I decide to take a break from working with Mr. Donovan so I can focus on getting my grades back up instead, and maybe come back to our private lessons with a cleared head.

He doesn't argue, and neither does Ms. Cross. But as a few days turn into a week, and that week stretches into another, I can tell that they are getting impatient. I know that any day now they'll demand that I start the lessons back up, but I have no plans on doing that until they make me.

The way I see it, there's no point.

                                                        *   *   *

It's the Monday before Thanksgiving break, and there's a four day weekend ahead of me that I plan on enjoying as much as possible before I have to return to St. Bosco's.

I'm going to El's for the holiday like I do every year, and I'm looking forward to the familiar familial bickering of her siblings; the endless over-bearing concern for my well-being that Mrs. Fuentes rains upon me; and the feast that will be presented on Thursday, the leftovers of which will keep us well-fed until we return to school. The thought of that meal was the only thing getting me through the week.

I managed to pull up my grade to a solid C in Ms. Perry's class, and English Lit has improved a lot since I started letting El proofread my essays before I turned them in. Meditations and Thaumaturgy are still living nightmares of course, but I can't do anything about that. Magic in Media is still the only class I genuinely enjoy, and I take at least a little solace in the fact I'm getting an easy B in that class.

But it's nearly the end of November now, and soon it will be Christmas, and then January is just around the corner. February will lead into March, and the next thing I know it'll be spring, and that meant that April and May will rush by as quickly as they always do. Then it will be June, and Ms. Cross will demand that I finally make a choice: to stay, or go.

The thought makes my stomach clench, and I have to remind myself that it's still only November, and I don't have to decide yet.

It's lunch period and I'm sitting at a table across from El, poking a fork listlessly at the pasta salad in front of me.

“Just eat it already, for Circe's sake,” El snaps. “Skipping meals isn't going to solve anything, and will only make it harder for you to concentrate on both your classes and your magic.”

I sigh, and push the bowl away from me. “I'm not hungry.”

“You're always hungry.”

Well, I'm not right now,” I say, starting to get annoyed.

I know she's right, but my stomach hasn't stopped churning since the first day of school and I seem to have completely lost my appetite.

“You look awful,” El tells me.

“Thanks,” I grunt.

“No, I mean worse than usual. Like, really bad. It's like fifty degrees in here, but you're sweating right through your shirt, and you positively reek of magic. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think I've seen you actually channel anything through your wand in Meditation in the last few days. When was the last time you tried to cast a spell?”

“I try to cast spells in Thaumaturgy all the time,” I protest, but I'm guilty and I know she can see it written across my face.

El leans across the table, narrowing her eyes at me.

“When was the last time?” she demands, jabbing her fork at me with every word.

“I don't know,” I hedge, looking anywhere but at her.

“Adam!”

“When I stopped lessons with Mr. Donovan!” I admit, my voice rising nearly to a shout.

A few nearby heads turn to look in our direction. I flush angrily and lower my voice. “I haven't done any magic since then. Not really, at least, nothing big. A few little things here and there.”

“Adam,” El gasps, and she recoils from me as if I'm a bomb that's about to go off.

I guess I am.

“You're not serious, are you?”

“I can't cast any more spells, I'm burnt out!” I tell her, but she's not having any of it.

“So it's all just been building up in you for two weeks? No wonder you look like shit! You're probably burning up from the inside! Magic's Might, Adam, you've got to be a ticking time bomb by now. Are you trying to blow up the school?”

“I'm not going to blow up the school!” I hiss back at her. “I'm fine! I've been letting it out at night in my room, where it can't do any damage!”

“What do you mean?” she demands.

I struggle to find the words to explain. “Like... I lay on my bed and close my eyes, and just sort of... open up. All the pent up magic kind of leaks out and dissipates, and as long as I keep my mind clear and don't think of anything, I don't accidentally cast any spells.”

I'd learned the importance of keeping my mind completely clear when, the first day I'd attempted this, my thoughts drifted to the sound of an owl hooting outside my open window. My desk lamp was suddenly semi-transfigured, sprouting feathers as the shade spun around and around like an owl's swiveling head.

