by Keary Taylor
I pressed my lips together, trying to gain control over the emotions in me. But I lost. Two of my own tears pushed themselves out onto my cheeks. “Do you think that all of the other things were maybe just too easy? That maybe we just took the rest for granted?”
“I think that maybe we made too many assumptions too early,” Nathaniel said, his words barely audible at this point.
I leaned forward and I pressed my lips to his. Gently, softly, as if he were fragile and he might shatter or disappear into mist at any moment.
“You’re the love of my life, Nathaniel,” I said in a whisper. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
He looked up into my eyes, and I saw it there, everything I was feeling, reflected in his eyes. “I think maybe we need to take a step back, Margot, and evaluate some very important things about ourselves.”
And as much as it killed me, I knew he was right.
We each had to decide. If we could change, if we could accept, or if there were core flaws that would put cracks in any foundation.
So, I nodded. I climbed off his lap, and with feet that weighed a thousand pounds each, I walked toward the door.
Nathaniel stood as I reached it and put a hand on the doorknob. I looked back over my shoulder.
“See you at nine tomorrow to work on the healing book?” I asked, trying to say something normal.
Nathaniel didn’t say anything, simply nodded with his lips tightly pressed together.
So, I walked out of the solarium. My legs felt like disconnected tree stumps as I walked faster and faster. My throat grew tight. Emotions flooded my eyes. I pushed myself faster.
I was halfway across the school grounds when I utterly broke down.
Sobs ratchetted their way up my throat. Tears broke free from my eyes. I had to wrap my arms around my middle to keep from crumpling to the ground.
While we had never said as much in words, I knew Nathaniel and I would never be what we were ever again.
We were too easy, had been too young and too naive. We had ignored critical differences in our personalities, and now the bill had come due.
I’d meant it when I said Nathaniel was the love of my life. I’d believed we were meant to be together with every fiber of my being.
But what if that wasn’t enough?
Chapter Twenty-One
For the first time since I was a five-year-old, I slept in on a Tuesday morning in March.
The sun was high in the sky by the time I opened my eyes. I rolled over and stared at the window, where light was pouring in through the gauzy curtains.
That was the same window that Nathaniel had once crawled through, the night we had our first kiss. The same window where he would send paper airplanes with sweet messages.
And now that window was devoid of anything but sunlight.
I pushed all of those feelings away, and I crawled out of bed. I did normal things. I showered. I ate breakfast. I dressed like it was any other day.
And while I was brushing my teeth, there was a knock at the door. I darted downstairs with my mouth full of foam and opened it to find Borden on the steps. I waved him in and then darted into the kitchen to spit and rinse out my mouth.
“Are we still looking on the bright side and appreciating that we got to sleep in today?” Borden asked as he closed the door behind him.
“Yes, we are,” I declared as I flicked my toothbrush at the sink, knocking water off. “Wasn’t it lovely?”
Borden smiled and looked around. “I guess. I’ve always been an early bird. So, sleeping in till seven was an accomplishment.”
I looked over at the clock on the stove. It was almost nine.
“You look like you came over here with a plan,” I said as I leaned against the counter.
He nodded. “We have a lot of time on our hands now. I was thinking that we could replace one kind of schooling with another.”
“No days off for you, huh?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If I sit in that apartment thinking about everything that happened, I will go entirely insane.”
“Did your dad call?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink with dread.
Borden nodded. “It was what I expected.”
He’d been cut off. He’d called it, and then it came true. I hated that it did, and I hated that I had something to do with him losing everything.
But this was where we were.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“I know,” he said, giving a little nod. “But it’s worth it, you know? To be what I am. To become what I was always meant to be. It’s weird to think though, that Dad should be able to do everything I can. My mage blood comes through him.”
It floored me, that statement. Really, despite all this family history we’d done, I hadn’t thought of Borden or Mary-Beth’s parents being mages. My mother had disappeared, Nathaniel’s parents were low-lifes who had lost custody of him when he was three. But Borden and Mary-Beth still had both their parents.
“Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about that,” I said. “That your dad is one of us, too. Have you ever considered telling him?”
Borden crossed his arms over his chest. “No,” he answered confidently. “The man’s a controlling prick who looks at every person as a dollar sign. He’d find a way to take this and make a profit out of it. Or he’d just take you and turn you into a gold-making cog in his machine of wealth.”
“Yikes,” I said, my eyebrows raising at his blunt statements.
He nodded in agreement. “But I was thinking we could work on that trick you used on me in the solarium and the beach.”
“You want me to purposely knock you out?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
He shrugged. “It’s a good defense. It’s likely that throughout our lives we’re going to be in dangerous situations. We need to learn how to defend ourselves.”
I shook my head at him, surprised at his willingness to let me knock him out. But I stepped forward and joined him in the living room.
