Before she lost her nerve, she said, “Yes! It’s me! I’m the problem!”
Father tilted his head.
“I mean Sage! I mean, me at Sage. That’s the problem. Can I please please please go back to Dunwiddle?” Nory pleaded. “When the buildings are repaired, I mean. I’d be much happier there.”
Father looked baffled. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“Um. I fit better there, I think. At Dunwiddle.” Nory stole a glance at Hawthorn. “Because of the architecture and stuff?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Father. “You love Sage.”
“Actually, I don’t,” Nory said.
Instead of responding, Father started talking to Dalia about the skunk test she’d taken the day before, an important part of Fuzzy finals for eighth graders. She had gotten the highest grade in her class.
Either Father hadn’t heard Nory, or he had pretended not to.
Later, Hawthorn rapped on Nory’s bedroom door. “I wanted to check on you,” he said, entering and sitting at the foot of her bed. “Because at dinner—” He broke off. “Nory? Are you crying?”
Nory put her face in her pillow. She hiccuped.
“It’s hard adjusting to a new place,” Hawthorn said awkwardly. “But everyone struggles at first, in new situations.”
Nory cried harder. She always cried harder when she was sad and people were nice to her. “I h-h-hate it so much,” she managed to say.
Dalia appeared in the doorway. “Nory? Hawthorn?”
“Nory’s sad,” Hawthorn said. “She knows she’ll settle into Sage just fine”—he glanced at Nory and nodded encouragingly—“but right now, it’s challenging.”
Nory knew she would never settle into Sage. Never.
“Oh, Nory,” Dalia said, joining them on Nory’s bed. “We’re so glad you’re here. We missed you so much when you were with Aunt Margo. All of us, Father included.”
“You are a Horace,” Hawthorn said. “Sage is where you belong. You’re having growing pains, that’s all. You’ve got this, Nory.”
“But …” Nory said. But what? Hawthorn’s eyes were kind, and he wanted to cheer her up, but he wasn’t really listening, either.
“I have an idea,” Dalia said. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll go to campus early, just you and me. Okay, Nory?”
“Why?” Nory said, sniffing.
“Because!” Dalia said. She beamed. “I know just how to cheer you up. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until now!”
“What is it?”
“Nope, not going to tell.” Dalia squeezed Nory in a sideways hug. “But you will love it. And you’ll see that Sage isn’t all that bad, I promise.”
The double-talent affinity group met on Wednesday, after classes were over for the day. Elliott followed Mitali up a long, winding staircase to the very top of a tower. Through a heavy wooden door was a circular room, with stone walls. Elliott felt like he was in a fairy tale.
Kinnette was there already. She was the senior Flicker-Flyer Nory’s dad had mentioned during hide-and-seek. She was lean and wore a headscarf, and her arms were invisible, though her hands were not.
“Sorry not to be entirely present, ha-ha,” said Kinnette to Elliott in a friendly way. One of her hands rose through the air, and Elliott shook it. “I have an invisibility exam tomorrow, so I’m practicing. They grade us by the inch.”
The other members of the group arrived—two kids, two sloths, and one kangaroo—and introductions were made all around. In addition to Mitali and Kinnette, the double-talent group consisted of a seventh-grade girl named Dawn, who was a Flyer-Fuzzy; a ninth-grade girl named Prairie, who was a Flyer-Flare; and an eleventh-grade boy named David, who was a Fuzzy-Fluxer. He was in the shape of a tree sloth, and he was accompanied by an actual sloth. The two sloths looked identical as far as Elliott could tell, but apparently all the others could tell them apart.
The kangaroo turned out to be Ms. Cheddarlegs, who taught magic history and regular history. She served as the faculty leader for the group.
“Excuse the kangaroo,” she said to Elliott after fluxing into her human form. “And please don’t tell Dr. Horace. But it’s much easier to get up the stairs in marsupial form than in the form of a fifty-year-old human with chronic knee problems.”
Ms. Cheddarlegs wore sheer pantyhose, and initially, Elliott felt wary of her. Then she passed out red licorice, which just went to prove that first impressions really shouldn’t be trusted. Everyone sat around a big table in the center of the room, except for the sloths, who climbed onto a coatrack and settled themselves there.
