Rowan watches Ophelia out of the corner of his eye.
She can’t keep still, beats out the music on her thighs, the tabletop. There’s something brilliant and nervy about her this evening, like she’s burning up inside.
The music is mostly too loud to talk over. Romulus takes medieval music and rearranges it for electric guitar, bass, and drums, screaming liturgical melodies into the mics.
“You like these guys?” Rowan yells over a song.
“They’re great!”
“I know the guitarist.” The song ends; his voice is loud in the sudden gap. He feels embarrassed—is he trying to impress her?
“Which one?”
“The guy with the black hair.” The band launches into a new song and whip their heads around in unison, long tails flying.
“They’re sick!” Ophelia yells.
—
After the first set she enthuses over a coffee. “They take that medieval stuff and make it work.”
“The chord progressions and song structures are practically the same as metal.” Yup. He’s trying to impress her.
Ophelia smiles. “Wonder what the monks would have made of it.”
Rowan crosses himself and is rewarded by a laugh from her. Is this going well? He thinks it’s going well. He wants it to go well. “I like it,” he says. “I guess I’ve never really felt at home in the twenty-first century.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He wishes he hadn’t said that. She’s looking up at him from underneath her eyelashes. They curl in this really pretty way. And her eyes—at first he’d wondered if she was wearing those coloured contacts, but up close he sees that her eyes really are a sort of translucent greenish colour, like jade. He’s glad; he hates those contacts, they’re creepy.
“No, really, what do you mean? Like, you eschew cell phones?”
“I what cell phones?”
“Eschew them. Avoid them.”
“Oh. I thought you said chew.”
They’re both laughing. “No, no . . . Eschew was my word of the day earlier in the week, so I’ve got to find multiple seemingly natural ways to work it in. So I learn it and it sticks.”
She’s totally a geek, he’s totally falling for her, his stomach turns and sends electricity down his thighs; he can’t stop smiling. “What’s your word for today?”
“Incipient.”
“How have you worked that one in?”
“Incipient, as in incipient madness.”
She’s stopped smiling, shit, what did he say wrong? “Ah. Well, I don’t eschew cell phones. I just . . . you know. When I was a kid . . . No, it’s too embarrassing.”
“Come on. You’ve got to tell me now.” Good, the sparkle is back.
He takes a deep breath. “When I was a kid,” he lies, “I loved all that stuff about, you know, the lost chosen one who saves . . . you know. Knights. And wizards and stuff.”
Her eyes get big and her face opens. “Chosen knights and wizards.”
“Yeah. . . .” Why is she staring at him? “I’d imagine I was a knight or a lost prince come to save my people. Just kid stuff. It’s embarrassing.” He’s glad he pretended it was a kid thing.
Ophelia says something so quietly he has to ask her to repeat it. “Me too.”
“You’re a knight?”
“No. You’re right, it is embarrassing. A . . . like a chosen . . . sorcerer.”
“Sorcerer.”
She nods. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of being able to bring things together, to shape . . . I guess shape energy. And being able to transform into . . . maybe different creatures?”
Her head droops again.
“A sorcerer.” Yeah, he can see it. Something about it suits her—her volatile moods, her burning eyes.
“A wizard. Like Harry friggin’ Potter.” She meets his gaze again and the smiling is back, the insane way he can’t stop smiling around her.
“Maybe you are. Or were. In another life.”
She raises one eyebrow the way his mother does, but on her it’s cute. “I don’t know how many wizards looked like me in medieval Europe.”
“Oh.” He thinks about this. “But is . . . I mean, is it Europe? In your imagination, I mean.” He has asked himself this. It’s not Europe, not really, Antilia. In some ways it might be, but not quite. For one thing there are lions, and places that look like the haunting limestone hills of China. There are fjords but also sandy beaches, and blue water, so blue it hurts your eyes to look at it. Rowan shakes his head; what’s he thinking? That Ophelia has the same imaginary place? Stupid. The band’s going on again—good, it’ll stop this stupid conversation he’s started.
Ophelia’s not letting go. “Maybe,” she’s saying. She looks thoughtful. “Yeah, maybe it’s more . . . because you’d really only love the actual past if you were a nobleman. No matter where in the world you were, for the most part.”
“Of course. You wouldn’t want to be a peasant. . . .”
“Or some sap in an army. And mostly you’d want to be a man, I think.”
“Absolutely. Unless, your eminence, you are a wizard.”
She whacks his arm with the back of her hand. “Shut up.” But she’s smiling. The band digs in, the sound hits them like a wave, and she’s smiling.