For hours, we practiced. I found I was able to do it again, knock him out. At first, he was out for thirty minutes. But then I was able to control the amounts of time. I brought it down to five minutes, and then one.
I explained how I did it to Borden. And it was terrifying, becoming his guinea pig. But I let him knock me out.
He was right. It was the best sleep I’d ever gotten. Even if I was only out for twenty minutes the first time, and then a few minutes after that.
But over the course of the day, Borden and I got a really good hold on how to do it. We each took time detailing the instructions in our personal grimoires.
I put dinner in the oven and then he and I sat at the dinner table with four rocks on the table.
“You just say the words, prick your finger, and that should start the process,” I said again, showing him how I’d done it. My blood soaked into the rock, and then it started changing into gold.
Borden did exactly what I’d just done, but it stayed looking exactly like a rock with a few blood drips on it.
“Am I saying the words wrong?” he asked. The frustration was rising in his voice with every attempt.
“Your pronunciation isn’t great, but yes, you’re saying it correctly,” I said. “I just…maybe Nathaniel is right. Maybe it has something to do with our affinities. Yours is electricity, which has nothing to do with gold. I mean, it’s a conductor, but maybe that makes it even worse. Your magic is just going straight through.”
“So far, I feel like yours is the most useful affinity,” Borden mused as he folded his arms on the table and stared at my two golden rocks. “Nathaniel can fix books and make paper airplanes fly. I cause storms whenever I get angry. But you have yet to try anything that doesn’t work.”
“I think we’re all going to have our different skill levels,” I said. “Everyone has got to have strengths and weaknesses.”
“I guess I should just be grateful I can do anything,” Borden said. “Mary-Beth is growing mo
re frustrated by the day.”
It was true. She often didn’t even want to come to our study sessions, because even though it had been this long, she still had yet to perform an ounce of magic.
The door opened, and in walked my dad, carrying his briefcase. In surprise, he looked at the two of us together, and the lumps of gold that lay on the table in between us.
“Is that…is that what it looks like?” he asked with wonder.
I nodded.
“Alchemy is real?” he asked in addition, wonder filling his voice.
“Seems so,” I said, picking up the golden rock and setting it in Dad’s hand. “So, don’t worry too much, Dad. I might be a college dropout, but I think I might be able to care for myself. Speaking of which...”
I stood and went to my purse, which hung on the coat tree by the door. I dug around and pulled out a sum of money. I walked back to Dad and set the money in his hand. “I’m really sorry that I’ve disappointed you. But now that I’m not in school, I fully expect to pay my way around here. It’s time that I act like an adult and start helping out.”
He opened and closed his mouth twice, at a loss for words.
“Just take it,” I said. “It will make me feel a lot better about things. Why don’t you go wash up? Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
He eyed Borden and I warily, but finally, he turned and walked up the stairs to do what I said.
“I don’t think he likes me very much,” Borden said in a low voice as soon as Dad was gone.
I shook my head. “It’s not that. He’s just a little in love with Nathaniel, himself.”
“I haven’t asked yet,” Borden said, “but, what happened between you two?”
I looked down at the table and shook my head. “It’s complicated. We just…we have some things that make us absolutely right for each other, and then there are some things that we handle very, very differently. We decided to take a step back and figure some things out.”
I was surprised when Borden laid his hand over mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry to hear that, Margot. Anyone who has seen you two together can see how much you’re meant for each other.”
I thought about it then, telling Borden about the rumors that were going around school, that he and I were a thing. That I’d seen the questioning in Nathaniel’s eyes.
But there was nothing here. Nothing but friendship and partners in resurrecting magic.
So, I kept my mouth shut.
“Thanks,” I offered simply. I stood and went to the fridge and pulled out the bag of green beans. “Want to help me snap these?”
It hurt being around Nathaniel that night. We all met together in the solarium like everything was normal. Mary-Beth tried her very best, but never accomplished anything. Borden and I went over the knockout magic we’d been practicing all day. Within a matter of an hour, Nathaniel had it down perfectly.
But he and I kept our distance at all times, staying across the solarium from each other. We rarely made eye contact. But I kept seeing him looking from me to Borden, with a thoughtful expression on his face, like he was trying to determine if the rumors at school were true.
But he never said anything, and to my relief, he never seemed to make up his mind one way or another.
My heart ached seeing him keeping his distance. I kept looking at his hands and remembering what they felt like in mine. I kept looking at his lips, remembering how they tasted. I found myself looking at his bed and remembering lazy Saturday nights, lying together underneath the covers, being totally innocent.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get that back, and it was killing me.
But the fact that I wanted it didn’t change the reasons why we weren’t currently doing it.
And that night, I left the solarium having hardly said a direct word to Nathaniel. Mary-Beth awkwardly said goodnight before heading across the grounds to go back to her dorm, and Borden and I walked silently down the sidewalk together, because his apartment was generally in the same direction I went to go home.
