Page 12 of The Alchemists

Don’t think about it: The way his body betrayed him in every possible permutation.

Don’t think about it: The way Conrad’s weight settled against his back; the way the pillow swallowed his protestations and his oxygen in equal measure.

Don’t think about it: The repetitive chorus of the song, drawing out endlessly, grinding against the back of his skull.

Don’t think about it: The way he wished for oblivion for the second time in one night.

Don’t think about it: The way he would have given anything to have this again, in any way but this.

Don’t think about it: The way the slick of someone else’s sweat on your skin could feel like a curse and not a gift; the noise Conrad made as he rolled off of him.

Don’t think about it: The way the last thing he remembered thinking before darkness took him—this is all your fault.

“Seb?” Then, “Sebby? You okay?”

He blinked up at Tori, swathed in fire and darkness.

“Ye-yeah.” He took the hand Asher offered to help him up. “How were the cantrips?”

Shake it off, shake it off.

Asher shrugged. “Not as good without you.”

He mustered a fraction of his usual bravado, staring past the night. “Nothing ever is.”

“Ass.”

“Oh, look, here comes trouble.” The boys followed Tori’s gaze. Gemma Greer was stalking toward them, her face hooded in determined sensuality.

“And trouble’s looking for Seb.” Asher turned to him, eyebrow raised. Gemma’s crush on him was both long-standing and well-advertised.

Seb took another sip of his warm beer and sniffed. He took in the waves of Gemma’s burnished bronze hair, her athletic frame, her square jaw. Trouble looked good. Earlier that night he’d told himself to make new memories, overwrite the old.

He finished his beer and tossed the cup away.

LILY

Saturday morning dawned bright and mild, light cutting through the blinds in spears of milky pink. Lily rolled onto her back, pulling her enormous stuffed dog over her face while she let herself wake up in lazy rivulets of consciousness. As she squeaked over the warped floorboards to the window and twitched the blinds, not a cloud had the courage to hang in the sky. A day this bright would punish anyone with a hangover.

She plotted out her day as she meandered downstairs to the cluttered kitchen. It was late enough that The Couple was already off to the farmer’s market, and early enough that The Girls weren’t slouching down from the attic yet. She ate breakfast at the kitchen table, propping her arcana textbook against the fruit bowl.

Gemma had apparently achieved her years-long wish and gone home with Sebastian Allsaires. The two of them had passed her, carving a boustrophedon path back toward campus shortly after eleven. Gemma had clung to his arm, looking more like a weight than a catch. Lily had tried to get a read on his face as they passed, but Gemma had been screechy, drowning him out, if he’d been saying anything, and his face had been on the dark side of the fire. He was playing later today, in the first set of Cantrèa bouts of the year.

She scratched a nail through the table’s ancient varnish, her neck warming as she imagined him in the match. Lily had seen him play plenty of times since that day at the dueling club. She loved the sport as much as any Magician, and somehow that ruthless boy made the intersection of movement and magic seem next to godliness. Lily grimaced at her toast as she wondered if perhaps her love of Cantrèa was really a love of watching Allsaires play Cantrèa. She pushed the thought away, not ready to follow the implications to their given conclusion, and turned back to reading about a separatist sect of Magicians in Tanzania that all supposedly shared Words of Power.

The day went the way most of her Saturdays did. It was easy to keep a routine when you didn’t have friends trying to drag you to brunch or fake-study at the library; when you didn’t have extracurriculars to attend because meetings involved voluntarily spending time with other people.

She studied all morning, migrating between her desk and the couch in the sitting room, and eventually to the swing in the backyard. She helped her mom rake leaves, helped Gran look something up on the internet, cast a cantrip for The Girls’ hangover without them noticing.

Around one, she biked to the west side of campus, going twice around the roundabout because it felt nice to lean into the curves and there weren’t any cars coming. She chained her bike outside the Movement Arts building, and the weekend cleaner high-fived her in the entryway. All of the staff at Windermere—from the dean to the janitorial team—were Magicians, but most of the students and some of the faculty liked to pretend otherwise. If magic made everything better, what did it mean that some Magicians were left sweeping up after others? Lily felt closer to the cleaning staff than her fellow students. They were all outsiders in their own community.

The halls were pleasantly dense with silence and slow dust. She entered the key code on the pad outside Studio C and the lights chirped on as soon as her feet hit the linoleum floor. She slung off her bag, then moved through the motions of beginning her practice with a ritual slowness.

Around Christmas, nine years ago, one of her mom’s co-workers had invited them to her daughter’s performance of The Nutcracker. Benignly curious, three generations of Perkinses bundled into the car and drove the five minutes downtown to the community theater, where they’d handed over cardstock tickets to someone’s mother who tried to upsell them on popcorn.

They’d sat in shabby velvet seats that scratched the backs of Lily’s bare thighs because she’d refused to wear tights. Her mom and Gran had exchanged shrugs over Lily’s head as the lights went down and the music started. Lily remembered almost nothing about the show itself until the grand pas de deux between the Cavalier and the Sugar Plum Fairy. Two of the oldest teens had performed the dance, spinning and leaping together, setting the confetti snow to sparkling through the hazy air. Lily remembered the moment with vivid, breathless clarity. As the lights went down, she’d turned to her mom and gasped, “I want that to be me.”

And it had been. Twice. Her mother had picked up a pamphlet in the lobby. Lily had silently ogled and then had her picture taken with the Sugar Plum Fairy. In January they began the twice-weekly tradition of driving thirty minutes across the river for dance classes.