“You don’t believe in magic, do you, Harper?” Kate asked. It was one of those classes where the teacher didn’t care that her feet were up on the windowsill, and the sun streaming through reflected harshly off her sunglasses, kaleidoscoping infinitely on the far walls.

Harper appreciated a good hypothetical, much more than than the dirty looks he’d been getting because the new girl’d been favouring a seat next to him more and more over the last few days.

“What kind of magic?” He decided to take the bait, idly swinging his phone charger around his finger. The bell was set to free them from History, one of their shared electives, and send them off to lunch, but it was much easier telling that to Harper’s mind than it was to convince his stomach.

For better or worse, he’d become her de facto sherpa around the school. How did they end up sharing so many classes?

“I mean magic-magic. Y’know, Dungeons and Dragons. Swords and dragons and mystic missiles.”

“No,” Harper replied. It was his turn to laugh. “I… believe in miracles, I guess.. Or maybe that they happened once, a long time ago. But… I don’t think that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the flashy, action-y kinda way. Why?”

Kate looked at him for the longest time before simply shrugging it off as no big deal. “No reason.”

“So what’s your deal, anyway?” he asked.

Kate cocked her head quizzically.

“You a politician’s kid or something? Someone important?”

Her mouth turned up at the corners as she returned to her phone. “What an odd question to ask someone.”

“Sorry, but… I dunno, where you from? Why so mysterious?" Why do I feel like I already know you?

“Where d’ya think?”

Harper crossed his arms. “Were you this difficult with Kelly Liu, too?”

For the first time, the girl bared her perfectly straight white teeth in a wolfish grin.

“Miss Rich Bitch? You saw that, huh?" Kate sucked air through her teeth in a terrible grimace. "Tell you what, kid. I take more kindly to people who open with a corny joke than with their daddy’s real estate portfolio. Seriously, where I’m from is all anyone in this school is all everyone in this bloody school’s concerned with, isn’t it?”

The way her demeanour changed sent Harper shrivelling back into his seat, so much so that even Kate faltered. “...Sorry. That was a bit mean, wasn’t it? I, um… If I end up sticking around, you’ll get all my dark secrets. We’ll grab a coffee or something.”

“Yeah. ‘s alright, your business and all,” Harper said stiffly. But the worst imaginable was already happening. A second question started to swell in his throat. Just asking where she was from caused her to snap at him, and still, he couldn’t help himself.

“You don’t know if you’re gonna stick around?”

Kate let out a sigh. “You really are just that curious. How about this; You let me be nosy for a sec. That girl, Rose Newman. The one who disappeared.”

The boy sat up in his seat. After nearly a week of no news, just the mention of it alone had his hackles raised. He glanced sideways at his teacher, who cast them a disapproving look in turn, but she was also too busy trying to hide the fact that she was looking at her stock portfolio while waiting for class to ring out like the rest of them to draw attention to herself by calling them out.

“Yeah. I knew-know her. Ask away.”

“What’s her story? There a crappy boyfriend somewhere in there? She hang around any weird circles online?”

Harper shook her head. “Nope. Well, not that I know of. She’s just… normal. She’s a conductor in the big band, she’s on the awards wall every other week. She’s a good kid. But…”

“But…” Kate leaned forward. “Good girls don’t disappear out of their beds for no reason.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “None of them disappeared for no reason. But the hell are we supposed to believe? Some of them go as young as… they’re kids. And they disappear, no struggle, no nothing. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah. But she’s not the first to go from this area, is she?”

Harper raised an eyebrow. “You’re not asking me because you don’t know, are you?”

Kate shrugged, turning her attention out the window. She was done with the conversation, and didn’t shift her gaze until well after the bell let them out for lunch.

As Harper fiddled with his locker combination at the end of the day, surrounded by his friends, his free hand doodled out a crude approximation of the scene from his daymare. Actually, to be fair, that was probably what was keeping him from being able to remember the three numbers that would let him take his bag and leave for the day.

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The black spider-thing towered over the stick figure that represented himself. Black liquid leaked from the pipe that burst from its chest and its mouth probably had a few too many rows compared to what he’d actually dreamed, but his gut told him he was getting the right idea. In another corner of the page, he drew her. Her silver hair, represented by his best attempt at shading in greylead, flowed down the page, along with the end of the bandanna that obscured her eyes. Those details, he could mark out, but try as he might, he couldn’t decide on the shape of her mouth or the curve of her chin.

Nothing felt quite right.

