Staying Under

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

There was one class I loved the most in Asphodel Academy. It was categorized as Maths but most of our learning involved practice rather than scribbling on a sheet of paper. We had it every year, and the teacher was always the same. Precision and Error—or, as we often called it, Mr. Hollister's PE. An inner joke, because there was no gym class in Asphodel. All our sports had its own classes already and every student was required to take at least one of them.

Anyway, back to PE. I loved it so much, mostly because it was the only class where we were taught to do magic without having to memorize spells and partly because I was so good at it. Basically, in PE we were taught how to direct raw magic correctly with the right approximation. How wide our force field should be, how we channel that raw magic—through spells, or object, or just a thought, even—and how high the intensity scale of our emitted magic, affected how strongly it was going to hit our target. Since our target were usually small inanimate objects rather than a huge dummy, it took a great deal of control to hit it with our magic square and center.

Did I say I was good at it? Scratch that. I was the best.

I tried to suppress a smug look coming onto my face and failed as Mr. Hollister came over to my table and said, "Well done, Miss Williams. Now why don't you show your friends how to do it right?"

Shrugging, I repeated what I'd done the first time. I focused my magic to the tip of finger and made it my channeling object, and then I directed the force straight to the kiwi, willing it to ripen until it was brown and blackish, a glop of goo on the table. As we were always taught, I then drew back my magic and tucked in my finger so that I wouldn't accidentally hit anyone.

"Well done—" Mr. Hollister began to say again, but one of the girls interrupted.

"That's cheating, sir!" the girl whose name I never learned exclaimed. I vaguely recognized her as one of the newer students. "She converted her force field from linear to radial instead of making the three-dimensional time bubble we're supposed to do!"

"It gets the job done, doesn't it?" I snapped back.

"Yeah, but you're using an old method instead of doing it like the module says."

"Well, if you want to see a real time bubble I can show you now if you get yourself a mirror."

Mr. Hollister stepped in then. "Kids," he said, the way he knew we always hated. "Calm down. Miss Dewitt, please go back to your table and show us how exactly you mean by doing it like the module says." Before my smugness consumed my face again, though, he turned to me with a pointed look. "You, too, Miss Williams. Miss Dewitt was right about you preferring to stick to two-dimensional force fields. There is no learning without getting out of your comfort zone."

"But—"

"Get back to work, everyone."

As everyone else scattered off, I saw the Dewitt girl shooting me a wide toothy smile. She point her finger at me and before I knew what she was going to do, I was suddenly blasted back against the bottles behind me and they fell to ground, shattering into pieces. Irate, I began to point my finger at her, but realized a spell was more practical in this case. Just like I did with Amy last night. I muttered the same spell with a little altercation and snapped my fingers.

The Dewitt girl's scream probably carried to the woods outside the academy.

Twenty minutes later, I landed in the principal's office.

"This has to stop, Riley Williams," Principal Edgerton stressed. "Detention for you, Friday night."

Me? "But she started it! Doesn't she get a punishment, too?"