Status: Updated every Wednesday and Saturday

Breaking Magic

One

My name is Adam Wolfe, and depending on who you ask, I'm either the best magician in the world, or the worst.

I don't really have much of an opinion on the subject myself. I'm just different, and my magic is different, and there really isn't anything I can do about it. Believe me, I've tried.

It's the first day of my senior year of high school, and I'm already on campus. I'm always on campus. St. Bosco's is technically a boarding school, but I'm the only one who lives here during the school year. I also live here during the summer. I just live here, period, and I have the whole place to myself. And it’s a lot less fun than it sounds.

Back when St. Bosco’s was first built, it was the only magic school west of the Mississippi, so students came from miles around. Now, however, there are dozens of small, local school in every state, so no one needs to board anymore. Everybody else attending St. Bosco’s lives close enough that their parents can just drop them off in the mornings and pick them up again after school, although we do get the occasional foreign exchange student who stays in one of the dozens of empty dorms so they can spend a semester learning about American style spell work. It can get lonely, but at least I never have to share a bathroom.

When I wake up, I'm so excited that I put on my uniform right away, even though it's only 6am and nobody will even start to show up for another two hours. I pull on a blue sweater vest with the St. Bosco’s logo on it over a white button up, taking the time to roll up the shirt sleeves.

I always keep them rolled up, because my arms are always just a little too long for my shirts. The cuffs hit just above my wrists, and I look ridiculous. I can't go up a size either, because then the rest of me just looks like I'm drowning in a shirt that’s wide enough to fit two of me. I have the same problem with the grey slacks, but fortunately a belt helps make up the difference there and I don't have to walk around looking like I grew two inches since putting on my pants.

I automatically reach for the grey and navy striped tie in my cupboard, but with a rush of pleasure I remember that seniors aren't required to wear them. It's a small perk for going twelve years without ending your magical career prematurely by accidentally blowing yourself to kingdom come.

I hated the stupid tie, I'd never figured out how to tie the damn thing right. I always had to have El redo it for me when she arrives in the mornings before I can get a demerit for looking sloppy. Well, sloppier than usual.

I glance in the mirror before I leave my room to see how bad my hair is. I hadn't cut it all summer and it was starting to get really out of control now, black curls constantly getting into my eyes every time I blink, the back almost touching the collar of my shirt. Maybe I'll ask El to ask her mom if she’ll give it cut for me, before I end up with a full mullet.

I look okay otherwise. I never look good, exactly, but I don't look like I've been steamrollered or bulldozed over or hit by a train, and that's enough for me. My magic tends to leak out of me, especially when I haven't used it for a while, which always leave me with a thin sheen of sweat on my forehead, like I've just finished a brisk jog. But I spent most of the night practicing minor spells though in preparation for the first day of classes, and I'm not overflowing yet.

The skin under my eyes is always a little grey. My cheeks are slightly hollow, no matter how much I eat, and I am always one missed meal from tipping the scales of thin to scrawny. I have a small vertical scar on my upper lip, and one single dark freckle to the right of my nose. That freckle is my favorite thing about myself. I've only got the one, and I'm not embarrassed to say I cherish it.
The last thing I put on is the silver watch that El's parents gave me this past Christmas. It's flashy and expensive, and way too big for my skinny wrist, but I always wear it anyways. I'd never owned anything like that watch before, and getting it from El's parents made me feel more a part of a family than I could ever remember feeling in my life.

I head down to the dining hall, where I know the cooks will already be preparing enough hot breakfast to feed a Roman legion. Most days only a few students eat breakfast at the school, but the three women that keep a school full of precocious magical children and teenagers fed whip up a real feast for the first day breakfast. It's called the Pancake Social, but pancakes are only the tip of the culinary iceberg.

There are cinnamon rolls with warm icing; waffles with real maple syrup, not the fake maple-flavored corn syrup stuff I’d always had before St. Bosco’s; fruit salads with lemon glazes; scones fresh out of the oven; every variety of muffin that has ever existed; french toast that's been soaking in syrup and milk overnight to make it as soft and moist as possible; crispy bacon and eggs fluffier than you would think possible; thick slices of ham and sausages and hash browns and toasted white bread with way too much butter. And jam. Before I came to St. Bosco's, I used to think jam only came in one flavor: grape. Now I try to make it my personal goal to have at least three different types of jam per day, even if I've run out of things to put it on and just eat it by the spoonful.

