Domestic Magic

June 6th, 2011

The most picked-on kid at a high school for the magical has nightmares about J. Rutherford Wisenhaur II killing people with a fire spell. She can’t stop him. She only has domestic magic and can’t do most difficult spells. To make matters worse, no one will believe that her dream is important. What’s a young nearly powerless witch to do?

A young adult fantasy story by USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble.com, and in other e-bookstores. Also in the collection, Five Fantastic Tales, which is available in trade paper for $7.99 or in electronic edition for $2.99 on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble.com, as well as other e-bookstores.

Domestic Magic

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

The dream’s like the scenes on TV only with magic. J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third comes into the cafeteria wearing his father’s black robes, points a finger at June Bauer and immediately she’s burning. Alive. A couple other kids use water spells to put her out, but when they do, he shoots flames at them, and they go down.

Water spells are beyond the expertise of almost everyone in the room—one of the higher levels that a lot of us will learn in college (at least that’s what Mrs. Parnham says. She also says don’t worry about it; you won’t ever need them, which is bad advice considering the dream).

I’m in line to pay for the slice of pizza I’m not supposed to be eating—Mom says you can’t use magic to get rid of fat; it’s not fair and it won’t hold (which turned out to be true in the case of my older sister)—when J. Rutherford starts his rampage. I scurry behind the steam tables, taking my tray with me—God knows why I think pizza will be helpful—and I watch him burn down half a dozen other students before Principal Haas, who is still in his office, douses the entire cafeteria in an ocean of water.

We—everyone in the caf—get swept outside, but not before six die. They’ll stay dead too. Resurrection spells are black magic, and worse than that, they’re flawed. You create zombies or ghosts unless you’re really, really good at it. So as drenched kids run across the lawn—slow motion, just like on TV—everyone knows that what happened in there was awful, permanent, and terrible.

And then I wake up.

In tears.

I’m not a precog. I don’t have a lot of magic skills and the ones I do have are disgustingly domestic—I can turn MacDonald’s french fries into the best garlic mashed potatoes you’ve ever tasted; I can clean your house with an eyeblink; I can iron your clothes just by rubbing my forefinger and thumb together. It’s so damn sexist. Boys almost never get the domestic magic gene. Some of our geneticists (yes, we have geneticists and other scientists as well) think that the domestic magic gene is carried on the X chromosome and becomes stronger in girls than it’ll ever be in boys.

So I’ve accepted that I have girl magic—the most stereotypical type. I’ve also accepted what I can’t do.

Among the many things I can’t do is see the future. Not in flashes, not in visions, and certainly not in dreams.

So no one is going to believe that what I dreamed might come true.

Maybe not even me.

But I’m scared too. Because if I did see the future, then I’m duty-bound to stop this thing.

Except I’m not the right person for the job. J. Rutherford and I have history.

Bad history.

The kind that makes anything I say about him sound suspiciously like I’m out for revenge.

Which I’m not.

At least, not any more.

***

J. Rutherford and I grew up on the same block. He lived three houses down from me in this single-story suburban ranch thing that everyone thinks is trendy now, but they thought it down market then.

His dad had just started the Magic Revival Hour on local cable access, but the show hadn’t yet been picked up by the Sy-Fy Channel, which led to repeat airings on USA, which made J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Second (known around here as Number Two) the most famous real magic proponent in the country.

That’s when the Wisenhauers bought the mansion on Pendergast Hill, although you’d more properly call that white elephant a castle, and after the rumors about Number Two dabbling in the black arts started.

There’s lots of jealousy in the magic community. My mom always attributed the comments to sour grapes—it was pretty clear from the beginning that Number Two’s TV show was going to take off, especially when the Conservative Right sent its minions from all over the country to picket outside his cable access studios.

But I wasn’t so sure jealousy was the source of the talk. I’d seen J. Rutherford around the neighborhood and he knew how to do stuff long before it got taught in Salem Township Elementary. Mean stuff, too, like hanging someone by his feet from an invisible rope or morphing a litter of puppies into a single entity attached at the tips of the tails.

That stuff may not be black magic, but it is precursor black magic, and something most parents would never, ever allow their kids to read about, let alone try.

Some kids knew how to undo—which made me wonder about them too—and more than a few parents got involved, privately talking to Number Two or his wife. They always promised to do something—and they did, but only about the problem at hand. The puppies got separated or someone cut the invisible rope and floated the poor victim to the ground so he won’t break anything.

But the Wisenhauers never really did anything about J. Rutherford and we all breathed a sigh of relief when he moved to that hilltop.

We figured he wouldn’t be our problem any more.

But of course, he was.

***

As for me and J. Rutherford, here’s the text message version. But first, you need a little background.

