Two of Wands, Reversed

Aside from not knowing they woke up bilingual, Wilder also doesn’t know they’re being watched. Doesn’t know they’ve been flickering, showing signs of Magic for days, doesn’t know that on someone else’s radar—someone with already Awakened Power—they’ve just lit up like a Coney Island Ferris wheel. Doesn’t know that there is, at this very moment, a calming presence being dispatched, albeit a little later than he would prefer, given a set of unforeseen circumstances.

Quibble is wending his way toward Wilder’s apartment the quickest way he knows how. He is a solid, steady man with sparkly brown eyes and generous lashes. He’s a gentleman of alto experience, now a buzzy bass, slow and deliberate in his words. But quick in his mind; everything he says is clever. A real juxtaposition. He has a nose like someone played Pin the Tail on the Donkey with a scalene triangle, stuck it wherever, and called it a day. The nose umbrellas over a lopsided smile. He dumps out onto Wilder’s street and intends to knock on their front door, introduce himself. Maybe take them out for coffee. Anything to ease the shock of what’s just happened. This is his first time intervening with someone newly Awakened, but he is confident he can improve the process. Make it more believable, less traumatizing. Make it kinder.

He remembers his own Awakening. It ripped through him like a stomach virus; he did vomit, actually. But that could’ve been the external circumstances. His parents had just died. Suddenly. A plane crash. He was seventeen, all alone. When his Power Awakened, no one came for him. For a decade, he thought he was the only one in the world. That he was crazy or a mutated freak or both.

His body begins to react to his flashback with a yawning void sensation, the floor dropping from under his feet until he buries the feeling. He notes that he has done it—something “maladaptive” his therapist is adamant he begin to mark—and he knows that later the feeling will poke its gnarled hand back up, undead, because one can never bury a live feeling without suffering the zombie repercussion. For right now, however, he has a job to do.

The building he faces is sad. Drab, with streaks of mold-esque black organic matter running down its block-concrete face. Quibble itches to power wash it, to watch the dirt run off the rough surface. He hopes it’s not mold, just the hot breath of the city marking the façade with grit. A dumpster in front of the building overflows. Baby fussing floats from a window. He speculates about who he’s going to meet—Artemis says this one is queer, trans. She’s always right about that. But is the baby theirs? Hers? His? What do they look like? What does their Awakened Power feel like—what does it do without them trying, if anything, or do they have to actively use it? And what does it feel like to cast with them?

He texts Artemis. anything else i should know?

Well. We missed them. They’re out

fuck.

Yeah

can you see where they went?

I’m working on it. Right now I can just See they’re not where you are

Quibble wonders if he’ll be able to clock this person. If, as a trans person himself, he would be able to tell who they were if he wandered around for a while. Immediately, he feels like a bad person for thinking he’d be able to use some kind of fucked-up trans radar—based on what sort of problematic clues, exactly? Based on who looks out of place? Who looks a little bit uncomfortable? Some kind of homogenized queer signaling? Then the internal (but not quite internalized) voice of his therapist says that’s all very human of him. And then the voice muses about how sometimes, for him, it feels good to be clocked. That it’s about intention, about who’s doing the seeing. He types to Artemis, again, laughing at himself.

i’m gonna go for a walk, i guess? it’ll be scary if they come home and i’m lurking outside their door.

Whatever else this is or winds up being, Quibble doesn’t want it to be scary (though it will be, despite his best efforts). Softness is the whole point.

Wilder is also taking a walk. A walk with purpose, the purpose being the library. Because they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was irrevocably weird, they couldn’t focus on their work. They decided to change their scenery even though the whole point of taking this job was to not go out in the cold.

