Chapter 3: Tell Me Straight

Mrs. Elsie Pendergast ran over, ashen-faced. "Who did this to you?" she demanded.

At first, I had no idea what she meant. I didn't know what she was talking about, but it was such a weird day and I was so stressed, I just started babbling. Because someone cared, it all came tumbling out of me—everything about being so scared and unsure of what was going on.

When I finished explaining, I stared at her, trying to gauge if she believed me. Not only did she, but And then she said something I didn't expect. "I did this to you. This is my fault. I knew about the pig: I thought he was cute. I didn't see the harm. We both are to blame and owe you a debt."

"Both?" I asked. "You mean the pig?"

"Both," said the earnest-faced woman. "I think I see the best path forward. You've already befriended this animal. I think you had better take him on as a familiar. That way, his protections can partially compensate for the complete loss of yours."

"I don't understand."

"I'll walk you through the binding. I'll be your first proper magical teacher...And then… well, I didn’t set out to have an apprentice to teach, but here I am. I also didn’t set out to prevent neighborhood girls from eating my fruit."

"I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm."

Wait. Magic?

"I surmise the berries had probably fallen off," the witch said.

I nodded. Close enough.

"You didn’t mean any harm. And it’s my responsibility as the one who made the extremely dangerous fruit to keep it out of circulation. What you did wasn’t functionally different from throwing it away, except now you’ve ruined your life."

I must have flinched.

"Oh. I’m sorry, that was tactless."

"No shit," I said. Then, hesitantly: "I’d rather you tell me straight."

"Okay, straight talk. The world is full of things that would love to hitch a ride and puppet you around, and potentially suck up your spirit like a Slurpee while they’re at it, since it’s convenient. Humans have an immune system for that, just like you’ve got an immune system for measles, mumps, and rubella. And sometimes, like with a physical immune system, there’s a benefit to exposing yourself to a challenge to make you stronger. That's why I grow the strawberries, but that’s for mature immune systems, if you understand. Yours wasn’t prepared.

"So, it’s a lot like—and this is straining the analogy here—but I’m an adult and I want a peanut butter sandwich, so I get a peanut butter sandwich and I’m fine. You’re an infant and you get a peanut butter sandwich, and you die of peanut allergies because your immune system loses its mind over something so unfamiliar. That is essentially what happened here. Your body repurposed all of its magic to fight off the existential threat of a handful of strawberries."

"Five," I said.

"Oh, gosh, girl, did you want to die? Five strawberries," she said, shuddering. "And it repurposed everything—potentially including some of what’s meant for allocation for keeping your heart beating, etc. You may well be more sickly after this. It reallocated the resources because it thought you needed it to survive. And just like with the peanut, that was a bad judgment call made by an automatic system. We can’t necessarily do better than our automatic systems. They’re in place for a reason; without them, bad things happen to us. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not capable of going way off the rails and doing horrible things to us, too."

I nodded.

"What you have is called Aura Vision," the witch explained. "I’m sure you’ve seen the bubbles around different people, glowing different colors."

"Yeah," I acknowledged. "Yours is blue-purple and takes up the whole aisle."

"Well, I am 'open,' dearie. Everybody who’s open has a bit more to play with."

"And I am open, too?"

"You," the witch said, "are all the way open."

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"And that means I’m unprotected."

"Yep. It’s like the saying: Don’t have such an open mind that your brain falls out."

"In this case, you make it sound like I've just opened up my brain for the vultures to pick at."

"Excellent!" said the witch. "That was a very exact metaphor. I must be good at this teaching thing."

"Lovely," I complained. "My wise old witch is a sociopath."

"I’m just forty-two!"

It was a little later, at the Pendergast house. It turned out to be very nicely appointed inside, although she seemed to have a love affair with the color teal. The ceiling was sky blue, the floor was a deep navy tile, and everything else was teal or black paint over wood.

"Home sweet home," she said. "You can call me Elsie."

"I couldn't possibly do that," I replied.

"No, no, I insist. I love my husband to death, but taking his last name was an error."

