3. OH, THE DRAMA （ACT 1）
THAT AFTERNOON, THE SENIOR WITCH CREW MET ON THE QUAD, just outside Marlow Theatre, the brick walkways leading them toward one another like a preordained collision.
Fairfax was glued to Ames, his school vest undone in a way that only he could make look cool and not sloppy.
He marginally detached himself as Alistair swooped in from an adjoining walkway with a fist bump to Fairfax, a wink for Ames, and an air-kiss and arm-drape for Embry.
The diviner leaned down toward her ear. “Embry Woodcross, you are the only person in the world who could’ve convinced me to take drama as a class, and I still can’t believe I’m enrolled. ”
“The theater needs more dudes,” Embry exclaimed. “Plus, we all know you can sing, and this is a musical. You’re musical, and you’re a dude. This makes you the best of dudes.”
“Excuse me,” Fairfax butted in, faux indignant. “I’m the best of dudes because I joined sophomore year when you recruited me. Elton-Bentley put you off for two whole years.”
Ames poked her boyfriend in the sternum with one very sharp nail. “If you were the best of dudes, we wouldn’t have had to recruit you. You would’ve just intuitively done it.”
Rubbing his chest, Fairfax coughed, then laughed. “Maybe I didn’t want to seem like I was stalking you before I got up the guts to ask you out.”
“You asked me out on the first day of freshman year.”
“That’s why it took guts to do it again sophomore year. You’re terrifying.”
“I’m also the only person who has ever told you no.”
Embry was the reason Ames had finally relented and said yes, actually. Her first true matchmaking win. And these two were great together, even when they were having one of their more dramatic tiffs before the inevitable kiss-and-makeup session.
Ames booped Fairfax on the nose, which put her grinning face within inches of his and suddenly they’d resumed their canoodling while aimlessly progressing toward the theater steps.
Again, Alistair leaned into Embry’s ear.
“Do you want to start making out right now just to see if they can actually do that and enter the building without us guiding them? You know, for science?”
Laughing in answer, Embry grabbed Alistair’s hand and skipped ahead to navigate the steps for their indisposed friends, all the while gazing up dreamily at the building. “I cannot wait to see what this semester’s production will be.”
“Does it really matter?” Alistair asked. “I’m sure Miss Jones has something picked just for you. You’re her favorite student.”
Though a newbie, Alistair was right—Jonesy had a penchant for playing to the strengths of her class, and she knew she had a stellar group of seniors. Led by Embry, of course.
There was drama in drama class.
“Where are my girls? Why aren’t there more girls?” Jonesy looked as if she might actually cry. Medium brown face deepening to the shade of a ripe plum, she scanned her newly amended enrollment for advanced stage performance with absolute horror and disbelief.
Embry and Amethyst were the only two girls in the class.
Typically, twenty people were enrolled. Her entire Raven’s Head career, Embry had never been in this class with more than five guys/masculine-presenting people. Ever.
Something was definitely up.
“August Bell.” Embry waved her hands at the senior two rows over.
He was a neckless shifter with the personality of a freight train, but that made him unfailingly honest. He simply didn’t have the patience to beat around the bush.
Shifters made excellent private security in the “regular” world.
“Where’s Felicia? She’s always in this class with you. ”
Felicia Clawson was August’s girlfriend. He did everything she told him to do—including attending this class, which, considering Alistair’s and Fairfax’s enrollment, may not be that strange.
“Powder-puff class with Heston.”
Jonesy blinked owlishly. “But Julius knows nothing about makeup application. Why—”
August barked out a laugh so loud and, well, nearly feral, that it snapped her question in half. “It’s a new gym class. Girls’ football. It’s this hour. Heston recruited all the shifter girls.”
“Football?!” Jonesy nearly shrieked, the sound careening into a wail. Tears welled in her chocolate-brown eyes and suddenly she looked both much older and much younger than her twentysomething years.
Oh no. Embry shot straight from her seat and toward the now-sobbing teacher.
“Are you gonna teach us to cry on command like that?” August asked, completely serious. “That could be really useful.”
“Shut it, Bell,” Ames warned as she caught up to Embry. The pair of them blocked Jonesy from view, an acute triangle of the only double-X chromosomes in the theater.