They cut through the weekday smattering of pedestrians at speed, past the low-slung bakery that always smells of rising bread, of the butter melting in baking croissants. The woman on the corner selling tamales—Wilder can understand her, too, as she speaks with a customer in a suit, and yet they still do not notice (come on, guy). They round the corner to the elevated metro platform, the tracks aboveground this far out into Queens. At the base of the platform’s stairs, they see a very lost Japanese family speaking to each other, two adults arguing as the two kids helpfully point at the upside-down subway map in their hands, ignored by their parents. They argue about which way to take the train for Manhattan. They must be tourists. A strange time to come, February—New York City has a good six weeks on either end of summer where it doesn’t induce depression. The father (Wilder assumes this is the father) pulls aside someone and says, “Pardon me” in the careful way of someone who does not speak English but for a few phrases they learned on Duolingo. The someone that the father pulls aside: a man with lines on his face so pronounced that he may as well be the subway map. Wilder watches the ultra-concentrated look of someone who knows six phrases of English being confronted by one of those phrases in English spoken by someone else who also knows six phrases in English. It is a familiar look in this borough. In this man’s case the look is a stare of both fierce attention and resigned politeness.

Wilder does not generally speak to people. In fact, they generally go out of their way to avoid it. But something about the children, about the cute, stupid way they’re holding the map the wrong side up, that they have a paper map at all, and something, also, about the way the other stranger looks so pained, torn between the desire to be helpful and the shyness manufactured by linguistic distance, makes Wilder at least think about stopping (and today is different from every other day they’ve ever had, not that they’ve realized it, so why not do something a little bit out of character?). It is so against their nature that their body tries to walk past. The crosswalk lights up with a blinking orange hand and they nearly run to catch it, have to think about pausing instead.

First, they speak to the lone lined man. “Don’t worry,” they say. Their voice is crackly, husky with disuse. They have only grunted one word this morning. This is normal. Many days their voice never wakes up. They clear their throat and try again. “I’ve got this.” They—oh Christ—they still do not notice. Their mouth is making different shapes than it would normally make, their coffee has made them alert, they’re outside in the suck-the-breath-out-their-lungs cold, their cheeks turning red, their mind on their actual face and the air flowing in and out through their nose, all the parts where the words come from and yet they haven’t figured it out. What will it take? What will it take for them to notice that their life is forever different?

Then they turn to the family, who all turn toward Wilder, a bland politeness wiping their features clean of confusion. The mother looks like she is holding her breath. Wilder figures they better get to the point. “Manhattan is that way,” they say. “The entrance across the street. Over there.” They point and everyone, including the lone lined man, including Wilder, takes a second to turn and look at the opposing stairs, packed with people on their way into work.

Then the family turns back. The children’s reactions are what Wilder would expect: one of the children smiles a small, smug victory—she’d been correct about which train to take. The other hides his mouth from their parents, like he is whispering, as he sticks his tongue out.

The parents, however—their mouths open so wide they look like they are about to receive a train into them. They both quickly close and cover their pie holes, the father with the back of his hand and the mother with the tips of her fingers. Wilder’s brows furrow—had these two perhaps heard that New Yorkers were rude, that they would not receive help if they needed it? In Wilder’s estimation, it was far ruder to do what they had just done—interrupt someone, approach them. The rule of New York, they figure, is to pretend that everyone has privacy in public. Or—is this a gender thing? Now Wilder’s face echoes that same bland politeness, which isn’t politeness at all but rather the armor of expected microaggression (or, to be perfectly fair, macroaggression). If they just paid closer attention, they would realize neither of these options is the correct answer. If they looked at the lone lined man, a New Yorker, perhaps they would be helped along by a few more context clues. Or perhaps not, as it seems as though, this morning at least, Wilder is a fucking idiot.

The mother recovers first, closes her mouth but keeps the tips of her fingers over it and smiles from behind them, genuinely this time. “Thank you,” she says, and Wilder’s face relaxes. “Forgive my surprise, it’s just”—she gestures to them—“you’re American.”

“Uh,” Wilder responds, not understanding what social territory they are now in and worrying that they don’t understand precisely because they are “American” (white). “Yeah?” is all they manage to say, already wondering how to disengage and run away.

“Sorry,” the mother says, registering Wilder’s extreme confusion. “We just don’t expect Americans to speak Japanese so fluently. How long did you live in Japan?”