We don't usually eat quite that good at school, but the Pancake Social is a tradition that all the stops are pulled out for. Almost everyone comes early so they can snag at least one pancake or sausage.
The dining hall is empty, of course, but the metal grill that separates the kitchen and the dining tables is open and waves of steam are already pouring out, bringing the smell of bread and cinnamon and syrup on their tides. I slink into the kitchen, technically not allowed behind the serving counter but it's not like anyone is around to stop me, and I loiter in the doorway while I wait for one of the cooks to notice me.

They are rushing around, frantically trying to get everything prepared in time, but eventually Mrs. Pendle spots me and stops for a moment.

“Oh, good morning Adam!” she says, smiling brightly at me. “You're up early, aren't you?”

“Just excited,” I reply.

“Ah, that's right, this is only your third Pancake Social, isn't it?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Well you'll have to wait a little bit longer, I'm afraid, but I might have something to tide you over until it starts. You're so thin, I'm worried you'll slip right down a drain one of these days!”

She always says that, and she always gives me extra food, even when it's just me over the summer and she's the only cook on campus. It's her life's mission to fatten me up. I'd be inclined to think she was a fairy tale witch intent on eating me if I didn't already know that she was just a regular witch without any cannibalistic intentions to speak of.

She scrounges up two of the muffins for me, one chocolate, the other almond poppy seed, and a cup of milk to wash it down with. I thank her and wave to Ms. Bella and Mrs. Hancock, the other two cooks, before leaving them to their task.

My muffins and I head out to the front of the school, where picnic tables have already been set out in preparation on the lush green lawn. The lawn is magicked so it's always lush and green, even though the state has been in a drought for years. It seemed like a silly waste of magic to me when I first arrived, but now I appreciate things like that, the little ways that magic can make you happier, or your day a little brighter. Magic comes from emotions, I've since learned, and there's no such thing as a waste of magic.

I avoid the picnic tables and decide to sit under an oak tree even though the ground is slightly damp. It's pleasantly cool now, but I know that it'll be sweltering before ten, and I aimed to claim the best shady spot before everyone else realized their mistake and fled to it. The courtyard in the front of the school is huge, but I can still see the gravel parking lot from where I sit, and can only just make out the road beyond that. No cars that don't belong to St. Bosco students or their families ever use that road, so I know that anybody I see driving up it will be one of my school mates.

St. Bosco's teaches kids from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so even though there aren't a ton of magicians in the world, I’m still a far cry from knowing everyone. And out of those that I do know by name or at least by sight, plenty don't care for me, and a few outright detest me. Even so, I'm practically tingling with eagerness for people to start arriving. I visited El a couple of times over the summer, and I even went to the beach once with some classmates who thought to pick me up on the way since they had to drive past the school to get there; but mostly my summers at St. Bosco's are long and lonely. I was eager to see a face that didn't belong to a staff member.

I finished both my muffins and my milk an hour and a half before the first person showed up.

At seven thirty it was already becoming uncomfortably warm, and I’m beginning to wish I'd worn my school shorts instead of pants, even though I looked like an idiot in them, when I hear the low and distant whine of a car. I sit up straighter and strain my eyes, and eventually a black car trundles into view, slowing and pulling into the gravel parking lot where it grinds to a halt.

I don't recognize the car, or the family that comes out of it. It’s a girl, several years younger than me, maybe fourteen or so, and her parents. They also have a really little kid with them, a boy just too young to attend kindergarten at St. Bosco's. The girl is wearing a pastel backpack that’s so full, her feet actually sink an inch into the ground from its weight every time she takes a step. That’s one benefit of living in the dorms: I only have to carry a couple of classes' worth of books at a time because I can just stop by my room to switch them out.

I smile at the girl and her family as they approach, and they smile politely back, but go to sit at one of the tables a little ways away from me. I don't think her parents realize who I am at first, because the girl leans in towards them and says something too quiet for me to hear. They both glance quickly back at me with expressions caught somewhere between affected nonchalance and blatant curiosity.

I don't mind, I’m fairly used to it by now.

A few more families trickle in over the next half hour, mostly younger kids I’ve seen around but never talked to. A gaggle of juniors I definitely know by sight show up packed in a van without a single parent between them—evidently someone had gotten their license over the summer and was eager to flaunt their new found freedom over all the lowly kids who hadn't turned sixteen yet. A few of them smile and wave at me, others sneer or ignore me entirely. It’s always a mixed bag.