“Don’t cry, Jonesy,” Embry whispered as the woman’s shoulders shook, the enrollment paper crinkling in her hands.
Technically a Glitch, Jonesy was an empath whose personal emotional reservoir was vast, deep, and prone to flooding.
Telling her not to cry was like telling the moon to divorce the tides, yet Embry knew if she tried a calming spell, it would only make Jonesy jolt with panic at her detaching emotions and sob harder.
“That dumb fairy did this on purpose,” she snuffled into one tearstained hand. Fairy was not a terrible euphemism—it was his magical designation. The gym teacher and football coach was fae. “To punish me. And now I can’t do Into the Woods like I wanted!”
“Why would Heston punish you?” Embry asked carefully, setting aside the fact that she loved that particular musical.
She’d watched both the Broadway recording and the movie many times with Rye on the worst of Maine’s winter days and may have written her own two-person spin-off at age thirteen.
Embry glanced over the top of the teacher’s bent head at Ames, who looked just as baffled as she felt.
Jonesy wiped her nose, an entire smear of cinnamon-hued foundation rubbing onto the back of her hand. “We were engaged. I broke it off, and even though it was the right thing to do, I’ve been so lonely for weeks, and now he’s punishing me!”
Engaged? To be married? Embry supposed the teachers were about the same age.
Midtwenties, nice-looking, and, well, shoehorned into this boarding school together for nine months of the year.
The faculty stayed in cottages past the lake, but the setup was a glorified dorm situation for adults.
Though living within spitting distance of your ex and working on the same campus would definitely not be the best of outcomes.
“Oh, he’s not trying to punish you, Jonesy,” August shouted, making it very clear that despite the wall o’ witch in front of the teacher, they weren’t soundproof. Should’ve tossed up a sound shield spell. “Heston told us to enroll to keep your class numbers up.”
Embry arched an eyebrow at him over her shoulder. “Us who?”
August gestured to the mass of muscle surrounding him. “The football team.”
Goddess help us.
Another sob burst from Jonesy’s lips. She pressed a quivering hand over her mouth a moment too late.
“He stole my girls and stacked my class with boys who’ve never acted a day in their lives.
I’ve been begging for masculine-presenting people for years and now I’ve got a windfall.
A windfall! Good Goddess, I’m going to have to get rights for Newsies. ”
Embry patted her shoulder. “Slow down, there’s no reason to change your plans just yet.”
Jonesy’s gaze raised, incredulous, furious.
“We can’t do Into the Woods with two girls!
Sure, I’ve got my Witch”—here she motioned to Embry—“and my Little Red Riding Hood”—and now to Ames—“but the cast is half and half. We could get creative with the gender roles in casting, of course, but it’s a musical and it is far too much to hope a half dozen of these boys can carry a tune. ”
Jonesy was going to make the head Witch of Raven’s Head into the Witch in the show? That was more than Embry could’ve even imagined—how tongue in cheek and—
“Newsies is a musical, too,” Ames pointed out gently (for her).
“Oh, no, it is. Maybe if they’re all singing and dancing, it’ll sound okay?
” Jonesy was the picture of downtrodden.
It was as if she’d been tackled by the football team instead of infiltrated by them.
“Why would he do this to me? Julius Heston knows my budget and how I already blew it on the rights and don’t get me started on the costumes—”
“Don’t change a thing; we’re going fix this, Jonesy.”
If anyone was good at solving problems, it was Embry Woodcross.
The teacher raised her eyes but didn’t seem emboldened by Embry’s confidence. “That’s sweet, but even the most talented of witches cannot magically make it all go back to how it used to be.” She grimaced. “And as much as I wish that man an everlasting hemorrhoid, there’s nothing I can do.”
A witch like Embry could technically give Heston an everlasting hemorrhoid, but she wouldn’t need to. “We’ll just balance out class enrollment if you give us a few days—no magic time travel needed.”
Jonesy sighed. “I appreciate that, but it’ll take me a week to get Martinelli to sign off on emergency funding to purchase a new show, which means casting will be in two weeks instead of one and that only gives us a month before opening night. I just don’t think we have the time.”
“We do. Just give us until the end of the week.”
