Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

18. Raised On Teresa Teng

Adrian was still thinking about that encounter the a few days later, as he sat in on yet another chaperoning mission.

This time it was at a McDonald's. The franchise owner had been educated at Carleton back when it had barely outgrown the one-room pack school it had once been, and he had decided to give back even though the institution as it currently existed barely resembled the place he had gone to all those years prior. Business was booming. There was one problem. The soft serve machine was working quite well indeed. A bit too well. So well, in fact, that it needed some... intervention.

And so an arrangement of sorts had been arranged.

As the manager herded the boys into the back of the store to do the dirty deed, he settled down to a coffee. This was too easy. Just sit around for a few hours doing nothing and get paid for it. He had felt slightly guilty at first and then it had gone away after he had gotten used to it. Now it had come back, so gradually that he had not even noticed it. Until now.

He decided to use the time to review his lesson plans. He had the exhibition coming up in just a few days, and planning that was already taking up his whole schedule. Everything had been selected, but there was still so much to be done. He had so many people to see, so many things to arrange. Things to hire. He needed time to think. But there was so much going on.

He felt that the atmosphere had shifted. He could be imagining it, or was it real? People seemed to walk faster, as if they had more purpose than before. Were they onto him? Or was he overthinking it, and it was just the natural turning of the seasons, perhaps amplified by the magical undercurrents? People changed. But the thought still unnerved him.

He had literally no idea. There was a letter from Halberstam, all PR-speak, no hard edges. They needed to be vigilant, it said. Vigilant of what? There was whispering in the classroom. Who had tipped them off? Why? He had no idea what exactly was going on.

Despite the fact that the logic told him that his liaising with Brendan could not have possibly led to this, he could not shake the feeling that it was somehow related. What if he was somehow working for them, due to some Stockholm Syndrome-type thing? But that didn't really make sense. Why would he do that. He had dropped out. He had no face anymore to show around them. He had said as much. It didn't make any sense.

The stuff Brendan told him really made him wonder. What else could they do? It was very hard to get into this kind of mindset given he had no prior experience with magic before getting into all of this. People with magical powers only made up a tiny minority of the New Carinthian population, lost among the fae, vampires, elves, merfolk and the overwhelming majority of wolves. Immigration in the past 40 years had brought the numbers up as humans encroached elsewhere in the world, but they were still a fraction of a fraction.

He decided to concentrate on the things that he could work out. He thought about every encounter he had had that day with another teacher, another student, trying to recall what they had said to him and their tone of voice and the facial expressions which had accompanied their words, trying to feel for some kind of pattern. It was hard to recall at times, when he had forgotten about the interaction pretty much immediately afterwards, and he had to sort of imagine what had gone on, extrapolating off of the other events.

Feeling like an outsider was nothing new to him. He had always been aware he was different, but this was less about that and more about being found out. The feeling of dread was the same though.

They wouldn't do anything, though. They had no proof. Or did they? Would he be called to the principal's office one day and be simply sent packing? What would happen then? He had no idea.

Nothing worked. Nothing seemed to alleviate his fears. He realised it was something he could not fully rationalise, at least in the amount of time he had. He could only hope that his paranoia would be proven correct. He just had to live with it for the moment.