"You turned your sister into a bird?" Lily asked, her eyes never leaving her notebook, "That's harsh."

  "She had it coming, rummaging through my things without permission. Why I needed to be so harsh is my business," Nick glared at Lily for her audacity, "and mine alone." Letting out a malicious grin, he laughed, "And may I state for the record what a lovely bird she made. A pity Lawrence had to intervene." His muscles tensed as he took out his notebook and placed it on his desk.

  Abelle snarked at her brother's impertinence. She squirmed uneasily in her seat, obviously unsure how to take the sarcastic flattery from her brother.

  Elora's pen began scribbling today's lesson down onto her paper with an easy flick of the wrist. "I guess it's a brother and sister sort of thing," she pondered out loud. Her lack of siblings never failed to annoy her. Being the only child of her family, part of her envied Nick and Abelle despite their hostile relationship.

  Claire sat there silently, eavesdropping onto their conversation, quietly taking in the lesson conducted by Mr. Ednill. She secretly wished she was taking part in their discussion. Besides, something about Nick made her skin boil. Someone needed to put him in his place. After all, if he did do cruel things regularly, he must be up to no good. Her heated thoughts and the sound of Nick's incessant rambling sent Claire over the edge. She couldn't help it. With a single twist of her fingers, a bubble of water formed, floating above her hand. Another flick of her wrist and the water hovered, twisting like a serpent above her fingertips. Just a little closer. A tiny nudge, and it would spill onto Nick’s desk—nothing too serious. Just enough to even the tides.

  Nick’s lips moved in a barely audible whisper, his fingers brushing against the silver band on his ring. The water bubble shuddered mid-air then instantly froze. It shrank to the size of an egg, ice-crystals spidering across its surface. With a smirk, Nick flicked it onto Claire’s desk, where frost crept over the polished wood. A few tendrils of frost formed around it, slowly creeping across the polished wood.

  "Touché" Claire stared into the crystalline form.

  "I would hex you for that, but I have bigger fish to fry," he replied.

  The clock's ticking seemed to grow louder with every second. The class was silent as Mr. Ednill droned on about the invention of the lightbulb. Apparently, Thomas Edison was a brilliant wizard who invented a novel spell so spectacular that it led to the creation of the lightbulb, or something of that sort. To be honest, Claire never remembered that much about what she actually learned in class. Learning in a classroom and sitting in a classroom are two completely different things, after all. In class, she was taught that light is a type of energy that shows both waves and particle properties. However, sitting in class, she learned that time seemed to move slower the more she stared at the clock.

  Claire tried her hardest to pay attention to the lesson. The chalk rubbed against the dusty blackboard letting out minor screeches and scratches. She found herself distracted from the tapping sounds that came with each motion of the chalk against the board. She noticed Mr. Ednill's excitement about specific factoids and how he would write faster and more compactly when trying to share his brilliance with the class. Bored, Claire began doodling waves in the margins of her notebook when something peculiar on her notebook caught her eye.

  Slivers of blue ink began dancing on the page. The words "Did anyone do the homework for Advanced Potion Studies yet?" Seemed to have written themselves across the page.

  Written in pink glitter gel, "No, I'm just gonna take the L, we get to drop 3 homework tasks anyways."

  "We had homework?" appeared in soft grey graphite.

  It was as if the paper was having a full conversation with itself, conversing back and forth between the different colored markings. Claire’s stomach twisted. The words had appeared on their own. No hand had written them. No ink had bled from her pen. Magic, sure—but whose? Indeed this was not how standard notebooks worked. This showed the signs of some kind of minor spell work, but cast by whom? She rubbed her eyes and glanced back down at her page. Could this be some sort of joke? She glossed her eyes over to the girl on her left and peered down at her notebook. It was empty. Reluctantly, she looked to the right at Nick's notebook, and it was clean from any marked messages too. "Who is this?" she scratched down using her thin green marker, the letters of her bold, smooth lines, all flowing together, like running water.

  "Hello? Who is this?" pink glitter gel wrote back.

  Blue ink replied, "Lily, you must have messed up the spell!"

  Lily? Claire looked up to the pale girl who spoke out earlier.

  Lily’s pen danced across the page, pink glitter ink sparkling under the classroom lights. The same swirling, bubbly handwriting appeared in Claire’s notebook—perfectly synchronized with Lily’s movements. The patterned rhythm of her words seemed to match the bounce in the pink lines on the page. The way she bubbled the curve in the "n"s and how she hooked her "j"s in one large swooping motion matched how her words hopped out of her mouth when she spoke.

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude," Claire wrote in reply. "Claire here."

  One after another, the names, each in their corresponding ink color, started to appear. Elora wrote in pencil, boldly pressed to the page with sharp effortless lines. Lily had a glittery pink gel, huge lettering with lopsided "l"s all curved and squiggled. Mystic in the pale blue, writing so small with each letter perfectly written as if someone had typed it. Slowly, a pale lavender ink bled into the page, swopping and twirling the letters of the name "Abelle."

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  The lavender ink continued, "Don't worry about it. Messaging spells are tricky, sometimes this happens."

  The bell rang. It was a piercing sound that made eardrums ring indefinitely. Claire was not used to such loud frequencies. She had desperately wanted to cover her ears to block the sound but stopped herself as no one else seemed bothered by the noise. She clasped her notebook close and tucked it into her backpack, waiting out the roar.

  Elora sprang up and ran towards the back of the room to meet up with Mystic and Abelle. Her friend, Lily, following closely behind. "Abelle! Any chance I can…" she smirked.

  Abelle sighed frustratingly, "Elora, no."

  "Well, it was worth a shot, am I right?" Elora replied, unhappily accepting that Abelle was not going to give her the answers to the homework.

