Spoiler
This is the first three-and-some-change pages of my most recent project, which I'm calling The Price of Magic. If you'd like to give it a read, I would love to know whether or not it engages you in any way. Would you keep reading, maybe? Did I make you snore on your keyboard?
Thanks again for looking!
Thanks again for looking!
I’d like to think that my part in everything started when Sheila Atkins came to wake me up.
She opened my door precisely a half an hour before breakfast, which was something I knew because in our house, my mother arranged for the cooks to strike bells one hour, thirty, and fifteen minutes before a meal was served. She did this so that not only was there never any excuse for lateness, there also wasn’t one for arriving disheveled, or arriving just in the nick of time.
The bells were administered by the host-boys, who stood on the grand staircase at the designated intervals with the bells around their necks, and they would beat them with little hammers. The bells rang three times at the half-hour mark, and the third iteration had just died when Sheila walked into my room.
“I need your help.”
Apparently unconcerned with checking to see whether or not I was sleeping, Sheila sat down on the nearest ottoman and waited for me to answer.
Briefly, I toyed with the idea of pretending to wake up, but her businesslike manner made any kind of subterfuge seem like a bad idea—how had she known I was awake in the first place?
“What do you need?”
The ottoman she’d chosen was against the wall, to the left of my bed, and I turned in that direction without sitting up or throwing off my blankets. I knew I probably looked ridiculous, but I didn’t want her to see my pajamas. On some level, I recognized that as absurd (she’s walked in on me at seven in the morning; what else would I be wearing?) but Sheila was also one of my sister, Jane’s, many beautiful friends and she was four years older than me and probably well-versed in what adult men—men like my sister’s husband, Gerard Dupon—wore to bed. I didn’t want to fall short in any criteria of manliness if I could avoid it.
“You know how today is Gerard’s birthday?”
I hadn’t actually been aware of that, but I nodded against my pillow anyway. Probably my ignorance was my own fault.
“Well, Jane never had time to pick up his present yesterday, so she asked me to do it for her and then come by their room this morning and leave it in the foyer, right, so that he’d be surprised first thing when he woke up.”
“That’s…um, nice.”
Not knowing what else to do, I nodded again. Each passing second and each additional word out of her mouth was making me more and more aware of how much I disliked this situation: my sister’s friend (who before today had spoken to me precisely twice, once to introduce herself and once to ask me to move, please, I was blocking the bathroom) and me, wrapped up in blankets like a hybrid between a chrysalis and a swaddled child. Clearly, we should not be sharing breathing space.
It occurred to me that I might be dreaming, in which case the awkwardness would end at any moment, probably with my mother shaking me awake, up in arms that I’d slept through her breakfast bells. I looked forward to it.
Oblivious, Sheila kept talking.
“I did like she asked and went up to their room, but the door was locked, so I knocked, right, and for a while I thought they must have been asleep, because I couldn’t hear anything. I kept going, loud enough to wake anybody up—“
“Jane’s not a heavy sleeper,” I said. “She wakes up if you so much as sneeze.”
Unexpectedly, Sheila laughed, and I wished I hadn’t said anything because my previously blank expression had to have been preferable to the stupid look of unrestrained pride that took over my face before I could suck it back in.
“I know,” Sheila said, “poor Gerard, right? Anyway, I ended up putting my ear right against the door, trying to see if anyone was even in there, and when I did that I heard this noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
Sheila opened her mouth and then hesitated.
“I don’t know how to make it,” she said. “But I guess if I had to say…it was a wailing?”
“Wailing?”
“That’s the closest I can think.”
She was staring at me intently. For the first time, I noticed that she had a hint of a moustache. I wondered if Jane had seen it. If she had, why hadn’t she told Sheila to take care of it? I’d have to ask.
“So you’re telling me my sister wouldn’t open her bedroom door for you because she and Gerard were too busy wailing on the other side?”
“Why would I come all the way here to tell you that?”
I recognized the look on her face, but it took me a moment to realize that was because it was the same expression Jane used whenever I said or did something she deemed too stupid to deserve a vocalized response. It was a combination of a scowl and a glare, her lip curling enough to show off her teeth.