“I don’t speak Japanese,” says Wilder, in Japanese. And as the family’s mouths all drop open once again, Wilder notices. (Finally!) They notice the bend in their mouth that they’ve never had before, their tongue flattening to make a different set of glottal caverns. What they are hearing with their actual ears, the sounds pressing against their actual eardrums, slams into some new territory, an instant double consciousness that immediately gives them a headache. Sound pulses from ear to ear around them, like wearing bad headphones at the library. They unintentionally tilt their head to one side, trying to expel water that isn’t there.

“Uh,” they say, suddenly deeply aware of the pastiche of languages around them, the way they now innately understand the entire world as they argue, cajole, compliment, screech, whisper, rant, plead, cheer, ask, update, impress, answer, invent, predict, worry, and echo, echo, echo—it’s too much. “I meant to say I have never lived in Japan.” They say it very, very fast.

“Oh—well—your Japanese is very good.”

An awkward pause, which would usually make Wilder want to perish. But what Wilder is feeling now is so, so much worse than merely wishing for death. The mother saves them by saying, “Thank you!” The family turns around and heads in the correct direction.

There is just the lined man left. Wilder stares at him. He stares back. Normally, the lined man would just grunt and move on with his day—not because he isn’t cheerful. He actually is. Has a reputation in his family for being too nice, in fact, nice to stray dogs and strangers, chatty in queues even for unpleasant chores, but this country isn’t like back home and not everyone can understand him when he talks. It is precisely because Wilder spoke in Urdu that the lone lined man—who isn’t really lone at all, not really, not in the rest of his life—smiles warmly and asks, “How many languages do you speak?”

Instead of saying anything at all, Wilder’s hands fly to their mouth and they run. If Wilder were a cartoon, the ground underneath their feet would fold like fabric and their departure would make a gunshot sound. But they are not a cartoon. They are extremely real. And that is why this is not possible, they think. That is why they are absolutely one hundred percent going clinically insane. Except, they think, if they were going insane, no one else would be able to understand them, and these people do understand them. They are interrupted by the idea that maybe they are sleeping and, therefore, imagining the people, so they kick a trash can to be sure, the result of their extremely scientific experiment being that their foot hurts and they scatter garbage across the sidewalk.

“What the fuck?” they hear the woman selling tamales in front of the bakery say in Spanish, another language that Wilder doesn’t speak, and they scream—a quiet scream, high-pitched, and all the closest dogs begin to bark.

It’s Magic, of course, but they haven’t gotten there yet, which is hilarious because Wilder has spent so much of their childhood—all that time they should have been learning any of these other languages—reading fantasy novels, subconsciously preparing for this moment. Or perhaps unconsciously is the better word. They have packed so many narratives of magical discovery into their own head and the average of all the reactions is seated somewhere inside them, stuck in their rib cage and silently unfolding.

There is the doubt reaction, ranging from mild to hostile. Perhaps the first stage of magical discovery is denial. There is the patented and frequent but-I’m-not-special, and its opposite, the I-secretly-knew-I-was-special. There is awe, wonder. There is rocking back and forth, doubting sanity. There is joy at a crazier, happier world, the classic child-like acceptance of new circumstance. Protagonists have all sorts of reactions to being told they possess magic.

Alas, the average of all these reactions unfolding in their rib cage in the nonfictional world all at the same time is a panic attack.

Rarely are they surprised by panic attacks the way they used to be. Back when they were very small and had no language to describe gender dysphoria, their body would, instead, manifest a matrix of anxiety to house the dissonance. They never stopped getting panic attacks; they simply became expert in having them. Medication? Out of the question. Wilder didn’t grow up as a person with health insurance and they didn’t grow into one either, and even in the era of “universal” “health” “care,” being a person with insurance isn’t a quality one simply manifests overnight (like Magic). But what Wilder can do is breathe deep into their belly when they feel one coming. Count the number of things they can see, the number of smells they can smell. Pick at their cuticles until they feel the everyday manageable pain calling them to step from the undulating ocean of tooth-splitting worry back to shore. They can always mark the sensation of impending alarm. A swell like a tide in their stomach-chest. A hollow feeling in their bottom teeth. A shortening of attention span; a turning inward, unable to watch anything but their own sea-horizon.

