Chapter 12: Makework

Monday morning came way too early. I made it back to the house before dawn. Surprise, surprise, nobody called anybody about my missing curfew.

I let myself in via my window trick.

Another day of school, but today felt different. I felt ready in a way I hadn't felt, say, last week.

One more week, I chanted. Just one more week.

Magic existed. Everything I had always thought was wrong. Heck, I'd already known half of what they taught in high school was wrong. What this really meant was that the other half of what they taught was wrong, too. What a good use of four years of my life.

I found myself wondering if there were day jobs for witches. Obviously, the carnival was on the table, but the thought made me feel squicky inside. Do you know what they make those women wear in carnival sideshows?

Pass. Hard pass.

I'd be eighteen in a couple of weeks. I felt weird thinking that.

An adult.

Not that Toby was living proof that being an adult really changed all that much. You didn't automatically get to opt out of all the stupid things people make you do as a teenager. You did not automatically get respected. You did not automatically find a good job.

From my point of view, the important part of becoming an adult was still going to be achievements: Obtain currency. Secure lodgings. Consume nutrition. Repeat until you die.

The thought made me chuckle as I slipped out my window again, this time fully laden with my backpack, my hoodie, and all my textbooks. Not that I needed them; last week of class, the teachers were really phoning it in, as per usual. But it would be just like them, to make sure we were nice and quiet little cogs in the machine, to give us in-class homework "for our own good" so we wouldn't get rusty before the finals.

I wondered what Mrs. Scarlett Humphrey would do with me in her class after the weekend we'd had.

Call me up to the board and take my illicit substances, I thought immediately. Well, not a pat-down.

But.

I stopped by the crosswalk and fished out the blunt from my sock. "I'd better not," I told it regretfully. I dropped it down the middle of the crossing sign's square section post.

Nobody'd find it there. Or be able to connect it to me.

The thought that I would pass a random locker or person check was an unusually freeing one.

In the end, I took my bike to school. I didn't have to, but there's something extremely freeing about being able to leave when you want to leave. Not that it was that easy, but if I wanted to leave school and go to the gas station, I could do that. It wasn't quite like having a car.

It was good enough for me, though.

School was pretty laissez-faire about the whole thing: if you show up on a bike, you can leave on a bike, unless your parents say not to. Or maybe they had had to sign a form at the start of the year. I wasn't sure.

School was the only place that I couldn't get away with walking my bike inside and putting it somewhere. I idly wondered if it was possible to get a magical lock. I could trade, like, cleaning Mrs. Flores' garage for one, maybe.

The idea had potential.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I read fantasy novels about kids who get magical powers, and they never think to leverage normal human interaction, like yard work. Not that there was any yard work currently going on in my neighborhood, but I'd swept my share of leaves. I knew my way around a leaf blower. Most of my yard work experience was actually 'leaf-adjacent,' upon reflection. There was a retired Navy man at the corner of the street with a big, beautiful oak that dropped all of its leaves every autumn, and he hated it. So along comes a spindly teenager willing to do anything for some pocket money, and I'd gather all his leaves up and burn them in an aluminum drum for him.

Did I mention he let me play with fire?

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea: do yard work or housework or babysitting in exchange for something to protect the most important asset I had in my life—my bike.

Mr. Oinkers, you may be thinking, is more important. No, no, no. That's not what I mean. He's not an asset. I think of him as the cop in this buddy-cop dynamic we've got going. He's gruff and serious with the deep voice, and I'm a wild card who's up to no good.

My school was probably built by committee; at least, I can't think of any other reason you'd put it at the bottom of four sloping roads. But there it is: you can coast to the school from anywhere, and it's uphill from the school to anywhere else.

Unsurprisingly, the septic drainage is terrible.

So, I coasted down to school and used my bike lock to secure my ride. I tied a complicated knot with the cable and just kind of half-heartedly put the lock pieces together and spun the dials. All you have to do is knock the lock against something sturdy and it'll open up again—as is industry standard—but if you knot the cable hard enough, it'll take too long to untie to be worth trying to steal such a crappy bike. I’d learned the double-constrictor hitch from YouTube videos for just this purpose—yank on my cable and my lock would pop open, but the hitch would clamp down and become nearly impossible to untie, being rubberized steel cable. Suck on that, Monica.

Real thieves would cut the cable, but real thieves wouldn’t want my bike.

Stupid Monica had no reason in the entire world to care that I existed anyway.

Most of the time, when you think about people who go out of their way to pick on other people, you think, Well, they must be returning the favor for something, or, I guess their home life is terrible, or, Oh, it's a crush, they're just not very good at communicating. Like that one guy who pulled my braids when I was... no, wait. That was Toby.

He was annoying when he was sixteen. Never got any better at communicating, but at least he's chilled out on the boundaries issues.

But you think of people going after other people for reasons. Monica's dad owned the gas station where I went for energy drinks. I saw her working behind the counter one day, realized I'd seen her at school, and said hi.

That's all it took.

She threw my bike in the culvert. (Did I mention the drainage around our school?)

Then she told the teacher I was cheating off of her in English class. English. Like “Yes, Mrs. Huxley, as you can see this essay we’ve been writing for the last twenty minutes is definitely derived from the chicken scratch she’s got on her paper over there.”

I wasn’t bitter, even if it was pants-on-head stupid to think someone would try to copy someone’s in-class essay.

Especially Monica’s.

My first class had no Monica. It would be the only one of the day, but I took the opportunity to get a bit further into my bodice-ripper from the previous night. The ever-industrious, plain-spoken but mysterious hero, Tristan, was fending off the advances of not one, not two, but three of high society’s daughters while refurbishing a clock-tower wreathed in climbing roses.

Coach Lawson raised his eyebrow at me but didn't call me out. It was the last week. We'd finished covering the sections of the physics coursework that he'd pledged to cover the week before.

Besides, how often was I actually going to use physics?

The temperature was definitely rising by the end of class: Nadia had arranged for both rivals to be simultaneously defenestrated, only for said leading ladies to be rescued by Tristan's last-second leap from the window, snagging both in his warm, capable arms.

I bookmarked it.

The rest of the day wouldn't be quite as nice.

Following physics, I had history, then English, pre-calculus, gym, lunch (why not lunch, then gym? So we wouldn't all be in the same room while sweaty? Because stupid), chemistry, biology, and I would end the day with French.

A complete waste of time, n'est-ce pas?