What most people don’t know about small domestic magic is that it’s practical magic. I can do all kinds of small useful things that no one else even thinks of. I can stop your casserole from burning, or add golf spikes to your shoes so you won’t slip down an icy hill.

I’m like the white vinegar of magic; no one even thinks of me until they spill red wine on their shirt.

The thing I learned from my mother is that practical magic is subtle. I can’t resuscitate a blackened banana into nutritious food, but I can prevent a perfect yellow banana from going stale for an entire week. And that’s valuable, especially when you only have so much food, and it’ll all spoil before you get to it.

Sometimes, by thinking small, you can make great changes.

Mom told me all this by way of a lecture one night after a long crying jag—mine, of course. I was upset because I couldn’t make rats jump over the walls of their maze like show ponies. Everyone else could do it, but not me.

I, however, could clean their cages with a wave of a hand.

Mom said that cage-cleaning is a lot more important to real life than rat wall-jumping, which of course I didn’t believe. But she talked about the practical magic, subtle magic, small equals great thing, and I finally believed her.

Then I decided to test it on J. Rutherford.

Okay. I didn’t decide right then and there, but the next day, I’m outside and I see J. Rutherford picking on the new kid from down the block.

The new kid looks pickable, the kind who just by his clothes is asking for trouble. He’s wearing obvious hand-me-downs—the worn knees on his jeans actually puddle around his ankles—and he’s way too skinny. He has a bruise along one chin and fragile glasses that someone has attached to his head with one of those rubber things that goes around the back of the skull.

To make things worse, he doesn’t approach the world with confidence. He cringes as he walks, which is a neon red KICK ME sign to someone like J. Rutherford.

J. Rutherford has the new kid in his sights. He’s calling to the kid, putting on the personal charm that he learned from Number Two, and making the kid feel welcome. I’ve seen J. Rutherford do this a dozen times, and it always ends badly.

Actually, it always ends with the invisible rope, and a kid hanging by his feet from some obscure spot in the neighborhood until someone sees him and gets him down.

Only I think this kid isn’t going to survive the upside down trick. It’s going to break what little spine he has left.

I’m about to find a grown-up when I remember what Mom says about small things. I know magic theory. I know that the invisible items created—heck, any item created—has to be made of the same kind of materials it would have in the real world. Which is why, to go back to the banana example, I can’t create a new banana from a spoiled one (my magic isn’t big enough) but I can preserve a good one for a limited period of time.

J. Rutherford’s invisible ropes are made of hemp. He’s never been any good at tying those plastic ropes or those slick ropes you buy at the hardware store. He can only tie—and we’re talking by hand here—the ropes made from coarse natural materials.

Now if I were better at magic, I’d change the natural ropes to plastic ropes, but I’m not. I have to think domestically.

I have to think small.

And as J. Rutherford conjures his invisible hemp rope, I stand on the curb, just outside his eyeline and fray the weave. I fray it so badly the rope has no tensile strength at all. J. Rutherford doesn’t notice because rough unfrayed hemp feels pretty much the same as rough frayed hemp, especially when you can’t see what you’re doing.

So he commands this thing, with its hangman’s noose, to wrap itself around the new kid’s feet. It does, but the minute J. Rutherford pulls the thing tight—that moment in which so many of us fell flat on our backs and screamed with surprise—the thing just kinda slips away from the kid’s ankles, leaving rope burns and little else.

The kid still screams like the hounds of hell are after him, and runs home.

I slide along the curb until I find a good tree, and wait there, but J. Rutherford never sees me. Instead, he picks up the rope, and tries to figure out what went wrong.

He did that every single time I thwarted him—and I thwarted him a lot that spring. Then he finally gets the bright idea to make the rope visible (something the rest of us would have done right away; I never said J. Rutherford was the sharpest knife in the drawer) and sees the fraying.

Even then he doesn’t figure out it’s me. He blames a bunch of other kids. None of them know how to fray a magical rope like that—the magic is too small, and most people never learn the small stuff because it seems too unimportant.

So it takes him another month to find me.

But when he does….

Oh, when he does…

I don’t like to remember that. It involved hanging—by the neck, actually—and real torture and six weeks in the hospital for me. By the time my throat had healed enough so that I could talk and my hands had healed enough so that I could write, Number Two had moved his family to their little castle and had given lots of money to local charities.

So when I blamed J. Rutherford, no adult believed me.

The kids did, of course. They knew how mean he could be.

But the adults wondered why I was lying about such a nice kid (he knew to turn on the charm with them too) and urged me to tell them what really happened.

The local police (magical branch) figured some drifter had done this. There’d been a lot of torture murders of little girls in nearby communities, and they figured this was just a different version of the same old song.

Only they caught the torture murderer guy, and he confessed to killing dozens of kids all over the country, but he wouldn’t admit to attacking me.