"Okay, Mrs. Elsie," I said.

"You're such a good apprentice."

I searched my memory for Star Wars references from Anakin's point of view, but all I could think of was the deep, speaker-like sound effect of his breathing.

"Anyway, there’s no time to waste," Elsie continued. "We'll get you set up with your pig. Where was I? Ah, yes, Aura Vision. There are three basic starter disciplines in magic which I will be teaching you. You already have one: Aura Vision. Second, you must learn how to expel spirits from your own soul, given your condition. And third, I don't personally think you're a real practitioner if you can't perform the basics of object divination. If I give you a wand, I want you to know what it does. Simple enough?"

"Okay."

"I expect you to be here after class. Fridays are best for me."

"I can't do Friday," I said. "I have... with my foster family... I've got chores."

"Oh, I stay up quite late," she said cheerfully. "Just come by afterward. It won't hurt you to stay up late on a Friday night. Most of what I do, I do under the moon anyway. Magic's easier then—you'll see tonight."

I must've looked a little alarmed.

"I promise, when you have to take off your clothes, you'll do it alone in a room by yourself."

That wasn't as comforting as she seemed to think it was.

"And you'll sit with your back to the closet wall," she explained, "and I'll sit with my back to my bedroom wall. We'll have a wall between us. And I'll reverse the lock on the door so you can lock it from the inside and feel safe."

"You're going to make me go into your bedroom and take my clothes off?"

"Child, I am trying to be responsible here for the fact that the next time you go to sleep, your soul is going to drift out of your body and dangle like a tasty-looking snack."

"Can I have another adult in the room with you?"

"Would my husband being there make you feel better or worse?"

I was starting to feel a little bit trapped, and she could obviously tell.

"Okay," she said slowly. "I can see there isn’t a lot of trust here, and that’s okay. You don’t know me, and I could be a horrible villainess who wants to stuff you into an oven."

I didn't comment.

"I’m calling an emergency coven meeting," she said. "This is extremely urgent. You really don’t need to go home yet. I will bring seven women. I understand none of them are a social worker or a police officer, but would that make you feel safer?"

I hesitantly nodded. "I think that’s a better idea," I said.

She grumped. "I didn’t have to save you," she pointed out, but there was no heat in it.

She walked over to one wall, which I saw belatedly had a different texture than the others, although it was still teal.

"Chalkboard paint," she said. "Excellent for witching."

She took out some chalk and proceeded to draw a number of figures at a respectable speed. There was a certain rhythm to it. It was completely believable that she had drawn the same symbols—strange as they were—as many times as she had drawn English letters. There’s something hard to fake about that.

"Now, the traditional method," she said, "is that we allow students to branch out and select their school of magic themselves from the traditional twelve. I am only truly versed in three, but as you are not my apprentice in the usual sense, I would beg, borrow, or steal a reference for you to cover the basics if you needed something a little different. The problem in front of us is that, well...

"The soul interacts with the world by generating magic and trying to pour that magic into different things: spells, your immune system, the neurons keeping your body moving, you know, that sort of thing. The soul is tuned just a little bit differently in different people. It makes it easier or harder, relatively speaking, for them to perform certain acts of magic. This is all a function of your magical immune system—it determines what it lets through more or less easily. You can kind of let anything through. You’re currently incapable of differentiating. Any resistance you gain will be from the pig, which means that your school selection should probably be based on his resistances. Which I don’t know. And I can’t ask him, because he’s a pig. So, our first step is to bind you two for life, and then you get to find out what you get."

"That sounds like a terrible deal."

"That’s right," said the witch. "Which is why my happy thought is that what we’re going to do is try to teach you your first cantrip before you bond with the pig. Once you know it, any incompatibility will be less strongly affecting."

She gestured at the board.

"And so, the twelve classic schools—"

"Are there more?" I asked.

"Oh yes. Necromancy, and cannibal magic, and Trismagisten sex magic, and all those sorts of things. But we don’t do that sort of thing here. This is a nice suburb."