Never Believe It's Not So

Seb Matthew-Smith is magic.

It's not a secret really, he's never made any effort to hide it, unfortunately, it seems that all his friends are either too dense or too self centred to notice.

The first people who should have noticed were really his older siblings, Georgia, Liam and Harry or maybe his mum. Seb had been 4 at the time, and up until that point was Sebastian. He returned from his first day of school simply insisting that he had to be called Seb.

His family was widely accepting of any simple request such as this, but when they asked Seb why, they really should have got it.

Because Seb couldn't be Sebastian anymore, the lady said so. Names held power for people like him the lady in the tree had said.

In his family's defence, Seb hadn't really gotten it then, and his mother and father had chalked Seb's constant insisting that the lady in the tree with the green skin and the purple hair had spoken to him down to childish imagination. But they agreed to call him Seb, so that was good enough for him.

The second person who should have noticed was Natalie Bagley.

It was freshman year, and Seb had long since gained a grip on his abilities (and still visited the dryad in the tree by his elementary school when he could). Natalie was his only real friend in freshman year and in March she was going through it.

It was her first real break up, from Greg Harris from their chemistry class. They had started dating in the summer and had been going strong for nearly six months, until Greg announced that he never really liked her that much anyways, that she wasn't pretty enough for him and had been cheating on her with Jasmine Robe from their geography class.

Natalie had been inconsolable, and the break up process from the movies of eating a lot of ice cream and watching romcoms didn't seem to be quite as effective as it seemed in the movies.

Natalie stayed over at Seb's farmhouse that night, staying in his room as his parents didn't seem too worried about his heartbroken best friend staying with him, she fell asleep halfway through High School Musical 2 still sniffling about how 'he was always too good looking for me anyway'.

As Seb reached to turn off the TV just as Sharpay started plotting a way to stop her classmates from participating in the talent show when an idea formed in his own head.

Quietly checking that Natalie was definitely asleep he crept out of the room and out of the backdoor smiling slightly at the soft snoring from Chowsie, their sheep dog.

He moved silently through the garden to the big willow tree that stood not far from the hay barn and traced his familiar sigil against the hollow of the tree and watched in wonder as it opened up with a soft glow to allow him into the small room hidden within, no matter how many times he did it, the simple cloak reveal never got old.

He ignited the candles inside with a simple click of his fingers and set to work mixing up herbs.

The next day when Natalie approached him excitedly in the cafeteria in morning break to tell him that when she had seen Greg in art class he had been struck down with a terrible case of acne over night, he couldn't suppress his smile. It was a simple curse, not overly malicious but very effective. Maybe next time Greg would think those conventional beauty standards he had been beholding everyone else to , because Jasmine had dropped the jock like a tonne of bricks, the girl was predictably shallow.

He almost choked on his disgusting cafeteria lunch when Natalie had added something about her weird dream where Seb walked inside a tree.

Third came Ricky Bowen.