  Claire wasn't the type to eavesdrop, but for some reason, she decided to put her backpack on a little slower than usual. She watched as the girls walked down the aisle and across the room. Her eyes scanned them for details. The way Mystic's hair curled up around her chin. How Elora's half-open book bag seemed to keep her hoard of loose papers and containers of odd yellow slime from falling out. The thick umbrella Lily carried was almost twice the size of Lily herself. Abelle's dress, still slightly covered with small pieces of the black feathers, she wasn't able to shake off. Each amazed Claire. It was an enigma.

  "Ms. Quire," Mr. Ednill spoke out just before Abelle left the room. A brown piece of folded parchment appeared between his fingers, "For when you see the headmaster." Abelle grudgingly took the paper with a distinct look of contempt on her face. She walked out of the classroom.

  The hallway was often dark and dreary, and the lack of windows didn't help the low lighting situation. It was a long, agonizing walk just to get from one end to the other. Nevertheless, one could push and weave their way through the sea of students who crowded the space. The best method for walking through any school hallway is to follow the herd going in the same direction you are heading. After all, it's easier to move with the current rather than against it.

  Claire had no idea what was waiting for her just around the corner. In this specific school, she was standing in this particular hallway on that particular day at precisely 9:57 am. Had fate not have brought her here, this one moment in time would have never gone on changing everything.

  A classroom door flung open. Everyone close by heard the bang. Some students took a quick look at the chaos before they shuffled away to their next class. Others, like ants to rotten fruit, swarmed around the doorway. Students huddled up and wanted to get a glimpse of the action. In the classroom, desks were turned over, and chalk was scattered on the floor. Heavy textbooks flew off their shelves. A woman in a deep red cloak sat on the floor in the middle of the room. Her veil was long and made from a thick slimy goop stuck together to create a sort of cloth. The giant hood on her head covered most of her facial features.

  Claire stood at the front of the onlooker line. An obnoxious screech rang in her ears. Where is it? Where is the book? The scream ripped through Claire’s mind like nails on glass. Her breath hitched. The woman in red wasn’t speaking—not out loud. Claire could hear her anyway. The red woman's thoughts played in Claire's mind as if they were her own. She was in pain.

  Mystic shoveled past Claire to get to the front. She stood beside Claire, and Elora followed suit, pushing Claire aside to watch the scene with her friend. By the look on their faces, they didn't hear the voice scream. It seemed that only Claire did.

  "Wait until the school paper gets a load of this!" Mystic chuckled as she pulled out her phone to snap a picture.

  The woman's head lifted through the shadow of her hood, exposing two shining silver eyes. She raised her hand, and with the flick of one finger, a gust of strong wind blew Mystic into the room. Mystic screamed in fear and was suddenly bound by a wet, sticky, green muck. It was alive. The woman in red motioned to it as if she controlled this unusual thing. The goo started to twist itself around Mystic's arms and leg. It held her tightly, not letting the girl break free from its sticky grasp.

  Elora ran in after her friend, "Crazy witch!" she growled.

  Another quick bend of the wrist and the woman's hand commanded the goop to strike again. It twirled and spiraled around Elora, and she, too, was stuck inside its hold.

  Every onlooker scattered, afraid to become its next victim. Calls for help echoed throughout the hallway, and after a single clap of thunder and two flashes of lightning, the school was officially in lockdown. Several students ran to the nearest faculty, who proceeded to herd them into the safest classroom as the ward enchantments began to rise, locking each doorway with a yellow fogged force.

  Claire couldn't find it in herself to run away and continued to watch in morbid curiosity. That green muck was not unfamiliar to her. She had seen it and even touched it before. She knew what it was and how to break them free. Knowledge had to be more valuable than running, she thought.

  "Don't just stand there, do something! Go get help!" Elora snapped at Claire.

  Claire’s feet locked in place. Every rational instinct screamed at her to run, to find a teacher, to get help—but her gut said otherwise. Mystic and Elora were trapped. That green muck—she knew what it was.

  You can fix this.

  Her fingers curled into fists. With a steady breath, she stepped forward. Staring confidently at the woman, Claire spoke loudly and with conviction, "Let them go!"

  The book, where is the book? The woman in red repeated in her thoughts.

  A younger gentleman emerged into the classroom before them. With a tight grip, he pointed his metal wand at the woman. Frozen crystals appeared at the tip of the wand as he muttered a familiar chant. Frost formed around the woman in red, and she was entirely frozen into a block of ice.

  Elora and Mystic were Claire's priorities. That green slime she recognized was a paste made of arctic moss, something she and her old peers would use in art projects back at the O.A.M. In small amounts, the moss acted as super glue to repair broken seashells. She had never seen it used in this much of a quantity or in this particular way. Nevertheless, removing any arctic moss was always the same technique, heating it and drying it out. Since the moss was only useful wet, the heat made the bonds brittle, allowing them to break easily.

  In her right hand, Claire began to heat the water vapor in the moss that bound Elora and Mystic through a clenched fist. It was a fundamental trick she had learned to master at an early age. If she needed to dry off anything in her way, a simple clenched fist would solve the wet problem. Her energy could pull the water out of the object and release it back into the air. With the moisture gone, the damp moss became dry flakey dusk, and the girls broke free.

  The gentleman placed his wand back in his pocket and turned to face all three of them, "The three of you, Volk's office. Now!"

  Elora helped Mystic up, clearly shaken by the incident, and began to walk out of the classroom without hesitation. It was shocking. She didn't expect the new girl to be so shrewd, electing to stay and fight rather than retrieving help from a professor like Elora instructed. She glared at Claire as they exited the room. To Elora's dismay, Claire followed after them.