AFTER HOURS OF REVIEWING THE letters and the notes and comparing them to my own notes and staff files, I decided to take a lap around the outside of the school. I needed to get my head straight, and I needed to figure out how to deal with being in the same building as my sister, and Rahul, and almost certainly a murderer. And I needed to walk away from that bottle of gin before I got carried away with it—I was already starting to get the midafternoon headache that comes with too much of a bad coping mechanism.
I put my hands in my pockets and tried to stroll across the sprawling green lawns instead of walking with my usual sense of hungover purpose. The grass was impeccable, manicured in tidy, straight lines. Dandelion-free. My dad would have killed for a lawn like that one, and I wondered if it had ever occurred to my sister to tell him the secret that the Osthorne groundskeepers seemed to possess. Right on cue, I passed by one window and saw that the lawn just underneath it was dense with gardenias—my mother’s favorite flower. When I peeked in the window, I saw the back of Tabitha’s head, silhouetted against a huge orb of what looked like ball lightning.
I ducked away before she could turn and see me. Things had changed the night before, there could be no doubt about that. Something between us had been … not repaired, not exactly, but splinted. I didn’t know how to put weight on it yet, but maybe with time—
“She said that you told her.”
I froze before I rounded the corner, pressing my back against the mossy bricks. I’d reached a shadowy section of the Osthorne grounds, and from the sound of it, I wasn’t alone.
“I didn’t, I swear to God, Alexandria.” I didn’t recognize the second girl’s voice, but it sounded terrified.
“Do you know what a risk I took for you? Do you have any idea? I haven’t told anyone what we did, but you—”
“I didn’t, though!” The second girl’s voice rose above a whisper, and I could hear Alexandria shushing her.
“Look, Court. I get it, okay?” Courtney, then. Alexandria’s voice had turned gentle, almost saccharine. “It’s exciting, having a real live detective talk to you. I know you don’t get much excitement in your life. Plus, you want to be useful, right? You want to help for once, instead of getting in everyone’s way. I really, truly get it. But you can’t tell anyone what happened. If you do?” Her voice dripped honey and acid. “I’ll say you’re a lying slut.”
An oppressive shock wave of unwarranted terror shot through me, like the shiver before you realize someone is coming up behind you in a dark alley. Grass rustled as Alexandria stalked away. I stood there, trying not to breathe, as waves of a-tiger-is-chasing-you panic rippled across my skin, and listened to Courtney crying. I was trying to decide whether or not I should round the corner and ask her what was going on, but my palms were sweating. What the fuck? I took some deep breaths, pressed the back of my head against the bricks and squeezed my eyes shut as the fear ebbed. What is going on? Why do I feel this way?
I heard Courtney give a deep sniff and a sigh. There was a clack and a thud. I rounded the corner just in time to see a fire door swinging shut.
Well. I didn’t know what had just happened—between Courtney and Alexandria, or with that sudden fear-bomb—but my gut was screaming at me that it was bad.
Really bad.
I found the person I was looking for in the teachers’ lounge. I glanced around when I got in—Rahul wasn’t there. I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or disappointed. I was still shaken from whatever had happened outside, and I was a little wobbly from the morning of rum and obsessive study, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to show him the person I wanted him to see.
It was for the best that he wasn’t there. It was for the best that I hadn’t texted him back yet. It would wait. It would keep.
The only person in the lounge was Mrs. Webb. I had half hoped that I wouldn’t be able to find her, but I still had to follow up on Toff’s alibi. And here she was, sitting with her head bent over a bowl of water. She was staring into it with intense, absolute focus.
“Mrs. Webb?” I said, hesitant. Her head snapped up. I jolted—meeting a stare that was such a deep blue as to approach black. The whites of her eyes were completely occluded by liquid, shining darkness, as though her pupils had expanded to completely fill the spaces between her eyelids. They looked cold, standing in stark contrast to the warm brown of her skin.
