Work Text:
The sky in this town had so much depth to it. Agott had done her astronomy studies, had watched Bill Nye in class, knew that we knew no limits to the stars above, always a galaxy past a galaxy. But the city she had grown up in had always obscured that view, pollution and skyscrapers and man-made lights that showed that humans could only ever create facsimiles of what nature provided. Professor Qifrey had asked them once to do an essay comparing and contrasting magic and technology, to give reasons for why we kept both alive in a society where problems could now be solved with science. In her opinion, it was because magic melded in with the natural order of things. It was not an adjunct of the world but a living breathing part of it. Eventhough Witch society had only recently opened its tomes to let the entire world in on its secrets, magic had been around for longer than written history. It was a courtesy that they let regular society believe that their technology could ever hold a candle to magic. Once enough people saw that, she wasn’t sure there would be much to write about. And more and more people were learning the old ways every day. These days, anyone could be a witch. Theoretically.
Agott looked over to where Coco was kneeling on the pavement, carefully drawing glyphs into the heels of her rollerskates. Agott had thought the assignment was pretty straightforward and regurgitated all of her old lessons on the importance of keeping tradition alive and how science would never have the same prestige as magic or tradition of a code of ethics. But Coco. Coco had talked about the hope and awe of magic, of the possibilities it opened up for people who couldn’t afford tech and gadgets. Society had made so many advancements without magic, but they had put a price tag on it. Everything was expensive: medicine, transportation, everyday convenience. It was all justified because of the cost to build, the cost of bringing all of the components together and the labor and of course supply and demand. She argued that the only cost of magic was for a pen and paper, even just a stick and the dirt on the ground. Anyone could do magic.
Agott hadn’t had the heart to tell her that there was a reason only certain people did.
But after months of living with Coco at Professor Qifrey’s, Agott was slowly losing her hard outer shell, like a candy softening in the palm of Coco’s hand. She wasn’t sure if that shell had grown naturally or if she had been encased in it on purpose, shoved into a chrysalis before she could decide for herself what kind of butterfly she wanted to be. Maybe there was more to magic than the rigid rules she had grown up with. Like at this moment. She had been telling the other girls about the magic toys she had had when she was young, shoes that let you float a foot off the ground, self-propelled scooters, bubbles that didn’t burst when you held them in your hand. Coco had said that she had made something similar with some of her neighborhood kids. Her summer’s spent at the library meant she had found a propulsion glyph and had practiced it over and over until she could make her skates zoom off on their own. They were now out at the waterfront, late into a dusky summer evening, and Coco had moved on from her skates to Agott’s skateboard.
The board was the most run-down thing she had ever owned, a hand-me-down from Mr. Olly that he had unearthed from the garage for her when Coco asked if she could start going to the park with her skates. Tetia and Richeh had clamored at the opportunity to get skates of their own, joining Coco in seeing how fast they could fly across the pavement and looking up old rollerdisco moves. But Agott knew she would do better with a challenge. Mr. Olly had complained about his knees when she had dragged him out of retirement to show her how to do a manual, she could now do a varial heelflip (the first result when she had searched ‘hard skateboard trick- slowmo’ on YouTube.) And eventhough she absolutely preened under the one-on-one attention from Mr. Olly, she still caught herself stealing glances at the other girls holding hands and dancing around each other with a feeling in her chest that made her want to open her ribs like the door of a birdcage and reach inside. She didn’t know what she would do once she grasped the feeling in her hands. It was 50/50 whether she would try to coax it out and befriend it or just wring its neck and be done with it. She had hoped she would get along with her heart better after living with it for fifteen years, but how could you hope to learn about something you refused to ever look at?
“I need your shoe next.” Agott looked over at her dumbly, noticing that Coco was no longer sharpie-ing the board and was now holding her hand out expectantly. It looked like she had drawn most of a glyph near the back of the deck where her heel was always situated and Agott finally put two and two together that her back foot would be what completed and activated the glyph. Duh. She can’t just leave her board constantly juiced up. Coco must have learned the trick of joining two objects to complete a circle from Mr. Olly and his various contraptions. Trying not to think too much about it, Agott uncurled one knee from where it had been propping her chin up and extended her ankle right into Coco’s waiting hand.
