Charlotte
“CHARLOTTE!” Dad screamed my name from downstairs, interrupting a pretty important fight with a dragon in my favorite MMORPG.
“Just a sec!” I screamed back.
“Charlotte! I need an explanation right now!” He was getting that high-pitched voice he gets when the raccoons are in our trash.
I had absolutely no clue what he could need an explanation about, seeing as I had no life and had not done anything out of the ordinary, but it sounded important.
“Charlotte!”
omg, I hastily wrote. i have to go. i’m so sorry. emergency unfolding in-house. brb.
The rest of my fellow adventurers freaked out on me, but my sexy elf warrior girlfriend/boyfriend Firia said, You’d better talk to him. The rest of us can handle it.
uhh…how did you know it was ‘him’?
I just assumed it was your dad.
oh yeah well you’reright. thx.
It was a weird moment because I was pretty sure I’d never told Firia that my Mom was gone and I wondered how he guessed the emergency wasn’t burnt toast or something, but I didn’t have time to fully ponder it. I had to check on Dad. Anyway, Firia was awesome for not getting upset at me for ditching on the dragon fight, seeing as my brooding mage character Larius had the pivotal dark spells for defeating said dragon. Firia was also the closest thing I had to a boyfriend. We’d been playing Fortune’s Favor for years. I met him on Christmas when Dad gifted me a year’s subscription, and we’d stuck together through a lot of fights. Before long, we were flirting. A couple months in we figured out that we had each chosen avatars of the opposite gender, but we were having fun anyway, so I called him “my girlfriend” in the game.
Of course, I was fully aware Firia could be lying and was not really an eighteen year old guy but was actually like…a fifty year old guy, or whatever. We’d never taken it off the game. Whenever I tried, he got cagey. Which was probably a warning sign, and his hot babe elf avatar might not be a good sign either, but maybe he was just a self-conscious nerd boy. At least he took all my hassling about sexism in the gaming industry without getting upset.
I padded down the stairs. Dad was standing at the dining room table, staring at an envelope that sat in the middle of the wooden surface, looking at it like it was poisoned.
“Dad? What’s wrong?” I stood on the first step, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Something came in the mail?”
“Is there something you aren’t telling me about?” he cried.
“Um…no? I don’t think so. I’m eighteen. I guess there might be something.” I laughed, but then I realized this was going beyond my dad’s usual level of overreaction. “Hey, what’s up? Just tell me.”
My dad and I had a thing going. We were opposite in a lot of ways. He was fun and also had a tendency to overreact. I was stubborn but chill. He liked loud music, barbecuing, tattoos. I liked magical-sounding soundtracks, gaming, pajama pants. It wasn’t unheard of for him to freak out over nothing. I went to look at the letter. Maybe the bill from our annual checkup was more than he expected or something.
“I don’t know how to explain all of this,” he said. “Shit. I wish y—”
I shot him a look. It seemed like, for all the world, he was going to say that he wished my mom was here. I could hear the ghost of the “your” when he cut himself off.
He never talked about Mom.
I saw the return address on the envelope.
MERLIN COLLEGE
P. O. Box 332
Small Hollow, NC
“YOU’RE FREAKING out about ‘Merlin College’? What is that? Sounds like spam.” I started opening it.
He grabbed it from my hand and slammed it on the table. “No. It’s not spam. It’s a reckoning, that’s what it is. I thought you were safe from all this. I thought your mom—like—sealed that stuff up. Were you talking to your elf friend online?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Maybe I should make him explain it. Nah, you’re my daughter.”
“Him? Firia? What does he have to do with it?”
He took a deep breath. “Your mother had magical blood. I believe this letter is from a witches’ college. That’s why it’s so nondescript.”
“Well, I’m already going to college, so…” I’m not sure why I said that first. Like, when you get your Hogwarts letter do you go, oh dang, but I already sent in my paperwork to the Montessori school? “Magical blood? What do you mean?”
“Your mom’s mother was an Ethereal witch from a very old witch family. Her father was a Sinistral demon who could turn into a wolf. So a werewolf, basically. I mean—let me back up. Magic is real. You know that, right? Deep down, I’m sure you know that.”
Admittedly, I believed in magic longer than other kids, because my dad played along with all my childhood games, built fairy houses with me and was very insistent about offerings for Santa Claus. And yet… “Did the neighbors sell you drugs or something?”
“I wish. Your mother was supposed to protect you from this shit!” He grabbed a stuffed cat that I had seated at the dining room table because I was a dork, and threw it on the floor.
My heart was beating pretty fast at this point. “Be nice to Jiji! Calm down.” I grabbed the letter and ripped it open.
DEAR MR. CHAR BYRNE,
YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN ACCEPTED. You will attend Merlin College, the elite school for warlocks, with a starting date of September 12th. We were stunned by your test results and are thrilled to have you with us. Please be packed and prepared on that day, as we will send a vehicle for you. Please refer to the attached list of items that are not acceptable at Merlin College and familiarize yourself with the rules of conduct.
WE LOOK FORWARD to meeting you,
Ignatius Blair
Dean of Merlin College
“GOD,