Then she blinked a few times, and her eyes cleared. The water in the bowl between her hands went from clear to a faded blue-gray.
“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice less icy than usual.
“You, um, your, I.” She waited patiently while I stammered. “Yes, I just had, uh. A few questions. If now is a bad time…?” I was already edging toward the door. I closed it behind me before she could answer, and when I looked back into the teachers’ lounge through the little window that was set into the door, her eyes had darkened again.
I watched for a while, unable to tear myself away. Every few minutes, she would blink over the bowl; I never saw the blackness fall away, but the water in the bowl got darker every time her eyes cleared.
“Ivy?” When I turned my head, Tabitha was walking down the hall. I put a finger to my lips, and she pulled up beside me with knit brows. When she looked through the window to the staff lounge, her brow cleared.
“Oh, dang. I guess I’ll have to come back later. I wish she wouldn’t do that in the teachers’ lounge. I really wanted a coffee.” She made an oh-well face. “What are you doing here?”
“Just, you know. Workin’ the case,” I said, not sure how to talk to my sister now that we seemed to be on speaking terms. Now that I had seen her broken.
“Oh, okay. Well.” She looked as awkward as I felt. “I won’t bother you, then. I mean. I won’t interrupt, not that you’re making me feel like a bother, just—I should go supervise my class anyway, I left the student aide in charge so I could caffeinate. I’ll let you get back to it.” She started to leave, but I put out a hand and she stopped midstride. She looked wary, like she could feel the fragility between us and was just as afraid to step on it as I was.
“Wait, sorry,” I said. “I’m just wondering—what exactly is it that she’s doing in there?”
Mrs. Webb was staring into the space above the bowl. The water in the bowl was still dark—but when I looked at Mrs. Webb’s eyes, they were covered by a film of gray.
“Oh, that. It’s a memory extraction,” Tabitha said, standing beside me again to look at Mrs. Webb. “She’s pulling out the things she’s seen and washing them away. When she pours the water down the drain, she won’t have to remember anymore. She’s been doing it since she found … you know.”
I blinked at Tabitha. “Really? Wait, really? Do people do that?”
“Nobody does that,” she said, her voice pitched low. “It’s extremely dangerous to mess with your own brain the way she does. It’s really old-school—seriously, it’s like … like using leeches to draw out the bad blood. Except, you know. What she’s doing kind of works.”
“I thought she was a really amazing healer?”
Tabitha shrugged. “Well, yeah. If I tried that I’d probably—” Her voice caught, and she cleared her throat. “I’d probably die in the process. She’s the best healer of our lifetime, Ivy. But you know … she’s old-school.”
I shuddered as Mrs. Webb’s eyes cleared, then began to fade to black again.
“So, does she save the memories after?”
Tabitha shook her head. “They’re not really memories anymore once they’re out of her head. It’s not like you could use them again. They’re waste, at this point. Like how the stuff inside of zits used to be white blood cells?” She wrinkled her nose. “She’ll probably just wash them down the drain.” A bell rang, and Tabitha swore under her breath. “That’s the five-minute bell, I have to go get ready to dismiss my class,” she said. “Can we get drinks tomorrow night, though?”
I nodded, and she grinned at me before she turned to walk away. It was an easy smile—the kind that you would share with a friend who you know you’ll see again soon.
I’d never seen her smile like that before. It felt like a promise.
I turned to go, and ran straight into a lanky blur. I reached out a hand to steady myself and got a fistful of bony arm for my trouble.
“I really need to start watching where I’m going,” I muttered, sick of running into people. I looked up to apologize to whoever I was clutching. Dylan DeCambray’s architecturally intense face stared back at me—but it was blurred, almost foggy, and kept snapping in and out of view.
I blinked hard, let go of his arm. The instant I let go of him, he disappeared.