El groaned and threw her fork down onto her plate. “That's what Meditation is all about, you idiot! Just opening up and letting the unformed magic flow through you, controlling the strength and focus!”

“Yeah, well, I can't do it through a wand,” I remind her heatedly. “And I can't control the strength or anything. All I can do is let some of it out so I don't completely overflow.”

“But it clearly isn't working,” she points out, gesturing at me. “Maybe it was enough at first, but it looks like you haven't been able to release as much as you produce. You're all filled up, and your magic is just leaking out all over the place whether you want it to or not. I can practically taste it from all the way over here.”

“You didn't even notice until just now.”

“I wasn't paying attention to you until just now, because I didn't think you could be so incredibly stupid. Tonight after school, you'd better try to burn off some of this magic while you can, before anything happens.”

“Nothing is going to happen,” I insist, but I don't sound convincing even to my own ears.

The rest of the lunch period passes in tense silence, and I have to resist wiping away the sweat that's dripping into my eyes, as if acknowledging it would be admitting that El is right.

                                                          *   *   *

I didn't take her advice about casting spells to use up my excess magic that night. I knew that I should have, but stubbornness made me just throw myself into bed, glaring at the wall. I should have opened myself up too, like I had been doing for the past several nights to let some of the pent up magic escape; but I was too irritated to even do that. Right then, I wanted nothing to do with magic.

That meant that I wake up the next morning a complete wreck.

I'm almost in physical pain the moment I open my eyes when my alarm goes off. It's a feeling I know well, one I had experienced multiple times before Ms. Cross found me, when my magic would just build up in me until I couldn't control it anymore.

I groan and push myself up into a sitting position. The room is buzzing slightly, filled with latent magic that had poured off me in the night. My sheets are drenched with sweat and I feel as though I've just finished running a marathon, rather than sleeping for eight hours.

An ice-cold shower in the bathroom cleans me up a little and temporarily puts a stop to the sweating, but by the time I've put on my uniform I already have growing wet patches on my back and around my collar.

I grit my teeth. El was right, I should have worked this off last night.

It's fine, though. It will be fine. I'll just start casting little spells, easy ones I know I can do throughout the day and burn it off gradually. By Thaumaturgy I should have released enough of the pressure that I'm not a boiler about to blow anymore, and I can try a couple of bigger spells to drain the rest of my magic.

“Calceamenta ligabis meum,” I recite, pointing my wand at my untied shoes.

It explodes in my hand.

“Damn it!” I swear, waving my burnt hand frantically in the air. It hurts like a bitch and I want the pain to go away; and abruptly, it does. A thimbleful of magic burns off as it reacts to my desire to be healed, repairing the injury almost instantaneously.

A healing spell like that, even a simple one, can exhaust a normal magician. It takes the same amount of energy to heal a wound by natural means or by magic; only when you use magic to do it, your body has to use all that energy at once. You don't notice the extra effort your cells put forth to repair cuts and bruises when they do it the old fashioned way, but trying to heal a major injury can be enough to kill the magician attempting it.

I'm not a normal magician though, and this spontaneous healing trick hardly even puts a dent in the enormous well of magic that's filling me up right now.

I tie my shoes by hand, and go to my desk drawer to pull out my spare wand. I only have one left, and can't afford to go blowing this one up too. Still, this was the first I'd destroyed this year, which beat my record for last year.

I went through nineteen wands my first year at St. Bosco's; eight last year; and I sincerely hoped that the one that just went would be the first and last during my senior year.

This was fine. That was just one little error of judgment on my part. The next spells I try, I won't use the wand at all. I'll just do it my way, and there won't be another issue. It'll be fine.

                                                          *   *   *

During English Lit I spell a fly out the window I cracked open, despite the protests of the classmates sitting next to me, and that feels just a little better. In Astronomy I tune out Ms. Perry's lecture and focus entirely on levitating my desk a half inch above the ground, not so high that anyone would notice, in short bursts of a few seconds at a time. In Contemporary Magical History, I repeatedly change the color of my eraser. But then I get tripped up when I realize I don't actually know what color chartreuse is, and the eraser melts into a sticky puddle. When the rest of the class begins to audibly wonder what the burning rubber smell is, I cover the puddle with my textbook and pretend to look around in confusion with them.

