by Maher Tegan
I narrowed my eyes at him, then turned back to the woman, who was talking on the phone with one finger plugged in her ear to drown us out. She gave me an apologetic smile, then braced the phone against her shoulder and held up one finger to indicate it would only be a minute. My mind whirred. I had no roomie assigned, and she hadn’t gotten a chance to look at Emma’s file yet, or at least I didn’t think she had. I cast a worried glance at Emma, who was chewing on her lip and shifting her weight from one foot to another like she did when she was upset.
That did it. I made a snap decision—a habit I’d been doing my best to temper for the last year. But desperate times called for desperate measures. I pulled out my phone and put it to my ear so it wouldn’t look like I was talking to myself, then uttered a quick spell and shoved a little bit of magical intent into it.
The woman hung up and turned her attention back to the screen just as the warm sensation that always accompanied my magic ebbed. I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping it had worked. I didn’t have the best luck with doing magic on the fly.
Her forehead wrinkled in confusion as she switched to the tab that held my information, then flipped back again. “There seems to be some kind of mistake,” she began.
“Seriously,” the guy behind me snapped, “we have a team meeting in an hour. We’d like to get to our rooms before then.” I cringed when I noticed there were several others in line behind him, and we were getting the stink eye from a few of them, too.
The woman gave me the side-eye as her gaze flickered to the growing line behind us, and I stepped to the side so I could look at the screen. “Oh,” I said, trying to use just the right amount of surprise. “Look, it says in her file that she’s in the same apartment as me. They must have just forgotten to link us or something.”
That sounded like a crock even to my ears, but the woman glanced from me to the impatient goons behind me, then to Emma.
“So it seems,” she said with a smile so stiff I was afraid her face was gonna crack. “Apparently, Miss Payne, you’re Miss Flynn’s roommate after all.”
I gave a mental happy dance, both that I’d done the spell correctly and that Emma and I were roommates once again.
“Thank you,” I said as she pulled a set of keys from a locked box on the wall behind her.
She thrust them at me, then gave Emma the fakest apologetic look I’d ever seen. “I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to have any keys for you, Ms. Payne. Check back tomorrow.”
She gave me one final, weighted glance as the muscle heads behind us started to get restless. “And Ms. Flynn? You’d do well to remember that survivors learn to play the cards they’re dealt. Manipulating reality to suit yourself is rarely an option in real life.”
Before I could formulate a response, she’d turned her attention to the guys, dismissing us.
“Well that was weird,” Emma said once we were out of earshot. “Did you do something? I thought I felt a whisper of magic while she was on the phone.”
“I did. But just a little. It was no big deal. It’s not like I had a roommate already.” A little niggle of doubt worked through me as I said that, though. That level of arrogance had gotten me into serious trouble once. So serious that had it not been for angelic intervention, I wouldn’t have made it through to tell the tale. I pushed the thought aside, though. It was spilt milk.
The heat smacked us in the face as we left the comfort of the air-conditioned building, and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t put more serious consideration into the school in upstate Washington that had accepted me. Anybody who chose to stay in a place so hot and humid that you practically needed a scuba tank to breathe needed their head examined. Then I remembered I felt the same way about snow, but to a much greater degree.
“This place is massive,” I said, referring to a map that had come in our welcome packets. I stepped into the shade of a giant oak and unfolded it.
“Okay,” Emma said, pointing at the map. “We’re here, and our apartment’s there.”
I groaned; it was all the way on the other side of campus. “Let’s just go and get it over with,” I said, climbing into my car. “Please tell me you don’t feel like going out to explore tonight, though.”
She shook her head. “Not even a little. I have to call Mom to let her know we made it, then I’m ready to chill. I’m dreading just hauling our stuff up.”
My phone dinged with an incoming text and I glanced at my phone. Cody, my boyfriend of two years, was letting me know he was all checked in, but that his advisor wanted to talk to him. Since he’d ridden his motorcycle, all his stuff was in my car. I texted back to let him know about the change in plans and told him to meet us at our place when he was done.
“I guess that’s one of the benefits of the apartment,” Emma said, reading something in a pamphlet the registrar lady had given us. “They’re co-ed, so Cody will be able to visit whenever he wants.”
“Bonus, then,” I said. “Now if we wanna do a binge session of Supernatural, we can, without watching the clock.” We’d reached the parking lot where we’d parked, and just looking at the full load it was carrying made me tired.
“I’ll follow you,” she said, climbing into her own car. I laughed when she pushed her giant stuffed Pikachu out of the way. Her car was packed tight. Unlike me, Emma was not a light packer, and I was pretty sure she’d brought close to everything she owned with her. I had two suitcases and a couple boxes of stuff, plus my laptop and tablet, of course. The smile fell off my face when I realized how many trips it was going to take us to carry all of that stuff up. As tired as I was, I saw a little witchy business in our immediate future. We couldn’t leave it in her car, but I was pretty sure I’d die if I had to make too many trips, especially if our apartment was twenty miles from the parking lot and up ten flights of stairs.
I backed carefully out of my parking space and waited for Em to get behind me, then guided us toward our new home away from home.
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