Chapter Text
MOM DRIVES TOO FAST down the freeway, singing along to Bowie on the scratchy stereo, though her heart’s not in it.
“He's a squib, you know,” Mom tells any magical being she meets, and now that Phil’s in on the secret, she tells him. Regardless, Phil doesn’t care about glam rock. Neither do the goblins at the bank.
I was firmly on the side that Mom should tell Phil about Magic Etcetera before the wedding, you know so she could obliviate him without having to get a divorce first, but she didn’t listen to me. Luckily since finding out in September, Phil has adapted to life with witches better than I expected. From what I can tell, this is some kind of childhood fantasy come true for him. Mom’s not Samantha Stevens, but his laundry does get magically folded and put away. Without a nose twitch.
She turns her head back to me. Her red cowboy hat slides forward.
“Mom, the road.” I should’ve driven but Mom always claims she needs practice.
She looks back up, and we make eye contact in the rearview mirror. “I know you don’t think much of Divination, baby, but Mrs. Yoruba’s interpretations are never wrong. She wouldn’t tell me what she said, but… oh, honey. There’s still time to turn this car around. I hate no-maj airports anyway. Ugh, the lighting? So dreary. And it’s crowded like a niffler’s nest.”
Phil laughs. He does that more now that he’s starting to understand Mom’s jokes.
Mom had forced me to have tea with Mrs. Yoruba before leaving. “Take another biscuit, you’re so skinny. The leaves are not good, pretty swan,” proclaimed our generous neighbor in her thick Nigerian accent. “Too many clouds in the cup. Difficult journey, and these mountains? Here, see? Enemies, baby. You will make powerful enemies. What you been doing at that wicked school? Tell aunty why they kicked you out.”
In my totally unbiased opinion, Mrs. Yoruba’s tea reading business is a front to launder gossip out of the Phoenix magical community. Needless to say, I didn’t share why they kicked me out. So far, I’ve not had to voice it aloud. Mom got the details from the Headmistress, I didn’t have to tell her. I don’t have the words yet.
“And he won’t admit it, but Charlie’s frightened by magic,” Mom says, swerving into the fast lane and cutting someone off. I wait until the blare of horns stops to respond.
“Good thing I can’t do magic for the next two years, I guess.” I can still hear the snap of my acacia wand like a phantom wail. Expelled, Miss Swan.
- Snap - and the thunderbird feather core burned to ash when it touched the air.
“Babe,” Phil speaks up from the passenger seat, “blinkers go on before you change lanes.”
Mom looks down at the dash. “Shoot. That makes sense though.” She turns off the obnoxious blinker, shaking her head.
The conversation about Forks stops there. We did the tear-filled arguing the night she picked me up from Ilvermorny with my suitcases, without my wand. I heard it all, Mom really unloaded. Why she was disappointed in me, how I’m going to turn out exactly like her family (evil and dead, I guess), how this is the kind of thing she ran away from, how I don’t need to follow the same path to destruction.
To top it all off, she rolled up her sleeve and showed me the faded, pink mark that once charred her skin. Once red as a bleeding tattoo, now an almost nonexistent scar. A brand nonetheless.
She yelled, “I only got this so they wouldn’t kill us! They would’ve killed you! And this is how you repay me?”
Yeah, all that baggage got dumped on me . And in turn, I blew up at her. About the pressure of going to school year round, keeping up my grades, then working three jobs during the summer to make up for the bills she doesn’t pay while I’m gone. Because she can’t hold down a job for longer than six months. She loses interest, she stops showing up. She drinks a little too much (she was raised to be a socialite, I tell myself, comfort myself. No one else will). I have no savings because I have to buy my own school supplies, plus more than half of my sister’s. I screamed at Mom like I never had, and my throat still kinda hurts three days later.
But I’m tired of living up to the version of myself she’s created in her head, which is just Renee 2.0. Or Renee without mistakes. Someone that didn’t and couldn’t exist.
