Wattys shortlist 2021. One morning the sun rises a few hours early, striking levitating skyscrapers in Soliara ahead of schedule. People in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their watches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving...
"With a spell, bad memories can be eradicated, distracting embarrassments extracted. One could be made to forget anything you wanted them to." One could be made to forget anything that you didn't want them to see, anything that caused others to judge you, anything humiliating you had done. Anything that made them dislike you.
She kept this in mind throughout the whole class, and by the end, she felt inclined to agree with Fog. These lessons could be very valuable. She kept what she had learned in mind as they went together to mind-reading class with Willow.
"Don't pair with anyone you have built strong rapport with," came Willow's frequent mantra.
The best pillow in Willow's memory class was the large, flat navy one. Frost dragged it to the ideal position in the class. The best spot to glance from face to face, to check who was staring, who was judging. The constant soothing light from the wide windows and her pillow seat restored her peace.
Thursdays were for strings practice. Which meant Kudzu was absent. As if in hopes of torturing her victim more, Divine snagged Frost for a partner.
An endless stream came from Divine's head. On her turn, Frost ignored the message that repeated, "No good showoff, no good showoff" and instead, took the allotted time to explore the barrier partitioning the rest of Divine's thoughts.
The trick to discovering a spell seemed to be following instincts through rigorous trial and error. It was easy to visualize Divine's barrier as a stony wall strengthened with mortar and piled high. In her mind's eyes, Frost imagined that the wall was already full of cracks. The picture became a wall that was thin and poorly constructed. Unlike the solid ancient walls built by knowledgeable engineers, this mental barrier would be more like a wall of pebbles put together by a child on a beach. Wet muddy sand formed the foundation.
The young magician had followed no constructs of engineering. She had completed no calculations. She didn't even listen in class, as far as Frost could tell, so no way could the wise instructors' instructions and guiding tenets have found their way into the formation of the spell. She wouldn't know how to pack mortar evenly (metaphorically) or how to stamp building materials between frames (so to speak), how to balance irregular shapes, to reinforce weak areas, or how to determine which materials could bear the most weight. All of this was a construct Frost made up, but she knew she would be right about the strength of Divine's concealment — or lack thereof.
She relied not on a strong concealment spell but on the agreement of her fellow students not to try to breach it.
Running imaginary hands over an imaginary wall, Frost imagined that cracks and holes penetrated the barrier without her even lifting a finger to break through. Peering inside one gap, she saw the teenage bully preying on a girl who was smaller than her. A miniature of her, in fact.
As if peering through a keyhole, Frost watched Divine hit her sister, unaware that she was being watched. And moving down the stone wall, she peered in another crack, another memory, the little one chasing a mother halfway out the door with suitcases.
"Take Ruby," a sharp voice commanded from the fair woman who looked like the future of both girls. The elder sister grabbed little Ruby in her burgundy lace dress, shiny black mules kicking, pinning her arms. The little girl being abandoned kicked and cried with wet screams, panting until she had exhausted herself and went limp.
On to the next crack, in the calm orderly rows of mundane school where the only sound (at first) was Divine's voice in stream of consciousness trying to work out a math problem on a test. Then she gave up. "No one will ever know if I take the answers from someone else's mind." She broke Willow's oath in class in the middle of a test, scanning from mind to mind. As if a radio had turned on, voices filled the space, "You have to flip the y-axis now, I think. . ." and "nineteen X plus B times cosine" and "that would make the correct answer to number 13 . . . C." Without doing the work, Divine filled out C on number 13 on a bubble sheet in confident bold #2 pencil.
Inside another crack, Divine's mind-reading spells stole gossip, too, from the girls who sat with her in the cafeteria. The chatting was interspersed with ghost-like disembodied voices. The words coming out of mouths would quiet, and then Divine would hear continued commentary. After the girl seated next to her said out loud, "Oh yeah, Braydon wants you, Maisy," the stream inside her head went on, "But not as much as he wants Ari. Tough luck. Maisy looks so stupid swooning like they're getting married."
Through another crack, the passing back from desk to desk of A grade on a Spanish test she hadn't earned.
Frost scoured from crack to crack for Divine's real name, just so I didn't have to keep calling her a name that implied she was the queen of the heavens. Through one hole in the wall, the name appeared next to a driver's license picture: Frances Munster.
Frances. Didn't have quite the same ring to it. Though to be honest, it was a pretty nice photo for a driver's license.
Peering through just one more, there was 'Frances' lying in bed, belly down, legs kicking with black socks rolled up the knees, on a laptop. A familiar face filled the screen. Kudzu's. Frances was Facebook stalking him. Clicking through photo after photo in the album, she clicked a drop-down menu and clicked download.
Fodder for a prank? Or did Frances like Kudzu with a burning desire she couldn't fight? How had she found his real name?
Eavesdropping thoughts, most likely.
Yet as the time came to an end, and the class began to pack up, Frost had no time to dig further and find out.
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