Fortunately, there were no guards around as I crashed out into the main tunnel, because I’d probably have flipped out completely if someone tried to stop me from getting as far from that little door as possible.
My luck held all the way to the nearest set of steps up into the capitol proper, where I finally remembered that I needed to act like I belonged if I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon in Aaron’s office answering hard questions or worse. I didn’t think my mom or Oscar would be at all happy to have to come downtown and have a chat with the capitol police. I’d spent enough time in the capitol on my various visits, authorized and un-, that I knew the quickest way out to the front doors and sunlight.
Once I got out there, I kept right on going until I was back on school grounds and down in the little drainage ditch behind the gym. By my watch I’d missed the class change and American Government, which meant I had forty-five minutes till the next bell rang and I could get in without arousing suspicion, so I found a sunny spot out of the wind and settled down with my book.
It was a fantasy novel with really creepy elf-like creatures that lived underground and had skin like stone, and I found my heart battering the walls of my chest once again as I read about them. After a few minutes, though, it occurred to me that this was probably where the whole sequence in the tunnel had come from—a book with a similar setting, and my own very active imagination. I’d scared myself often enough over the years that I’d pretty much convinced myself that was the answer by the time I dropped my trash bag in the can by Aaron’s office.
That answer was soooo much better than the one that included thinking about a talking hare or the weird feeling that had come over me when I talked to the principal. Because that answer meant I wasn’t going the way of my mother.
A thought occurred to me then that had never crossed my mind before: If I went mad, who would take care of her? I sure couldn’t trust Oscar to do it. It hit me like a rock in the teeth.
Please don’t let me be going the way of my mother …
* * *
“Rise and shine, Kalvan!” A woman’s voice, big, musical, and full of bombast—Evelyn Hulsing, the Free School’s drama teacher and my advisor.
Wait, what? I blinked my eyes open and it took me a moment to realize that I must have gone down super hard when I tucked myself into a beanbag chair in my homeroom after Oscar dropped me off this morning. Normally I just kind of dozed, but the clock said it was time for classes to start. Hopefully this Monday wouldn’t go as weirdly as the last one had.
Finally, I remembered my manners. “Hello, Evelyn. How are you?”
“It’s a beautiful September morning with the sun rising like Juliet in the east and the birds singing away as the seasons turn. How could I be anything other than delighted to be alive?” She spread her hands expansively, then swept past me on the way to her desk.
And that was Evelyn to a tee, always sweeping or rolling majestically, or stomping. She never just walked anywhere, and she never missed an opportunity for a grand gesture. She was five foot nothing and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she didn’t just teach drama, she lived it. I adored her for that, and it probably saved my life.
Because my mother. Okay, maybe I should back up just a touch, so that makes sense. I’m a dreamer, day and otherwise. My imagination is always running away from me. Sometimes so much so that I can get a little vague on the here and now. That would probably be okay if it weren’t for my mom. She’s not just vague on the here and now, she’s only an occasional visitor—a situation I really didn’t understand until I was around ten. Once it sank in, though, my own mental flights of fancy took on a much darker tone. What if I was the same way?
I don’t think I can possibly express what that means to anyone who hasn’t grown up with someone like my mom in their life, but it’s not good. Not even a little bit. It’s completely terrifying, and I’m not at all sure what would have happened to me back then without Evelyn. I ended up in one of her theater classes at about the same time the whole mental illness thing was sinking in and I started really freaking out.
It was an improvisation exercise about three years ago …
* * *
Evelyn stood at the front of the room by the stage.
“All right, boys and girls, this next exercise is all about creativity and learning how to let it take you places you didn’t know existed before you got there. I’m going to start the music playing and I want you to let it create a scene in your head. Once you’ve got a place to start, I’d like one of you to get up on the stage and start acting out that scene. We’ll do this a lot over the term, so everyone will get a chance to open a scene. This time we’ll just go with whoever comes up with an idea first.”
She smiled at us all. “But acting is as much about sharing as it is creating. So, next I want someone to get up there and join in whatever scene is going on. I’d like the person who started it to go with what the second person does and let them move the scene forward. As the scene goes on, I want more people to go up. If you run out of things to do, come down off the stage and make room for someone else. Ready?”
We all nodded, and Evelyn left the stage to start the music. I’ve always been a little shy, and I was petrified by the idea, but even before the music started, Dave poked me in the ribs.
“What?” I whispered.
He grinned at me, white teeth shining bright in the dimly lit space below the stage. “You’re always coming up with cool games for us to play, knights and dragons, or spacemen, or whatever. You should be great at this.”
I didn’t think so. I didn’t think so at all. But the second the music started, a picture started painting itself in my head. It was dramatic sneaky music, and I couldn’t help thinking of one of the video games I’d been playing the most lately, where you’re this super thief in a medieval setting. Half against my will, I found myself getting up off the floor where I’d been sitting and heading for the stage.
