Magic is an App | Book 1 | Chapter 9

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CHAPTER NINE

Lots of trauma going around

For a moment, the ground seemed to tip sideways. My thoughts scattered, panic bubbling in my chest.

“I know that kid,” I whispered.

The duel between two teenage gladiators in that ruined gym flitted across my mindscape like scenes from a movie, although it was hard to concentrate with all the buzzing going on around me. Brook-Sci’s students whispered in clipped but tense voices while casting curious glances at the paramedics wheeling their stretcher past the gathered mob.

“That’s Jack Dandy from the debate team, right?” asked a student to my left.

“Yeah,” murmured the kid next to her. “They say he’s unconscious—barely breathing.”

“Shit,” a third girl replied. “Dandy was my pick on the rehab list.”

Eavesdropping didn’t do me an ounce of good, because their whispered conversations made no sense to me. The name Dandy sounded familiar, though. It was one of two names I’d seen on a flier outside the ruined school gym. With this remembrance came another, one with a violent ending; Dandy Lion lying on the ground as Scum Blade stabbed his gut with a fencing foil.

Recalling that gruesome scene caused cold sweat to prickle my neck. Thankfully, no one noticed me cringe.

“Jack was one of the two guys fighting for my slot on the debate team,” Dre said.

“You were on the debate team?”

“Until the end of freshman year.”

Earlier, Guillermo had mentioned that Dre was being bullied by the debate team members, and maybe losing his place on the team might have been the reason. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t a member anymore, though. It wasn’t my business.

“Nerd,” I teased.

“Nerd turned athlete,” he corrected.

Right. He had mentioned something about being on Brook-Sci’s fencing team too.

“Move aside,” a paramedic said, drawing my gaze back to the stretcher that was now disappearing around the corner, which I assumed led to a parking lot in the school’s backyard that I hadn’t seen yet.

I could hear the sirens, though. They blared nearby, filling the air with tension.

It was a scene all-too familiar to me, evoking memories of the incident in my mind. Luckily, I didn’t get hit with another panic attack. Before one could fully blossom—and in front of so many students, too—I got distracted by a whispered conversation behind me.

“Didn’t think Dandy would lose. I lost a month’s allowance thanks to that idiot,” someone muttered.

“That’s why I don’t bet on the sure wins. They’re never hungry enough,” someone replied. “Survival of the fittest. It’s the law of the Coliseum.”

I whirled around, but instead of suspicious Brook-Sci kids, I found myself face-to-face with The Law.

“All of you,” Dr. Lawson’s eagle-eyed gaze drifted away from me and took in as many guilty-looking faces as possible, “return to your classes. Now.”

It was as if a bomb had exploded underneath the crowd. Brook-Sci’s students couldn’t flee the back lot fast enough. I got lucky, too, getting swallowed by the current of escapees before Dr. Lawson and the teachers she’d brought could get their hands on me. Dre grabbing my shoulder and steering me out of harm’s way might have also helped, though.

Soon enough, we arrived at the gravel alley where Hank’s crew had bullied Enzo, and I was quick to reclaim my backpack from the ground. But as I picked it up, I also caught sight of something weird. There was a splash of red staining one of the gravel stones beneath my feet. Tiny compared to the red lines I’d glimpsed before, and it wasn’t glowing either, which was an enormous relief, though I couldn’t help feeling repulsed by that red dot.

I jumped back.

Dre looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t bother explaining. I skedaddled out of that alleyway before stranger things could start up again.

It turned out that the reason Dr. Lawson assigned Dre as my guide to Brook-Sci was that he and I were in the same class. This made little sense to me because I’d recently learned Dre was talented enough to be on both the debate team and the fencing team. His track record didn’t ooze juvenile delinquent vibes, at least not compared to mine. Then again, Hank’s crew had let it slip that Dre might have caused an incident of his own last year. I didn’t bother asking about it. I was just glad he was around to guide me to the classroom for our last class of the day.

Dre thumbed the closed door we stopped at. There was a plaque on the wall next to it.

[2-F]

Just before I could peek through the door’s window panel, it slid open on its own, and the bald giant standing on the other side of them cast me a smoldering look that had one eyebrow arching up his shiny brow.  

