Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Ispend the next two months fruitlessly attempting to learn magic.
Mom’s notebooks are full of information, but there’s nothing about casting spells. An internet search reveals nothing helpful—I don’t want to summon a demon or force anyone to love me. There are absolutely no free resources for fae magic, and I don’t want to pay for something that might be a scam.
Locked out of magic by a paywall. How depressing.
I brood about this for a few days until something occurs to me. Something so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it sooner.
Is my magic tied to water? Is that why Mom was so neurotic about water? Because she didn’t want me accidentally casting spells?
But when I stand in the shower and try to lift a bar of soap using only my mind, nothing happens. Naked and frustrated, I draw a bath for the first time in my life.
It’s nicer than I expected, sinking into the warmth, basking against the porcelain, which isn’t nearly as cold and unpleasant against my back as I thought it might be.
I let my eyes drift shut, prop my feet on the edge of the tub, and just sort of imagine the bar of soap lifting from its tray, rising higher and higher over the bath water, then to the edge of the tub, where my neatly folded towel and a napping Jolene await…
The phone rings.
Mom was the one the last few people on the planet with a landline, and the ringer is shrill and frantic. The sound sets my teeth on edge.
I startle, splash. Reach for my towel, remember Jolene, and sigh.
Nude and dripping, I make my way down the hall to Mom’s room.
Caller ID flashes across the phone screen.
It’s probably nobody I know, but I usually answer just in case it’s one of Mom’s old friends, someone who doesn’t know she’s dead yet.
But it’s just dial tone.
I slosh my way back to the bathroom, reach down to drain the tub (my concentration is shot now), and find myself staring at the bar of soap, completely submerged in water.
Did it fall in after I got out? Or was that the splash I heard when the phone rang? Is it possible…?
And if it is possible, am I going to have to perform all my spells from the bathtub?
Is that a bad look?
It’s probably a bad look.
For the second time in my life, I go to a swimming pool.
Then I stand there like an idiot.
No wonder Mom never brought me here. The smell of chlorine is the only perk.
The lifeguard is an annoyed-looking teenager, most of the swimmers are screaming children, and while I’ve definitely attracted the notice of some moms in lounge chairs, I’m a lot more worried about whether the water—let alone the concrete I’m standing on barefoot—is actually sanitary.
I got a staph infection once, and ended up at an urgent care at three o’clock in the morning, the boil on my back about to burst. Jeremy held my hand and struggled to contain his laughter. “It’s like the size of an egg, babe! How’d you let it get this bad?”
I didn’t know how to tell him that I was just really, really good at ignoring problems until they got entirely out of control. Growing up, there really wasn’t an easy way to deal with my mom, so I just… pretended nothing was wrong.
Anyway, Jeremy held my hand while I threw up from the pain and cried, and then the doctor drained the worst of the boil and gave me some antibiotics.
I was right back lifting weights two days later.
The damn thing came back twice more before the doctor convinced me that I was going to become antibiotic resistant and maybe get sepsis if I went straight back to weightlifting, so I spent two miserable weeks jogging every day instead.
After a few minutes, I convince myself that the chlorine has definitely made the water safe, and wade into the shallow end of the pool. The water presses in on me, cold against my skin. Each step is met with resistance.
It’s a foreign, almost alien sensation. And yet, something clicks into place.
I am where I should be, purrs a part of my hindbrain that I didn’t know existed.
As I sink lower into the water, a screeching whistle pierces the air.
The children let out groans of despair. I’m out of the water before I even know what happened, back pressed to the railing, heart racing.
The women on lawn chairs look at me like there’s something wrong with me, and maybe there is.
The lifeguard leans forward, shouts, “Adult swim!”
Oh.
This isn’t working out. The moms (and one dad) are ogling me. One is laughing. Another looks concerned. Another is definitely interested in my abs.
I have never felt more like a fish out of water. I am an adult. I could climb right back into that pool, into the water that calls to me, and be just fine.
But twenty-two years of warnings echoed through my mind as I walked into the building, stepped into the locker room.
My heart is pounding, and I have an almost irresistible urge to leap back into the pool—the deep end, this time—and dive under, to stay below until the air bursts free from my lungs in a torrent of bubbles, and I’m forced to inhale—
—and the lifeguard probably wouldn’t like that.
I don’t trust myself not to do anything stupid or dangerous, so I head for the locker room.
Maybe I’m a water witch. Is that a thing? I decide to look it up once I finish rinsing the chlorine from my skin, after I’ve changed back into my clothes.
