"What?"
If it had looked like she was coming out the other side of her tears before, I surely wouldn't have thought that now. She was sobbing, wheezing, her whole body shaking, her hands making tangles of her hair.
She may have also been talking. If she was, it wasn't in any kind of language I could understand.
I sat beside her, the mattress bouncing up and down to accommodate my weight, and pulled her hands from her hair. "Rebecca. Rebecca, please...Rebecca!"
She flinched.
"Sorry." I said.
But at least that had snapped her out of it.
"Rebecca, I'm gonna need you to take a deep breath and explain to me exactly what you meant by 'Dr. Alvarado is dead because of me'."
She sniffed and nodded, taking in a deep breath like I told her to. And with the release of this breath came at last a string of coherent words. "There was this...this test for english. A big one that was going to count a lot towards our final grade. It was supposed to be easy too. Based of the reading we did the night before. For The Scarlet Letter."
The story of how a woman's life is ruined after being accused of being a witch being taught at a Witch School? Typical.
"A-and I tried reading it, I did. I even looked at summaries online, listened to the audio recording and everything but the words all just washed over me, like...and I just knew that I was going to fail yet another test in that class and I couldn't handle it so before I went into class that morning...I did a knowledge siphoning spell." She said this last part avoiding my gaze.
I sucked in a breath. Siphoning spells of any kind were the type of Big Bad magic that humans feared, the kind that were rarely looked the other way for. The kind that, if not done properly, can screw with your magic permanently.
"The teacher caught on pretty quick." She rushed on. "But she didn't know it was siphoning so I only got a week of detention. But..." She shifted, uncomfortable. "But I knew that the spell had done...something to my magic. It feels heavier now. Darker. Wild." She looked back at me at last. "And I knew that performing that suggestion spell wasn't going to end well as soon as we started it. I didn't know it would...that she would..."
"Why didn't you tell us, Rebecca?"
"I don't know. I didn't want you to know, okay?"
"What? That you were practicing siphoning magic?"
"That I was stupid!"
"You aren't stupid..."
"Am I not?" Her laugh was harsh and flat. "Do you want to see my doctor's note?"
It was my turn to flinch. I don't think I'd ever heard her yell at anything before, let alone a person. And I kept waiting for her to apologize, for this jagged girl in front of me to fold back into the meek Rebecca that I knew. But that didn't happen. She only grew more jagged, her eyes darker and sharper as she practically spit out her words.
"My brain doesn't work like everyone else's. Learning things, reading...it just doesn't work for me and I've never known why. The doctors, they give it all these fancy names like that changes the fact that everyone is always ten steps ahead of me when it comes to just about anything."
"You have a learning disability..." I nearly whispered.
She snorted. "Yeah. Big surprise, right?"
"But...plenty of people go through that, Rebecca. You don't need to hide who you are. I'm sure no one would even care."
"But I care!" Her voice was venom, and her eyes piercing fangs. "Let's face it, Cass! I'm a straight, rich, white, blond girl who writes paragraph long instagram captions and frequents Starbucks." Her hands curled into fists on her knees. "I wear flowers in my hair, I giggle instead of laughing and I prefer dresses to pants. I'm a big enough cliche as it is, don't you think? Being stupid too? Well, that's a little on the nose."
I didn't have anything to say to that. I looked at her and knew that I was a part of the problem. To me, she'd always just been Rebecca Lovelace, frivolity in it's purest form. I hadn't even been surprised when she told me she'd cheated on a test. And I imagined that if she had said she was a the top of all her classes I would have been surprised.
And then there was that confirmation of her unattainability. That word. Straight. And I know, I know of all the times now was not one of the ones to be thinking about this. And I know I had known all along. But it was still another stone in addition to the sixty that were already piled up in my chest. (Was it ironic that I had all these stones but not the one I needed? Maybe Alanis Morissette would think so.)
Still, I had to say something. Silence was a gaping chasm between us, growing wider and wider by the second, and it threatened to swallow us both whole.
"You aren't a cliche." I said quietly.
"Sure."
"Really, you aren't. I mean, you are very blond and very rich and white and...straight..." I indwardly winced at the word. "but you're also like, the kindest person I've ever met. And you're observant and strong and you always know the right thing to say. And you are smart."
"Cass..."
"No, really. I mean, between you, me, and Mallory, I think you've got the majority of our shared braincells."
She laughed, small and reserved, but she wasn't crying anymore. She wasn't yelling.
And if she did keep yelling and crying, that would be okay to. It wasn't for me to decide which emotions didn't look right on her face. I felt like an asshole for wanting to keep her image pristine and innocent. It was real male gazey of me.
"And I'd like to reiterate that all of us did that spell. You may not have known all the consequences, but I sure did. And Mallory's the one that suggested we do it in the first place. So if you think you can get away with claiming all the credit for this half assed assassination, you are all the way wrong honey." God I was spending too much time with Mallory.
But it gained me a laugh, a real one, from Rebecca, so maybe that wasn't so bad.
She bent over, giggling to her knees.
"What?" I asked, unable to keep myself from joining in on her laughter. "Too soon?"
