Firespell

I stared at the ceiling. Tiny yellow-green dots emerged from the darkness. The plaster above me was dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, I assumed pasted there by a former St. Sophia’s girl. As my mind raced, wondering about tomorrow and repeating my to-do list—find my locker, find my classes, manage not to get humiliated in said classes, figure out where Scout had gone—I counted the stars, tried to pick out constellations, and glanced at the clock a dozen times.

I tossed and turned in the bed, trying to find a comfortable position, my brain refusing to still even as I lay exhausted, trying to sleep.

I must have drifted off, as I woke suddenly to a pitch-black room. I must have been awakened by the closing of the hallway door. That sound was immediately followed by the scuffle of tripping in the common room—stuff being knocked around and mumbled curses. I threw off the covers and tiptoed to the door, then pressed my ear to the wood.

“Damn coffee table,” Scout muttered, footsteps receding until her bedroom door opened and closed. I glanced at the clock. It was one fifteen in the morning. When the common room was quiet, I put a hand to the doorknob, twisted it, and carefully pulled open the door. The room was dark, but a line of light glowed beneath Scout’s door.

I frowned. Where had she been until one fifteen in the morning? Exercise seemed seriously unlikely at this point.

That mystery in hand, I closed the door again and went back to bed, staring at the star-spangled ceiling until sleep finally claimed me.

3

My bedroom was cold and dark when the alarm—which I’d moved next to the bed—went off. Not nearly awake enough to actually sit upright, I fumbled for the OFF button and forced my eyes open. My stomach grumbled, but I didn’t think I was up for food. I already had butterflies—the combination of new school, new classes, new girls. Questionable high school cafeteria fare probably wasn’t going to help.

After a minute of staring at the ceiling, I glanced over at the nightstand. The red light on my phone flashed, a sign that I had messages waiting. I grabbed it, flipped it open . . . and smiled.

“SAFE & SOUND IN GERMANY,” read the text from my mom. “FIGHTING JET LAG.”

There was a message from Dad, as well, a little less businesslike (which was pretty much how it worked with them): “HAVE A HOT DOG FOR US! LV U, LILS!”

I smiled, closed the phone again, and put it back on the nightstand. Then I threw off the covers and forced my feet to the floor, the stone cold even beneath socks. I stumbled to the closet and grabbed a robe, then grabbed my toiletries and a towel, already stacked on the bureau, prepped and ready for my inaugural shower.

When I opened my bedroom door, Scout, already in uniform (plaid skirt, sweater, knee-high pair of fuzzy boots), smiled at me from the common room couch. She held up the Vogue. “I’ll read about skinny chicks in Milan. When you get back, we’ll go down to breakfast.”

“Sure,” I mumbled. But halfway to the hallway door, I stopped and glanced back. “Were you exercising until one fifteen this morning?”

Scout glanced up at me, fingers still pinched around the edge of a half-flipped page. “I’m not admitting whether I was or was not exercising, but if you’re asking if I was doing whatever I was doing until one fifteen, then yes.”

I opened and closed my mouth as I tried to work out what she’d just said. I settled on, “I see.”

“Seriously,” she said, “it’s important stuff.”

“Important like what?”

“Important like, I really can’t talk about it.”

The room was silent for a few seconds. The set of her jaw and the stubbornness in her eyes said she wasn’t going to budge. And since I was standing in front of her in pajamas with a fuzzy brain and teeth that desperately needed introducing to some toothpaste, I let it go.

“Okay,” I said, and saw relief in her eyes. I left her with the magazine and headed for the bathroom, but there was no way “exercise” was going to hold me for long. Call it too curious, too nosy. But one day after my arrival in Chicago, she was the closest friend I had. And I wasn’t about to lose her to whatever mess she was involved in.

She was on the couch when I returned (much more awake after a good shower and toothbrushing), her legs beneath her, her gaze still on the magazine on her lap.

“FYI,” she said, “if you don’t hurry, we’re going to be left with slurry.” She looked up, her countenance solemn. “Trust me on this—you don’t want slurry.”