So, just as none of the neat, received narratives fit the way they felt their body move through the world in a gender-sense, none of the neat, received narratives fit exactly the experience of discovering their own Power Awakened. But more. More extreme, more sudden, more alone—for who ever heard of magic really, actually happening? Plenty of trans people exist—you can throw a stone in any direction, really, and hit a trans person in the shins. But Magicians? Alone, alone, alone. And so. A volcano of dread-fluster-hysteria-cold-sweat-fight-flight-freeze explodes. Their hands shake with it, with the effort of seeming normal as they speedwalk, keeping themself as low to the ground as a slinking cat. The sounds around them become muffled and they struggle to breathe. Their face is numb. Their thoughts are light. They scream again, absent any trigger, and people cross the street to avoid them.

They finally reach their building’s front door. They do not notice a man across the street, watching them.

But there’s Quibble, squinting, watching them do a Monty Python walk because they are sick with worry-dread, not to mention a hurt foot from the trash can punt. Quibble texts, well i think we have a winner to his dispatcher.

Wilder claws at their keys with helium-filled fingers. They make their way to their bedroom, and Quibble can see them sit on their bed through the barred window. First floor. Easy enough, he thinks, if they don’t answer the door. Certainly easier than it was to get all the way here.

Wilder stares at nothing, all their coping mechanisms forgotten. Or perhaps the better way to say it: their coping mechanisms do not quite address this, the sudden return to smallness, the dropping away of agency and understanding. They fling their hands around, try to feel something in them, shake them awake. They breathe shallow. They rock side to side. They hear a wet ripping sound immediately to their right, bouncing loudly off their too-close walls, and this is not a symptom of anxiety they’re familiar with. And that’s because the sound is real.

Wilder jumps off the bed, backs up, trips back onto it. They grab their T-shirt quilt and hold it up in front of them as if it were a shield. They mean to hide their eyes with it, but they can’t look away. A—portal? Is that what they’d call it?—opens slowly, suckingly, in the middle of their limited floor space. It grows from penny-sized to human-sized in a matter of seconds, torn open like the air is cheap fabric instead of nothing. A man steps through, smiling crookedly under a large nose, holding his hands out and up. He opens his mouth, ready to speak some sort of words, but he is drowned out by the sound of screaming. Wilder does not realize they are screaming. They are enveloped by screaming. Only screaming.

Then flick. Dark.

Quibble catches them as they slide off the bed to the ground. He looks down at the body before him. He is unsure if he should be chastising himself for displaying Power before having the chance to talk about it. It may have been the wrong call. The thing is, though—what exactly is the right one? He and Artemis have been trying to figure it out for ages; they have gotten it “right” exactly zero times.

Quibble wonders if there isn’t a right way, never has been and never will be. That this is never a conversation that feels good or sane or fair. The other person will always react however it is they’re going to react, regardless. Still. He sought to be a comfort and he failed. He feels a way about that, even as he acknowledges the following: how else would he get inside their house? His knocks had gone unanswered.

Sometimes all one can do is make the next best decision in the moment, given all the givens. And not everyone can See the future. Quibble certainly can’t. He kneels. He does not yet know Wilder’s name. He thinks of them only as “this witch.” Their face is somehow both flushed and paper-white, the standard pallor of the recently fainted. Their lips stand out plum against their panic-boiled skin. Their cheeks are heavy, round with sudden onset muscle relaxation. Their mouth lolls open slightly. Their eyelashes, hard to see given how light red-blond they are, flutter. Quibble can see Wilder’s trying-to-swim-up-ness.

He can hear stirring in the next room. A roommate. Shit. Of course they don’t live alone. Nearly no one lives alone, except for him. He forgets sometimes. He tries to be thoughtful, but the sharing of space isn’t a mother tongue. Impossible to keep at the front of mind even at the most neutral of times, and this isn’t the most neutral of times.