We said goodnight, and he walked home alone, further into town.
And for the next few weeks, things continued in the same way.
Borden would come over to my house during the day and together, we would work on magic. And we started making incredible progress. We both mastered transfiguration as far as it was outlined in the book. We could transform any ordinary object into something else that wasn’t alive. We started speculating if we could transfigure living things into other living things, including making ourselves look like someone else. But it was a risky experiment to perform, so for now, we left it alone.
We pushed the boundaries of our telekinesis. We tried bigger and bigger objects, and extending our distance, using the beach as our practice grounds.
Borden learned how to alter and steal memories, and the only way to practice was on other students at school. That was the test, to see if he could make them forget anything happened.
And over those weeks, I started doing mass amounts of alchemy. Every day, I created five new lumps of gold. I let them wait for four days before I trusted they were going to stay, but every single one of them did.
So, Borden and I started going around to every jeweler in a thirty-mile radius, selling the gold.
I made more and more money. I started stockpiling it and made my plan to make the offer on Asteria House.
And twice a week, the four of us would meet at the solarium to practice together. It was hard to be patient, because while Borden and I were progressing by leaps and bounds, Nathaniel was learning at a slow pace, having to balance school and his hours at the library. And Mary-Beth was still unable to do any magic.
I felt the dynamic changing. Where once Nathaniel and I were the directors of this group, the parents and teachers, it was now Borden and me.
And that broke my heart further.
I didn’t want to have one more rift between Nathaniel and me. But it was growing bigger by the day.
One week before school was out, I decided it was time to clear Mom’s office out. We had booked our flights. We’d gotten hotels arranged for the trip. Nathaniel and Mary-Beth and my father had worked hard plotting out what regions were best for us to hit. What they didn’t know was that Borden and I hadn’t booked return flights just yet. We were planning to stay however long it took to get everything we needed. And I truly wondered if Borden just planned to stay. And I wondered if, when that decision was made, he was going to try and talk me into doing the same.
I knew what my answer would be. I wasn’t going to move to another country. Harrington Massachusetts was my home, and I wasn’t making that sacrifice.
But for now, I had to face what I’d done. I had to make the necessary arrangements.
Already, I felt strange walking through the halls at the school. I felt like an outsider, when never in my whole life had I felt that way. This was my playground as a child, and now it wasn’t a place I was welcomed. The others walking around me were no longer my peers. They were students at the college in my backyard.
And for the first time, I started to feel like this kind of other. Not a student. Not just any other human.
I was a mage.
I was different from them.
And I even further felt the fear of them. There were so many more of them than me, and in the past, my kind had been killed.
But I also felt a little bit of awe. I could show them things that would blow their minds. I could do things that would seem godlike to them. I could do more than they could ever imagine.
And suddenly I had to wonder how no mage had ever used their power for evil and tried to take over the entire world. Surely there had to be some incredibly powerful ones who could have done extraordinary things and could have forced the world to bow before them.
Someone bumped into me and brought me back to my present surroundings. As I looked around at all the teenagers and young adults walking around with their backpacks and textbooks clutched to
their chests, I felt confirmation again of why I was okay with this expulsion. My life had become so much more than their classrooms.
I walked into the library and cut along the bookshelves to work my way back to the McCallum room. I double-checked that no one was watching, and I unlocked the door and slipped inside.
Already, more than eighty percent of my mother’s things, and then our things, had been moved out. Every night before he came home, my father would pack up a box and bring it back to the house.
It kind of broke my heart to see it so empty. This was the one last bit of her that I had. My last connection. I think I had always held on hope that this room was going to reveal her secrets to me. And as of now, it had given me nothing but her knowledge.
I started packing her last few things in a box. Her journal. A few books that seemed useless to me. The jar of pencils that sat on her desk.
I jumped half a foot into the air when I heard the sound of the bookcase below opening, and one second later, Nathaniel’s head appeared in the opening.
“You scared me,” I said, letting out a breath as I turned back to what I was doing.
“Sorry,” he said, though I could tell he was distracted. He stepped into the middle of the room and looked around. “I keep wanting to ask about this place and learn it’s history, but I also don’t want to raise any questions until we’ve gotten everything out of here.”
I nodded in agreement. “Probably only one more load. I’ll come get the last of it tomorrow or the next day.”
Nathaniel went and sat on the couch, and I could feel the weight of a conversation settling in, so I stood and leaned against the desk.
“This has felt like the longest and quickest school year ever,” Nathaniel said. He rested one arm along the back of the couch and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee. “So much has changed and so much has happened. And then I think about it and I wonder how it has only been eight months since we met.”
“It kind of seems impossible, doesn’t it?” I said. “I feel like somehow we’ve known each other for our whole lives. But that can’t be real, because I’ve been right here, in the same place, the whole time, and you were never in the same place for long.”