Fairly confident she was right—the name being awful enough—I dumped my toiletries in my room and slipped into today’s version of the uniform. Plaid skirt. Tights to ward off the chill. Long-sleeved button-up shirt and V-neck sweater. A pair of ice blue boots that were shorter but equally as fuzzy as Scout’s.

I stuffed books and some slender Korean notebooks I’d found in a Manhattan paper store (I had a thing for sweet office supplies) into my bag and grabbed my ribboned room key, then closed the door behind me, slipping the key into the lock and turning it until it clicked.

“You ready?” Scout asked, a pile of books in her arms, her black messenger bag over her shoulder, its skull grinning back at me.

“As I’ll ever be,” I said, pulling the key’s ribbon over my head.

The cafeteria was located in a separate building, but one that looked to be the same age as the convent itself—the same stone, the same gothic architecture. I assumed the modern, windowed hallways that now linked them together were added to assuage parents who didn’t want their baby girls wandering around outside in freezing Chicago winters. The nuns, I guessed, had been a little more willing to brave the elements.

But the interior of the cafeteria was surprisingly modern, with a long glass wall overlooking the small lawn behind the building. The yard was tidy, inset with wide, concrete paving stones, tufts of grass rising between them. In the far corner sat a piece of what I assumed was industrial sculpture—a series of round metal bands set atop a metal post. Ode to a Sundial, maybe?

Having perused the art, I turned back to the cafeteria itself. The long rectangular room was lined with long rectangular tables of pale wood and matching chairs; the tables were filled with the St. Sophia’s army. After ten years of public school diversity, it was weird to see so many girls in the same clothes. But that sameness didn’t stifle the excitement in the room. Girls clustered together, chatting, probably excited to be back in school, to be reunited with friends and suitemates.

“Welcome to the jungle,” Scout whispered, and led me to a buffet line. Smiling men and women in chef gear—white smocks, tall hats—served eggs, bacon, fruit, toast, and oatmeal. These were not your mom’s surly lunch ladies—these folks smiled and chatted behind sneeze guards, which were dotted with cards describing how organic or free- range or un-steroided their particular goods were. Whole Foods must have made a fortune off these people.

My stomach twitching with nerves, I didn’t have much appetite for breakfast, organic or not, so I asked for toast and OJ, just enough to settle the butterflies. When I’d grabbed my breakfast, I followed Scout to a table. We took two empty chairs at one end.

“I guess we were early enough to avoid the slurry?” I asked.

Scout nibbled at a chunk of pineapple. “Yes, thank God. Slurry is the combination of everything that doesn’t get eaten early in the round—oatmeal, fruit, meat, what have you.”

I grimaced at the combination. “That’s disgusting.”

“If you think that’s bad, wait until you see the stew,” Scout said, nodding toward a chalkboard menu for the week that hung on the far end of the room. “Stew” made a lot of appearances over the weekend.

Scout raised her glass of orange juice toward the menu. “Welcome to St. Sophia’s, Parker. Eat early or go home, that’s our motto.”

“And how’s the new girl this morning?”

We turned our gazes to the end of the table. Veronica stood there, blond hair in a complicated ponytail, arms cradling a load of books, Mary Katherine and Amie behind her. Amie smiled at us. Mary Katherine looked viciously bored.

“She’s awake,” I reported. That was mostly the truth.

“Mmmm,” Veronica said in a bored tone, then glanced at Scout. “I hear you’re friends with someone from Montclare. Michael Garcia?”

Scout’s jaw clenched. “I know Michael. Why do you ask?”

Veronica glanced over her shoulder at Mary Katherine, who made a sound of disdain. “We spent some time together this summer,” she said, glancing at Scout again. “He’s cute, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t tell if they were trying to fix Scout up, or figure out if she was crushing Michael so they could throw his interest in Veronica back at her.

Scout shrugged. “He’s a friend,” she said. “Cute doesn’t really figure into it.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Veronica said, smiling evilly at Scout, “because I’m thinking about inviting him to the Sneak.”