“Son,” he said, his voice low and gruff, “do you know how late you are?”

Some people might consider me tall, but this tan-skinned dude was tall as a mountain, and built like one, too. The man had muscles on top of muscles that stretched his button-down shirt to its limits. He didn’t ooze final boss vibes like The Law, but he could’ve been her lieutenant, the half-giant you had to battle first before the big fight at the end of a dungeon raid could begin.

He didn’t believe me when I said I got lost exploring campus. The twitch of his goatee, the flaring of his nostrils—he obviously thought I was full of shit.

It didn’t help that Dre was chuckling behind me throughout my lying.

“You’re late too, Pascal,” the half-giant said, turning his smoldering gaze on Dre.

“Counseling took a while, Mr. Bones. You know how Valentina likes to be thorough,” he answered.

To be fair, it wasn’t like Dre could tell a teacher that he’d been stuck in a hellish reflection of the school while needing rescue from the gladiator-cosplaying delinquents who were torturing him. And since we didn’t know who to trust at Brook-Sci, a little white lie seemed like the right answer. Dre even compounded his lie by fortifying mine, telling Mr. Bones how he’d found me wandering around campus looking like a lost puppy.

Mr. Bones didn’t seem like the gullible type. But in the end, he sighed and said, “It’s your first day. So, you get a pass.”

He raised a finger close to the tip of my nose.

“Tomorrow’s a new day, and I don’t want you pulling this crap again, you hear?”

I nodded.

Mr. Bones stepped aside.

“Go in and introduce yourself.”

As I walked into 2-F, a feeling of déjà vu hit me. Push the tables and chairs up against the walls, plant some nasty-looking red vines on the ground, and it’d look exactly like the torture room I’d rescued Dre from. Remembering these details made it challenging to put on the emotionless mask I needed to face the eclectic troop of juvenile delinquents whose gazes followed me as I stood in front of the whiteboard that dominated the classroom’s front wall.

I felt the weight of their stares, hungry and measuring, as if they were sizing up fresh meat. The air was thick with the tension of unspoken hierarchies. No one spoke, though a few exchanged glances—some skeptical, a couple curious, but most with a glint of mischief that put me on defense.

I’d had similar encounters before back west, and I’ve cultivated the perfect response. Usually, that meant showing them my middle finger, letting these kids know I would be no one’s bitch. But remembering how I planned to keep my head down and be anonymous—at least here in reality—I opted for a wolf-eyed glare like I’d used on Hank right before our duel began.

In hindsight, it hadn’t worked on Hank, so I should’ve expected it might not work on these kids too. If anything, my show of aggression sent excitement streaking into the faces of the most hardened-looking thugs, and the only reason they didn’t jump at me was because tall and massive Mr. Bones was standing nearby.

“I’m Ollie.”

That was it for my introduction, which was met with silence and more glaring. Only Dre, who’d found his seat by the window, clapped for me. Three slow claps, and that was the end of my welcome.

Mr. Bones shook his head.

“There’s an empty seat in the back,” he said.

“Right,” I nodded.

On my way past the two dozen gazes fixed on me, I caught snippets of whispered conversation. Most sounded like Dre’s earlier questions. Rumors about how I was a violent criminal who’d nearly murdered someone, or that my rich mom got me out of a five-year prison sentence, and how I had steel implants for knuckles that I used to bludgeon a celebrity’s kid. That last one made me roll my eyes, nearly making me miss the foot that had extended underneath me.

I stopped before I got tripped.

Then I glanced to my right, my wolf-eyed stare blossoming once more.

The chubby kid who owned the foot clicked his tongue.

I frowned, but not because he looked disappointed that he’d failed to trip me, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen him before. It was the same sensation I got when I saw Jack Dandy being carted off on a stretcher, and I quickly realized that I’d just met the fat kid who’d stabbed him in bizarro Brook-Sci’s gym.

It wasn’t a comforting thought. I didn’t know his name, but I’d seen his weapon, and the way he’d smiled when he stabbed Dandy.

“What’re you looking at, probie?” he sneered.

I wondered where he got his courage from, or why he was dealing out so much aggro, and if I should ask him about the whole gladiator thing. But I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I’d been to bizarro Brook-Sci. So, instead, I sighed. Then I moved on. What else could I do in broad daylight?

