Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib

by David J. Schwartz

  He managed to keep a straight face through this speech, but his friends were laughing loudly by the end. Joy waited for them to quiet down before responding.

  “I’m guessing you’re from Arthur Stag College,” she said, referring to the prestigious — and expensive — private school across town.

  The ringleader nodded and smiled. “Busted.”

  “I see,” Joy said, pacing back and forth across the platform. “Arthur Stag is an interesting figure, of course. He was a skilled administrator and a competent teacher, but not, I’m afraid, a great magician. Crowley called him — what was it — ‘egregiously ordinary,’ but then Crowley rarely had a good word for anyone. Hedda Vik, a much more tolerant person, said he was ‘small-minded enough not to have the least understanding of magic, but just visionary enough to imagine that he was in charge.’ It’s widely reported that during the first demonic tests at White Sands, Stag was so overcome with fear that he had to be physically restrained. General Farrell called it ‘The most shameful display I have ever witnessed from a man, even in the face of such terrifying power.’ ”

  She stopped pacing and looked up. “Perhaps you should write a paper about that. In the meantime, though, I’m afraid that this course is for students of Gooseberry Bluff only, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  The class broke into scattered applause, and the Stag kids stood up and left, the ringleader turning to bow before exiting. Joy called for quiet, and the kids looked back at her, faces and auras eager.

  Nice recovery, Wilkins, she thought to herself.

  After that, the rest of the lecture went smoothly. She gave them what she thought of as an overture for the course, introducing the major themes and characters — kabbalah to kundalini, Merlin to Rasputin. When she had first seen the course description, she had found the scope of it overwhelming. If she hadn’t had access to Carla Drake’s notes, she wasn’t sure she could have taught this without making a fool out of herself. But she’d spent the last few weeks reshaping those notes into something that had a narrative she could follow, and she felt hopeful that the students would be able to see it as well.

  The students listened and took notes, but otherwise they hardly reacted to her words, and as soon as she was finished most of them hurried out of the room. If she hadn’t been able to see their auras, she might have been worried that she hadn’t reached them at all. But the golds had calmed somewhat toward more subdued yellows, and Margaret even waved to her before hurrying out, her shoulders hunched, books and laptop clutched to her chest.

  Joy took a deep breath and gathered the notes and books she had scattered over the table, almost none of which she had actually needed to refer to. She turned off the lights in the lecture hall but left the door open for the custodian and took the stairs to her office on the third floor. There was an elevator, but she was both tired and wired; she needed to wake up and calm down. And she was more convinced than ever that this job was going to be harder than her superiors expected.

  The next morning Joy got up before dawn for a twelve-mile run, ate her usual breakfast of coffee, oatmeal, banana, and English muffin, and took a long shower. She got out to reach for a towel…and startled herself in the mirror.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t used to her new house yet, so there was still that moment of who-the-hell-are-you when she spotted herself in the mirror. Her own face wasn’t exempt from her face blindness. She wished, for the seven millionth time, that she could see her own aura. Or, as long as she was at it, auras in ordinary photographs, or on video. Those were the only times when her face blindness was a serious liability. People’s auras weren’t static, but they rarely changed completely — they were more like handwriting than fingerprints. Joy had more or less convinced herself that seeing auras was more useful than seeing faces, but then she guessed that if she had been born able to see faces she wouldn’t have learned to see auras as well as she did.

  It was another warm day, so she decided to walk. She had chosen to rent a pricier house just a few blocks from the college, just in case she needed to get to the school fast. Her sister would have said that this was just another example of Joy being unable to separate her work life from her home life, and Joy knew that her sister would have been right about that. Thinking of her sister made Joy want to talk to her, so she grasped the rose-colored crystal that hung around her neck and said, “Rosemary Ebrahim.”

  Instead of her sister, though, she ended up reaching a ghost. This was the problem with crystal communications: you could reach anyone anywhere, and it was always crystal clear, but you had about a one in twelve chance of connecting with a dead person.

  “Wilson?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “No ma’am, it’s not Wilson.” The theory ran that ghosts always had unfinished business, or at least unfinished conversations, so they broke in on calls hoping to find that person they needed to talk to. For some reason they almost never got through to the right people.

  “Who is this?”

  “Just a friend,” said Joy. You weren’t supposed to tell ghosts your name, because then they would be able to call you back.

  “Wilson shouldn’t have lady friends answering the phone,” the ghost said. “He has a wife.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I should go — I’m sorry for the confusion.”

  “Stay off this line!” the ghost shouted, and Joy closed the connection.

  She was nearly at the school, but then she remembered the health insurance form sitting on her kitchen table, and she had to turn around and go back to get it. Paperwork was such a pain, especially when it wasn’t actually necessary. But since most of the school didn’t know that, she had to go through the motions.

  She tried her sister again. As always, Rosemary knew it was Joy before she picked up the call. “I can’t talk. Zen is home from school throwing up, and her brother kept us up all night.”

  “OK,” Joy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I mean it, I don’t even have time to eat, let alone have a conversation,” said Rosemary. “My life isn’t like yours. I don’t have the leisure to travel and go out on dates.”

