I looked down at the table and shook my head. “It’s complicated. We just…we have some things that make us absolutely right for each other, and then there are some things that we handle very, very differently. We decided to take a step back and figure some things out.”
I was surprised when Borden laid his hand over mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry to hear that, Margot. Anyone who has seen you two together can see how much you’re meant for each other.”
I thought about it then, telling Borden about the rumors that were going around school, that he and I were a thing. That I’d seen the questioning in Nathaniel’s eyes.
But there was nothing here. Nothing but friendship and partners in resurrecting magic.
So, I kept my mouth shut.
“Thanks,” I offered simply. I stood and went to the fridge and pulled out the bag of green beans. “Want to help me snap these?”
It hurt being around Nathaniel that night. We all met together in the solarium like everything was normal. Mary-Beth tried her very best, but never accomplished anything. Borden and I went over the knockout magic we’d been practicing all day. Within a matter of an hour, Nathaniel had it down perfectly.
But he and I kept our distance at all times, staying across the solarium from each other. We rarely made eye contact. But I kept seeing him looking from me to Borden, with a thoughtful expression on his face, like he was trying to determine if the rumors at school were true.
But he never said anything, and to my relief, he never seemed to make up his mind one way or another.
My heart ached seeing him keeping his distance. I kept looking at his hands and remembering what they felt like in mine. I kept looking at his lips, remembering how they tasted. I found myself looking at his bed and remembering lazy Saturday nights, lying together underneath the covers, being totally innocent.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get that back, and it was killing me.
But the fact that I wanted it didn’t change the reasons why we weren’t currently doing it.
And that night, I left the solarium having hardly said a direct word to Nathaniel. Mary-Beth awkwardly said goodnight before heading across the grounds to go back to her dorm, and Borden and I walked silently down the sidewalk together, because his apartment was generally in the same direction I went to go home.
We said goodnight, and he walked home alone, further into town.
And for the next few weeks, things continued in the same way.
Borden would come over to my house during the day and together, we would work on magic. And we started making incredible progress. We both mastered transfiguration as far as it was outlined in the book. We could transform any ordinary object into something else that wasn’t alive. We started speculating if we could transfigure living things into other living things, including making ourselves look like someone else. But it was a risky experiment to perform, so for now, we left it alone.
We pushed the boundaries of our telekinesis. We tried bigger and bigger objects, and extending our distance, using the beach as our practice grounds.
Borden learned how to alter and steal memories, and the only way to practice was on other students at school. That was the test, to see if he could make them forget anything happened.
And over those weeks, I started doing mass amounts of alchemy. Every day, I created five new lumps of gold. I let them wait for four days before I trusted they were going to stay, but every single one of them did.
So, Borden and I started going around to every jeweler in a thirty-mile radius, selling the gold.
I made more and more money. I started stockpiling it and made my plan to make the offer on Asteria House.
And twice a week, the four of us would meet at the solarium to practice together. It was hard to be patient, because while Borden and I were progressing by leaps and bounds, Nathaniel was learning at a slow pace, having to balance school and his hours at the library. And Mary-Beth was still unable to do any magic.
I felt the dynamic changing. Where once Nathaniel and I were the directors of this group, the parents and teachers, it was now Borden and me.
And that broke my heart further.
I didn’t want to have one more rift between Nathaniel and me. But it was growing bigger by the day.
One week before school was out, I decided it was time to clear Mom’s office out. We had booked our flights. We’d gotten hotels arranged for the trip. Nathaniel and Mary-Beth and my father had worked hard plotting out what regions were best for us to hit. What they didn’t know was that Borden and I hadn’t booked return flights just yet. We were planning to stay however long it took to get everything we needed. And I truly wondered if Borden just planned to stay. And I wondered if, when that decision was made, he was going to try and talk me into doing the same.
I knew what my answer would be. I wasn’t going to move to another country. Harrington Massachusetts was my home, and I wasn’t making that sacrifice.
But for now, I had to face what I’d done. I had to make the necessary arrangements.
Already, I felt strange walking through the halls at the school. I felt like an outsider, when never in my whole life had I felt that way. This was my playground as a child, and now it wasn’t a place I was welcomed. The others walking around me were no longer my peers. They were students at the college in my backyard.
And for the first time, I started to feel like this kind of other. Not a student. Not just any other human.
I was a mage.
I was different from them.
And I even further felt the fear of them. There were so many more of them than me, and in the past, my kind had been killed.
But I also felt a little bit of awe. I could show them things that would blow their minds. I could do things that would seem godlike to them. I could do more than they could ever imagine.
And suddenly I had to wonder how no mage had ever used their power for evil and tried to take over the entire world. Surely there had to be some incredibly powerful ones who could have done extraordinary things and could have forced the world to bow before them.
Someone bumped into me and brought me back to my present surroundings. As I looked around at all the teenagers and young adults walking around with their backpacks and textbooks clutched to their chests, I felt confirmation again of why I was okay with this expulsion. My life had become so much more than their classrooms.
I walked into the library and cut along the bookshelves to work my way back to the McCallum room. I double-checked that no one was watching, and I unlocked the door and slipped inside.
Already, more than eighty percent of my mother’s things, and then our things, had been moved out. Every night before he came home, my father would pack up a box and bring it back to the house.
It kind of broke my heart to see it so empty. This was the one last bit of her that I had. My last connection. I think I had always held on hope that this room was going to reveal her secrets to me. And as of now, it had given me nothing but her knowledge.
I started packing her last few things in a box. Her journal. A few books that seemed useless to me. The jar of pencils that sat on her desk.
I jumped half a foot into the air when I heard the sound of the bookcase below opening, and one second later, Nathaniel’s head appeared in the opening.
“You scared me,” I said, letting out a breath as I turned back to what I was doing.
“Sorry,” he said, though I could tell he was distracted. He stepped into the middle of the room and looked around. “I keep wanting to ask about this place and learn it’s history, but I also don’t want to raise any questions until we’ve gotten everything out of here.”