Staring at Sheila, I was reminded of the flapper girls I’d seen on movie screens. They all walked the same way, surefooted and slinking despite their pointy shoes, their long, long legs rhythmizing with each other.
How did girls do these things?
“Paul? Paul, I’m talking.”
Sheila was still giving me the look. I drew up my blankets until they were on top of the most of my face.
“Sorry,” I said through the wool.
“So, as I was saying, I could tell—or I guessed, I suppose—that it was Jane on the other side of the door, so I called her name and said, ‘Jane, it’s Sheila’ and for a while she didn’t say anything, and then all of a sudden—she was loud, she must have been talking right into the keyhole—she said, ‘Go away.’ ”
She stopped again, looking at me expectantly.
“So…uh. Did you?”
“No!” Sheila crossed her legs, looking highly offended. “What kind of friend do you take me for? I said, ‘Jane, darling, you sound upset, is there anything I can do?’ and there was this pause, right, no wailing or anything, and then she said, ‘Paul. Get Paul.’ ”
She paused again and leaned against the wall. I was almost certain she was finished, but out of fear of invoking the look again, I asked, “Is that when you left?”
“To get you, yes.”
“All right.”
I shifted beneath my blankets. Sheila continued to perch on the ottoman, her eyes on me. I felt like a zoo animal.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to go?”
“I…yes.”
“Then come on! Get up!” She jumped to her own feet.
“Can’t—don’t you have somewhere you need to go?”
I had made it this far into the conversation underneath my blankets, and I didn’t see why Sheila Atkins and I couldn’t part ways without me exposing myself. Also, I was fairly sure that if I got up now, Sheila would follow me to Jane’s room, and her story had made it sound as if Jane had already sent her away once. God knew why Jane had done that, but I never understood the tiffs Jane was heaving with her friends beyond the fact that they usually ended in tears and, more importantly, any advice that I gave that could be construed in any way as unsupportive of Jane would somehow get back to my mother.
I wasn’t surprised to see the Paul-isn’t-worth-words look settle back over Sheila’s face, but I drew the covers a little higher anyway.
“Are you telling me to go away?” she asked.
This was a trick. The truthful answer was yes, but saying that meant that Sheila could go around the rest of the day telling everyone how rude I had been to her. On the other hand, saying no was the same thing as giving her permission to stay, which I didn’t want to do.
Unfortunately, knowing about the trick didn’t mean that I knew how to get past it.
“I’m not telling you to do anything,” I tried. “I’m thinking about Jane.”
Sheila was very pretty when she was annoyed. I thought sometimes that this was a major problem with beautiful girls: they knew that they looked better when they were upset and they went out of their way to look like that.
“You should know that I’m not some tactless busybody,” Sheila said, glaring down at me. “Jane asked me to come here this morning, so I did. If anything, I think she’s the rude one, asking everyone to cater to her like this.”
“Why does anyone have to be the rude one?” I wondered. I thought this might be another trick, but Sheila ignored me.
“If you want me to leave, that’s fine. I have a lot to do today, anyway. I was only trying to be helpful.”
Usually I felt self-conscious when Jane’s friends were in our house and they didn’t speak to me, but I was beginning to believe that I could go the rest of my life without talking to a girl if they were all like Sheila Atkins. I sifted through my head for something to say to her, but all I could come up with were rails at Jane for unleashing this woman upon me so early in the morning. I stayed dumb as Sheila finally turned her back on me and exited my room without giving any kind of goodbye. This, at least, unfazed me; Jane executed at least five similar dramatic departures a week. My mother hated them.
“All right, Jane.” I threw back my covers, too awake by now to care about the morning chill. “What do you want from
me?”
Not taking any chances, I went to my closet and picked out a dress shirt, slacks, and a pair of long socks. I frowned as I pulled on the thick cotton pants, watching the spring sun make glaring patterns on my window, but I had no idea where my warm weather wardrobe was stored. Also, Jane always made fun of my shorts. Apparently I had hairy knees.
“Better than smooth knees,” I said to nobody, giving one a rub through my trousers as I opened the door.
. What else can I say without repeating myself? Ahh, what the hell. This was lovely! Looking forward to the next part! Great job!