“Oh.” Coco’s eyes widened as she found the thrifted Vans right in her face. “Okay, yeah, sure, I can do it while you wear it.” She was gentle as she held Agott’s ankle steady, always more comfortable with physical contact than Agott was useful. Tetia had been delighted at Coco’s easy hugs and always made a point to hold her hand when they all wandered the weekend market. Both of them had held Agott’s hand too at some point, Coco shy about it at first, and then bolder and bolder, but Agott could never push herself into crossing the boundary of being the one to initiate it.
With Coco’s hand now wrapping around her ankle and eyes studying her sole, Agott’s face flared with instant heat. Stupid. She was so stupid. She knew she was smart, she worked too damn hard to not be smart, so why did her brain always peace out whenever Coco was involved? It was too late now to change her mind, that would just make her look more dumb. Instead of trusting her words, she tried to put on her most non-plussed expression and shrugged, meeting Coco’s eyes and challenging her to question her.
An outing without Tetia and Richeh— with just the two of them— was unheard of, and when Coco had suggested it, Agott had almost responded like a date? She instantly bit her tongue, mortified that she even had the thought. Did she even want to go on a date with Coco? She had never been on one before, only heard the other girls talk about them when the vote for movie night leaned towards rom-com. Professor Qifrey and Mr. Olly went on dates, she knew that, but they had been together forever and she couldn’t imagine a time when the idea of being alone together would be enough to make them blush. Whatever did they do when they were alone? She suspected it was talk about magic they didn’t think she was old enough to learn yet. And probably kiss.
She made herself stop thinking.
Once Coco was done, they both stood up and got into position: Coco with her feet spread so as not to activate the two halves of her glyph on each skate and Agott with her front foot planted and left one ready to kick off. “On your mark, get set, go!” With Coco’s voice ringing in their ears, they both pushed off and were on their way.
Agott’s first thought was “I’m flying.” She wanted to berate herself for being so cliche, but there was no other word for how smoothly she was rolling over the pavement, wind pulling her skirt against her legs, streetlights becoming blurred lines in her jet wash. Coco was ahead of her, emblem from Professor Qifrey’s university shining bright on her backwards baseball cap as her green hair streamed behind it. The disastrous memory of when her and Tetia had dyed it came unbidden, a late night stroke of inspiration after Professor Qifrey had suggested the girls experiment more with self-expression. She focused on that memory and the shape of Coco’s head in front of her to keep from worrying if her ball bearings could endure going at this speed.
As she stared, Coco decided to turn her head, verdant eyes meeting her own as the wind ripped a laugh from her lips, never to be heard. The look of pure exhilaration on Coco’s face had the bird trapped in her ribcage slam itself against the bars. The force of it knocked her off-balance and she felt herself getting the speed wobbles. If it was going to cause problems like this just from a pair of pretty eyes, she might really have to rip it out of her chest and dispose of it. She quickly tried to lower her center of gravity and flung out a hand to balance. Immediately, a small hand grabbed her own and she was suddenly being pulled along, Coco now skating backwards and giving Agott her full attention.
“I got you,” Coco mouthed.
The moment stretched on forever, two warm hands encasing Agott’s own, green eyes waning into crescents as Coco’s smile grew wilder, the dawning realization that there was a breaking dawn on Agott’s own face that she couldn’t keep under control. A glow glyph had been activated somewhere inside of her and she was scared of how known she was in this moment. How much of this warm feeling was she letting show?
Coco just reflected that light back to her, a moonbeam she wanted to forever bask in.
The bend was coming up ahead and they desperately needed to slow down or else they would overshoot and end up in the street. Coco disengaged her glyph first, feet separating and knees bending as she was dragged behind Agott as she faltered a half second behind. Even with her heel lifted, the board was still moving off of momentum and it took both of them crouching and dragging their heels for it to finally slow to a stop.