Even after that, no adult believed me and the more I pointed at J. Rutherford, the more people forgot my six weeks in the hospital (and the very real fear that I wasn’t going to survive) and the more they started thinking of J. Rutherford as the victim of some poor little girl’s delusion.

Once I asked my mom if Number Two had cast a spell on the whole town, making them believe that J. Rutherford was a good kid.

But she just shook her head. “If he cast that kind of spell, you would never say anything about J. Rutherford, and I would think he’s a saint too.”

Still, I wondered if such a spell would work on people who’d suffered at J. Rutherford’s hands. Maybe the spell only worked on people who hadn’t paid much attention to J. Rutherford.

Only I didn’t say that theory to Mom because she’d tell me to let it all go and to stay away from the Wisenhauers. It was just safer that way.

And I couldn’t look up black magic spells without setting off alarms all over town. I was already seen as the kid who went crazy when that drifter tortured her. If I got viewed as the crazy kid who dabbled in black magic, I’d get sent away somewhere.

So I successfully avoided J. Rutherford for four years—from elementary school to our first year of high school—and I never talked about him.

But that didn’t stop everybody else from wondering if I ever got over the “trauma.” I have to see counselors every other week, and no matter how much I claim I’m over it, they don’t believe me.

In fact, sometimes they act like I’m the one who’s going to blow up the school—even though girls never do those things, not even at the magical schools.

Mom thinks I’m just paranoid—and she says that I’m not over it either and won’t be until we move somewhere far away from the Wisenhauer family (although I wonder how that’s possible to do, with Number Two being internationally famous and all).

So I’m just hanging on until I get out of high school. I’m hoping for college somewhere that’ll appreciate my domestic talents or maybe even a trade school, like that magic chef school in Paris that I’ve been reading about.

At least, I was hanging on until the night I had that stupid dream.

***

The first time the dream comes, it’s at 3 a.m., and scares me so deep that I don’t want to go back to sleep. So I go downstairs and make Mom the best breakfast ever—without magic (or much of it anyway). It’s just the two of us now, with my older sisters married and making babies, and my dad long gone—as in he ran off, not as in he’s dead.

I kinda like it being me and Mom, but I’ve never cooked anything just for her before, so when she gets up at her normal 5:30, she’s stunned.

Over bacon, eggs, toast and this amazing pastry that I got from my latest French cookbook, I tell her about the dream and she says, “What an awful nightmare,” which sounds like she’s dismissing it.

So I say, “What if it’s a premonition?”

And she stifles a laugh with a mouthful of scrambled eggs, probably thinking I don’t notice.

“Honey, no one in our family has ever had precognitive abilities. Visions don’t come to us. It’s just not possible.”

I set down my fork. The food is good, but not good enough to eat when I’m this upset. “What if you’re wrong?”

She freezes for a minute, then sighs. “Has he said anything to you?”

“J. Rutherford? Are you kidding?”

“No,” she says, but she’s talking like she’s not really paying attention to me. “So have the other kids said something, something you might have overheard?”

“You mean like J. Rutherford confessing his plans to his friends?” I can’t keep my voice from rising. “Mom, that would mean he has friends.”

She frowns at me. “You can’t tell anyone about this, hon. Everyone knows that we don’t have that kind of magic, and then there’s your reputation.”

She makes it sound like I did something wrong.

“I don’t have a reputation,” I snap.

“You know what I mean.”

The thing is that I do know what she means. But that doesn’t make it right. “He hurt me. How come everyone around here thinks I did something to him?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, hon.”

“But you said it that way.”

“Just like the school officials will when you bring this to them.” Mom leans over her plate of eggs. She hasn’t touched the pastry yet and it’s the best part. “Hon, listen. It makes sense that you’d have a nightmare about J. Rutherford. I’m amazed you don’t have more of them.”

“I do.” I get up, grab my pastry and my coat and leave the house. Mom can handle the mess I made. And I don’t need my books.

I just need to get out of there.

The one person who usually believes me, the one who understands me, and she tells me to blow this off. I’d love to, but I meant what I asked her.

What if this is a true premonition? What if I have developed some kind of Sight?

What if J. Rutherford walks into the cafeteria with a fire-loaded finger, and kills six of my classmates?

What if I could have prevented it just by telling the right person?

I don’t want to live through that. I don’t want to be the cause of six deaths.

I just don’t.

***

So when I get to school, I go straight to the counselor’s office. I have a private therapist, Mr. Marx, on Tuesdays outside of school, but my every-two-weeks meetings are with Mrs. Emerson who works in the guidance office. She doesn’t have a psychology degree. Her degree is in magical brain phenomenon, which is more like neurology and psychiatry as it pertains to magic.

Or that’s how she explained it to me once.