By eight o'clock, there are perhaps a dozen family or friend groups gathered, the stream of those arriving growing more steady by the minute, and I sense the electric tingle in the air a split second before the beautiful spread of the breakfast feast magically appears on the picnic tables. Literally magically, of course. Some people clap, and everyone rushes forwards to get the first or best bites. I would have been right there with them, prepared to wrestle someone's Gran for the biggest cinnamon roll, but El still hasn't arrived yet.

Usually she tries to arrive as early as possible, knowing that I'll just be tooling around by myself without her. I’m almost starting to get worried that something has happened to her when I see the big green minivan pull around the corner and into view. A grin spreads across my face and I abandon my shady spot to jog up the drive, wanting to meet her as soon as she gets out of the car.

Her mom and dad are the first ones out, but El's two younger siblings aren't far behind them.

“Adam! How are you?” her mom says with a smile almost as wide as my own when she sees me. She pulls me in for a hug when I’m close enough.

“I'm good, Mrs. Fuentes,” I reply, and I shake her dad's hand as he comes around to greet me too. Mrs. Fuentes always does the driving, since El's dad doesn't have a license. That always makes me feel a little better about never having the chance to learn how to drive myself. “Hi, Mr. Fuentes.”

“Good morning, Adam. Magic's Might, is it really that hot already, or is it just me?” he asks, tugging at the collar of his shirt.

“Maybe you're having hot flashes,” come's El's voice, and I turn to see her struggling to pull her messenger bag out of the car. It's heavy and awkward, and she's always complaining about how the uneven weight distribution from the single strap messes with her back, or how her books constantly bumping against her thigh when she walks gives her bruises, but she refuses to trade the thing in for a regular backpack. “You are getting to that age, Dad.”

Her father just shakes his head, like he can't believe where he went wrong, and pats me on the shoulder.

“Good luck having her back, my boy. Maybe next summer you'll talk her into staying in the dorms with you, eh? And give her poor old folks a bit of a break.”

“I'm graduating this year, Dad,” El says with the exasperation of someone who has had this conversation a hundred times. “I leave school for good in June.”

I feel an uncomfortable twist in my stomach, and I interrupt the conversation by giving El the biggest hug I can muster. I have to crouch a little to manage it, since she barely scrapes by at 5'3” on a good day which leaves me a half a foot taller than her.

“Alright, alright, I just saw you a few weeks ago!” she protests, but she doesn't struggle that much. Eventually she pushes me off her and inspects me with a critical eye, as if afraid I had changed somehow despite, as she so lovingly mentioned, it having been just under a month since we'd last seen each other. I inspect her back, just to give her a taste of her own medicine.

Her skin is dark brown, darker than the rest of her family's even though she spends half as much time outside as the rest of them do, and her hair is thick and shiny and so black it’s practically a void that time and space can’t escape from. She always wears it in a braid or pony tail, and she's constantly complaining about it being too long and getting in the way. She changes the subject when I tell her to just cut it short then, the same way she does when I suggest she trades in the messenger bag for a regular backpack.

She's wearing her uniform too, but she wisely opted for the short sleeved collared shirt and a grey pleated skirt, anticipating the heat of the day. She is still wearing her grey and navy bow tie—everyone has the option to choose between a regular tie or a bow tie, but only the girls ever wear the bow tie because they just make the boys look like they're cosplaying Doctor Who or something—but I wasn't expecting anything less. El didn't often wear makeup or do her nails, but she was always impeccably dressed. Not wearing a tie of some sort would be an affront to her dignity, I think.

“You look awful, Adam,” she says after giving me a good hard look up and down.

“Don't I always?” I reply, still grinning. She shrugs.

“I guess so. I just always forget how shitty you look after I haven't seen you for a while.”

“Language, Eleanor!” her mother, who is tying her youngest son's tie into a complex windsor knot, scolds.

“Sorry Mom,” El says, not sorry at all.

“Hi Adam, bye Adam!” the middle child, Noemi, calls to me as she rushes past, backpack crooked, down the walk to where her friends are gathered. She's fourteen this year, and far too cool to be seen with her parents, big sister, or little brother for more than five minutes at a time.

“Bye Noemi,” I call after her, but she's already gone.

