Page 47 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Tonight he's waiting by the boathouse when I get there, hands jammed in his pockets, hair standing straight up off his head.

He looks at me like I'm a ghost. He's not far off.

"You're alive."

"Yep." I spread my arms so he can get a good look.

"They said you were severed. They said⁠—"

"I was. I got better." I sit down on the boathouse steps, the wood warm from the day. "How's the rod?"

He sits down next to me, not too close. Static snaps off his sleeve when it brushes the railing. "I've been going up there. Eustace takes me, ever since you—" He picks at a splinter in the step. "She said you'd want someone to keep taking me."

The lake laps at the pilings under the dock.

"Yeah," I say. "I did want that."

He's quiet, and I let him be. Out on the water a fish jumps, and the rings spread across the black surface and fade before they reach the shore.

"Can you teach me?" he asks finally. "What you do?" He's looking at his hands. There's static jumping between his fingers, little blue sparks, and he keeps closing his fists to hide them. "I just can't hold it. I keep blowing out the lights in my room every time I get upset. My roommate moved out. He said it was like living with a microwave with the door open."

I think about Nell on the roof this morning with her hands cupped in front of her, holding all of it, grinning at me.

I think about my mom in our kitchen, with her hands flat on the counter and no one to show her anything. No one ever taught her how to hold it. No one ever took her up to an attic, put her hand on something, and said here, put it here. The school knew she was a grimoire with no one to teach her—it was all in the files Brittany photocopied out of the school's records room and Everly brought to me. They tested my mom for years, to see how much she could hold, and they never once knocked on our fucking door.

The kid next to me is shaking a little; I can feel it in the step.

"Yeah," I tell him. "Come back tomorrow night. Same place. Bring a friend if you've got one who needs it."

He brings three.

15

BRITTANY

There's something wrong with the lines north of here, and I'm not imagining it.

I'm on the floor of my room with my back against the bed, Herbert's tank beside me and my notebook on my knees, sitting still on purpose, which is not something I'm naturally good at.

I can't feel the lines the way Ren and the others can, because I'm not tied into them. Helena didn't stand me on a hill in the dark and have me give my magic to the ground, so I draw on the Well, like every other student at this school who didn't get thrown out the front gate.

But I've been living right on top of the crossing under Concordia all summer, and if I sit still, I can sort of feel them now—the way you feel a train coming through the soles of your feet before you can hear it.

Most nights I write down nothing. Every so often, though, something a long way north of campus pulls on the lines, drawing the magic off them slowly and steadily, a lot of it, for a long stretch, and then it stops.

Tonight it starts while I'm sitting here. I feel it go in the soles of my feet, a long slow draw towards the north, and I write it down under all the other times and look at the page until it stops looking like a coincidence.

Then I tell someone.

I tell Ren, because he's the one who'll actually ask for evidence instead of just telling me I'm being paranoid. I find him in the kitchen in the middle of the night, eating cold cereal standing up over the sink. He reads my notes all the way through, then goes upstairs and comes back down with Helena's map.

It's gone soft as an old handkerchief from being folded and unfolded, and the pencil lines have smudged in the places where his thumb keeps going. He spreads it out on the kitchen table, weighs the corners down with the salt shaker, a mug, and a jar of peanut butter, then puts his finger on the crossing under Concordia and runs it north.

It travels up one of the pencil lines, past the edge of campus and past the town, into the blank part of the map where no one's drawn anything but contour lines, and stops at the very top edge, where the lines run into each other.

"There." He taps it. "Three lines cross there."

"What's there?"