Mrs. Emerson is younger than my mom and skinnier too. She wears designer rip-offs, which automatically makes her suspect to me because I think anyone who wears designer-rip-offs has to have low self-esteem.

But still, she’s the only person with some authority I can think of telling. Or, to clarify, the only person with some authority who has even the slightest chance of believing me.

Her office has windows that overlook the parking lot. She has covered those windows in plants, many of which are hanging medicinal herbs. She makes me sit in that fake leather chair across from her desk and she listens attentively as I tell her about the dream and my fears. I don’t tell her what Mom said, although Mrs. Emerson repeats Mom’s sentiments almost word-for-word.

(Except she doesn’t say our family; she says your family. But still.)

So I lie. I tell Mrs. Emerson she’s one of the people burned to death.

That at least makes her stop offering petty reassurances. For a half a second she even looks a little scared.

Then she says, “You know, with all the recent television coverage of school shootings, it’s not surprising you’d dream about something like that here. And as focused as you are on J. Rutherford Wisenhauer, it makes sense that he’d be the villain in your dream.”

I stand up. I’m so mad that I can hardly see. I knew no one would take me seriously, and here they are, not taking me seriously.

“It’s not a dream,” I say. “At best, it’s a nightmare. At worst, it’s true.”

That scared look comes back on her face and stays there longer this time. Then she gets up and goes to the filing cabinets behind her desk. She pulls open one in the middle, waves a hand over it so that I can’t even see the folders, and peers inside.

She heaves a small sigh of relief, closes the drawer, and comes back to her desk.

“He doesn’t have the ability to create fire like that,” she says. “None of the students do.”

“What about the teachers?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “That’s a black magic.”

“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s been around longer than almost all magic. The ability to make a flame so that you can light a room or ignite kindling to keep the family warm. It’s a survival skill.”

Which makes it a domestic magic. A small magic. I hope she doesn’t figure that out. Because then that would turn the suspicion back on me.

Her jaw hardens and she says, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

Meaning am I planning this thing? As if my ability to create a tiny flame could turn into those jets of fire that I saw in my dream.

I decide to misunderstand her, even though I want to scream at her. There’s a lot I want to tell her, much of which might get me expelled.

I walk to the door, put my hand on the knob, and then stop. “I just want to tell you this. If he does spray up the school and kill a bunch of people, it’s not my fault. I’ve tried to warn you. If you die at lunchtime, it’ll be your own damn fault.”

Then I let myself out, only to find myself grabbed by two of the school’s four security guards.

They pull me into the principal’s office. Seems half of what I said in Mrs. Emerson’s office sounded like a threat, so she pressed some button, notifying them. Now they’re detaining me.

The good part is I’m not going to the cafeteria today.

The bad part is that I’ve only managed to make my crazy victim reputation worse.

Which means no one will believe me now. And the longer this day goes on, the more I think they should.

***

Of course no one talks to J. Rutherford to see what he’s planning. So when they finally let me out of Principal Haas’s office with a warning not to threaten counselors again and a reminder that they’ll be watching all of my interactions with authority figures, I realize that only one person can prevent this whole thing.

Me.

By the time they let me out of Principal Prison, it’s long past lunch. No one’s in the caf and no one will be again until tomorrow morning at 10:40 when the first lunch begins.

And nothing happened, which means everyone’ll say that my dream was a nightmare and nothing more.

But there wasn’t a timeline on the dream. It could’ve happened today or it might happen tomorrow.

Or, if I’m being charitable, it might never happen.

And that would be the best.

But it is a function of what I think about J. Rutherford that makes me believe he will attack the school and he’ll do it sooner rather than later.

So as soon as they let me out of Principal Prison, I scout the hallways. I’m looking for J. Rutherford, and I find him in the library, actually cracking a book.

He’s a lot bigger than he was when he put me in the hospital. He’s six-five and built like a football player, even though he’s not that athletic. He dresses in black, but that doesn’t mean much since half the school does.

What he doesn’t have are tats or piercings or other things that would scare the grown ups. All he has are those sharp blue eyes that, if anything, have gotten meaner.

I stop at the door. My heart is pounding. I haven’t voluntarily gotten near J. Rutherford in four years. But I’m going to do it now.

I square my shoulders and walk across the thick pile carpet until I reach his table. He’s looking at old spell books—studying them in fact—and I can’t tell if it’s for a class or because he wants to.

He doesn’t look up when I sit down. So I lean forward and put my hand over the page he’s studying. Dust rises from the parchment.

He raises his head slowly and when his gaze meets mine, I nearly run from my seat.

It takes all of my strength to stay there.

“I know what you’re planning,” I say. “Don’t do it.”

He frowns.

“It’ll hurt you more than anyone else.” Which isn’t technically true—the kids that burn alive and survive will always remember it even though healing magic’ll ensure that their skin won’t scar and the kids that die, well, their families’ll be hurt the worse.