"Way too soon." She said. Soon her giggles faded away with a sigh and she sat back up again. She looked at me and quirked her mouth in this odd way that I hadn't ever seen before. It wasn't the kind of smile that lit up her whole face, instead the glow hung around her mouth and eyes.
We stared at each other a moment before she spoke, just two strangers realizing how much they still have to learn about each other. "Thank you, Cassandra. I know you said you weren't good at comforting people, but you really helped me."
Luckily enough for me, the door chose this time to swing open, otherwise I would have asked her for her exact coordinates on the Kinsey scale, or if I was just miraculous enough for her to love me inspite of my gender.
"I swear to—oh, there you are." It was Mallory. Because of course it was.
Rebecca straightened and shifted away from me (or perhaps away from Mallory), and played with the hem of her shorts.
Mallory raised an eyebrow. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
"No." Unfortunately. "What do you need, Mallory?"
She smirked and tilted her head. "Nothing. It seems I've managed to do both our jobs for us while you two were doing...god knows what in here. I mean...not that I care of course."
Rebecca and I rose to our feet.
"You know where it is?" I asked.
"And the password to get past the wards, yes, I know, I'm amazing."
"Oh my god..." I said. "we might actually pull this off..."
Mallory crossed her arms. "Mm, I think the words you're looking for are thank you, Landry."
"Can we not right now guys?" Rebecca interrupted.
Mallory blinked at her.
"We've pulled nothing off until we actually have the stone, right? And we don't have any time to waste so...let's get going." Rebecca said.
Mallory actually looked impressed. "Okay, girl scout. I didn't think you had it in you, but color me surprised."
"Where is the Old Stone hidden, Mallory?"
She panned her gaze over to me. "Second floor, master bedroom, walk in closet."
I snorted.
"I know, a real gateway to Narnia situation. Anyways, the password is a a pretty easy spell, fire summoning. It really shouldn't be a problem for you."
"Again," I said through gritted teeth. "I didn't start that fire in the gym."
"Whatever. Are we going or what?"
I smiled down at her, "Lead the way, Mallory."
She laughed and turned on her heel, weaving her way through the party.
As we stumbled our way up the stairs, I noticed someone in the crowd below. I squinted, trying to confirm that it was him, and it was.
Seeing where I was looking, Rebecca attempted to follow my gaze. When she saw nothing, "What are you looking at?"
"Jesse." I shook my head, realizing she probably had no idea who that was. "My brother. A freshman who has no business being at a party like this." Especially not with that red cup in his hands, his arm slung around the shoulder of some girl I didn't know.
We may not have had time for me to go full big sister on him, but there was plenty of time for me to whip out my phone and snap a picture of him in the act. I had a feeling it was going to be very useful.
The second floor was just as packed as the first had been, but in a way this was worse, as it was a narrower space up here than it had been below. It wasn't too long, however, before the crowd began to thin, and the door to Felix Fletcher's room loomed before us. We knew it was his room because taped to it was a sheet of printer paper with the words dad's room, don't enter plz scrawled across it in sharpie.
Mallory laughed at the sight. "Come on, girls, this is it."
Felix Fletcher's room was much nicer than the one we'd seen down stairs. A full canopy bed with coffee colored sheets, a grand piano and a love seat, a plush carpet that I wanted the thread my hands through...
But my attention was almost immediately redirected to the closet. Double doors inlaid with silver script written in the Old Tongue. The magic that radiated from the sight alone was enough to bring me to tears and move the wind around my head.
And I could even feel Mallory's magic, a slight rumbling in the ground below our feet. And then there was this strange weight on the back of my neck, too hot against my magic, growing, eating—
"I should stand look out." Rebecca said, taking a step back from the closet, clinging to the door frame.
I nodded, knowing that volatile magic was the last thing we needed to be standing next to a long dormant relic of unimaginable power.
"I guess its you and me again, huh, Landry?" Mallory asked.
I groaned. "Don't remind me."
We approached the closet cautiously, my fingers twitching at my sides in anticipation, the wind gathering around us and the ground vibrating beneath us with more urgency. If I listened hard enough, I could just make out the sound of distant whispers.
Mallory was the one that turned the knob and pushed open the closet door to reveal...
...a closet. But according to Josh, the real secrets were at the back.
We exchanged a glance. I nodded at her and she straightened.
We were ready.
I grabbed her hand, just as cold as her magic was, and began about the work of focusing my magic into flame. From beside me, I could feel Mallory doing the same.
I raised our clasped hands as flames erupted around them, hot and wild. But despite the heat, our hands stayed cold. Slowly, we extended our hands outwards towards the back of the closet, and the plain wooden panel before us began to glow, to hum, to ripple. We placed our hand on the back wall, past it, and was surprised that there was still more space to go.
Deeper and deeper we reached into this abyss, almost to our shoulders when Mallory exclaimed, "Do you feel that?"
And as I looked to her to tell her that I did, in fact, feel what she was grasping, I noticed how close we were. I noticed how her eyes weren't just dark brown that looked black from far away like mine but glossy black disks floating in pools of crisp ivory.
I inhaled sharply, losing my focus over the spell, causing the flame around our hand to sputter out, and the humming that the wall of the closet had been emitting turn to screeching.
"Oh my god, Cass, are you—" were the last of Mallory's words that I could make out before my world was eaten by darkness.