He was obsessed with getting the image into a record longer-lasting than his memory, and so he stared at the page, deep in thought, until the smell of citrus invaded his nose and bid him to look up.

Kate just about made him crap his pants. She was close, literal inches away. She’d sat down, silent as a shadow, just to peek in on what he’d been drawing. Unbidden, his friends grew a little quieter, retreating a few steps to give the two a little space. You idiots. Save me!

“Sorry Harper, I had something else to ask you. Oh, whatcha drawing?” she asked casually. There was a speck of food matter on her top lip that she wiped away with an errant thumb, and Harper was tongue-tied.

She nudged her mirrored glasses back to their proper place.

Girl. Girl. Girl, droned his malnourished libido, in that pathetic, teenage kind of way.

“Um,” he said, very eloquently.

“She’s pretty,” Kate commented, tapping the page. “She from a TV show or something?”

“Um, yeah.” Harper was so tight-chested, he had to force himself to breath. “I think so.”

The string of tense silence between them tightened and tightened before it finally snapped. In the same moment, Harper’s hand reached for her sleeve and she seemed to realise something that soured her expression immediately. Though he couldn’t see her eyes, he could tell she was feeling something just barely adjacent to utter disgust, and just like that, the moment shattered and she pulled away.

“Sorry, kid,” she muttered. “I’ll talk to ya tomorrow.”

Kate left, and Harper’s friends exploded all at once.

“What the hell was that?!”

“My Lord, I’ve never seen a larger fumble.”

“You okay, podonok? Who took your balls away?"

Harper was paralyzed, as the feelings racing through his mind dissipated as soon as they’d hit him. What the hell was that he just felt? He felt like he was about to cry or vomit or both. Bloody hell, he was pathetic.

“Ahem!”

Olivia cleared her throat, silencing the raunchy boys with barely a sound, and dragged him up from the floor with surprising ease for a girl her size.“Go talk to her,” she said, with an air of finality, and Harper just barely nodded his assent.

He’d be able to stop her at the school gate. It would be super casual, and he wouldn’t push too hard. They had grown to be friends over the last week, after all. It was an awkward moment between friends who evidently hadn’t figured out their boundaries, that was all.

He had to kill the awkwardness in its crib, now, lest she have all night to stew over it just like he knew he was going to anyway. Finally, Harper spotted her. But when Kate said her goodbyes to her popular friends and left the main building, she turned right at the gate, skimming the boundaries of the school grounds.

There was nothing that way except for the oval and the two old equipment sheds, officially condemned and unofficially smoke spots for the older students, and he knew she wasn’t a smoker.

So he followed her.

Kate’s hands trailed the cast-iron fence, though as she walked, she sped up, growing visibly agitated. She eventually stopped out the front of the sports shed. Harper watched the girl pace back and for a full minute. Just as he thought she’d give up on whatever she was doing and go home, he saw that what he took for nervous bouncing was actually her hyping herself up.The girl let out a snarl and ran straight at the closed front double doors. Harper opened his mouth to yell at her, demand to know what the hell she was doing but instead of colliding with the hardwood doors and bouncing to the ground, she disappeared through the door.

The surface wood rippled like oil and allowed her through, and just like that, she was gone.

Harper looked around to see if there was anyone else who’d seen it, but the closest students were on the other side of the oval and completely oblivious.He rubbed his eyes, just to make sure he was still seeing straight. The girl was gone, and the old sports shed looked just as assuming as ever. He inched closer, until his nose was an inch from the hardwood door.

I need to go back the way I came. There’s nothing for me here,’ said his voice of reason.

The boy placed his hand on its surface and pushed. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but when he did, the pins-and-needles sensation was almost familiar to him as his hand sunk into the surface of the door.

He was having a psychotic break. Well, that, or he was comatose in the sick bay, stuck in a dream that he’d never wake up from.

Harper muscled his way through and the sponge-surface of the door consumed him, blacking out the sun, and then he was falling. He didn’t fall for very long, or land very hard, but when he opened his eyes, it was night time. No - not night time, the sun still shone in the purple sky, but the fog that suddenly permeated the world kept it in relative darkness. Between five seconds ago and now, the half of his school that hadn’t been suddenly blown open by some unknown catastrophe had been crushed under a massive cruise liner, and looking up at it all, just in front of him, was Kate, her long, silver hair rippling along the currents of an unfelt wind.

She whipped around at the sound of his arrival, her gleaming silver bat catching the sun.

“Oh, Harper,” Kate sighed, lowering her guard once she realised it was him.

“You’re a friggin’ magnet for this shit.”