Third period was the longest class of them all. While boring, it was also the single time of day, besides lunch and spelling, that you could get away with pretty much anything. This was because Ms. Daftny had a hearing aide that had died last season. She had failed to notice because her habit of smacking the yard stick on the desk was an every five-minute ritual. Only once had it been interrupted by a fifteen-minute absence when it had broken and she'd gone next door for a replacement.

You did what you wanted in her class, well, because she was gonna smack the yardstick and keep talking anyhow.

Tess and Rowe's conversation had just been interrupted with the BANG when Moore took the opportunity to butt in. "The grey in your hair is rather radiant today, Tess," he said.

She turned her attention from Rowe's diagram and looked at Moore’s eyes, which were sizing up her new multi-lensed glasses, now hung around her neck. "Thanks," she said regardless.

"I see he's showing you our plans for the mill," said Moore

She looked back at the diagram of the donkey pushing a lever around in a circle attached to a large stone wheel. Then she looked over at Ian Stein, who sat wedged in his desk across the room. Despite his muscles, his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth as he worked in a notebook of his own. She stared for a moment too long and giggled when he broke another pencil. Ian would say that Moore and Rowe were both Poindexters. Jocks who get by on magic and so have no real brains or strength. She had to agree. Most of the jocks were snoring, after all.

"Do you have the hots for Ian?" asked Moore, a bit louder than necessary.

Rowe began shutting his notebook, embarrassed that Tess was ignoring him, but she put her hand between the pages, then glanced briefly back at Ian to be sure he hadn't noticed. She sighed in relief.

"What's it matter?” She said pointedly. “He doesn't take any of my experiments seriously." She lifted the goggles briefly then pushed the notebook back open, putting a finger on Rowe's diagram. When she glanced back at Moore he was still staring at the contraption around her neck. "Eh em," she started, getting his attention. "I just don't understand the point in pulverizing things."

"Are you kidding?" barked Rowe, then a loud SMACK came from the front of the room, which everyone ignored.

The bell rang and all the students gathered their things and headed out the door for the hall and next period. Ms. Daftny, having missed the memo, went on lecturing and drawing on the whiteboard.

"I just don't get it," said Ian. He'd waited outside Ms. Dafny's door for Tess, watching all the Poindexters filing out. "How do they get by with sleeping?"

"Ah," said Tess, "don't mind them. They are all on sports scholarships. Dean's bound to give them a free pass on a class like this just to be sure we take next year's cup at the finals."

Ian put the pencil back together. "Ha!" He held it up before her. The top half balanced nicely on the bottom half for just a moment before tipping and falling over. He looked defeated.

"You could always just glue it," she said picking it up off the floor.

"Yes," Ian said, taking the piece and then throwing both into his bag before zipping it up, "but that would be adding more energy into the system."

"Energy?"

"Yes, energy. Ya know, like the stuff everything is made up of?"

"I thought everything was made up of magic," she said, watching him shoulder his backpack and following him toward the door.

"You think it was magic that done that bit to your hair?" Ian asked.

"Well, I thought that was really bright light, you know like fire."

"Wouldn't fire have singed the hair right off your head?" he asked.

She thought about this and then said, "Well, everything did kinda smell like burnt toast for a while after I was struck."

He pulled the door open, and Tess ducked under his arm and out into the hall before he could object. Then she was standing there, holding her book up in front of him when it closed behind him.

"This energy," she said. "You think there's a way to get it out of things?"

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His face bunched up and then he put a finger to his bottom lip. After a moment he said, "The energy came out of the sky when it found you. The pencil, too. It was energy in my hand that broke that pencil, I should say." He leaned a little closer to look over the top of the book she had up in front of her face. "Are... you... alright?"

"Watch!" she said and opened the book halfway to where a metal ruler had been stuck into the spine. Then, she turned one of the pages by hand, which got the book going automagically again. Each time the page flipped one of the origami triangles pushed neatly into the next one. The students passing gave awkward glances as the two stared at ten- or eleven-pages flip. One annoying student made a sucking sound and sent kisses their way while elbowing his hallmate.

"Okay..." Ian said questionably.

"Touch it," Tess said.

"Touch what?"

"The ruler, you dummy!"

"Ouch!" Before his finger got within half an inch, he was delivered a bright blue zap and Tess started hopping from side-to-side, giggling.

"You see?" she said. "It's like when you roll around on the bearskin rug before grabbing the fire poker!"