“Come on.” El links arms with me and begins dragging me down the drive as well. “Before everything good is gone. I'm starving, and if I don't get at least one pancake, the entire school year will be ruined.”

“Why were you late?” I ask, struggling to keep up with her. My legs are longer, but I walk with a naturally slow pace, while El is like one of those wind up toys who move so fast their little plastic feet are just a blur.

El rolls her eyes. “Noemi had to change her outfit about a hundred times. First she came down with the waistband of her skirt rolled up so that it was practically a miniskirt, a la Sailor Moon. Mom just about had a fit, and sent her back up to fix it. Then she came down with her bow tie around her neck and off to the side like a bow on a cat or something. After mom finally talked her out of that, she decided it was too warm to wear her long sleeves and had to go back up to change again. Then just as we were finally about to leave the house, she decided that the tie looked better with the short sleeve shirt and ran back in. It's a freaking miracle we got here at all.”

I decided not to remind El that she had done much the same thing daily back in sophomore year when I had first met her.

Most of the students are here by now, but we manage to elbow our way up to one of the tables and grab a couple of plates, loading them high with enough carbs and sugars to give a troll diabetes.
I had known it would be a mistake to abandon my spot under the tree, and I was right because a gaggle of ten year olds has already rushed in to fill the void. They don't last long however, and are soon chased off by some pushy sophomores who aren't above abusing their status as upper classmen. It isn't worth the aggressive ritual of dominance displays that would be required to win the spot back, so El and I just find some space at the end of one of the less crowded picnic tables.

“Are you excited to start classes?” El asks me through a mouthful of icing.

“Yeah, I am,” I say, and for once, I mean it. I had been deeply disappointed when I first came to St. Bosco's two years before, only to find out that magic schools aren't nearly as fun in real life as they are in books and movies. Especially for me, with my special... circumstances. But this year, my private tutor, Mr. Donovan, promised he’ll let me try casting some serious spells, instead of focusing on how to properly hold my wand and drilling spell phrases for hours and hours without actually casting anything.

“Oh yeah, you're not in Magic Kindergarten anymore this year, are you?” El cackles, a cloud of powdered sugar puffing from her mouth like dragon smoke as she laughs.

“I wasn't in Magic Kindergarten, I was just observing Magic Kindergarten,” I protest, flushing. “I was supposed to observe how young children naturally acclimatize themselves to channeling their magic through a wand,” I add even louder, over her blatant laughter.

“Sure, and learn your colors and numbers, and how to spell your name and what sound the doggy makes,” she snorts.

I miss El like crazy whenever she's not around, but I can never remember why when she's actually here with me.

I decide to try ignoring her—not that that ever works—and look back out towards the parking lot. Almost everyone is here already.

I see Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes out on the lawn trying to coax their youngest, Ryan, towards the picnic, but he's too busy chasing after dandelions like they might escape him if he doesn't move quickly enough. Some other seniors I know are playing Frisbee nearby, though they've put a spell on it that gives you a nasty electric shock every time you touch it, which seems a bit sadistic to me. All the new kindergarteners who are starting their very first year at St. Bosco's are clinging to their parents, but the first graders consider themselves Old Boys now and are running in circles while screaming at the top of their lungs, like little sugar crazed hurricanes. Beyond all of them the lot is filled with cars, and it's hard to see the road. El shoved a buttered muffin into my hands—she's also constantly harping on about my weight—and I take a distracted bite out of it.

“Oh, look who's finally here,” El says with a healthy dose of sarcasm, the same moment I myself see the car appear from behind the wall of trees that keeps St. Bosco's partially sheltered from the road.

It's a sleek black car, something expensive and foreign that probably makes all the other cars feel inadequate. It vanishes behind a silver minivan to park and I just wait and watch, my mouth full of blueberry muffin. I wish El had put blueberry jam on it instead of butter.

Felix Roth and his parents finally come around the minivan and start heading towards the courtyard, as cool as you like.