The moment holds and then slowly relaxes, viscose as molasses as the sounds slowly trickle back: the crickets in the long grass singing their lullabyes, the last plane of the night returning home to the regional airport, the hum of the streetlamps cheering them on. Coco is a rhythmic in and out of breath next to her, displacing the air and then handing it back to her, never the type of person to take more than she’s willing to give. Everything is encased in amber and hung like an ornament in the back of her mind, sealed with a repetition glyph where she can admire it over and over ‘til the end of time, a fragile memory of a time when she let herself bleed outside her carefully drawn lines.
And then it breaks.
“Wow.” Her thoughts were a jumbled mess as she looked back the way they had came and realized just how much ground they had covered. “The stop was totally inelegant, next time we should add a deceleration glyph and…” Agott’s words died in her throat as she realized what she was doing. None of the others would jump right to criticizing after Coco was nice enough to share her spell. Richeh would have played it cool and made some type of joke, and Tetia would be thanking her before either of them could’ve caught their breath. But she was so herself, never satisfied with what she had, always talking about what could be.
Before Agott could decide what a proper response looked like (did she need to apologize?), Coco jumped in. “Like some sort of breaking system! If you were super careful about your foot placement, we could add a second circle to the deck, but my skates—“ and on she went, doing her Coco thing where she solved every problem set in front of her with no complaints.
They riffed on each other for a bit, Agott handling her words with care to make sure Coco was receiving the support she was trying so hard to give. (Professor Qifrey had tried talking to her multiple times about the way she came off to others, expressing concern about whether she talked to herself with such reproach as well. She had tried explaining that she held herself to the exact same standards she held everyone else to and that she didn’t see the problem since her test scores were always at the top of the class. Instead of arguing further, Professor Qifrey had started surreptitiously leaving child psychology print outs on her desk, ones that explained the ineffectiveness of punishment and shame in a learning environment. Mr. Olly had just said, “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, y’know?” and then stopped to think for a moment. “Just think about what kind of friend you wanna be remembered as when you girls’re all up and grown. You deserve to be that kind of friend to yourself too.”)
After a few minutes of sitting in the tall grass among the summer willowpuffs, Coco pulled out her phone to check the time. “It’s getting close to midnight, do you think we should go home soon?”
Agott looked up at the sky, assessing the trajectory of the moon. She knew the night would eventually end, and she should be eager to get home and start her summer homework, but so far this not-date had been a reprieve she didn’t know she needed. What more would she learn about herself by spending an evening with Coco’s full attention on her? “Professor Qifrey and Mr. Olly are at a show in the city tonight and said not to wait up for them. I don’t think we really have to be home if we don’t want to be.” The house would be pretty quiet tonight with no adults. Richeh was over at Eunni’s playing through Twilight Princess (again) and Tetia was holed up in her room watching a livestream with her discord friends. Some big performance with her favorite idol group. Now that they were all in high school, Professor Qifrey didn’t really enforce a curfew, but all the girls knew that if they weren’t home by midnight, they would miss unofficial snack-time. “Do you want to walk to the 24-hour drink shack and get sodas?”
Coco immediately jumped up and shook loose grass off her legs. As they had been talking, she had been weaving willowpuff stems into bracelets and she extended a hand with one twined around the wrist to help Agott up as well. “We should get one for Tetia too! They just got mango puree as a seasonal add-on and she’s been really wanting to try it.”
They made their way across the street, board and skates in respective hands as they double checked the empty streets for cars. As they reached the other side, youthful voices could be heard from the other side of the public gardens where a small bridge stretched over a small offshoot of the river the town was named for. Agott couldn’t miss the curious look Coco shot that way. Unlike Agott, she had grown up in this town and was much more comfortable interacting with the general populace. They had known each other long enough that Agott could tell when she was suppressing an urge for the comfort of someone else, so Agott made the magnanimous decision to indulge her this time and boldly redirected their course to head closer to the voices. It would feel less like a date this way, she reasoned.
“It’s okay, we don’t have to…” Agott didn’t even acknowledge her protest, marching ahead and daring Coco to call her bluff and stay behind. Just like Agott knew she would, Coco quickly pivoted and followed her, bare legs taking elongated strides to catch up. “I think I recognize them. We don’t have to stay long, we can just say hi and go.”
