Magian High (15 page)

Max and I left study hall and headed up to the third floor only to find Claudio and Kameko coming back down.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“There seems to be an architectural anomaly in this part of the building.  We are—”

Amity and Elizabeth appeared in the stairwell and stopped.  “What are you all waiting for?” asked Amity.  “Let’s get this show on the road
.”  She winked at me and took the steps two at a time.

Clorenzo reached after her.  “Wait!  Amity—”

She and Elizabeth continued up, chatting about something to do with history, and when they stepped out onto the invisible hallway, Clorenzo actually squealed and Kameko blanched even paler.

“Oh,” I said, smiling. 
“The floor.  Right.  C’mon, guys.”

They followed me up to the landing and we could see Amity and Elizabeth seemingly floating in midair outside the assigned room.  Max grabbed my arm.  “Did Amity get
flying
magic from you?”

“Uh, yeah.
” I grinned, pulling him forward.  “You, too, Max.  You’re my bud.  I love you, man!”  Max wrestled free and then stood as if on a giant surfboard, with his arms out for balance.  “This is
so awesome!
  Is it like a force field or something?”

Clorenzo kept the noises at bay this time, but his face showed terror.  “Welcome to Magian High!” I said, spreading my arms wide.  I stomped on the invisible floor with one foot and started our school pep rally yell. 
Kameko tested the floor with her toe and then skittered across quickly to enter the room where the girls had gone.  Max and I turned and followed her.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Clorenzo doing his best to swagger while testing the footing of each step as he went.  It looked like some funky dance, and I had to duck through the door and stifle a laugh.

Rolls of colored poster paper lined one
wall, and a shelf full of paints and markers filled another.  Cramped in the remaining space, a long well-used work table stood with only three chairs around it.  Mr. Whittle entered the room backwards, coaxing Clorenzo.  “You won’t fall, Claudio.  I’m so sorry I forgot to explain…”  Clorenzo took a firm step into the room, and relief bloomed on his face.

I couldn’t resist.  “I thought tall guys weren’t afraid of hei
ghts.”  The silent stare that he gave me was my day’s reward.  He couldn’t think of anything to say!

Mr. Whittle insisted that the girls take the seats, while the guys stood all chivalrous against the wall.  The light above flickered like one of the
tube bulbs had caught a cold.  Not a very auspicious location for a Unity Team that was going to change the school culture.

“So,” said Mr. Whittle, rubbing his hands together.  “Did you all get your assignment done?”

I flashed a goofy look at Elizabeth who scowled at me as much as her good nature would allow.  Kameko, on the other hand, raised her hand tentatively.

“Yes, representative from Corporal District?” said Mr. Whittle with mock formality.

She gave a thin smile and spoke quietly.  “Um, we came up with ours.  It’s that Corporals try to develop our
whole
selves, not…um…”  She looked at Amity and scrunched her nose a little.  “Um, and not just our brains.”

“Bravo!” said Mr. Whittle. 
“If we had to put that in one word?”

“Well-rounded?” suggested Max.

“Terrific.  Corporals are well-rounded.  Good to know.”  He punched the air.  I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be mimicking a lot of Mr. Blakely’s mannerisms, except they felt a little stiff coming from Whittle.  I guess he caught me staring because he pointed to me next.  “Mages?”

I tossed a thumb in Elizabeth’s direction.  “She’s our spokesman.”

Elizabeth sat up straight and tucked her hair behind her ears.  “I think that we decided on something like, Mages are creative.”

“We
did
?” I asked.

“Well,
I
did.  Kincaid didn’t really help much.”

Mr. Whittle looked at me questioningly.  “You didn’t understand the assignment?”

“I didn’t really understand the
point
of the assignment,” I said.

“Ah,” said Mr. Whittle, stuffing his hands in his pockets.  “Well, let’s say that we’re tryi
ng to determine perspectives, the way we see ourselves and others.  Step one is to figure out how we see ourselves.  Step two is to figure out how we view others.  Step three is to fix any errors in those perceptions.”

“So our next homework assignment is going to be to talk about what we think of the other groups?” guessed Amity.

“Exactly,” said Mr. Whittle.  “Spoken like a true Wiser.”

“Do we really need to spend a lot of time on this, sir?” I asked.  “Couldn’t we get on with planning some kind of actual event to draw us all
together?”

Mr. Whittle looked at me without expression for a whole beat before he snapped back into his Blakely bounce.  “That’s what we’re prepping for.  I’ll want each pair to
make a presentation at an upcoming Assembly.  You’ll start by recognizing how your group is perceived by others, and then share instead what you really are.  Maybe this shouldn’t be done by the two from each school.  Could each couple maybe run a survey amongst their own kind—?”

“
Not
a ‘couple’!” said Amity, her eyes wide and her hands waving the word away.  “
Don’t
call us a couple, please.”