But my lie sounds good.

For a moment, tears line his eyes, then they disappear as quickly as they appeared.

“What are you talking about?” he snaps.

“Is this spellbook about the black arts?” I ask. “Is that how you learn the fire jet spell?”

His cheeks flush. For a moment—just a moment—he looks as terrified as Mrs. Emerson did.

Then he slams the book closed, right on top of my hand, and says in a really loud voice, “How come you always accuse me of stuff? I haven’t done anything to you. I’ve never done anything to you.”

Everyone turns and stares at us. I can see them out of the corner of my eye. But I don’t look away from J. Rutherford, and I say softly, “We both know that’s not true.”

He starts to say something, but that’s when my personal security guards—the same creeps that took me to Principal Prison—grab my arms again and drag me back there.

I get a lecture on harassing other students, and when I’m not repentant (I’m angry; no one is believing me), that’s when I get suspended.

For three days.

Like I’m the bad guy.

Which I most decidedly am not.

***

Three days away from school—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and then the weekend. I figure nothing’s going to happen this week, because I’m not there, and I’m absolutely there in the dream, right down to rescuing my own personal slice of pizza because I somehow deem it important.

Mom is “disappointed” in me and she actually makes me go see Mr. Marx like I’m the one who’s crazy, not J. Rutherford.

Mr. Marx is, at least, sympathetic. But I have a hunch that’s because the insurance company pays him more than $100 an hour to be as nice to me as he can.

Still, he says all the right things and makes me choke up when he says, “That took a lot of courage to face J. Rutherford by yourself.”

He’s right. It did take a lot of courage. More courage than I thought I had. But I really believe lives are at stake.

He also says, “You’ve done everything you can. You’ve warned the principal and the administration, you’ve even challenged J. Rutherford himself. There’s not much more you can do.”

And he’s right about that too. Because I can’t spell away J. Rutherford’s powers nor can I dunk him in water every five seconds. I can’t get those stupid school security guards to follow him and I don’t have enough magic to fight him.

I’ve warned everyone and no one’s listening.

“So now what am I supposed to do?” I ask Mr. Marx.

He shrugs. “It’s a tough situation. Let’s just hope everything you’ve done changes the tide.”

It sounds like he believes me. In fact, when he said that I thought he believed me. But as I’m leaving I realize he never actually said that. In fact, he was careful not to say he believed me.

I’ve got to say Mr. Marx is pretty good at make me feel like I’ve had a sympathetic ear. But a sympathetic ear isn’t what I want. I want someone to stop J. Rutherford. Or I want someone to prove to me that J. Rutherford isn’t about to finger-burn kids in my school.

I’m depressed again by the time I get home. Depressed and angry and frightened.

So I do what any good old domestic magician does when she loses control of her world.

I cook and cook and cook. I use real recipes and I cheat on a few others. I make pastries and cakes and pies and two different dinners and a salad that has both fruit and vegetables and a dressing I invent myself.

I cook until I can’t any more. (And Mom eats until she can’t any more.)

Then I stagger to bed, so exhausted I know that nothing will ever wake me up.

***

Except that stupid dream.

I have it again. Only this time, when J. Rutherford comes into the cafeteria, he looks right at me and his eyes are filled with tears.

But he doesn’t point at me or at Jane Bauer. He starts with a different kid, a boy I don’t recognize, and then when the same kids try to help, J. Rutherford goes after them.

I still manage to hide behind the steam tables, only this time I don’t rescue my piece of pizza. And it takes the same amount of time for Principal Haas to get his act together and drown the entire cafeteria in water.

I wake up even more terrified, and this time, I wake up Mom. She’s starting to worry now too, and she promises, in the morning, we’ll hire a true precog and see exactly what is going on.

***

The true precog is Willard Pruitt, the great-great-grandfather of last year’s prom queen, Willa Pruitt. No one knows how old Willard is, but everyone knows he’s the best precog in a family full of them.

He shows up at our house fifteen minutes early (Mom later jokes that precogs never do anything on time), banging on the door before I finish making Mom’s breakfast. So I have to use a bit of magic to double everything, just so I can offer him some.

When he comes into the kitchen, I’m glad I made the effort. He’s has that weird look some old guys get when it’s pretty clear they were really big once and aren’t any more. It’s not that his clothes don’t fit—they do—it’s just that they look like the kind of clothes a six-six guy would wear instead of a guy who’s a little under five-seven.

His bones are big too—his hands are twice the size of mine, but look frailer some how—and so is his nose. Hairs grow out of it and out of his ears, and when he sits at the table, he says, “I’ve been looking forward to this meal all week.”

Which, I was about to say, was impossible, until I realize that he probably knows everything that’s going to happen at this meeting. That creeps me out and makes me not want to talk to him.