As they followed the path through the ornamental hedges, Agott knew it wasn’t just going to be a quick hello.
“Custas!” Coco squealed, dropping her skates to run up and do a complicated handshake with the boy. Agott vaguely knew the story of Coco helping save him from this very river when they were kids, an unfortunate mudslide leaving him without full use of his legs. His family hadn’t had money for an ambulance, so Coco had called 211 and gotten a team of volunteer witches to fly him to the hospital. When it was clear he would need a mobility aid from then on, the same witches had helped him procure a contraption to help get around. Coco had furtively told them that this was actually her first time meeting Professor Qifrey, but whenever they pressed him about it, he waved them off and said his time volunteering with the street paramedics was a long time ago. Last time she had seen Custas, he had been in a tricked out wheelchair, but now he was standing upright, two curved metal blades where the other kids had worn-out sneakers.
“Coco!” he cheered, ending their handshake with a loud clap of their hands. It occurred to Agott that maybe Coco and Custas had dated. They had gone to the same middle school after all. The thought made her feel almost seasick, so she looked for a steady point on the horizon to focus on while she breathed through it. “And… Agathe?” Custas questioned, cutting her attention back to him. He managed to look a little sheepish at not remembering her name.
“This is Agott,” Coco corrected. “She lives at Professor Qifrey’s with me.”
Agott felt a bristle along her spine and felt the need to add, “I’m her friend.”
Coco smiled back at her winningly. If they gave medals for being able to set someone at ease with just a look, Coco would get gold for sure. “One of my best friends,” she agreed.
The easy way she agreed had Agott’s hackles lowering, a small bloom of embarrassment replacing it. Of course she knew they were friends. She didn’t have to make Coco say it out loud for it to be true. Coco had proven they were friends many times over with her easy laughs and candid truths. Even now, the matching willowpuff bracelets on their wrists were a symbol of their easy camaraderie.
Custas nodded in understanding. “Well a friend of Coco’s is a friend of mine.” He held out a hand and Agott hesitantly reached out to shake it. Custas shot Coco a look of both bafflement and delight. “Alrighty then friends, are you here to join in on the mischief?”
Agott craned her neck to look past him and saw a pile of shoes and shirts on the bridge. She vaguely became aware of the splashing of water beneath them. Just as she was realizing what was going on, two kids clamored up the bank of the river and ran for the bridge. “Custas!” one called. “Come and take a video, I want to see what it looks like in slow-mo!”
“Duty calls.” He gave them two thumbs up and retreated to the waiting teens.
“Uh uh,” Agott said with a shake of her head as Custas aimed his phone at the two others as they each got a leg up on the rail. “That’s just begging for a head injury.”
“It’s not so bad,” Coco appeased, watching them jump off the rail into the darkness below. “The water’s deep and the current is slow. We did this all the time growing up. I don’t think anyone ever really got hurt. At least not the ones who did it sober.”
Her response did nothing to ease the trepidation that was growing in her chest. Agott’s mom had not let her so much as climb a tree growing up, warning of concussions and broken bones. Even just stepping foot on a skateboard, even under Mr. Olly’s careful supervision, had given her a thrill of rebellion. The thought of her mom finding out about /this/, about jumping off a bridge, no lifeguard, no adult supervision at all, in the dark, had her mentally going down the list of heartattack symptoms in her head.
“Are you going to do it?” Agott asked, dreading the answer.
Coco took a minute to really look at her, and then shook her head. “I can always text Custas and come back some other time. Maybe I’ll bring Richeh and Tetia.” But not you, Agott heard, unspoken between them, because you’re too uptight and rulefollowing and never have any fun with us.
Agott loosened the grip she had on her own fingers, not realizing she had been wringing her hands against the fabric of her skirt. “You don’t have to do that.” She took a steadying breath and relaxed her hands by her sides. “Let’s do it. The skateboarding was fun, just like you said, so.” She hesitated, deciding on the right words. “I trust you.” She looked at Coco, expecting the big, moon-bright grin, but her expression was softer, the corners of her eyes and mouth held in like there was a secret she was trying to share, a message just between the two of them. Agott tried desperately to read it, but Coco was a language she was only just beginning to grasp at.
