Page 14 of Magical Academy for Delinquents
Potts eyed me up and down. “Did you fake your transcripts?”
My mouth dropped. First she kind of insulted my car. Then she’d definitely insulted me. “No.”
“You’re a Darklight. I know you’re school-hopping, soul-searching or whatever. But you should have a handle on temp changes by now. Damn. You’re gonna be a lotta work for me.”
I shook my head as I neared the car and my fob automatically unlocked the Porsche. “Should have charged my mother more.”
She agreed as we slipped into our seats. “Yeah. Seeing this thing, I probably could have charged double.” She stroked the leather seats. “You’re spoiled.”
I shook my head. “This was dad’s old car, and I’d been begging him for it since I was eight. So, technically it’s a hand-me-down.”
“Still,” she snorted before pulling out her phone and pulling up a saved address. “Alrighty, I’m in charge of music. You just follow the turns the map shouts out.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “You aren’t touching my music.”
She just smiled, ignored me, and hooked her phone to my dash. Then she turned on the most godawful polka music I’ve ever heard in my life.
I slammed the volume button to mute it, but her hand went right back to turn it up as soon as I started driving. She turned the volume up bit by bit, slowly, smiling as I clenched my jaw.
I made it through two songs and about six minutes of driving. But when the third song started, I said, “I can’t listen to another one.”
Potts pretended she couldn’t hear me, until I reached over and turned the music off. “Oh,” She smiled at me like a lion smiles at a gazelle. “Don’t like the music? I guess you can talk instead. Tell me about your childhood.”
Clever bitch! I shook my head. I couldn’t help but be amused and annoyed. “I’m gonna find your house and pay someone to toilet paper it.”
“You aren’t allowed to pay someone. If you do the legwork yourself, you’re more than welcome. Childhood?”
I rolled my eyes and turned left as the instructions dictated. “Good. Normal I guess.”
“Favorite game to play with your brother?”
Memories drifted up at that question. “Matthew liked everything, pretty much. He really liked to make up scenarios. We were cowboys and space aliens at the park. We’d be underwater undercover agents at the local pool …” I trailed off as I remembered Matthew chasing me under the water, freaking out the norm lifeguards when he used his Icefire magic to lift the all the pool water in a frozen arch high in the air above him so he could run away, but melted it right behind him with his fire powers, leaving everyone around him in the water, forced to swim after him. Marco Polo with him had been a nightmare. It was only when Evan and I teamed up that we even had a chance. My lips curled into a nostalgic little grin as I got onto the highway, picturing Matthew’s freckled face laughing at me from the pool ledge. I hated my freckles, but I’d gotten lucky. Matthew had gotten a face full of them. He even had one on the bottom edge of his lip that stretched when he smiled.
For whatever reason, Potts gave me a few minutes to reminisce before asking another question.
“You two ever fight?”
The question tripped me up. Nobody asked that. Not about a vampire. That was about as bad as asking if a dead person had been an asshole. I glanced over at Dr. Potts, but she gestured back at the road. “Watch that bus, please, I’d prefer to get there in one piece.”
I drove for a few minutes in silence, trying to dissect her question. “He didn’t tell me that he was going to try to become an Unnatural, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not what I asked. What did you guys fight about?”
I shrugged. “Regular stuff. TV. He hated that I could change the channel to whatever I wanted with my magic. I used to make him watch Barbie movies non-stop.”
Dr. Potts chuckled. “You’re a true sadist. More so than me.”
I laughed. “I was just a sweet six-year-old.”
She shook her head. “Nope. Not buying it. What else did you fight about?”
I took a deep breath as my mind flickered through my memories. It had been three years since I’d tried to bring up a bad memory. I’d only ever brought up the ones that pushed me forward. “We fought about him joining dad’s company. I thought he should go back to his old dream of helping sea magicals.”
Potts grunted as she absorbed that information. She leaned an elbow on the car door. “What did he say?”
I had to dig deep to remember specifics. “Something about wanting to do something bigger. Matthew wanted to do what had the most impact.”
“And what did he think that was?”
