Penny sighs but doesn’t argue. She stares out onto the brown lawn. “I miss the Visitings. They were so magickal.…”
I laugh.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “Aunt Beryl came back to my mum, and I missed it.”
“What’d she say?”
“The same thing she said last time! ‘Stop looking for my books. There’s nothing in there for the likes of you.’”
“Wait, she came back to tell you not to find her books?”
“She was a scholar like Mum and Dad. She doesn’t think anyone’s smart enough to touch her research.”
“I can’t believe your relative came back just to insult you.”
“Mum says she always knew Aunt Beryl would take her bad attitude to hell with her.”
“Do the ghosts ever show up at the wrong place?”
“I think of them more as souls—”
“Souls, then. Do they ever get lost?”
“I’m not sure.” Penny turns to face me, holding out a slice of Battenberg cake. I take it. “I know you can confuse them,” she says. “You can try to hide their target. Like, if you’re worried a soul might come back and tell your secret—you can try to hide the living person who might get Visited. There’ve even been murders. If I kill you, you can’t get a Visitor; ergo, you can’t hear or tell my secret.”
“So the Visitors can get mixed-up.…”
“Yeah, they just show up where they think someone is supposed to be. Like a real person would. Madam Bellamy said she’d seen her husband lurking at the back of her classroom a few times before he actually came through the Veil.”
Just like I saw Baz’s mum at the window.…
I should tell Penny what happened. I always tell Penny what happened.
“Come on,” she says, standing and brushing dead grass off the backs of her thighs. “We’ll be late to class.”
She holds her hand over the napkins and plastic wrap, and spins her wrist. “A place for everything, and everything in its place!” They disappear.
“Waste of magic,” I say out of habit, picking up our satchels.
Penny rolls her eyes. “I’m so tired of hearing that. We’re supposed to use magic. What are we saving it for?”
“So it’s there if we need it.”
“I know the official answer, Simon—thanks. In America, they think that you become more powerful the more magic you use.”
“Just like fossil fuels.”
Penny glances over at me, then snorts.
“Don’t look so surprised,” I say. “I know about fossil fuels.”
* * *
Baz is in half my lessons. There are only fifty kids in our year; there have been terms in the past when he and I’ve had every lesson together, all day long.
We usually sit as far apart as possible, but today in Elocution, Madam Bellamy has us push all the desks out of the way and work in pairs. Baz ends up right behind me.
Madam Bellamy hasn’t been the same since her Visiting; it’s like—well, like she’s just seen a ghost. She keeps making us do practical work while she wanders around the room, looking lost.
At this point, eighth year, we’re past all the basic Elocution stuff—speaking out, hitting consonants, projection. It’s all nuance now. How to give spells more power by saying them with fire and intent. How pausing just before a key word can focus a spell.
Gareth’s my partner today. And most days. He’s terrible at Elocution. He still drones his spells out like he’s reading from a cue card. They work, but they land like lead balloons. If Gareth levitates something, it jerks; if he transforms something, it looks like it’s happening in cheap stop-motion animation.
Penelope says Gareth’s painful to watch—and not just because of his ridiculous magic belt buckle.
Baz says Gareth wouldn’t have even got into Watford in the old days.
Baz’s elocution is flawless. In four languages. (Though I suppose I’m just taking his word on that when it comes to French and Greek and Latin.) I can hear him behind me, rattling off cooling spells and warming spells one after another. I feel the change in the air on the back of my neck.
“Slow down, Mr. Pitch,” Madam Bellamy says. “No need to waste magic.”
I hear the irritation in Baz’s voice as he starts shooting the spells out even faster.
Sometimes it’s disturbing how much Baz and Penelope have in common. I’ve mentioned it to her before—“And,” I said, “your families both hate the Mage.”
“My family is nothing like the Pitches!” she argued. “They’re speciesist and racist. Baz probably doesn’t even think I should be at Watford.”
“Is he racist?” I ask. “Isn’t he a race? His mum looks sort of Spanish or Arabic in her painting.”
“Arabic is a language, Simon. And everyone is a race. And Baz is the whitest person I’ve ever seen.”
“Only because he’s a vampire,” I said.
Damn it all, I have to tell Baz about his mum. Or I have to tell Penny about Baz’s mum.… Or maybe even the Mage. If it wasn’t the Humdrum who had Baz’s mother killed, who was it?
I can’t keep a secret this big. I don’t have room for it.
* * *
Penny sneaks up to my room before she leaves that night with her mum. She’s stupidly brave—it’s the only stupid thing about her—and I swear it gets worse when we go too long between emergencies. I’m tempted to slam the door when I see that it’s her.