I found my seat at the far end of the classroom. I dropped my bag and plopped my butt onto the wooden chair, and only then did I notice who was sitting next to me.

To my left, her head resting against the glass pane of the window overlooking the baseball field, was a girl whose gray-blue eyes seemed to bore a hole right through me just like her earlier comment of “Coward” had done.

Bella gave me the once-over, so I did the same—though her eyes didn’t just glare. They studied me. Like she knew something I didn’t and wasn’t planning to share. I also noticed I wasn’t the only one rebelling against Brook-Sci’s uniform code. Underneath her cream blazer was a black Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt. Although it was the kicks she had on that really caught my eye. She wore a pair of new Air Artemis’s with the limited-edition violet colorway you couldn’t get without celebrity connections. I knew this for a fact because I’d seen an ad for the sneaker drop countdown only yesterday at the LAX terminal, and even with Mom’s network, it’d be two weeks before I could preorder an all-black version.

Honestly, I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous.

She caught me staring a little too long though, and probably thinking I’d been looking at her shapely legs, muttered, “Creep,” right into my face.

Oof, this girl had a mouth that was like a Magnum revolver. Every time she opened her lips was a kill shot to my masculinity.

Why was she even here? I thought this class was just for delinquents like me.

I spun away, sighing. It was going to be a long hour. Thankfully, Mr. Bones, who looked nothing like any science teacher I’d ever had, taught physics, and physics was something I understood better than high school cliques.

So, after he reminded everyone not to get too worked up about the “Dandy situation,” because “He’s just overworked like the others,” as if implying that this wasn’t the first time this happened, Mr. Bones restarted class with a question I thought was almost as intriguing as discovering that today wasn’t the first time a student was found half-dead on campus grounds.

“How can energy, which is intangible, become physical matter?”

A lot of hands came up. Not Dre or Bella, but more than I’d expect from a class of juvenile delinquents.

“E equals MC squared,” a Hispanic girl in pink dreadlocks answered.

Of course, Einstein’s equation was the most obvious response, but I didn’t think it was the best answer. If we got down to the core of Mr. Bones’s question, the how of it all, then the complex process of high-energy collisions, like what you’d see in particle accelerator experiments, would be my answer. But since I didn’t raise my hand, someone else got it right.

The kid who got it was a tall African American boy with a buzz-cut, who, after being told he was correct, got bombarded by crunched-up paper bombs from the kids sitting around him.

“Nerd,” they teased.

“Show-off,” they pestered.

“Loser,” they jeered.

And coming from students who’d had their hands raised only moments ago, too.

Anyway, getting it right wasn’t what interested me. It was the question itself—energy turning into matter—that got the gears in my head turning. I wondered about the opposite, how matter could become energy, or at least something close enough to it that a being of matter could become intangible.

How does Ghost work if seen through the lens of physics, and can science even explain magic?

It was a question that hounded me even after school, my commute, and to 279 68^(th) Street where a surprise was waiting for me. Two, in fact.

I was dead tired when I opened the front door with my new key, and I discovered Aunt Odette waiting for me on the other side of it. With her hands pressed to her hips, I assumed she’d been waiting there long enough for her mood to turn sour.

“You missed most of your classes on your first day.”

It wasn’t a question.

“How’d you know?”

“The school called.”

Of course, they did.

“I don’t know how that’s possible since I dropped you off right in front of the high school building.”

The judgment leaked out of Aunt Odette’s voice, but it was the disappointed look she gave me that made me feel like shit, even though I was simply a victim of supernatural circumstances. I would’ve spilled my guts out to her if I could, because the weight of this secret was something I wasn’t sure I could handle. She wouldn’t have believed me, though. She didn’t even believe the lie that I’d gotten lost on campus for over four hours, and it wasn’t even a lie.

“You have one chance to get this right, Ollie.” Aunt Odette’s frown deepened. “I won’t let you throw it away.”

Old me would’ve protested that I was being treated unfairly, and that I hadn’t messed up, at least not by choice. But again, a cone of silence closed over me. Some things you just can’t share, especially with an adult who had her FBI badge dangling from her neck.

