He started off with a quiz too, and even though I’d had pre-calc back at my own school, I was sweating by the time I turned in my test. At the end of class, I was one of the first students out the door and very nearly collided with the guy I’d seen at the waterfall. How had I not noticed he was in class?
“Hey Laine,” he said, as if we were old friends, and then he disappeared into the mob moving into the hallway. I still had another hour to go until lunch and I was ready to beg my parents to let me finish out high school at Macgregor Hall. Mikayla’s parents had offered to take me in—they owned a six-bedroom house in Calabasas—and both of them traveled a lot for their jobs. They’d barely know I was even there.
Rationally, I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but the fantasy was appealing.
The cafeteria at Wixsted Academy looked more like the food court of a medium-size mall. There were food stations providing a dozen different meal options, from vegan and gluten-free to borderline nutritious, like fish and chips and tacos. I opted for a chicken wrap and a fruit cup, paying for the food with a swipe of a meal card I’d been issued along with my class schedule.
Tray in hand, I surveyed the dining hall, looking for a place to sit.
Like every high school everywhere, the cafeteria was divided by cliques. A beautiful black girl presided over what I presumed was the “high table.” Everyone sitting there was either model-beautiful or geekily adorkable. I wouldn’t be sitting at that table.
I’d hung out with princesses back in L.A., but always knew I didn’t belong in their world.
I looked around for the misfits table and finally spotted it. I recognized Connor from calculus. Good enough. I headed in his direction rehearsing my opening line. Hi! Mind if I sit here? What if they said “no?”
But I never made it to the table. Stepping in front of me so that I’d either have to stop or run into him was the guy I’d stumbled upon after calculus class. Up close he was even better-looking and the breezy self-confidence that had sustained me in our first encounter utterly deserted me.
“I’m Wix,” he said. “Why don’t you sit with me?”
“Okay,” I said because…not to sound shallow or anything…but not only was this guy the best-looking guy I’d ever seen in my life, he was the first person who’d paid more than passing attention to me all day.
I followed him to a table that was totally empty.
I sat down opposite him. “Is this the detention lunch table or are you just really, really unpopular?” I winced as I heard the words leave my mouth, but good-looking guys make me nervous.
He looked disconcerted for a moment; but recovered nicely. “I like eating alone my first day back at school.” He gave me a million-megawatt smile. “It lets me look over the talent without distraction.”
Are you kidding me?
I looked down at my tray. I wasn’t hungry anymore, but I think wasting food is a sin. I picked up the wrap in its biodegradable paper sleeve and tucked it into my purse. “Good luck with Stony Point Has Talent,” I said as I stood up. I tossed my head in a move I’d learned from Mikayla, and my ponytail swished around.
I walked out of the cafeteria without looking back. As I passed the “high table” I saw everyone was watching me.
Or maybe it was my imagination.
So naturally “Wix” was in my second period afternoon class—Alchemy 101. Fortunately, the teacher seated us alphabetically and whatever Wix’s surname was, it was alphabetically distant from my own.
The course designation might have been “101” but there was nothing beginner about the class, which seemed to be a mix of chemistry and astronomy and arcane lore sourced from a dozen different religions. Some of it felt familiar—my friend Delia had dabbled in Kabbalah—but as I opened the little kit of elixirs and potions I’d found at my desk, I felt utterly lost. Theoretically, it seemed like all you had to do was “follow the recipe” to achieve the desired outcome, but somehow, I knew that it wouldn’t be that easy.
Though trying to focus on the lesson, I was acutely aware of Wix, and was grateful that our teacher started lecturing immediately, after a PSA about their preferred pronouns. At least they didn’t expect us to turn lead into gold our first day. “Be sure and bring your lead bars to class tomorrow,” they reminded us as the bell rang. “We’ll be starting with the basics.”
The basics. I wondered where I was going to get a bar of lead.
The last class on my schedule for the day was Worldwide Magical Systems. It was basically a lecture class, working through the systems from A (Afghanistan) to Z (Zimbabwe).
This classroom had a different set up than the others I’d been in. For one thing, the room was in an octagonal tower so that light poured in from windows on all eight sides.
The room was dominated by a huge, three-dimensional globe that floated in the center of the space. Rings of seats surrounded it in concentric circles with name plates in front of each student. Each of our nameplates had a randomly assigned national flag next to it. According to the course description I’d read, the flag represented a country we were expected to be “responsible for.” In addition to learning the overall curriculum, we’d all be getting personalized tests about our specific region.
I looked around at the flags on the desks near me. I didn’t recognize a single one, including the one next to my name, which was white and red with a blue isosceles triangle flying in from the hoist side of the flag. I didn’t have a clue and realized I’d have to google it later.
No one else seemed to be having the same difficulty, but then most of them would have taken the course before.
I had a feeling I was going to be playing catch-up all year.