It wasn’t a touchy-feely talk session, the way it would have been if Ms. Starr had been running it. Nobody revealed their emotions or shared things about their day. Instead, the meeting was divided into two parts.
First, Ms. Cheddarlegs shared news articles about double talents. One was about issues specific to double-talent education. “As double talents, we have to be mindful about mixing our magic,” she said. “For some of us, our two talents should never be used together. Mixing them might tangle up the magic. I do not flare while fluxed, and neither does Mitali. But in other talent mixes, there’s more leeway. David, obviously, is using his Fluxer magic. He’s a sloth! And at the same time, he’s using his Fuzzy magic.”
One of the sloths jumped down from the coatrack and popped into boy shape. Boy-David was slightly stooped and wore thick glasses. “I was taught that it’s very important never to lose track of my human mind,” he said. “But if I want to be the strongest Fuzzy I can be, I actually need to let go of my human mind a bit and get in touch with the sloth mind. I’ve discovered that if I follow the rules, then when I’m in animal form I can’t communicate with animals very well. My fuzzying is low-level. In order to truly befriend my sloth, I have to break the rules and let my human mind go.”
“Interesting,” said Ms. Cheddarlegs. “Some educators, including those who have been studying upside-down magic, think that certain rules might indeed be limiting our magic abilities.”
At the mention of upside-down magic, Elliott sat up straighter.
The second half of the meeting was more like coaching. The students made short presentations about their double talents. Dawn told them that her flying was going really well, but in Fuzzy classes she was struggling whenever she had to interact with more than one animal.
People made suggestions: David said that sometimes it was easier to get along with groups of a certain species. “We all do mice in seventh grade, but maybe you’re better with groups of insects, or schools of fish, or something,” he said.
“Sometimes double talents have unique abilities in one area,” confirmed Ms. Cheddarlegs. “I never was much good at kittens and puppies, and I worried that—” Here, she looked at Elliott and paused. “I worried I was never going to be able to do more difficult animals,” she said finally. “But marsupial fluxing turned out to be very natural to me—and my kitten still isn’t that good!” She laughed.
After the others had presented, Mitali stood up. She looked nervous.
“If Ms. Cheddarlegs hadn’t talked about the different educational ideas about double talents, and if Elliott wasn’t here, I don’t think I’d be showing you guys this,” she confessed.
Elliott leaned forward.
Mitali took a breath. She lifted her chin. Then she fluxed into a small brown bird with an orangey-red throat and belly. A robin!
Robin-Mitali flew around the room. The other students clapped.
Then Robin-Mitali breathed fire. A big burst of fire, directed at the stone wall.
Everyone fell silent.
Robin-Mitali landed on the floor and fluxed back to a girl. “I know Fluxer-Flares aren’t supposed to mix our magics,” she said. “But it just feels natural to me. Please don’t tell my teachers,” she added. “I don’t want them to know.”
Ms. Cheddarlegs fluxed into kangaroo and hopped over to Mitali. She thumped her tail consolingly and patted Mitali’s sh
oulder.
“We won’t tell,” said Dawn, Kinnette, and the others.
At the end of the meeting, Mitali asked Elliott to show his freezing magic. Kangaroo-Cheddarlegs turned back into a teacher and sparked a fire in the hearth with a flip of her wrist. Elliott iced the logs, putting out the fire and spreading frost across the stone and out across the wall.
“It’s beautiful!” cried Mitali.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the teacher.
“My control is getting better,” said Elliott. “I think Dr. Vogel’s fire-breathing exercises are making my magic stronger. But I still ice things by accident sometimes, and I really need to use a Hex glove if I want my flaring to work. Which I’d never even tried until today. So I don’t know if I’m actually a double talent.”
“Honestly, I don’t know either,” said the teacher. “But as long as you’re here at Sage, you’re welcome to attend our affinity group.”
“I’ll be gone on Friday,” said Elliott, feeling sad. “As long as the repairs to my real school get done on time.”
