(FROM THE GRIMOIRE OF BINX AKARI KATO)
TWO DAYS EARLIER…
1 CATEGORY FIVE FREAK-OUT
Magic is personal and should be kept away from prying eyes.
(FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)
Iris pressed her face against the cool metal locker—number 1693, was that even the right one?—and fought the urge to vomit all over the black-and-white checkerboard floor. “Stop it, stop it, stop it. You’re being such a baby,” she whispered to herself. A panic attack on the first day of school; seriously, what a cliché.
She heard footsteps passing behind her, voices rising and falling. Were people talking about her? No, they were talking about stuff that was actually interesting, like “Who got Mr. Ferguson for English?” and “Why did they paint the cafeteria Day-Glo green over summer vacation?” and “Did Shaquille really break up with Taryn because of what Hannah said?”
Iris did have a good excuse for her Category Five freak-out. Kind of. Sort of. This wasn’t just the first day of school; it was her first day at Sorrow Point High, where she knew absolutely no one and which was three thousand miles—more like three thousand light-years—from her old school. Not that she hadn’t had her occasional anxiety spirals there. But still.
It had started this morning. Iris had left the house, made a U-turn, gone back to her house, and changed her outfit… four times. The neighbor lady, Mrs. Wendlebaum, had been puttering around in her herb garden and called out, “First day of school, huh? Butterflies in your stomach, dear?”
Iris stifled another wave of nausea. This was not butterflies. This was the creature from Alien wanting to explode its way out of her chest. This was her heart pounding a bloodred Dothraki battle cry in her ears. This was the Mage-Rage Potion from her favorite video game, Witchworld, shock-waving its way through her system.
Behind her, the hallway chatter seemed to have shifted away from teachers and cafeteria decor and breakups.
“They’re holding a meeting at the community center this weekend.”
“No way! The mayor’s a total pacifist. She’d never let that happen.”
“Well, it’s happening. Axel’s going, and so’s Brandon.”
“Speaking of… did you guys hear about the gravestones at the cemetery?”
“You mean the…”
The voices faded away.
Gravestones? A mystery meeting? But Iris didn’t have time to dwell on these distractions because she was this close to throwing up; she could taste acid and her breakfast (extra-pulp OJ, hot chocolate, blueberry oatmeal) in her throat. She made herself inhale deeply for six counts, hold for six counts, and exhale for six counts. Her skin buzzed and prickled. The pounding in her ears subsided by a micro-decibel. Crisis temporarily averted?
Her therapist—not her occupational therapist or her social skills therapist but her therapy therapist—had taught her the deep-breathing trick and other techniques. Distract your brain! Touch something soft, like a silk scarf. Smell a bottle of perfume. Listen to classical music. Name ten European capitals. Calculate the square root of 14,400.
The tricks worked, sometimes. The daily one hundred of Zoloft helped, too. But what she really needed to make this panic-attack-from-hex go away was a nice little calming spell.
There was just one problem with that. Magic was forbidden. Illegal. So far, Iris had managed to stay out of trouble. In New York City, where she used to live, and around the rest of the country as far as she could tell, the federal anti-witchcraft law, called 6-129, seemed to be only loosely enforced. Also, Iris, no doubt like most witches, had always been careful to keep her identity secret and do her craft on the q.t. (most of the time, anyway).
Plus, the consequences for the witches who did get caught breaking 6-129 hadn’t seemed too end-of-the-world and horrible. Some girls at her old school had gotten suspended for making potions in chem class. Another girl had been expelled for trying to morph Principal Ellison into a hamster. The hygienist at Dr. Singh’s office had gotten fired for using spells to clean teeth. Stuff like that.
But… things were changing. A new president, David Ingraham, had taken office in January, and he was really, really anti-magic. (According to rumor, his youngest daughter had been a witch and died in some mysterious magic-related incident.) He said bad, untrue things about witches and witchcraft all the time, either in the regular media or on his social media. He’d announced recently that he was working with Congress on a bill to seriously beef up enforcement and punishment for 6-129 violators.
And his message had found an audience. After he became president, a national hate movement called Antima—“Anti-Magic”—started to surface. And what was up with that name? Had they deliberately riffed on “Antifa,” the antifascist movement, when they were the polar opposite of that? Evil jerks!
Iris had learned from the news and online that the Antima were made up of small local factions with one goal in common: eliminating witchcraft for good. What would that even look like? Did they want to go around hunting down everyone with the teeniest amount of magical powers, and… what? Iris was worried (okay, maybe more like terrified) that this was their goal, because lately, they’d begun to amp things up. A couple of their rallies in Washington, DC, had turned violent. Last week, Iris had seen on TV that a Texas witch was beaten up by an Antima gang called the Sons of Maximus and left for dead.
Iris hadn’t personally encountered any Antima members in New York City (that she was aware of, anyway). She hadn’t heard about any Antima incidents there, either. As for Sorrow Point, she and her family had just moved here, and she’d only visited a few times before, so she didn’t know it well. But it seemed like such a cute town (despite its name—seriously, it could use some