  “I don’t go on dates,” said Joy. “And you have a husband.”

  “If you mean that zombie who shuffles off to the office every morning, I’m pretty sure that’s not my husband. Last night when he fell asleep walking our son back and forth across the living room floor, I know for damn sure he wasn’t my husband.” Joy heard someone — she assumed it was her niece — vomiting in the background. “He’s not bad-looking, though. I will concede that.”

  “You’re busy,” Joy said. “I’ll let you go.”

  “Yes, you should go on a date or something.”

  “It’s eight thirty in the morning.”

  “The bakeries are open. Go meet a nice baker.”

  “I don’t go on dates. I think I said that already.”

  “Do it for me. I want to hear about something besides diapers and puke.”

  “I will not. Dating is like…it’s like watching TV. Both place too much emphasis on appearances, both can be fun at first but quickly become tedious, and neither feels real. The main difference is that there isn’t a magical remote control that enables you to switch men in the middle of a date.”

  “Not yet,” said Rosemary. “Invent that. We’ll split the profits.”

  “I already have a job. I should hang up and do it. Call me when you have time to talk, and tell Zen I hope she feels better.”

  There was a thick fog hanging over the bluff when she reached the campus. Gooseberry Bluff was known for its fog, but somehow it seemed particularly thick on the grounds of the school. Joy found herself peering through the trees on the front lawn as she walked to the main building, but unlike yesterday, there was no one outside except the omnipresent crows.

  There weren’t many folks inside, either; the course scheduling was weighted toward afternoon and evening classes, since so many of the students worked. There were a few students reading on the
couches in the atrium, but none of them looked up as Joy walked past them toward the administration offices.

  As far as Joy had been able to determine, the person who really ran Gooseberry Bluff was President Fitzgerald’s secretary, Edith Grim-Parker. Edith was brusque, impatient, and incredibly efficient. Her small office was the same faux-brick concrete as the rest of the administrative offices, but above the file cabinets and the ancient steel desk were shelves heaped with clay pots and planters. Vines and flowers spilled from the shelves, straining toward the light of Edith’s narrow window.

  Edith was a large, red-faced woman with beautiful long gray hair twirled back in a bun. Her aura was an orange yellow, with dots of green and turquoise: a perfectionist, with the capacity for great compassion and love. Neither of which was directed at Joy as she entered the office.

  “What’s wrong now?” Edith asked, interrupting a student aide who sat across from her, running down what appeared to be an agenda for the day.

  “Good morning,” Joy forced herself to say, and smiled. “I just wanted to drop off the health insurance forms.”

  “About time.” Edith took the forms and handed them to the aide. “Add that to the packet and send it out. Do I need to go over it first?” she asked Joy.

  “I don’t think so,” Joy said.

  The aide took the form and slid it into a manila folder, carefully not looking at either Joy or Edith. Edith, on the other hand, stared at Joy. “Is there something else?”

  “Actually, I was wondering if there was any chance of talking to the president today.”

  “He’s booked up,” Edith said. Something flickered across her aura — a dark blue of worry, or fear. It spiked up through her chakras and then spread out, almost fading, but not entirely.

  “What about next week?”

  “I’ll let you know, Ms. Wilkins. Are you sure it’s not something I can help you with?”

  “It’s more of a personal thing,” Joy said. “Thanks anyway; I’ll check back with you.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Edith called after her, but Joy pretended not to hear.

  Since Gooseberry Bluff was a college of magic, Joy was the only full-time member of the history department, and she shared offices with the alchemy department on the second floor. Andy Ruiz, the departmental secretary, was sorting mail when she arrived. Andy’s aura was a soothing blue, and he was wearing a pair of gray tights and a black shirtdress. He had short dark hair and stud earrings with small bluish-gray stones in them.

  “Good morning, Andy.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Wilkins,” he said.

  Joy accepted a handful of envelopes from Andy and unlocked her office. It was tiny — about eight feet by twelve — and nearly empty aside from the boxes of Carla Drake’s course materials. Joy had hoped to have access to all of Drake’s papers, but so far that hadn’t been possible. She sat down and logged on to the college e-mail server.

  Andy knocked on the doorframe. “Ms. Wilkins—”

  “Joy.”

  “Joy. I thought we could have that little meeting about your needs.” He hesitated. “I mean your work-related needs, in case that wasn’t clear.”

  Joy laughed. “Sure. I have office hours starting at ten, but we should have enough time for that.”

  Andy was careful to tuck the dress under him as he sat down. During Joy’s orientation, Andy had shaken her hand and said: “Hi, I’m Andy. I’m genderqueer and I often wear women’s clothes here in the office. I hope that won’t make you uncomfortable.” Joy wasn’t sure what genderqueer meant—she'd since learned that it was an umbrella term for persons who identified outside of the male-female gender binary—but she had assured Andy that she had no problem with it. She admired Andy's forthrightness and the way that he carried himself. He walked better in heels than she did.

  Andy cleared his throat. “So you already know that the history department here was basically just Professor Drake, so the alchemy department shared me with her. Technically I’m their secretary, and I do things like coordinate with the chair on creating the schedules, help with the budget, do a little bit of crowd control with the students. You shouldn’t have to worry about any of those things, at least for now.