Ian was looking at the tip of his finger. "You own a bearskin rug?"

"Of course, don't you?"

"Nah, we have an old blanket by the hearth. It's crochet. Me mum says nothin' need ever be bought that she can simply crochet."

Tess was looking at his trousers.

Ian blushed. "So, what are you saying?"

"They're nice," she said.

"Not that! About the energy," he said, desperate to change the subject. Then he started walking off toward the north tower. Tess followed, glancing back over her shoulder.

"This isn't the way to Runes three," she said.

"Nah, I'm skippin' it today," Ian said, while students made way for him, mostly so they wouldn't get flattened. "Mr. Trendall is letting me do my clinical hours, running the InternalBugManager."

"What?" she said, not attempting to hide her jealousy. "That's not fair! You'll get to see all the answers on the tests!"

"Just the students' answers. The right answers are loaded in the IBM before I start. He wanted at least one student to see how it worked before being replaced with the ManuallyActuatedConstruct next year. Apparently the new tallyer has less bugs."

She looked at her feet then caught up to walking beside him. "Well, I was hoping to talk to you more about the experiment I've been working on," she started.

"The ruler thing? That’s just entropy," Ian said. "Getting energy out is the easy part, it's putting it back in, now that's the real brain teaser."

"What's entropy?" she asked.

"You know, the tendency for complex systems to break down over time, like the pencil breaking."

"Ya mean, how every time the arch Druid casts another spell he just makes things worse?"

She thought she saw him chuckle. "Well," he said, "that may just be his getting older."

"Isn't it the same thing?" she asked sarcastically. She frowned when he hadn’t noticed her wit. Then she saw why.

Peggy was walking by with some of the four-eyed jocks and Ian had noticed. "Look, Tess," he said, turning to her. He had been working on his own little project lately, and really, he didn't have time to think about starting another side thing, though the prospect of a side thing with Peggy seemed like it might be rewarding. "I really don't have the time..."

Tess saw it in his eyes. "Figure out how to get the energy back in," she said. "Gotcha!" Then she turned away and then back again. "And Ian, if you want to get her attention, try out for Football!"

Then, she turned her back to him and listened to Ian go. Once his footfalls diminished, she took the goggle contraption off from around her neck with the thought of dashing it to the floor but before she could, a hand fell on her shoulder. It was Moore...

Football? Ian thought as he sulked away. Well, that was impossible as he couldn't cast a spell to save his life.

Casting spells required memorizing strings of complex letters like abracawuzitzname—signs and sigils you were supposed to make with a stick before a flick or a twist. Who had time for all of that?

Not only was that embarrassing, but the fact that he had been an irregularly large baby just screamed Manual-laborer. It was true, he did have a little more muscle than everyone else. Okay, a lot more muscle than everyone else, but that was only because he was actually required to carry his backpack at full weight instead of casting a shadow spell on it to make it lighter. Also, that meant, he took the hit of the other guys on the field during tryouts without being protected by a light spell to make him heavier.

He had given up on football the first day of junior varsity and decided to trim down his magic curriculum to just the core classes so he might focus on things he could touch and feel, without getting hurt so often.

Mum was supportive, but Da told him he'd never amount to anything if he kept his feet on the ground. Ian had simply been born a Figurer not a Memorizer. He used the majority of his brain for processing instead of storage. Not relying on magic meant he had to work things out in other ways. Kinda like being left-handed in a right-handed world.

He was aware that memorizing magic spells might make him normal, and probably better at math, because he was almost certain the two were closely related, but he would never figure it out if he did that.

“Figure what out?” His dad would ask him repeatedly. And that was just the thing he was working on figuring out first. It wasn't that he needed to figure out how magic worked, or even why magic worked. It was something else. It was IT. He had to figure IT out whatever IT was and he would never find IT if he crammed his head full of letters and numbers.

Gotta keep things moving! That was his motto. There always had to be questions being answered that led to more questions. Puttin' concrete things in the brain just made it heavy and slow. He survived on clarity. The faster his thoughts were moving, the more he could see right through them so to speak. Like the spokes on a spinning wheel.

Did he want to be like other, more successful guys? Well yeah, he'd totally love to be able to whisk up a dozen roses and woo the perfect girl and make magic as a wide receiver. Truth was, he'd love to have his head in the clouds. He just wanted to be sure what those clouds were actually made of first.

As he started up the spiral steps of the North tower, toward grading and innovation, he thought he might just be getting an idea.