Felix Roth wears his school uniform like he should be modeling it in a magazine. Like El, he's chosen to keep his tie this year, and he looks more like a business man in the grey and navy school colors than a student. He's taller than me, and slender where I'm just skinny. I might have broader shoulders than him if we were standing back to back, but you'd never have guessed it to look at us. His hair is slightly longer than I've ever seen it before, covering his ears, light brown and curly. His nose is straight as an arrow, it wouldn't have looked out of place on the bust of a Roman emperor, and his cheek bones are sharp enough to carve the bust with. His mom, who walks beside him in a white sun dress that makes her look young enough to be mistaken for one of the students, has rich auburn hair and nose and cheeks splashed with freckles. Felix didn't get his mother's hair, but he's got her freckles, which might have made him look boyish if it weren't countered by that dickhead expression he's always wearing.

Felix is one of the people who, if you ask, will tell you I'm the worst magician in the world. And he likes to remind me of this loudly, and often. And anybody else who'll listen. He'd have it published in the school newspaper if he could.

If he notices me and El staring at him, he pretends not to. He and his parents sidle up to some of the others families who run in the same social circles as them, and Felix breaks away to talk to his friends. Some people, the Roths included, are going out of their way to avoid me, to put some physical as well as social distance between them and me. They don't trust me, or at least what I represent. Or I guess what I could do without meaning to. And especially what I could do if I meant to. What I might be capable of doing someday. Not everyone thinks I should be allowed to attend St. Bosco's.

Felix seems to sense me staring at him, or maybe one of his friends notices and says something to him, because he half turns and glances in my direction. One eyebrow raises, disappearing into his curls, and his lip curls in a sneer of disdain. Then he looks away again, as if that's all the time and effort I'm worth to him.

“What a prick,” El says, slapping a fried egg and some bacon between two english muffins and handing it to me. “If he's in all my classes again this year, I'm going to drop out, I swear I will. He's insufferable. We all know he's the top in the class, he doesn't need to show off like such a tool all the time. One of these days he's going to annoy me so badly that I'll snap his wand in half.”

Felix's particular brand of showing off isn't quite as obvious as El seems to think, but it does get damn irritating after a while. I suppose her tolerance for it is lower than mine, having spent the last twelve years being forced to watch it. Felix's magic is incredible to watch, and he doesn't pass up a chance to remind people of that. El probably could given him a run for his money for the top spot in our grade, if she ever bothered to do any of her homework. She’s stupidly good at magic, and math and English and geography and every other subject. She picks things up almost immediately and has never gotten less than 100% on a test since I've known her. She refuses to do a single piece of homework or classwork though, claiming it's a waste of her time since she obviously already knows what she's doing. She's not wrong, but it means that despite her natural genius, she still only scrapes by with Cs and the occasional B in classes.

“What do grades matter?” she always says. “Grades aren't indicative of intelligence, or skill. If they can't tell I'm a magical marvel by my spell casting, then they are too stupid for me to want to associate myself with.”

I hope she's right about that, because my grades are worse than hers.

* * *

By now I've eaten my own body weight in breakfast foods, and it's almost ten o'clock. Classes start an hour late the first day, which the teachers hate but they get us six hours a day, 180 days a year from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I don't know why they're complaining.

Most of the parents are leaving, gathering their things and kissing their children goodbye. The parents of the kindergartners linger a little longer, a few of the kids are crying. There aren't any preschools for magicians as far as I know, so it's the first time they've been left somewhere all day that isn't grandma's house for most of them. I always feel sad for them, afraid to see their parents go and be left in this strange, new place. The lower grade teachers, kindergarten through sixth grade, come out to gather their students into orderly rows before leading them to class. The rest of us are trusted to find our own ways to class, since all of our schedules are divided into periods and where we go depends on which class we have that day.

Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes come over after tracking down and saying goodbye to Noemi, and give a parting hug to both El and me. El squirms and rolls her eyes.

“I'll literally see you guys at three. It's not like I'm going to forget the warmth of your parental embraces in the space of five hours.”

They both ignore her, which is a skill they've grown exceptionally good at. You have to, if you want to be able to stand more than five minutes in El's company.

Mrs. Fuentes smooths down my hair and gives me a warm smile. “You be good, Adam dear. I hear you're really starting to get the hang of using verbal spells now. You just keep working hard, put all of your effort into practicing, and it will keep getting easier.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Fuentes,” I say with a slightly forced, but grateful smile in return. I'm afraid she's wrong, but it feels good to know she believes in me. They say their final goodbyes, make sure that Ryan is lining up behind the right teacher, and head back to their car with all the other parents.

“What's your schedule?” I ask El as we start walking at an exaggeratedly leisurely pace towards the school building. She reaches into her messenger bag to pull it out, having received it in the mail about two weeks before. Mine was still in my room, I had it memorized.