Fortunately, something else caught my eye that flipped the situation around. Next to the side table were three big boxes, each one carrying the label of being shipped from my old home address in Bel Air. At a guess, I assumed those stuffed boxes carried the clothes, toys, classic vinyl, and books I’d left behind in my room because I was silly enough to dream that I might one day get to go home. Mom had different ideas.

Aunt Odette followed my gaze, and her disapproving frown morphed into one of sympathy. “Ollie…”

The one bright side of having reality take a dump on me was that Aunt Odette couldn’t be mad at me anymore.

“Come on, let’s go eat.” She lightly kicked the bottom of the biggest box. “We can deal with these later.”

I shrugged. “I’m not hungry.”

“Not even for Japanese?” She asked, eyeing me knowingly.

There were two people in the world who knew what my favorite food was. Ironically, neither was Mom. One was someone I’ll probably never speak to again, and the other was my favorite aunt.

“I’m craving a side dish of tempura to go with my donburi. How about you?” Aunt Odette asked.

“Seriously?” I watched her pick up her purse and car keys from the side table. “We’re going out?”

“I know a place that serves great Japanese food near the Barclays Center,” she said, reaching past me to open the door.

The corners of my mouth twitched upward.

“What about curfew?”

“Suspended for the night.”

Aunt Odette’s nose wrinkled.

“Why do you smell so moldy?”

While feigning ignorance, I shook off my school coat before I rushed my aunt out the door. No way I’d let her change her mind over borrowed clothes.

“You know, I guess I could eat,” I said.

Going out for dinner was something I sorely missed because Mom kept me home for two entire months after the incident, leaving me behind even during family dinners or advanced movie screenings as if I were the boy-Cinderella hidden away with the rats. I think Aunt Odette knew this, which was why she was now giving Mom the proverbial middle finger for making her son feel like shit with those boxes. Regardless, I was just grateful, and Aunt Odette hadn’t lied; the food at Mr. Don was great, with golden-fried tempura and a mayonnaise-based sauce being a highlight of dinner.

Brooklyn’s vibe at night was awesome. Comforting.

For a short while, as I devoured the vanilla shake Aunt Odette bought me from a food cart, with my aunt touring me around some of her favorite haunts in our neighborhood, like the brightly lit Owl’s Head Park further down our street, I let myself hope that tomorrow might be better—that maybe, somehow, I’d figure out how to fit in, or survive, or at least not mess up so spectacularly like I’d done today.

But hope, I was learning, was a fragile thing in New York these days.

After we’d come home from a fun night out and Aunt Odette had helped me bring my boxes down into the basement, I found myself not unpacking my things, leaving those boxes unopened along with my pent-up resentment. Instead, I decided it was time to stop ignoring the elephant in the room, which was why I was inside my bathtub with my head underneath the water.

No, I wasn’t trying to drown myself. This was training. Training.

I kept my eyes closed, listening to the muffled drumming of my heartbeat, letting the water soak away the residue of today’s adventure. Meanwhile, my fingers curled against the bathtub’s porcelain ledge, ensuring my body stayed underneath the water even as my lungs gasped for air.

Not yet.

One more second.

Deprived of breath, tension filled me. I held on as long as I could, though, because training wasn’t supposed to be easy. If I couldn’t hold my breath, I couldn’t hold my ground. And next time, Dre won’t be there to pull me out.

Just one more.

When I came up for air, my gaze snapped to my smartwatch, which I’d left on the sink. The stopwatch app showed I’d been under for two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Not bad, just shy of the average, but it wasn’t something to celebrate either.

Based on its spell description, two minutes and thirty-seven seconds would be the limit for how long I could use Ghost because I couldn’t breathe while in ghost form, and taking a breath, perhaps even the thought of it, might break the spell as easily as if I snapped my fingers. I would need to get better at holding my breath if I wanted to wield Ghost more effectively.

“I should try meditation too. That might help lengthen my time.”

After getting dressed, I padded over to my new bed, settling against my pillows, heart thudding as I prepared to face the responsibility braided into my life, the secret legacy Briar Rose had dropped on my shoulders. Magic was real—and it was in me. And so, I picked up my phone and opened my magic app.

“Alright, Grimoire,” I took a deep breath, “show me what I’ve won.”

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