When I got there, I pretended to sneak in from the side and started trying to open the shutters on a window. It didn’t really exist, of course, but I could see it sooo clearly in my head. It was real to me. A minute or two later, this older girl—the Free School emphasizes working across ages, and you might have students in four grades in an average class—named Millie came up and started walking a beat like a castle guard.
After that, more kids joined in and it changed into something modern with a chase and a shoot-out, and I got shot and fell off the stage. It was a ton of fun and I forgot all about how real the unreal parts of my life felt for a while. But then, when the class was over and it was time to leave, Dave told me how cool my idea was, and I realized how much I’d believed it in the moment, and that scared the bejeebers out of me.
That’s when Evelyn came over and asked me to stay a minute after class. She wasn’t my advisor then, and I absolutely knew she’d seen how much trouble I had separating my daydreams from reality and that’s why she wanted to talk to me. I started sweating like crazy over going crazy, and it was all bad.
“Kalvan?”
“Y-yes, Evelyn.” Here it comes …
“You did really well up there today. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student your age leap into their first improv like that before. More than that, it was a good scene. You convinced me you were really trying to break into a building and really got the scene off to a great start. You have a talent for acting and a truly creative mind. That’s a rare gift, and I’d like to see you develop it. Tryouts for the school play will be coming up soon, and I want you to promise me you’ll come out for the auditions. Will you do that?”
I nodded mutely, and she smiled that huge, dramatic smile of hers. “Excellent! I look forward to it.”
I started to turn away, then stopped and turned back. “You really think what I did up there was good?”
She nodded.
“Because usually people are trying to get me not to…”
“Not to what? Indulge your imagin
ation? Live inside your head instead of the real world? Spend so much time woolgathering?”
“Yeah.” Woolgathering was practically Oscar’s favorite word for me.
“They’re wrong.” It was a flat declarative statement with no room for argument. She went to one knee, putting her face more on a level with mine. “Creativity is one of the things that makes us human. Some people have less. You have more, and that’s magnificent! I don’t know whether you’ll settle in theater or move on to some other art, but it’s clear to me that you were born to create, and the world needs that. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”
The next day we did more improv, and I was a bit less terrified to try it and a little more willing to let my imagination carry me away. And again, Evelyn encouraged me. By the end of the semester, I’d started to see my dreams as a gift instead of the first signs I might be going crazy, and I’d asked to transfer into Evelyn’s homeroom.
* * *
I still had days where I was afraid I might go the way my mother had, but I no longer lived in fear of my own imagination, and that was thanks to Evelyn. Lately, though, I was starting to worry again. Because if I wasn’t cracking up, then I seemed to be wandering headfirst into a Harry Potter novel or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
It’s a weird sort of problem. I read a lot of books with magic in them, and it always irritates me when the lead character spends a ton of time dithering about whether the magic is real or not. On the other hand, I wasn’t in a book … or at least I didn’t think I was. In my life so far, I’d run into zero magic and a fair number of delusions, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m more likely to believe in the latter.
The rest of my advisory group started trailing in after Evelyn arrived. There were fourteen of us in Evelyn’s group, which kept it small enough to feel like a family. Free is a tiny school with three hundred students scattered from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Dave and I are the youngest in Evelyn’s group, though we’ve only got one actual senior. Morning advisory group was just a fifteen-minute check-in. Afternoons run half an hour, and once a week we had a two-hour advisory meeting, as well as monthly whole-school get-togethers. I knew everybody within a few years of me, and even if I didn’t like some of them, it was generally more like not liking a cousin than the bullying and stuff that used to happen at my old school.
After check-in we all headed down to the cafeteria for breakfast, where I saw Aleta on the way to eat with her girlfriend. She waved and paused, but I just waved back and shook my head. Aleta’s seventeen and my student mentor, but we don’t otherwise run in the same circles, so I try not to bother her if I don’t really need it. Every new kid gets assigned an older student to help them figure out how to make it in the Free School. It’s a good system.
Mind you, it does lead to sharing tips and tricks for ducking out of classes and other things the adults would prefer we not do. Take, for example, hiding out in the gym wing of the school …
After stuffing a banana, some Froot Loops, and a carton of milk into my pack—I wasn’t hungry enough for a second breakfast quite yet—I ducked out of the caf and headed straight for the gym. I needed some time alone to get my head straight.
The gym’s basically a separate building with an enclosed hallway and some low stairs that connect it to the main school. It also doesn’t get used much. Free’s only phys-ed teacher also teaches math, so there’s only three hours of gym a day, all after lunch. That makes it a great place to hide out in the morning if you’ve got an open period and know the tricks for getting in—all of which Aleta taught me in my second year, once she’d decided I wouldn’t rat her out.
Trick number one is the lights. There are very few windows in the gym building, so it’s really dark and that can be kinda scary, especially at the back of the hall that runs along the side of the gym. To make things worse, it doesn’t have real light switches, just these slot thingies for light keys, but Aleta taught me how to use a nail to flip the switches.