“What the fuck?” I blurted. There was a startled hiccup from a few feet in front of me. Dylan appeared again, waving his hands in front of his face like he was clearing away cobwebs. His face blazed pink.
“Sorry,” he muttered, not making eye contact with me.
“What did you just—what was that? What did you just do?” I asked, then caught myself. Shit. I should know what it was that he did. “I mean, what are you doing?”
Mrs. Webb’s voice rasped from behind me. “That was Mr. DeCambray illustrating his ability to break school rules by casting a see-me-not illusion on Osthorne grounds during school hours. And by being in the halls without a pass during class time.” She was looking at him with weary amusement. She brandished a white pharmacy bag with a pink hall pass attached to it. “I imagine that you’re here for this, Mr. DeCambray?”
He went even pinker, his ears very nearly glowing, and nodded. “Thanks, ma’am,” he said, taking the bag. He walked away, not making eye contact with either of us, and by the time he’d reached the end of the hallway he’d gone invisible again. Mrs. Webb shook her head at the seemingly empty halls.
“Did you need something, Ms. Gamble, or were you just going to watch me through the window all afternoon?” She was looking at me with the same weary amusement she’d given Dylan. I wondered if maybe weariness was just a baseline for her.
“What’s in those bags?” I asked, still staring at the place in the hallway where Dylan had vanished.
Mrs. Webb opened the door to the teachers’ lounge and walked in without waiting for me, but I had the feeling I was supposed to follow. As she made her way back to the little table she’d been sitting at before, I realized she was talking. I strained to catch her hoarse words.
“… all depends on the student, of course. But for the most part, it’s birth control.” She shook her head as we sat at the table. I noticed that the bowl of blue-black memories was gone—in its place was a mug of steaming milky tea. The swirling steam filled the air with the smells of honey and cardamom. “These kids don’t want to learn about the old magic that would let them deal with their bodies—they want pills and patches and condoms.” I don’t know what the look was that crossed my face upon hearing this, but whatever it was, it drew a genuine laugh out of Mrs. Webb, creasing her face like rumpling silk. “Oh, it’s better this way, of course,” she said. “If you do the magic wrong, it doesn’t work, and then you wind up with all kinds of problems. But still—I miss the days when a girl had to understand herself well enough to learn an ovary-clamping charm.”
I had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Another bell rang, and the hall outside began to fill with bodies and noise, with shouts and squeaking sneakers and slamming lockers.
“Now that young man?” She pointed a finger toward the hall, which was full of young men, but I knew she meant Dylan. “That young man right there has nothing to be embarrassed about. I keep telling him so, but he insists on using that damned illusion every time he comes to see me. He’s one of the only ones who comes to me for something other than condoms.”
“I know you probably can’t tell me, but … what is he coming for?”
Mrs. Webb laughed again—not quite a cackle, but something that was a close cousin to it. Whenever she laughed, her freckles disappeared into the network of wrinkles laced across her cheeks. “I can tell you whatever I please, Ms. Gamble. He’s getting a tincture for his girlfriend’s cramps.”
I looked toward the hallway as though I’d be able to see the invisible Dylan there amid the sea of teenagers. “Well, damn. That’s pretty great for a teenage boy.”
“I know,” she said. “She’s a lucky girl, whoever she is.”
“It seems like you’d know everything that goes on around here,” I ventured. “You really don’t know who he’s dating?”
“You have a limited number of breaths in this life, Ms. Gamble,” she murmured. “Do you really want to waste any on trying to flatter me into telling you student gossip?”
Another bell rang, and the halls began to empty again. It seemed like such a short time that the kids had, to get from class to class. Such a short time in which to see each other, pass notes, trip each other, steal from each other, make enemies, find friends, make out. I wondered how they managed it all. I wondered how I’d ever managed it all.
Mrs. Webb stared steadily at me across the table, waiting for me to say something worth her time. I tried another tactic. “So you handle all of the … what, the clinic stuff, right? The stuff that Sylvia used to handle?” She nodded, sipping her tea, and I let myself take it as an encouraging sign. “Would that include taking care of pregnant girls?”