  “You’re in charge of your own schedule,” he continued, “but I can help you with small-scale copy jobs, except for exams — the work-study kids do the actual copying, and we can’t be tempting them with anything that important. PoofPost goes through me; the college has an account with them. If you’re out of the office, the calls get routed to my desk. That’s not a problem as long as you don’t get a lot of personal calls.

  “I also want you to think of me as a resource. If you have questions about anything that falls outside of the scope of course content, ask me. What I don’t know, I’ll find out. How are you doing with the computer system?”

  “Fine. I thought it was kicking me off last night, but then the site went down, so it must have been a system problem.”

  Andy pressed his lips together and nodded. “Honestly, the servers here are ancient. Sometimes I wish that even half the resources that go into magical research went into computers.”

  Joy smiled. “That seems unlikely.”

  “I know. So. Questions? Fire away.”

  Joy didn’t think she had any questions until she started talking, and then she remembered how much she had yet to learn. Andy’s energy was such that she didn’t feel hesitant about admitting when she didn’t understand something, and after a half hour with him she felt anxieties that she hadn’t realized she was carrying slide off her back.

  As Andy stood to leave, Joy stopped him. “Andy, I have one more question. I was looking for a list of approved paper topics in Professor Drake’s materials, but I haven’t found anything. Do you think I could get access to the rest of what was left in her office?”

  Andy crossed his arms. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure where it all ended up. President Fitzgerald went through the course materials himself; he wouldn’t even let me touch anything he hadn’t looked over first. He took the rest of it and locked it away somewhere, I think.”

  “Ah. I’ve been trying to get in to see the president, but I can’t get past his secretary.”

  “Edith. Yes. She’s actually wonderful, but she’s also a hard-ass.”

  “Maybe you can get me past her,” Joy said. “It’s not just the list. I have some other things I need to talk to the president about.”

  “I could try.”

  Joy smiled. “I can’t ask any more than that.”

  Joy spent the next two hours running through a computer tutorial on grading. No students showed up, which didn’t surprise her, since they’d only had one class. At noon she packed up her things and locked the office.

  She stopped to say good-bye to Andy, but before she even opened her mouth the outer door opened and one of the alchemy professors, Zelda Akbulut, entered. Joy recognized her by her aura: turquoise patterned with splotches of a dark forest green. She backed in, carrying a tray of coffee stacked on top of a Dunkin’ Donuts box.

  “First day!” said Zelda. She spun around, spotted Joy — and the tray of coffee tipped forward off the box and splashed Joy from her feet to her waist.

  “Oh my God!” Zelda shouted. “I didn’t…I’m so sorry…are you…”

  “I’m fine,” Joy said, even though her jeans and socks were soaked in scalding coffee. “Look out for the—”

  Zelda set a three-inch pump on the soaking floor, slipped, and in struggling to retain her footing, lost the box of doughnuts. Sugar and pastries fell into the coffee, taking on the appearance of a paste. Joy gritted her teeth and shook drops of hot coffee from her hands.

  “I’ll call Greg,” said Andy, who had somehow come out of the whole ordeal with his dress unscathed.

  Zelda had covered her mouth with one hand, and it looked as though tears were welling up in her eyes. “It’s really OK,” Joy said.

  Zelda lowered her hand and sighed. “I should have —
I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s OK. I was just on my way out. We’ll talk later, OK? It’s fine.”

  Gooseberry Bluff, Minnesota, sat on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin on the St. Croix River just a few miles east of the Twin Cities. It had been a magic boomtown, settled by a number of minor practitioners throughout the fifties and sixties, including Arthur Stag, who founded his private college there in 1952. The community college was founded in 1965 in response to a grassroots campaign by a group of less prominent, but highly energetic, residents. Now the two schools, along with the maximum-security prison on the town’s western border, employed the majority of Gooseberry Bluff's inhabitants.

  Gooseberry Bluff was a beautiful town with lots of trees, views of the river, and houses set back on the ridge overlooking the town. Joy found herself admiring it again as she drove south out of town and caught I-94, headed west toward St. Paul. But the farther she drove, the more tense she became. She hunched forward over the wheel and chewed at the inside of her lips. She started talking back to the radio, looked for some music that didn’t irritate her, and finally turned it off.

  She pulled into a gas station just outside the St. Paul city limits, took a deep breath, and grabbed her satchel. She tried to keep the word “disappointment” out of her head as she walked in and made a beeline for the restroom.

  “You’re late,” a man’s voice said the moment she pushed through the swinging door.

  “Yes, well. I’m working two jobs now,” Joy said. She took a deep breath of air that smelled not of urine and disinfectant but of wood and leather. “I wish we could meet a little closer. This isn’t a drive I want to be making once a week.”

  “It won’t be the same place next time.” The voice came from behind a massive desk stained deep reddish brown. The desk had carved lion’s claws for feet and a front panel showing the seal of the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs. The man who stepped out from behind the desk had bright-silver hair and an aura to match.