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Penelope's roommate hovered in the doorway - literally. Penelope wondered if she realised she wasn't touching the floor.
"Aren't you coming to the evening social?" Lucinda asked. "It's down in the main hall, at the end of the Corridor of Questions of Existence," she added helpfully.
"Yeah, in a bit," Penelope said. "Don't you already know lots of the other students, though? You grew up with this." Lucinda had arrived at the room they would share with her brother Austin in tow; Austin had apparently been here for years.
"Of course!" Lucinda said. "But I don't know everyone who's like you, who's just learned about magic." She frowned suddenly. "I suppose I should start by meeting you before I go down there..."
Penelope laughed. "I'll see you down there soon," she repeated. "I just... want a moment to myself, all right?"
"Oh! All right." Lucinda nodded vigorously, dropped down to the flagstones, turned, and sped off.
Penelope sat down on the bed and was still for several minutes. She thought about the beast guarding the gate who had politely introduced herself as a Yale. She thought about the parts of Watford she'd seen so far and the parts she wanted to explore. She thought about their very first lesson, which had only ended an hour before.
"Every year, I get a class of very clever children who already think they know what words can do," Mr Dempsey had said, tapping his fingers on the desk. "And the wonder and the glory - or the enormity - of it is that you really, truly, do not."
He smiled. "We’ll leave enormity for later," he'd said, and then he'd made it rain inside, cancelled gravity, and drawn a path to the opposite side of the world. He'd sent a boy, Simon, to sleep and then taken the rest of the class on a tour through his dreams. All with common phrases, words that had been said so often that they had left a mark in the fabric of the world, like a stone polished by the pass of a hundred fingers.
Penelope got up and went to the second of the room's two doors - the one that led not to the corridor, but to a toilet and sink squeezed in to the space of a cupboard. Above the sink there was a mirror. Penelope stared very hard into her own hazel eyes.
Penelope was a very clever child.
"I think I can," she said, carefully, testing. Meaning: learn, adapt, excel. I bet it only works if I believe it, she thought. But I do.
"I think I can," she chanted, firmly and solemnly, and there wasn't any doubt in her eyes.
Twice before breakfast, Penelope thought, and twice before bedtime, and maybe it would work like an investment: start when you're young. Keep going. Let compound interest work its magic. Or let words work theirs.
Penelope smiled at herself, and the smile stayed on her face as she went downstairs.