7. Lily
LILY
Saturday morning dawned bright and mild, light cutting through the blinds in spears of milky pink.
Lily rolled onto her back, pulling her enormous stuffed dog over her face while she let herself wake up in lazy rivulets of consciousness.
As she squeaked over the warped floorboards to the window and twitched the blinds, not a cloud had the courage to hang in the sky.
A day this bright would punish anyone with a hangover.
She plotted out her day as she meandered downstairs to the cluttered kitchen.
It was late enough that The Couple was already off to the farmer’s market, and early enough that The Girls weren’t slouching down from the attic yet.
She ate breakfast at the kitchen table, propping her arcana textbook against the fruit bowl.
Gemma had apparently achieved her years-long wish and gone home with Sebastian Allsaires.
The two of them had passed her, carving a boustrophedon path back toward campus shortly after eleven.
Gemma had clung to his arm, looking more like a weight than a catch.
Lily had tried to get a read on his face as they passed, but Gemma had been screechy, drowning him out, if he’d been saying anything, and his face had been on the dark side of the fire.
He was playing later today, in the first set of Cantrèa bouts of the year.
She scratched a nail through the table’s ancient varnish, her neck warming as she imagined him in the match.
Lily had seen him play plenty of times since that day at the dueling club.
She loved the sport as much as any Magician, and somehow that ruthless boy made the intersection of movement and magic seem next to godliness.
Lily grimaced at her toast as she wondered if perhaps her love of Cantrèa was really a love of watching Allsaires play Cantrèa.
She pushed the thought away, not ready to follow the implications to their given conclusion, and turned back to reading about a separatist sect of Magicians in Tanzania that all supposedly shared Words of Power.
The day went the way most of her Saturdays did. It was easy to keep a routine when you didn’t have friends trying to drag you to brunch or fake-study at the library; when you didn’t have extracurriculars to attend because meetings involved voluntarily spending time with other people.
She studied all morning, migrating between her desk and the couch in the sitting room, and eventually to the swing in the backyard. She helped her mom rake leaves, helped Gran look something up on the internet, cast a cantrip for The Girls’ hangover without them noticing.
Around one, she biked to the west side of campus, going twice around the roundabout because it felt nice to lean into the curves and there weren’t any cars coming.
She chained her bike outside the Movement Arts building, and the weekend cleaner high-fived her in the entryway.
All of the staff at Windermere—from the dean to the janitorial team—were Magicians, but most of the students and some of the faculty liked to pretend otherwise.
If magic made everything better, what did it mean that some Magicians were left sweeping up after others?
Lily felt closer to the cleaning staff than her fellow students.
They were all outsiders in their own community.
The halls were pleasantly dense with silence and slow dust. She entered the key code on the pad outside Studio C and the lights chirped on as soon as her feet hit the linoleum floor. She slung off her bag, then moved through the motions of beginning her practice with a ritual slowness.
Around Christmas, nine years ago, one of her mom’s co-workers had invited them to her daughter’s performance of The Nutcracker.
Benignly curious, three generations of Perkinses bundled into the car and drove the five minutes downtown to the community theater, where they’d handed over cardstock tickets to someone’s mother who tried to upsell them on popcorn.
They’d sat in shabby velvet seats that scratched the backs of Lily’s bare thighs because she’d refused to wear tights.
Her mom and Gran had exchanged shrugs over Lily’s head as the lights went down and the music started.
Lily remembered almost nothing about the show itself until the grand pas de deux between the Cavalier and the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Two of the oldest teens had performed the dance, spinning and leaping together, setting the confetti snow to sparkling through the hazy air.
Lily remembered the moment with vivid, breathless clarity.
As the lights went down, she’d turned to her mom and gasped, “I want that to be me.”
And it had been. Twice. Her mother had picked up a pamphlet in the lobby. Lily had silently ogled and then had her picture taken with the Sugar Plum Fairy. In January they began the twice-weekly tradition of driving thirty minutes across the river for dance classes.
None of these kids knew she was a Magician; she was just another dancer suffering through pointe classes and rolling around trying not to laugh at their woo-woo teacher in Contemporary.
Last year and the year before, she’d been the one in the white tutu with a sparkling tiara and glitter in her hair, doing the grand pas de deux with Adam Avin, who could do three stationary back handsprings and was now at school in Montreal.
She’d been the one posing with weird little kids whose parents let them touch her even though she gleamed with sweat and smelled terrible, and it had been, incomparably, the best moment of her life.
Lily warmed up gooily, rolling around on the floor for a while before moving to the barre, and then into stretching.
When she was dancing, Lily felt like herself.
That is to say, she felt like Lily, a human being, instead of a collection of negative suppositions that people applied to her.
She felt vital and alive—full of hot blood and heartbeat, hard pumping lungs, and Magic.
She never felt Magic more than when she moved.
She loved the shape of the secret language her body spoke when she danced, the patterns and forms it left in the air; the way it stirred the dust with new currents of energy.
She practiced until her back ached, until her legs shook under her own weight.
Her bangs stuck to her forehead, her shirt to her stomach.
Ravenous, she wolfed a protein bar and headed for the showers.
She washed quickly and traded her whiffy leggings and tank top for jeans, a heavy flannel that had been her dad’s, and her canvas high tops.
She let her hair free of its tiny ponytail and raked her fingers through the long bob.
With a sigh, she hoisted her duffel into the milk crate on the back of her bike and rode for the Cantrèa complex.
She took a seat at the top of the stands as she always did.
Daphne wasn’t much for Cantrèa, but Lily spied Gemma at the front of the stands, in her signature scarlet.
Even from this far away, she looked hungover.
Lily leaned back against the wall, flapping a reading assignment open on her knee as she waited for the match to start.
The opponents entered from opposite sides, Everton Braithwhite first. Allsaires entered with his usual sauntering grace, as if it was a given that the world would stop and wait for him. This time, though, the world didn’t wait.
Chin in her hands, Lily watched him lose.