Yep. There it was. I didn’t need to know what the “Sneak” was to figure out her game—stealing a boy from under Scout’s nose. If I’d had any interest in Michael, it would have been hard for me to avoid clawing that superior look right off Veronica’s face. But Scout did good—she played the bigger girl, crossing her arms over her chest, her expression bored. “That’s great, Veronica. If you think Michael’s interested in you, you should go for it. Really.”

Her enthusiasm put a frown on Veronica’s face. Veronica was pretty—but the frown was not flattering. Her mouth twisted up and her cheeks turned red, her features compressing into something a little less prissy, and a little more ratlike—definitely not attractive.

“You’re bluffing,” Veronica said. “Maybe I will ask him.”

“Do you have his number?” Scout asked, reaching around for her messenger bag. “I could give it to you.”

Veronica practically growled, then turned on her heel and headed for the cafeteria door. Mary Katherine, lip wrinkled in disgust, followed her. Amie looked vaguely apologetic about the outburst, but that didn’t stop her from turning tail and following, too.

“Nicely done,” I complimented.

“Mmm-hmm,” Scout said, straightening in her chair again. “See what I mean? TBD.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “TBD?”

“Total brat drama,” she said. “TBD is way too much drama for me, especially at seven thirty in the morning.”

Drama or not, there were questions to be answered. “So, who’s Michael Garcia? And what’s Montclare?”

“Montclare is a boys’ private high. It’s kind of our brother school.”

“Are they downtown, too?”

“In a roundabout way. They have more kids than we do—nearly four hundred—and their classrooms are scattered in the buildings around the Loop.”

“What’s the Loop?”

“It’s the part of downtown that’s within a loop of the El tracks. That’s our subway,” she added in an elementary-teacher voice.

“Yes,” I responded dryly. “I know what the El is. I’ve seen ER.”

Scout snorted. “In that case, you’d better be glad you’re hooking up with me so I can give you the truth about Chitown. It’s not all hot doctors and medical drama, you know.” She waved a hand in the air. “Anyway, Montclare has this big- city immersion-type program. You know, country mouse in Gotham, that kind of thing.”

“They clearly don’t have a Foley,” I said. Given what I knew of her so far, I guessed she wouldn’t let us out of her sight long enough to “immerse” ourselves in Chicago.

“No kidding,” Scout agreed. She pushed back her chair and picked up her tray. “Now that we’ve had our fill of food and TBD, let’s go find our names.” Although I had no clue what she was talking about, I finished my orange juice and followed her.

“Our names?” I asked, as we slid our trays through a window at the end of the buffet line.

“A St. Sophia’s tradition,” she said. I followed her out of the cafeteria, back into the main building, and then through another link into another gothic building, which, Scout explained, held the school’s classrooms.

When we pushed through another set of double doors and into the building, we found ourselves in a knot of plaid-clad girls squealing before three rows of lockers. These weren’t your typical high school lockers—the steel kind with dents on the front and chunks of gum and leftover stickers on the inside. These were made of gleaming wood, and there were notches cut out of both the top and bottom lockers, so they fit together like a puzzle.

An expensive puzzle, I guessed. Slurry or not, St. Sophia’s wasn’t afraid to spend some coin.

“Your name will be on yours,” Scout shouted through the din of girls, young and old, who were scanning the nameplates on the lockers to find the cabinet that would house their books and supplies for the next nine months.

Frowning at the mass of squirmy teenagers, I wasn’t sure I understood the fuss.

I watched Scout maneuver through the girls, then saw blond hair bobbing up and down above the crowd, one arm in the air, as she (I assumed) tried to get my attention.

Gripping the strap of my messenger bag, I squeezed through the gauntlet to reach Scout. She was beaming, one hand on her hip, one hand splayed against one of the top lockers. A silver nameplate in the midst of all that cherry-hued wood bore a single word: SCOUT.

“It says ‘Scout’!” she said, glowing like the proud parent of a newborn.