A man winks at me as I pass him, wrapped maybe a little too modestly in one of Mom’s fraying pink towels. He’s tall, with a sharp jawline and dark eyes, and I look at him just a second too long, clocking the brand of his shoes, his shorts.
Wealthy. A little older. Just my type, and exactly the kind of person I’m trying to stop spending time with. I can’t help grinning back, running my hand through my hair just this side of flirtatious, but I’m gone before he can say anything, around the corner and fumbling with my locker.
He doesn’t follow.
I tell myself I’m not disappointed as I step into my shorts, my shoes.
Water witches, as far as I can tell, only exist on social media. If the fae use social media, they aren’t spilling their secrets or making themselves easily identifiable.
In fact, it’s been pretty much impossible for me to do any research.
Mom’s notebooks are by far the best resource I have, but I get frustrated flipping through them, trying to imagine her in class.
Why was she doodling water everywhere? In a few notebooks, I find drawings of a pregnant belly, a baby wrapped in blankets and feel a weird sort of embarrassed guilt.
I know Mom was pregnant with me when she graduated.
Based on these drawings, she must have been excited, or at the very least, not dreading my arrival.
It’s strange to think about. Mom was twenty-four when I was born, a mere forty-six when she died, pale and frail from cancer, her hair thin like an old woman’s. (Like a corpse’s, my brain supplies unhelpfully.)
To distract myself, I dig further into the notebooks, looking for any signs of a possible lover—I know I didn’t spring out of thin air.
Instead, I find that strange symbol again, and this time I search until I find something about sigils.
I can’t prove that this is a sigil—there are way too many magical symbols out there—but I think it makes the most sense.
Someone designed this symbol for a reason.
In theory, I might be able to work it out.
Sigils are made from the leftover letters of a word or phrase, once the vowels and repeating letters have been filtered out.
I think Mom’s initials are worked into the symbol, the N and M fused into one letter, but there’s something else.
A circle, and ocean waves within that don’t look like part of any particular letter.
I spend a long time trying to puzzle it out on a separate piece of paper. Part of an S? A G? Maybe a C?
I can’t figure it out.
Gretchen calls when I’m at my most frustrated.
It helps, to pretend to be happy for a few minutes, to let her prattle on in my ear.
Her daughter, my cousin Nora, is going to be moving into Mom’s house when I’m gone and paying enough rent to cover the mortgage.
She’s also going to be taking care of Bruce and Jolene, which I feel ridiculously guilty about.
I hate leaving them behind. I trust Nora to keep them safe, to take them to the vet and feed them on time, but a part of me feels like I’m abandoning my obligations.
I promised Mom that I wouldn’t let them go to a shelter, no matter what, and it hurts to turn my back on them.
They don’t have any idea what happened. They don’t deserve any of this.
What if Nora gets frustrated with Bruce?
What if Jolene goes outside and gets lost? She’s not an outdoor cat…
Gretchen assures me at least twenty times that everything will be fine. If anything happens, she can take the animals.
I want to throw up. I hate the idea of leaving.
But there’s a huge chunk of my life missing, and I’ve realized that I can’t effectively educate myself at home. If I’m going to learn more about my heritage and what I’m capable of, I have to attend Halea. There’s no other choice.
OK, so maybe I could track down one of the fae and convince them to explain things to me, but then I’d always wonder what might’ve happened if I just gave in and went.
Mom survived, so it probably isn’t anything weird, right?
No death trials or secret passages or anything else I’ve encountered in fiction.
I leave halfway through August with a backpack full of Mom’s notebooks, two of her matching suitcases stuffed full of the toiletries and clothes she’d bought me, and a heavy heart.
Halea University is nothing like I expected. It’s high up on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Gray, angry waves slap against dark, craggy rocks.
My stomach curdles with a combination of terror and awe. The moment I lay eyes on the sea, I know that it will one day lure me into its waters, and I will go willingly, longingly, lovingly.
I shudder and turn away, but a part of me is already yearning, desperate. I clench my fingers around the strap of my backpack, take deep breaths.
Is this some sort of contrarian reaction to all of Mom’s rules? Or something deeper, pathological? Is this why she banned me from the ocean? Because she knew I wouldn’t be able to resist its call?
Something is wrong with me. I close my eyes and don’t open them until the cab driver puts on the parking brake.
Towering pines encompass a great, emerald lawn. A stone wall surrounds campus, pale and foreboding. Moss crawls between crevices. Wrought iron gates swing open as soon as I step out of the cab.
Magic, or automatic like the doors at the supermarket?
I guess there’s only one way to find out. I tip the driver and haul my luggage inside.