Chapter Fifteen
Tuesday morning began more normally. Nothing went afoul during choir, and Chrys breathed a sigh of relief. Either yesterday had been a fluke, or someone from the Society had gone to the school last night and cast some wards or counterspells under the cover of darkness. Either option was fine with her.
It had finally gotten too chilly to eat lunch outside, so Chrys flopped down at the table she shared with Anushka, Isaiah, and (every other day) Luke. She’d been wanting to talk about the choir incident with someone, and she was feeling her lack of witch friends acutely. The best she could hope for was to overhear something good at witch school tomorrow night, and that felt like forever away.
“What are you moping for?”
Anushka asked, misreading her mood.
“I’m not moping.”
Isaiah poked at the slice of pizza on their tray. They’d forgotten their lunch and had been left to the mercy of the cafeteria gods.
“Sorry, no. That was a total moping face. And you’re not even eating tomato-sauce-covered cardboard.”
“Is it our English quiz?”
Anushka asked.
“It is, right? I hate English.”
Chrys rubbed at the bruised spot on her apple.
“The quiz isn’t until tomorrow.”
“Yes, but I’m pre-moping,”
Anushka said.
“I’ll be very prepared this way for when I get my grade.”
“I’m not moping.”
Ugh, was Chrys wrong? Was she moping and misreading herself?
This was stupid. She was being stupid. Her week had improved since yesterday morning, and she wasn’t someone who gossiped anyway.
Across the room, Lily laughed loudly. Every head at Chrys’s table turned in her direction, but Chrys held her ground and took a bite of her apple.
“So, Luke,”
Anushka said.
“I wanted to ask you … What the hell?”
She jumped up midsentence, leaving everyone hanging.
Chrys was about to ask what had happened when one of the cafeteria’s brown cardboard trays went zipping past the end of their table.
“What the hell?”
she echoed Anushka.
A girl shrieked, and someone yelled.
“Who did that?”
“Knock it off!”
another girl yelled back.
“Is someone really trying to start a food fight?”
Luke asked warily. He also stood and was using his height to scan the room for the culprit.
Obviously, Chrys had been too optimistic about her week improving. She should have known better than to think it on a Tuesday. Another tray went flying, this one covered in food.
“Hey, that was my lunch!”
a third girl called out, and the room erupted in more yelling.
“I didn’t do it!”
“Stop it already!”
The voices grew louder and more numerous, and Chrys closed her eyes in exasperation. A food fight? What was wrong with these people? It occurred to her, then, that she’d better keep her eyes open in case she had to dodge any projectiles, and she opened them in time to witness a stack of unused trays by the serving lines lift into the air and whiz across the room like a deck of playing cards.
“Did you see that?”
a boy asked.
In answer, another tray sailed by in the opposite direction. It hit the boy in the face and splattered the remains of indistinguishable food in all directions.
“You are dead, Cal!”
the boy called out, pulling pizza crust off his shoulder.
“That wasn’t me! It leaped off the table, I swear,”
came a response, presumably from Cal.
Not only trays were starting to fly. Chrys’s lunch bag twitched in front of her, and she slammed her hand down on it, her pulse quickening.
Magic. Again. Different, but no less unpleasant or more logical than choir.
Wetting her lips, she glanced at Anushka, who, although she might not understand the cause of the ruckus, knew what the wise call was.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The four of them grabbed their fidgeting food—Chrys’s bag wasn’t the only one developing a mind of its own—and rushed toward the cafeteria door as someone yelled out.
“Food fight!”
“Oh my god, I hate people!”
Anushka said, dodging as half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich missed her by inches and smacked the wall, smearing sticky goo everywhere.
“What has gotten into everyone?”
Luke muttered. As the tallest, he was partially hunched over, trying to make himself a smaller target.
The normies couldn’t accept that the trays were flying on their own, so they assumed someone was behind it. That much made sense. The who, the why, and the what of the spell—that was something else entirely. Like yesterday, it made Chrys’s brain hurt. It was almost as if someone had hexed the school, but who would do such a thing? Chrys despised high school as much as the next sane person, but this did not seem like a good way to deal with emotions.
And hexing Lily was? an annoying voice whispered in her head.
Chrys scowled, refusing to second-guess her choices. That had been a very specific, direct kind of hex. It was nothing like whatever this was.
A memory of the venom with which she’d spat out I hate you about Lily last Wednesday night, and the feeling of release that had followed, nearly made Chrys trip over her feet as she exited the cafeteria. Okay, fine. That had not been very specific. But that also hadn’t been a hex. It was just her venting. Totally different.
“Stupid,”
she muttered, and she shook her head at Isaiah, who’d heard her talking to herself.
“Everyone is acting stupid.”
They weren’t the only ones who’d poured into the hallway, and, unable to help herself, Chrys glanced over her shoulder to see if Lily had made it out, something irritatingly like guilt gnawing on her gut. She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. No words spoken in a fit of anger could be responsible for anything bad happening to Lily. If that were the case, surely witches would be harming other witches on a regular basis every time someone lost their temper.
There was no sign of Lily, but Chrys blinked at the doorway, a fres.
“what the hell?”
forming on her tongue.
Black lines were creeping out from around the opening. No one else seemed to notice them, but to her, they were clear as day and very … wrong was the only way to describe it.
At first, Chrys thought they were cracks forming, that the whole wall was going to tumble down and they’d all soon be buried in the school’s rubble. But she realized her error a second later as the tail end of the lines faded while the front snaked forward. They more closely resembled veins; they pulsed slightly, carrying their magical ichor to some unknown destination.
A cold dread swept over her, reminding Chrys of that momentary sensation she’d felt in the cemetery on Sunday. She couldn’t detect any off-putting scent this time, but given all the off-putting food being tossed around, she wasn’t drawing any conclusions. She’d also never seen or heard of magic like this, but there was no doubt in her mind that it was related to what had gone down in the cafeteria. How could it not be?
“Out of the way!”
Some boy pushed past her as more students ran out of the cafeteria, and Chrys stumbled backward.
In the second when her gaze flicked elsewhere, the lines disappeared. Chrys squinted at the wall, reached deep inside herself for that well of magic that would open her third eye as though she were scrying, but it was impossible to focus with the chaos around her.
Anushka grabbed her arm.
“Mr. Ogden is coming,”
she said, referring to the vice principal.
“Let’s get to the library.”
Only half-aware of what she was doing, Chrys nodded and let Anushka pull her through the crowd. Something very creepy was going on at school, like she’d needed another reason to loathe this place.