I didn’t even bring up all I endured because of her actions during the war in England, but I could’ve ( Could I really, though? It’s locked far away ). Mom knows it, too. I try not don’t think about the war. The worst parts never cross my mind. I doubt the best therapist in the world could crack open that wasp nest.
I’m a natural Occlumens, which just means I repress the hell out of everything. Without even trying. The exception was this fight with my mother. I let it all out.
Phil was super freaked. Like, he locked himself in a bathroom for hours. When Mom gets mad, glasses usually shatter and a spell is always thrown. I have more control as an Occlumens, but I got angry, and I’m not going to take a stinging hex sitting down. Phil never saw me get heated before. He’d seen it with Mom and Aurora, but incorrectly assumed the Rowle temper skipped me.
If only.
Pushing the speed limit, Mom loudly starts singing, “Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe! Put your dray-gon to my head!”
I don’t bother correcting her, and neither does Phil. I’m pretty sure she sings the wrong words on purpose. I join along during Rebel Rebel , because duh. Traditions. They’re important.
If I pretend, if I delude myself I mean, this could be any other trip to Forks to visit Charlie. I could imagine my younger sister sullenly refusing to sing along beside me. All the better, her voice sucks. I can practically feel the lull of summer break while we’re still in March. I clutch the pot holding my little Arizona cactus, one thing to remember a time gone by.
The end of an era.
Of the Old Bella Swan.
I’ve not visited my dad’s small town in years. I put my foot down when I was fourteen and told Charlie that I wanted to do more than watch movies and go fishing during summer break. For the past three years, Charlie, my sister, and I went to California to do No-maj California Things. Hollywood, Disney, Universal. The beaches are a favorite of mine, though I burn to a crisp in the Sun. Nana Swan lived in a pretty San Diego studio apartment before she died last year.
But, this isn’t a trip like any other. This is exile. Self-imposed, but I don’t really have another choice when you think about it.
Mom and Phil are going to travel for Spring training, and they’re still in that lovey-dovey honeymoon phase that nauseates everyone else. Like right now, Phil has his hand on her knee, thumb stroking her bare skin.
And while I’m legally an adult (in the magical world), staying in Phoenix would be too painful. Without magic, without my erratic harebrained mother, it won’t be home. And by now, Mrs. Yoruba has told everyone in Phoenix that the older Swan girl was expelled from Ilvermorny.
So, I’ve decided to make a new home with my dad, because… fresh starts and all. That’s good enough, right?
“I’ll send Caesar to you with our new address as soon as we get settled in Jacksonville. Write as often as you can,” Mom says. Almost pleads. “Your sister never writes, she’s so busy. You know I count on you for that. Write to me about everything. Weird no-maj things you see, boys you meet. And try to make friends. Our rental is completely no-maj and won’t have Floo set up. I don’t even know if it has a fireplace. Honey, are there fireplaces in Jacksonville?”
“More like fire pits.” Phil shrugs. “In our new place, definitely not. You could bippity-boppity a fireplace, right? They are a little less out of the ordinary than owls.” In Florida? I try not to laugh at my step dad.
Mom shakes her head. “I will not be doing that, no. I’d rather be burnt at the stake. Was that the sign for the airport?”
“Mom, you have to get into the right lane. Like now .”
“Shoot, shoot, shoot.” The cars around us blare their horns, but she does use the blinker first.
“Can you go back to why you’d rather burn at the stake than whip up a fireplace in our rental? Not even to talk to your daughter?” Phil asked, turning in his seat, looking at me like I’d know.
I shrug while Mom shakes her head.
“If you want to light a fire, I’ll be glad to oblige you and ‘whip up’, dear, but I refuse to deal with the Floo Communication Bureau. Of all the condescending airheads. And… one of my exes works there, and he’s an ass.”
Phil nods. “I don’t think we’ll need a fireplace in Florida, babe. Like you said, completely no-maj. Maybe we can keep it that way for a bit? Charlie has a landline we can call, and it’ll be nice to have door knobs that don’t bite.”
“Well, you should stop trying to use the girls’ bathroom,” Mom advises.