He feels strange, grabbing their face. He doesn’t know them at all. But it would be ruder, he feels, to grab their Meta-Face with the internal Hands made of his own Awakened Power and yank. That is so much more personal than a mere body. So he touches them as gently as he can manage, tentative. He puts his palms to their cheeks. Taps. Strokes. “Hey—” Not knowing their name is awkward, and he draws the e and the y sounds out long. He tries to stay quiet. “Hey, buddy—”

He hears a muffled, sleepy “Wilder?” from beyond the wall. “What the fuck was that noise?”

“Hey, Wilder,” Quibble whispers, thankful for the name supplied. “Come on, bud. Up time.” The new witch, Wilder, stirs and Quibble eyes the closet. It is so small—will he be able to fit in there? Bouncing from the room will make the sound again. While the Unawakened will usually do anything not to notice Awakened Power, he doubts the roommate will be able to rationalize such a thing away, not when it happens in his own home. Twice.

Quibble spots a lock on the door and rocks back on his heels, clicking it quietly into place. He returns to Wilder. “All righty, let’s—up. I’m going to get you onto the bed.” He grabs them under their arms, can feel their ribs, their shallow breathing returning to something deeper. A short-circuit. A reset. Good. Perhaps they need it to readjust their world. Their head rolls on their neck and Quibble reaches out to support it with his hand as he struggles their no-help-weight up three feet, spilling them onto the bed as kindly as he can. He grunts. It’s a low sound, an almost-growl.

“What? Who—Wilder, are you okay?” The roommate raps at the door, polite but firm. “Wilder?”

The new witch’s face flinches at each sharp knock, which, ultimately, gets them to open their eyes. When they do, Quibble’s face swims into view. His eyes are doe-like and worried. A set of three small wrinkles sits between his eyebrows and they relax as Wilder wakes. Awakens.

Wilder shoots backward, sits up and pulls their quilt back around them. They do not yet know Quibble’s name. But he is handsome, and Wilder is surprised by the faraway small part of themself that wants to trust someone because they are beautiful. Then they remember with the weight of a falling anvil how he came to be in their bedroom. They open their mouth again, a sharp intake of air, ready to scream once more. But Quibble puts his finger to his lips and, for a reason Wilder can’t quite acknowledge, they shut their mouth around the sound they were about to loose. Both turn their heads toward the closed door and back to each other.

Quibble’s whisper is so quiet as to be almost entirely inaudible, merely a breath with syllables, an ASMR video. Wilder has to lean in to hear.

“Listen,” the man says, and Wilder clocks the buzz. They don’t have a lot of friends—any friends—but they’re not stupid. They’ve watched enough trans YouTube to understand Quibble is a trans man. “I know what you’ve been through this morning. It is very confusing. I am very sorry. Get us—” The knocks begin again and Quibble speaks even more quietly, a feat Wilder hadn’t considered possible. “Get us some privacy and we’ll talk about it.”

Wilder nods once, their movements restrained. They feel hungover and their head rings like a bell. They wince as they get off the bed, dragging the quilt with them, and Quibble plops down, sitting on the edge. Wilder clicks the lock open and cracks the door. “Andy—hi. Everything’s, um. Fine.”

Roommate Andy raises an eyebrow, then breaks into a wide grin of the shit-eating variety. “Ah,” he says.

“What?” Wilder responds, confused, as they look over their shoulder where Andy’s looking. “Oh, uh. I’m—um.”

“Nah, man, I get it, totally—wow, you’ve never had anyone in here before and I wouldn’t have guessed you liked the D.” Wilder can feel themself light up red and they hear the soft whump of a whole face being buried straight into rumpled sheets from behind them. “Listen, I’m tryna sleep, though. Could you two be a little quieter?”

“Andy, it’s not—”

“No shame in it, bro! No shame in it! No need to deny it! Just quieter, okay?” His eyes twinkle as he pulls the door shut, and both witches can hear his low chuckle as he shuffles his way back to bed.

Wilder whirls toward Quibble, who is still face down in the bed. “What the fuck is going on?”

Quibble stands, and Wilder’s body tries to do two things at once: back away from him and shake his outstretched hand. Quibble’s eye-corners crinkle at Wilder’s gawky weirdo dance. Wilder is struck by how completely he smiles. His whole face cheers and a knot they hadn’t noticed between their shoulder blades loosens just a little bit.

