The Last Apothecary

Chapter 8.

With a whip of my head, I turned to find the same purple-hoodie wearing guy from this morning now inspecting my face, way too close for comfort.

"Huh," he said, glancing down at my name tag. "So your name is Crow. That's pretty cool."

I immediately pulled my face back. "Geez. Do you not know what personal space is? And why do you care about what my name is? I'm not looking for yours?" I hated when people did that. Only one Summer here, and people loved using that name tag to call me out when they didn't even know me.

He stared back at me with light grey eyes. "...Yeah, I guess that really isn't fair. My name is Dustin. There, now we're even," he responded with a small grin, completely missing my point.

"Okay great. What do you need?" I asked, leaning against the counter, propping up my chin with my hand. 

"Oh yeah! I want to reserve the computer over there. It is open today, right?" He pointed to one in the far corner. He handed me his clip card, and with a sigh I took it, tapping against the last square on the wall behind me. Registering the payment, the square lit up a light blue, the electicity flowing through the wires on the clear floor, and flicking the screen of the corresponding machine on. I handed him his card, which he happily took back, humming to himself as he sat down, switching the mouse to the other side to play.

I turned back to the rest of the room. It was a lot emptier than I thought it would be, so with nothing else to do, I went to go grab a broom. After all, nothing was worse at passing the time than sitting there and doing nothing. Maybe that's why my boss liked me so much.

"Hey. Why'd he call you Witch Boy?"

I turned to see my boss right behind me, their hands on their skinny hips, right above the black apron tie. Something about the intense focus in their blue eyes unnerved me.

"What? Oh..." I glanced back at Dustin, smashing away keys on the computer in front of him. Of course he'd gone ahead and opened up his mouth. "Because... that's what I am." I looked away, trying not to make eye contact as an uncomfortable amount of sweat dripped down my neck. I knew what was coming next. Something I thought was never going to come back to bite me in the ass.

"But I thought you put on your application that you were Human?" I saw them raising an eyebrow, and I tried to focus back on what I had been doing. Sweeping. It seemed very pointless now. There wasn't anything on the floor anyway.

"Well, I didn't think it was... I had just thought I-" I stopped for a minute. Stupid assuming kid! Just because he heard me sing to one band and assumed I was a Witch. And now look where... I stopped for a moment, seeing my backpack in the corner of the room, tossed aside because I hadn't put it in a locker with my rush to clock in on time. My backpack, with my 'Son of a Witch' shirt hanging right out of the side. The same shirt I had worn to school today... Crap.

"-I'd just always thought I was an Ord. So I filed under Human, that's all," I answered. When I had first gotten past the interview, I remember being so nerve-wracked about the whole thing that when I got the papers, I was just trying to fill them out quickly enough. I just assumed, since I never had any sign of magic anyway, that I could just file as Human. Unlike some people, my mind flashed to that girl in my science class, I didn't go around announcing I was a Witch. Nor did I usually hide it. It was a part of me, but not everything. If it came up, it came up, no big deal. After all, "What difference does it make?"

"What difference does it make? Ord or no, there's a lot of twisted laws for you guys with how the government is right now. If they release something about new regulations for you in the work area, it's my job to enforce them. Not to mention my wand rule. I don't want those in the building." Their voice had that snippy tone back in it, like they had had the time I tapped the card into the wrong computer, and they had needed to call up the company to get the money back on the clip card.