Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (2 page)

By the time she’d taken this inventory she was considerably calmer than she had been after the president’s introduction. “You’re also required to do a paper on a major magical figure, either contemporary or historical. This counts as twenty percent of your grade, and your topics must be approved by me. It’s a good idea to get an early start on this, but I would encourage you to wait at least a month and not to pick someone just because you’ve heard of them. In particular, I’d caution you to think twice about choosing the late Secretary Crowley as a subject. There’s a lot of disinformation out there, in his own writings and that of others, and you may quickly find yourself headed down the wrong track. Not to mention that Aleister Crowley was not a very pleasant person, and his writings are not for the easily offended. Just the fact that there’s a black woman up here talking about him might well have set him off on a tirade.”

There was scattered, nervous laughter, and one of the red kids near the back raised a hand. Joy took a deep breath. People who didn’t see auras tended to think that red was a negative color. That wasn’t necessarily true — sometimes it was simply an indicator of pragmatism or determination — but the shading on these kids suggested trouble. “Yes?”

“What if I wanted to do a paper about Gooseberry Bluff?” the boy asked, and his companions laughed, their auras sparking with bright yellows and dark blues.

“Do you mean the school?”

“No.” He was speaking loudly, with a false sincerity. “All the best schools are named for great magicians, right? I just assumed that this school was named for a magician named Gooseberry Bluff. I mean, I’ve never heard of them, but I assume we’ll learn about them in your class.”

He managed to keep a straight face through this speech, but his friends were laughing loudly by the end. Joy waited for them to quiet down before responding.

“I’m guessing you’re from Arthur Stag College,” she said, referring to the prestigious — and expensive — private school across town.

The ringleader nodded and smiled. “Busted.”

“I see,” Joy said, pacing back and forth across the platform. “Arthur Stag is an interesting figure, of course. He was a skilled administrator and a competent teacher, but not, I’m afraid, a great magician. Crowley called him — what was it — ‘egregiously ordinary,’ but then Crowley rarely had a good word for anyone. Hedda Vik, a much more tolerant person, said he was ‘small-minded enough not to have the least understanding of magic, but just visionary enough to imagine that he was in charge.’ It’s widely reported that during the first demonic tests at White Sands, Stag was so overcome with fear that he had to be physically restrained. General Farrell called it ‘The most shameful display I have ever witnessed from a man, even in the face of such terrifying power.’”

She stopped pacing and looked up. “Perhaps you should write a paper about that. In the meantime, though, I’m afraid that this course is for students of Gooseberry Bluff only, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

The class broke into scattered applause, and the Stag kids stood up and left, the ringleader turning to bow before exiting. Joy called for quiet, and the kids looked back at her, faces and auras eager.

Nice recovery, Wilkins
, she thought to herself.

After that, the rest of the lecture went smoothly. She gave them what she thought of as an overture for the course, introducing the major themes and characters — kabbalah to kundalini, Merlin to Rasputin. When she had first seen the course description, she had found the scope of it overwhelming. If she hadn’t had access to Carla Drake’s notes, she wasn’t sure she could have taught this without making a fool out of herself. But she’d spent the last few weeks reshaping those notes into something that had a narrative she could follow, and she felt hopeful that the students would be able to see it as well.

The students listened and took notes, but otherwise they hardly reacted to her words, and as soon as she was finished most of them hurried out of the room. If she hadn’t been able to see their auras she might have been worried that she hadn’t reached them at all. But the golds had calmed somewhat toward more subdued yellows, and Margaret even waved to her before hurrying out, her shoulders hunched, books and laptop clutched to her chest.

Joy took a deep breath and gathered the notes and books she had scattered over the table, almost none of which she had actually needed to refer to. She turned off the lights in the lecture hall but left the door open for the custodian and took the stairs to her office on the third floor. There was an elevator, but she was both tired and wired; she needed to wake up and calm down. And she was more convinced than ever that this job was going to be harder than her superiors expected.

The next morning Joy got up before dawn for a twelve-mile run, ate her usual breakfast of coffee, oatmeal, banana, and English muffin, and took a long shower. She got out to reach for a towel…and startled herself in the mirror.