“Okay, come with me and I’ll walk you through it. I promise it’s not as scary as it looks.” Coco started emptying her pockets, adding her belongings to the disheveled pile. When she stripped off her tunic, baring the camisole and jean shorts beneath, Agott had to look away and make sure her breathing sounded normal. It probably did. Why wouldn’t it be normal? In and out Agott, don’t be weird about this. Professor Qifrey’s hat sat at the very top of the pile and Coco looked at Agott expectantly and she threw her short hair up with a scrunchie. “Only get undressed as much as you are comfortable. It’s just easier to wade through the water with less fabric.”
“Are clothes are going to be so soaked. Are we just going to walk home dripping wet?”
Coco took a moment to think. “Probably not the best idea. Proffesor Qifrey and Mr. Olly will have questions if they see soaked clothes in the hamper.” Oh, so this was something they were doing in secret. Agott hadn’t really ever hidden something from their foster-dads before. Did it count as disobeying if she knew they wouldn’t get in trouble if they were found out, they just wanted to avoid making them worry? She convinced herself it was a kindness, really, to not make Professor Qifrey think about all the bad things that could have happened to them by playing in the river. Agott knew she wished she could avoid her own worried thoughts.
An idea seemed to strike Coco. “We can just use Mr. Olly’s drying rings afterwards!”
Agott nodded, satisfied with Coco’s logistics. Hesitantly, she unzipped her skirt and unbuttoned her blouse, leaving herself in just the slip she wore underneath. She turned her back and tried to be modest as she reached underneath to pull her stockings down and off. Coco grabbed her elbow to steady her as the last bit got caught on her foot and she stumbled. By the time they were ready to approach the rail, most of the other kids had already grabbed their things and shouted their goodbyes. Custas approached Coco and they gave another clap of their hands as they promised to get together soon. When Custas held out his hand to her again, Agott got the idea and gave it a half-hearted slap.
“Nah, we can do better than that,” Custas argued. “Cup your palm and really let it connect.” Coco offered her hand and Agott studied them as her and Custas repeated the motion. The resounding clap rung out in the night air.
Nodding in understanding, Agott lifted her arm in determination. When her and Custas’ hands met, it made a much better sound and his face immediately brightened with cheer. “Now that’s a dap! We’ll keep practicing, Miss Agott. Riff on some things with Coco and we’ll try more next time.” He threw up a peace sign as he jogged off to catch up with his other friends.
Now without an audience, Agott felt a lot calmer. She knew she should protest that it’s even more dangerous with it just being the two of them, but Coco was holding her hand as they stared down at the water below and she let herself trust that Coco would never do anything to put her in harms way.
“On my count,” Coco guided, her grip on her hand a reassuring pressure. “3…2…1…!”
They leapt.
Being airborne was not the same as flying, she decided. When they had been rolling along the pavement at a speed yet unknown to her, she had felt self-determining, in control. It had been intoxicating, knowing she was taking simple physics into her own hands to tweak the natural order of things, defying the limits mother earth had set on them as bipedal mammals. Now she was in freefall, her stomach in her throat, her eyes closed in fear of what was going to meet her when the drop stopped. At the last moment, she remembered her diving lessons and pointed her toes. And then they were submerged.
The water was cold enough to shock, but not enough to make her seize up and panic. After the muggy heat of the summer night air, it was almost a welcome balm. She had been so scared of the jump and of what they would say when they came home dripping wet that she hadn’t thought about what a thrill it was to go from all of the usual summer sounds to completely submerged. In the impact, her hand had left Coco’s and she instinctively reached out, finding the other girl’s wrist as they both got their heads above the surface. Coco was already laughing, and this time Agott got to participate in this small corner of the world that got to appreciate the sounds of her joy. Her trepidation lifted as she realized the worst hadn’t happened. She’d always hated the adage “if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you too?” because the answer was obviously not. She had always prided herself on being a free thinker. But it turns out. It turns out sometimes your friends have the right idea and it’s more fun to just trust them and leap. It’s more fun to let herself open up and experience that joy with her.