Phil laughs. With Charlie, that kind of stuff would have turned into an argument. Somehow. She and Charlie always shouted at each other. I don’t remember much before they divorced, but I remember yelling.
Mom has chilled in the past fifteen years, and Phil knows what to say when she starts speaking in her Pureblood Voice. It’s a more grating version of a Transatlantic accent, just super arrogant sounding because Mom was a Rowle once upon a time. Her father would never admit to learning his accent by watching American “talkies.” It’s funny to hear Mom call someone condescending when she sounds like she walked off the set of a black and white movie.
My mom, though claiming to hate mundie airports, is looking around excitedly once we enter. She’s fascinated with no-maj stuff. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to explain aerodynamics to her (not that I’m a physics wiz). She understands none of it, and continues to classify airplanes as “No-maj Magic.”
“Bella, do you have food for the flight? I’ll buy you a snack from that vending machine.”
I don’t want to watch her fiddle with the machine for ten minutes. “Yeah, I’m all set, Mom.” She’s disappointed. She loves pushing those little buttons.
My gate calls for final boarding.
“Okay, last hug. I love you, honey. So much. Be good for Charlie.”
“Bye, Mom. I love you.” And with a final squeeze, all the while telling myself not to cry,-- Control yourself, Bella— I leave.
I like airplanes. Magical forms of travel are designed to exacerbate the uncoordinated. But planes and cars are nice. The chair isn’t very comfy, and it smells like a preteen boy overdosed on body spray inside the plane, but it’s still rather peaceful. Just sitting here next to a snoring old lady. I get to relax for a few hours and plan my next steps for surviving Forks.
I have no clue what I’m going to do when I get there, and by the time I land, my list hasn’t grown much.
- Get closer to Charlie
- Figure out how to brew Elixir of Euphoria without a wand (I’ll need it)
- Get a job, save money
- Buy a car
Yeah, that’s all I got as the wheels collide with the tarmac.
“Welcome to Seattle, ladies and gentlemen. The time is 10:39 am, and the temperature outside today is 48 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 degrees Celsius. We hope you’ve enjoyed your journey with us and hope you choose American the next time you fly.”
On the hour-long flight from Seattle to Port Angeles, in a much smaller, stickier plane, nothing’s added to my list. Circe, I’m going to be so bored. But what can I do without magic?
I love potion crafting, but unless you’re brewing rudimentary potions, you need a wand. To experiment, you need a wand in case something blows up. Mine’s… just ashes now. And my probation won’t let me have another for two whole years. I need a new hobby. Maybe I’ll learn to knit?
Unlikely.
Charlie’s near baggage claim. He looks stiff, but greets me with a smile and a bear hug that lifts my feet off the ground.
“Good to see you, Bells,” he says, setting me down and patting my head. When you’re just under 5’3, people pat you on the head a lot.
“Yeah, you too, Dad.” My hand flies up to fix my hair.
“Your hair’s grown,” he comments.
It’s shorter since last summer. “It does that. I think your ‘stache is longer, too. I’ve missed you.”
“Me too, kid.” Charlie leans down to pick up my suitcases for me.
“Dad, you don’t have to—”
“Your old man’s not that old. Oh, I see. Light as a feather. Well then, how about you take one. C’mon. I’m in the cruiser, hope you don’t mind.”
I smile because I don’t mind at all. Charlie’s police cruiser reminds me of simpler times. When I was younger, like kindergarten years, I thought it was the coolest thing to sit in the backseat and pretend I was a criminal. I’d go back to no-maj school and tell all my classmates that I rode in the back seat of a real cop car. Now I’m basically a criminal, riding shotgun.
For the first ten minutes, the drive is almost silent. “The weather’s nice this year.” “Yeah?” “Yep.” ... “Have you gone fishing lately, Ch–Dad?” “Oh yeah. Me, Billy, and Harry Clearwater try to get together at least once a month.” “That’s cool.” ...
We’re tiptoeing around the reason I’m here, like it’s broken glass near our feet, waiting to cut us open. I don’t want to bleed, and I think, neither does he. Maybe he won’t ask. Maybe he’ll never ask. He’s never asked me about Ilvermorny beyond the occasional, how’s school going?