“Ah,” said Ms. Cheddarlegs. “Well, we will miss you.”
Elliott gave her a wobbly smile. He would miss them, too.
Nory’s feet dragged as she put on her uniform Thursday morning.
Thick tights, ugh.
Pleated skirt, ugh.
Tie and blazer, double ugh.
She felt annoyed at her old room in Father’s house. It was painted pale pink and had a white nightstand that matched her white dresser. All things that had been chosen when she was a baby. Her room at Aunt Margo’s was much more of a middle schooler room.
She cheered up, though, when she remembered she was leaving the house early with Dalia. She ate her hard-boiled egg and grabbed an apple to munch on while they walked to Sage. The day smelled like snow, but it wasn’t snowing. It was the kind of crisp winter weather where the wind bites your face.
Dalia took Nory past the Fuzzy building to the back entrance to the Hall of Magic and Performance. There, surrounded by a low stone wall, stood a greenhouse. Its windows were steamed up and Nory could see plants inside. Dalia led Nory to where they could peek in.
The ground inside the greenhouse was covered with moss, though there was also a path you could walk on. There were pots of flowers, bushes and trees, plus a number of hollow logs and what looked like hutches made of wood.
Puttering about, going in and out of hutches, sniffing all around the place, were about thirty skunks. They had fluffy patches of white on their heads and two stripes down their backs. All of them were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“They’re so cute!” said Nory.
“Aren’t they?” said Dalia. “Some Fuzzies don’t like them, but I think I might like them even more than rabbits. They get up to more mischief. I like to come here when I’m feeling sad, or when I need to think. My Fuzzy teacher showed me where the key is. She only shows it to the students she likes best.”
Dalia bent to the low stone wall that surrounded the greenhouse. She pressed her palm against one particular stone and used her finger to dislodge a large, ornate stone key that had been fitted there, almost invisibly. “Don’t tell where the secret key is, ’kay?”
Nory promised she wouldn’t.
A wave of warm air hit Nory as they entered the skunk garden. She took off her winter coat and scarf and hung them on a hook. “Won’t we get sprayed?” she asked as they walked farther in.
“No, I know what I’m doing,” said Dalia proudly. “I aced my skunk exam, remember?”
As Dalia’s Fuzzy magic began to work, the skunks toddled out of their habitats and came to meet Nory. Nory sat down on a hollow log and stretched her fingers out to let them be sniffed.
One of them wiggled its bottom and then jumped, catlike, onto her lap.
“Without Fuzzy magic, you could never pet them,” said Dalia. “They’re not friendly to humans.”
Nory knew Fuzzies could befriend all sorts of animals, even wild animals, if they put in enough practice. But she’d never had the chance to meet any wild animals herself, except the dragons during her Dragon Haven field trip.
A second skunk jumped onto her lap. “Those two are best friends,” said Dalia. “Their names are Domino and Penguin.”
Dalia gave Nory a handful of raisins from her pocket. “You can feed them if you want. They love fruit.”
“Even pineapple?” Nory disliked pineapple. She fed the raisins to Domino and Penguin, who nibbled them gently from her palm.
“Even pineapple,” said Dalia. “Cranberries make them go wild, though.”
“Wild? What do you mean?”
“Cranberries are like catnip for them. I brought one cranberry so you can see,” said Dalia. She pulled it out of her pocket. Immediately, Domino and Penguin leapt off Nory’s lap and ran to Dalia, sitting on their hind legs in a begging position. All the others followed, until Dalia was encircled by thirty begging skunks.
She bent down and offered the cranberry to Penguin, who practically inhaled it. Then she held up her empty hands. “That’s all, sorry!” she told the skunks. “No way am I letting you all go wild. Not on my watch!”
When Nory saw how Penguin acted after gobbling the cranberry, she understood Dalia’s caution. First, he ran around in circles. Then he bounded high in the air, as if jumping on a trampoline, several times. Then he ran up and down the small indoor trees like a cat in a frenzy, finally stopping for breath high on a branch.
Gently, Dalia lifted him off the branch and set him down. “He goes up there and then he’s stuck,” she explained. “Cranberries! What can I say?” Now on the mossy floor, Penguin rolled back and forth, waving his front paws.