She shook her head. She wasn’t used to her new house yet, so there was still that moment of who-the-hell-are-you when she spotted herself in the mirror. Her own face wasn’t exempt from her face blindness. She wished, for the seven millionth time, that she could see her own aura. Or, as long as she was at it, auras in ordinary photographs, or on video. Those were the only times when her face blindness was a serious liability. People’s auras weren’t static, but they rarely changed completely — they were more like handwriting than fingerprints. Joy had more or less convinced herself that seeing auras was more useful than seeing faces, but then she guessed that if she had been born able to see faces she wouldn’t have worked so hard to see auras as well as she did.

It was another warm day, so she decided to walk. She had chosen to rent a pricier house just a few blocks from the college, just in case she needed to get to the school fast. Her sister would have said that this was just another example of Joy being unable to separate her work life from her home life, and Joy knew that her sister would have been right about that. Thinking of her sister made Joy want to talk to her, so she grasped the rose-colored crystal that hung around her neck and said, “Rosemary Ebrahim.”

Instead of her sister, though, she ended up reaching a ghost. This was the problem with crystal communications: you could reach anyone anywhere, and it was always crystal clear, but you had about a one in twelve chance of connecting with a dead person.

“Wilson?” It was a woman’s voice.

“No ma’am, it’s not Wilson.” The theory ran that ghosts always had unfinished business, or at least unfinished conversations, so they broke in on calls hoping to find that person they needed to talk to. For some reason they almost never got through to the right people.

“Who is this?”

“Just a friend,” said Joy. You weren’t supposed to tell ghosts your name, because then they would be able to call you back.

“Wilson shouldn’t have lady friends answering the phone,” the ghost said. “He has a
wife
.”

“Yes, ma’am. I should go — I’m sorry for the confusion.”

“Stay off this line!” the ghost shouted, and Joy closed the connection.

She was nearly at the school, but then she remembered the health insurance form sitting on her kitchen table, and she had to turn around and go back to get it. Paperwork was such a pain, especially when it wasn’t actually necessary. But since most of the school didn’t know that, she had to go through the motions.

She tried her sister again. As always, Rosemary knew it was Joy before she picked up the call. “I can’t talk. Zen is home from school throwing up and her brother kept us up all night.”

“OK,” Joy said. “I’m sorry.”

“I mean it, I don’t even have time to eat, let alone have a conversation,” said Rosemary. “My life isn’t like yours. I don’t have the leisure to travel and go out on dates.”

“I don’t go on dates,” said Joy. “And you have a husband.”

“If you mean that zombie who shuffles off to the office every morning, I’m pretty sure that’s not my husband. Last night when he fell asleep walking our son back and forth across the living room floor, I know for damn sure he wasn’t my husband.” Joy heard someone — she assumed it was her niece — vomiting in the background. “He’s not bad-looking, though. I will concede that.”

“You’re busy,” Joy said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Yes, you should go on a date or something.”

“It’s eight-thirty in the morning.”

“The bakeries are open. Go meet a nice baker.”

“I don’t go on dates. I think I said that already.”

“Do it for me. I want to hear about something besides diapers and puke.”

“I will not. Dating is like…it’s like watching TV. Both place too much emphasis on appearances, both can be fun at first but quickly become tedious, and neither feels real. The main difference is that there isn’t a magical remote control that enables you to switch men in the middle of a date.”

“Not yet,” said Rosemary. “Invent that. We’ll split the profits.”

“I already have a job. I should hang up and do it. Call me when you have time to talk, and tell Zen I hope she feels better.”

There was a thick fog hanging over the bluff when she reached the campus. Gooseberry Bluff was known for its fog, but somehow it seemed particularly thick on the grounds of the school. Joy found herself peering through the trees on the front lawn as she walked to the main building, but unlike yesterday, there was no one outside except the omnipresent crows.

There weren’t many folks inside, either; the course scheduling was weighted toward afternoon and evening classes, since so many of the students worked. There were a few students reading on the couches in the atrium, but none of them looked up as Joy walked past them toward the administration offices.

