Chapter 9: Grimoire

The little foster gremlins fled as I marched back to my bedroom. Posey, the youngest, was a pale little girl with the blackest little soul in the entire world.

I don't even know how old she is—maybe four—so it's not like her scope of possible evils is particularly advanced. But she still sticks her tongue out at me and makes crazy eyes as I pass her.

I checked that my door was locked. I unlocked it, then hurriedly rushed inside and closed the door, locking it again. I started locking my door after she peed in my bed.

I'm not kidding. Do you know how much urine can fit inside a toddler? Do you have any idea?

You don’t want to know.

It was a dark mirror to my normal daily routine. Most of the time, I come home from school, dump my books on the bed, and look at them with hatred in my heart. I sweep most of them onto the floor and do what I absolutely can't avoid doing as fast as possible.

That way, I can go to sleep.

I nap a lot. It's better than being in my room. Being in my room is better than being in the house. It makes sense in my head.

Today, when I emptied out my bag, it was the unaccustomed folder from Staples that Elsie gave me that I found myself staring at. Sure, I have math homework, but it's hard to care. There's only one week left of class.

I've done my homework every day for a year. Well, not every day, you know. Maybe not all of it. But I've done so much homework, it feels like for this last week, I should get a break. A girl can dream.

Besides, there was magic afoot in the world.

She had photocopied—carefully—pages from, I suppose it was, her grimoire, and put them in a plastic folder for holding the papers. It still had the receipt in it. She told me she'd give me a little of everything. She didn't expect me to pick everything up, and she told me we'd figure out what I was actually good at next Friday. But she also told me to pick up whatever I could, because the broader I can get my basis in fundamental magic, the more deeply I can dive into any specific category.

Which made sense to me.

She had scoffed a little—or maybe that was me reading into her tone of voice—when she talked about writing magical runes. Reading the pages she'd given me on the topic, I could see why. This was rote memorization plus handwriting. It appeared that the exact angle at which various lines intersected was what determined the function of a rune, not, crucially, whether or not it was similar visually speaking. The anatomy of the rune was the important part. I would have to make it perfect each time.

Nuh-uh. I'd do that only if I absolutely had to in order to do something else.

I put those pages at the very back, hoping to avoid looking at them again for a long time.

Racing through the pages, I eventually found something that caught my eye. It hadn't seemed like the most exciting thing when Elsie’d described it the first time, despite the obvious utility, but now that I'd actually cast something, the concepts had more weight. More... immanence.

Because I could use it immediately. If I could get it down—if I could make anyone I could see see anything I wanted...

Forget trying to sneak in cheat sheets. I'd make Monica see spiders.

Besides—D&D got it wrong. Illusions could make you feel things too.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Elsie’s sticky note on the back of the page made me snicker. She was a good read of character.

“This is an apprentice-difficulty conceptual framework which enables you to use line-of-sight casting of spells. I suspect telling you it’s hard is only going to make you more determined, so to supplement my teacher’s notes to me, here’s how I like to visualize it…”

Trivial.

In the end, it was trivial.

What teenager hasn’t felt eyes on them?

You just follow them back home.

Was the metaphor broken? Yeah—probably. It only works on people who can see me back.

Still.

I’d keep at it.

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I couldn’t get the fire to work.

Like, it was supposed to be THE foundational first novice exercise, used to check whether someone could even cast magic at all.

Maybe the gestures were wrong, or I didn’t know what they meant in context, but the candle flame burned steadily, sending up a plume of greyish sooty smoke up toward my ceiling. “Dad” smoked, so it wasn’t like it was hurting anything.

I was bored. I was restless, my belly having turned into a furnace and sucked all the heat from my arms and legs, and slightly food-coma sleepy, but I’d been reading for hours.

And staring at candles.

I had to go out. Or at least stop thinking about problems I couldn’t solve.

I thought about the joint I hadn’t finished yet. I thought about Mrs. Scarlett Humphrey.

I put it off. I just needed something to do.

So, I went to the library.

This may seem stupid for a couple of reasons. For one, I have a tablet. For another, I was already overwhelmed from too much reading, so going to do more seemed pointless. But actually, no.

That wasn't the plan. I was going to talk to Mrs. Huxley, the librarian, about whether I was doing the signs right and see if she was willing to be witchy in public.

I've read the basics. I know the genre.

There's some sort of reason that people don't talk about magic all the time, that people don't believe in werewolves. The most obvious answer is that there aren't any werewolves. But... there weren't supposed to be any witches, either.

I wasn't willing to write off any possibilities until I'd thought about it more carefully.

Or asked questions.

I was already writing a list of questions for Friday. Some of them were quite pointed.

Like: "Did you send me home alone in a world with werewolves in it?"

I don’t have to be fair ALL the time.

The library was a boxy cinderblock building with municipal brown and a letterboard with missing letters showing the hours of operation.

I had ages to spare.

My food coma had gone the way of the dodo the instant I got onto my bike. I love my bike.

I can’t tell you how much I love my bike. I have literally tied my soul to Mr. Oinkers, but my bike is the other non-negotiable presence in my future. Does that help?

So anyway I don’t trust bike racks. I’ve seen people open those locks on the internet. The tool? Other locks by the same manufacturer.

The bike came inside with me and I put it behind the checkout counter. Mrs. Huxley didn’t see me—it was story time, and she was at one of the little round tables, with attendant kiddos.

“You're okay," said the soothing voice of Mrs. Huxley. Strict though she is, her reading voice is lovely. “It’s all going to be okay.”

"NO, I'M NOT. I'M UPSET. We're all not okay."

A little kid sat next to a picture book, red-faced and grumpy.

I could wait.

I browsed the fiction circulars, spinning the wire racks gently to keep my hands occupied. I glanced up and saw her staring at me.

Didn't think you'd see me so soon, didja?

As I met her gaze, I rushed through the finger gestures, forming the words "Talk. Please?" in my mind in big, glowing letters. I could feel the tension of the spell building in the air around me like a static charge.

I followed the pressure of her eyes back to her.

It totally worked. Her face went suddenly blank.

She'd seen it.

HA! I am an immortal witch goddess! I am invincible!

I did a little dance and knocked over the circular with a crash.

I could have sworn I heard her clap her hand to her forehead.