“
‘Own
kind
’?” asked Kameko.  “What does
that
mean?”  Her sudden boldness sounded defensive, and it got everyone’s attention.  “We’re all just teenagers,” she said.  “I started as a Wiser and moved to Corporal because I was more interested in the athletic department than math and science.  Now I’m at Magian High.  But in all three schools, I was still
me
.  I’m not a ‘kind’.”  Her voice had grown louder with each sentence, and when she finished, Amity, Elizabeth, Max and I all stared in open-mouthed appreciation.

Mr. Whittle stumbled over an apology.

“If we need a president of this club or something, I vote Kameko,” said Max.

“I second that motion,” said Clorenzo, moving closer to her and flashing a broad smile. 
Kameko almost got some color in her face before looking back down at her shoes.  She knocked her knees together with nervous energy.

Amity and Elizabeth were clearly torn between wanting to support
Kameko and wanting to maintain control of the unity movement.  “Did we
want
a president of this club?” asked Amity. “Can’t we be a unified voice to set an example for the whole school?  Y’know, how to work together?”

We all looked at Mr. Whittle who chewed the insides of his cheeks and shrugged.  “Hey, this is your thing. 
Your club.  You tell me.”

We all kind of stared at each other, not knowing how to respond.

“I have an idea,” said Mr. Whittle.  He tore a small piece off the end of one of the rolls of paper, and then ripped that into six little pieces.  Grabbing a marker, he said, “I’ll write each of your names on a piece of paper, and we’ll draw one randomly to be the president, knowing that you all have to work together either way.  That person will act as a spokesman to the student body.  Is that all right?”  We continued with the blank looks.  Mr. Whittle folded each paper up, cupped them in his hands to shake them up, and then looked around for something to put them in.  He gave up and stuffed them all in his suit pocket.  He shook the jacket once more for good measure, closed his eyes, and pulled out a piece of paper.

“Claudio Lorenzo!” he announced happily.

And it pretty much went downhill from there.

Clorenzo and Whittle were addicted to Talking Points, mostly because they liked to sound important, I think.  The rest of us sat glassy-eyed through weeks
and weeks of these meetings, and then intentionally failed to complete our “assignments”, which always seemed designed to keep the Unity Team as divided as the school.  The rest of us suspected that Clorenzo wasn’t thinking so much about school unity as he was coming up with excuses to work one-on-one with Amity.  Flinckey’s counsel that the real work had to happen between meetings proved gold.  All of us, except Clorenzo, had at least one class with another member of the Unity Team, so we passed messages along, and worked on recruiting people to the cause, even if Whittle didn’t feel we were ready to launch the official school-wide club yet.

On the last Friday in October, a bunch of us got together at Binney’s for the biggest Gel Ball game of the century, and Max got the brilliant idea that we let ourselves get plastered with the Gel (no smocks) and then leave for the park with regular squirt guns and re-use the Gel.  He figured the Mages with Water magic could extract the goo and re-form it into new ammo where we could play running through the trees and playground equipment, no Flash Jumping allowed.  We were all having such a good time that we didn’t do the math to figure out that we only had three Mages with Water magic: Curry, Hadley and Elizabeth.

“Three teams, then,” said Max. 
“One goo-master Mage per team.”

“And one Corporal runner per team,” I added.  “No fair if Max, Rikki and
Kameko are all on the same team.  No one will ever hit them.”

“Okay, but we need to divide up the strategists, too,” said
Kameko.  “Amity can
not
be with Lindsey.”

I laughed, looking around at the crowd.  We’d added Jason and Noah from chemistry and four other Mages from P.E., including on
e of the Dirt Hole guys.  Elizabeth and Rikki had also grabbed a few more Corporal girls, sophomores, who were a little ditsy, but nice and very accepting of everyone.  Amity and Lindsey had even gotten two Wiser guys to join in the game, a stretch for them because it didn’t involve anything in the binary code.  Once I got past their sun-deprived, weakling appearances, they turned out to be pretty cool.  Despite the fact that their IQs were probably double mine, they seemed to look up to Max, Hadley and me.

Leaning in to Amity, I whispered, “You know what?  This is the biggest group of friends I’ve ever had.  This is really—”

I stopped myself, eyes and mouth both big.  “Hey guys!  This is it!  A giant Gel Ball game with mixed teams!  We could set up obstacles in the gym and have some play while others watch from the stands, and then rotate in—a big activity to promote school unity.”

“
Unity through war,” said Lindsey out of the side of her mouth in her typical manner, but she actually nodded.  “It could be fun.  We won’t be able to re-use the Gel, though, without magic.”

“Actually,” said one of the
Wiser guys, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a finger.  “I’ve been studying some polymers in an online college chemistry course, and I think I could come up with something that would work for Nomers, too.  More like a colored putty, but…”

“Brilliant!” cheered Hadley.  “Then Kincaid can play, too.”