Coco started pulling her towards the shore. “How was it?” she asked, showing Agott which roots to grasp to pull herself from the water and up the bank.
Her heart must be waterlogged with how full it felt in her chest. She tried to think of the words for how to describe this feeling to Coco, how to tell her that she would always be willing to jump if the other girl held her hand on the way down. What came out was, “next time, we definitely need to bring Richeh and Tetia.”
As they made it back to their pile of stuff, Coco looked at Agott expectantly. Agott looked back, and then gestured to Coco’s belongings. “Where did you put the rings?”
Coco’s eyes widened and she suddenly looked unsure. “I thought you had them?”
“Why would I have them, it was your idea.”
“Oh, you’re always so prepared, I guess I just assumed…” They stared at each other for a minute, Agott’s face a show of frustration and Coco’s of sheepishness. It didn’t take Agott long to break and let out a small laugh.
“I guess we’re doing this the old fashioned way. Do you remember the glyph?” Agott picked up her phone and opened her quire app, flipping through her incomplete sketches as Coco dried her hands on her discarded shirt and picked up her paper quire. It was a Sanrio branded one with a green frog on the front that Agott had forgotten the name of. All four of them had gotten matching ones when Coco first came to the house. Agott’s purple one was stashed in a safe place in her desk drawer, still as pristine as the day they bought it. Coco’s was starting to look a little worse for wear from always being stuffed in her pocket and carried around.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to write it down,” Coco admitted. “Mr. Olly’s always been around with the rings whenever we’ve gotten caught in a rainstorm.”
“We should just text him and see if he can send one.” She checked the time on her phone and saw it was distressingly close to midnight. “Is it okay to interrupt their date? They might still be at the concert.”
Coco shrugged. “Just don’t make the text sound urgent. Be suuuuper casual. You know how Professor Qifrey is with water. He might assume the house sprung a leak somewhere and have a conniption.” She took a moment to think. “Maybe say you dropped your phone in the toilet?”
“If I had dropped my phone in the toilet, why would I be the one texting him?”
“Good point, I’ll do it.” She pulled out her phone and made a face. “I’m at 10%. We really need to get home.”
“Do you know how to draw a charging glyph?”
“My phone doesn’t support the quire app and it’s too dark to use pen and paper.” If Coco had been a more advanced witch, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. Agott had been practicing drawing glyphs blind since she was 11. Modern society no longer required spellcasting to be a hidden art, but her family had prided itself on keeping the old traditions alive.
“I got it,” Agott offered, pulling the stylus out of her phone case and opening her app. “I’ll text it to you and you can complete the circle in your photo editor.”
Coco nodded along, eager at the thought progression. “That’s such a good idea Agott.” As Agott scrawled out the well-used glyph, she discreetly switched over to her notes app and put in a reminder to talk to Professor Qifrey about getting Coco a new phone. The rest of them had phones specifically designed for witches that came with a quire app and stylus. Sometimes she forgot that Coco didn’t grow up learning magic and that her mom wouldn’t have thought to get her such conveniences.
The powerlines crackled and the streetlight overhead flickered as Coco received the text and activated the glyph. “Oh nice, that got me up to half. I’ll text Mr. Olly now.”
Agott wondered how their date was going. Richeh always pulls a gross face and Tetia makes kissy noises whenever their foster-dads talk about doing something just the two of them, but Agott figures that even a romance that’s gone on for as long as theirs has needs its flame stoked every once in a while. Maybe if you take loving someone for granted for too long, you forget why you fell for them in the first place. Though with how many stories Professor Qifrey and Mr. Olly tell about growing up, she doubts either of them have forgotten anything in their life. She definitely knew they didn’t forget anything when it came to the girls they had taken into their home: birthdays, favorite meals, their strengths and weaknesses when it came to spellcrafting. Mr. Olly always remembered to stop by her room and turn off her reading lamp on his way to bed, even though she had only asked him to the one time when she knew she’d be up studying late for a test. In turn, she tried to remember things about the two of them. Like their favorite jazz record to put on as they cleaned up dinner and helped the girls get ready for bed. Like the ozone, lemon, and jasmine candle she was working up the nerve to give them for fathers day. She had been with them for over a year, it wouldn’t be too weird to give them a gift, right? She kept meaning to ask the other girls, but she couldn’t be sure what their reactions would be.