By the time Thaumaturgy starts, I feel like a bomb with a minute left on the clock, rather than ten seconds. It's not much of an improvement, but it will have to do.

“You all have personal transfiguration down pretty well now,” Mr. Donovan says to the class, “so I think we're ready to make it a little more challenging. Today, you'll be transfiguring a partner, and you'll be doing it blindfolded. That means that you'll have to inspect your partner extremely closely, be familiar with every single little detail about them, from the freckles on their face to the dirt under their fingernails before you attempt anything. We're going to return to changing hair color, because I think that's the aspect you all have the most practice with and is the least likely to result in unfortunate accidents.”

“Unfortunate accidents like what?” Terry Wrede asks, raising his hand in the air only after the words come out of his mouth.

“Like three years ago, one of my seniors accidentally covered their partner's entire body in hair. In blue hair, from head to foot..”

The class giggles.

“Which is inconvenient, but much better than what happened in my predecessor's class back in the '80s, when they started with growing mustaches and one student obliterated their partner's face entirely because they couldn't accurately picture the partner's face in their mind's eye.”

No giggles now.

“The partner did, however, have a lovely mustache. Now, everybody pair up, and pick someone you already know well if you can.”

Before my classmates can start scattering, Felix Roth raises his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Roth?”

“Adam shouldn't do this exercise, sir.”

Every pair of eyes in the classroom fixes themselves upon me, and I feel myself growing hot under so many stares.

“Everyone needs to practice this, Mr. Roth, Mr. Wolfe included,” Mr. Donovan says, frowning at Felix.

“Excuse me sir, but I've been watching him all day, and I know that he can't handle something like this.”

My hands clench into fists in my lap, and I can feel myself shaking with anger and humiliation. What the fuck is wrong with Felix? Why does he insist on making everything even worse for me than it already is?

“I've been working with Adam for three years, and I know that he can handle this just fine,” Mr. Donovan says firmly. “I will be his partner in any case, so thank you for your concern, but it is unwarranted here. Focus on your own magic, Mr. Roth, not other people's.”

I'm sitting behind him, but I can see Felix's ears turn pink, as if he's flushing. Everyone stands up to partner off, but Felix turns to face me before he goes to his friends.

“Don't try this today,” he says.

“Fuck off,” I reply.

His expression twists for a moment, caught somewhere between exasperation and what almost looks like concern. “I'm serious. Look at yourself, if you try a spell as complicated at this, you'll just get someone hurt.”

“It's none of your business what I do,” I say, and I push past him to go meet Mr. Donovan. I can feel everyone staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. Now, because of what Felix said, they're all on edge, worried that I'm going to make something terrible happen.

But I'm not. I know Mr. Donovan's face like the back of my hand. I know I can do this. I won't even bother with my wand. It'll be easy as pie.

Mr. Donovan gets close to me, and he looks concerned, despite what he told Felix. “Adam, are you alright?”

I wipe the sweat from my brow, my jaw set. “I'm fine. I'm ready to do this, let me try.”

Mr. Donovan looks doubtful, but I know he won't deny me. Maybe he thinks this is a good sign, that I'll want to start our lessons back up again. He stands there with his arms outstretched, letting me stare hard at him until I feel like I have every line of his face memorized.

I close my eyes and let the image of his face swim to the forefront of my mind. I go over it, picturing in perfect clarity his eyes, his nose, his mouth, the shape of his chin and ears. Then I move onto his hair, until I'm sure I have the color and texture right in my head.

All I have to do is a simple color changing spell. As long as I don't choose chartreuse, I can do that. I'm good at those. It'll be simple. Felix is an idiot, what does he know? He's just a stupid, pompous ass who gets off on humiliating me, on turning our classmates against me, on perpetuating the Council's belief that I'm something dangerous, a weapon that can't be trusted, that might blow up the school at any minute if I lose even an ounce of control—

And as the image of the school going up in flames flickers across my mind, the magic pouring out of every inch of my skin makes it into a reality.