Gotcha / Magic Camp
Faith’s Note: This story has never been seen.
Never been read outside of a certain nosy, demanding PR person named Mud, and the editors.
Angie is twelve, Mud is sixteen, and they are at summer magic camp, learning how to use their magic.
And yeah, I know neither of them has magic like most witches do.
Yeah, I know they don’t really belong there.
Interestingly enough, they know that too. Mwahahaha!
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“My hair is not supposed to be puke green.” Angie threw the hairbrush into the corner of the girl’s bathhouse, where it ricocheted and settled, with a wood-on-concrete-block thunk.
“Could be worse,” Mud said, sounding too calm for Angie’s temper. “Could be actual puke. Or you could be growing leaves in your scalp at night, like me.”
Angie poked at her hair. It felt weird. It wasn’t curly anymore. “I know someone who would turn into a mountain lion and kill the person who did this to her.”
Mud snorted and lifted a strand of the mostly olive green, pepto-pink, snot gray, disgusting hair. “That someone is the Dark Queen of the Vampires, and queens have minions. She’d send one of the big hunky ones to get back at them.”
“Hunky?”
“Like Koun.” Mud got a goofy look on her face and her leaves rustled. “Sorta Viking looking. With all those tattoos. And that hair.”
Angie turned from the mirror and said, “You have a crush on Koun? He frowns. And when he talks he mostly grunts and looks to the side.” And he was a Celt, not a Viking, but Angie didn’t share that because, well, rules. And privacy. Stuff she had learned at the queen’s court when she was little.
Mud didn’t respond to the “crush” comment except to blush a little. She said, “Koun acts like that around you because you’re the Dark Queen’s godchild and because you got your magic as a kid.”
“That’s stupid. Koun’s a vampire warrior. He could break me in half. I know. He taught me to fight, starting when I was, like, eight.”
Mud shrugged. “Same reasons why the administrators wouldn’t let you attend magic camp until you were twelve.
Same reasons why the Cabin A girls pick on you like they pick on me.
Because you’re unusual. Atypical.” Mud plucked a leaf off her head and placed it in Angie’s hand, as if to illustrate that distinction, to show what she meant by being atypical.
She took the leaf back and tucked it into her overalls’ pocket.
“That means you probably have big magic, but you haven’t shown anyone at magic camp what you can really do. Which means you also have secrets.”
Angie controlled her expression and her breathing. No one was supposed to know about the secrets and Mud was saying that . . . everyone already knew.
“Also,” Mud continued, “you have connections. So they’re jealous of you.”
Angie had always been different, and different people were picked on. Always. Tears prickled under her lids and she blinked them away. “I just wanted to have a real friend.” Even to her own ears it sounded pathetic.
“I’m your friend.”
Mud Nicholson wasn’t one of the cool kids at Magic Camp.
Her real name wasn’t even Mud. She picked that one herself.
A lot of Mud’s differentness was on purpose.
Sometimes she let leaves grow from her hair and fingernail tips and she always had dirt under her nails from working in their garden plot and the greenhouse.
She wore overalls and boots and carried a five foot tall, beaver-chewed, oak stick like a staff.
She couldn’t fight with the staff like Angie could, and she didn’t have witch magic, a fact that made the mean girls giggle, but she had earth gifts that fell sorta into the witch category, which was why she had attended Magic Camp every summer since she was fourteen.
She was very different, which made her “less than” in the eyes of the cool girls in Cabin A.
Mud, however different she was, had what the queen would call presence.
But she sounded as lonely as Angie felt.
Tentatively, Angie said, “I’m just your garden friend, not a friend-friend.
You’re sixteen. Practically grown up.” She yanked at her gross locks, her ire rising.
“Plants listen to you. You get to help design new magics with the earth witches. You tamed that garter snake and it sleeps with you. And . . . And I have puke green hair!”
“Shhh.” Mud glanced out the door, peering all around in the dark.
She came back, nearly whispering now. “Not everybody knows about Sir Thamnos, and some people are scared of snakes, even nonvenomous ones. And friends don’t always look just like you do.
Sometimes they can be older, or different from you, and grow leaves.
” Mud scowled at her. “I’ve never made friends here either, in case you haven’t noticed. ”
Angie had noticed. The same group of cool, mean girls who picked on her also picked on Mud.