“They must still be busy.” Coco set down her phone and stretched out on the grass. “I guess we can just dry out the old-fashioned way.” Agott witheld her comment that glyphs were the old-fashioned way, for some people. “What would you even be doing if we were home right now anyway? It’s not like spending a Friday night watching TV is too terrible a thing to miss.”
“I’d be studying.” Like she did every night, Agott didn’t add. Coco probably already knew anyway. They had a curtain separating the room they shared, but it was hard to ignore when someone was igniting pyreballs ten feet from you. Some nights (most nights) Coco drew back the curtain and joined her, for as long as she could stay awake. Agott was pretty sure Professor Qifrey knew, but he hadn’t called her a bad influence yet, so she figured they were in the clear. He did make a point to be sure they had full waterbottles whenever they headed to their room, but that could just be a regular dad thing. He did it for Richeh and Tetia too and she doubted they were practicing fire magic late at night, Richeh absorbed in her crystals and Tetia her clouds.
Coco pulled out her palm quire and turned the flashlight on from her phone. “Let’s do that here then. I used Professor Qifrey’s academic library card to get a new book of glyphs on Libby. Maybe we can practice different light spells.” They huddled together over the five inch screen and Agott had to push her curls back to make sure they didn’t drip onto the glass. Coco had the phone held perilously between two knees so they could look at the screen while the flashlight still shone on the palm quire below. She was craning her neck at an awkward angle to try to see both at the same time and Agott decided to take pity on her.
“How about we just take turns sharing mine?” She held up her phone and stylus. Coco took it gratefully and they spent some time going back and forth, learning how to distort a simple glow glyph into different shapes and tinge it different hues. There was a comfortable quietness between them. It was just like they were at home in their shared bedroom, twin flames of ambition and wonder burning into the night. Agott could imagine a lifetime of this, gently passing a quire back and forth, making small comments on what each other did well and on how a spell could be improved. Agott imagined a bedroom without a curtain, a large desk with a chair on each side, quire tablets on a swivel so that they could be turned and offered up for critique. She bit her lip to stop that line of thinking when she realized the implications of wanting to share a bedroom with Coco for the rest of her life. She was envious of the practiced dance Proffesor Qifrey and Mr. Olly did to entwine their lives together, twenty years of practice making it so they rarely stepped on the other’s toes. The thought of spending that much time with one person, of letting them know you inside and out until they could tell what you were going to do, what you needed, before you even knew yourself made her a bit light-headed and queasy. It was more of a commitment than she could fathom at fifteen.
Coco was taking her turn with the palm quire and she stopped to flip a few pages ahead on her phone and study a diagram. With a few quick strokes and a shakey cirlce, she unleashed fizzling sparks into the space above the phone that flashed a bold “A” before showering her hand in star-fall. “I wanted to write ‘Agott’,” she admitted, “but that was too much to fit.”
Agott looked over her shoulder to study the page and saw the instructions for a simple fireworks spell. Retrieving the digital quire from Coco’s offering hands, she drew a few confident lines and a swarm of green sparkles burst into the air and spelled ‘Coco’ in perfect looping cursive.
A smattering of applause followed and Coco’s whole body was radiating glee. “I know it’s kind of silly, but I think this is my favorite kind of magic.” She went back to looking at her book, acting like Agott didn’t already know this, like it wasn’t the whole reason she had done it, and swiped through pages to find something else to try.
A bit hesitantly, Agott looked down at the phone in her hand and contemplated. She wasn’t one to offer up information on herself, sure in her belief that her work spoke for her and that all the mundane details of her personality were best left buried within her. But something about Coco’s simple joy for the thing Agott herself had grown up taking for granted made her want to share her own joy. “Do you want to see my favorite kind of magic?”