“Hello to you, too. You’re Wilder, seems like. I’m Quibble. And this morning, you became a witch. Congratulations!”

“I’m not a woman,” they respond.

“I didn’t say you were?”

“I—Sorry—you said ‘witch.’ I thought witches were—”

“Yeah? Witches are—?”

Wilder drops it. Instead they ask, “Why are you in my room? How are you in my room?”

“Magic,” says Quibble, “is the answer to both of those questions.”

Wilder deploys the voice of every adult their child-self heard right before whatever book they were reading at the time was ripped from their hands: “Magic doesn’t exist.”

Quibble raises his eyebrows. “Then what the fuck is going on with your day?”

In response, Wilder moves to open their mouth to argue, but they close it. Because Quibble has a point. The first thing they do with all this confirmation is touch their own still-hurting betrashcanned foot, pinching their a-little-bit-swollen pinky toe to make sure they are not still out cold. Just in case. But no, it hurts and Quibble pretends not to notice as he bends down and says, “Who ish dish? Who is dish pretty kitty?”

“The Lady Anastasia,” Wilder says while their cat shamelessly requests pets from a terrifying magic stranger. Then: a not small silence in which Wilder thinks. They feel like they are going to puke.

“Okay,” Wilder says. “So let’s say magic exists, then, just for now. I haven’t really decided yet.” They pause to take a beer-sized gulp of air. “Do I get a book about it? Go to a school? All the stories say I get a toad or a letter or a broomstick. None of them mention getting a terrifying trespasser instead.”

“I’m not a trespasser!”

“You broke into my apartment. I’m—still not quite sure how.”

Quibble shakes his head. “It’s Magic, pal. How else would you explain this, exactly?”

They close their open mouth because every single retort feels contrived, like they’ve seen it somewhere before. Except for one. One shining kernel of light that, if they know what is good for them, they should put their internal Hands around and cup gently; they should nurture this thought-feeling, the one that whispers triumphantly, I knew it. The one that is passion, excitement: I knew this was the way the world worked. I knew that underneath everything there was magic. But it is very difficult to choose that thought-feeling, even on the best of days, even for people who have a lot of practice doing so.

So instead: “Do I get an admissions letter? A syllabus? What about a massive safe full of gold guarded by goblins and a dragon? I wouldn’t say no to that.” And the hope in their voice sours into biting sarcasm as they try to make sure Quibble absolutely cannot see the kernel of light in their head, cannot hear longing, the hope that all the ways reality has broken their heart might be reversed.

Quibble isn’t perceptive in a Magic way, but neither is he a complete ninny. He has been here before, after all, in the place where everything seems possible and impossible at once. “Sorry, bud,” he says, and his smile is so kind Wilder hurts with it. Internally, they withdraw even further. This is not something Quibble notices; it’s not something anyone would notice, unless they could hear thoughts. Wilder’s face doesn’t change; they do not flinch—and it’s sadder, because this is just the way they are, the sediment layers of thirty-one and a half years of letdowns, disappointments, hostilities. Their face is an undisturbed pool of water, glassy, so neutral as to reflect back only what is put in.

Quibble continues: “No witch bank full of treasure. No such thing as a school for this. Never seen a book on it myself, not this exactly, not one that isn’t fiction. And no one I know flies around on a broomstick. Unless—that’s what you woke up being able to do today?” Quibble’s face betrays his excitement at this absurd imagining, the thrill of the literal.

Wilder shakes their head; they think that they would have an easier time not feeling insane if they could demonstrably fly. They’re brought out of their own imagining because Quibble is asking them a question: “What can you do, actually?”

“Uh—mostly I’m a freelance copywriter.”

“No, I mean what can you do with the Power?”

“Oh! I um—” Their voice is warbly with post-panic-pass-out fatigue, which isn’t only physical exhaustion, but also embarrassment. They sound so, so stupid. “I think I can understand a bunch of languages? Maybe all of them? I don’t know. Spanish, Urdu, and Japanese so far—and I spoke Japanese without noticing.”