Nory stroked Penguin’s belly. “I’ve fluxed into skunk before,” she told Dalia, “but never without adding some other animal. I mostly add elephant, actually.”
“That must be dramatic.”
“Oh yeah.” Nory told Dalia the whole story of her disastrous first day at Dunwiddle, when Lacey Clench had upset her so much she’d fluxed into an enormous skunkephant and skunk-sprayed half the people in the school cafeteria.
Dalia laughed. Not a mean laugh. Not at Nory. Just at the idea of a skunkephant in a school cafeteria.
Nory laughed, too. It hadn’t been funny at the time, but now that she’d made friends and was happy at Dunwiddle, it was easy to see the humor.
“How come you want to go back to Dunwiddle?” asked Dalia. “I know there’s no skunk garden there. And there’s definitely no special pool for fish fluxing lessons, or a monkey gym for primate fluxing class. Plus you told me yourself the cafeteria food was gross.”
Nory petted the skunks. “I feel like myself at Dunwiddle,” she said. “And like I’m learning to be my best self. I can’t say I won’t like the monkey gym here at Sage, but I want to wear my own clothes. And have a teacher who really likes me. And a principal who listens to my ideas, at least some of the time. I have a kittenball coach who thinks my dritten will be great on the field, and I have friends who understand what it’s like to be UDM.”
“Well, it’s true you won’t get any of that at Sage,” said Dalia. “But you will get me! And I know you’ll be all right.” She stood and offered her hand to Nory. Nory took it and stood up.
“Thanks for taking me here,” said Nory.
“I’ll bring you back anytime,” said Dalia. “Just let me know.”
The skunk garden had been glorious. The skunks had been glorious.
But the rest of Thursday was stinky.
Mean looks? Check.
Boring silence? Check.
Do this, do this, do that? Check check check.
At lunch, Marigold bigged up everyone’s corn bread and chocolate pudding, but Monitor Sorbee strode over with pursed lips when Pepper’s pudding cup ended up the size of a cantaloupe.
“That is too much pudding,” she scolded. “You’ll vomit if you finish it. Also, Marigold, you’re distracting your tablemates with upside-down
magic during mealtime. I insist you leave the food alone.”
“Yes, Monitor,” said Marigold, who then winked at Pepper.
Nory looked around at her friends. How could they be talking and winking and eating pudding when Sorbee was mean and they all had ties on? They seemed unreasonably happy.
Suddenly, Lacey Clench dropped into the seat directly across from Nory—and Sorbee didn’t even notice! How come Sorbee saw Pepper’s giant pudding cup, but not Lacey being out of her seat? Ugh.
“Why do you look miserable?” Lacey asked.
“It’s been a tough week.”
“What? You’ve got it made. You’re a Sage Academy student.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be here,” Nory said, sighing. “Have you ever thought of that?”
Lacey snapped. “Are you that wonky that you don’t even realize how lucky you are?”
“Not everyone wants what you want, Lacey.” Nory looked at her friends for backup, but they were all involved in other conversations.
Lacey rolled her eyes. “If you’re so unhappy, just wonk out and get expelled! Turn into your disgusting skunkephant and spray everyone. They will escort you right out of here, I promise you that. And then I’d get your spot. Which is rightfully mine, anyway.”
Nory almost laughed out loud. Imagine if she turned into a skunkephant right here in the cafeteria! She’d spray stinky skunk smell on everyone. And on the food! She’d break, like, seven hundred rules, and make Monitor Sorbee super mad, and … oh!
I really could get kicked out! Nory realized. They’d send me back to Dunwiddle!
Yes, yes, yes! That’s what she would do. That’s what she would do RIGHT NOW, before she could chicken out!
“Okay,” Nory said. “I’m going to do it.”
Lacey’s eyes gleamed. “What? Really? No! Really?”
“Yup, here goes!” Nory took a great inhale and thought of those dear sweet skunks in the skunk garden. Her bones cracked and popped. Her skin rippled. Then she invited elephant to mix with her skunk.
But something was wrong.
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