“All right,” Dad said. “That’s fair enough. Maybe we should have taken that more into consideration. And then cons?”
I held back a grimace. He wasn’t going to let me fudge this list. “I’ll be spending money I could otherwise be saving. If I have a few bad months in selling my figurines, I’ll have to dip into the savings I already have. I won’t be able to just pop up here and grab something to eat if I’m feeling hungry and lazy, but maybe that’s a good thing?”
“It won’t be as safe,” Mom said. “You’d be living around strangers.”
“I’m going to have to sometime, aren’t I?”
“It’ll be extra stress when you have your studies to focus on,” she went on. “And you’ll have a lot more pressure to keep going with your current job because you need that money, even if you decide you want to try something new that’s more of a risk. In some ways, you’ll have less freedom.”
“It’s not that we’re trying to keep you here forever, Rory,” Dad said. “We just want to make sure you get the best start we can give you. Why not wait another couple years until you can really launch a career for yourself, and in the meantime we can try to find ways to help you feel more independent here?”
It was hard to argue with that. There were tons of cons. I didn’t know how to express how important the one main pro was to me in a way they’d accept without hurting them a whole lot more than I wanted to.
As I bit my lip in thought, Mom smiled, her voice falling into the softer lilting tone it often did when she was about to work her magic. “I know you’ve been getting a little stir-crazy, wanting to do some traveling too, so I thought we could finally take that trip to New York City this summer—see the Met and MoMA.”
Her words did exactly what she’d intended. A spark of delight lit in my chest at the idea of jetting across the country to some of the most respected art galleries in the country. We’d done a bit of traveling as a family before, but only within the state.
With that joy came a knot of guilt as well. I was already planning my own solo trip—a week in Florence, Italy to see all the amazing galleries and architecture there—and I didn’t need parental sign-off to do that. I hadn’t decided yet whether I was going to wait to tell them until I was heading out the door or not until I was actually on the plane. Telling them now, months in advance, would only mean more arguing.
Mom couldn’t feel the guilt, though. As a mage, she drew on joyful feelings to perform her magic, so she was finely attuned to only that aspect of my emotions. With a soft murmur and a flick of her hand, she set my cooled coffee steaming again. A bit of comfort to ease the sting of their disagreement.
“Thanks,” I said. “And that trip sounds fantastic.”
“I’m looking forward to it too,” Dad said with a grin. “I’ll see if the Conclave has any special projects I can take on. I expect we’ll have plenty of energy to work with.”
He was a mage too. The two of them could turn any joy they stirred up in each other or me—or anyone else we ran into—into power. Dad’s specialty was healing. Around his ordinary accounting job, he volunteered at a nearby hospital, nudging people’s recovery along. Always be open to happiness, he’d told me when I was little, half playful and half serious. Every time I make you smile, it could save someone’s life.
Letting them turn my happiness into magic was as close to any kind of supernatural power as I got. From what I’d gathered from the little bits and pieces they’d revealed over the years, being a mage was hereditary. As an adoptee, I hadn’t gotten the genetic benefit, and there was no way for them to teach me when I didn’t have the power already inside me.
Maybe that was another reason I wanted to take at least a few more steps away from the house I’d grown up in. No matter what I did, I was never going to be as special as they were. Most of the time, I was okay with the fact that I was just a Nary, which was what Mom and Dad called regular people—short for ordinary, or as Mom had said when we’d had The Talk about their talents, Nary a bit of magic. Sometimes, though, the yearning prickled so deep it made me queasy.
I was ordinary, and eventually I was going to have to build a life with no magic in it at all. Might as well get it over with.
“We’ll come back to this conversation when I can convert some of those cons into pros,” I told my parents, getting up. Maybe they hadn’t been able to teach me magic, but they’d definitely taught me stubbornness.
I brought my coffee downstairs and through the laundry room. On the threshold of the basement apartment, I paused for a moment, taking a sip and contemplating the space.
I really did appreciate having it, and I wished it’d done the trick. Even though the apartment was cramped and dim with storage boxes stacked against one wall, it wasn’t awful. I just couldn’t shake the growing sense that the longer I stayed this tied to my parents, the harder it was going to be to stand on my own when I really needed to. Until I’d started the college classes this fall, Mom and Dad had been the only people I’d regularly spent time with. I had a lot of catching up to do.
My pet mouse, Squeak—not the most original name, but it was her first owner who picked it, not me—was scurrying around her cage, nuzzling at the bars. The sunlight coming in through the little window over her perch made her fur shine: pure white other than a splotch of black on her left flank. I popped open the door and let her scramble up my arm to my shoulder while I considered how I wanted to spend the rest of my morning.
I could finish the last bit of the History of Modern Design essay that was due on Thursday… or I could get to work on that phoenix figurine idea that had come to me last night.
I wavered for approximately two seconds before grabbing my bin of polymer clay and my sketchpad off my desk. Squeak’s whiskers tickled the back of my neck as she wriggled under the dark waves of my hair. Sometimes she liked to hang out back there like it was a nest or something, which, given how much trouble I often had getting those waves to behave, was kind of fitting. I started up one of my favorite playlists on my phone and sat down at the little kitchen table.
The first stage for any figurine was working out the design with pen and paper. I had to see what I was going to sculpt before I could start working on the actual pieces. My fingers flew over the sketchpad, bringing to life a fiery bird soaring up from a burst of flame. A giddy shiver ran through me as I filled in the details. Perfect.
It was going to be hard to part with this one, but now that I’d spent a few years building a name for myself online, I could make twice as much money selling just one of my little creature sculptures than I did with my three shifts a week at the art supply store downtown. I needed to pay for that Florence trip—and maybe to put down enough advance rent that some landlord would be willing to skip the whole guarantor thing.
When I was satisfied with the sketch, I started warming up the orange clay that would form the base of the phoenix’s body. Its tangy waxy smell filled my nose. The feel of the clay softening under my fingers always took me into a sort of trance that felt almost magical. My art was the closest thing I had to a special power.
I was shaping the lump of clay, humming faintly with the song that had just come on, when the ceiling shook.