“If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be spraying spit at my face. Get off.”
He shoves me with enough force that I went sprawling backward. by the time I scrambled to my feet, he was already standing, striding toward the roof access door without even a backward glance.
“Hey!” I went after him, yelping as I slipped, cursing my choice of ballet flats for shoes today. “We’re not finished—”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look back. “We are.”
The door slammed in my face.
I stood there alone on the roof, soaking wet, shaking with adrenaline, the taste of ozone coating the back of my mouth. The sky above me was a perfect blue again, as innocent as can be.
Three days. I’d only been at Nyxhaven for three days, and already two of the four fraternity presidents had decided that I was a problem in need of solving.
How the hell did I get here?
Three days earlier, I thought this place might actually feel like home.
I pulled my beat-up Honda Civic into Nyxhaven’s parking lot and got out with my meagar possessions: a polka-dot suitcase, a Tupperware container full of homemade cookies, and the kind of optimism that comes from never having been truly beaten down. I’m Everly Grey, the youngest of four kids with loving parents, the girl who shows up with snacks and leaves with invitations. I’ve never walked into a room that didn’t warm up to me eventually, one way or another, and I was certain that Nyxhaven would be like every other challenge in my life.
The letter from Nyxhaven had arrived in the middle of winter break, slipped under the door of my dorm at the state school I’d been attending—the same state school my parents went to, my siblings went it, everyone in my family going back three generations went to, really. I wasn’t special or different. I wasn’t destined for anything. I was just Everly, the youngest, the one who wore bright colors and baked from scratch when she couldn’t sleep.
Then I opened the envelope and my whole world cracked open.
The letter explained things I’d never been able to explain to myself. The way objects sometimes moved when I was upset. How I could feel storms coming before the sky even changed. The sense I had that my emotions seemed to leak out of me when I was upset, affecting the air itself in ways I couldn’t control.
Magic, the letter called it. I had it. And there was a school that could teach me how to use it properly.
I tried to tell my parents, but every time I got to the part about magic, their eyes went glassy and they changed the subject. The letter had warned me about that: mundanes it what it called them, people without magical affinity, who couldn’t perceive or remember anything related to magic. To my family, Nyxhaven University was just a small private university in Massachusetts, very prestigious, almost one of the Ivy League schools, and wasn’t it wonderful that I’d gotten a full ride scholarship?
So here I was, alone for the first time in my life. Ready to finally understand what I was, and how I was different from my family. Excited and hopeful about it all.
The quad cured me of my optimism quickly.
Everyone was staring at me—not with curiosity, but with the kind of open disdain you’d give to someone who’d shown up to a funeral in a clown costume. I looked down at myself: purple sundress, pink tennis shoes, and a yellow cardigan. Bright, happy colors, the kind of outfit that had always made people smile back at me.
Here, it made me a target. Everyone else was wearing grey and black, and the only colors that I spotted were emerald, deep purple, blood red, and the occasional splash of royal blue. Emphasis on the royal.
I tried anyway. That’s what I do.
“Excuse me,” I said to a group of girls wearing matching charcoal blazers, “could you tell me where Bellamy Hall is? I’m new here.”
They walked past me like I was invisible.
“Hey—sorry to bother you—” I caught up to a guy in a deep purple sweater and charcoal slacks. “I’m looking for the freshman dorms, can you point me in the right direction?”
He actually sped up to get away from me.
“The map doesn’t match the campus layout,” I told a girl in silver and white, shoving a crumpled brochure towards her. “Can you just point me in the right direction? Please?”
She looked at my outstretched hand like I was offering her a dead rat. “Figure it out yourself, charity case.”
I’d been called names before. I’d been overlooked underestimated, and dismissed. But I’d never been treated like my actual existence was offensive. Like the colors I was wearing or who I’d been born was a personal insult to everyone who had to look at me.
I found Bellamy Hall through sheer stubbornness and more than a little wandering, taking every pathway until I stumbled onto a grey stone building with ivy choking the windows. By the front doors, a golden plaque had been dedicated to one Isadora Bellamy, 1659-1682, Who Gave Her Life In Defense Of Magicks Known And Unknown.
I took that to mean she’d been murdered, and didn’t feel terribly comforted, especially once I did the math on her age.
There was no elevator inside the building, of course, and I’d been assigned a room on the second floor. I was halfway up the third flight of stairs, sweating as I dragged my suitcase behind me, when a girl half my size floated past with an entire bedroom’s worth of furniture drifting in her wake. She flicked her wrist and sent it all sailing around the corner without breaking stride, leaving me feeling foolish behind her.
