Chapter Four
I walk down to the canal and keep walking.
I follow the pathway away from the city and into Ancoats, walking under bridges that smell like piss, covered in graffiti, and over locks that are full and swirling.
Farther down in Keepers Quay where the riverboats moor up, there’s an amazing bakery on the edge of the water.
It’s a great place to stand and smell delicious things, fresh sourdough and recently made croissants, and sit on the stone benches and watch as the swans flock around the green-and-red patent houseboats, their white bodies vibrant against the dark water.
It helps today to be there and watch them swim in pairs, so graceful, and not think about Bastian’s puzzled expression, Carl’s poisonous delight.
My mind unhelpfully lingers on the words spread across the front of that bloody pamphlet—“depressed … manic … lonely … suicidal ideation”—then I’m suddenly back in the bathroom in May.
My breath so hard and fast, the splash of my blood on the white rug under the sink.
A leafy pattern, and the drops of blood are tiny rosebuds, perfect circles, becoming rivers—
“Hey.”
I look up, blinking, pulling myself back to the bench and the canal. Bastian is standing there, holding two cups of coffee from Ezra’s.
“Are you following me?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He looks down at the cups. “I didn’t know if you were vegan so I just got one with oat milk and one with no milk. What do you want?”
I stare at him for a long moment, waiting to see if there’s some clue in his face to what he’s thinking and why he followed me, but there’s nothing. Just an expectant anxiety that he might have bought the wrong coffee. Well, I think, might as well get a free coffee.
“Oat milk,” I say. He hands me the cup with a smile.
It’s annoyingly cute. Then he slides his satchel off his shoulders and sits down on the bench beside me.
We both stare at the water for a long minute, at a Canada goose shitting on the top of a fire-engine-red narrow boat, its feathers ruffling against the potted petunias on the roof.
“You didn’t have to bring me pity coffee,” I mutter, sipping it anyway.
“It’s not a pity coffee, it’s just regular coffee. Do they sell pity coffee?”
He leans back with his eyes closed, face tilted toward the sunshine. His dark eyelashes are ridiculously long, the lucky bastard. Mine used to be like that, in my last form. Now they’re gingery and practically invisible.
“So that guy, Carl,” says Bastian.
“Yeah.”
“He’s a twat.”
I sip my coffee. I could tell him that Carl Lord has always been a twat.
That when I first came to college, I was the youngest in my year by two years because of homeschooling, and I had a male form.
Carl wanted to be my friend and I thought we were.
It was a nice surprise, different from what my parents had told me to expect—that no one would like me or want to be friends with a shifter.
But I realized quickly that Carl didn’t have friends, only people he used.
I could tell Bastian about how, for the first eight months of college, Carl took me on a roller coaster of his affections, telling me he was my friend but also trying to aggressively slobber over me whenever we were alone.
I could tell him that when I shapeshifted into a female form before the summer term in first year, Carl took it as a rejection and the teasing and goading has pretty much never stopped.
I could tell him that being the toxic masculine gay leader has made Carl Lord the worst kind of bully and predator, who has monopolized a queer community that could have sheltered me and instead made it unsafe for me.
But what good would that do? Bastian is exactly the kind of person who will fit into Carl Lord’s pack of superattractive, superpopular queer witches.
There’s no point in me telling him what he’s destined to find out for himself, very soon.
“So that…” Bastian nods at my arm in its bandage. “You did that yourself?”
Lying will be completely ineffectual. I sip my coffee all the same, trying to hold on to the moment when he thinks I’m a tiny bit less pathetic than he will do in a minute.
“Yeah, in May,” I say, like the time that has passed makes it less painful. It doesn’t.
“Ah.” He looks awkward. Everyone always looks so awkward. Who knew that attempting suicide would be such a conversation killer? I half expect him to stand up and walk away now that my status as a nutter is solidly confirmed, but he doesn’t. He just sips his coffee and keeps frowning.
“And the memorial they’ve got up there,” he asks. “That was…”
“Elizabeth,” I say. “My girlfriend.”
“Elizabeth,” he repeats. “She died?”
“Yeah.” I swallow the coffee, wincing at the bitterness, praying he doesn’t ask how. Thankfully, he doesn’t.
