Chapter Two #2
I climb the last flight of stairs and push open the door to the common room, which makes it sound fancier and more austere than it is.
It’s the useless top floor of the building, all exposed crumbling brick and precarious hanging light bulbs.
There are tables spread out with various pieces of secondhand furniture around them, all of them wonky and uncomfortable and smelling of must. The threadbare velvet sofas by the giant floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over Manchester are considered the best seats, having the most stuffing left in them.
Since it’s the first day back at college, it’s busier than usual, with newly matriculated first-years all reading through their welcome packs, second- and third-years marking their territory, and fourth-years looking world-weary.
Carl’s already lounging across one of the best sofas as if he owns it, twisting his fingers in a sharp cutting motion so that his pink tourmaline ring glows and his hair changes from black to blue and back again.
His mates are laughing appreciatively. I don’t look at him, but I feel his eyes, the eyes of everyone on me.
It was like this the last time I shifted; I’ve only done it twice since starting college, so it’s still a novelty.
Even when I wear the same boots, the same coat, presenting a uniform for people to navigate, their eyes still pillage me, seeking out all the ways I am different.
I find a grotty table in a dark corner that has a chair with the seat nearly worn through and avoid looking at anyone at all. It doesn’t stop the whispers.
“Didn’t even go to the funeral…”
“Do you think they were really sleeping together?”
“I didn’t know they were lesbians…”
I sigh heavily and pull out my headphones again.
I don’t turn any music on, I just enjoy the way they muffle the theories and questions buzzing around me.
Part of me wants to tell everyone that I didn’t go to the funeral because I was banned by Elizabeth’s parents.
Her mum threatened to curse me to hell and back and looked like she’d sell her soul for the power to do it.
As for the sleeping-together stuff, well, that’s no one’s business.
I pull my summer work for my spellcrafting class out of my bag and look down at the various hand positions on the paper.
I can get on fine in my lore classes, they’re all essay based and are my highest marks, but witchcraft is an absolute nightmare.
I try my hardest to pick modules that are all written coursework, history, and theory courses, but everyone enrolled on the Witchlore and Witchcraft degree is required to take at least one practical craft course a term.
This term, it’s Twelfth-Century Witchcraft, and the tutor will probably despair of me as much as every other craft tutor I’ve ever had.
Taking a deep breath, knowing it will come to nothing, I move my hands in the correct motion, telling myself over and over what my parents and every shifter teacher I’ve ever had has told me since I was about five years old: Shapeshifters don’t need rings.
Use your shifting power, direct it to your hands, craft the spell.
… It’s supposed to be easy, innate, lifting off my skin like mist, traveling through my fingers just like it does for my parents, beautiful and terrible all at once.
Nothing happens. What should bring light and magic out of me is just weird hand movements, like I’m doing a daft shadow puppet theater.
I can see some girls at another table looking at me and smirking.
It’s been two years and I’m still the weird shapeshifter who can’t control their powers.
At least one thing is the same about this year.
“Hi again.”
Someone sits down beside me. I look up. It’s the new guy. He’s smiling at me. Again. I slowly remove my headphones and stare at him.
“It’s Orla, right?”
“I go by Lando.” I cover my work with my arms. I don’t want him to see how I’m still practicing first-year transitions. He frowns.
“I thought it was Orla.” He looks over his shoulder toward the group all lounging on the sofas.
They’re competing, moving their hands rapidly, racing to be the first one to cast a small breeze to make wind chimes sing.
Carl laughs when it glows pink, a corresponding color to his ring, proving it’s him.
I look at the new guy. I can’t understand why he’s over here instead of over there.
“That was a nickname my friend gave me last year.”
I can hear her voice in my ear. Don’t leave me, Orla.
“Shapeshifters change their names every time they shift gender?” His voice is eager and not at all scornful, but I don’t owe him an answer.
Some witches are like this at first, approaching a shapeshifter with excitement, but it always curdles and I don’t want to be the odd thing in the window of the curiosity shop that new people stare at.
“I don’t change gender.” I glare at him. This particular glare has always been enough to push everyone away. I can imagine exactly what he’ll say to the others when he swans back over to the sofas. Crazy shapeshifters, no wonder they’re so messed up in the head. He doesn’t move.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have … that was crappy of me.”
Literally no one at this school has ever said that to me. His apology leaves me speechless. He sticks out his hand with the ring on.
“I’m Bastian,” he says. “He/him.”
I don’t take it. I don’t like touching witches’ rings anymore, not after Elizabeth.
“Orlando,” I say. Everyone knows my pronouns.
“You’re a shapeshifter and your parents named you Orlando?” He sounds amused. “Is that an homage or a dig?”