Carmelina and Jessamine—Carm and Jessa—were both in Cabin A, where all the older trainees lived, the ones who were in their last year of summer Magic Camp.
They were powerful teenaged witches from important witch clans, and they led their own small gang of seventeen-year-old mean witches.
Technically, Angie could turn her hair back to normal, but everyone here would figure out way too much about her magic if she did and revealing that secret was against Everhart Clan rules.
Angie was one of the rare witches who could work raw magic.
That made her dangerous should she lose control (she never did, not since she was a little kid) and put her at risk from people who might want to exploit her magic.
“We might as well team up and be friends,” Mud said, giving a weird shrug as if she was embarrassed or something.
“Really?” Angie said.
“Yes, Stupid.”
Despite her hair, Angie grinned. “No, you’re stupid.”
“I have to be, to like someone as spoiled as you. You’re what old people call a piece of work.”
Angie frowned at herself in the mirror over the row of sinks. “Not spoiled.”
“Humph,” Mud said, her tone disagreeing, though her next words changed the subject. “How did they turn your hair puke green, anyway?”
“Carm pretended to be my friend,” which Angie had wanted so bad. “She offered to help with the maths to imbue a malachite focal stone with a glamour charm. She ‘messed up’ on the math and directed the working at my hair. But she did it on purpose.”
“How do you know it was on purpose?”
“I saw her face.” Angie had really seen the magics leave Carm’s fingers and shoot to her formerly strawberry blond hair, not that she could say that.
Angie’s face flushed at the thought of what she wanted to do to Carm.
And couldn’t. Not only were revenge and direct attacks punished at Magic Camp, Angie had never studied attack magic, and the only time she had tried to turn her magic violent, she had hurt someone.
Maybe worse. Mama had never said so, but Angie had been mad and she thought she had killed.
She was too powerful to have that ability yet, according to her parents, and since Angie couldn’t give her power-level away, the accident-that-wasn’t left her with green hair.
Carm got off scot-free. She grumbled, “I want to get her back so bad.”
Mud shoved the leaves away from her face. “I’m in.”
“In what?”
“Holy Moly girl. I’m in on the revenge. Wait. You don’t want to kill them do you?”
“I don’t think I could get away with it,” Angie groused.
“I’m not sure that’s a good answer, Angelina Everhart Trueblood, but it’s at least honest. Friends?”
Not sure how friends were supposed to work, Angie held out her hand. “Friends.”
Instead of shaking hands, Mud laced fingers with hers and squeezed once before she let go. “Now pull these leaves outta my hair and help me be presentable or some random tree will try to pick me up on the way back to our cabin.”
Angie wasn’t sure Mud was entirely joking. She yanked leaves off and stuffed them into Mud’s overalls pocket. Together they snuck back into Cabin L and into lower bunks next to each other.
◆◆◆
“I could catch them with vines and hold them still while you cut their hair off at the scalp. Or make them trip while we’re on the hike and fall into the lake.”
“Anything with vines and leaves will send the counselors straight to you. They’ll blame you, and not me, and punish you. This has to be sneaky. And I have to do it.” Angie fell behind on the path to bite off and spit out the jagged end of a broken fingernail. It tasted vaguely like dirt.
They were taking the trail to the corner of the garden they shared as part of earth magic coursework.
Overhead, oak and maple trees met across the path, their shade muting the heat by a few degrees.
The route took them past the barn, which smelled of horses and manure, past the Earth Magic Shed, which smelled like aromatic herbs drying in the hot air, and the greenhouse where the older girls like Carmelina were working on projects.
Laughter echoed through the opaque plastic greenhouse walls and unidentifiable shapes moved, blurry and indistinct.
Mud had a place in the greenhouse too, but she only went there when she could be alone with the plants. Mud didn’t use magic workings like witches did, to make plants grow. She just talked to trees and bushes and seeds and they sprouted and rooted and grew.
Because of Mud, their corner of the garden was bigger and greener and had more plants than anyone else’s and Angie was learning all sorts of things about talking to plants.
Mud insisted that thinking the right “grow thoughts” make plants happy which made them bigger, stronger, and healthier.
Working with Mud, Angie had even modified two minor witch workings to keep away pests and stop weeds with runners underground from invading.
She smashed into Mud’s shoulders, nose first. “Hey what—”
Mud cussed.