearly wasn’t MIT but I was intrigued enough to stick around for a day, for curiosity’s sake alone if nothing else.
He managed to get to me and stood with his hands on his hips, smiling. “Well done.”
“I…” I tore my eyes away from the crowd to focus on him. He was distractedly handsome. I’d always thought of magicians as... well, nerds and not the cute kind. He was making me reassess my stereotypes. “I’m not paying for the damage to that room. The academy can sue me if they want but trust me, I don’t have the money and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t pay to go here even if I wanted to do magic tricks for a living.”
Lucas smirked. “I think they can probably manage the repairs. And you don’t pay tuition here. The academy gets contributions from alumni to cover the cost of student tuition. It’s considerable. Let me show you to your dorm and introduce you to your freshman mentor.”
He turned to lead me somewhere but I tugged at his sleeve to stop him. “Lucas? Hi, yeah. So, what I’d actually prefer is if you’d just call me a cab or something. You can mail me my luggage, but I’m not staying here another second.”
The man bit his bottom lip in a way that was unfairly sexy, but not enough to distract me from my point. Nice try. Classic honeypot. Not today, Satan.
“The thing is,” he said, “there’s no cab to call. The car you rode in? It was a magical construct and is used rarely. But, I tell you what: there’s a bus, once a month. It picks up the senior students and shuttles them between here and Moretown. It won’t be by until the last weekend of the month. That’s twenty-three days. The rooms here are nice, the food is five-star restaurant quality, and you get a weekly stipend in a student account. About a grand a week. So… stick it out for just a few weeks, and if at the end you really don’t want to be here anymore, you go home with a few thousand bucks and never have to look back.”
“Wait,” I said, somehow more incredulous about the money than even the wild magic tricks, “I’m sorry—how much money does the Academy actually have? How can they pay students that much just to be here?”
“That’s just freshmen,” he said. “They tack on another thousand each year you survive.”
My eyes widened and my eyebrows must have disappeared into my hairline. “I’m… sorry?”
“Metaphorically speaking,” Lucas added quickly. But as he turned away I could swear I heard him mutter, “Mostly.”
He walked off into the crowd and I itched absently at my right palm as I made the quick decision that following him would, at least, keep me in sight of someone I knew. I hurried after him to the end of the foyer and then up the right set of stairs.
“The stairways lead to different floors,” he said over his shoulder, loud enough to cut through the din. “Always remember that your room is up the right stairway. The left one leads to the classrooms and labs. The dorms are divided into four hallways. It used to be just one, and there were only four doors, but there was an incident and some of the rooms collapsed on one another so ever since then we keep them all separate.”
I tried to listen for creaky floorboards. They could pay students thousands of dollars to be here but not keep up repairs? “What, like they were one big room? Like a barracks?”
Lucas tossed a grin over his shoulder. “No.”
We reached the top of the stairs and emerged into a hallway with, as he’d predicted, two hallways branching off on either side. They looked like they ran the length of the mansion. “Clockwise from the left,” he said, pointing to the hallway nearest the stairs on my left, “freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. There’s no curfew, and we don’t do RAs or anything like that. We do have a security office but they’re only here for investigations related to conduct and accidents; you won’t see them unless they’re looking for you, pretty much. Each class has a head apprentice—it used to be head girl and head boy, but then we got a few of the younger faculty in and they changed it. We’re an old institution but we’re progressive.”
“Oh, wow, great,” I muttered.
“Come on.” He waved me down the freshman hall.
The doors weren’t numbered. Like Lucas’s ‘office�
�, each door had a different pictogram on it, though I couldn’t be sure none of them repeated. I started counting doors instead, apparently under my breath.
“Oh, there’s no point in that,” Lucas said. “The doors aren’t always in the same order. Leftover from the old configuration. Some of the seniors and deans are going to see about working that out after winter break.”
“They don’t change order,” I breathed. “Look, can we—just stop for a moment, please?”
Lucas did, turned on a heel, one eyebrow politely raised in patience.
“Lucas… this is all…” I took a breath, counted backward from ten like my therapist recommended a million times over the summer. It actually did help, a little. “In the ‘exam’ room, I had a… sort of a really severe panic attack, I think. And I’m starting to wonder if I haven’t reached the upper limit of my mental health. I lost my godmother last May, and I spent the whole summer in therapy but I’ll be honest. I didn’t do any of my homework and now I think maybe my therapist was right about how if I didn’t deal with my grief it would start showing up in other ways that I wasn’t expecting. Even if this was some kind of amazing opportunity, I think what I need is to go back home and put the time in to get my mental health under control and then just… move on with my life. I’m begging you, Lucas. Can you please, please just arrange for me to go back to Moretown? I don’t need the money; I need to get well.” I scratched at my palm as I spoke.
Lucas’s general expression of patronizing amusement gradually flattened as I spoke, and when I finished he rubbed his jaw and took a step toward me. He reached down and very gently took my hands in each of his. “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” he said softly. “I know what it’s like to lose the people closest to you. Believe me, what you’re going through—I get it. There really isn’t any way other than walking to leave the grounds and get back to town, Amelia. But I promise, there is a bus. Give this place a try. You’re more stable than you realize; this is not a nervous breakdown. What you experienced before—and I know this is going to sound like I’m gaslighting you but you have to at least consider the possibility—it wasn’t a panic attack. It was the room, and the situation, helping you to manifest a very special gift. One that almost no one in the world shares. This isn’t a school to learn magic tricks, Amelia. It’s a school to learn magic. Real magic. But if you aren’t convinced by the time the bus arrives, I promise that I will see to it you are given a seat—and your money—and you can leave and never look back. Can you just pretend, for a few weeks, that this might be the most amazing opportunity that you’ve ever received? Because it really might be.”