“Oh hell yeah, that’s just fucking useful. Passive. Doesn’t draw much attention to you at all. You can just be a man who speaks a lot of languages—”

“I’m not a man.”

“Ah, sorry, noted. You can use it whenever. No one will notice. You could work at the UN—Oh, bud, your hands. They’re shaking. Let’s get you some water. Can you walk?”

Wilder nods and they manage to wobble out to the kitchen. Their normal movements are languid, slow. They move through the world trying to cause the least amount of friction. Quibble moves up behind them and puts his hand on their back. “You can sit. I can see the sink. I can find the glasses.”

As Wilder watches Quibble, a man they have just met, open all their cabinets with a look of open and honest concern, two things wash over them—a thought they’re aware of and a feeling they’re not.

The thought they’re aware of: they can’t tell anyone else why they’re so freaked out right now, not the truth. Because no one will believe them. They didn’t have friends before today, and now, if they were to go out and make an effort—or even try being a little more friendly with Roommate Andy—there will forevermore be a Thing. A thing that no one else can know about them but that is formative, that comprises a large part of how they move through the world, that literally shapes what they see and hear. They spent long enough in various closets to know that a secret of this magnitude means no one will ever actually know them. This stranger who can rip through the air like it’s shitty exercise pants is their actual last shot at having anyone in their life.

The feeling that they are unaware of: unmitigated rage. Wilder is not the first to respond to change with anger and they certainly will not be the last. But they are not terribly self-aware when it comes down to it and they wouldn’t be able to make the sentence “I am responding to change with unmitigated rage,” not for a trust fund and a pound of weed; so instead, as Quibble returns to the kitchen table with a glass of water, Wilder’s spoken “thanks” turns sour in their mouth, comes out short and sharp.

“Yeah,” Quibble says. “That’s—about right. That’s how I felt, too. But I didn’t—”

The rage has burned out all Wilder’s shakes. They don’t drink even the tiny sips of someone who’s going to puke; they simply set the glass on the table and stand. “Well,” they say, and their mouth is tight. “If there’s no school or book or anything, why are you here?”

“Artemis sent me. She’s like—” Quibble snorts, interrupting himself. “It sounds so cheesy to say—like, the head bitch in charge of our small coven. See, I don’t even like calling it a coven. It makes it sound like we’re Tumblr baby try-hards. It’s—We’re family. She looks out for me, I look out for her. We try to look out for others as best we can. She’s—difficult to describe. She’s also Awakened.”

“Excuse me?”

“When she casts spells, it does real shit. It’s not just thoughts and prayers. It’s what you are, too. Awakened.” Quibble perches on the stool opposite Wilder; Wilder wants to push him off the stool and watch him fall on his ass, watch his stupid face register shock. “She finds ’em, the Awakened ones. I round ’em up. Well, that’s the new plan, anyhow. She’s not exactly—gentle. A bit scary, if I’m honest.”

Wilder’s mouth gets so tight that if one popped a piece of coal in there, it’d be a diamond within a week. “Round me up?”

“Oh, I mean that casually. I’m not going to make you come with me or anything. I’m not here to kidnap you, nah.”

“No, not kidnap me. Just break into my apartment.”

It’s at this point Quibble begins to suspect he’s in territory he doesn’t understand. He is gentle, thoughtful—but this is an erratic time, and Quibble, well. He tends to assume people like him, which means he isn’t equipped to foresee Wilder’s response. Plus, he has a speech prepared. He’s thought about this hard and long. So Quibble soldiers on. “And the truth is we probably won’t be all that helpful. We’ll probably just ask you a bunch of questions. Everyone’s Awakened Power is so different. Magic isn’t structured. It happens to you one day, mostly when you’re older. And then there is no wizard school, no manual, no self-help book that can save you. And people deal with it mostly how they deal with all other forms of adulthood, like personal finance or handling emergencies or asserting their own boundaries: they move forward and pretend they know what they’re doing.”

Wilder thinks about their roommate, who once lit a toaster on fire because he left a plastic bag too close to it. And rather than calling the fire department or using the fire extinguisher (which was right there next to him), he picked up the flaming toaster and threw it out the open window into the street. They think about that guy, but with magic. Magic and no user manual. Their anger shakes with fear. “That’s terrifying,” they say.