Elizabeth slapped his shoulder and a few people laughed in a friendly way.  My lack of Gel-Ball skills had become more legendary than the myth about my blowing Jack and the Punkers down the street, and ironically, it seemed to help my image rather than hurt it.

“If we’re
gonna play, we should get on with it,” said Curry.  “The park closes at sunset.”

We took a few minutes and divided up the teams as evenly as possible, and then spread out to three home bases.  I went with Curry, Rikki, Jason,
a Mage from P.E., a sophomore Corporal girl named Ashley, and the polymer Wiser guy.  Our home base included the merry-go-round, and we all piled onto it to discuss strategies.  The polymer guy sketched out a map in the dusty surface of the merry-go-round.  Huddled around, we listened and squinted and plotted.

“They’re coming,” hissed the Corporal girl.

We turned around to see about ten hands blazing towards us.  “What the—”  None of the teams had enough Mages to generate that much fire, which could only mean—

“Punkers!”
screamed Rikki, as a bunch of Fire Balls flew down and hit the middle of the merry-go-round.  Before we could all scramble off, Jack and his buddies swooped over and began spinning the merry-go-round really fast.  All of us clung to the bars to keep from being thrown.  Sparks from the Fire Balls spread and scorched my hands before dying out for lack of fuel.  Curry, on my right, let go of the bars and flew up to confront them.  Amidst the whirring and the screaming, I heard the sound of hand-to-hand combat, and the merry-go-round slowed down in jolts as hands grabbed the bars to stop its spinning.

Max, Jason, Noah and the Dirt Hole Mage from P.E. were
sitting on the Punkers, keeping them face down on the ground with their hands where they couldn’t do anything.  None of the Punkers were strong enough to fly away with somebody on his back.

The air suddenly brightened with red and blue flashing lights, and
a patrol car pulled up to the curb on the street nearest where we were.  The sirens whirred twice, like a warning, and then two cops got out.  A bunch of the kids went over to tell the police what had happened.

Curry came up behind me, grabbing my arm.  “Jack got away.”

I swore.  “Of course he leaves his guys to get caught.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Curry.  “We got witnesses
, but you better get out of here.  You can’t afford any more police publicity right now.  Go!  Fly!”  He shoved me in the opposite direction of the police cars.  When I hesitated, he growled, “Don’t be a hero right now, Kincaid.  Go home!”

Still unsure, I f
lew up into the tree, but the cops were peering up into the branches of the trees closest to them, so I sped away towards home, hoping everyone would be okay.

***

“Curry’s my new hero.”

I looked down at the cell phone to make sure I really knew who had called.  Yep. 
Amity.  “Really?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.

“He got in the Punkers’ faces before the cops got to them and totally burned Jack.”

“Wait, I thought Jack escaped.  Curry burned—”

“With words,
silly.  Crazy coming from stone-face Curry, but he let them see what a loser Jack was for abandoning them to take the rap and how they’d better learn to walk the line or they’d end up in entry-level welding jobs after they got out of jail.”

“He said that?”

“Yes!  And by the time the cops got over to them—Max and Noah kept holding them down—
so cool!
—they were ready to confess.  They told the cops everything, including about Jack.”

“Was it Sheldon?”

“Nah, but it doesn’t matter.  They were taken away to the station to write up the incident.”

“Why?  Were people hurt?” I asked, suddenly concerned.

“A few…”  Her voice lost its perkiness.  “Expect us in a few minutes for some healings.  We’ve got Noah’s van packed, and we’ll be by for the Kincaid clinic.”

“Oh,
whoah!  Okay, I’ll be ready.  Can you keep them outside on the porch?  Mom’s trying to get Kelsey to bed, and she’ll jump on any distraction she can get.”

“Sure.  See you in a few minutes.  I love you, Kincaid!”

The connection died as my heart soared.  She loves me.  Jack’s busted.  Does life get better?  I bounded down the stairs and opened the front door.  “Mom, I’ve got some friends coming from the park.  We’ll stay outside and be quiet, okay.”

“How many?” she called.

“Not sure.”

“Okay, only until nine, honey.
  And keep them quiet, please.”

I closed the door behind me and felt as though the air had been kicked from me.  There, burnt into the new top step, were the words,
This is NOT OVER!
  I knew it was Jack’s warning.  Without thinking, I reached down and grabbed the edge of the board.  Pulling with all my strength, I managed to loosen it.  A few more yanks and I got it free.  I didn’t want a hole for people to fall through, so I flipped it over and lay it upside down in place.  It wobbled and a couple of nails stuck up along the edge, but if I kept people down on the lower steps, no one would notice until I had time to fix it.