“And you’re a witch named after one of the classic pieces of German fantasy literature so I think you can shut up,” I snap. I think this will surely be enough to send him running, but he smiles slowly.
“Most people think it’s short for Sebastian.” He fiddles with his ring.
“Yeah, well, I read a lot,” I mutter. There’s very little else to do when you grow up with no friends.
“So your parents were fond of twentieth-century queer literature, were they?” he asks.
There are plenty of queer witches (after all, they don’t have the reputation of dancing together naked under the moonlight for nothing) and there’s even a nonbinary witch tutoring practical brews here at college, but they’re twenty-five and they’re not a shifter so they don’t get shit for it like I do.
So I hesitate. I check Bastian for the usual signs, piercings or rainbow stickers or undercuts, and don’t find any.
He might be closeted, but a closeted boy is probably the last thing I need after what happened last year.
“Why? Are you fond of queer literature?” I stare at him steadily.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. So, not closeted. Just tall and handsome and sitting with me.
“I don’t know what my parents are fond of.”
“I’m sorry.” He looks genuinely sad about it. “They said you were…”
An orphan. Nobody at college ever asks what happened to them or where they are so I never have to tell the truth.
It’s easier to have no parents than explain the parents I do have.
The locked doors, the emotional blackmail, the appalling and weirdly affirming realization that even a hospital-mandated halfway house for mentally unstable teenagers would be better than living with them again.
“Did you hurt your wrist?” he asks.
“No, it’s a fashion statement.”
“Shapeshifters can’t heal themselves?”
“No, I’m not Wolverine.” I scowl at him and put my bandaged wrist under the table, out of sight. His eyes follow it.
“I could heal it for you, if you like.” He lifts his hand and twists it, the stone of his ring catching the light.
I stiffen. All witches can heal with brews (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble and all that) and anyone can make a healing tonic or two with ginger and lemon.
But a talented few witches can heal with stones.
Rings are inherited, passed down generations with different magical properties attached to them.
A healing stone is a rare ring, however, so rare that most modern witches would prefer to take a broken bone to the hospital than trust in the volatility of an ancient stone.
If he’s confident in his ability, he must be more naturally talented than most of the witches I’ve met.
I examine his ring. It’s a very traditional chunky piece, clearly ancient, yellow gold in a square setting that has lost the sharpness of its edges and runes graven into the sides of it.
The sapphire itself is oval and a dusty blue, not cut like a modern gemstone but smooth, like sea glass.
It looks so comfortable on his finger, as if eager to perform witchcraft for him.
I stare down at my bare fingers. I’ve been trying to learn witchcraft my entire life and I still can’t do the basics.
I can’t even control my shifting. I have a sudden flash of memory, my father standing over me as I cried, his face impassive as his body filled with light, the hair on his arms growing long and then disappearing, the disgust in his eyes still the same.
A shapeshifter who cannot control her powers is less than a witch, less than nothing.
We are made to be the strongest, not the weakest. I don’t know what I was made to be, but I knew I couldn’t make him happy and it was my fault. Always my fault.
“No, thanks,” I say. I would be a naive prat to let a strange witch use their ring on me. He has sexy eyes but he might be a secret douchebag. So many people are.
“Another time, then,” he says.
“Can’t wait.”
I am deliberately sarcastic but Bastian doesn’t seem to care. He grins broadly and nods, pulling a library book out of his bag and opening it.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I have this reading to do before my Early Medieval Brewing class in ten minutes.” He frowns. “Did you want to talk about something else?”
“No, I mean, what are you doing—” I gesture to his body, sitting opposite mine, and then to the various spaces at other tables around the room, implying the obvious question: What the hell are you doing sitting with me?
“Do you want me to go?”
“I don’t…” I go to pull my hair back from my face, that familiar smoothing motion of scooping long curls back into a ponytail, only to find the shortness of my new curls. The back of my head and neck suddenly feels very exposed. “Sit wherever you want.”
“Okay.” He turns back to his book. “I’ll sit here.”
I watch him for a minute, wondering if this is some kind of ploy and he’s going to start asking me if it’s really my fault that my girlfriend is dead, but he doesn’t. He seems to be underlining something with a pencil. I wait. He turns the page.
“Fine,” I say.
After all, what does it matter to me if some new guy wastes his time with the weird shapeshifter?
I have a sudden urge to tell him my version of things; it rises in my throat until I can taste the words on my lips: It didn’t happen like they say.
But I don’t speak. No one believes me, after all, and neither will he.
By lunchtime, he’ll have heard their version and he’ll never sit with me again. That’s just what happens.