“What happened, Sam?” I prompted, my hand sliding up his arm to rest on his massive shoulder. I thought about wrapping my arm around him, but it wasn’t quite long enough to reach when we were sitting like this, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him than that.
He slowly shook his head. “It’s hard to say,” he said, his voice a growl of a whisper. I didn’t press him to say more, so I waited patiently while he decided what he was going to say. “I wanted to marry her, I really did. When I left for Vegas, I thought that we were doing the right thing. Sure, we’re young, but when you know someone is your soulmate, I don’t know what difference it makes, you know? It’s not like I’m ever going to stop loving Starla.”
His shoulders slumped forward, heavy with emotion. I
The weekend went by quickly, even though we had three days left of our break. We went back to school Monday morning without having seen much of Starla at all. Raven went up and checked on her several times, bringing her food and even bringing her laundry down to wash it. When we got into the vehicles to head to school Monday morning, I ended up in the back of Ben’s truck next to Starla somehow. Normally, I sat in the front with Ben, but Joshua had raced me, and I’d lost. Melanie insisted on getting in the back with us, instead of just riding with Brice, which made me have to slide over into the middle, right next to Starla.We’ve never been friends, but I’ve been trying my best to get along with her because she is dating Sam, which makes her important to him, and whoever is important to him is important to me. But… when I slid into the center seat, she scooted as close to the
The new girl was all the buzz throughout the day. By the time lunch arrived, it seemed like everyone was talking about Fionna. I couldn’t blame people for being curious about her. She was beautiful, but not in an obvious way. She was interesting looking, that was for certain. I knew very little about her and didn’t have her in any of my classes between art and lunch. Still, when we all sat down to eat, everyone seemed to be looking around to see who she would sit with.Fionna was offered a seat next to Starla at the table she’d been sitting at for most of the school year, with her two best friends and a few guys who played on the basketball team. Fionna looked a little out of place there, like she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. I tried not to stare at her. After all, it had made me super uncomfortable when I’d looked up in art class and saw her glassy eyes focused
The first day back to school after a long break is usually excruciating, but this Monday seemed to stretch on for weeks. By the time I got to drama class, the last period of the day, I felt like I’d already been in school long enough to have reached graduation.Fionna was not in any of my other classes, and when the bell rang for seventh period, and she hadn’t joined us, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I was so glad that she wouldn’t be in any of my classes other than art. The thought that she might have to change her schedule, like Ben had had to, came to mind, but I had to force it away for my own sanity’s sake. I could make it through one class a day with her, especially since she sat behind me, but any more than that, I might not be able to handle.Brice sat next to me, as usual. Starla was across the room. While Ms. Piper gave
Ms. Piper got up from her desk and rushed to the classroom door to look out. The entire school was black, as far as we could tell, like the electricity had all gone out. There was a row of windows in the classroom, but it was a dark wintry day, so not a lot of sunlight was filtering in. Without the buzz of the overhead lights and the computers we normally heard, it was a little eerie. I looked from Ms. Piper to Brice and then back again. He shrugged, but I could tell he wasn’t alarmed. The teacher, on the other hand, looked as if she didn’t know what to do, but she seemed to think that something was wrong.She stood there for almost a minute, which seemed to take a long time under the circumstances, before her cell phone rang. Ms. Piper pulled it out of her pocket and answered it, tentatively. “Hello?”Of course, all we could hear was he
I pushed the door to Ms. Grover’s classroom open slowly. An eerie blue glow was emanating around the barrier, like something out of a sci-fi movie. The energy was odd, even in the hallway right outside of the door, like something from a horror movie.Once the door was open, I could see what the problem was--sort of. It almost rubbed my eyes, it was so surreal. Everything I was looking at seemed like it couldn’t possibly be real.The room was full of electrical blue charges, fizzling and sizzling around in the air. In the middle of the room, Fionna Flamingo sat at a desk, her hair standing on end, like she’d touched one of those Tesla balls at the science museum. Around her, fifteen or so kids were floating in the air, many of them upside down, all of them with shocked expressions frozen on their faces. They drifted around her, floating u
I joined my pack in the hallway as other students began to cautiously come out of the other rooms into the hallway. Even with the lights on, it was obvious many of them were still scared. I could understand why they would be, the humans anyway. I remembered back in California when we used to do lock down drills for possible intruders in our school. We hadn’t had any of those here in Montana. I figured that was because there were enough mages and shifters present that a person would have to be out of their mind to try and infiltrate a school like this one. But it was scary, back then, when I thought I was human, and we had to cower in the corner of the classroom with the door locked and covered as administrators or sometimes the police walked around and tried to get in, just to see if it were possible. They would pretend to be shooters, trying to get in and kill all of us, and there have been enough situations like that recently that it seemed li
Mr. Short led us into his office. I could tell he was nervous. His hands were shaking a little, and tiny beads of sweat popped up on his forehead near his hairline. I took a seat across from him, and Ben sat down beside me. It took the principal a few moments to compose himself once he settled behind his desk. He folded his hands in front of him and took a few deep breaths.When he finally started talking, his voice was soft, and he took his time, like he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to say. His thoughts seemed rambling and disconnected at first, like he wasn’t quite sure where he was going with this but needed to get it out of his system or something.“I am not a magical person. I don’t have any magic. I don’t know how to do magic. Until I moved to Whispering Hollow, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as magic.
Ben did his best to keep me calm all the way home, trying to tell me that everything was going to be fine the next day and that Francis and Fionna Flamingo probably wouldn’t do anything too outrageous during their meeting with Mr. Short, the principal, but I wasn’t convinced. If my boyfriend was going to take that route, the soothing, “let’s not freak out about anything until we know for sure” route, he should’ve deployed that tactic from the get-go, not attempted to put it into place after he’d already said enough to get me to lose my shit.When we pulled into the driveway, I felt calmer, though. I had been doing some deep breathing exercises on the way home, and I felt like I was going to be able to handle whatever happened the next day. It helped to be at Grandma’s familiar house and to be able to feel the forest calling to me. I intended to go sit in the