Page 8 of Darkest Magic

They both went off to work lighter than they had been in years. I could practically see them bouncing on their feet. I stayed in the kitchen on my phone as I searched for this school.

Æscholt had almost no internet presence. That was not a figure of speech. Places left tracks. There were bad reviews, alumni pages, grainy photos from someone’s cousin’s tour, lawsuits, sports scores, a social media page maintained badly by an employee named Susan, or, worse, an intern. Even fake places left tracks if enough people believed in them.

Æscholt had one page, with no photos, no address that landed anywhere useful, no faculty list and no proud alumni and no campus map. There was just the crest from the wax seal, a green tree on a cream background, and one line in serif type.

“For those with the power to answer.”

I stared at it until the words blurred.

Then I closed the page, opened it again, and took a screenshot, because people like me did not trust that something that important wouldn’t vanish after a single look.

The week before I left, I dyed my hair. The box came from the drugstore three towns over, because I refused to run into anyone I knew while buying it and answer the plethora of questions they would undoubtedly have. The woman on the front of the box had a glossy smile and hair a color no human body had ever produced on purpose. The label called it “Riot of Roses”.

In other words, pink. Not soft pink or baby blanket, but pink like a warning sticker slapped over an electrical panel, pink like wet paint on a wall that said do not touch, like a frog that’s deadly to the touch.

I set up at the kitchen table with an old towel, plastic gloves, a mixing bowl, and the timer from the stove. Across the table, my mother pretended to read the newspaper. She had not turned a page in twelve minutes.

The dye stung cold when it touched my scalp, then warmed to a chemical bite. The smell was so vicious, all ammonia and fake flowers, that my eyes watered immediately.

“You sure about that color?” Dad asked from the doorway.

“No.”

He nodded as if that made perfect sense and went back to the porch. The newspaper lowered by half an inch. “They may have rules,” my mother said.

“They can have them.”

The paper lowered another inch. “They may not like it.”

“That’s the idea.”

She looked at me then, really looked, at the gloves and the bowl and the hair clipped into sections, at the girl she had spent nineteen years teaching how to survive rooms that wanted her smaller. Her mouth pressed into a thin line.

Then she got up, took the comb from my hand, and started working dye into the back where I could not reach. Neither of us said anything more.

When the timer went off, I bent over the kitchen sink and watched the water run pink, then brighter, then pale, while my mother held the sprayer and rinsed until it went clear. Her fingers worked through my hair the way they had when I was little and screamed over tangles.

In the bathroom mirror, a stranger looked back, pink to the roots, with skin too pale from nerves and fumes and eyes too old for nineteen and too young for whatever had already found me. A girl anyone could see from across a courtyard. A girl no school full of old money and older blood could pretend had arrived quietly.

Behind me in the mirror, my mother stood with the towel in both hands. “It suits you,” she said.

It didn’t, and we both knew it. What she meant was, I see what you are doing.

I smiled at her in the glass. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It does.”

They could have the rest of me, I decided, the full provision, the impossible name, the wax seal and whatever waited behind it.

They were not getting to choose the color I came in.

THREE

Billie

I hadn’t expected the car that came to pick me up for Æscholt, with some kind of door-to-door service. Nor had I expected that to be the most normal part of the day.

The first strange thing was that the car dropped me at the gates, not inside them, but in front of them. And they were giant wrought iron monstrosities that were taller than the house I grew up in and more detailed than any gate I’d ever seen before. There were different animals and plants woven in metal along with filigree and spikes jutting out of the top. In the center of it all was the same tree from the wax seal and the website. They looked old enough to have their own opinions on just about everything.