“Let's see... on a normal day I have Speech and Debate for zero period... calculus for first period, then Astronomy on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Astrology on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Third period is Contemporary Magical History—I'm so excited to finally get starting this class—then English Writing. After lunch I've got Thaumaturgy, and obviously 6th period is Meditation.”

“You're still taking Meditation?” I ask, pulling a face that is an adequate physical representation of my loathing for Meditation class. “Your control is perfect though. Hell, you probably could have stopped taking it years ago.”

“I like Meditation. It's soothing.”

“For you, maybe,” I grumble under my breath. I hate Meditation even more than Thaumaturgy, which I already loathe with every fiber of my being. “Well, it's better than last year at least. I have Astronomy and Astrology second period too, and Contemporary Magical History afterwards with you as well. And we'll be in Meditation together so I guess that's one bright spot in my personal hell. I've got English Lit first period, and Thaumaturgy fourth. Oh, and Magic in the Media fifth period,” I add, brightening up considerably. It’s an elective about looking at the ways magic is portrayed by non-magical people in books, movies, and on TV, and one of my only classes that doesn't fill me with academic dread.

“Are you going to learn how all the kids at Hogwarts learned how to spell since they never seem to take an English class?”

I elbow El in the ribs. “Who wants to read a book about a wizard learning how to diagram the parts of a sentence and doing pre-calculus at a magical school?”

“Suspension of disbelief my ass,” El snorts.

We walk up the front steps, taking up the rear of the throng of students trying to squeeze through the bottleneck of the front doors. Eventually we make it inside, and everyone disperses in different directions, heading down hallways or up staircases towards their second period classes.

St. Bosco's was built in the late 1800s as a private school for the child of wealthy magician families, and that's reflected in the architecture. It's caught somewhere between Victorian and Late Gothic—which I only know because El's mom is extremely vocal about her distaste for the resulting effect—and is all columns, turrets, arches, and about a thousand overly ornate windows that somehow don't let in any light. Some of the teacher try to lighten the mood of the classrooms with bright posters with school themed puns on them, but it's a pretty futile task.

It's Tuesday, the day after Labor day, so the lesson is Astrology, a magician's version of Astronomy. We have to take all the same science classes ordinary, non-magical high schoolers do, because we live in the same non-magical world as ordinary people 99% of the time. The magical community isn't huge, and in America we get pretty spread out. I know that in smaller countries like England and in Europe there are entire neighborhoods and even small villages of just magicians living together, but here in the US, your nearest magician neighbor might not even be in the same zip code. So since we have to live in the same world as the mundanes, we have to learn the same things. You still need to know the basics of biology and chemistry, of US government and history. We just supplement those classes with the magical version on alternating days, or years.

Let me tell you, nothing fucks with your mind more than sitting down and learning the basics of mortal physics on Monday, then learning how little things like “gravity” and “the conservation of matter” suddenly don't apply when magic gets involved on Tuesday. Some magician physicists think that what the rest of the non-magic scientific community calls Dark Matter is actually raw magical energy holding the universe together, and that's where our magic comes from. Sort of like that Carl Sagan quote about how we're all made of star dust, but way weirder.

It's all easily digestible, even boring to my classmates. But I went to regular high schools until I was sixteen, never realizing that I was part of an entire secret world of magic, not just some freak mutant, and sometimes it’s all a bit much for me. I'm looking forward to Astrology though, which can't possibly be as bad as Physics of Magic.

A slow and painful death probably isn't as bad as Physics of Magic.

El and I are almost late when we finally make it to class, and there aren't any available seats next to each other. She heads for a seat closest to the front of the class, and while I would have naturally migrated to the back row, it's already full of the other slackers and underachievers. I see a seat next to Riley Funke, who I'm friendly with, and snag that instead.

“Hey, Adam,” he says with a smile. “How was your summer?”

I smile back. Last year everyone was too afraid to ask me that, since they all knew I stayed at school, alone, all summer long, with only Mr. Donovan as my remedial tutor and a skeleton crew of staff for company.

“It was good,” I reply, and I mean it. “I went camping with El's family which was cool, I'd never been camping before. And to a couple amusement parks. Plus I got to hit the beach once with Marcus and his friends.”

“Did you blow anything up?” Riley laughs.

