Breaking Magic

Chapter Three: Adam

     I meet El for lunch just outside the dining hall.

     "How did Thaumaturgy go?" she asks me, trying to sound casual but not quite pulling it off.

     I shrug. "Oh, you know," I hedge, "about the same as usual."

     El narrows her eyes at me, but doesn't press any harder. She knows that if anything really bad happened, I'd tell her, and that otherwise it must have just been the regular shit show it usually was and that I'd rather not spend the entire lunch break dissecting exactly where I went wrong.

     El used to make me do that in sophomore year, as if rehashing every painful moment of my failed spells would somehow result in a sudden flash of understanding as to where I was going wrong. But all it ever actually did was reinforce how different, how incompatible my magic is with everyone else's. El has since given up, though I'm sure she has theories and potential experiments she's bursting to try if I just gave her the opportunity.

     We head into the dining hall and slide into the lunch line. Some kids, especially the younger ones, bring lunches from home, but since St. Bosco's is a private school for the wizardly inclined, the quality of the school food is pretty good. And since the lunches are free too thanks to a few big shot alumni donors, most of the students choose to eat the school food.

     It's pizza today, and I grab three slices of the veggie and two of the ham and pineapple. There is a choice of fruit salad or a house salad past the pizzas and I grab a bowl of each, plus a carton of milk and a glass of water. It's an effort to get to a table without spilling anything on my tray, but somehow I manage it. El sits across from me, two pieces of pepperoni and a house salad the only things on her tray, and she watches me with an expression of mild disgust as I inhale the first three slices of my pizza.

     "It won't kill you to breathe in between bites, you know," she says.

     "Breathing slows me down," I reply, or at least I try to, but it comes out as garbled mush through my full mouth.

     "Have you cast any spells since breakfast?" she asks, eying me suspiciously. I shake my head no, pause, then make a so-so sign with my hand. I hadn't managed to get the invisibility spell down all the way, but I supposed I had made it work a little.

     "Well, you must have been letting off waves of magic if you're already so hungry," she says with conviction, starting on her own salad.

     El has a theory that I'm always so thin, and so hungry, because I'm always burning through my magic at a higher rate than most people, and it takes a lot of energy to keep that up. Maybe she's right, but I didn't always get a lot to eat in foster care, and I still managed to freeze the entire boy's bathroom in middle school into a solid block of ice once, so it isn't as though the power of my magic suffers if I don't eat as much.

     "I've had four classes with Felix Roth so far," I tell her.

     "Yikes," El sympathizes. "That's like your worst nightmare."

     "My worst nightmare is showing up to Meditation class and realizing I'm naked," I correct her. Then I pause and think about it for a moment, and amend, "but yeah, Felix is there in the dream mocking me, so I guess you're pretty much right."

     "Well, you have Magic in the Media next, right? I highly doubt Felix will be taking that class too, so you'll at least have a break from him for the next fifty minutes."

     "Yeah, he's probably taking Advanced Council Politics or something," I say bitterly. Felix Roth's parents aren't members of the Council themselves, but they're powerful backers of it thanks in part to their wealthy socio-economic status. Felix's political career in the magical world was practically mapped out for him, whereas my future couldn't have been more uncertain if I was using a Magic 8 Ball to make all my decisions for me.