MEGAN. TIME TO GET TO CLASS.
“Oh, there’s the bell,” Katier said. “You timed that well, Ryan!” She smiled at Ryan, though it wasn’t a very good attempt as far as Katier’s smiles went—to Megan, she was obviously wicked uncomfortable. As well she should be. Megan thought that might be the first time either Katier or Nisha had actually addressed one of her old friends, who they’d ostracized, by name.
In response, Ryan directed a withering gaze at Katier, who indeed withered, and said, “Eh heh. Uhm, Megan, we have Choir first, right? You wanna walk over?”
“Katie,” Megan said. “Why didn’t you just tell me? If you thought it was so wrong you kept trying to convince Lauren and Nisha to stop it, why didn’t you just tell me about it?”
Katier scrunched her face up in pure frustrated misery. “I didn’t know what would happen, Megan! I didn’t know what to believe, and I didn’t know if you’d freak out just because I brought them up!” She shook her head, expression still wrecked. “And besides, I swore to Lauren. I couldn’t go back on that, even if I’d been sure you would want to know so you could stop it. She and Nisha have been my best friends for longer than I can remember.” She peaked at Megan through one nearly closed eye, somehow making the expression pleading. “You get that, right? This,” and she gestured vaguely, meaning the whole situation, “Is like, the same for you. Right?”
Megan closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “Yeah. This is very much the same for me. Go away, both of you. I can’t talk to you guys anymore right now.” Nisha, who had been doing her Silent Like a Rock routine nearly the whole damn conversation, like she always did when she felt out of her depth, turned without speaking and practically marched away.
Katier gave Megan another miserable, pleading look. “Megan, I—” but Megan was shaking her head—she just couldn’t anymore—and Katier stopped. “Okay. I’m going to go check on Beth—she’ll be there too. Unless she’s so upset she went home, I guess, she put a fair bit of work into that outfit, and I get the feeling at this point that this might have been a gut punch for her.”
Megan closed her eyes, mirroring Katie, more or less. “Gods. Entirely possible. We haven’t—we didn’t ever talk about stuff, much, except after it first—” Her throat threatened to close up and her equilibrium threatened to snap entirely. “Yes, please, go check on Beth. Tell her I’m sorry.” She opened her eyes again, feeling her face get harder without meaning it too. “Tell Lauren and Kay that they’re in trouble.”
Katie got noticeably paler looking at that. “Okay. I—Okay.” Then she, too, turned and headed toward the gym and theater building. Megan, Ryan, and Evan all stood in silence as she retreated, for long enough that they faintly caught Katier say, “Uuuuuugh this suuuuucks!” when she thought she was far enough away they wouldn’t hear her. Or maybe she didn’t care. Megan just assumed.
The silence stretched longer, for tens of seconds, before Megan felt compelled to break it, turning to the boys[1] and saying, “No wonder Angie had to leave. I can’t believe this is real. Please. This is an awful prank, right? You’re just punishing me for not talking to you guys for so long. This isn’t—you got my friends in on it this summer, right? Please tell me that.”
[1] The boys! From third grade through the end of sixth—so much of her life, of her memories, suppressed though they’d been—‘the boys’ had always meant Ryan and Evan. It’d been such a shock the first time in seventh grade that Lauren had used the phrase to refer to Brandon and his friends as if Megan and the other girls would all immediately get she was talking about them.
Evan shook his head, while Ryan rolled his eyes and said, “Were that the case, your girls would be well advised to head down to Hollywood, skip the SBC[1] entirely. If Nisha were that good an actor she’d be the next action superstar for sure. She’s exactly what they’ve been casting for our entire lifetime, basically.”
[1] The Seattle Broadcasting Company is a public service broadcasting company, similar to PBS or the BBC. Most city-states in the Fredonian Union have one, and the national equivalent, the Fredonian Broadcasting Company typically distributes the best performing, as determined via a complex, multifactor methodology, of each city’s productions across North Fredonia. Hollywood is more commercial, and is one of several national hubs for major film production.
“Lauren would be more so,” Megan said, dully, “If she could get out of being a Bakili.”
“Yeah, I imagine her parents might let her on Flames of Love to find a nice Light Bearer to marry,” Ryan said, “But that’s probably about it, huh? The peril of not being a Light Bearer in a Light Bearing family. I’ll get out my tiny violin when I see her.”