Until Charlie rips through our quiet with, “Now, I know you probably don’t wanna talk about it, but you gotta tell me what happened. All your mom said on the phone was, ‘Expelled for dark magic.’ And she never answers my questions when I ask, so I’m asking you. Why were you doing dark magic, Bella? And what kind of dark magic? Like, voodoo?”
Circe. I won’t even touch on how ignorantly racist that is. My answering sigh is drawn out. How do I begin to explain this to Charlie? Mundie, stoic Charlie who switches TV channels whenever there’s anything supernatural involved. He won’t understand. But I’ll try. Like I’m talking to a first year, I guess.
“Magic is, it just exists continuously. Magic is neutral, almost always. Until you give it purpose. Other parts of the world call it gray, light and dark. In the Americas, it’s mostly referred to as good, bad, or neutral, as simple as it sounds. But magic can be manipulated into good or bad purposes for spells and potions. We do that with our intentions, which imbue magic with… anyway it’s,” I sigh, “the ritual I was expelled for is used to communicate with the dead.”
“And it was bad?”
“Yeah.”
And it requires a lot of blood. Dirt, wet like mud but it hasn’t rained, slipping on my knees. Open wrists leaking puddles.
Breathe. As soon as I focus on my five senses, the memory isn’t choking, it’s in the background. Blood sacrifice beneath a full moon, a ritual involving two European pentagrams, an array of Native American symbols converging and intersecting along the lines. That’s all I know. If only I knew the name of the ritual, then I’d have something to go off of.
“How do you get expelled for something like that?” Charlie asks. “Doesn’t your school have ghosts, spirits, whatever floating around?”
“Yeah, but ghosts are just spiritual imprints of people who died… traumatic deaths and had unfinished business here. They’re not even classified as beings, they’re technically has-beens. This ritual calls upon the real someone who’s gone. And, it’s illegal, or a variation of illegal, which is why they expelled me and banned me from owning a wand for two years. I’m honestly lucky my case didn’t go to trial or anything. It’s going to be counted as a misdemeanor essentially because the spell is… unique. It could’ve been a lot worse.”
Like, hard time in Roanoke Penitentiary. But my Head of House spoke to the Aurors about my reputation as a good, quiet student, and I’m inclined to believe she pulled some strings to lighten my punishment. I need to send her some cookies or something because Professor Cornweed saved my pathetic life. I know myself. I’m not cut out for prison. I’m a hot chocolate and fuzzy slippers type of girl.
“Well, that’s good I guess,” Charlie says, almost morose in delivery, “I’m glad they didn’t do anything worse to you. Seems pretty harmless to me, as far as magic goes.”
It’s not harmless, or the ritual wouldn’t be illegal. Or semi-illegal? What’s it called? I sigh again. My words taste like saw dust, “Forks is definitely better than prison.” Or at least, it’s a better prison than Roanoke.
Conversation is predictably stilted after that. Hard to go back to small talk once we’ve covered blood magic. And soon enough we’re in Forks, population 3000 something. I’m unused to the slow churn of small town life. I grew up in a city with over 1.5 million people and went to a school with nearly five thousand other kids.
I like being one face in a large crowd, unnoticed. That’s not going to happen here. The police chief’s daughter come home. It’s freaking prodigal. I can almost hear the gossiping neighbors asking, Why’s she here? Only one of the Swan girls? What happened to that fancy school? Why isn’t she staying with that flighty mother of hers?
I’m so caught up in my worry, I don’t hear Charlie announce, “I got you a car,” until the second time he says it.
And even then, I’m baffled. “What? I get expelled… and you buy me a car ?” Did I just enter the Twilight Zone?
“A truck, actually. It’s not a reward, just a necessity. I’m not gonna be able to drive you everyday, and it’s mostly highway here. You can drive a stick, right?” I nod. I won’t tell him that Phil taught me last spring. “Good. It’s old but in great shape. I bought it off Billy, real cheap, and his son Jake fixed it up. You remember Jake, right?”