As far as Joy had been able to determine, the person who really ran Gooseberry Bluff was President Fitzgerald’s secretary, Edith Grim-Parker. Edith was brusque, impatient, and incredibly efficient. Her small office was the same faux-brick concrete as the rest of the administrative offices, but above the file cabinets and the ancient steel desk were shelves heaped with clay pots and planters. Vines and flowers spilled from the shelves, straining toward the light of Edith’s narrow window.

Edith was a large, red-faced woman with beautiful, long gray hair twirled back in a bun. Her aura was an orange yellow, with dots of green and turquoise: a perfectionist, with the capacity for great compassion and love. Neither of which was directed at Joy as she entered the office.

“What’s wrong now?” Edith asked, interrupting a student aide who sat across from her, running down what appeared to be an agenda for the day.

“Good morning,” Joy forced herself to say, and smiled. “I just wanted to drop off the health insurance forms.”

“About time.” Edith took the forms and handed them to the aide. “Add that to the packet and send it out. Do I need to go over it first?” she asked Joy.

“I don’t think so,” Joy said.

The aide took the form and slid it into a manila folder, carefully not looking at either Joy or Edith. Edith, on the other hand, stared at Joy. “Is there something else?”

“Actually, I was wondering if there was any chance of talking to the president today.”

“He’s booked up,” Edith said. Something flickered across her aura — a dark blue of worry, or fear. It spiked up through her chakras and then spread out, almost fading, but not entirely.

“What about next week?”

“I’ll let you know, Ms. Wilkins. Are you sure it’s not something
I
can help you with?”

“It’s more of a personal thing,” Joy said. “Thanks anyway; I’ll check back with you.”

“I’ll let you know,” Edith called after her, but Joy pretended not to hear.

Since Gooseberry Bluff was a college of magic, Joy was the only full-time member of the history department, and she shared offices with the alchemy department on the second floor. Andy Ruiz, the departmental secretary, was sorting mail when she arrived. Andy’s aura was a soothing blue, and he was wearing a pair of gray tights and a black shirtdress. He had short dark hair and stud earrings with small bluish-gray stones in them.

“Good morning, Andy.”

“Good morning, Ms. Wilkins,” he said.

Joy accepted a handful of envelopes from Andy and unlocked her office. It was tiny — about eight feet by twelve — and nearly empty aside from the boxes of Carla Drake’s course materials. Joy had hoped to have access to all of Drake’s papers, but so far that hadn’t been possible. She sat down and logged on to the college e-mail server.

Andy knocked on the doorframe. “Ms. Wilkins—”

“Joy.”

“Joy. I thought we could have that little meeting about your needs.” He hesitated. “I mean your work-related needs, in case that wasn’t clear.”

Joy laughed. “Sure. I have office hours starting at ten, but we should have enough time for that.”

Andy was careful to tuck the dress under him as he sat down. During Joy’s orientation, Andy had shaken her hand and said: “Hi, I’m Andy. I’m genderqueer and I often wear women’s clothes here in the office. I hope that won’t make you uncomfortable.” Joy wasn’t sure what genderqueer meant--she'd since learned that it was an umbrella term for persons who identified outside of the male-female gender binary--but she had assured Andy that she had no problem with it. She admired Andy's forthrightness and the way that he carried himself. He walked better in heels than she did.

Andy cleared his throat. “So you already know that the history department here was basically just Professor Drake, so the alchemy department shared me with her. Technically I’m their secretary, and I do things like coordinate with the chair on creating the schedules, help with the budget, do a little bit of crowd control with the students. You shouldn’t have to worry about any of those things, at least for now.

“You’re in charge of your own schedule,” he continued, “but I can help you with small-scale copy jobs, except for exams — the work-study kids do the actual copying, and we can’t be tempting them with anything that important. PoofPost goes through me; the college has an account with them. If you’re out of the office, the calls get routed to my desk. That’s not a problem as long as you don’t get a lot of personal calls.