Going Your Own Way, but with Magic

Chapter 1

My name is Max and I am 16 years old. This morning, I set my college library on fire. I managed this by shooting flames out of my hands. Now, I am on a bus. I don't know where I am going on this bus, although I'm thinking vaguely about London. I'm going South, anyway. I am running away. This is not a scary thought, or even a new one. If there's anything I know how to do, it's how to run away. Running away is a known variable. Fire springing from my hands, less so. And I know what I saw. It wasn't a hallucination or a guilt-induced fantasy. I have tried every logical explanation and none of them come close to making sense. I was angry and then I summoned fire. Please believe me, if I had any rational way to explain this I'd have found it by now.

I was born Elisa Grafton and that name is pretty much everything I got from my parents. I don't even have a photo to see about genetics, so I don't know if I have my mother's eyes or my father's jaw. I don't really know why I changed it to Max, when I desperately want something of my parents to cling to, but Elisa feels wrong. Elisa is a name for their baby, who died with them. She had a life that didn't happen, and she left behind Max. They died when I was three. Car accident, very tragic. I have memories of them. They're probably fantasies, but I don't care. There's occasional flashes. A man dancing with tiny me, a woman's smiling face. Always blurred or turned away from me, though; I can never get their faces clear. The rest of my childhood consisted of a lot of bouncing around foster homes. It wasn't awful. People were kind and good and I have some happy memories. I had an unremarkable childhood that flirted with nice at times. But there was always a hint of sadness. Not even sadness exactly, more of something being missing. Nothing there really foreshadows the arson, or the mysterious power that I did the arson with.

My skin is a pale brown, darkening in summer. I have nice eyes – big and dark with long lashes – which are probably my best feature. My hair is dark and long and poker-straight. I continually think about cutting it all off, but I've never quite had the courage. There's a harshness to my features that makes it look like I'm constantly clenching my jaw. I like it. It stops people approaching me and it gives me a few illusions of power. I have a small, faded scar on my right cheek. I wasn't born with it, it doesn't glow. I got it falling off my bike when I was seven years old. I wear thick-lensed glasses because I can't get use to pulling at my eyeball for contacts. I don't have one eye that's bright purple, my scar doesn't burn when I'm near danger and my hair didn't even have the decency to be flame-red. In my appearance at least, there are no indicators of what I did.

I have been able to avoid, up to this point, thinking too much about it. There's been enough things that need doing to keep my mind busy. Evidence has to be destroyed, bedrooms have to be broken into, bus tickets have to be bought. Right now, on the bus going somewhere, I don't have any of that. And my thoughts are forced right back into what happened this morning.

It would be nice to say that at some point it becomes a blur, a convenient blackout somewhere to absolve me of some of the blame. 'I can't even remember what I was angry about, it was so trivial.' 'Next thing I knew, everything was burning and I couldn't stop it.' Maybe, 'next thing I knew I was on a bus, hood up and slumped back into the seat, having smashed my mobile phone and bought a disposable to make me harder to track.' The only thing is, it never does. Become a blur, I mean. There is nothing there to make me sound a bit more innocent, nothing to even stop myself from remembering for a while. I can recall every second in perfect, painful detail.

It was one of those days where from the minute you wake up you know nothing's going to go right. Normally those end in a larger bar of chocolate than one person should be eating and a lot of self-pity. This one ended in me setting everything on fire. Like I do on every one of those days, I was hiding in the library. Ostensibly studying. Mostly hiding. Then, in walked Jonah Campbell. Jonah Campbell is an asshole. Not an unthinking blustery type of asshole, a malicious one. There's probably some deep-seated insecurity at the heart of it all. Maybe he's never recovered from that thing his dad said to him when he was seven that crushed him psychologically. Maybe everything he does is a desperate cry for love and attention. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I couldn't care less. Anyway. Jonah Campbell. Asshole. Glad we've all got that sorted. And he won't leave me alone. Apparently, my emotional outbursts are absolutely hilarious. So boy found girl despite her best efforts to hide from everybody, boy taunted girl about parents or lack thereof, girl set boy on fire. The usual stuff. I promise this isn't a pity party. Arson bad. This is scene-setting. Well. With the scene set, I now have no way to avoid thinking about the fire.