Page 13 of Big Little Spells

I think on that and the words seem heavy with importance. I can’t move past them. It’s about how this looks. It’s about keeping up appearances. That means it’s also about complacency. Around the Joywood. And maybe within us too.

“They want us back in high school,” Zander throws out. “Like we’re teenagers under their thumb all over again.”

He’s right, but there’s something more to what he’s saying. I frown. All that static in my head, all those fractured pieces—it’s like they’re still inside me. Trying to find purchase. Wanting me to somehow rearrange them. I place my hand on the binder, the Joywood’s magic all around it, and try to see.

But I can’t, and my head begins to throb. It’s so loud it drowns out everything else. Beside me, Ellowyn puts her hand on my shoulder. She must say something to Jacob, because he reaches around her and gives my back a little pat and poof. The pounding inside me stops, and my head gets blessedly quiet again.

I force a smile. “Thanks.” He nods.

“I for one look forward to my mother marching down to the school and giving Felicia a piece of her mind the first time Felicia decides to call me a half-wit again,” Ellowyn says. She’s smiling, likely at the memory of her mother barreling into the school with actual flames shooting out of her eyes. Ellowyn certainly didn’t get her temper from the ether. “You know she’ll be only too happy to reprise her role.”

It’s something about the image—both what happened then and how it might happen now, ten years later—that begins to whirl inside me like magic. Like seeing. “They want us back the way we were,” I say, some of those pieces starting to stitch together, maybe. Something finally makes sense inside me, and it feels like a gift. “Powerless. Afraid. Humiliated. So that everyone in St. Cyprian is on board with whatever they do to us.”

“And Emerson wants us to let them,” Zander says darkly. “Because she likes her binder.”

“I don’t want to let them do anything,” Emerson replies steadily. “But I’m also not afraid of their little games. Or their tests. Or what people think. We stopped the flood.” She takes a bite of cinnamon roll, but then continues. Because of course she continues. “Also, I could put together a way better binder. In my sleep.”

I think about games and tests, and Emerson. Who was the perfect student back then and will be again now, no doubt. Who always went above and beyond. Who did everything that was asked of her and then some.

And who failed anyway, just like me, who did...none of that.

Now instead of just hanging us for treason, they want us to go back to the place where they won their unfair fight—where they wiped her mind and I ran away into exile. Because we couldn’t prove what we both knew then. Everyone accepted that the adults knew more than the kids, the teachers more than the students. That those in power always knew more than their subjects.

Ellowyn always says that people like things simple.

But it’s more than the fact that we couldn’t prove ourselves ten years ago. That the Joywood didn’t let us prove it. Not to them. It’s been pretty clear to me for a long time that they know exactly what Emerson and I are capable of and what powers we’ve always had.

What they really didn’t want was us proving that to everyone else.

Because that would also prove that the great Joywood coven, who know all and see all, were completely wrong about the Wilde sisters.

For our entire lives.

And they can’t have that.

“Emerson,” I say. My visions are fractured and still don’t make sense, but there’s something in them. Something about being here after ten years of a break from St. Cyprian that lodges the idea inside of me. So deep, so true, I have to say it out loud. “Did it ever occur to you that we didn’t fail the pubertatum?”

5

EMERSON’S EYEBROWS DRAW TOGETHER. “What do you mean?”

“We have magic, Em. I always knew it. And look at you—whipping up breakfasts and ghost power points. Killing adlets.” The scariest monsters in all the fairy tales we were ever told as kids. The ones that aren’t supposed to be real but she, the spell dim disappointment who earned her mind wipe, fought them off anyway when they attacked her last month.

She shakes her head, but she doesn’t look as certain as she usually does. “It was the adlets and their attack that awakened my power, and then Jacob and I got together and that cemented it.” She looks over at him, but he’s frowning too.

“Do you really think that you just came into your power? Randomly?” I ask.

“It wasn’t random.” She blows out a breath, but it doesn’t sound the least bit steady. “It’s a Confluence Warrior thing. That’s how the book made it sound.”

“If all of that power was in you all along, why didn’t the Joywood try to help you?” I ask, reasonably enough. I think. When I didn’t even know this argument was simmering inside me. “I’ve always seemed to have as much magic as anyone else. And enough to help beat back a flood in the here and now. Why didn’t they see that back then? Why wipe your mind and exile me?”

Emerson is blinking too much. “Because that’s the law.”

But she doesn’t sound sure.

And no one else is eating any longer.

“It’s divide and conquer,” I say into the quiet, to all those stares. “A divided house cannot stand and all that. It’s a performance, so everyone believes the Joywood have our collective best interests at heart. But what if they don’t? And never have. They can’t have us challenging them, can they? No one ever has. Isn’t that what we’re taught in school?”

---