The teacher’s room wasn’t a room at all. It was actually a modest house, sitting on a graceful slope behind the main school building. Inside, it was divided in several rooms, each one assigned to two teachers or researchers. There was also a kitchen and a bathroom, and a living room with a beat-up red couch. Despite being a house, it was still called the “teacher’s room” for some reason.

“The student council uses that one room over there,” said Samantha, pointing at a door by the end of the corridor. Seeing how nervous that statement made me, she added: “But they’re not here right now, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” I said, worrying.

Sam rolled her eyes at me and sighed, before continuing. “Anyway,” she said, “Mr. Thomas’ room is upstairs.”

I followed her up a small staircase by the wall, which led to another corridor with doors on either side. Sam stopped by a wooden door with two steel labels affixed to it. One read “Thomas Williams, W.D.” The other label had our math teacher’s name on it. She knocked on the door.

A few seconds later, our Math teacher walked up to the door, and opened it, with a surprised expression in his face.

“Samantha!” he exclaimed. “How’s my best student doing? Anything I can help you with?” Then his eyes fell on me. “And miss Anamaria, I take you’ve come to me for some help in your studies, eh? Tired of me asking you questions you can’t answer?”

“Actually,” Sam interrupted him. “We’re here for professor Thomas. Anamaria has an appointment with him.” Our math teacher looked mildly disappointed when she said that. “But don’t worry,” Sam continued. “I’m going to help Ana study for the exams.”

“That’s my best student for you,” he said, trying to sound proud but still unable to hide the disappointment. He backed away from the door. “Tom,” he called. “There’s two students here to see you,” then turning to us, added, “come in, girls.”

I followed Sam into the room. She immediately turned to her left and dashed to the nearest table. I followed her with my eyes, and found a tall man sitting behind a table by the wall. He had olive skin, messy curly black hair, and a complexion that was neither Northern nor Southern. If anything, I’d guess he was from the West, across the ocean. His smile was bright and charming, I’d say, and his clothes fit him perfectly, as they were probably custom-made. I didn’t find him all that attractive, but I could understand why several students (Samantha included) had a crush on him.

“Hey, Sammy,” he called her, picking up the documents that were spread across his table and piling them up in a corner. “What have you got for me?”

Sam was grinning, and she looked really happy and expectant. “I’ve got a new prototype for a wrinkle-resistant clothing enchantment. I think you’ll like this one.”

He chuckled, still smiling and talking to Sam as if meeting an old friend. “You never cease to amaze me.”

“Just you wait. But before that… Anamaria here needs your help with something.” She motioned me to come closer. I took a few steps toward the table, nervously. “Did Director Louis talk to you about it?” she asked him. “About how she has a curse, and how our classmates have been mistreating her for it?”

He nodded, slowly. “I’ve heard. So… Anamaria,” he extended his hand, offering me a handshake. Well, that confirmed it, he wasn’t from the North. I shook his hand, uncertainly. “I’m professor Thomas, head of the Witchcraft Division here in Willow Institute. I think I can help you with those two problems, the curse and the bullying. Would it be alright if I conducted a routine examination on you? Preferably outside, there’s not enough space for this here in my office.”

“That’s… fine, I think.” Then realizing I might have sounded a bit ungrateful, I added: “Thank you for agreeing to help me.”

“Oh, no worries. You can thank me afterwards, once we get those problems of yours solved.” He spoke with such assertion that I actually began to believe, despite my better judgement and previous experiences, that he could be able to help me out.

We walked together out of the office, and Professor Thomas led all three of us down the stairs and onto the backyard behind the house. It was the grassy slope of the hill, beyond which prairies extended seemingly forever.

He asked me to stand in the middle of the open field, and Samantha sat herself down on the grass a meter or two away from us. Then he picked up my head in his hands – that part I was already used to, from having been examined so many times by so many professionals, – and conducted a very thorough examination of several points on my head. His hands stopped on the back of my head, near my hairline.

“What is this?” he asked me.

I raised my left hand and felt for whatever he was referring to. Oh.

“It’s a hairpin,” I told him. “My father got me as a charm to dampen my curse.” This had been ages ago, back when I was still a toddler. I still wore it to this day, without even thinking about it, to the point where I could legitimately forget I was even wearing it.

“Take it off,” he ordered me. “And let me take a look.”

I obliged, handing him the cross-shaped hairpin. He took a quick glance at it, then handed it to Samantha. That surprised me. Did he not want my curse under control?

“Keep it for me, for now, will you Sammy?” he said. She nodded, took it from his hands and sat back on the grass.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him.

“It’s a dampening enchantment, all right. But it doesn’t have any effect on curses, only on spells that you cast. I take it you haven’t been having much success casting spells with that thing on your hair, have you?”

I swallowed dry. Seriously? That’s the reason I couldn’t cast spells? It couldn’t be just that, could it? And it wasn’t even helping me with my curse! Suddenly I felt really cheated on and betrayed.

Professor Thomas continued to examine me with his hands, proceeding to check my neck, and then my torso.

“Technically, I’d have to ask you to take off your shirt, so that I can inspect your skin. But I’m not going to ask you to do that in the middle of the school grounds. So, can you just tell me if you have any birth marks, spots or tattoos? Anything that shows up on your skin?”

I nodded, grateful that I wasn’t being asked to undress in front of them. I was from the North, I could never get used to that habit.

“I have one,” I told him. “Right here.”

I raised the side of my t-shirt, to show him a reddish splotch that I had on my lower back, since time immemorial.

