"So if I were to wear a garbage bag with enough confidence people would consider it fashion?" Thulani asked unconvinced, looking at Dipi as if she were mad.

"No, people won't necessarily think that it is fashion but more people will think that whatever you are doing is supposed to happen. If that makes sense." Dipi answered. Lani opened his mouth to speak but Orlando cut in.

"No, it does not make any sense at all." He stated seriously. Dipi whacked his arm and Orlando just laughed after flinching from the attack.

A few of us were just chilling in the back gardens before our classes had to start. Dipi had mentioned during lunch that going out into nature is good for the body or something like that so some of the people in my group thought that they could come along just to be around people longer and chill.

Sam hadn't come because she wanted to do some personal stuff in her room before going to class, and Harvey and Warlo hadn't come because the two had left before breakfast even ended and were probably doing random stuff together since they were best friends.

My brother Orlando had joined us and though it was kind of hard for some of my friends to get used to speaking to him casually they got over it when he and I had hit each other back and forth for a good minute. Now we were just lounging around and talking about whatever while looking at our phones.

After maybe fifteen more minutes of doing nothing together we heard the familiar warning to start heading to class. Because we stayed at the school, the academy had us finish breakfast about an hour before classes started and half of that time was considered 'get ready for school time' and the other half was considered 'somehow get your social buts into your first classes'.

I tended to just relax for the first half and then get ready all in the second since I was one of those few people who got ready in five minutes. So, when I heard the call Sebastian was on my feet and waving goodbye to my friends.

—————

As a magic user and someone who relied on the ability quite regularly because it suited me I should have been jumping for joy when my magic class came around. It was a quarter theory, a quarter spell memorizing, and half hands-on magic practice.

At the time when I first saw the list of all my classes I was ecstatic, I found magic loads of fun, and being able to use it even better would be great in the long run. But now that I attended magic class, I always dreaded stepping into the room.

Though a smaller portion of the class, spell memorizing was extremely difficult. It wasn't like the movies where they were all in Latin.

Depending on who made the spell and at one time we could get a spell in any language possibly known to man ever. There was one that I had learned last week which was in freaking Arabic. I don't even know anybody who speaks Arabic! Yet I had to somehow develop the perfect accent and say all of the words perfectly. If you are not a magic user yourself then I know what you are probably thinking.

"Why not just translate it into English?"

Although translations would be hard to do without a fluent speaker, nowadays we have Google translator. But because that can sometimes be shit, we magic users can use a translator spell.

The problem is, when a spell is created it has power and strength because of the power of the person who wrote it down. A person associates certain emotions to certain words and if I were to translate that Arabian spell into English more than half, if not all, of the power would be lost in the translation. Because of that annoying fact, I am stuck trying to recite Japanese and sounding like an idiot.

But that's not even the worst part of the class. The worst part is actually using magic. Whenever our teacher has us do a spell it is always really difficult to say and requires a ton of emotion to get it right.

But would you have lots of positive emotions towards a school project? I don't think so. With that I am stuck getting yelled at by our teacher for "not trying harder" and "sleep spelling while I should be wide awake.

I let out a huff and opened up our current magic textbook to the page Ms. Dovermal instructed. She was an older lady in her mid-forties who was single and never married. Rumors that swirled among the students were that she was so focused on work that she never found time for relationships, not even casual lays, but thinking about her sex life irked me so I tried to keep out of the teacher gossip about her.

"Okay class, today's warm-up spell will be an earth spell, you will all be given three small rocks and you will recite the wind spell that is in front of you in your books to summon the winds and direct it towards the rock. The goal will be to move the rocks three inches from their original spot." She explained, walking around the room and looking each student in the eye before walking back to her desk.

She picked up three rocks and raised them up for all of us to see before placing the rocks down on her desk on a piece of paper. She got a pen and made marks on the paper before starting.

We all waited patiently as she read over the spell a few times then closed her eyes and took in a small breath. She looked at the rocks suddenly and started muttering under her breath, wind started rushing straight from her to the rock, it was so controlled that I could not feel the slightest whisper of it from where I sat in the third row. In a few moments, the rocks started shifting backward and when it almost fell off of her desk she stopped.

"You will have to place the rocks on a piece of paper, mark the front of the rocks, summon the wind until you move them far enough, and then mark the front of the rocks in their new places." She continued to explain. "I only used a small stream of air because though this spell can be harmless if any of you get too excited to get this over and done with you could cause all the papers in this room to go flying. All you have to do for the warm-up is to move the rocks three inches away from you, which means one inch per rock. If you are feeling excited, you can do this without using your hands, if you are feeling extra extra, you can also try to move just one rock three inches away."

I could tell by the sudden energy shift in the room that quite a few of my classmates were feeling confident and planned on showing off when it came to these spells.

Although I also found the warm-up simple, I reasoned that Ms. Dovermal would not choose it as the warm-up if it were just a piece of cake so I started with the three. I tried to memorize the spell so I could close my eyes and focus but I just couldn't get the hang of the Russian words so I just read it out while I directed my hands. Getting the spell started was the easy part, staying in control of it was a whole other situation. 

I started with just going ham and seeing what happened, but my rocks ended up hitting some guy's butt in the first row. So then, I tried the soft approach, but my rocks hardly moved at all. I was about to try small sudden gusts of air when Ms. Dovermal suddenly cleared her throat.