He's only joking, but I still feel my grin grow a little forced. “Not this year.”

There used to be a gazebo by the pond in back of the school. Since last summer, there’s just a circular patch of scorched earth there instead, and the fish in the pond immediately sink to the bottom in a panic whenever I come near.

“Alright, alright, everyone settle down!” the teacher barks as she comes into the room once everybody else is seated. I recognize her as Ms. Perry even though I've never actually had a class with her before. She’s immediately identifiable by the long white blonde sheet of pin straight hair that reaches the small of her back. She's tall too, at least as tall as me, and she stands out like a lighthouse beacon in crowds.

Normally a teacher like Ms. Perry can silence a room with a look, but we're all a little worked up from the excitement of the first day back, plus more syrup and icing than is good for us.

“Zip it!” Ms. Perry snaps with a flick of her wand, and silence seizes all of us, as if our vocal cords had just been snipped. A really powerful magician can do that, can use a word or phrase of their own to cast a spell instead of relying on the old tried and true incantations they make us learn in school.

The spell isn't permanent, and we probably could have all shook its compulsion if we'd really fought against it, but we take the hint and turn our attention to the front of the room.

I see a mess of brown curls two seats in front of me, and recognize the back of Felix Roth's head. Great, yet another opportunity to humiliate myself by completely failing a fresh subject in front of him.

As the class goes on, however, my hopes start to tentatively rise. It being the first day and all, Ms. Perry is mostly just explaining the history of Astrology and how it works, and going over what we're going to learn in the class. Memorizing star charts and the alignment of planets; interpreting the relations and movements of celestial bodies; that’s stuff I can do. I won't even need to cast any actual magic, which increases my chance of getting a decent grade in the class tenfold.

After her brief introduction, Ms. Perry passes out a sheet of paper with a series of constellations printed on it to everyone, with the instructions to label as many as we recognize and to draw in any more if we know them. She pauses just a moment longer at my desk, offering me a supportive smile along with the worksheet.

“Glad you finally have you in my class, Mr. Wolfe,” she says.

“Uh, thanks,” I reply a little awkwardly. I;m still not used to people knowing me by name. I’m just glad her reaction was a positive one. My Politic Science of the Magical World teacher last year had gone out of his way to ignore me completely, going so far as to skip my name in roll call. When the Headmistress called him out for it, he claimed it was to avoid the “scene” that would surely arise when the other students heard my name. That might have been a decent excuse the year prior, which had been my first year at St. Bosco's, but by then everyone pretty much knew me and a lot of the thrill of having a class with the mystery kid with broken magic who stood at the center of a worsening political divide had worn off.

Felix apparently overhears her say my name, because I can see his shoulders tense even from behind. I almost expect him to turn around and say something, some derisive comment or quip, but he doesn't. I'm almost disappointed.
♠ ♠ ♠
Hello, dear readers!
Welcome to "Breaking Magic"! I hope you enjoyed chapter one, and expect updates twice a week, on Wednesdays and either Saturday or Sunday (either or, depending on my work schedule).
A couple of disclaimers before this story really gets going:

First of all, if you're thinking the premise for this story sounds veeery familiar, you're probably right. It was indeed inspired by another fairly well known book, whose characters I absolutely fell in love with. To be fair, that book was itself intentionally inspired by yet another well known book of the same basic premise, so I decided not to be wracked by the persistent guilt of unoriginality too much, and just let myself enjoy writing this fun fantasy romance. I hope you too can forgive me, and find enjoyment in my own original spin on the "magic boys at a magic school" concept.

Speaking of romance, that's the other disclaimer I want to briefly mention here. This story is primarily a fantasy adventure, with a major male/male romance subplot. I want this to be a meaningful, sweet story of romance caught up in the context of magic, politics, and danger.
I am a straight (more or less) woman, and there is often a certain degree of fetishizing of gay romances by straight women. It can be a real problem in the LGBT+/Queer romance genre. I believe I have avoided falling into the tropes and usual pitfalls that the offenders usually display (primarily by treating my characters as, you know, people rather than sex objects), but if at any point I have accidentally strayed from "genuine romance between two queer males" into "fetishization of gay culture and sexuality by an outsider", let me know ASAP and I'll edit the issue.

Thank you for reading this far, I hope to see you on Wednesday evening for chapter two!

-J. Brenton Parker