Embry and Ames both nodded confidently, hands on hips, ready to get shit done.
They weren’t acting, though Jonesy had taught them well over the past few semesters. They were seniors, prefects, and popular. If anyone at this school could change the entire makeup of a class in just a couple of days, they could.
And Jonesy, bless her, knew it.
“Okay.” Jonesy shook out the sleeves of her adorably hippie-ish dress and pushed back her shoulders until she was standing tall again against the stage apron. “I suppose we could start by introducing the football team to the wide world of theater and go from there.”
Embry nodded, hoping her enthusiasm was revitalizing Jonesy’s internal empathic core. “Maybe they’ll surprise us in a good way.”
Jonesy smiled weakly as the girls returned to their seats in the very front row of the theater. “I don’t want any more surprises today if that’s not it.”
As if on cue, because it was that sort of day, a surprise walked into the theater.
Rye Knighton.
Jogging down the center aisle, artfully destroyed tennis shoes drumming on the onyx carpet, his customary button-up cuffed to the elbows and undone, a graphic tee from his massive collection layered beneath. He flashed both an apologetic smile and a brand-new lanyard.
“Sorry I’m late, Jonesy,” he called as he approached. “Guest pass shenanigans.”
“Oh, Goddess, really? They should know who you are! It’s only been three months since graduation!” Jonesy exclaimed, then pulled Rye in for a quick hug, because that’s just how she was. “I’m so glad you’re here. I needed some good news!”
Rye’s smile fell into true concern as he asked gently, “What’s going on?”
Jonesy immediately launched into a low-toned, hand-waving explanation of her very sudden and terrible enrollment problems.
“So, should I know who that is?” Alistair asked the front row group in a whisper. “Other than another guy when we already have about ten too many of those?”
Sometimes for a person who could literally look into the future, Alistair was really terrible at remembering anything he’d learned in the past.
“Ryszard Knighton,” Ames stated flatly. Rye’s big brother act was not her favorite because she did, in fact, already have three big brothers and didn’t need another, especially in her coven away from home. “He’s the broody beanbag next door.”
Alistair’s brows pinched. “That man is not from Miami.”
“Rye,” Embry corrected, because calling Rye by his dead father’s name was a bit harsh if accurate.
And then because she couldn’t believe Alistair didn’t know, given how long they’d been friends, and the fact that he’d been to her house many times and thus seen Rye’s house through the trees many times, she added, “He’s my neighbor. Last year’s salutatorian.”
“Ah,” Alistair said, latching onto one of those two statements. “The orphan.”
Embry’s heart squeezed. “Yes.”
“And Macbeth,” Fairfax amended.
“Yes,” Ames agreed. “And our Scottish king. Oh! And he was Hamlet the year before. All the tortured kings, that broody beanbag.”
Embry sighed. “Please don’t let Rye hear you call him royalty; his ego doesn’t need the encouragement—especially if he’s going to be in charge of us in some way.”
“Now his shirt makes way more sense,” Alistair commented.
They all squinted to read the wording scrawled across his tee between the brackets of his open button-up. TO QUOTE HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE 3, LINE 87: “NO.”
Had he been wearing that shirt this morning? Embry wasn’t sure. She just knew that apparently Rye’s gap year had spread from the coven to his alma mater. And the context clues indicated his presence wasn’t a surprise to Jonesy, nor was it temporary.
A fact the teacher confirmed by clapping her hands together, dark eyes nearly as large as Oakley’s under glasses she only wore half the time, as she leaped to her feet on the stage.
Then she proceeded to lavish Rye with compliments while introducing him to the class as the musical’s assistant director.
And, of course, because he was Rye, an hour later he couldn’t let Embry leave class without catching her eye.
He held up his hands in a stage combat version of self-defense.
“Before you say anything, Jonesy knew I was around, could play piano, and would volunteer if asked, so she reached out. Not to mention I adore Into the Woods—you know I do. How could I not?”
Okay. When he put it that way, Embry herself had a really hard time coming up with why he shouldn’t. So, instead she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that this morning?”
Rye knocked her gently on the shoulder. “So I could see that look on your face.”
Then he plunged his hands in his pockets and walked away.