“Yeah, sorta. We played in the mud together as kids. Aurora freaked him out by having all the worms in the yard crawl on him. But Dad?” I ask as we pull into the driveway of his house. It’s a small, white two bedroom. The house he grew up in, inherited and never really changed. On the side of the road, I see the bright orange pickup truck parked. It’s the ugly kind of cute, like a pug or a pukwudgie.
“Yeah?” Charlie parks the car and rattles the keys.
“You didn’t tell anyone that I was expelled, did you?”
Charlie looks at me, his stubbled cheeks puff with air. “Just Billy Black.” Just Billy I can handle. He’s like family to Charlie. “And,” here he inhales slowly, “well, the school had to know.”
What . “School? What do you mean?”
“Forks High. You’ll be starting Monday.”
No. In two days?! “No, I’m not.”
He rubs his hand over his face and sighs. “Let’s talk about this in the house, ‘kay?”
He carries my bags inside and up to my room, but I wait at the bottom of the staircase, my arms crossed in front of me. Keeping warm inside the March-chilled house, not pouting. I’m basically an adult, and I won’t pout. But what the hell? What am I gonna do in a school for mundies?
You’re basically a mundie, Bella, without a wand. Your wandless magic sucks, you can’t do anything more than simple charms. You’re nothing special now. What are you without magic?
I want to cry. Control your emotions. Control your mind.
I look around the tiny living room and see Charlie’s pictures on the mantle. They’re the unmoving kind, which I like better. A single instance captured. One angle to scrutinize. He still keeps his and Mom’s wedding photo up, weirdly. Sadly . And a picture of all four of us at the hospital when Aurora was born. But then I see my school photo there beside my sister’s. Matching smiles, matching blue and cranberry robes. Would it be rude to ask him to remove mine? Just seeing myself in my school uniform, knowing I’ll never graduate from Ilvermorny, never get that Potions Apprenticeship… Gods, I’m gonna cry.
Control. I squeeze my hands into fists and barely feel my nails digging into my palms.
Breathe and become…
Empty.
“So,” Charlie says, his big boots clonking down the stairs to reach me, “I know you don’t want to go, and you think you won’t learn anything, but I promise you will. Everything’s set up. Ilvermorny sent your mom some paperwork, and she tweaked it so that it looks like a normal school record.”
“How would mom know what a normal school record looks like?”
“Well, she did her best, I think. Or did that spell that makes a piece of paper look like whatever someone thinks it should. I looked it over before dropping it off. Only said you were expelled for misconduct.”
“Misconduct? Wait… Mom knew about this?” She knew this would happen and still let me come, with no warning? No way. Denial. No way! Anger.
Bargaining, “Dad, please, I’ll get a job instead. I’ll do home schooling and finish high school that way. I haven’t been to no-maj school since I was ten. It’s the middle of the year. I’m going to be so behind, I’ll look like an idiot. My classes were Potions, Alchemy, Care for Magical Creatures. How am I going to figure out Trigonometry? I’ll stick out like crazy. Please, don’t make me.”
“Your mom and I talked about this, and we think you need to give yourself more options now that certain… paths are closed to you. You could make some normal friends. You could still go to college, Bells, get a degree in chemistry or something like that. In anything. Don’t you think you’d like that?”
Normal friends. Normal people. I pretend that doesn’t hurt. Our versions of normal are different, and that’s okay. “Chemistry isn’t potions, Dad.” Potions is an art as much as a science .
“I know, kid. But this is how it’s gonna be. Your school books are in your room if you wanna start on them.”
Great. “Then I guess it’s settled. Now that everyone in town thinks I was expelled.”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
I remember a quote I read a long time ago somewhere. The truth is whatever you can’t escape. In a small town, that’s everything.
I trudge up the stairs, no more fight in me. One step, one breath to find balance.
My legs feel too heavy.
Another step.
Control.
All I have is control of my mind and body. But not my future.
This witch is going to high school.