“Your relationship was a secret, right?”
I don’t ask how he knows that. The gossip has been all over college, all over the covens of Manchester.
The spin on the sordid story usually casts me as a jilted lover, a weirdo who lost control of their magic out of jealousy, and Elizabeth, the sweet, popular bicurious girl who suffered the consequences.
I drink my coffee and inhale the canal air, the scent of fresh cinnamon rolls from the bakery, and the damp, earthy smell of the water.
I think about Elizabeth. She had always been on my radar, this beautiful girl, seen from afar, who was studious and lovely.
Then, at the beginning of second year, we had the same module, History of Tudor Witchcraft, and we sat next to one another.
“It was her laugh,” I say quietly.
“What?” Bastian asks. I look at him to see if he’s scornful, but he just seems interested. So I speak, partly out of a need to correct whatever horrible tale he’s absorbed and partly just to remind myself of the truth.
“Her laugh did it for me. We had to sit next to each other in a class and I made a joke about Anne Boleyn—”
“What joke?” he interrupts.
“Just a silly music joke.”
“Tell me.”
“Why?” I stare at him.
“I like silly jokes, indulge me.”
“It was cringey, we were doing this thing about how King Henry was trying to persuade Anne Boleyn to be his mistress and I said…” I flush. “If he liked it, he should have put a ring on it.”
Bastian stares at me.
“Did you do that old dance? With the”—he flips his hand back and forth—“hand thing?”
“Yeah.”
“So she laughed?”
“Yeah.” At the time, it had seemed miraculous. Her laugh was the opposite of her, brash and bawdy rather than tittering and girly. I loved it first, before I loved her.
“Huh,” Bastian says thoughtfully. “That is funny.”
I wonder if he always announces things he finds funny rather than laughing at them.
“And was that it, then?” he asks. “She was blown away by your quirky personality?”
“No, we became friends first.” I smile, remembering the notes we’d pass in class at the beginning and how we escalated to messages, to secret meetups, each step a milestone to me of a closeness I’d never had with a friend before.
I didn’t even care that we never hung out with her friends, or sometimes she’d pretend we’d never spoken.
I took every second of her attention as an unforeseen miracle, but soon they had piled up and my life was saturated with Elizabeth’s brightness.
“Yeah, she was popular but, like, she wasn’t stuck up.
She was nice to me, and she had this laugh and I just… ”
“Caught feelings?” Bastian says ruefully.
“Yeah.” I sigh. “Then we kissed this one time, randomly, and it … snowballed.”
We’d been the only two in the college library at the end of a cold December day, preparing for the practical presentation at the end of my module that would be 70 percent of my grade.
I’d been trying to make magic come out of my fingers to no avail for hours and finally, feeling like I was the worst person ever, I’d slammed my head into the desk so I wouldn’t cry.
She’d looked at me, leaned across the table, and pressed her lips against mine.
At first, it was soft, sort of comforting, but then I realized it might be my only chance to kiss the girl I had been low-key obsessed with for months so I went for it.
When I did, she made this delicious little gasping sound and her opal ring glowed with a creamy light. That was that.
From then on, I kissed her whenever I could, catching the train to Alderley Edge and walking to her house to “study.” She didn’t live in student accommodation, since her family home was only a quick train journey from the city, and while both her parents were at work, we watched movies, ate ice cream, had dreamy daytime sex, and listened to music sitting on her trampoline in the big back garden that looked out on the woods.
She was too scared of being outed to go on real dates in the city or to stay overnight at the student accommodation in Ancoats with me, but it didn’t stop the five months between December and May being the most perfect time of my life.
I realize my cheeks are wet. I brush tears hastily away with the back of my sleeve and look down, hoping he hasn’t noticed.
“But … you didn’t kill her?” Bastian asks hesitantly.
It’s weird, because even though the police and the coroner are satisfied it was a brain bleed from the fall, even though legally, I absolutely didn’t kill her, my parents, Elizabeth’s parents, the college, all the other students, even sometimes myself are absolutely sure that I did.
But the truth? Well, as always with me, it’s more bloody complicated than it looks.
“No.”
“So why do they say—”