Enchantments should block me.
I saw it once.
When I was younger, and a senior guy tried to go up the staircase to the girls’ dorms, whether to chase down a girlfriend in a fight or to prank one of us, I don’t know, but he was thrown back into the door of the cigar room with so much force that the hinges snapped, and he knocked his head so bad he had to go to the infirmary.
Then he had a tonne of detention.
It was all the talk in the dorms for a while.
But that doesn’t happen.
Not now as Eric leads me up the staircase, then into the narrow pressure of a corridor, and leads me down it, hall tables knocking into my hip every other moment, then up another set of stairs—
Until he slows down, and I feel the brush of a door moving against my shoulder.
He takes me into his dorm room.
And I’m still standing.
Not knocked back, not thrown down the stairs and corridors by an invisible force.
He did something.
Some kind of magic.
Maybe some of the older seniors, the guys, worked out a way around the enchantments.
Maybe all the seniors know this trick except me, since I’ve been on the outs for so long.
The air rushes around me, disturbing the hem of my definitely wrinkled dress, and I guess he’s closing the door, because a moment after, his grip re-firms on mine, and he guides me through the dark to a wall of curtains.
No, not curtains.
His bed.
The drapes shift, like he reaches over my head to hit them aside, then his hand leaves mine.
The pressure of his fingertips meets my middle—and pushes me back.
I thud onto the mattress.
Into another pocket of darkness.
With or without the curtains, light is stolen by the blackout. But the curtains do a job of it on their own. If I ever want light inmy bed with the drapes shut, I need to tug in a nightlight or lamp with me.
I wait for a moment before he presses a lump of material to my chest.
Tentative, I reach up for the bundle.
Blindness slows me as I dab my fingertips against the soft fabric.
Clothes.
A t-shirt and boxers.
I take them from his grip.
His fingers loosen, then they are gone.