Instead, I give him a serving of waffles sprinkled with powdered sugar and covered with strawberries so fresh they look like they’ve been airbrushed. He asks for and gets coffee, then he loads the waffles with butter and eats like he hasn’t seen food in a week.

Mom and I wait until he’s finished before telling him why we’ve called.

He listens, but with that distracted air people get when you’re telling them something they already know.

Finally, I say, “You know how this is going to come out. Why don’t you just tell us?”

He smiles, grabs the full orange juice glass in front of his empty plate, and leans back in his chair.

“Precognition isn’t quite like that,” he says. “Some events are certain—like this spectacular breakfast—and others are in flux. I have no idea what is going to happen in your school cafeteria, if anything. I am not privy to the future of the Wisenhauer family. It’s blocked. It’s always been blocked, which leads me to believe Number Two cast some kind of shield spell over the whole family about the time he decided to do his cable-access show.”

For some reason that news makes me shudder.

“So,” Willard Pruitt says, “I’m here partly to see if I can help you, partly to see if there’s any truth to your dream, and partly for that breakfast. You should open a restaurant, honey. You’re the best chef I’ve ever encountered.”

I flush in spite of myself.

Mom nods.

“Yes,” she says. “My daughter is an amazingly talented domestic.”

I look at her in shock, thinking maybe she’s talking about one of my sisters. Only my sisters aren’t domestics. So Mom has to be talking about me. Except she’s never talked about me like that before.

“What she isn’t,” Mom is saying, “is a visionary or a precog. This dream of hers, while scary, can’t be true. Our family doesn’t have the magic for it.”

Willard Pruitt clears his throat. Then he drinks some orange juice. Then he clears his throat again.

He’s obviously thinking about something, and he’s battling with himself about whether or not to say it.

Finally, he says, “There’re precogs and people who have a bit of the visionary magic, and then there’s everyone else.”

Mom nods. She knows this. I know this.

“But then there are break-through moments. Do you know what those are?”

Mom frowns. I frown. I’ve never heard of this.

“Break-through moments are future moments so powerful that even the non-magical get a sense of them. That’s why the non-magical talk about having déjà vu. They’ve had a wisp of a vision about that moment, and haven’t even acknowledged it on a conscious level. Usually they can’t acknowledge it—they don’t have the tools to access it.”

I’m beginning to feel like I’m in magical theory class. All this talk about stuff most of us just do irritates me and gives me a headache all at the same time.

But I’m trying to pay attention to Willard Pruitt because he is, after all, trying to help me.

“The magical,” he’s saying, “no matter what their talents can have these break-through moments and can remember them. Usually they come in a vision, not a dream and usually—forgive me hon…”

And he looks at me for that.

“…usually, they’re about the visionary’s impending death.”

I let out a small breath. That revelation doesn’t really surprise me. I had a hunch this might be about my death. Although that doesn’t explain why I can see how the whole thing resolves—from the ocean of water the principal unleashes to the drenched kids running across the school-yard in slow motion.

Mom picks up her coffee mug, spills some coffee, and sets it down again.

Willard Pruitt looks at her shaking hands, then reaches over and pats them. “I do not think your daughter is having a break-through moment.”

Mom purses her lips and I can tell she’s thinking he’s patronizing her.

“This could be a sending, a warning, that’s coming directly to her, something that could happen. Or it could be, as her counselor says, a manifestation of your daughter’s fear of this young man which is—”

And he looks at me again.

“—entirely justified. The Wisenhauers are terrifying people, and they get a way with a lot.”

I let out a small sigh. He’s the only person, except maybe Mom, who has ever really believed me.

“I happen to think, however, that it’s a metaphor.”

I blink. We’re not in English class. Metaphor is not a word I expected this nice old guy to say.

“A metaphor?” Mom asks.

“Your daughter sees a potential in young Mr. Wisenhauer. She understands how destructive he is. Her subconscious is sending messages to her conscious via dreams, using the imagery of modern life. This doesn’t mean that young Mr. Wisenhauer is going to destroy her school, but he is going to damage something important. Something important to your daughter. It’s not by accident that she has this dream about the cafeteria, which is the only place in a high school where her talents are relevant. He’s messing inside her magic, and the fact that in the first dream, she saves her food is important. How important I do not know. I think you should hire a dream interpreter. Then you’ll get to the bottom of this.”

A dream interpreter. I can see dollar signs in the sadness on Mom’s face. Willard Pruitt is already costing us a small fortune. We can’t afford any other help.

“What’s a sending?” I ask. He had mentioned that first, before all the other possibilities.

He sighs, as if he had hoped I hadn’t heard that part.

“A sending,” he says, “comes from someone else. Like a message or a warning. It too can be a metaphor.”

