Page 46 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I take her down to the lake after midnight, under the shadow, along the back of Callister and around past the boathouse to the far side, where there's no path and the willows come right down to the water. The bank goes soft and muddy, and the reeds are full of frogs. Across the lake I can see the lamps along the boathouse path, and every so often a warden's lantern bobbing between them.

Everly stands at the edge with her shoes in her hand. "Atlas. Are we swimming?"

"Your hands," I say. "The water's cold underneath. It'll help."

She looks at me, then at her palms, and gets a look on her face as if I gave her a diamond ring instead of a lake full of goose shit. Then she pulls her shirt over her head and wades in.

I call Callum's piece up out of my shadow and leave it lying on top of my shirt on the bank so it'll stay dry, because I'm not explaining to Callum why it didn't, and go in after her in my boxers. The mud squelches up between my toes. The water's warm on top and cold underneath, and she's already in up to her chest with her palms flat on the surface, sighing out loud.

That's when the lantern stops on the far path.

It swings our way. We're out from under the shadow now, expelled and in our underwear in the middle of a lake, and I don't think about it. I reach up and pull, and a cloud comes together over us, low and dark, and opens up.

It rains on us and nowhere else. Everywhere else the stars are out and the lake is flat and black all the way to the boathouse, and over our little patch of water there's a warm, heavy summer rain coming down so hard it hisses on the surface. From the far path we have to look like a squall caught in the reeds.

The lantern hangs there for a while. Then it turns and goes on along the path, faster than before, because whoever's holding it has decided he doesn't need to get wet over some weird weather.

Everly is laughing. She holds her palms up to the rain with her face tipped back and her hair plastered flat. "You made it rain on purpose."

"Yeah." I hold my hand up into it, and the rain runs down my wrist.

"You never make it rain on purpose."

She's right. When it rains around me, it's because I'm pissed off or scared, and someone's about to get hurt. I can't remember the last time it came because I wanted it to. I'm standing in a lake in the middle of the night, and I'm happy, and the sky's just doing what I tell it.

She lies back and floats with her arms out and her ears under the water. "Try it."

I try. I go straight to the bottom and come up spitting lake water, and she grins so wide she swallows some.

"You have to let go," she says, coughing.

"I don't know how." It's out before I can stop it. "I've been holding on since I was seven. When I let go, things blow up."

She goes quiet. She stands up in the water and puts one hand flat under my back and the other on my chest.

"Then I'll hold on," she says. "Lie back."

I lie back. She keeps her hand under me, and the rain comes down on my face, and I float for the first time in my life, with nothing to hold on to and nothing blowing up, and Everly standing there in the dark keeping me up.

We come back to Concordia dripping all over the kitchen floor. The shadow is the only dry thing either of us has. Callum takes it back out of my shadow without a word and checks it over before he lets it go. In the morning there's a word in my box on the fridge in Brittany's handwriting, lake, with a little cloud drawn next to it.

The kid from the Fulmen stairs finds me in the middle of August.

Fall term hasn't started yet, but Fulmen opens early for students who need to come back, the ones with nowhere else to be. He's a sophomore now, technically—the one who had static coming off him every time he breathed out, who sat on the Fulmen stairs in the middle of the night and asked me if it was always going to be like this.

I took him up to the attic, put his hand on the lightning rod, and showed him where to put it. That's all I had time for before everything went to hell.

He finds me because of the Storm Daughters, who tell each other everything and the rest of the world nothing.

Eustace Hodges came back to campus early too, and she worked out I'm not dead before anyone even told her. She waited down by the boathouse night after night, sitting on the bottom step with her braids pulled back and her conductor band on her wrist, until one night I walked past her wrapped in Callum's shadows. No one should have been able to see me. She didn't see me, either, but she said my name into the dark anyway.

I stopped, which was pretty stupid.

"I knew it," she said, to the empty path. "I knew you weren't dead. The sky's been wrong all summer. It's been raining on one spot behind Callister and nowhere else, and that's you, Knox. No one else is that bad at keeping it in."

So I let the shadows go and let her see me. She didn't scream or run. She stood up and punched me in the arm, hard, then hugged me, then punched me again for good measure. Well, I had it coming.

Eustace told the other Storm Daughters, and one of them told the kid, because he's been showing up at their house since April asking if anyone knew what really happened to me.