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“I didn’t say she wanted to be an actor,” Megan said. “She loves being a Bakili. I was just saying Hollywood would probably want to cast Lauren out of anyone from Asphodel if they could. How much time do we have?”
“Pre-start bell only gives us seven minutes, so we need to move our butts,” Ryan replied, and he started to do so. “How about that commcode, Megaton?”
“I don’t think I’m into that particular nickname anymore, Ryan, speaking of butts,” Megan replied, slapping her hips with both hands as she too began to walk.
“Noted,” Ryan said. “Won’t happen again.”
“Thanks,” she replied. “It’s CRJ-CMM-2011.”
Ryan had somehow produced his phone (which was definitely the new IPhone, as if Megan gave a shit about that anymore) without Megan noticing him going for it, and now said, “Got it. I’m BRT-CDB-1990. I’ll send you a friend request on Social, too.”
“Thanks,” Megan said. She pulled out her phone, got Ryan to repeat the code so she could enter it, then looked at Evan.
“BAB-GAG-2009,” Evan said. “Our digits[1] are only two off.”
[1] “Digits” is how folks most commonly refer to the numeric portion of their communication code. Having the same or close digits to a new acquaintance is usually viewed as fortuitous.
“Neat,” Megan said without the enthusiasm that fact deserved as she entered his code into her phone. “How can you possibly forgive me? I can’t believe you want to make up.”
Evan’s face got colder, and Megan swallowed hard. “I am not forgiving you, Megan,” he said, his voice frosty. “I want to make that clear. I missed you and I’m giving you a chance to redeem yourself. But you are nowhere close to forgiven.” He paused. “But you didn’t know, so I can’t blame you too much for everything.”
Shaking her head at herself, Megan replied, “You certainly could! I should have known! I can’t believe I’ve been so, so, so insensate!”
“See?” Ryan said. “Poetic.”
Megan laughed, though it sounded a little cracked to her own ears. “I love you Ryan. Never change. Hey, while Angie’s not here, is she okay? She’s so…”
“Skeletal?” Ryan suggested. At Megan’s shocked face, he said, “Oh, she’d be the first to joke about it, if you’d brought it up while she was here. Yeah, she’s fine. She’s just got emberbelly syndrome—it’s not a big deal.”
At Megan’s blank face he gave her a kinda sniffy look in return and said, “It’s a physiomystical syndrome they think is probably connected to her crittertongue and her knack for enchanting, but her stomach has some fire in there along with normal acid and stuff. Don’t ask me how that works, that one pushes my understanding even—thaumaelemental conditions are weird.
“And it’s not exactly normal fire anyway—it kinda ‘burns’ some of what she eats and renders it into aether instead of the normal results of, you know, burning food. But that means that food’s not available to turn into glucose and junk. And she has a super high metabolism, too, which may or may not also be connected, so she needs to eat a lot. She’s doing her best. They’re working on how to pack some more calories into her day with something other than bleh nutrition shakes or pure garbage.”
“That doesn’t sound… super fine,” Megan said, not feeling that much better, and not without a little bewilderment. She didn’t know a ton about magic. Aether was the stuff of magic (and life), she knew that, but she was more of a music sort of girl.
“It is what it is,” Ryan said, an expression flickering over his face, for a moment, that made Megan worry he was telling himself it was fine as much as her. Evan’s expression was stoney, but that wasn’t, historically anyway, particularly unusual.
Trying not to let her voice tremble, Megan said, “I’ll… I’ll see you guys later. Please?”
“Sure you will,” Evan said with a nod, as he came to a stop—they’d reached the split in the path that led into each quad or right into the Tower. “Which lunch you got?”
“Second,” Megan said.
“Oh perfect! We all do too,” Ryan replied with a slightly wicked grin. “I’ll have plenty of time to go over the various theories all our classmates had about why we got our dang selves all Exiled.”
“Wonderful,” Megan said, letting her lack of enthusiasm for the idea show in her voice, knowing she should probably know because people would try to talk to her about them. “We better go, I guess.”
“Yuppers,” Ryan replied, turning toward the tower. “Catch you later, Meggles.”
Megan, despite it all, giggled at that. She didn’t think he’d ever called her that particular variation before, and certainly no one else had. “See you guys,” she said, and watched them until they disappeared behind the closing doors, quickly losing sight of them through the small, narrow windows.[1]
[1] Too narrow, one hoped, for even the smallest of spawnlings to break and fit through, and only there so that people trying to open the doors weren’t constantly slamming them into each other.