She eyed me over her mug. “Why do you ask? Is someone pregnant?”
I cocked my head. “I’m not sure. What if someone was, though?”
She suddenly gave me a penetrating look, and I felt a rich warmth spreading through my abdomen. I looked down and saw that it was faintly glowing, as though someone were shining a flashlight through my shirt. I yelped as I realized that the question I’d answered wasn’t the one she’d been asking.
“No! Not me!” I resisted the urge to shield my stomach with both hands. The glow and the warmth both vanished.
“I’ll say,” she said. “Nothing of note in there. Although you’re not getting any younger. Tick-tock, Ms. Gamble.”
I cleared my throat, trying to regain my composure. She sipped her tea and watched me. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Well, at least one of us was.
“I meant, what if a student was pregnant? Would you be the one who would know about that?”
She set her tea down and wrapped her hands around it. When she spoke, her voice was marginally less raspy than it had been. “If they came to me for help, I would know about it, yes.”
I pulled out my notebook in a manner that I hoped would be nonchalant, but her eyes zipped to it and stayed there as I uncapped my pen. “What kind of help?”
“Any kind of help,” Mrs. Webb said. “But I think what you’re really asking is what kind of help I would be able to provide, yes?”
I flashed back to my third-grade teacher: I don’t know, Ivy, can you go to the bathroom? “Yes ma’am,” I said evenly, “that is what I’m asking.”
“Official policy says I can give them prenatal vitamins and a reference to a registered obstetrician in the mage community,” she said, then pressed her lips into a thin line. Everything on her face said this sentence is unfinished, but her eyes were on my notebook and pen.
I set the pen down, closed the cover of the notebook. “What does unofficial policy say?”
She leaned across the table. “There are certain things that we don’t do, Ms. Gamble. We don’t do gynecological examinations, because this is a school and we aren’t about to start making children take off their clothes in front of teachers. But handing out over-the-counter medications, prescribed medications, and potions graded below a level 4N by the Medical Mage Association? That’s allowed.” She leaned back and cleared her throat—her voice was starting to get raspy again. She took a sip from her tea, and I noticed that although she’d drunk quite a bit of it, the mug remained full. “Now, district policy states that we don’t provide any medications or potions that might induce adverse effects in a fetus being carried by a student we know to be pregnant.” She stared at me, unblinking, making sure I understood.
“But you might do that anyway?” I said slowly. She merely raised her eyebrows and took a drink. I folded my hands on the table and waited.
“You’re a stubborn one,” she said. I didn’t respond. “If, hypothetically, a student came to me in the immediate aftermath of an accident, I could provide them with a potion that would prevent fetal implantation or induce a menstrual period. Either one would cause about thirty minutes of heavy bleeding followed by a bit of fatigue. If, hypothetically, a student came to me in the less-immediate aftermath of an accident—say, perhaps, anything earlier than nine weeks in—I could give her a pair of potions. She’d take the first one right away, and then spend the next three days bleeding and drinking the second one.” Mrs. Webb was very still, speaking softly enough that I unconsciously leaned toward her. “She would have to drink the second one every hour, on the hour, even at night. She would have to take it continuously, do you understand? But there would be no pain, no risk of infection, no nausea even. She’d feel fine. But I would give the girl the full day off of her classes in case she has a hard time emotionally. Hypothetically,” she said, her voice suddenly returning to full volume. “Not that I’ve ever provided a student with such a potion.”
“Of course not,” I answered. “After all, you haven’t been doing this part of the job all along. Only since Sylvia died, right?”
“Five months,” she said with a dark twinkle in her eye, “is certainly not long enough for anyone to get pregnant.”
“Certainly not,” I said. I didn’t wink at her, even though I wanted to. She didn’t feel like a woman one should wink at. “Now, let’s say—hypothetically—that a student approached you who was not in the earliest stages of pregnancy?”