Once she had gotten Coco’s ready agreement, Agott got to drawing. Her hand was practiced, pulling out an old favorite that she used to do whenever she felt like she deserved an award as a kid. It used to be every day she drew the familiar lines, proud of herself for spending an extra hour studying after school. And then it was saved for if she did a full two hours. And then it came out rarer and rarer, a last little hurrah the few times she realized she had managed to keep her eyes open and her hand from cramping until 2 am. As she completed the circle, mist gathered over the seal and solidified itself into a small dragon. It rose in the air, serpentine body leaving the confines of the seal to wind itself around Coco’s shoulder before dissipating into the night air. “I know a few other animals,” Agott admits.
Coco hears the offer in it, not needing her to spell it out with words. She leans back against the grass, green hair bright against the browning blades. “Could you do a brush buddy?” she asks.
Agott leans back next to her, dark curls filling the space between their heads. She holds the phone above her, careful not to let it drop on her face. It’s easy enough to recall the symbol for a brushbuddy, and one after another she lets off spells that sculpt all kinds of animals, a full menagerie performing for an audience of stars (plus two waterlogged girls).
Did they really need to get home? Agott knew they should, a small part of her anxious about what her foster-dads would do when they found out they had been out this late. Their clothes were drying against their skin, hair starting to smell more like the grass they were laying in than the river water. Neither girl spoke up to point it out. Her and Coco spent many nights in silence in their shared room, sometimes together with spells, sometimes on their opposite sides, but this time it felt different. It felt important.
“You should tell me something,” Coco whispered, only a voice besides her as Agott kept looking up at the night sky.
“Like what?”
“Something you haven’t told me before, something close to your heart.”
There were lots of things Agott hadn’t told Coco, but that wasn’t the same as things Coco didn’t know. Agott knew that, despite never saying much out loud, Coco knew more about her than most people. “I don’t really think I’m a ‘close to my heart’ kind of person. Does that count?”
“I don’t think so.” Coco takes a moment to think, stretching the moment as far as she could take it. Agott would have let her take it farther, comfortable with just her quiet presence. “Could you tell me about how you came to live with Professor Qifrey? I know about Richeh, and I know about Tetia, but you and me have never talked about it.” It wasn’t a secret, and Agott knew Coco probably already knew, but it was true that Agott was never the one to tell her.
“I wanted to.” Agott took a moment to think, choosing her words carefully. “My mom never believed in me, but I knew Professor Qifrey would. She thought… she thought I would cheat in order to live up to the Arklaum legacy and get into a private school. She didn’t believe me, wouldn’t acknowledge how hard I worked, and we fought and I left. I can’t tell if I miss her or not, but I know that Professor Qifrey has never made me feel the way she made me feel.”
Coco reached out and squeezed her hand, and then pulled back. It came so natural to her, reaching out to others, letting them know they were not alone. “I miss my mom.” It was said like a confession, but everybody who knew Coco knew about the hurt she held close to her chest, the wound she was trying so hard to heal. “I’ve been working with Professor Qifrey, and Tartah’s been learning medicine and has some ideas, but I still have no idea how long it will take for her to wake back up.”
Agott didn’t hesitate to cross that invisible boundary, the one she had been eyeing for months, wondering what it would mean for her to be the one to comfort Coco back. She interlocked their fingers together, running her thumb over the ridge of her knuckle. After tonight, Coco’s heartline was a familiar groove against Agott’s own. She knew there was nothing she could say to make it better, so she didn’t try. She let her breathing slow and listened to Coco match her, a slow in and out, take and give. The sky above them had so much depth, deep enough to get lost in, and she wondered how long it would take her problems to find their way back to her if she unleashed them into the heavens like a dragon made of mist. Maybe they would dissipate just as quickly. Maybe they would leave them to just be two girls, hand in hand, creating one crystalline memory of what it’s like to be fifteen and have the entire world at your back, an entire life ahead to spend shaping it into the one you want to live in, quire and pen in hand. She thought maybe it didn’t matter what name she put on it, the feeling she had when Coco was by her side was one she wanted to last a lifetime.