I’d never been the new kid at school before and it wasn’t fun. It would probably have been a lot worse if I were a little kid, but even so, it was bad enough. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anyone. There were people willing to introduce themselves or engage me in conversation before class, but even when they did it, our conversation had the stilted quality of two species trying to communicate. They spoke in shorthand, references to people and places and events I had no context for and which they had no interest in explaining. And then there’d been that unpleasant moment with Wix. I’d been playing over and over in my head and wondered if maybe I’d been too harsh. Maybe he was making a bad joke. Maybe he was, but it was still kind of skeevy and I wasn’t up for skeevy.
I tried not to let the brief encounter bother me. I figured the burden of getting to know my new classmates was on me. I took a deep breath. I’ve got this.
The seat to my left was empty, so I turned to the girl sitting to my right. She was the willowy black girl I’d seen ruling over the “cool table” at lunch. She somehow made our school uniform look like couture. I wondered if she’d had her blazer tailored. Mine sat on my shoulders like a sack while hers looked like it had been made to order for her.
I took another deep breath.
The flag in front of her nameplate—Jonna Harrison—was blue with three alternating stripes of red and white covered with a circle of ten gold stars.
“What country do you have?” I asked.
Jonna turned to me, her amber eyes flicking over me like a laser measuring tape. “Cape Verde,” she said flatly, then added snarkily. “Do you know where that is?”
Are you kidding me? I thought, glad that I knew the answer and desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask me what my nation my flag represented.
“Island nation in the North Atlantic,” I said.
She tilted her head to the side, fractionally, as it to acknowledge I’d surprised her and then said, “more interesting than the country you got.” And then, just to be a bitch, she said. “Czechia.”
I desperately wanted to say, “I know,” but knew she could be messing with me. For all I knew, the flag represented Tajikistan. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m Laine Blackwood.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m in your father’s history class.”
Great.
“I’ve got Mr. Markham,” I said. “What’s his story?”
I really wanted to know. I hadn’t gotten much of a read off the nebbishy teacher who’d spent the hour talking about the required reading and sent us all home with a list of essay topics to choose from and the warning that our first paper would be due in a week.
When your father teaches at the same school you attend, there’s sometimes collateral damage from teacher politics. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with that here, on top of everything else.
The girl studied me for a moment longer. “He’ll like you,” she said. The way she said that made my skin crawl.
“What do you mean?”
Instead of answering, she put her hand up, palm facing me, in the universal sign for “stop.” She spoke slowly, as if explaining things to a child. “I’m not auditioning to be your black best friend. If you have questions, I’ll be happy to show you where the Guidance Office is.”
Okay, mean girl. Nice talking to you, too.
“Maybe I’m auditioning to be your new white friend.” I said. If anything, her look became even more contemptuous.
“I don’t need any more friends,” she said. I heard someone sliding into the seat on my left. And wished I’d waited a few more seconds to strike up a conversation. I was about to introduce myself to the redheaded girl in the seat when the globe in the center of the room suddenly started to spin like a disco ball. A second later, our teacher appeared in front of it, so abruptly it looked like she’d simply blinked into existence. I tried not to goggle.
“Don’t look so impressed,” the redhead on the other side of me whispered. “Izzy likes making big entrances but that’s all the magic she has.”
I considered this comment. Though gossipy, it didn’t seem to have any particular emotion behind it.
“Izzy?” I whispered back.
“Dr. Renata Izquierdo,” she said, “but everyone calls her Izzy.”
“Really?” I said, skeptical.
The girl smiled.
“She hates formality,” she told me, “says it is part of a patriarchal system she wants to smash.”
If she’d just left it at “yes,” I might have believed her. But when she elaborated, she wasn’t as good at keeping her sense of hateful glee out of her words. So, it was a setup. If I’d fallen into the trap and addressed the teacher that way, it would not have been good. I wondered if she was just trying to trick me because I was the new girl or if there’d been a more malicious, focused intent behind her words.
“That’s cool,” I said, and then turned my attention toward the center of the room where the globe had gone dark except for one glowing blob that outlined a country in South Central Asia. Afghanistan, I realized. I started jotting down notes on my tablet.
It was going to be a long year.
4
Favor for Favor
After a few weeks, I no longer felt quite so clueless in my afternoon classes. I was decent at alchemy and had managed the formula turn lead into gold on my second try, which had given me the confidence to go on to master other alchemical goals. I’d found many of my classmates were more interested in showing off their skills than one-on-one competition, so I stopped feeling self-conscious about being so far behind. If I kept my head down and my mouth shut, no one seemed to notice me. Except Wix. He went out of his way—cartoonishly so—to avoid being paired up with me in lab. Most of the time I ended up partnered with Tessa Nguyen, who was hands down the star of the class and pretty patient with me, all things considered.
The one class I was absolutely crushing was World Sys. I’d always been interested in other cultures and I had a good memory. No actual magic was needed to pass the class, so I was in good shape.
But I still hadn’t seen any sign that I really had witchblood running through my veins, and that was starting to be a problem in my basic transformations class. The magic seemed simple enough—change an apple into a red rubber ball, change an orange into a Rubik’s cube. Simple enough in concept but I didn’t have a clue. I’d come to dread the class and it didn’t’ help that the teacher was a jerk.