“How do I know if it’s my subconscious or someone trying to contact me?” I ask.

“Well, you can hire someone to trace the dream to its source. It’s a highly specialized form of magic. No one here has that ability, but I can give you some names—”

“What about you? Why can’t you do it?” Mom asks.

“If it’s not a vision or a true prophecy or a break-through moment, my magic can’t help you either.”

Her cheeks are flushed. Mom is getting mad. Next thing you know, she’s going to deny him his fee, which she can’t do since he already told us some valuable things.

And, I think, he’s probably the only person who really, truly believes me. That’s worth the fee too.

“Can I do anything to see if it’s a sending?” I ask. “I mean, there’s got to be a way to tell if it’s just a dream or a sending, right, without going to the source?”

He looks at me for a long time. Then he says, “You might try dedicated dreaming.”

He doesn’t have to explain that to me. We all learn dedicated dreaming in Head Start. Naptime is supposed to be about dedicated dreaming, although you learn later in the biology of magic that four-year-olds really can’t control their dreams. That ability doesn’t come until puberty. But it’s a good way to get little kids to close their eyes for a half an hour.

Dedicated dreaming, not that I’ve tried it since I became of age, is the ability to control your dreams. If it’s a true dream, you can turn it, make it into what you want. You can even ask the dream questions and it’ll answer you.

Essentially, dedicated dreaming is about talking to your own subconscious and having it answer.

So I can see the logic of his suggestion. If I can control the dream, then my subconscious is trying to tell me something. If I can’t, then there’s a good chance something else is going on.

Mom sighs. “Now I’m finally beginning to understand how all the mundanes feel.”

By mundanes, she means the non-magical. I don’t ask her what she means—I know Mom, and I know she makes comments like this as a set up for some angry comment.

But Willard Pruitt doesn’t know Mom at all, so he asks her what she means.

She glares at him. “This all sounds like mumbo-jumbo. It’s a colossal waste of time and—”

“Mom,” I say.

He’s leaning back, startled at the vehemence in her tone.

“—a waste of money and if we hadn’t already paid you—”

“Mom!”

“—we wouldn’t be.”

“Which is why,” he says as he stands up, “I always ask for up front payment. It doesn’t take a precog to know that sometimes customers don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

He nods at me, and I see warmth in his eyes.

“Good luck,” he says softly. “The future is dark on this topic. I hope your dream is wrong, but if it’s right, I know you will do the best you possibly can.”

Note he doesn’t say I would do the right thing. Or even that I would do the heroic thing. Only that I would do my best.

Which I’m already trying to do.

Mom’s still yelling at him as he heads for the door. I stay and clean the kitchen, feeling unsettled by the encounter. Not because Mom is angry—she always gets angry when she feels like we spent money we don’t have—but because, really, Willard Pruitt has no idea if my dreams predict the future or not.

He only has what we have—an idea that they don’t, and a fear that they might.

I’d be back to square one if it weren’t for two things: he actually believes (like I do) that J. Rutherford is a threat; and I can try dedicated dreaming.

When I finish cleaning my mess, I go upstairs and log onto our household computer. I read all I can find on dedicated dreaming, and there’s not a lot, at least from the magical perspective.

What there is is all about ritual, the kinda stuff I usually scoff at.

But I need to know, so I go through all the goofy rituals from the scented oil bath to the vanilla candles to the overturned mirrors and the quiet bedroom. I’m prepared to have the dreams of my life.

And of course, I don’t dream at all.

***

Until Sunday night, the night before my suspension ends. I was right about one thing; nothing happened while I was away. School lunch is normal, and nothing, not even threats, make the news. I monitor the MySpace pages of everyone I can think of, and don’t even see rumors.

Which both relieves me and terrifies me. It leads me to believe I’m onto something when in fact, I might just be delusional.

Certainly the fact that I can’t even dedicated dream makes me wonder if I have much magic at all. According to the websites, dedicated dreaming is one of those basic spells everyone can perform after a certain age.

Everyone but me, apparently.

So I don’t go through the stupid dedicated dreaming rituals at all on Sunday and I actually fall asleep on the couch, watching some Monster Truck Rally thing.

One minute I’m watching giant trucks drive over other giant trucks, and the next I’m back in the cafeteria, holding onto my silver tray with its lonely little piece of pizza. Kids are sitting at various tables, talking, and Mrs. McGuillicuty—the cafeteria supervisor—is telling me about this luscious lemon pie she makes, and I’m pretty convinced none of that happened before, but I’m not sure I’m making the changes.

So I consciously chose to set down my tray (and its delectable piece of pizza) and I turn around long before J. Rutherford comes into the cafeteria.

In fact, I’m beginning to think he’s not going to when he does, his father’s black robes flapping around him. J. Rutherford raises that deadly finger and then he stops. He stares at me.