“Yup,” Quibble replies.

“I think you’re full of shit,” Wilder says.

Quibble is now sure he’s in territory he doesn’t understand; his next word sounds defensive, the question mark a shield rather than a true invitation. “What?”

“How is the world not one giant smoking crater if people wake up with powers and there’s not really a pedagogical system for dealing with that?” they ask.

Quibble shrugs, trying not to get thorny. He succeeds a little; he fails a little. “Same way economists are shocked there isn’t, like, a lot more murder than there already is.”

Wilder’s eyebrows shoot up and they wonder if they’re about to get killed. “Excuse me?”

“Some economists say that the practical barrier for killing another human is not really at all insurmountable. Most people who commit major crimes don’t get caught and people are generally assholes in all other facets of life, so economists are like, well, why doesn’t everyone do a murder when they get angry if they’ll probably get away with it? And their best answer is: we’re tryna have a society here. So it’s probably like that. Everyone is sort of subconsciously aware we’re tryna have a society here so not even the freshest baby Awakened explodes anyone by accident.” He pauses. “Do you want to be?”

“What? Exploded?”

“No, rounded up. We’re not teachers. But coming from someone who didn’t have this, it sure beats trying to figure it out alone.”

Wilder pauses. Not because they’re not sure what they’re going to say, but because they want to wind up before they verbally punch. “No.”

“Wait—no?”

“No. No, I do not want to be rounded up.”

Quibble blinks a few times in genuine surprise. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not some charity case,” Wilder says, and it comes from the deep part of them that was treated like a charity case over and over as a child, the recipient of everyone’s pity rather than anyone’s true interest or desire for connection. “You said that you all are family. You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.”

And Quibble can’t argue with that. He doesn’t know Wilder. At all.

Wilder continues: “You also said you probably wouldn’t be that helpful anyhow. So, like, why? Why do any of this, except to feel like you’re saving someone?” Wilder sneers and a very-interior part of their consciousness recognizes the shape of their father’s mouth come to rest on their own face. Word for word, their father bursts from them: “What even is the point of you?”

Quibble had been prepared for a variety of reactions, even anger. But the insistence that a person needs to have a point at all? He doesn’t know how to respond. This Wilder is supposed to be queer! Queer people should know better!

Except, of course, that’s not true, is it? Being a member of the same community doesn’t mean that Wilder cannot look at Quibble and try to figure out where the softest parts are, what bruises will hurt the most when poked.

It so happens, however, they have it wrong. Because Quibble grew up rich. Like, really fucking rich. And he’s still really fucking rich. So the service impulse they’re assuming is a part of most queer people’s personalities based on the idealization of community support absent systemic support? That doesn’t exist here either. Quibble and Wilder misunderstand each other so badly that Quibble hurts Wilder when he doesn’t mean to, and Wilder can’t hurt Quibble when they do mean to. So what comes of it? Quibble’s bemused reply:

“Bro, what?” Accompanied by a very inappropriate grin. The kind of grin that doesn’t come from deep, wounded feelings but from confusion and discomfort, a face muscle spasm of what-the-fuck.

But unless one is on the inside of that grin, one just sees a grin, a disrespectful one, and Wilder is upset they haven’t gutted this stranger, so they snap, “Get out.”

“Wait, hold on—” Quibble tries to reason with Wilder, but they are already standing, already on their way to the door.

“I guess it doesn’t mean much, kicking you out,” Wilder says, shaking with rage, tears erupting, a long-buried hot spring finding daylight for the first time in forever, burbling into their voice, and they sniff. “You could always just—come back in.”

“I wouldn’t—if you want me out, you want me out, fine, I’m going.” Quibble’s hands are up above his shoulders, palms out, in surrender. “I just think—”

“I don’t care. Leave.”

And he is on the street, the door shot shut behind him, a crack so loud that he turns around expecting some part of the frame to be broken, the hinges buckled, something. But he sees only a very, very closed door. He sighs; he texts Artemis.

well that was shit