“Umm … yeah.” This conversation was like falling off the edge of the world, plummeting all the way around the globe, and then falling off the edge a second time. Patricia’s stomach was upside down.
“So you already know. I hate to say this, and remember I’m just the messenger. I regard all human life as precious and irreplaceable. But Laurence Armstead must die. And you must be the one to kill him. Nobody else can do it. As soon as you complete this task, you can begin your training.”
Patricia couldn’t remember what she said after that—it probably had a lot of “umm” in it. She didn’t say she would kill Laurence, and she didn’t say she wouldn’t. She may have thanked Mr. Rose for the message. She wasn’t sure. She was in an upright coma for the rest of the day. Even Roberta hanging from the banister upside down and staring at her after dinner barely registered. Roberta’s dark brown hair hung straight down and her eyebrows twitched, but she said nothing as Patricia walked past.
Patricia found herself in Roberta’s room an hour later, right before lights-out. “Bert,” she said, using her old nickname. “Could you kill a person? If you absolutely had to?”
Roberta was painting her toenails candy-apple green, in her white cotton PJs. “Wow, Trish. Morbid much?” She laughed. “For your information, the answer is yes and no. Yes, I would be willing, if I felt it was necessary and whatever. But I probably couldn’t go through with it. I would be too much of a wuss to look at someone and take them out. Even if I was sure it was the right thing.”
“Umm, okay. Thanks.”
“But Trish,” Roberta called after Patricia as she turned to go to her own room, across the hallway. “If you do ever take someone out, I get to watch. I want to see you do it.”
“Umm, okay.”
Laurence was back at school the next day, in a good mood for a change, swinging his arms in the wet hallways like he owned the place. He was back to not talking to Patricia, but he smiled at her without looking right at her. She could so easily end him, just push him in front of one of the senior citizen tour buses the school used as transportation. It would look like an accident. Patricia found herself studying his twitchy head and slender wrists, trying to imagine if it could be true: Was he going to become an enemy of magic? He was already hostile to it, that was for sure. Maybe the grown-up Laurence would be some kind of monster, for all she knew, persecuting her kind. Maybe this was part of what witches did—regretfully, sorrowfully—snuffing out people who would threaten the balance of nature?
She watched him in the cafeteria. Punishing his food. She watched him running wind sprints up and down the hill behind the school, shivering in his track uniform. She tried to imagine him launching a vendetta. Persecuting her friends, if she ever actually had friends. She couldn’t make herself believe it, and she couldn’t do it unless she did. She could imagine killing him, that was shockingly easy—one shove, into the big wheels—but she couldn’t imagine him deserving it.
Whenever she tried to talk to Mr. Rose, he was either busy or absent. She finally caught up with him in the hallway near the teacher lounge and tried to mention the Tree. He looked at her as if she was speaking gibberish. One brow raised.
At home, she asked CH@NG3M3, “Will Laurence become an enemy of magic?”
CH@NG3M3 responded, “Do you think Laurence will become an enemy of magic?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Why are you asking me?”
She couldn’t get to sleep for ages, even with Berkley scrunched along her rib cage—but then she finally slept, and dreamed she was carving Laurence open with a big knife. His skin parted to reveal a shining portal to a magical land full of kind wizards who gave her a wand of her own. She dreamed she lured him to the Wadlow River cliff, where the high-school kids partied, and shoved him off the edge onto the sharp, slippery rocks.
She woke up crying and shaking and holding on to Berkley for dear life.
*
SOMEONE THREW A rock at Patricia’s head before school started. Not a snowball with rocks in it, just a plain chunk of granite. Patricia ducked, but slipped on the path. Laurence grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. He steadied her, and seemed to be trying to say something. Then he walked away, like he usually did these days whenever he was about to speak to her.
First period, Patricia reached in her backback for her textbook and something else spilled out: a pair of panties, with a stain she couldn’t identify and didn’t care to examine further. She was sure they hadn’t been there when she left the house. The other kids at her table, including Macy Firestone, started laughing and taking photos.
“What’s that commotion?” Mr. Gluckman asked from the board.
“Someone has put … something unspeakable in my bag.” Patricia tried to sound dignified, not like a victim but not like a troublemaker, either.
“Emo bitch,” someone hissed from the corner.