Right about then, the van pulled up and Noah got out.  I
Flash Jumped down to the path and came to them at the curb.  Amity backed out, helping Rikki, whose cheek was turning shades of purple.  “They picked her up and dropped her,” growled Curry, coming around from the passenger side.  He let fly a few choice curses and everyone agreed.

“I think there’s something
wrong with my shoulder, too.  I can move it, but it really hurts,” she said, her voice wobbling with the effort of keeping back the tears.

The polymer guy got out next.  His
glasses were broken and his hair was majorly singed.  The last was Ashley from my team.  Her hands and face had second degree burns, and she held some light gauzy material over her chin.

“Didn’t the cops do any First Aid?” I asked. 

“They had to get Hadley and Elizabeth to the hospital,” said Noah, watching my reaction closely.

My stomach lurched.  “What happened to them?”

“Breaks, I think.  Neither could walk.  They were definitely being targeted.”

It was my turn to swear.  Tears welled in my eyes.  Curry put his hand on my shoulder.  “It’s okay, man.  The cops told us to
get these guys to a healer, and they all asked for you.  Hadley and Elizabeth will be okay.  You can take the little stuff.”

I went to Ashley first because I figured she had to be in the worst pain.  She removed the gauze, and I saw a nasty cut on her chin
in addition to the burns.  “Am I going to be scarred forever?” she cried.

“Not if I can help it.
”  I placed one hand on the bottom half of her face like a beard and the other over the bridge of her nose so I could reach her cheeks.  “Can you breathe okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.  Just breathe in and out ten times with me, and we’ll see how you feel by then.”

Everyone watched
silently while I stood in this odd position, as if they wanted to see it happen to believe it.  By about the seventh big breath, I knew her face would be fine, but I let her keep going to ten because it calmed us all down.  When I pulled my hands away, she looked good as new.  A collective sigh of relief sounded through the group, and she spun around to see her reflection in the side view mirror.

“Oh
my gosh, that’s amazing!  I thought only the doctor Mages could do that!”

Curry nodded.  “That’s strong
healing,” he muttered.

“Well hang on, guys.  I’m not done yet.”  I took her hands in mine, like I’d done with Amity before.  She watched her hands, sniffing quietly and trying to breathe slowly.  The heat emanating from her skin worried me a bit, but it, too, responded to the magic, and within a minute she flexed her fingers free.  She touched her face and then looked at her hands front and back.  Suddenly she threw herself at me and hugged me.  “Thank you so much!  I was so scared and…”  She sobbed onto my shoulder, and I glanced over at Amity.  She grinned, so I felt free to pat the girl’s back until she’d finished
crying it out.  Eventually, she pulled away and squeezed Rikki’s hand in a gesture of excitement.

“Rikki, you’re next.  Why don’t you sit down?”

Before I could suggest another spot, she went over to the porch steps and planted herself on the bottom.  I went and sat on the step behind her and the others gathered in a semicircle, watching again.  This time, I put one hand on her shoulder and one on the opposite cheek.  She winced when I touched her face, and I could feel her tears rolling over my fingers.  Curry knelt down in front of her and took her hand.  If he’d held up a ring, it couldn’t have looked better, and sure enough, in a couple of minutes—the shoulder took a while longer than expected—she shrugged and wrapped her arms around his neck.  He held her now unscathed face in his hands and the rest of us turned away while they worked on each other’s lingual flexibility for a while.

Polymer guy chuckled awkwardly.  “Well, I g
uess we can go home now, Noah.”

“W
hat about you?” I asked.  “Did you get hurt?”

“Just my hair burned off.  It’s okay.  I can buzz the rest to match.”

“What about your glasses?”

“I’ll be okay
,” he said, frowning slightly.  “My eyes aren’t so bad.”

I stood, studying his face and thinking. 
“How bad?”

“Like
barely bad enough to need a prescription.”  He stared at the ground and scuffed his shoe back and forth, almost like a little kid.

“Can I
try something?” I said.  “Close your eyes.”

“What are you
gonna do?” he asked, backing away.

“Worst case scenario: nothing.  Close your eyes.”

Amity nudged him and he fluttered his lids shut.  I took a deep breath and placed my thumbs on his eyelids.  He flinched but then relaxed when I took the side of his head into my palms.  I closed my eyes, too, feeling the strain of the magic use.  I’d never tried fixing sight before.  Mom said it took a lot of power, but if I could boost it a little…I finally let go when I couldn’t feel anything changing beyond an initial surge of power.  “Well, I don’t know if it helped, but you can try the cheap glasses at the store tomorrow and let me know, huh?”

“Hey, yeah.
  Thanks for trying.”  For a few seconds, he squinted up at the sky and the trees and then opened his eyes wider.  “It
is
better than it was!”  He waved and climbed back into the van.  “Wow, thanks!”