Things calmed down quickly. Maybe I was imagining things, but the press as a whole seemed to want to move on from having gotten things so wrong for so long. Some groups did a couple of quick ‘this poor child, look at all of this witch discrimination’ pieces and moved on to more interesting, more current stories.

There were rumours flying about that Matt wasn’t nearly as badly hurt as everyone believed, and that maybe his family had been faking it in search of a bigger payout. I didn’t know if those rumours were true. Matt’s condition was, suddenly, nothing to do with me.

I kept to the house, avoiding the handful of local reporters still looking for a human interest interview. I stared out of my bedroom window at the tree branch spread tantalisingly close to it, and was struck by how fragile it looked. Had I ever really trusted that thing to take my weight? Of course, it had made sense, when I was five. And it would hold a six year old. And day by day, I weighed what I had the previous day, so there was no reason not to trust a branch that I could trust the previous day, which was why a fourteen-year-old with a broken leg had felt confident in throwing his full weight onto it and scrambling across it to the neighbour’s house. Wow, that had been a stupid decision.

There was a gentle knock on my bedroom door.

“You can come in, Liss.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“You’re the only person who ever knocks. How are you?”

“Well, you know.” She bit her lip. “School goes back next week.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“There’s going to be so much gossip.”

I nodded. “And everyone knows about the curse, now. They know it’s dormant, but they know it’s there. I don’t know how to be the person with a curse, publically, and also the person who hasn’t hurt anyone with a curse. Those two periods of my life aren’t… supposed to coincide. You know?”

She frowned. “You don’t know how to be yourself?”

“It’s not… I don’t understand how I’m supposed to behave. I feel like people are going to judge whatever I do.”

“Of course they are. It’s high school.” She sat on the end of my bed. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You still want me on your internet show?”

“Not yet. Not until you’re okay.”

“I just said I was.”

“You’re lying, though.”

I sighed. “I just… this is supposed to be good news, right? Surprise! You’re actually fine; everything’s fine! Except for the part where everyone knows about my curse, this is the happy ending; an ending happier than anything I could’ve expected from that trial! I should be happy about this!”

“Why aren’t you happy? I would be.”

“Because it means that the past six months have been a lie. So much happened, I worked so hard, and it turns out the whole thing is completely meaningless. After everything, it turns out that all along, I’m not… I’m not…”

“Special?”

“You know what I mean!”

“I don’t. But I believe that you know what you mean. What do you mean about six months being a lie, though? I’m sure you got something done that wasn’t about your curse.”

“The only reason I went to the Haven was because of my curse, so not really.”

“The only reason we started our youtube channel was because of your curse, and guess what? It’s still going strong. It still exists. What did you accomplish this six months?”

“Well, I punched a jerk in the face.”

“Chelsea would be so proud.”

“And I had a fling with a sexy weightlifter.”

“Achieving my dream, too? Now that’s just greedy. See, who could want to achieve more than that in six months, curse or no?”

“Good point. And that’s not even including finding the person who kept nearly killing my teacher for political power.”

“… What?”

“It doesn’t matter any more. It was fun, but Malas – that dude at the trial, you know? – was just manipulating me to be there. He could have told me right away I was innocent and sent me home, and everything just feels… dirty, now. Not to mention what he did to you guys!”

“Kayden, I’ve never even met this dude.”

“No, but think about it. This whole court case. It was blown way out of proportion from the start, right? I don’t just mean the whole thing where we accidentally attributed stuff to a curse, I mean the fact that the media cared. A kid pushes another kid off a roof with magic, how scary! It should’ve gotten local attention for a week, tops, and then been something that the neighbourhood gossipped about and ostracised my parents for. Why did they care for so long? Why did they harrass you? Why did they attack my mum? I met someone at school, a mage student, who found out what I was facing here by just asking an Australian he happened to know. I met a New Zealander who recognised me on sight! I never questioned it until now because, well, of course it’s a big deal to me, but I can’t help thinking… why is it big news? Why were people still interested when the court date rolled round?”

“Here we go; a famous Kayden conspiracy.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“Why would mages want to ramp up the drama on something like this? Whenever something magical goes wrong, even curse stuff, people blame mages. They’d just be making themselves look bad.”

“To gain public support for a government bill they want Australia to pass. They’re not Australian and can’t do anything, but… look, it’s kind of complicated, but the point is this: that man on the stand? He’s the school doctor. He’s been in charge of my health for six months, and he found out that the curse was still dormant on the first day. And that guy on the phone to him, casting the illusion? He was my surveyanto. He was the adult in charge of making sure I was safe and didn’t have any problems at the school. And this means that not only was the past six months pointless, but the two people I needed to be able to trust most in the world were lying to me and putting my friends and family in danger with all this media hype, to further their own ends. I said when I got there that I didn’t want to be anyone’s pawn, and it turns out I’ve been absolutely everyone’s pawn the whole time, and somehow put you guys in even more danger than I usually do. Sorry, I’m being a downer. Do your pep talk; I’ll try to cheer up.”