—
In the awkwardness of the aftermath—crush of people, cell phones under harsh sodium lights—he almost loses her. Looks around frantically, sees her walking away. “Ophelia!”
She stops, she turns.
Rowan says something to whoever he’s talking to, he doesn’t know what, swims through the crowd to her. “Where you going?”
She shrugs.
“Why don’t we . . . You want to walk a bit with me?”
He thinks he sees the beginning of a smile bloom on her face but she ducks her head, takes out her cell to check the time. He must, must get her number before the evening ends.
“Okay.”
He’s so happy he forgets he brought his bike and has to jog back half a block to get it.
They walk up the chestnut-lined road, talking about music: who they listen to, what they like. She likes a lot of old stuff—good strong vocalists, not surprisingly. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday. Admits, shyly, to a bit of a Rihanna obsession. Serena Ryder, and they both like Tegan and Sara. Radiohead. He promises to make her a playlist: Tame Impala, he thinks, The Strokes, Young Rival, Arctic Monkeys, The Lonely Parade.
He’ll never be able to admit to anyone that he writes songs. The stars wink through the heavy leaves overhead, shimmering down at them. Before he knows it, they’re standing at his doorstep.
“Look, you want to come in?”
He sees her hesitation, looking up at the shining door and the immaculate sweep of the front steps. His father repainted them last month in heritage colours.
“Please? I’ll fix you a snack.”
“Okay. I . . . don’t really want to go home just now, to tell you the truth.” That nervy energy is back in her, like she’s about to burst into flames.
“Dad?” he calls as they walk into the front hall, but there’s no answer. “He’s probably snoozing.” Rowan gestures to the light under the door of his father’s study. “Pretending to work,” he whispers, then hates himself for repeating the cutting words of his mother.
“You got a mother?”
“Yeah. She’s a journalist.” He leads Ophelia down the hall to the kitchen. “You want a sandwich?”
“Naw, I’m not hungry.”
“You mind if I . . . ?” He starts making a grilled cheese sandwich, and when she sees that she changes her mind and he makes her one, too.
“So your mom’s a journalist? Cool.” She talks with her mouth full; it’s cute.
“Well, it’s cool if you don’t mind never seeing your mom.”
“How come? Oh—out researching stories and all that? Does she travel?”
“All over the world.”
“Does she write about the war?”
Rowan nods, finishing his sandwich. He could eat another. “That’s all she writes about. For years now.”
“But it just started.”
“But there was all the lead-up—you know, the maneuvering, the politics. And the Union. She had a field day when that came down.”
Ophelia licks her fingers. Rowan has to look away; she’s completely unconscious of the effect her tongue and lips are having on him. “But really. It’s frightening.”
“The war?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He thinks of his blank university application forms. “Yes.”
Her gaze sharpens. “You okay?”
Christ, his thoughts must be obvious as the nose on his face. “Sure.”
“We’re the same age, right? So you could be called up because next year, when’s your birthday? Oh, never mind.”
“What?”
“Silly of me. You’ll be going to university.”
He gets up, takes her plate. Drops it. It shatters on the tile floor.
She tries to help him clear the shards away, but he fends her off, puts the bits in a paper bag, in the garbage. Conversation averted.
“Look, Rowan, are you . . . You haven’t been called up, have you?”
Conversation not averted. She’s looking at him with those penetrating eyes, a worried furrow between her eyebrows.
“When’s your birthday?” she asks again.
“In . . .” He clears his throat. “In February. February the fifteenth.”
She stares. “That’s the same as mine!”
“Really?” It fits—of course they share a birthday. Everything about this girl fits.
“But you know what that means.” She’s not happy, her eyes are wide. “Rowan, you’re in the cohort that’s up for the lottery.”
He takes a deep breath. He wants to tell her. He hasn’t spoken of this to anybody, the daily fear of seeing that letter. “Yes. And yes. And yes, I charged myself with the task of filling out my university entrance forms.” His voice cracks, he doesn’t care. The words keep coming, dripping with bitterness and self-loathing. “My parents got them all lined up for me—applications to three prestigious institutions. And offered to help me fill them out. And that felt insulting. I can take care of myself. So I cleverly filed them.”
“Didn’t you get in?” Her voice is a whisper.
He bets she’s good at school. Probably a straight-A student. “Are you? Going to university, I mean.”
She barks out a bitter laugh. “We can’t afford it.”
“Oh.” Stupid, tactless Rowan.
“You?”
She’s like a bull dog. Fine, he’ll come clean. “When I say filed, I mean filed . . . on the floor. Under my bed.”
A long silence. Finally, he looks at her.
There are tears in her eyes.