I stare at him and realize how stupid he looks, all in black like a TV magician, with one finger pointed and this frown of concentration on his face. He’s conjuring up how to do the spell, that’s what he’s doing.

And no one can stop him.

Except…

I wave a finger at Mrs. McGuillicuty’s asbestos gloves, the ones she keeps behind the counter for removing things like pizza from the double-hot ovens. I command those gloves to cover J. Rutherford’s hands and not to come off until he leaves the cafeteria, and gives up his dream of killing people.

The gloves soar across the caf just as he turns toward Jane Bauer, the kid he burned alive in the first dream. And as the fire jets out of his finger, the gloves slide on, interrupting the flow. Jane’s clothes light on fire, the boys around her put it out, and those evil security guards—the ones that took me to Principal Prison—cart J. Rutherford away.

Then I wake up.

The TV’s playing some Japanese game show, the point of which seems to be to make everyone fall so that their back bends into an unnatural position. Mom’s covered me with a blanket, but she hasn’t sent me to bed.

And my heart is pounding.

Okay. That had to be dedicated dreaming since I set down my tray and actually stopped J. Rutherford with domestic magic. That couldn’t happen in real life.

I push off the blanket and go into the kitchen, my domain. There I drink some water, wipe off my sweaty face, and lean against the counter for a while.

It’s done. The whole dream thing is over.

At least, I hope it is.

Especially as I head for school that morning.

And walk into the cafeteria at lunch.

***

Of course, stupid me, I decide to have pizza to celebrate. I’ve been dreaming of pizza for a week now, and I deserve some. I mention that to Mrs. McGuillicuty as I’m getting my slice. She pulls off her asbestos gloves to serve it to me, fresh and bubbly, looking better than I even dreamed it would.

Then she tells me about this lemon pie she’s making, and the hair rises on the back of my neck.

I turn just as J. Rutherford comes into the caf. Only he’s not wearing his dad’s robes and he’s being trailed by those evil security guards. They’re not quite touching the backs of his arms.

He comes directly at me. I snap my fingers, and instantly, I’m holding those asbestos gloves instead of my cafeteria tray.

He sees that move and he smiles. Then he blinks hard. Against tears.

Tears again from J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third. What the heck is this all about?

He crowds so close to me that I wedge my back against the railing around the steam tables.

“I just had to tell you,” he says, “I’ve turned myself in.”

He says it real soft, so no one else can hear, except maybe those guards.

My mouth is dry.

“The gloves got me,” he says. “Good move. Made me realize that not all magic is about power. And some day, we’re going to tell that to my dad.”

Before I can even say, “Huh?” he heads out of the cafeteria again. Next thing I know it’s all over the school that J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third has voluntarily committed himself to some treatment facility for suicidal kids. Suicidal magical kids.

Seems he’d been dreaming about dying for a week or more because (rumor has it) he can’t stand living with Number Two and Number Two’s expectations.

Only I know different. Maybe he’s been dreaming of suicide, but only after he takes out part of the school.

Because he was sending me the dreams.

Me, the person he beat up so bad I went to the hospital.

Me, the person with such small magic that no one pays attention to it.

Me, the person who used that small magic to stop him once before.

The whole thing is a big scandal—the kind the tabloids love: J. Rutherford The Second’s namesake is so miserable he’s thinking of suicide. What’s really happening in that mansion on the hill? Rumors of black magic, Satanism—and all that stuff the mundanes are afraid of.

When really, Mom thinks it was just the same stuff that mundanes deal with. A depressed kid, a distant and demanding father, an alcoholic mother (yep, that came out too). The kid decides he’s going to go out, but in a way that’ll destroy his father forever.

It’s not enough to kill Number Two, after all. J. Rutherford has to demolish everything Number Two stands for.

Only some spark in J. Rutherford’s subconscious, some little teeny part of himself, maybe the part that started all that self-loathing in the first place, knows it’s wrong. So it sends out feelers to the one person who actually knows J. Rutherford for who he really is.

Lucky me.

J. Rutherford’ll be in his mental health facility for the next five years or so. His father’s not on TV any more, and the mansion’s up for sale.

I’ve been accepted to the magical version of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Mom, she vacillates between being really proud of me and wondering what she’ll do when she no longer has a resident chief cook and bottlewasher.

And I try not to do much dreaming. Sleep dreaming, that is. I’m up a little later than I used to be and I drink a lot more caffeine.

Mr. Marx says it’s a natural reaction to all I’ve been through. Mom thinks I should get past it because dreaming’s a normal part of life.

But I just don’t want the responsibility. Or the angst over the life-and-death philosophical questions.

I’d rather just spend my life cooking—and not mopping up someone else’s spilled red wine.

First published in Witch High, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008.