"Oh, I just remembered!" she gasped fakely, drawing her hand over her chest in an apologetic manner a moment later. "I completely forgot. If you blow the rocks right off your table then I have no way of knowing if you really did it or not, and if you just have the marks you could have just drawn them and showed them to me to say that you finished. So, you must have the six marks on your paper after successfully doing it and do the spell for me live so I can verify it." She smiled evilly and I groaned under my breath. Just great.

It took me a little while but I finally got the spell and was luckily able to do it in front of our teacher so I was able to relax and read my book until we started our main lesson. I only had to wait five minutes since I was one of the later ones to finish and Ms. Dovermal immediately went into our next lesson. 

"For our main lesson today we are going to keep the momentum and continue using spells in our magic, yay!" she cheered sarcastically, clearly unenthusiastic as well. "This spell won't be nearly as easy as the first one so pay attention to all of the instructions so you can get a good grade because this is a project." The whole class groaned but Ms. Dovermal just ignored our pain and told us to turn to a different page in our textbooks.

The page that I found when I went to the number she told me was in one of the last chapters, and because I had been in here long enough I knew that the further you got into the book the trickier and more intricate the spells.

"Your task, which you must complete by the following Monday, is to magically create what I like to call a MorphPple." Ms. Dovermal said with a smug tone appearing in her voice. There were some muffled comments of confusion passing between some of the students but they all quieted down when Ms. Dovermal started to read the page.

A MorphPple turned out to be a kind of fruit that you can magically create that can morph from an apple into another fruit of your choice. It was a project that Ms. Dovermal usually had the freshman do because it was fun to decide what fruit you would change your apple into. If someone wanted extra credit they could create one that changed two fruits instead of one.

I was nervous to start the project when Ms. Dovermal explained what we had to do. The morphing process sounded hard and I was worried that I wouldn't have enough time to finish it. But when we actually read over the instructions the hard part was the morphing, it was creating the apple and the other fruit.

The fruit had to actually be edible and if anything was missing, like the seeds or enough juice, then we lost points or could possibly get none. I was now even more nervous about the project.

"Now if I were any of you, I would get started on my MorphPple." She told us, waving her hand in a way that told us to get to work. And I sure as heck did.

—————

"Well, you look very cheery today Sebastian." My mystery man joked. 

"Well . . . I don't know what you look like, I bet it would be like an annoying asshole who takes pleasure in not letting me see his face." I clapped back, taking his abrupt and loud laugh as him taking my jab in stride.

"You are definitely grumpy. Why the sour face sugar plum?" He asked, still slightly teasing as he creepily whispered the phrase into my ear. I frowned, making a disgusted face, and tried to lean away from him.

"Eww, don't ever do that again," I told him, frowning harder when he chuckled.

"Sorry, just teasing," he apologized sincerely. "Honestly though, what's up?" I let out a dramatic sigh because I was moody af and decided to spill.

"My magic teacher just gave us this really tough project and I don't think that I will be able to do it," I explained dejectedly. "I mean, I love using my magic! But this project is . . . a lot. I don't know if I am good enough."

He was silent for a little while.

"Can you show me a spell?" he asks instead. I wonder why he ignored my worries briefly before agreeing. I thought over what spell I would perform and settled on one quickly. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the object that I wanted in my mind.

I felt a tingling sensation in my palm and soon felt my muscles flex under weight. I opened my eyes and smiled when I saw the photo album, that I wanted to create, in my hand. I held up the album behind my head and let him take it from me.

"This is the photo album that my parents have in their house, it has a ton of pictures of my whole family when I and my siblings were just babies and some pictures of my aunts, uncles, and grandparents," I explained, hearing the crinkling of the plastic as he flipped through the photos. "I thought that you might enjoy seeing some funny baby photos of me."

He chuckled behind me but just continued to flip through the pages.

"Thank you for showing me this," he said, a thump being heard as he closed the album. "You are going to nail that spell in class." He handed the photo album back to me but my face scrunched up in confusion.

"Why would you say that?" I asked, holding the photo album and focusing my energy on it until it disappeared.

"Because you just made a complete photo album out of thin air without breaking a sweat. You are obviously an amazing magic-user Sebastian, why wouldn't I say that?" He shot back. I felt heat creep up my neck and onto my face and hoped that my darker skin tone would hide the blush.

"Well . . . you aren't even a magic user yourself, how would you know if this were an easy spell?" I decided to ask him, still trying to reign in my blush. Mystery man let out a soft chuckle.

"I think I know enough. Besides, apart from your abilities, you are always so dedicated in class while we are learning about the species. I doubt that you would slack off when it comes to magic, something that you absolutely love." Mystery man said matter-of-factly. I thought harder about his words and got a sudden thought. 

He's in my class with Mr. McCain.

That comment was so obvious that I was surprised that he had slipped up so badly, that was a major clue as to who he was. I thought over the men that I had seen in Mr. McCain's class. The short one with the hoodie, the hot straight one who likes to sit in the corner, the guy who never has his own pencil, the-

I cut off my thoughts abruptly when it hit me.

What if Mystery Man is Mr. McCain?

I almost gasped out loud.

Mr. McCain was a literal heartthrob and oh so nice, if he was the one that I was talking to I might actually die.

Mystery Man steered the conversation elsewhere and I somehow followed along. Still, all throughout I was thinking about what he had said and the possibility that he was actually the young McCain brother.