At this, she shook her head, the dark twinkle gone. “I have the expertise for it, but I wouldn’t take that risk on school grounds. That’s a surgical procedure.”
“Really?” I was taken aback. “There’s no potion for it? No magic?”
She rapped the table with her knuckles. “That’s not what I said, girl. Listen better next time.” Her voice was sharp. “I said that’s surgical.” She reached out a finger and jabbed it into my left shoulder; I felt a twinge of terror at the sudden memory that arced through me. My shoulder, dismantled and floating in front of my face. Her wand, zapping away the infection.
I swallowed hard as I understood. “So that’s, uh, that’s how it’s done?”
Mrs. Webb nodded. “It’s perfectly safe if it’s done by a medical professional in a sterile environment. The girl gets a sedative so it’s not too traumatic. She walks out when the sedative has worn off. Much less invasive than the nonmagical version of the procedure.”
“Is it?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Of course it is,” she said. “No stirrups. No pain. Twenty minutes at the most.” She sipped more tea, then tapped the side of the mug twice with her ring finger. Fresh steam swirled from inside the mug. “I performed hundreds of them, back when I was practicing. But never here.”
We sat in silence for a minute or so as I digested this. Finally, she made a harrumphing sound. I looked up at her and saw that she was watching me, impatient.
“Can I ask one more thing?” I said, and was frustrated at the quaver in my voice.
“What is it?” she asked. Her face was still impatient, but her tone had gone gentle.
“What you did to my shoulder—what you used to do for the women in your clinic. Can you do that for other things?” She didn’t answer, waiting for me to stop dancing around the real question. “I mean, if someone had cancer. Could you take it out?”
Her face went still and cold. “You’ve been talking to Tabitha, have you?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I told her: not cancer at that stage.” Her voice was level, but the table trembled with the force of what I realized must have been a lifetime of frustration at the limitations of healing. “Theoretically? A healer can do anything,” she said, “but realistically, it’s just not possible to do that to someone. To take them apart for hours, and hold everything alive, and find everything in the bones that’s wrong. And then to put them back together again.” Her mouth twisted as though she were going to spit. “It can’t be done. It’s never been done. There’s nothing we could have done.”
She stood up and waved a hand over her mug of tea; when I looked down, it was empty and clean, although a faint smell of cardamom lingered in the air. She turned on her heel and made for the door. She let it swing shut behind her. I sat in the chair and stared at the place where she’d been sitting. I thought back to the night before—to Tabitha crying on my couch, telling me that she couldn’t have helped Mom. That even if she’d wanted to, even if she’d known how to, she couldn’t have saved our mother from the painful death that I had to watch her endure. I let out a shaky breath.
After a few minutes I walked out after her, taking deep breaths. A few students were milling in the hall, doing some class activity that involved sticking pieces of paper to each other and then turning them pink or blue with a snap of their fingers. I recognized Courtney—she was working with another girl, directing her partner to stick papers to the back of her baggy, paint-stained gym-class sweatshirt. She kept vacillating between turning them pink or blue, pink or blue, pink or blue.
Courtney caught me watching and lifted her hand in a wave, knocking one of the papers from her shirt. As it fell, it folded in the air, falling to the linoleum and bouncing high before falling a few feet away—an elaborate star. She laughed as she and her partner stooped to pick it up at the same time. Her partner tossed the folded paper back to her, and she caught the star easily.
She turned it over in her hands, and then looked back up at me. She tried to smile again, but she wasn’t fast enough to keep me from seeing the way that star broke her. She turned away before the tears could fall, but I saw them there, brimming already. And then she was gone, back into the classroom, her project partner abandoned.
Courtney dropped the star behind her as she walked away. It unfolded as it fell, but the light caught the contours of the folds in the paper, and I knew: in the shadows of those creases, there were answers.