The first switch was just inside the big steel fire door between the main building and the little hallway. As soon as I was through and into the darkness beyond, I bent down and felt around behind the radiator till I found the finishing nail we always left there. Once I had it, it was the work of a moment to slip the tip of the nail into the slot in the switch plate and …
FWAZAAM!!!
Blinding light, an impact like someone had hit my hand with a hammer, a sharp fizzy taste in my mouth, and fire burning in my head.
3
Hare, There, and Everywhere
THERE’S THIS MOMENT when something very fast and very bad has happened where you’re kind of sitting there full of nothing but blankness, trying to figure out if you’re still alive or not. That’s where I was now as I attempted to blink the stars out of my eyes and the fizzing copper taste out of my mouth. I honestly didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there.
“What the…” I mumbled, then jerked as I saw the words fly out of my mouth and take wing like little firebirds before each vanished into a puff of smoke when they hit the ceiling.
POOF, POOF …
It took me another long moment to realize the ceiling was directly in front of me … which meant I must be flat on my back. In turn, that meant the short flight of stairs that looked like I was about to walk down them were really above me and I was lying at the bottom.
I blinked some more and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The last thing I remembered was waving at Aleta, which reminded me of the gym, and … oh. I sat up and looked around. I was at the base of the stairs in the little hallway, about ten feet from the light switch, which … oh again.
The long black scorch mark on the wall was impressive enough in an I-am-in-sooo-much-trouble-if-I-get-caught kind of way, but that wasn’t what really grabbed my attention. No, that was the bright-red rabbit hanging by its ears from the switch plate. Its front legs were crossed in front of its chest in the classic disappointed-parent pose, and the look on its face made me want to melt into a puddle and drain quietly away.
“Um, hello?” I waved a hand vaguely at the rabbit—no, hare; I was pretty sure it was the same one.
“Jerk,” replied the hare, confirming my guess.
“What?”
“You heard me, jerk.”
“I … uh, do you need some help?”
“No, of course not. I love hanging by my ears where any mortal with half a hint of the sight could spot me at a minute’s notice. Or worse, one of the delvers might come by and decide to skin me. It’s my favorite thing in the whole wide world!”
“Oh, good, I’m glad you’re not…” I trailed off as the hare’s rolling eyes belatedly twigged me in to his sarcasm. Normally, I’m better with that stuff—it’s Oscar’s favorite parenting mode—but I’d had quite a shock. Both literally and figuratively.
“I’m sorry. Let me see what I can do.” When I stood, the whole world went purple and wobbly and I had to grab the handrail, but I managed to stay on my feet and drag myself up the stairs.
As I got closer to where the hare was hanging, I saw that the nail I’d used on the light switch had half melted, curving into a downward-pointing hook. Somehow, that had pinned the hare’s ears to the wall, though I couldn’t think of any natural explanation for that. Or, well, anything about this situation, really.
Closer still, I saw that the hare had a pair of tiny red stone hoops through his ears about halfway down, and the nail was bent through those. “I don’t suppose you know how I can get that loose?”
The hare’s eyes rolled again. “Conjure and abjure me, of course. I don’t know what they’re teaching you children these days.”
“Huh?” I realized my mouth was hanging open and snapped it shut.
“Do you have wax in your ears, boy? Or are you simply too dumb to know the meaning of words?”
“N-neither. I heard you, and I know what conjure and abjure mean.” I ought to; I’d read enough fantasy novels where someone s
ummoned a genie or demon or something.
“Well, then, get it over with. It’s your summoning. But you’d better believe I’m going to make you pay for it when I get my freedom back.”
“Freedom?”
“Are you sure you’re not an idiot?” asked the hare. “Because from where I’m sitting you’re really starting to sound like one.”
“But I didn’t summon anyone!” Which sounded whiny even to me.
“Then how exactly did I get here, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know. How did you get to the hill last week?”
“What the … wait. You’re serious.” The hare swore venomously. At least, I presumed he was swearing—I recognized the tone if not the language, which sounded very hot and crackly. Finally, he slowed down and gave me a hard look. “Tell me exactly what you were doing before I wound up here hanging by my ears and you ended up down on the floor staring at the ceiling.”
“I don’t know. The last thing I remember clearly is the cafeteria.”
The hare clenched his jaw for three long beats, opened his mouth, closed it again, then sighed. “Speculate. I presume you’ve been here before. How did you get here, then?” He waved a foreleg around vaguely.
I explained about the gym and the nail and the light switch, realizing for the first time that the lights were on—so that much had worked, anyway. “Do you know anything about how you got here?”
“There was a great burst of fire, and someone called my true name in the summoning mode. Come here and let me examine you more closely.” He looked me up and down. “Right hand.”
It was only as I extended it toward him that I noticed char on the tips of my finger and thumb, though I didn’t feel any pain. He sniffed at my hand and humphed.
Then, “Open your mouth and say ahh.” He practically stuck his head in there as I leaned in close. “Yep. That’s it, then. It’s all over you.”
“What is?”
“Words of fire, words of smoke, words of ash, and words of oak.”
“Excuse me?”
Magic, Madness, and Mischief Page 3