“I learned long ago that there’s no point in giving you a pep talk when you’re being all dramatically self-pitying. I came to give you mail. Someone delivered it to my house by mistake.” She handed me an envelope and stood up. “But when you’ve finished spiralling and you are ready to talk, well…”

“I’ll jump in the tree and come right over.”

“Please, please just use the front door like a normal person. Promise me. Say, ‘Melissa, I promise you that when I come over, I will use the front door like a normal person’.”

I sighed. “Melissa, I promise you that when I come over, I will use the front door like a boring person.”

“Close enough.”

When she left, I tore the letter open. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, but it was signed – the letter was from Kylie.

Kayden,

I heard about everything that happened. That all must have been confusing and awful. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I mean, what about the thing in Miratova’s lab? Could everyone really have been so wrong about your curse?

I yelled at Malas about it, and he let slip that you’re not coming back. Selfishly, I’m going to miss you, but I get it. After the way they treated you? I get it. I promise I do. So… just in case you don’t want to keep in touch, there’s something I want to tell you.

The day we met, you got in trouble with a lake monster, and I listened to the Evil Eye and followed its directions to save you. You kept saying how it didn’t make sense that I’d listen to it if I didn’t trust it, and kept asking me why I’d saved you. Eventually you stopped asking, and I just kind of figured you didn’t care any more, but just in case you were still wondering, there’s something I never told you about how the Eye works.

It only ever prophesies death or misfortune for my mob.

Only close family, or friends as close as family, get prophesies. So you can see why I didn’t want to say anything, right? I was so embarrassed! We’d just met, the Eye had just killed my family, and here I was letting it choose my friends for me? How pathetic is that?

But what was I going to do? I was alone and you might be in trouble. Either it was trying to kill me, or I might be able to save you, and I didn’t have too much to lose at that point and everything to gain. So… now you know. And it was right, too. It was right to choose you.

Kayden, I’m still going to go through the Initiation. I know it sounds stupid; I know there’s no going back and I know I should take what happened to you as a warning. But I can still learn things there, things that can help my family. And the staff might be awful, but not going won’t make them less awful. A good friend of mine once told me that the people who walk away from Omelas are misguided, not heroic.

With love,

Kylie.

PS: burn this after you read it. Nothing in here is anyone else’s business.

I carefully folded the letter and put it on my desk for later burning. Then I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling for a while.

I hadn’t called the people who walk away from Omelas misguided. I’d called them cowards.

I gave myself another ten minutes of self-pity and personal freakout time, then started to think things through properly. Whatever happened, however I’d been wronged, whatever emotional whiplash I might be experiencing over the whole curse things, the facts and my opportunities hadn’t really changed. I was already in a situation where I’d reasonably expected to be found innocent, but everyone would know about my curse. I was already in a situation where I was cursed and had a scholarship to the Haven, but I couldn’t seem to cast it under my own will. With those things in mind, I’d decided that the best course of action was to become a mage, so… why quit now?

I could say it was because I couldn’t trust Malas or Cooper any more, but that was an excuse. It was because I was mad at them. Malas had lied to me to keep me at school and I didn’t want him to ‘win’. But was I willing to lose out on a good opportunity just to avoid rewarding his behaviour? Why was I letting someone with a proven history of manipulating me determine my actions?

What did I want? Not what did I think I deserved, if I didn’t have an active curse; not what would annoy my enemies the most. What did I want? To give up the opportunity to learn magic? To say goodbye to Max and Kylie and Magistus and everyone? I could; I had a life at home that I could step back into, and while my future wasn’t as bright as it would be if people didn’t know I was cursed, I could still graduate and probably scrape myself into a job somewhere and keep out of trouble. That would be safer, on the whole; the decision to become a mage was permanent, and maybe it was best to back out of everyone’s sociopathic political machinations while I still had that option. But…

The curse was still in me. It still could activate someday, and I was back to having no idea what it actually did. I knew what had happened to Talbot. I’d told Cheryl that it was best to accept an apprenticeship to avoid that kind of fate, and an apprenticeship was a far bigger risk than the normal route. Was I really going to change my mind now that it was me in that position? Just because I was mad at a couple of mages?

I needed data. I went downstairs. “Hey, Mum?”

“Mmm?”

“Do you still have the contract you signed for my scholarship at the Haven?”

“Of course. It’s in the third kitchen drawer.”

AKA the Random Paperwork Drawer. I put the kettle on and fished it out, along with several information pamphlets that Instruktanto Cooper had left behind. Mum walked in to see the kitchen table strewn with paper, and me puzzling through the fine print on ‘Curses and You: How We Teach Safety’.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’m doing something I’ve never done in my entire life,” I informed her, laying the pamphlet next to ‘The Haven, The Home of Magic’. “I am thoroughly reading the orientation materials.”