“Yeah, I can see that,” he inspected it for a moment. “It’s not magical, though. Looks like a scar to me, or an old burn mark, but you’d have to see a physician to know for sure. Anything else you can show me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said, making a mental note to schedule myself an appointment with a physician to ask him what that was.

“Okay… I think we can proceed to the active part of the examination. If you have any other enchantments on you right now, please take them off, so they don’t interfere with the exam. No? Good. Then please open your arms… All right, you can close them… Perfect. Now, can you cast me a simple spell? The simplest spell you can think of.”

“It’s probably not gonna work,” I told him, sorrowfully. “I’m not very skilled with magic, if at all.”

“Try it. You might be surprised.”

I nodded.

The spell I was going to try was pretty much the first one I ever learned. It was also the only one I could actually get to react to me, even if only slightly, as all others would only ever result in completely botched attempts.

I untied my hair, letting it fall freely on my shoulders, and placed the ribbon on the ground. Then I took a couple of steps back, and started to chant the nursery rhyme I had learned about a decade ago.

Snake, oh snake, spooky critter with no legs,
Tell me how you dance, walk, and even lay your eggs.
Snake, mommy said to be careful where I tread, 
If you bite me I’ll get dizzy, vomit and fall dead.

It was, I realized, a very silly nursery rhyme. But it was a spell, too. When other people cast it, it made pieces of rope or string start to slither as if those too were living snakes. Usually, when I tried it, I could barely get the string to wriggle a little bit, as if my snake was too tired to get off the ground.

That day, standing on the grass with Sam and her teacher by my side, I actually managed to get the spell to work. Not only did my ribbon start to slither away on the grass, but it actually stopped, here and there, raised one of it’s ends (probably it’s “head”) and looked around, curiously. I’m positive that if someone got close to it, then, it might have tried to pounce on them. It even wriggled it’s tail end, producing a rattlesnake sound. I grinned, breathless at my accomplishment.

“Very good,” said professor Thomas, clapping and cheering on me. “See, Anamaria? You can do it!”

“How is this possible?” I asked him, befuddled.

“I told you before, didn’t I?” he said, as he chased down my ribbon-snake around the yard before it could manage to disappear into some hole on the ground. “You had a dampener on you. Now that you took it off, I’m pretty sure you can work other spells too, if you put your mind to it.”

I was stupefied. I could be a witch? Really?

“Professor, but what about my curse.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, after leaping on top of my ribbon to immobilize it. The ribbon still tried to wrestle itself away, but once he got hold of it, it wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much it struggled. “About that… you don’t have one.”

I blinked twice.

“I don’t… have one? A curse? How so?”

“Director Louis told me you’ve been to several witches and physicians in your hometown, and none of them could tell you what that curse was. Well, the reason for that is really simple. There was never a curse on you to begin with.”

“But… my bad luck!”

“That’s another thing,” he said, handing me the red charmed ribbon that was still trying to fight its way out of Mr. Thomas’ grip. Once I held it in my hands, it lost all motion, and just became an inanimate ribbon again. “You see, there can be no such thing as a bad luck curse, because bad luck isn’t a thing.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I proceeded to tie my hair up again.

“It’s like this,” he began to explain. “Suppose you miss the last bus back home. That really sucks, you know. Most people would probably call that bad luck.”

I nodded, just too aware, from my previous experiences, of what that kind of thing felt like.

“Now consider this,” he continued. “That bus you were going to take gets involved in a traffic accident. Now… suddenly, missing the bus doesn’t feel like bad luck anymore. It’s good luck, now.”

“I suppose,” I told him. It was something like what Claire had said to me, when she said that the landslide was good fortune because she got to meet me.

“The thing is that… you never actually got inside the bus. And since you haven’t done that, there’s no way for we to know whether the bus would be involved in an accident or not, had you arrived on time to catch it.”

“But… you just said there was an accident.”

“Yes. In the reality that you didn’t catch the bus, there was an accident. But what if the simple fact that you walked inside of it held the bus back a few seconds on the bus stop, and that was enough to avoid the accident entirely.”

“Then it would have been good luck to catch it.”

“But then again, maybe that wouldn’t be enough, and the accident would still have happened with you inside of it.”

“Then I suppose that’s… Bad? No… Good? Oh, I think I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

He nodded. “Of course you do. You’re a clever girl, anyone can see that. So if anything happens to you, would you agree that it can be interpreted as both good or bad luck? We don’t know the alternative possibilities to reality. All we know is the one reality we’re living on, right now. Of course, you can still judge the things that happen to you as good or bad, based on your own personal criteria, but you can’t really say it was fortune or misfortune that brought them to you, if you can’t evaluate what the alternate scenarios would be. Those two things, fortune and misfortune, are just… they’re just misconceptions, really.”

It took me a moment to process all of that.

“I think I understand. But then, how can I explain all of the bad things that have been happening to me since I was a child? If there’s no bad luck and no curse, then why does all of that stuff happen to me, and not to others?”

“Are you really so sure that everything that happened to you since then were bad things? Tell me, would you still be studying here if some of those so called bad things hadn’t happened to you? Would the good things in your life definitely have happened if those bad ones hadn’t too? How can you tell?”

“I can’t.”

“And that’s the gist of it.”

“So if someone says that I have a bad luck spell cast on me…”

“It means they have some very spectacular misconceptions about the nature of Witchcraft. Also about the concept of luck, and philosophy in general.”

I let myself fall to the ground, helplessly.

I don’t have a curse.

So all the rejection and pain I’ve had to deal with since I was a child… that was all for nothing. A mistake.

Sitting on the grassy hill behind the teacher’s room, I began to cry, uncontrollably, and I couldn’t tell you whether it was of sorrow, relief or joy.