By October, only two people in the class had failed every single transformation—me and a runty eighth grader named Jeremie Wixsted who preferred to be called “Remi.” The teacher, Mr. Eastman, didn’t like either one of us, but I guess he didn’t think it was a good idea to go after someone with the same name as the school, so he took out most of his frustrations on me.
“How did you even pass the entrance exam,” he asked me one day after calling me to the front of the class to demonstrate what he called “baby level” transformation. It was the most humiliating ten minutes of my life and there were giggles from the other students before I finally admitted that I couldn’t do it.
“This isn’t California Ms. Blackwood; your parents can’t just pay to get you accepted into a school.”
The sneer behind his words was too much. “Belittling me is not going to amplify my comprehension,” I said, as calmly as I could. “You’re the one teaching the class. Have you considered it might be a failure in your teaching process that’s responsible for my failures as a student?”
“What did you say?” he yelled, so angry his face turned purple.
I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one and I kept silent.
“If you can’t do this one thing right now,” he said, “then you’re out of this class. This class is for students who need remedial education, not hopeless retards.”
There was a collective gasp as he said the R-word, but he was so angry, he plowed right on. “Just because your father is the head of the Blackwood coven doesn’t mean you get—”
He suddenly broke off as he realized every student in the room was staring at him. He reined in his temper with a visible effort.
“Show me you deserve to be in my class, Ms Blackwood. Or go home early.”
I was about to pick option two when I noticed Tessa, staring at me intently. She gave me a fractional nod, which could have meant anything, but I took a leap in the dark and picked up the child’s wooden letter block I’d been told to turn into an egg. I closed my eyes thinking, this is going to be so bad. But then I felt my hand jerk and when I opened my eyes, I was holding a wooden darning egg. I showed it to Eastman.
“Close enough,” he said. “You may sit down.”
I risked a glance at Tessa as I sat down. She was smirking.
I looked down at my hands, which were turning the darning egg over and over without me really thinking about it. I slipped the thing into the pocket of my blazer and tried to pay attention as Mr. Eastman droned on and on.
I caught up to Tessa after class. “Thanks,” I said. “That was a nice touch, turning the block into a darning egg instead of an egg.” I had no doubt she could have turned that block into any damn thing she’d wanted to.
“I like to amuse myself,” she said. “and I didn’t want your first transformation to look too good.”
“What are you doing in Remedial Transformation?”
“Talent spotting,” she said. “My coven is always interested in new talent.”
I winced when she said “talent.” It reminded me too much of Wix. And then I wondered if he’d simply meant “magical” talent when he made that artless comment to me and not that he was checking out people in a sexual way. The thought distracted me, but I realized Tessa was still talking.
“What I can’t figure out is why you can’t handle the assignments. Your bloodline is as potent as anyone in the school’s. Maybe even better than Jonna Harrison.”
Jonna. The queen bee I sat next to in World Sys.
“When your talents finally start manifesting, you’re going to be impressive.”
Why is she buttering me up? I wondered.
“Well, thanks again for helping me out,” I said, thinking, why did you help me out?
“Không có gì,” she said. “It never hurts to have a Blackwood in your debt.”
I did n
ot like the way she said that.
“Later,” she said and bounced off to her next class.
Remi sought me out in the lunchroom the next day. He slid into the chair opposite me with a tray full of the healthiest meal I’d ever seen anyone eat—a scoop of quinoa and some kind of vegetable stir fry with an apple on the side. I hadn’t even known what quinoa was when I was his age. I thought about saying something, but it only would have come out sounding condescending.
“This is for you,” he said, and handed me a penny-sized gold charm shaped like a spiderweb.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a present. For standing up to Mr. Eastman yesterday.”
“You don’t need to give me a present for that,” I said. “It was my pleasure.”
I started to hand it back. “Keep it Laine, it’s a Wixsted marker.” I must have looked baffled because he added, “They’re important.” What was it with people in this school and their fascination with favors? I looked at the little trinket. It was very finely made, the lines delicate and clean, with a tiny loop at the top.
“Is this meant to be worn?” I asked.
“Some people like to collect them,” he said. “The loop makes it easy to hang from a key chain or whatever.” I’d noticed Jonna wearing a necklace of spiderweb charms and just thought she was being all Goth Girl.
“Why a spider?” I asked.
“The Wixsted coat of arms has a golden spider on it.”
“You have a coat of arms?” Of course, the Wixsteds have a coat of arms. Doesn’t everyone?
“Back in England,” he said.
I looked at the golden spider again. “Where do you get them made?” I expected him to say they sourced the tokens from Etsy or something, but he grinned.
“We make them,” he said. “You got a penny?”
Starlight & Shadows: A Limited Edition Academy Collection by Laura Greenwood, Arizona Tape, Juliana Haygert, Kat Parrish, Ashley McLeo, L.C. Mawson, Leigh Kelsey, Bre Lockhart, Zelda Knight Page 19
